No Ordinary Time, Page 57

  As Eleanor traveled through the South with the president, she was besieged with angry charges from whites about the “Eleanor Clubs” that black servants were supposedly forming in her honor, demanding higher wages, more privileges, and fewer hours. In every town she had visited over the past year, she was told that an Eleanor Club had been formed soon thereafter, committing the Negro cooks and maids to a set of club rules which changed their relationship to their white employers. In Florida, Eleanor was told, a maid stopped bringing in wood for the fire because the other maids in the neighborhood had jumped on her and told her she could not belong to the Eleanor Club if she continued to do extra chores that were not part of the job. In South Carolina, a maid began coming in the front door instead of the back, telling her boss that this was the rule of the Eleanor Club.

  “All the Negroes are getting so uppity they won’t do a thing,” one woman from North Carolina asserted. “I hear the cooks have been organizing Eleanor Clubs and their motto is ‘A white woman in every kitchen by Christmas.’” In Louisiana, it was said, a white woman drove to her maid’s house and asked her to come do the washing. The maid pointed to a mirror on the wall and said, “You look in that and you’ll see your washerwoman. Now you get out of here!” In an army camp in the South, Eleanor was told, a Negro maid working for an officer and his wife had set an extra place for dinner. When she was asked who the place was for, she replied, “In the Eleanor Club, we always sit with the people we work for.” In the midst of a fancy dinner party, another story went, the maid refused to continue serving when a derogatory remark about the president was made.

  After hearing these stories from one end of the South to the other, Eleanor asked the FBI to investigate whether Eleanor Clubs truly existed, and if so, what they were doing. After a comprehensive field investigation, the FBI concluded definitively that, despite the great sweep of rumors, not a single Eleanor Club actually existed. The answer to the mystery, the FBI observed, lay in the troubles white women were experiencing retaining their Negro servants in the face of the higher-paying factory jobs the war had made available. “It was but logical that the blame was to be placed upon something or somebody,” the FBI wrote. And that somebody was Eleanor, considered by many Southerners “the most dangerous individual in the United States today.” Eleanor was relieved to receive the FBI report, fearing that such clubs would not advance the cause of the Negro maids. “Instead of forming clubs of that kind,” she wrote, “they should enter a union and make their household work a profession.”

  • • •

  While they were traveling together in the South, Franklin approached Eleanor with the idea that they should try once more to live as man and wife. As Jimmy Roosevelt later heard the story, Franklin turned to Eleanor late one night and asked her to stay home more; to commit herself, since civilian travel was restricted anyhow, to their life in the White House; to be his hostess at his cocktail hour, and do things with him on the weekends.

  “I think he was really asking her to be his wife again in all aspects,” Jimmy observed. “He had always said she was the most remarkable woman he had ever known, the smartest, the most intuitive, the most interesting, but because she was always going somewhere he never got to spend time with her. But now that Missy was gone and his mother was dead and Harry had Louise he was lonely and he needed her.”

  Franklin’s request threw Eleanor into a tumult of conflicting emotions. For years, her most profound yearnings had centered on her husband; for years, there was nothing she would have cherished more than the prospect of intimacy, the chance to create a shared emotional territory in which each could depend on the other for love and support. But over the past decade, the experience of becoming a political force in her own right had brought with it a profoundly different sense of self—of independence, competence, and confidence. If joining her husband now meant giving up the life she had built for herself, it seemed a great deal to ask.

  Eleanor told Franklin she would think over his request. She was leaving the train the next morning to fly to the West Coast to visit Anna and John, but when she returned to Washington, they would talk again.

  • • •

  From Texas, the presidential train turned east, stopping at Camp Shelby, near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Camp Jackson in South Carolina, where the president inspected the troops at huge parade grounds. For generations, the buttons on the uniform coats of the officers, as well as the distinctive military insignia, had been made of brass. Brass was considered ideal for ornamental purposes, because it resembled gold when it was polished. But as the supply of copper became inadequate to meet vital ammunition needs, the army was forced to replace its shiny bronze buttons with olive-drab plastic buttons. The shortage of silk, which had been largely imported from Japan, necessitated another change. Though silk had, because of its special weathering and draping qualities, long been the army’s material of choice for banners and ribbons for decorations and medals, the army had to accept a rayon substitute.

  But far more important than the ceremonial look of the officers was the striking increase in the size of the army. Almost four million men had been added to the army in 1942, bringing the total strength from 1.6 million to 5.4 million. Thirty-seven new divisions had been brought into being. The number of soldiers in the ground arms had doubled; the number in the service branches and the Air Corps had multiplied more than fourfold.

  On Thursday, October 1, after traveling two weeks and nearly nine thousand miles, the president returned to Washington, where he reported on his trip at a special press conference. Seated in his shirtsleeves at his desk, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, he was in high spirits as he praised the morale of the American people. Reporters observed “no appearance of strain from the consecutive nights spent on the train.” His voice was “smooth and unruffled” as he described his long trip in excellent detail.

