Jean Edward Smith Read online

  As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because he was hot; a brandy mash “to keep the cold out of his stomach;” and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff.19

  In the autumn of 1880 Elliott set out on a leisurely world tour, highlighted by several months of big-game hunting in India.20 He returned to New York in March 1882, tried his hand halfheartedly at real estate, and within months met and fell in love with Anna Rebecca Hall, widely acclaimed as the most glamorous debutante of the year. They became engaged the following Memorial Day at a house party given in their honor by Laura Delano (Sara’s youngest sister) at Algonac, and were married December 1, 1883. The New York Herald described the wedding as “one of the most brilliant social events of the season.” Percy R. King, a childhood friend, was Elliott’s best man; James and Sara were among the guests.21

  The Long Island Roosevelts were delighted. Anna, they hoped, would provide Elliott with the motivation to make something of himself. And for two years the couple prospered. Elliott went to work for the Ludlow real estate firm on Lower Broadway, Anna ordered her dresses from Palmer in London and Worth in Paris, and the couple maintained a well-staffed brownstone in New York’s fashionable Thirties. Repeatedly Anna was singled out in the city’s society pages for her classic, captivating beauty.22

  Elliott, like FDR’s half brother, Rosy, was a mainstay of the hard-drinking horsey set: polo at Meadowbrook, riding with the hounds in cross-country steeplechase, the annual hunt ball, tennis and sailing at Bar Harbor and Newport. A keen observer of the New York scene called Elliott “the most loveable Roosevelt I ever knew,” adding that “if personal popularity could have bestowed public honors on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.”23

  On October 11, 1884, a daughter was born, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, named after both mother and father. For Elliott, his daughter was “a miracle from heaven.” In 1889 she was joined by a brother, Elliott, Jr., and two years later by a second brother, Hall, named for his maternal ancestors.24

  By then the marriage had all but collapsed. Always prone to excess, Elliott’s drinking was out of control, compounded by frequent recourse to laudanum and morphine—painkillers to thwart whatever demons stalked him. Unable to handle even the most routine assignments, he resigned from his uncle’s firm. An extended sojourn in Europe ended with Elliott confined to a Paris sanitarium to dry out. His mental deterioration was so great that TR and Bamie, with Anna’s reluctant approval, brought suit in New York court to have him adjudged insane and place his remaining property, estimated at $170,000, in trust for his wife and children. “It is all horrible beyond belief,” said TR.25

  News of the Roosevelt family squabble splashed across the front pages of New York’s press. ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT INSANE, bannered the Sun. demented by excesses, said the Herald.26 Elliott fought back with a letter to the editor of the European edition of the Herald, asserting he was in Paris merely for the “cure at an establishment hydrotherapeutique.”27 In January 1892 Theodore traveled to Paris to confront Elliott. He and Bamie would drop the suit, he said, if Elliott would place most of his assets in trust, submit to additional treatment for alcoholism in the United States, return to work, and spend two years on probation apart from his family. It was a Spartan regimen for someone as undisciplined as Elliott, yet TR was relentless. After a week of browbeating and intimidation, Elliott yielded. “Thank heaven I came over,” Theodore wrote Bamie. Elliott, he said, was “utterly broken, submissive, and repentant. He signed the deed for two-thirds of all his property, and agreed to the probation.… He was in a mood that was terribly touching. How long it will last of course no one can say.”28

  Elliott’s philandering did little to improve matters. Three months after he left New York for Europe, Katy Mann, a young servant girl employed by Anna at their Long Island estate, informed the family she was pregnant with Elliott’s child. When Elliott denied the accusation, Katy threatened legal action and public scandal. The Roosevelts initially sided with Elliott. “Of course she is lying,” said TR. But when they met with Katy and saw the baby, they gave up the fight.29 The Roosevelt lawyers initially offered $4,000; Katy demanded $10,000; and eventually that sum was placed in trust for her son, defiantly named Elliott Roosevelt Mann. According to the Manns, the child never received a dime, the money apparently looted by Katy’s lawyers.30 Whatever may have happened to the funds, there is no doubt that Elliott Roosevelt Mann was Eleanor’s half brother.*

