Kati Marton (12 page)

“My first act,” Eleanor remembered, “was to insist on running the [White House] elevator myself without waiting for one of the doormen to run it for me. That just wasn’t done by the President’s wife.” With a respectful press corps rarely transgressing beyond strict boundaries, the American people knew little about how the new first lady abdicated her role as traditional wife in exchange for the freedom to travel, to write and to speak out. Eleanor and Franklin rarely dined alone or shared intimacies. Franklin’s placement of a chest of drawers in front of the sliding doors that connected his wife’s study to his bedroom was only the physical manifestation of their separate lives in the White House.

Eleanor and Franklin soon discovered that the big old house suited their lives and their relationship remarkably well. They turned the White House into an informal place of high energy and spontaneity. In those days, anyone could walk through the gates and stroll the grounds without ever having to show any identification. To compensate for the absence of real warmth in their marriage, the Roosevelts needed the stimulation and companionship of others. Among the dozens of people invited to reside for a time in the White House was a young writer named Martha Gellhorn (not yet married to her future husband Ernest Hemingway), recently fired from her government job. “It was just a great big house … always full of chums and funny people, and it was one of the most pleasing and easygoing amusing places you could possibly be in. And there was absolutely no sign of imperial nonsense.” Gellhorn soon discovered that things could turn serious as well, especially at mealtime. “I was seated next to him [FDR] and Mrs. R. at the far end of the table at a given moment rose up the way she did and said, ‘Franklin, talk to that child at your left. She says that all the people in the South have pellagra or syphilis.’”

Eleanor gave the shortest shrift to both the ceremonial and housekeeping aspects of her role. “People just came to dinner,” Gellhorn
recalled, “took off their coats and went into whatever room downstairs. Mrs. R. was waiting for them to serve them some rotten wine. They always had terrible food and terrible wine. She didn’t know anything about food, or care about it. I don’t suppose he [FDR] did; he cared about his martinis, which he mixed upstairs. And they just sat about and chattered and then they went into the dining room, which I don’t remember as being in any way overpowering, except that there were a lot of people at table, because it was a combination of people who were supposed to be fun and amuse the President, or chums, and people that they had to have.”

It is clear from their choice of companions how different were the Roosevelts’ needs and expectations in relationships. Eleanor won people over with intensity and idealism, Franklin with ebullience. “If Father became friendly with a princess or a secretary,” their daughter, Anna, recalled, “he’d reach out and give a pat to her fanny and laugh like hell and was probably telling a funny story at the same time, whereas to Mother that was terrible. He loved to outrage Granny, to tease her. He could never do that with Mother. She was much too serious. Mother was inhibiting to him. She would never go along. That’s why he turned elsewhere.”

Franklin had his entourage, many of whom not only worked in the White House but composed part of the First Family. Missy occupied a suite of rooms on the third floor. But there were others who were frequent, long-term guests, including Crown Princess Martha of Norway and FDR’s cousins Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano. These women provided him with diversion and unquestioning loyalty. Franklin, of course, was not a stranger to strong women. His mother had been mistress of all that transpired at Hyde Park. But Sara’s identity was drawn entirely from her husband, her son, her domestic empire. Typical for a man of his generation, FDR was not especially comfortable with women who challenged him intellectually. The Eleanor he married was not the assertive, competent, self-confident woman she would become.

FDR liked his women pliant and seductive. Once, when his wife told him that he was to dine alone with Madame Chiang, the tough-minded wife of Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek, the president replied heatedly,
“Indeed I shan’t! I am going to bed early!” Eleanor later remarked, “I don’t think that Franklin likes women who think they are as good as he is.” His daughter, Anna, was also hurt by this. “Pa seems to take for granted that all females should be quite content to ‘keep the home fires burning,’ and that their efforts outside of this are merely rather amusing and to be aided by a patronizing male world only as a last resort to keep some individually troublesome female momentarily appeased,” she wrote her husband, John Boettiger, noting that her mother “goes along very strongly with me in our feeling that OM [Old Man] is a stinker in his treatment of the female members of his family.”

