Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  The situation at the Little House had reached a crisis point. Hick was months behind on her rent, and Ella Dana was under financial pressure herself. So when a family Dana was fond of came to her looking for a place, she asked Hick to leave. Eleanor was in Colorado, visiting Elliott and his new wife on his ranch, when she got an SOS, probably from Ella, informing her that Hick was no longer welcome at the Little House. Eleanor immediately arranged for her chauffeur, Archy “Tubby” Curnan, to come for Hick. It had been almost twenty-five years since Hick had fallen in love with the beautiful woods, the nearby ocean, and the house itself. It was the only home she had ever cared deeply about. But in August 1955, she packed up her things and her little dog Muffin—Mr. Choate was no longer—climbed into Tubby’s car, and left forever. “I will think of you,” Eleanor wrote her from Colorado, “for I know it’s a wrench.”

  —

  ELEANOR SUFFERED painful losses of her own that year. Tommy, her beloved secretary and alter ego of twenty-nine years, died of a heart attack. She was one of the people, Eleanor wrote afterward, “who remain with you in your daily life, even though they are no longer physically present, who are frequently in your mind . . . part of your laughter, part of your joy. . . . They are the people from whom you are never quite separated.” Tommy, who was only sixty when she died, had been both an honest critic and unabashed admirer, always willing to work at Eleanor’s consuming pace. There would soon be a new chief secretary, Maureen Corr, but no one was going to be able to take Tommy’s place.

  Tommy’s death, sad as it was, was not nearly as difficult as the continuing problems Eleanor faced with her children. Anna’s marriage to John Boettiger, which had seemed so strong for many years, fell apart after the two of them tried and failed in a newspaper endeavor, incurring worrisome debt. John succumbed to depression and committed suicide in 1950. Eleanor had been especially fond of John and had supported his courtship of Anna, even when she was married to Curtis Dall. She had encouraged the newspaper venture as well and watched in dismay as John retreated into a shell when it didn’t work out. She blamed herself for not taking his depression more seriously.

  There were painful family quarrels as well. In 1952, after his brother John and family moved into the original stone cottage at Val-Kill, Elliott sold Top Cottage without giving his mother any warning and left. Elliott was in his fourth marriage by then. (There would be a fifth.) Also, in 1954, James’s marriage, to the woman who had nursed him at the Mayo Clinic, ended in a very public way, with California scandal sheets detailing his extramarital affairs.

  Two of the four Roosevelt sons had some success in politics: Franklin Jr. became a congressman from New York City in 1949, and James, despite his marital woes, won a congressional seat from California in 1954 and served for the next ten years. But their public success didn’t seem to carry over into contented private lives. Eleanor confided in Gurewitsch one day, after her sons turned on her in anger, that she sometimes wished she were dead. “My children would be much better off if I were not alive,” she told him. “I’m overshadowing them.”

  Eleanor’s greatest consolation and joy in these last years came from her continuing relationship with Gurewitsch. “I love you as . . . I have never loved anyone else,” she wrote on his birthday in 1956. David was in romantic turmoil during those years—separated from his wife and pursuing, for a time, the mercurial Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met through Eleanor. Disillusioned with the United States, Gellhorn had settled in Mexico, where David visited her as often as possible over the two-year period of the relationship. Eleanor had understood from the beginning that he would eventually find a long-term partner closer to his own age. “I’m going to cling to you very closely dear,” she wrote, “. . . until you have someone of your own to cling [to] even more closely.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A NEW WAY TO BE USEFUL

  AROUND THE TIME OF Eisenhower’s inauguration, Eleanor Roosevelt walked into the offices of the American Association of the United Nations and asked the director, Clark Eichelberger, if he could use “an educational volunteer.” Eichelberger was so surprised and delighted at the offer that he “practically fell on the floor.”