  While in Paris, Elliott, unknown to Anna, took up with a sophisticated American expatriate, Mrs. Frances Bagley Sherman of Detroit. They lived intimately for six months, and when TR forced Elliott to leave France, Mrs. Sherman was heartbroken. “How could they treat so noble and generous a man as they have?” she asked.31

  Elliott returned to the United States in February 1892, underwent treatment for alcoholism in Chicago, then moved to Abingdon, Virginia, to manage the vast Appalachian estate of his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson. Anna meanwhile moved the family uptown to a new and more comfortable mansion in the East Sixties and did the utmost to provide her children a normal life. She declined to sue for divorce, hoping that Elliott would recover. But she was frequently depressed, and shattering migraines immobilized her for days at a time. “I know now that life must have been hard and bitter and a very great strain on her,” Eleanor wrote many years later. “I would often sit at the head of her bed and stroke her head.… As with all children, the feeling I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.”32

  In early November, Anna entered the hospital for surgery to relieve her headaches. She recovered from the operation but soon contracted diphtheria. On December 3, she lost consciousness. Four days later she died, her health broken by two years of anguish and disappointment.33 Six months after Anna’s death, Eleanor’s three-year-old brother, Elliott, Jr., also died from diphtheria.

  In Abingdon, Elliott fell off the wagon almost immediately. One evening, drunk and naked, he toppled a kerosene lamp and burned himself badly. Friends in Abingdon urged TR to come down, but he refused. “It would be absolutely useless,” he said.34 Elliott attended Anna’s funeral, drank immoderately, sang bawdy songs, and was quickly ushered out of town. He returned to New York surreptitiously in the autumn of 1893, rented a house near Riverside Park under the name of Maxwell Eliot, and took up with another married woman, a Mrs. Evans, who, like Mrs. Sherman in Paris, found him irresistible. He was now consuming half a dozen bottles of hard liquor daily. In May he spent the night in a police lockup, too drunk to tell his cabbie where he lived. “He can’t be helped,” TR wrote Bamie. “He must simply be let go his own gait.”35 On August 13, 1894, seized by delirium tremens, Elliott attempted to jump from his parlor window, fell back in convulsions, and lost consciousness. He died the next evening.

  Eleanor’s autobiographical writings depict a lovable, caring father and an austere, self-absorbed mother. Those were the memories of an impressionable young child. But as Blanche Wiesen Cook, ER’s preeminent biographer, points out, Eleanor was off the mark: “She did not relate to her mother’s bitter situation, even in adulthood, after she knew the facts. And she never acknowledged the sacrifice her mother had made for her, an act of love that allowed Eleanor to maintain her romantic image of her father.”36

  Unlike FDR, Eleanor was a solemn child. As a youthful relative remembered, she “took everything—most of all herself—so tremendously seriously.”37 After Anna’s death, Eleanor and her brother went to live with Grandmother Hall, dividing their time between the Halls’ stately brownstone on West Thirty-seventh Street and the estate at Tivoli in upstate New York. “Our household,” said Eleanor, “consisted of a cook, a butler, a housemaid, and a laundress.” In the country, the
re were additional coachmen, servants, and tutors. Grandmother Hall was only forty-eight at the time, and, as Eleanor remembers, discipline was strict. “We were brought up on the principle that ‘no’ was easier to say than ‘yes.’ ”38

  Eleanor was tutored in French, German, and music. She studied piano, attended classes in dancing and ballet, and was taken regularly to the theater. Her uncles taught her riding, jumping, lawn tennis, and how to shoot. As one biographer has noted, the six years Eleanor spent with Grandmother Hall were a time of healing. She became the center of attention. From her grandmother Eleanor derived “a new sense of belonging. Out of the chaos of her parental home, Eleanor felt for the first time secure and wanted.”39