Though FDR admired Eleanor’s single-mindedness and her moral absolutism, he could take them only in limited doses. Presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, a close friend of both Roosevelts, recalled one such occasion. Eleanor had been relentlessly trying to reach her husband, to plead for a stay of execution for a convicted black sharecropper. FDR was equally determined to avoid his wife’s calls. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” Hopkins remembered, “would not take no for an answer. The president finally got on the phone himself and told Mrs. Roosevelt, that under no circumstances would he intervene ….” It may have been awkward at times for Hopkins to navigate between the two Roosevelts, but, Hopkins once admitted, “I never cease to admire Eleanor’s burning determination to see that justice is done.”

“FDR sometimes was impatient because he was tired and Mrs. Roosevelt had something important she wanted to tell him,” Trude Lash recalled. “She wanted him to do something right away. The people around him very often didn’t tell him the truth. It is so tempting to only say agreeable things to the president. And they would tell him how wonderful things were, either because they were involved or they didn’t want to get hurt by it or they didn’t want him to get upset. But she would tell him. She had the courage not to get discouraged. And the president knew this.”

Eleanor also had her “court.” Earl Miller, a former state trooper who became Eleanor’s driver, bodyguard and companion, was a key member of her entourage. A physically powerful man, Miller taught her to shoot, drive and ride. He encouraged her to overcome her fear of sports and the outdoors. When, much later, Lash asked Earl if the rumor of an affair
between him and the first lady were true, Miller answered, “You don’t sleep with someone you call Mrs. Roosevelt.” Still, Earl clearly filled the need for masculine presence in Eleanor’s life. In all her homes, there was always a room for Earl.

Joe Lash, the melancholy young man who became her biographer, was also a fixture in her life. Eleanor loved Joe with an almost adolescent intensity. She frequently signed off her letters to him, “I love you,” a formulation she almost never used with her husband. Later, Lash’s wife, Trude, also joined Eleanor’s inner circle. Eleanor loved giving the young couple advice on their troubled relationship and seemed to savor vicariously their passion and commitment to each other. All the emotions missing from her marriage she channeled into these friendships. But sex with any of these intimates remained largely unexplored territory for a woman whose roots were firmly Victorian. “She loved deeply,” Joe Lash maintained, “but she was unable to let herself go.”

Eleanor was shy and slow to open up, but her friendships were deep, authentic and lifelong. How different her approach was to those she truly loved and trusted from the surface warmth she extended Franklin. “A little bit of my heart seems to be with you always Joe,” Eleanor wrote Joe Lash. “You’ll carry it round wherever you go and in its place the thought of you will be with me wherever I go ….” Eleanor often said, “If I have a weakness, it is the need for approbation from those I love.” Trude remembered: “She was wonderful about keeping in touch. She wrote sometimes twice a day. Very often the letters were just greetings or ‘I am thinking of you’ and nothing else …. She was a lonely person and needed a lot of friendship and affection and she gave herself so completely that she was always in danger of being hurt. The way you are if you give too much, too exposed …. She was very honest about herself. She knew that she got easily hurt. She would not show hurt, except she would get very quiet.”

Eleanor’s respect for Franklin was part compensation for the absence of intimacy. “I realize more and more that FDR is a great man,” she wrote Joe Lash, “and he is nice to me, but as a person I’m a stranger, and I don’t want to be anything else!” Her once consuming love for “Dearest Honey” had cooled. “Last night,” she wrote Hick in September 1939, “I … was asked if I loved my husband, which I did not answer!”
Franklin also gave her that which he gave so many Americans: “I’ve never known a man,” Eleanor wrote, “who gave one a greater sense of security. I never heard him say there was a problem that he thought it was impossible for human beings to solve …. I never knew him to face life or any problem that came up with fear.”

