The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (47 page)

As I look back now I think these latter-day readjustments in life have been made easier for me by the fact that I had become used to changes ever since Franklin’s illness. I think I had long been preparing for the personal adjustments that came with his death. I had always been a good organizer and I could make decisions. In the long night’s trip from Warm Springs, Georgia, before my husband’s funeral in the White House I had made certain definite decisions. I did not want to live in the big house on the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park. But what would the children feel? They loved the Hyde Park house. Their grandmother had made them feel it was their permanent home. How would it seem to have it swept out of their lives?

For myself, I knew I would live in the cottage that I had made out of my furniture factory on Val-Kill Creek, two miles back from the big house at Hyde Park. Tommy already had an apartment there. My cottage has a small apartment for the couple who work for me, two living rooms, a dining room, seven bedrooms, a dormitory for young people, two large porches downstairs and a sleeping porch upstairs. The cottage was an adjunct to our lives at Hyde Park but it was mine and I felt freer there than in the big house.

In his will Franklin left the place at Hyde Park to me and to our children throughout our lives if we desired to live there. At our deaths a certain acreage, including the big house, was to go to the government. But he left a private letter to me saying that he did not think we could afford to run the place and advising me to urge the children to give the house to the government at once. He wrote that his experience with the homes of other presidents had made it clear that visitors would make private life difficult. Characteristically, he remarked that he would hate to think of us taking refuge in the attic or the cellar in search of privacy.

I was happy when the children joined with me in deciding to turn the big house over to the government as soon as it could be arranged. I soon found that I had also better liquidate the farm at Hyde Park, since it was being run with doubtful efficiency. While I had my own daughter and three daughters-in-law and two sons with me, I arranged for the division of jewelry and furs, including all that had been designated for me from Franklin’s mother’s estate and everything else that I felt I would not need in my new way of life. Under the will I had first choice of silver, pictures, furniture, linen, china and other things, but I decided that I would take very little. I wanted a few things for sentiment—the Turner water colors my husband had given me, some of the linen and other objects that we had used for a long time. There were some things I would need that belonged to me. But, somehow, possessions seemed of little importance, and they have grown less important with the years.

My feeling that it is a mistake to hoard possessions was confirmed when I discovered under the eaves of the Hyde Park attic some bolts of Chinese silk. They probably had belonged to Mrs. Paul Forbes, my mother-in-law’s sister, and had been literally “put under the plank,” as she called it, many years earlier. When I found them hidden away under the eaves the beautiful silk had been hopelessly ruined by rain water.

After all the urgent matters had been taken care of as well as possible, and I had left the White House for the last time, I went to New York, where I had taken an apartment on Washington Square a year earlier. I had thought it would be just the right place for my husband and me when he left the Presidency. When I arrived there without him at ten o’clock on the evening of April 20, Lorena Hickok was arranging boxes of flowers and carefully gathering up the cards so we would know whom to thank.

Tommy was there, too, having traveled with me from Washington. The fact that she stayed on after Franklin’s death made it seem at first as though he were on one of his trips and we were living the kind of life we would have lived in any case. That first summer of 1945 I did much physical work, clearing out cupboards in the big house at Hyde Park, unpacking boxes and barrels that had come from Washington.

President Truman sent to Hyde Park a chauffeur and automobile to help me through the first month. After the chauffeur left in the middle of May I discovered for the first time what the shortage of gasoline and automobiles meant to people generally. I had no car except the little Ford fitted with hand controls which my husband used to drive around Hyde Park. It was an open car and all right for summer. But when winter came we still had nothing else except a small work truck, and Tommy and I must often have been an odd sight when, wrapped in all the rugs we could find in order to keep ourselves from freezing, we drove between Hyde Park and New York City.

There were in the summer of 1945 a number of kind friends who worried about me. One day my long-time friend Major Henry Hooker, who had been close to Franklin, telephoned to ask if he and John Golden, the theatrical producer, could call at my apartment in New York. When they arived they were very serious-faced and asked me about my plans for the future.

“I’ve had a number of offers of various jobs that might interest me,” I said.

“Now, Mrs. Roosevelt, we have come here to offer you our services,” Mr. Golden said. “We have appointed ourselves as a kind of committee to help you. We would like to have you consult us in connection with the various things you have been asked or will be asked to do. Then we could pass on whether such proposals are a good idea. In other words, we would be a committee to consider how your life is to be planned.”

Miss Thompson was sitting nearby and as he talked her mouth dropped open and she gave them both an unbelieving stare. “Did I hear you correctly? You want to plan her life?”

“Exactly,” Mr. Golden replied. “As old friends of the family, we feel she should be careful to do only things that count. Now, our idea is that I will provide whatever showmanship is necessary and Major Hooker will pass legal judgment . . .”

I had either to interrupt them or to burst into laughter. “Look, my dears,” I said, “I love both of you dearly. But you can’t run my life. I would probably not like it at all.”

They departed, still warmhearted, still a little worried and perhaps a little sad. “Remember,” Major Hooker said, “we are still a committee and if you need us we’ll always be ready to help.”

As time went on, the fact that I kept myself well occupied made my loneliness less acute. I am not sure whether this was due to my own planning or simply to circumstances. But my philosophy has been that if you have work to do and do it to the best of your ability you will not have much time to think about yourself.

The first year after my husband’s death was a busy one. Many persons—Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Ambassador and Madame Andrei Gromyko of Russia, General and Mrs. Eisenhower—came to call at Hyde Park. And, particularly in the summer, my children and grandchildren, nieces, great-nephews and others were often there.

