Eleanor and Franklin (103 page)

Why does she bother him with such trivial matters, the president's aides sometimes complained and oftener thought. Life might have been more tranquil for Franklin if she had not done so, but the texture of the Roosevelt years would have been different, a human touch would have been missing, the people and their government would have been less intimately involved with each other.

 

*
The
World-Telegram
in January, 1933, had spoken of a “connubial Presidency” after Eleanor, citing the danger of presidential isolation, said that her correspondence was an avenue

through which WE [
World-Telegram
capitals] can keep in touch with the public.

Not in the history of the American democracy and of the Presidency has a mistress of the White House spoken to the public in this extensive way, and so far as we know, not in the history of the democracies anywhere has the wife of a President, in alluding to the performance of the Presidential duties, used the first person plural “we” or “us.” In the case of Mrs. Roosevelt she welcomes the public to write not in the capacity of a representative of the President but as one member of a sort of co-partnership of interest.

†
See Chapter 49, “FDR Administers a Spanking.”

‡
Leonard Elmhirst sent it to her, requesting that she pass it on to the president.

41.
CHANGES AT HYDE PARK

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT HAD MANAGED AS
F
IRST
L
ADY TO REMAIN
herself, to be a person, not a personage, and to have the human being thus disclosed accepted by the American public. But to remain human she had to keep official duties from stifling her personal life. Sometimes she felt she was leading a Jekyll and Hyde existence—one moment the public personality, the next the private human being.

In 1937 Forbes Morgan, who had been married to Aunt Pussie, died. Eleanor's ties with him dated back to the year of her debut when as one of Pussie's suitors he had danced with her. The funeral services were in Washington, and as usual in family crises much of the responsibility fell upon Eleanor. She comforted “Boy,” Forbes's son, went with him to meet members of the family who converged upon Washington, and the next day accompanied him on the sad journey to Tivoli where Forbes was laid to rest in the Hall family vault. Yet all during the two days she also had to attend to such official duties as the annual breakfast of the Congressional Club, to which she had hurried after meeting her Aunt Maude at the train, for, she explained,

these official duties, like the one yesterday and the one today, are scheduled so long in advance that it always seems to me unfair to break the engagement unless it is absolutely necessary.

But in some ways it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one's life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its little hidden compartment to be taken out again when one's official duties are at an end.
¹

There were people who spoke to the passionate side of her nature, to whom she was bound by the memories of shared joys and sorrows—members of her family, a few co-workers, a few of the waifs for whom she felt a special responsibility. They represented the “personal side” of her life. She wrote of her Aunt Maude:

There are comparatively few people in the world whom you are always sure of finding equally interested, equally sympathetic, and equally entertaining as when you last met. When your ties go back into your childhood, however, and you have always found that a given person comes up to your expectations, you pick up the threads of relationship just where you dropped them when last you were together, and you feel a security of understanding which you do not feel with many people.
²

The president was immersed in public affairs, and her children were grown and gone. She had, moreover, always felt she had shared both her husband and her children with another woman, Franklin's mother. She needed to have people who were close to her, who in a sense were hers, to whom she was the one and only, and upon whom she could lavish help, attention, tenderness. Without such friends, she feared she would dry up and die. When such friends were in trouble she expected them to turn to her, and she felt rebuffed if they did not. When they came to Washington she insisted they stay at the White House, and when she was in New York City or whatever part of the country in which they lived, she planned, long in advance, the things they would do together. It gave her pleasure to bring them gifts, to take them to a new restaurant, to go to the theater with them. She corresponded with them faithfully, often writing longhand letters in the early hours of the morning. Their birthdays were listed in a little black loose-leaf book, their Christmas gifts in another, and in the bulging little engagement book that she kept in her purse (the pages for which were Lorena Hickok's annual Christmas present to her), the birthdays, Christmas parties, and wedding anniversaries that she unfailingly celebrated with them were the first entries. “As you know, Mrs. Roosevelt is always a year ahead of all the rest of us in her engagements,” Tommy wrote Hick. “She asked me to drop you a note to tell you that she would like to have the pages for next year when you have time to do them.”
³

Eleanor's cousin Corinne Alsop was staying with Alice Longworth, she informed Eleanor, but she would like to come and have dinner or tea with Eleanor when Alice was otherwise engaged: “I know that in casually saying I want to see you I am treating you as ‘Eleanor' and not quite as the Mistress of the White House and I am always finding myself shy in so doing.” “For Heaven's sake,” Eleanor remonstrated, “why shouldn't you treat me as Eleanor! I never think of myself as mistress of the White House with casual people, much less with my
family.” Corinne, like Cousin Susie and Henry Parish and Harry Hooker and Isabella Greenway, reached back to her youth. There were the friends made during the years she entered public life—Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and Elinor Morgenthau; those like Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller, who dated back to the days at Albany; and a few like Mayris Chaney, a dancer, who had been introduced to her by Earl in the Washington years. She went to great lengths to get together with these people.
⁴

In the 1936 campaign reporters were mystified when a petite, shapely blonde appeared on the presidential train during Roosevelt's tour through the Midwest. Who was she? they wanted to know, and gawked even more when the lady who they decided was someone's
femme fatale
rode in presidential parades in the same car with Mrs. Roosevelt. Finally a woman reporter was delegated to ask Eleanor who she was since no one else in the official party seemed able to tell them. She was, Eleanor willingly replied, Mayris Chaney, or “Tiny” as she called her, a dancer and a friend. But why on the campaign train? “Well,” explained Marquis Childs in his newspaper column, “they had promised themselves a holiday together and when Mrs. Roosevelt discovered she would not be on the West Coast that fall she wired for her friend, Mayris, to tour with the Presidential party. It was as simple as that.”
⁵