  The following week, he shared his impressions with the nation in a long, chatty radio address. The main thing, he observed, was that “the American people are united as never before in their determination to do a job and do it well.” He went on to describe some of the places he had been, skillfully mingling praise for the positive things he had seen with criticism for employers who were still unwilling to hire women and blacks. “I was impressed by the large proportion of women employed, doing skilled manual labor running machines,” he said. “Within less than a year from now, there will probably be as many women as men working in our war production plants.” But in some communities, he charged, employers were still reluctant to hire women or blacks or older people. “We can no longer afford to indulge such prejudices or practices,” the president concluded. Eleanor could not have been more delighted had she written the speech herself.

  True to her word, Eleanor arranged to have dinner alone with Franklin on Friday night, October 9. She recognized that, with Sara and Missy gone, Franklin needed her in ways he hadn’t needed her in years. Even before their talk in Fort Worth, she had noted his more frequent invitations to join him for meals. It was clear that he was trying to forge anew the bond that had once held them so close. She, too, was at a peculiar crossroads. In recent months the nature of her relationships with three of her closest friends—Joe Lash, Harry Hopkins, Lorena Hickok—had been altered significantly, leaving her more alone than ever before.

  Still, she could not accept her husband’s proposal. Too much had happened over the years to allow her to begin again. There were too many hurts to forget.

  It was now nearly four decades since their courtship, when Eleanor had believed their life together would be happy and untroubled. Things were much changed. Over the years, the very qualities that had first attracted Franklin and Eleanor to one another had become sources of conflict in their marriage. After initially valuing Franklin for his confidence, charm, and sociability, qualities that stood in contrast to her own insecurity and shyness, Eleanor had come to see these traits as shallow and duplicitous. After being drawn to Eleanor’s sinceri
ty, honesty, and high principles, Franklin had redefined these same attributes as stiffness and inflexibility. “She bothered him because she had integrity,” Anna Rosenberg observed. “It is very hard to live with someone who is almost a saint. He had his tricks and evasions. Sometimes he had to ridicule her in order not to be troubled by her.”

  If at first each had found in the other a complementary aspect of something lacking in his or her self, as time went by the tendency developed to disavow and demean the opposite qualities in the other, to be irritated rather than delighted by their differences. “You couldn’t find,” Anna Boettiger mused, “two such different people as Mother and Father.” Whereas Franklin, Anna thought, had “too much security and too much love,” with parents and relatives and servants all doting on him, Eleanor seemed forever starved for love.

  The hidden springs of Eleanor’s insecurity had disrupted her marriage from the very beginning. The honeymoon trip to Europe was not easy. Though there were many good days, filled with marvelous sights and warm companionship, Eleanor found herself ill at ease in the presence of other young tourists. At Cortina, high in the Dolomites, Franklin decided to spend the day climbing a mountain. When Eleanor, having no confidence in her climbing ability, declined to join him, he invited a fellow guest at the hotel, a handsome young woman named Kitty Gandy, to go along.

  “She was a few years his senior,” Eleanor later explained, “but she could climb and I could not, and though I never said a word I was jealous beyond description.” As the day wore on, Eleanor grew more and more restless. By the time the exuberant hikers returned to the hotel, filled with stories of all they had seen, Eleanor had lapsed into an irritable and aggrieved silence—a pattern of behavior that would be repeated hundreds of times in the years to come.

  Fear of failure prompted Eleanor again and again to give up too soon on a variety of activities which would have allowed an easy companionship with her husband. After days of practicing golf on her own, she allowed Franklin’s teasing remarks about her awkwardness to turn her away from trying to play again. A minor crash into a gatepost kept her from driving for more than a decade. The fear of losing control kept her from enjoying sledding or horseback riding. Terror of the water ruled out the pleasures of swimming and sailing. Nor, for reasons that even she did not understand, did Eleanor ever allow herself to learn enough about Franklin’s stamp collection to share the fun of it. “If I had it to do over again,” Eleanor confessed years later, “I would enter more fully into Franklin’s collecting enthusiasm. I would learn all I could about stamps. Every collector appreciates the real interest of his family in what he is doing.”

  Even more troubling to the young couple’s marriage was Eleanor’s lack of ease in social situations. Though she was thoroughly comfortable in serious discussions with older people about politics or philosophy, she found herself incapable of casual conversation with people her own age. “I think I must have spoiled a good deal of the fun for Franklin because of this inability to feel at ease with a gay group,” Eleanor admitted. The story is told of the evening she and Franklin went together to a large party. She was so impatient with the small talk that she left early and alone. Arriving at her doorstep without her key, she sat on the stoop, irritable and peevish, until Franklin sauntered in at three in the morning. Once again she had, by her own actions, made herself the wronged one.

  Franklin tried on occasion to accommodate his wife’s needs. Recognizing how much pleasure she received from her friendship with her aunt Maude Gray, he invited Maude to visit Campobello. “I know what a delight it is to Eleanor to have you,” he told Maude, “and I am afraid I am sometimes a little selfish and have had her too much with me in past years and made life a trifle dull for her really brilliant mind and spirit.” But on the whole, the ever-cheerful Franklin found Eleanor’s manifold insecurities hopelessly bewildering, and though it troubled him to see her unhappy and depressed, he blithely assumed that if he left her alone everything would be all right.