  The UN was under assault. Senators Joseph McCarthy and Pat McCarran regularly attacked it as a Communist hotbed. Ohio senator John Bricker was gaining support for an amendment aimed at limiting the role of the United States in international affairs, and “Get the U.S. out of the UN and the UN out of the U.S.” was a popular slogan in right-wing circles. Eleanor’s offer to work for the AAUN came at a critical moment.

  She was soon installed in a modest office, where she applied strategies familiar from her work with Molly Dewson in the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, organizing chapters around the country to promote the goals of the United Nations. Before long, she set out on the first of several lengthy tours of the world—beginning with a visit to Japan, then making the long journey westward to Yugoslavia, with stops in Hong Kong, India, and Athens, where Gurewitsch joined her.

  The trip ended with a visit to Marshal Tito at his vacation home on the island of Brioni in the Adriatic. Tito succeeded in captivating Eleanor. He was “youthful,” but with “deep lines of experience in his strongly molded face.” As he showed her around his private vineyard, she observed in him “the kind of buoyancy that comes from courage, the sort of courage I saw my husband and Winston Churchill show during the most trying times of World War II.” It helped that Tito seemed to be a supporter of his young wife’s efforts to go back to school and complete the education that had been interrupted by war. Not surprisingly, Eleanor came away from the encounter believing in Yugoslavia’s independence and promise.

  Even though she had spent many hours in negotiation with the Soviets in the UN, she had never before visited a Communist nation. Yugoslavia, she noted, was definitely a Communist country, but not a Soviet Communist country—or so its leader, Marshal Tito, convinced her.

  Such sentiments were controversial in 1953, when anti-Communist hysteria reigned at home. But she insisted, in defiance of McCarthy and his witch hunts, that she should be able to “sit down with anyone who may have a new idea and not be afraid of contamination by association.”

  Westbrook Pegler, the columnist who had made a career of attacking Eleanor, wrote that “the time has come to snatch this wily old conspirator before Joe McCarthy’s committee and chew her out.” Eleanor noted that she had never been called to testify, but would be “very glad to do so.” McCarthy knew better than to take her on.

  —

  HICK, WHO WAS USED to her quiet existence at the Little House on Long Island, was ill-prepared for life at Val-Kill when Eleanor’s driver deposited her there in August 1953. When Eleanor was there, she received a steady stream of visitors, and some of them didn’t welcome Hick’s presence. Hick had a way of signaling her special relationship with Eleanor—calling her “darling” in front of strangers, and expressing her strong opinions on whatever subject was at hand. On one occasion, when Joe Lash came to dinner, Eleanor actually asked Hick to leave—an event Lash recorded triumphantly in his diary.

  John Roosevelt’s daughter Nina remembers Hick as “a massive presence,” with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth in unladylike fashion. She sometimes wore sleeveless T-shirts and baggy pants, and she had rough hairs on her chin. But once you got past that, there was the possibility of a genuine connection. “She didn’t talk down to you,” Eleanor’s oldest granddaughter, Eleanor Seagraves, remembered.

  “You also saw kindness,” Nina recalled, and a special tolerance for the grandchildren’s rebelliousness. Nina worked at the Hyde Park Playhouse one summer when Gore Vidal was in charge. Her father, John, the Republican among the Roosevelt sons, heartily disapproved of her working with Vidal, who was known to be homosexual. But Nina, who was probably fifteen at the time, loved the whole scene—including her bit part as a prostitute in The Matchmaker and the socializing af
ter shows at a local bar. Hick saw Nina at the bar ordering Brandy Alexanders on several occasions but told no one. “Hick covered for me,” Nina remembered.

  After the first year, Hick moved from Val-Kill to the Lakeview Motor Court up the road—a motel unit, in log cabin style, with a kitchenette and a porch looking over a small, reedy lake. Granddaughter Eleanor remembered driving up a steep hill, “like going up the side of a rock,” to visit Hick there.

