Eleanor and Franklin (109 page)

If the laughter was at her expense, she was prepared to join in, and somehow it never seemed to detract from her graciousness and dignity. Yet to be the butt of ridicule was difficult for her. She had been a clumsy child whom her mother had made fun of as “Granny” and an awkward teen-ager who had been too tall and unfashionably dressed, so that her first impulse was to shrink from the limelight, especially from occasions where she might be burlesqued, but she presented a brave face to the world and encouraged others to do the same. She should not let her height worry her too much, she wrote a Philadelphia girl: “I have moments when I hate being tall. At other times I find it convenient, as, for instance in crowds. . . . After all, what we look like doesn't matter much to anyone except ourselves!”
Life
published a photograph of her asleep in an airplane with her mouth open. “She is fair game when caught by an enterprising photographer,” a
Life
editor rationalized. “The picture gave me no concern, though some of my friends were rather appalled by it,” Eleanor reassured the embarrassed photographer. “Nobody looks very nice when he goes to sleep with his mouth open, and this has served to remind me to carry a large heavy veil and swathe myself in it before I go to sleep on a plane again!”
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William Laas, who edited her column, explained why he had deleted the sentence, “I must not go to sleep on my good ear or the telephone will ring indefinitely and I will not hear it.” The general public “can be very cruel,” he wrote, “and it is seldom wise to leave one's self open to their gibes by revealing some personal idiosyncrasy.” No one ever is as inwardly composed as they outwardly appear, Eleanor once wrote, “but it is a very good thing to cling to appearances.”
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She was outwardly controlled, so much so that she had seemed to Cissy Patterson to be the most serene woman in Washington, yet there was an occasional reminder “of untamed Nature.” An unknown writer felt it when she heard one of Eleanor's great bursts of laughter over the absurdity of some situation. Her hearty laughter reflected a natural exuberance but it was also a release from the resentment of a strong nature when it feels hemmed in by circumstances. With two such strong personalities as Franklin and Eleanor, it was a wonder the household was
not torn apart between the president's realistic deference to what is and Eleanor's spirited impatience for what ought to be. It was held together not only by respect and mutual understanding and the interests that they shared in their children and their own careers, but by their ability to find a release from strain and tension in laughter and entertainment.

Louis, in addition to his other services to Franklin and Eleanor, had been a master of gaieties, and Eleanor, who had been his apprentice in this as in so many other things, carried on the tradition after he died. “I thought instead of making speeches at the dinner this year,” her invitation to the 1938 Cuff Links dinner read, “it would be amusing if each person would come either in costume or with something to present to the President as a reminder of some special incident, and the President will be asked to guess what the incident is. . . . The ladies as usual will leave the gentlemen free after dinner for their usual entertainments.” For Franklin's 1939 birthday party she asked everyone to come prepared “with a forecast of what may happen to the President in the coming year. It will be a general fortune-telling party.”
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She enjoyed organizing the birthday parties for Franklin and making them gay occasions with Franklin the focus of all the to-do, and she did the same for close friends. For Elinor Morgenthau's birthday, she wrote Agnes Leach, “I am asking everyone to either write a poem or make a little speech to her on some event during the past year.” But her own birthdays she preferred to have celebrated with as little fuss as possible. Franklin usually gathered the friends she really cared about for a birthday dinner, “but I was always glad when I ceased to be the center of attention.”
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She was unable to enjoy the limelight the way her husband—and her mother-in-law—did. At the president's birthday ball in New York City, Sara sat calmly amid a press of photographers in the glare of floodlamps enjoying “every bit of the commotion” that she caused, and when Helen Robinson left at 12:30 “she was still there, grand old war-horse that she is.”
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At one of Franklin's birthday parties at the White House Eleanor contributed some verse which she read while wearing a chef's hat. It was a gentle apology to her husband because the menus at the White House were often not up to his gourmet standards.

Ducks, deer, salmon,

Turkey, pheasant, trout

Quail, moose and reindeer

All arriving by the ton

May be eaten with a pout

By the household, but the master

Never, never has enough.

On those who cook he's pretty rough

And when terrapin appears

Till he tastes it we're all ears

Fearing something's wrong again,

But without these delicacies

Life would lose full half its flavor

So to the senders in these races

For the Presidential favor

Go his thanks and our apology

Mistress, housekeeper, and cook we're the sorry trilogy!

Usually Eleanor could not admit that the White House menus were on the dull side and not what her husband wanted, yet it was a subject on which almost all guests and members of the family were agreed. Once Franklin stated his feelings in writing. The situation had improved, sizzled a memorandum to Eleanor, since he had protested being served chicken six times in one week; now he was getting sweetbreads—“about six times a week. I'm getting to the point where my stomach positively rebels and this does not help my relations with foreign powers. I bit two of them today.”

One reason he wanted to be re-elected to a fourth term, he confided to Anna during the war years, and not wholly in jest, was “so I can fire Mrs. Nesbitt!” He was re-elected, James wrote, “but the housekeeper stayed on.” James' account of his father's sufferings at the hands of Mrs. Nesbitt was one of the few points in James' book to which Eleanor took exception and asked her son to print her letter saying so. If the menus were not what the president wanted, it was her responsibility, since Mrs. Nesbitt submitted the menus to her; nor did Mrs. Nesbitt cook the food. “It was cooked by very competent cooks,” and while Eleanor conceded that they had not known at first how to cook game and terrapin, the president had brought a man in once who did, and the cooks had learned from him.
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Partly, Franklin was a victim of the ascetic in Eleanor. She herself had little interest in food, she confessed, or, at heart, in other things that she considered time-wasting frippery. Once she distressed the nation's hairdressers with a columnar quip, “And now like all other women I must waste my time, at the hairdressers!” Why “waste”?
Ralph and Anna, the owners of a beauty shop, wanted to know. “We are as necessary as the milliner and dressmaker.” “My dear
Ralph and Anna
,” she hastily retreated, fearing she had dealt a blow to the nation's economy:

