Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Hick “moved to a little cabin of her own and plunged into the writing of children’s books.” She could work only an hour at a time because of her eyes. She couldn’t read newspapers, which would have once seemed like “death itself.”

  Hick “took her limitations in stride,” Eleanor wrote. By listening to the radio “she has become much better informed on the news . . . than most people. . . . She has taken what seemed to be a disaster, made her difficult adjustment, and created a new life, among new people, doing new work. . . . She had the courage to meet discouragement and turn defeat into a victory.”

  Hick was more worried about Eleanor than herself by then. Other people, who saw Eleanor traveling and speaking all over the world, insisted she was still “her old vigorous, alert, interested self.” But Hick’s long friendship and deep understanding of Eleanor made her believe differently. “She is by no means as well as she pretends to be, and her doctor worries about her all the time,” Hick wrote Helen Douglas in December 1961. When Eleanor had been in the hospital in the fall for a checkup, she was much sicker than most people knew. “At this point I think she is going through the motions, on her nerve.”

  Six months later, Hick was sounding the same theme to Nannine. “It’s as though she were walking away, disappearing over the brow of the hill.” By that time, Hick was finally working on a book about her relationship with Eleanor, to be called Reluctant First Lady. “The contrast between the Mrs. R in my book and the Mrs. R today—hurts.”

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  DESPITE HER DECLINING HEALTH, Eleanor continued to travel, returning to the Soviet Union and visiting Poland for the first time with David and Edna Gurewitsch. Her granddaughter Nina traveled with her to visit Anna and her third husband, a physician named James Halsted, who was helping to set up a medical school in Iran. Nina reported that her grandmother’s fabled energy came and went. She was capable of falling asleep on her feet. “It can be awkward if she’s in company,” Nina reported. “I keep a very close watch. If I can catch her just as her head is nodding, one tap of the ankle is enough. But once her head reaches her chest, it takes a good old-fashioned shake.”

  In 1960 Eleanor campaigned hard for Adlai Stevenson to be nominated a third time for the presidency. She had serious doubts about his chief rival for the nomination, John F. Kennedy. She was alarmed that JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, was spending “oodles of money” on the campaign, and she also thought Kennedy had been less than wholehearted in his opposition to McCarthyism. Kennedy, in an effort to win her over, requested a meeting at Val-Kill. When Eleanor agreed, the young Kennedy was suddenly so nervous he insisted on bringing a friend. He told his friend that the meeting, planned for August 14, 1960, felt as momentous as the historic encounter between Czar Alexander and Napoleon on a raft at Tilsit.

  Eleanor had suffered yet another personal blow the day before the interview, when John’s daughter Sally, aged thirteen, died in a tragic riding accident at a girls’ camp in the Adirondacks. Eleanor wrote in her column of “the slim young figure that was so graceful and so quick, such a good swimmer, such a good horsewoman.” Kennedy offered to postpone the meeting, but Eleanor told him to come anyway.

  Kennedy expected Eleanor to ask him to make Adlai Stevenson his secretary of state in exchange for her support. But she began by assuring him that she thought all presidents should be free to make their own choices. She went on, however, to tell him how much he was going to need Stevenson’s support to win.

  She concluded from their conversation that Kennedy had matured during the campaign and that he wanted to leave a good record for posterity. “I will be surer of this as time goes on,” she reported to her Stevenson allies, “but I think I am not mistaken in feeling he would make a good President if elected.”

  Eleanor did everything she could from that time on to help John F. Kennedy win the presidency. William Walton, Kennedy’s friend who had come along to provide moral support, reported after the lunch meeting that JFK was “absolutely smitten.”

  Eleanor continued to follow her rule that “engagements must be kept” until very near the end of her life. But starting in 1960, she suffered from persistent anemia, which made her prone to fatigue, frequent infections, and fevers. She kept going with the help of regular blood transfusions.

  In January 1961, she attended Kennedy’s inauguration in a snowstorm. “I thought the speech magnificent, didn’t you?” she wrote Hick afterward. This was the speech in which JFK spoke the memorable line “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Eleanor told Hick she read the speech twice. Perhaps it reminded her of FDR’s first inaugural, with its own memorable line about “fear itself.”