  Isolated as she was at Tivoli, there was little opportunity for Eleanor to meet or play with other children. One exception was Alice Roosevelt, TR’s daughter, whose mother had died after giving birth and who was being raised by Bamie. “I saw a lot of Eleanor as a child,” said Alice. “We both suffered from being deprived of a parent. But whereas she responded to her insecurity by being do-goody and virtuous, I did by being boisterous and showing off.”40 Alice agreed that many aspects of Eleanor’s childhood were unhappy. “But she had a tendency to make out she was unattractive and rejected as a child, which just wasn’t true. She made a big thing about having long legs and having to wear short skirts. Well, as far as I was concerned, I envied her long legs and didn’t notice her short skirts, if indeed they were short. She was always making herself out to be an ugly duckling but she was really rather attractive. Tall, rather coltish looking, with masses of pale, gold hair rippling to below her waist, and really lovely blue eyes.”41*

  When Eleanor turned fifteen, Grandmother Hall sent her to boarding school in England. Anna, before she died, had asked that Eleanor be sent abroad, preferably to Allenwood; and Bamie, who had studied under the school’s headmistress in France, strongly supported the choice. Located in Wimbledon Park on the outskirts of London, Allenwood was in some respects the female equivalent of Groton: a pioneering school that offered the daughters of England’s elite a liberal education emphasizing social responsibility and personal independence. Marie Souvestre, the founder and headmistress, was the daughter of the French philosopher and novelist Émile Souvestre. A committed feminist, she believed passionately in educating women to think for themselves, to challenge accepted wisdom, and to assert themselves. These were subversive doctrines to patriarchal Victorians, yet Allenwood succeeded, in no small measure because of the sparkling erudition of Mlle. Souvestre. Liberal intellectuals—Joseph Chamberlain, Henry James, the Stracheys and the Webbs—considered her a soul mate. Beatrice Webb said her intellectual rigor forged the future for a generation of young women.42 Like Endicott Peabody at Groton, Marie Souvestre was Allenwood. And for the thirty-five girls enrolled, Allenwood was Marie Souvestre.

  Eleanor flourished at Allenwood. The school was conducted entirely in French, and Eleanor was perfectly bilingual. “I remember the day she arrived at school,” said one classmate. “She was so much more grown up than we were, and at her first meal, when we hardly dared open our mouths, she sat opposite Mlle. Souvestre, chatting away in French.”43 Eleanor quickly became the most popular girl in school. She excelled in French, German, and Italian, wrote superb essays, and made the first team in field hockey. Marie Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall, “She is the most amiable girl I have ever met; she is nice to everybody, very eager to learn and highly interested in her work.”44

  For the next three years Eleanor continued to sit opposite Mlle. Souvestre.* During school breaks she traveled with her to Europe: “One of the most momentous things that happened in my education,” said Eleanor.45 Other times she toured the continent with her Aunt Tissie, Anna’s younger sister. Tissie was married to the wealthy art collector and portrait painter Stanley Mortimer, lived most of the year in Paris, and introduced Eleanor to a style of living enjoyed only by Europe’s most affluent.46 Photographs of Eleanor at the time show a tall, slender young woman with soft brown hair coiffed in a pompadour and dressed in current Paris fashions. “Entirely sophisticated, and full of self-confidence and savoir-faire,” said an admiring classmate.47

  Marie Souvestre’s goal was to make her students “cultivated women of the world,” and Eleanor blossomed under her tutelage. If ER had a fault, it was her seriousness. “Totty [as Eleanor was known] is so intelligent, so charming, so good,” said Mlle. Souvestre. “Mais pas gaie, pas gaie.”48 For her part, Eleanor was despondent when at eighteen it was time to return to New York to make her social debut. “Mlle Souvestre had become one of the people I cared for most in the world and … I would have given a great deal to have spent another year on my education.”49 Later Eleanor said, “Whatever I have become had its seed in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and a strong personality.”50 Throughout the remainder of her life, ER kept a framed portrait of Marie Souvestre on her desk. And when the headmistress died in 1905, Eleanor and Bamie served on her memorial committee.

  Allenwood ranked as the most emancipated women’s school of the era. Yet it was totally deficient in preparing young ladies to deal with a world of men. Marie Souvestre and Aunt Tissie taught Eleanor the finer points of cosmopolitan behavior, how to present herself, how to dress. Yet her three years at Allenwood were as cloistered as the previous five with Grandmother Hall at Tivoli. At the age of eighteen, Eleanor had never dated, had rarely talked to a young man alone, and as a practical matter had seldom been in mixed company. Her mind had been finely honed, she brimmed with self-esteem, but she was naive beyond despair.