When Tiny came to New York she stayed at the little hideaway apartment that Eleanor and Tommy maintained on East Eleventh Street in the Village, in a little house owned by Esther and Elizabeth. So did Eleanor's brother Hall. So did Earl. Eleanor no longer used the house on Sixty-fifth Street. When she and Franklin moved to Washington they had thought of selling it, but only if that also was Sara's wish. They dropped the plan when Sara wrote her son,

Yes, I should not care for being in New York and away from this house, which so exactly suits me and I have become fond of it. At the same time if we could get a good price, and if the money (half of the amount I get) would be a help to you, with your big family, I would willingly let it go and I should live in the country. Yet it would be a pity to sacrifice such fine property, for in time it will rise again in value.
⁶

James and Betsy used the house briefly, as did Anna and her children after she divorced Curtis Dall, but Eleanor preferred her little
apartment in the Village. “Dear Georgie,” Tommy wrote the Negro maid, Miss Georgiana Turner, who worked for her and Eleanor in New York,

Mrs. Roosevelt will be in on Monday just in time to go to the theatre. Will you leave for her some crackers and milk, so that she and Mrs. Morgenthau can just have a bite before they go to the theatre. Then will you leave some sandwiches and some iced Sanka and some fruit so that they can have something to eat when they return from the theatre. Mrs. Morgenthau will spend the night, so you will have a bed ready for her, as well as for Mrs. Roosevelt.
⁷

If Eleanor considered any place home, it was Hyde Park. “I am always given the reputation of being constantly on the move,” she said to a group of women who were meeting in Washington, and added, her voice becoming a little high-pitched as it still did when she repeated something that seemed to her quite absurd,

in fact, one woman, I was told the other day, remarked that she did not see very much evidence that I ever stayed at home. As a matter of fact, I believe very strongly in deep roots in some piece of ground . . . some place that carried your memories and associations of many years. All of us need deep roots. We need to feel there is one place to which we can go back, where we shall always be able to work with people whom we know as our close friends and associates, where we feel that we have done something in the way of shaping a community, of counting in making the public opinion of that community.
⁸

The Hudson Valley from Tivoli south to Hyde Park was that place for Eleanor, and Val-Kill particularly. For years the Stone Cottage, two miles east of the Big House—for which Franklin had given her, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman lifetime use of the land (and where, as a measure of the intimacy of the three women, all the linen was marked EMN)—had been a refuge for her. There she found quietness when public life became too much, and devotion when, hurt by some new display of Franklin's casualness, she needed sensitive response and the feeling that she was really loved. Since the mid-twenties no one had been closer to Eleanor than Nan and Marion, especially Nan. But now her feelings began to change. She was constantly growing:
“There is something rather exciting about starting a new thing and one's ideas run riot!” she wrote in 1937 when she was fifty-three. “If the day ever comes when some one talks to me about something and it does not at once start a dozen trains of thought, I shall feel that the real springs of life are slowing up and that age is truly upon me!” She told the Todhunter graduating class, “Don't dry up by inaction but go out and do new things. Learn new things and see new things with your own eyes.”
⁹

She lived by this rule, her friends less so. There was a small sign that the relationship between her and her friends had changed when in late 1937 Marion asked Eleanor's help in planning the expansion of Todhunter. Like Val-Kill, Todhunter was an enterprise in which the three women were partners, even though Eleanor had given up teaching when she went to Washington, except for a current-events class. She still came, however, for opening-day ceremonies and commencement, and still gave an annual party for the staff and had each graduating class at the White House for a week end. Although the school was an excellent one, it was Eleanor's association with it that made it unique. Eleanor agreed to help Marion with her new plans, even though Franklin cautioned her, “You realize, of course, that if a campaign is undertaken, you will have to go to several dozen pep talk dinners and that the campaign is really based on your effective leadership.” She did most of the things that Marion asked of her, but she refused to be quoted in the fundraising brochure as saying that she intended to make the school one of her chief interests after she left Washington; she hoped, in fact, that she would be able to go on with her column, her lectures, her radio work. “I am terribly sorry,” she wrote the fund-raising firm, “but as I do not intend to make the school one of my chief interests, I feel it very much wiser to be absolutely honest. It will be one of my interests, but as I have no definite idea of what my other interests will be or where they will take me, I regret that I cannot change my statement.” In the end, to Eleanor's relief, the expansion plans were abandoned because of the recession.
¹⁰

But the shift in her interests might not have led to estrangement if Marion and Nancy had not reacted possessively. The break came when the three women decided to liquidate the Val-Kill Industries, which produced furniture, pewter, and woven materials. Eleanor wanted to take over the factory building, “The Shop” as it was called, and convert it into a house for herself and Tommy. According to Marion, they liquidated the factory because it had become too great a drain
on Nancy: “The load that Nan carried nearly killed her,” Marion was later quoted as saying. “I was carrying the school, but she carried the shop, the Democratic State Committee and was helping Eleanor with the homesteads.”
¹¹
Tommy's version was different: the furniture factory did not show a profit, and Eleanor was underwriting the losses; friends suggested that she get a business-minded person to manage the enterprise, and when Nancy objected they decided to dissolve the partnership.
¹²