  In the summer of 1962, Eleanor kept one last important engagement: the dedication of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge, an international link between Campobello, in Canada, and Lubec, Maine, in the United States. At Campobello, a high fever made her realize, as she told Trude Lash, how easy it would be to die.

  “I think she knew she was going, all summer,” Hick wrote later.

  On her way back from Campobello with Trude, Eleanor stopped to visit two of her oldest friends, Molly Dewson in Maine and Esther Lape in Connecticut. Then, when she got back to Val-Kill, she called Hick. “If you are going to be at home this afternoon,” she said, “I might come over.”

  It was a beautiful late summer day, so they sat out in Hick’s yard under a big maple tree. “That time she stayed more than an hour, and we had a long, quiet, relaxed, intimate talk that I shall always treasure,” Hick recalled. It was the last time the two women would be together. But Hick kept writing letters, reporting on her progress with a new book about Eleanor’s friend, labor leader Walter Reuther, and sharing the good news that her Helen Keller book was a Book of the Month Club selection. Most of all, she urged Eleanor to listen to her doctors and work hard on her recovery. “Apparently that virus was even worse than you knew, and you’ll simply have to recognize that fact and take it easy for some time—which you will hate, of course.”

  By October 1962, Eleanor was back in Columbia Presbyterian in New York City, insisting to everyone who would listen that she was ready to die. To a nurse who suggested that she must wait until God was ready to take her, she muttered, “Utter nonsense.” She resisted pills and food. At one point, when she was semiconscious, she was heard to say, “Let the ceremony begin.”

  Eleanor’s one wish was to leave the hospital for home. “I am going to ask David to let me rejoin the human race,” she said on October 15. Two days later, she did return home, accompanied by David, in an ambulette. It was such a beautiful autumn day that she asked her driver to circle back through Central Park a second time. She died three weeks later, following a stroke. She was seventy-eight years old.

  Gurewitsch had been the first to suspect the cause of Eleanor’s illness—a cause later confirmed on autopsy. Eleanor had died of complications of tuberculosis she had been exposed to decades earlier, in 1919. Cortisone treatments, which were given to counter internal bleeding, probably exacerbated old lesions and activated the TB in the bone marrow. The realization of what was happening came too late: tuberculosis had spread all over her body by that time.

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral was a grand and historic event. President Kennedy and his wife flew into town on Air Force One, joining former presidents Truman and Eisenhower in the Hyde Park rose garden, along with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the secretary of state, the governor of New York, the ambassador to the United Nations, and representatives of many countries of the world. Newsreels showed clips of the “last rites for the First Lady of the World.”

  “In the death of Eleanor Roosevelt,” St. James Episcopal rector Gordon Kidd said, “the world has suffered an irreparable loss. The entire world becomes one family orphaned by her passing.”

  Hick spent the morning with Ellie Seagraves. Then, because she knew how much Eleanor disliked s
uch ceremonies, she drove to the Catskills to be with her friend Mary Margaret McBride, a popular radio broadcaster who had also loved her dearest friend.

  Hick staged her own counter-ritual in the dark of night, with the help of Gordon Kidd. They drove onto the Hyde Park grounds and pulled up as close as possible to the rose garden. Hick, clutching a bouquet of wildflowers like the ones Eleanor loved to gather on her walks at Val-Kill, made her way toward the white marble slab marking the shared resting place of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. But she couldn’t walk well enough to make it all the way there, so the Reverend Kidd took her bouquet and added it to the mountain of flowers already piled on top of the grave.

  Hick told her friend Helen Douglas she would want to die once Eleanor Roosevelt died. But she lived on for another five and a half years. Each year, on Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday, she visited the grave with her personal tribute to her dearest friend: a single yellow rose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LIVING ON

  “I’M GETTING OUT OF HERE over Christmas,” Hick wrote Helen Douglas after Eleanor’s death. “Coward. Can’t take it.” She wound up spending Christmas Eve with Helen and her husband, Melvyn, who were in New York preparing for a Broadway show, and Christmas Day at the home of Esther Lape.

