Kati Marton (9 page)

Eleanor’s childhood is the story of a chain of losses. She was the
solemn child of frivolous, beautiful parents. Her mother was a society belle who did not hide her disappointment that her daughter was plain. You have no looks, she told the child she called “Granny,” see to it that you have manners. “Attention and admiration,” Eleanor later said, were the two things she longed for in her childhood. She never had a chance to win either from her mother, who died when Eleanor was eight. Her father, who made up for her mother’s constricted love with effusive outpourings, was not a steady presence in the little girl’s life. Eleanor nonetheless adored the man who called her his “little Nell.” When, two years after her mother’s death, her father died of alcoholism, she and her two younger brothers were left the wards of their grandmother.

Eleanor’s salvation came when, at fifteen, she was sent to the Allenswood Academy, a progressive boarding school near London. She arrived in England a bundle of fears and insecurities. The headmistress of Allenswood was the first to perceive that the shy girl had an extraordinary quality. Despite Eleanor’s pedigree, she was seen to have an open mind, avid to learn and hungry for every new idea. And she had something else: a humanity that set her apart. When she returned home after three years at Allenswood, Eleanor had a stronger sense of herself. She had been encouraged to use her mind, and she had shone. “For the first time in all my life,” she said, “all my fears left me.”

When Franklin accidentally encountered his fifth cousin Eleanor on a train, he saw a more self-assured young woman, no longer trying quite so hard to bend to society’s expectations of who she should be. She was tall and graceful, with beautiful eyes, thick, fair hair and a lively curiosity Franklin had not encountered in a girl of his set. “E. is an angel,” he wrote in code in his diary, to keep his mother in the dark. A year later, the two Roosevelts were engaged. Sara Roosevelt, not yet ready to share her adored son, tried and failed to keep them apart. Eleanor was given away in marriage by her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, on March 17, 1905.

Despite such similar backgrounds, and even a blood tie, the couple’s differences were clear. Franklin, tall and conventionally handsome, used his all-is-well smile to keep the world at arm’s length. “If something was unpleasant,” Eleanor later said of her husband, “he didn’t want to know
about it; he just ignored it …. I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it would settle itself.” Relentlessly charming, he could talk for forty minutes at a stretch on any subject, so long as it was not personal. He liked sending people away happy.

Eleanor, intense and still somewhat insecure, inept at small talk, impatient to “be useful,” longed to connect more than socially. Moreover, deprived in childhood of the focused devotion which Franklin had had in excess, she hungered for intimacy. “You could not find two such different people as Mother and Father,” their daughter, Anna, noted. But neither Roosevelt knew nor cared much about their differences. Photographs show a secret joy, almost a look of relief, on their faces during this period. Franklin was declaring his independence from his mother. Eleanor, who had never had a steady, loving presence in her life, thought she had found it in Franklin. “Everything is changed for me now,” she wrote him. “I am so happy. Oh! so happy and I love you so dearly. I cannot begin to write you all I should like to say, but you know it all I am sure and I hope that you, too, dearest are very very happy.” For the first time in her nineteen years, she dared drop her reserve and entrust someone with her deepest feelings. “Dearest Honey,” she wrote him when they were apart, “I miss you dreadfully and feel very lonely, but please don’t think it is because I am alone, having other people wouldn’t do any good for I just want you!”

The young lovers tried to placate Franklin’s mother, who still tried her best to keep them apart. “Not only I but you are the luckiest and will always be the happiest people in the world,” Franklin wrote Sara, “in gaining anyone like E. to love and be loved by.” But Sara would not cede her preeminent position in her son’s life. Nor was it in his nature to confront her directly. How much pain Franklin might have spared Eleanor had he been willing to draw clearer boundaries.

No doubt Franklin and Eleanor saw in each other their own missing qualities. He was drawn to her serious, high-minded side and the generous empathy he did not yet possess. She already bristled at their over-privileged lives. “One thing I am glad of every minute I stay here,” she wrote her fiancé from a Long Island mansion, “is that we won’t ever have to have a house half so beautiful or half so overwhelming! I’m afraid I
wasn’t born to be a high life lady, dear, so you’ll just have to be content with a simple existence, unless you teach me how to change!” She saw how much Franklin enjoyed being Franklin, and wished for some of that lighthearted sense of well-being for herself. Cynical observers who saw only their surface differences said that in marrying Eleanor, Franklin was trying to get close to her “Uncle Teddy,” the politician he most admired. That is at odds with their evident and powerful feelings for each other.

A poem she sent him—part admonishment, part solemn vow—reveals how momentous their bond was to Eleanor. She kept a copy of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, and its lofty standard for love, all her life.

“I wondered,” she wrote Franklin, “if it meant ‘for life, for death’ to you at first, but I know it does now. I do not know what to write. I cannot write what I want. I can only wait and long for Sunday when I shall tell you all I feel I cannot write.”

Their first child, Anna, was born on May 3, 1906, followed in rapid succession by James, Franklin (who died soon after birth), Elliott, Franklin and John. “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one,” Eleanor wrote.

But her husband never did leave his mother. Through her control of the family finances, Sara still largely determined where and how they lived and even how they raised their children. Five years into their marriage, Sara bought them a town house in New York City adjacent to her own with a connecting door between the two on each floor. At the dining table at Hyde Park, Franklin sat at one end and Sara the other, Eleanor
along the side. To this day, two enormous armchairs flank the fireplace of the cavernous Hyde Park living room. The hearth belonged to mother and son; Eleanor was the visitor. Until she built her own house nearby, she had no place that was hers.