  Since Hick had sold her car and relinquished her license when she left Long Island, a motel cabin perched on top of a rock seems like it would have been a dreadful choice. Yet she was happier there than she had been in years. She liked being near Eleanor, she confessed to an old friend. But even more important, she had figured out a way, at last, to make a living as a writer. It turned out that she had a knack for writing what Nannine Joseph called “juveniles,” chapter books for grade school children. She had already turned out one about FDR’s boyhood, and was starting on another about Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan. Hick had misgivings about the project at first, as she confided to Helen Douglas. “In my innocence I didn’t think there was enough drama in Helen Keller’s life to interest a child. . . . I’d thought of her vaguely as a combination of trained seal and do-gooder.

  “Was I ever wrong!” She told Douglas she had never in her life met a human being who had quite the effect on her that Helen Keller did, and was enjoying the writing of the book “more than I’ve enjoyed any writing I’ve done in years—if ever.” She hoped she could capture enough of “the real Helen Keller” to captivate “an eight-year-old who would much rather look at TV than read a book!”

  The book couldn’t have happened without Eleanor: it was she who persuaded a usually reluctant Keller to meet with Hick. But Hick brought her own storytelling talents and personal experience to bear: she understood something of Keller’s girlhood rage and frustration. She used her skills as a reporter to help the reader grasp Sullivan’s complex, ingenious methods for bringing young Helen out of her cocoon. The little book, first published in 1958 by Grosset & Dunlap, went into numerous printings and sold many thousands of copies.

  —

  IN 1956, the conservative Scripps-Howard chain of papers tired of Eleanor’s liberal agenda and discontinued her “My Day” column. Her readership shrank, and her income from the column went from $28,000 to less than $10,000. But a new opportunity came along when the New York Post took over the column from the World-Telegram. The Post’s liberal publisher, Dorothy Schiff, offered to send Eleanor on an investigative trip to Russia. It was a trip Eleanor had been eager to make for years—all the more appealing now because she could travel there with her favorite companion, David, whose Russian would help to keep the interpreters honest. Ever since FDR had died, she had hoped to “write as a newspaper woman.” The 1957 trip to the Soviet Union was the best opportunity she had to do that. Though she was now seventy-two years old, she was eager to take it on.

  More than anything else, Eleanor wanted to meet with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the survivor in the power struggle following the death of Stalin. She knew from her UN experience with the Soviets that all power resided at the top. As soon as she arrived in Moscow, she requested an interview with Khrushchev. But the Russians kept her in suspense for almost the entire month of her visit. Finally, three days before she was to leave, she learned that Khrushchev was now willing to meet with her at his vacation home on the Black Sea. It meant a thousand-mile trip, by car and plane, to Yalta, and it might cause her to miss her flight home. But she took the chance.

  There was a kind of poetic justice in the interview’s taking place at Yalta. Eleanor had wanted to go there the first time around, when FDR, Churchill, and Stalin had met to map out Europe’s future; she had felt hurt and left out when FDR had asked Anna to go with him instead. Now she had a chance to play an influential role of her own in a new postwar world—a world in which hope had been replaced by suspicion. The Soviets had acquired the atom bomb in 1949, changing forever the stakes of conflict.

  Before the interview, Eleanor managed to tour briefly the palace where the Yalta Conference took place. Then she and David were chauffeured to Khrushchev’s dacha. He greeted them in a white smocked peasant shirt and proudly escorted them around the place, which looked down over the city of Yalta. It was especially beautiful at night, he told Eleanor, when the lights came on. They settled down to conversation across a wide table on his porch.

  Eleanor’s questions to Khrushchev concerned the ways in which the Yalta agreement had been betrayed: the postwar arms buildup in particular, and Russia’s refusal to allow arms inspections. She asked too about censorship and Soviet refusal to allow Jews to leave the country. David recorded the session and made sure the translation was accurate. They talked for two and a half hours. As Eleanor rushed off to catch her plane, Khrushchev asked her, “Can I tell our papers that we have had a friendly conversation?”

  “You can say,” Eleanor replied, “that we have had a friendly conversation but that we differ.”