The hairdresser is not wasting time; it is I who sit doing nothing while she works or while the drier works. The same is true of the time spent at the milliner's or dressmaker's, but we can't help wasting it and perhaps it is necessary for us all to do so now and then!
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The puritan in her kept her from yielding to the frivolous and sensual as her husband could do on occasion. The Morgenthaus provided the champagne for one of her birthday parties; it had contributed to the gaiety of the occasion, her thank-you note said: “I think perhaps Franklin was more appreciative than I could have been, but I do know the champagne tasted very good.”

It was not only that she punished herself by this form of self-denial but that she had to punish her husband. His very enjoyment of good food, high-living, and pleasure-loving company pushed her in the opposite direction. Such appetites were tied to the self-indulgent side of his nature from which she had suffered so greatly, as she had from her father's and her brother's, who was currently drinking himself to death.

When guests came to the White House for a family dinner one of the ushers showed them their places at the table on a seating chart; when all the guests had assembled in the Red Room, Eleanor came down, greeted them, and led them into the family dining room to join the president, who was already seated.

What went on at the executive-office side of the White House was controlled by Missy and the president's secretaries—Mac, Steve, Pa Watson, Jimmy—but in the family quarters her understanding with Franklin was that she gave the orders to the social secretary, the housekeeper, and the ushers. Even the invitations to the president's birthday dinners—the famous Cuff Links affairs—were left to her. “I am wondering,” wrote Steve Early, “because I know how much pleasure the President gets out of Colonel Watson, whether you could care to include him among those invited to the birthday dinner. He is always loads of fun.”
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The seating plan symbolized Eleanor's control of the social side of the White House, and she could mete out swift punishment to
someone who tried to tamper with it. A Washington lobbyist whose ideas interested Eleanor and Franklin came for dinner, and when Mr. Crim, the usher, showed him the seating chart, the lobbyist expressed unhappiness that he was to sit some places removed from the president.

“My dear Mr. G . . . :” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him later:

Mr. Crim tells me that you were extremely upset the other night because of the change I had made in the seating. However, you will remember I told you I would put you next to the President at dinner if I did not get you an appointment with him beforehand. Inasmuch as you had an appointment, I considered it was only fair that someone else should be given the opportunity to talk to the President at dinner.

Mr. Crim says you remarked that you were not here entirely for pleasure, but because you were doing things for the President. I realize quite well that you have taken a great deal of trouble and have done several things. However, I think in all probability the benefits have not been entirely one-sided.

In the future, I feel that it will be better for you to arrange your appointments with the President through Mr. McIntyre and keep them on a purely official basis.
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The gentleman felt himself undone. “To know you is a privilege and a joy and whether you are Mistress at the White House or living in a little one story frame house in Central Kansas, it would always be a grand human experience to travel out there and visit with you as often as possible,” he wrote back hastily, giving his version of the incident. She appreciated his explanation, she replied, “and understand that your anxiety was caused by your desire to have a few minutes' talk with the President,”
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but it was the end of their relationship.

His mistake was not only one of good manners; in undertaking to rearrange her seating order, he had also revealed that all his professions of loyalty to her were an expedient way of reaching the president. Franklin's charm was so overpowering, his instinct for predominance so strong, the power of his office so irresistible, that men and women who Eleanor thought were devoted to her and who shared her ideals often showed themselves more eager to have the president smile upon them when she introduced them into the White House circle than to stand with her for the principles they had previously voiced.

The White House was in a sense divided into two households—the
president's and Eleanor's. She was much amused, Eleanor wrote in her column, to see a newspaper caption under a photograph of Missy, Grace Tully, and Betsy Roosevelt sailing for Europe describing Grace as her secretary. “I fear the lady must be much annoyed for she much prefers the gentlemen to the ladies and her affiliation with the White House staff is on the President's side.”
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Both she and the president demanded a fierce and absolute loyalty from friends and associates. Harry Hopkins warned an attractive young woman for whom the president had shown a liking but who was a special friend of Eleanor's to be careful: Mrs. Roosevelt could freeze if she felt you were succumbing to the president's charm and abandoning her. He knew from personal experience, he added.
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Harry's introduction to the White House inner circle had been through Eleanor. It was she who had arranged occasions for the president to get to know him by having him and his wife Barbara, of whom Eleanor was very fond, visit Hyde Park and Campobello when the president was there. He was flattered by her constant calls. “Mrs. Roosevelt wants to see me about ‘lots of things,' his diary for 1935 noted. The president, Louis, and Missy also were taken with Hopkins. Louis had found him “most congenial company,” Aubrey Williams observed, and Missy was “a very devoted follower of his.” During the 1936 campaign, Franklin gave Eleanor the impression that Harry might be his choice as Democratic candidate in 1940, and immediately after the election she began to press Franklin to act accordingly. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Harry were the only cabinet members she invited to the 1937 Cuff Links dinner and to her own birthday party. In 1938, she hinted at her advocacy of him as Franklin's successor, writing in her column that Hopkins “seems to work because he has an inner conviction that his job needs to be done and that he must do it. I think he would be that way about any job which he undertook.” A few months later Roosevelt announced Hopkins' appointment as secretary of commerce, an appointment that was widely heralded as designed to transform the warmhearted social worker into a hard-headed business-statesman and thus pave the way for the presidential nomination.
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