  Perhaps, as Franklin hoped, everything would have eventually worked out had Eleanor been able to derive confidence and comfort as a mother. But from the moment the children were born, the rivalry between her and Sara had been transformed into a battle over the children, a battle so fierce that the children ultimately became an additional force pulling Franklin and Eleanor apart.

  This was the fertile soil that produced Franklin’s affair with the young and beautiful Lucy Page Mercer. As is often the case, the affair was more a symptom of disturbance within the marriage than a disturbance itself. Franklin had married when he was “young and immature,” Eleanor’s cousin, Corinne Robinson observed, “and had a life sheltered by Mama. Eleanor and Franklin were both smart and had produced many children and on the whole it was a good marriage but it lacked the ‘délicieux.’ The affair with Lucy provided the danger and excitement that was missing from Franklin’s life.”

  • • •

  Lucy had first entered the Roosevelts’ lives in the winter of 1914, when Franklin and Eleanor were living in Washington. Pregnant with her fourth child, Eleanor was overwhelmed by the voluminous social invitations to be sifted, accepted, and declined. The protocol was complicated; as assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin held an important social position which had to be maintained at all times. To help her with her correspondence, Eleanor hired Lucy Mercer to assist her three mornings a week.

  Though she was only twenty-two, Lucy was well suited for the position. Her father, Carroll Mercer, was descended from a distinguished Catholic family which included the founders of Maryland. Her mother, Minnie, was rated by one social reporter “easily the most beautiful woman in Washington.” As a young girl, Lucy was educated in elite private schools, but by 1914 the family had fallen on hard times. Carroll Mercer drank too much; the marriage was in trouble; and there was little money left. Lucy needed the income the job with Eleanor would provide. In return, she brought to her duties the intimate knowledge of Washington society which Eleanor lacked.

  Lucy was tall and statuesque, with blue eyes, abundant brown hair, and a rich contralto voice that belonged in the best drawing rooms. The Roosevelt children welcomed the days Lucy came to work. “She was gay, smiling, and relaxed,” Elliott recalled. “She had the same brand of charm as Father, and everybody who met her spoke of that—and there was a hint of fire in her warm dark eyes.”

  From the beginning, Lucy told her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff, she and Franklin were drawn to one another. “Lucy was a wonderful listener,” Anna later observed; “she knew the right questions” to ask; she had a gift of following the hidden meanings within conversations while appearing to be sailing on the surface. She was intelligent and responsive without being judgmental as Eleanor tended to be. Whereas Eleanor would invariably interrupt Franklin with “I think you are wrong, dear,” Lucy saw no need to correct his stories, or to redirect the conversation. She enjoyed everything he had to say—light or lofty, silly or serious.

  Almost imperceptibly, the story is told, the relationship slid from an affectionate friendship into an affair. Franklin was not by nature one to take great risks in his personal life, but at some point, it seems, he realized that his love for Eleanor and his children was not enough. “Of course he was in love with her,” Lucy’s close friend Eulalie Salley observed. “So was every man who ever knew Lucy.” The need for camouflage gave ordinary conversations an air of mystery and romance which most likely increased Lucy’s desirability to Franklin.

  Fired by the intrigue, Franklin devised various stratagems to spend time with Lucy. In the late afternoons, they would meet in the hills of Virginia and motor together through the dirt roads and small hamlets of the countryside. Franklin’s excursions did not escape the prying eyes of Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth. “I saw you 20 miles out in the country,” she teased him. “You didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.” “Isn’t she perfectly lovely?” a smitten Franklin replied. Fo
r the rest of their days, intimacy and country roads would be so joined that whenever Franklin and Lucy got together they set out for a long ride.

  In the summers, with Eleanor and the children in Campobello, Franklin grew bolder; accompanied always by a circle of friends, he brought Lucy sailing with him on the river, to small dinner parties at night, to picnics in the woods. In love, he was determined to do what he wanted. As the months went by, Eleanor noticed the growing attraction between Franklin and Lucy. Nervous about leaving Franklin alone, she kept delaying her departure for Campobello in the summer of 1917. She finally left, but not without chiding Franklin that he seemed almost anxious to have her go. “You were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all summer,” Franklin wrote from Washington, “because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo, just as I ought to . . . .”

  The next autumn, Eleanor’s suspicions were confirmed. Franklin had returned from an inspection trip to Europe with pneumonia. It was then, while unpacking his trunks, that she came upon the devastating bundle of love letters from Lucy.

  • • •

  Shortly after the affair ended in 1918, Lucy left Washington to become a live-in governess for the six small children of a wealthy fifty-five-year-old widower, Winthrop Rutherfurd. Rutherfurd was a member of an old and distinguished family which included Peter Stuyvesant of New York and John Winthrop of Boston. An avid sportsman, Rutherfurd divided his days between an elegant town house in New York; an old estate at Allamuchy, New Jersey, surrounded by thousands of acres of deer park and mountain slopes; and Ridgeley Hall, a winter home in Aiken, South Carolina, just across from the Palmetto Golf Club.