The real point at which outer readjustment seemed to culminate was on April 12, 1946, when we turned the big house over to the United States government at a ceremony attended by President Truman. In my speech I told how Franklin had pictured the estate, under federal auspices, as a place to which the people of our own country and even of the world might come to find rest and peace and strength, as he had. I said I had no regrets in turning it over to the government for safekeeping. It was better to pass the house on with its contents just as it had been left by my husband, so that it might not take on the personality of those who might have made the house their home after his death. “His spirit,” I said, “will always live in this house, in the library and in the rose garden where he wished his grave to be.”

Readjustments in one’s inner life have to go on forever, I think, but my main decisions were made by the end of the first year. It was Fala, my husband’s little dog, who never really adjusted. Once, in 1945, when General Eisenhower came to lay a wreath on Franklin’s grave, the gates of the regular driveway were opened and his automobile approached the house accompanied by the wailing of the sirens of a police escort. When Fala heard the sirens, his legs straightened, his ears pricked up, and I knew that he expected to see his master coming down the drive as he had come so many times.

Later, when we were living in the cottage, Fala always lay near the dining-room door where he could watch both entrances just as he had when his master was there. Franklin would often decide suddenly to go somewhere and Fala had to watch both entrances in order to be ready to spring up and join the party on short notice. Fala accepted me after my husband’s death, but I was just someone to put up with until the master should return. Many dogs eventually forget. Fala never really forgot. Whenever he heard the sirens he became alert and felt again he was an important being, as he had felt when he was traveling with Franklin. Fala is buried now in the rose garden at Hyde Park and I hope he is no longer troubled with the need for any readjustments.

I have led a busy life for many years and it has not seemed less busy since the death of my husband. In the years since 1945 my life has been complicated in some ways because my working hours are long. I travel a great deal and see many people. But in another way I live very simply, so simply that not a few visitors, especially those from some distant countries where servants are plentiful as well as inexpensive, are often surprised to find that I plan the meals, do part of the daily shopping, and serve dinner for a dozen guests with a “staff” consisting of a couple in the country, one maid in town.

In the years immediately after Franklin’s death I discovered that financial matters could be rather nightmarish because I was not a trained businesswoman. At first I focused mainly on cutting down expenses and earning enough money to meet my regular bills. Franklin had been too busy during the last years to settle his mother’s estate, which meant that now both estates had to be settled, and this took a long time. In 1933, when we first went to the White House, I had stopped sharing many of the expenses I had previously carried jointly with my husband. This had left me free to use most of my inherited income—about $8,000 a year—for clothes, which in Washington, and for almost the first time as far as I was concerned, were an important item. Then whatever I earned by writing and speaking could be used for my personal interests and charities.

But from the day of my husband’s death it was clear that I would have to meet all the daily expenses of the apartment in New York and, for a short time, of the big place at Hyde Park, which had a considerable payroll. Luckily, my husband had left me two life insurance policies. I used their proceeds while awaiting settlement of the estate, which amounted to approximately a million dollars. Then I had to make another decision.

I could live on what my husband had left me and stop working. Or I could continue to work and pay most of what I earned to the government in taxes. I don’t suppose that there was really much of a decision to make because, of course, I wanted to go on working. In my new position, however, because of the tax laws I could no longer give my earnings to people or organizations in which I was interested. I had to establish a charity fund into which I put all earnings from lectures, which amounts to about 20 to 30 per cent of my income. The laws permit me to give that much to tax-exempt charities, educational institutions, hospitals and churches.

I found in time that I could live on what I earned by writing, appearing on radio or television, and reading manuscripts at $100 a month for the Junior Literary Guild. Actually, these earnings total somewhat more than I spend on living expenses, and it is a good thing they do because all the income from my inheritance and more besides is required to pay my annual tax bills.

Although I have said that I live very simply, I do not mean that my life is always quiet or that things always go smoothly. It isn’t and they don’t. There was one day in 1957, for example, when I had a rather busy schedule, but I firmly announced that I was reserving “a few quiet minutes” before dinner for a chat with an old friend, Lady Reading, who had just arrived from England. The day was not far along, however, before another old friend, former Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, called me on the telephone. He had just returned from a trip to Africa.

“I wondered if it would be all right if I dropped by and had just a few minutes’ quiet talk with you before dinner,” he said.

Of course, I told him I should be delighted to see him and he and Lady Reading arrived about the same time. We had hardly settled down in the living room when the doorbell rang.

There were two young men in the hallway. One of them was wearing a bathrobe—and obviously nothing else. He was staying in the apartment above mine while the owner was away and he had accidentally been locked out.

“Oh, I forgot! I left the water running in the bathtub and it will overflow and flood the floor.”

Yes, I thought, and it will all come down through my apartment ceiling!

At that moment Governor Stevenson came to the door, saying that he could no longer stand the suspense and wanted to know what was wrong. When I explained, he rose to the emergency by dashing down to the basement and turning all the knobs he could find in an effort to shut off the water for the entire building. Meantime I sent around the corner to get a locksmith. By the time he arrived Governor Stevenson had acknowledged a certain lack of success as a plumber, but the locksmith was able to open the door of the boy’s apartment before we were flooded out. It was all rather amusing but it did interfere with my “few quiet minutes” with my guests. In fact, by the time we sat down again it was so late that Dore Schary had arrived to be my guest at dinner and to read for all of us the new play he had written about Franklin’s illness at Campobello.

I don’t normally have many quiet minutes in the day. I get up around seven-thirty most mornings. At breakfast, I read the newspapers. Then I work out the menus for the day and write instructions in “the cook’s book.”

By nine o’clock my secretary, Maureen Corr, has arrived to start work with me on my daily newspaper column. I have three secretaries, but not all in the same place!