Eleanor could have borne all this had Franklin been the partner she longed for. But once their courtship was over, he could not share his emotional life with his wife and was puzzled by her need to do so. “In the autumn of 1908,” Eleanor wrote,

It was more than her emotional life that was unfulfilled. The high-necked frocks and tight corsets she wore were only the outward manifestation of the constricted lives of women of Eleanor’s class. While her husband enjoyed his man-about-town status, her hungry mind was undernourished. Eleanor was searching for a way out of her confinement.

Escape came once Franklin launched the political career he patterned after Uncle Teddy’s. Moving to Albany when Franklin became a New York state senator, then Washington when he was appointed undersecretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, finally freed Eleanor from Sara’s yoke. Organizing her children’s and husband’s lives, she discovered she was a natural administrator. Always motivated more by duty than pleasure, she was now scrupulous about fulfilling her duty as the helpmate of a rising political star. “I was perfectly certain that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the
majority of women were doing.” Doing as the majority of political wives were doing—though surely most did not have five toddlers at home—meant a round of ten to thirty social calls each afternoon. But she did not enjoy the Washington matrons’ minuet of luncheon parties, the leaving of calling cards, the prescribed good works. Eleanor liked what she called real talk, conversation with a purpose. She yearned for the deeper rewards of real service.

The differences between Franklin and Eleanor continued to assert themselves. Where he was devious, she was straightforward. He loved playing games with people, she was incapable of manipulation. Where he fled hard personal truths, she embraced them. Where he was patient, she was impatient. Where he was practical, she was uncompromising. Franklin was the sort of man who was familiar to all yet intimate with none. Exuding a surface openness—he invariably called people by their first names in an age when it was unusual to do so—he never really dropped his guard with anyone.

Eleanor’s overactive conscience precluded fun for its own sake—something as essential as oxygen for Franklin. Her husband was a flirt who thrived in lighthearted female company. He almost always had a good time, even at formal events that simultaneously bored her and made her anxious. Nor could he join Eleanor in soul-searching conversation. She had come up against what some called his little “black box,” that place no one penetrated, where he stored his most private thoughts. Her husband was discovering that his greatest love was politics. “It is a little like a drug habit,” Franklin wrote, “almost impossible to stop definitively.” At some level, he surely sensed he could never make Eleanor happy for long. “I am sometimes a little selfish,” he wrote a friend, “… and make life a trifle dull for her really brilliant mind and spirit.” He wrote her in 1913, “I know it’s hard for both of us to lead this kind of life,” aware that it was hard only for Eleanor.

In 1918, when she was thirty-four years old, “the bottom dropped out” of Eleanor’s world when she discovered she was sharing her husband with another woman. She had had her suspicions for some time. Franklin seemed too eager to pack her off with “the chicks” for their summer retreat in Campobello, New Brunswick. “You goosy girl,” her husband had chided her for impugning his motives. The packet of love
letters Eleanor found in his suitcase when he came home ill from a European mission broke her heart and forever shattered her love for Franklin. That they had been written by her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, deepened the pain. Lucy was of Eleanor’s social class and breeding; she was a younger, more beautiful and more lighthearted version of Eleanor. Lucy and Franklin had fallen in love in her house, under her nose. The man who had given Eleanor confidence as a woman and had provided her a secure place in the world suddenly snatched them away. It was a reprise of her worst childhood trauma: the loss of her beloved father. Those she most loved seemed always to desert her. She never again allowed herself to love freely. Unlike her prior losses, however, this heartbreak transformed her.

Eleanor agreed to stay with Franklin for the sake of their five children and for his political future, which a divorce would have ended. FDR pledged never to see Lucy again. No doubt Eleanor was also motivated by more complex emotions: a powerful bond of affection, respect, a common history and shared goals. But for a woman as absolutist in her judgments as Eleanor, her husband’s betrayal was beyond redemption. “How could she forgive him,” one of her grandchildren later asked, “after her childhood experiences?” Two years later, on February 14, 1920, Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law, “Did you know Lucy Mercer married Mr. Wintie Rutherfurd two days ago?” Rutherfurd, a wealthy widower with six children, was more than twice Lucy’s age.

In a conventional sense, Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage ended in 1918. She abandoned her dream of a union based on perfect understanding and a complicity that would keep the rest of the world at bay. “After that, father and mother had an armed truce,” their son James wrote, “that endured to the day he died, despite several occasions I was to observe in which he in one way or another held out his arms to mother and she flatly refused to enter his embrace. [But] there was always an affection between them ….” Like the Clintons a half century later, the Roosevelts were embattled but permanently bound to each other.

Eleanor had idealized her husband as much as she had her mercurial father. She was disappointed by both men. But rather than allowing that disappointment to crush her, gradually and through great pain, she made it work for her. No longer burdened by trying to be the perfect wife or
the perfect daughter-in-law, she declared her independence. At a time when women did not even have the right to vote, much less participate in the male-dominated civic or professional world—when, in fact, Edith Wilson more than Eleanor represented the “ideal woman”—she began the personal journey from which she never retreated. Rather than withdrawing into herself, her pain spurred growth, made her even more compassionate. She now stopped playing by the rules of her social class and plunged into political life.