  “A year from now,” Hick wrote the Douglases after the holiday, “it will be easier for me. These things do grow dim with time. Next year I think I shall be able to go along as usual—the lighted outdoor Christmas tree, the party for all the little [neighborhood] boys and so on. . . . Part of my trouble has been, I think, that I took Mrs. R too much for granted. All the thoughtful, personal, little things she used to do for me. For instance, on New Year’s Day, which she usually spent in NY, she always called me, and so, involuntarily, I found myself listening for the telephone to ring that day.”

  Six months after Eleanor died, Hick told Jeannette Brice, a friend from Minneapolis days, that she was finally beginning to pull herself together. “Grief can be a very debilitating thing, and I haven’t had much energy or interest in anything.”

  She went on to give a grim update on her health at age seventy: diabetes, controlled by insulin, badly crippled by arthritis, blind in one eye from a series of hemorrhages. “But I manage to keep going. And my books, bless ’em, provide me with a fairly good living.” By 1963, she was getting as much as $4,000 every six months for the Helen Keller book and was swamped with fan mail from her readers.

  Hick kept in touch with Anna Roosevelt (now Halsted) and was pleased that they had finally become friends. She had never had much to do with the Roosevelt sons, nor they with her. “I cannot forget or forgive them for the many, many hurts they inflicted upon her,” she wrote Lape after Eleanor died. “It seemed to be my fate, since Tommy went, always to be with her when they hurt her.”

  Not long before Eleanor became seriously ill, two young families moved into Hick’s neighborhood. There were the O’Learys, who had seven boys and one girl, and a Dutch refugee couple, who had six children, slightly older. “All of the boys in the neighborhood are on my payroll,” she reported to Helen Douglas, “and they are in and out of the house all of the time. And do I love it?”

  Three of the boys, age eleven and twelve, were dog walkers, taking turns a week at a time—“only one gets paid but frequently all three go along.” Another was a dog groomer, “very gentle,” and another a dogsitter. The smallest, “an adorable little Dutch boy named Tony,” insisted on being Hick’s leaf raker. “I didn’t think he could do it,” she wrote, “but I hated to humiliate him by telling him he was too small.”

  The appearance of the two young families in her life, just as she was losing her great love, seemed almost like a miracle. “I don’t know,” she wrote Douglas, “maybe there is a God—without the long white whiskers.”

  Yet Hick sometimes felt “as though I were trapped in a backwater of the Florida Everglades, without even a crocodile for company.” Though she enjoyed the children, “I do long for adult conversation.”

  Hick’s letters were her way of conversing. Because of her failing vision, she no longer wrote them in her bold hand. But she could type almost as fast as she thought, and she would often apologize for going on and on. “This letter is much too long,” she once wrote. “I hope you haven’t tried to read it in one sitting.”

  Even as she faced her own debilitating ailments, Hick had a habit of obsessing over other people’s health problems and dispensing unwanted and dubious medical advice. But her better letters were full of stories and insights. To Helen, she lamented the terrible loss of JFK—“a fine mind, an open mind—what Mrs. R. would have called a flexible mind—destroyed in one instant.”

  FDR, she told Melvyn Douglas, “was just an intelligent, well-informed conservative, aware that changes must be made, trying to keep as much as he could of ‘the good old days.’” It was Eleanor, in her opinion, who was the true “small d” democrat.

  She liked LBJ, because he had “remarkable political savvy,” like FDR. “We never had a President who was worth a damn who did not have it. . . . Some people who worship the memory of Abraham Lincoln forget, if they ever knew—that he spent years and years in the rough-and-tumble of Illinois politics, right down at the dirt level, before he became President.” The only problem LBJ had, she noted in November 1964, was “the stench of our foreign policy” in Vietnam.

  It got harder for Hick to travel for research, but she kept at it until the very end. She told her editor, Allen Klots, that she was training herself “to work over an aching back as professional singers train themselves to sing over a heavy chest cold.” Early in 1968, she hired a car to drive her to a New York City meeting with Walter Reuther.