  Eleanor’s lack of worldly experience appealed to Franklin. “A more sophisticated woman would have scared the daylights out of him,” said his son Elliott.51 It is not surprising Franklin was drawn to Eleanor. Aside from being young, attractive, and smartly dressed (ER’s wardrobe was meticulously put together by Aunt Tissie), Eleanor had an air of serious intelligence about her: a genuine interest in what took place around her. Her years at Allenwood imparted a maturity that FDR adored.52 She was also a Roosevelt and the favorite niece of Cousin Theodore, who was not only president of the United States but Eleanor’s godfather. By marrying Eleanor, FDR would acquire even greater access to the man he most admired. Her financial endowment was taken for granted. Eleanor was not rich like the Astors, but her trust fund provided an annual income of about $8,000 ($160,000 today), which was considerably more than Franklin’s, the principal of which was still administered by Sara.

  The Roosevelt children, Anna and Elliott, believed that Eleanor “set out to win Father more than he tried to woo her.… She was stunned by the thought that here was a handsome man who would not only look at her but seek her companionship. She poured her heart out to him, undoubtedly the best listener she had ever met.”53 Eleanor wrote Franklin every evening to ensure that he did not forget her. “Oh! Darling I miss you so and I long for the happy hours which we have together. I am so happy. So very happy in your love dearest, that all the world has changed for me.”54 Eleanor often signed herself “Little Nell,” the nickname her father had bestowed, and she addressed Franklin as “Boy Darling,” “Dearest Boy,” and occasionally, “Franklin Dearest.” For the most part, Eleanor’s nightly letters during their secret engagement were reports on the day’s happenings, but, as one biographer notes, they “were as full of love as any letters she would ever write.”55

  In September 1904 Franklin entered Columbia Law School. He lived with Sara in an imposing town house his mother rented at 200 Madison Avenue, directly across from the marble mansion of J. P. Morgan. “I am anxious to hear about the first day [at Columbia],” Eleanor wrote from Tivoli, “and whether you found any old acquaintances or had only Jew Gentlemen to work with!” Ethnic identity was delineated more sharply at the time, and Eleanor shared the traditional prejudices of Knickerbocker society. Her friend and biographer Joseph Lash reports that FDR’s class at Columbia “showed 21 Jewish names in a class of 74.” Lash also notes that ER’s comment did not
prevent her from teaching part-time at Rivington Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side, where most of her pupils were recent Jewish and Italian immigrants, nor did it “inhibit her solicitude for them.”56 FDR sometimes met Eleanor at Rivington House and once, when a child in her class became ill, accompanied her to the tenement in which the child lived. “My God,” Franklin said, “I didn’t know anyone lived like this.”57

  On October 11, Eleanor’s twentieth birthday, FDR presented her with a gift he had chosen at Tiffany’s “after much inspection and deliberation”: a large diamond engagement ring. It suited Eleanor perfectly. “You could not have found a ring I would have liked better,” she wrote. “I love it so I know I shall find it hard to keep from wearing it.”58 After eleven months, the subterfuge was wearing thin. Later that month Eleanor and Franklin were houseguests at a family party given by Aunt Corinne and Douglas Robinson in Orange, New Jersey. “E. and F. are comic,” noted young Corinne, Jr. “They avoided each other like the black plague and told beautifully concocted lies and deceived us sweetly in every direction.… I would bet they are engaged.” FDR played the scene with such aplomb that Corinne told him he had a very deceitful nature. Eleanor was equally opaque. Three days later she and Corinne, Jr., went driving. “Neither of us mentioned Franklin,” Corinne wrote, “but I think he was on both our minds.”59

  The engagement was announced on December 1 and was followed by a blizzard of congratulatory letters. “I never saw the family so enthusiastic in my life,” wrote Lyman Delano. Grandmother Hall was thankful Eleanor was “going to marry such a fine man.” Alice Roosevelt, who would be Eleanor’s maid of honor, thought the news “too good to be true.” Bamie said she loved Franklin not only on his own account but because “his character is like his father’s [who was] the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman we ever knew.”60