Franklin also taught his wife not to take criticism personally. She was deeply hurt when conservative Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler accused her of social activism only to satisfy her own ego. “Don’t upset yourself,” her husband advised. “Remember, never enter into a contest with a skunk. All you can do about creatures like him is ignore them. You don’t need such people. You should be proud they’re not on your side.” And in time she accepted the criticism as part of the territory.

She thrived as first lady. During her first year in the White House, she traveled forty thousand miles, reporting back to Franklin about the fledgling New Deal’s progress. The
Washington Star
was only mildly tongue in cheek when it printed the headline, “Mrs. Roosevelt Spends Night at White House.” By 1935, she was earning almost as much money from her radio shows as was the president. The times served her well. The Depression and then the war loosened conventions regarding both marriage and women’s role in society. More and more women had to look for work outside the home to help support their families. Attitudes were slowly changing regarding what was a “suitable” role for a woman, and Eleanor’s example no doubt encouraged that shift. When a 1938 Gallup Poll queried the public, “Do you think that the president’s wife should engage in any business activity which interests her if she doesn’t do it for a profit?” Seventy-three percent of those polled replied “Yes.”

It is striking how each of the Roosevelts managed to be productive and personally fulfilled in their first term. Franklin understood Eleanor’s need to be “useful” and the consequences for both of them if she were not. Eleanor could be a dark presence in the White House when she fell into what she called her “Griselda” mood, sulky and uncommunicative. Franklin, who needed cheeriness around him, found her silences intolerable. She was not above using this passive-aggressive weapon to get her way in matters of policy. During the summer of 1935, every time Eleanor raised the subject of the four million unemployed young men and women, her husband put her off. But through a combination of persuasion
and calculated aloofness, she wore him down. Eleanor described how she got Franklin to launch the National Youth Administration. “I waited until my usual time for discussing questions with him,” she wrote in her memoir, “and went into his room just before he went to sleep. I described the whole idea …. He looked at me and said, ‘Do you think it is right to do this?’ I said …it might be a great help to the young people … but it might be unwise politically. Then Franklin said: ‘If it is the right thing to do for the young people, then it should be done. I guess we can stand the criticism ….’”

The bond of their shared history was strong. A part of Franklin still saw Eleanor as the slim and shy nineteen-year-old girl he once referred to as “an angel” in his diary. “That’s just the way Eleanor looks, you know,” Franklin once said to Frances Perkins, pointing to his wife’s youthful portrait. “Lovely hair, pretty eyes. And she always looks magnificent in evening clothes, doesn’t she?” Part of FDR’s strength was his ability to see what he wanted to see in others and in himself. At times he may even have convinced himself that theirs was a conventional marriage. “Dearest Babs,” he wrote her from Rio de Janeiro, “Your radio [wire] was welcome this morning, but I’m sorry about F’s sinus …. Another year, let’s cut out and take a trip to Hawaii and Samoa instead.”

ROOSEVELT, LIKE JOHN F. KENNEDY,
was a master of compartmentalization, revealing different parts of himself to different people. Though, as his son James noted, “Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, Father talked with no one.”

Part of his strength as a leader was his fundamental self-sufficiency. Since he left neither memoirs nor much personal correspondence, it is hard to know precisely how Franklin viewed his marriage. No doubt he admired Eleanor’s courage in standing up to him when so few others did.

Like other wives of charismatic leaders, “she got used to the fact that women adored him,” Trude Lash recalled. “He was very handsome and charming. Plus he had power.” Sometimes this acceptance required tremendous self-control. “Princess Martha got on Eleanor’s nerves a little … she was really very flirtatious, in an obvious way, almost like a young girl, but she was too old to be a young girl. She wanted to literally
sit at the president’s feet. And there were others who adored him and sometimes FDR got tired of it and asked Eleanor to deal with them. Like [newspaper heiress] Dorothy Schiff, who bought a house close to the Hyde Park house. So the president asked Eleanor to take care of her. When Missy got sick, it was Mrs. Roosevelt who took care of her, who went to Massachusetts to see her.”