  Klots remembered watching her as she entered the hotel dining room. “Now almost blind, she nevertheless insisted upon making her way independently. It seemed forever, as she moved at a snail’s pace with the aid of two canes, each step an expression of the agony she must have felt. . . . And then when she finally came to rest and began to talk through the cigarette smoke, one was reminded of the extraordinary vigor that made her the first-rate journalist she was.”

  That spring, Hick’s doctor told her that circulatory problems in her legs were so severe that he was going to have to amputate at least one of them. After the surgery at Northern Dutchess Hospital in Rhinebeck, north of Hyde Park, her sister Ruby came from Long Island to be with her in what turned out to be her final days.

  Lorena Hickok died there on May 1, 1968, from complications of diabetes. She was seventy-five. Hick made it clear in her will that she wanted to be cremated and “to avoid any sort of funeral ceremony.” If the St. James rector, Gordon Kidd, who had officiated at Eleanor’s huge, public funeral, was available, she would like him “to go to the crematory chapel and say a brief prayer before the cremation takes place.” As for the disposal of her ashes, she wrote, “I should like to have them dug into the soil around growing trees, which may benefit from whatever chemicals the ashes contain.”

  Hick got the first part of her wish: the rector officiated, without anyone else present, at her cremation, not just saying a prayer but conducting the regular Episcopal service. But after that, Lorena Hickok’s ashes sat on a shelf at the Dapson Funeral Home until they were buried, after twenty years, in the “unclaimed remains area” at the cemetery in Rhinebeck, ten miles north of the marble slab that marks Eleanor and Franklin’s shared grave.

  Hick left a three-page will in which she parceled out the things she loved, most of which were gifts from Eleanor. Almost all of her friends and their children got something—silver tea mugs, or pictures, or a poetry anthology she and Eleanor had enjoyed, or napkins and a runner embroidered by Eleanor with Hick’s initials. Hick gave Eleanor’s niece (Hall’s daughter), who was also named Eleanor, the large blue cup she had used for café au lait during her years at the White House. Her most precious possessions, including her little sheepdog Jenny, went t
o Eleanor Seagraves (Sistie), the Roosevelt grandchild she had felt closest to in her last years. Eleanor Seagraves was a librarian and her husband, Van, a newspaperman, and they had three young children to educate, so Hick gave them the $700 she had left from the $1,000 Eleanor had given her when she died. She also gave Eleanor Seagraves several pieces of furniture, made in the Val-Kill workshop, including her treasured desk, and stipulated that she would receive the royalties from the Helen Keller book.

  Many of the reports Hick had written for Harry Hopkins, turned down by publishers back in the 1930s, were finally edited by Richard Lowitt and Maureen Beasley and published in 1980 under the title One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression.

  “Unlike the convoluted government documents one is accustomed to,” wrote Rhoda Lehrman in the New Republic, “Hickok’s reports are really letters: persuasive, immediate, fiery, and memorable. The fear and hopelessness of the times are still palpable. The people are still vivid. What Hickok gave to her letters was passion.”

  Hick’s book on Walter Reuther was completed by Jean Gould and published under the names of both Gould and Lorena Hickok in 1972 as Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist. The New York Times called it “a fascinating book for the younger generation, as well as for labor historians.”

  Hick would have been pleased to know that Eleanor Seagraves has continued to receive royalties from the Helen Keller book, and that they have amounted over the years to $80,000. She would perhaps be even happier to know that Sistie, age eighty-seven at this writing, still sits at her Val-Kill desk.

  POSTSCRIPT

  PATSY COSTELLO HAS LIVED all of her seventy-five years in the same house on Main Street in Hyde Park, New York. The Roosevelt family saga has permeated her life. Her father served on the local Democratic Committee and her mother was president of the Roosevelt Home Club. As a girl, she was invited to Val-Kill, where Eleanor Roosevelt served her scoops of vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries. Nowadays Patsy is president of the Hyde Park Historical Society, which mostly concerns itself with the Roosevelt legacy. Books about the Roosevelts and Roosevelt memorabilia fill the rooms of her 165-year-old house, which is also a bed-and-breakfast where the Roosevelt grandchildren sometimes stay.