  Eleanor saw Khrushchev twice more on his visits to the United States. The first time, he was in too much of a rush to do anything but place a wreath on FDR’s grave at Hyde Park and grab a seed roll from the Val-Kill kitchen “for the road.”

  On his second visit, in 1960, he put on an outrageous show at the United Nations, insulting Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and pounding his shoe on the desk. Afterward, much to the dismay of some critics, Eleanor invited him to her New York apartment for tea. She pointed out that “we have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.” She also insisted that it was the correct thing to do. After all, he’d gotten nothing to eat when he last visited Hyde Park. It was simply good manners to ask him back for tea.

  —

  EVEN BEFORE THE TRIP to the Soviet Union, David Gurewitsch had begun the serious relationship with a younger woman that Eleanor both expected and feared. She was Edna Perkel, a petite and pretty young art dealer. According to Eleanor’s secretary, Maureen Corr, Eleanor’s face turned ashen when she learned that David was planning to marry Edna. She feared her relationship with him was over.

  Not long after, Eleanor and Edna shared a strained lunch. As Edna left, Eleanor said, vehemently, “Don’t worry. David will give you everything you want!” Edna made no response, “other than a strangled goodbye.”

  After that, Eleanor adjusted with astonishing speed to the new reality. In February 1958, Edna and David were married in Eleanor Roosevelt’s apartment. A year after they married, the Gurewitsches bought a town house with Eleanor on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Gurewitsches and Eleanor kept separate apartments, but they often dined and did things together when Eleanor was in town. Eleanor and Edna came to love one another.

  Thus Eleanor spent the last years of her life in a relationship that was, like so many before it, triangular. Though her parents were estranged, she spent her childhood dreaming of a life with her father, even imagining that she might play the role of mother to her siblings. She was often the third wheel in her own marriage as well, since her mother-in-law held sway over the household, and often over her son Franklin. Later, when she teamed up with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, she was once again the outsider, even though the trio worked closely together. She had been intensely involved in Joe Lash’s search for happiness and embraced Trude, just as she now welcomed Edna with increasing warmth. Hick may well have been the only one of Eleanor’s deep attachments who loved her above all others.

  —

  “I WAS DELIGHTED to hear from Nannine,” Eleanor wrote Hick in January 1957, “of a further payment for you. Keep going. You’re doing well!”

  She added a postscript: “I’m waiting for your outburst of fury.”

  Hick didn’t like it when Eleanor condescended to her. But she was doing well—so much
better than she had been when Tubby had rescued her from the Little House two years before. She had moved by now out of the Lakeview Motor Court into a small apartment in town, in what had been the Episcopal rectory but was now divided into four living units. The apartment had a peculiar layout: the front entrance was through the kitchen. But she had a very pleasing view from her front door, which looked out on a green lawn sloping down toward the Hudson.

  That October, after receiving a surprisingly large royalty check, Hick wrote Nannine Joseph an exuberant letter. “Thanks for the check. It’s wonderful. I keep pinching myself!”

  She had been “way over my head, in deep water,” back in 1955. “In a situation like that, you flail out with your arms and try to swim, or go down for the third—and last—time. And I never could have done it anyway without you and Mrs. R. My successes may be modest, but—I’m still afloat. And things are gradually getting better.”

  In 1960, in one of her last books, You Learn by Living, Eleanor surprised Hick with unexpected praise for her tenacity, in the middle of a chapter about dealing with adversity. “A case that comes most pressingly to my mind,” she wrote, “is that of my friend, Miss Hickok.” Eleanor described Hick’s career as an AP reporter and investigator for Harry Hopkins. “Always she lived a dynamic life,” Eleanor wrote, “surrounded by theatrical and political people, her friends among the celebrities in half a dozen fields, the news of the day a part of the very fabric of her life.”

  Then the “unexpected,” the “unforeseen,” forced her to adjust. She developed “crippling arthritis” and diabetes that affected her eyes. “How was she going to live in the future?”