America's Secret Aristocracy (20 page)

When Valentine Hall, Jr., perhaps mercifully, died in 1880 at the age of forty-six, his children really began to kick up their heels. Daughters Edith, Elizabeth, and Maude became hard drinkers and heavy gamblers, falling in and out of love with great rapidity and always with inappropriate men. Son Valentine Hall III was the heaviest drinker of all and lived reclusively in his bedroom in the family mansion, where all day long he sat at a window, drinking, with a shotgun across his knees. At any stranger or family member who appeared within his range he would fire a shot that was usually, thanks to his condition, well off-target. Still, it was a disconcerting habit that “Uncle Vallie” had and one that made visits to the house something of an ordeal. Fortunately, he was carried off by drink at an early age.

Anna seemed to be the only straight one of the Hall children, and for this she was considered the most peculiar of all. But she, too, would demonstrate certain eccentricities, and her life would also be cursed by alcohol. While still in her teens, she announced her engagement to a handsome neighbor, Elliott Roosevelt, who was then just twenty-one. It was thought to be a splendid match—because of who the Roosevelts were and because it united two prominent Hudson Valley families—and an engagement party for Anna was thrown by Miss Laura Delano, whose older sister Sara had married Elliott Roosevelt's cousin James and would become Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother. The Delanos, whose American ancestry went back to 1621, considered themselves even grander
than the Roosevelts, and with an ancestral fortune made in the China trade, they were even richer.

The future seemed bright for young Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. In a few years' time, his brother Teddy would be governor of New York and, a few years after that, president of the United States. But for all his good looks and charm, Elliott Roosevelt did not have his older brother's famous stamina and gumption. He suffered from something that at the time was diagnosed as epilepsy but may in fact have been a brain tumor. He was subject to sudden fits, dizzy spells, and violent headaches. To relieve his pain from these, he also resorted to the bottle. In addition, he felt no need, nor desire, to work, and despite a number of efforts on his family's part to find him jobs, he was never good at anything and preferred parties, polo, and riding to the hounds from the huge mansion he built for himself in Hempstead, Long Island. It wasn't long before Anna Hall Roosevelt realized that she had married a drunkard and a wastrel.

She herself, meanwhile, was turning out to be far from the perfect wife. She fancied herself, and was, beautiful, and she was extremely vain. When her daughter Eleanor was born, she complained that the child had inherited the overlong Livingston nose, and from the time Eleanor Roosevelt was a little girl, she was constantly reminded by her mother that she was plain. When, no doubt as a result, Eleanor grew to be a painfully shy, introverted, and solemn adolescent, her mother gave her the cruel nickname “Granny.” At the same time, Anna Hall Roosevelt enjoyed rhapsodizing about her own good looks and liked to boast that Robert Burns had been so smitten by her that he had recited his poetry to her while she was having her portrait painted in Switzerland.
*
Anna was also fond of foreign travel and, perhaps to escape her alcoholic husband, was often on extended tours about the world, disporting herself while becoming a stranger to her children, who were left in the care of governesses and nurses. If Anna Hall Roosevelt was proving an imperfect wife, she was also an even more imperfect mother.

Anna and Elliott Roosevelt had three children—Eleanor;
Elliott, Jr.; and Gracie Hall, the last a boy despite his name (in later life he would use the name Hall Roosevelt)—but with the birth of each child the parents' quarrels became more violent. The more Anna berated her husband over his drinking, the more he drank, and by the time she was twenty-five Anna had a new complaint: the ordeal of living with her husband was causing her to lose her looks. Elliott began to threaten to commit suicide, and he would disappear for months at a time while his cast-off family had no idea of his whereabouts. During one of these absences his son Elliott, Jr., died of smallpox at the age of four.

At the time, various European health spas were widely touted as providing cures for alcoholism, and when she could find him, Anna began escorting her husband to a series of these drying-out resorts. None of them worked. After her son Hall was born during the last one of these trips, Anna decided she had had enough of Elliott. She had discovered among other things that he had squandered all but $200,000 of his inheritance. In a panic, Anna had her husband committed to a hospital for the mentally ill in Paris. She then returned to America and immediately instituted a lawsuit to have him declared legally insane by the U.S. courts so that she could be given control of what was left of his money. Naturally, the case made tabloid headlines.

From Paris, Elliott Roosevelt countered with a claim that he had been kidnapped by his wife, that all she was after was his fortune, and that he was being victimized by his family. Pending settlement of the matter, he was released from the French mental hospital and promptly moved in with a Parisian lady of easy virtue, upon whom he began spending more money. He claimed that she gave him “love instead of lectures.” To try to clear up the whole untidy business, Teddy Roosevelt was dispatched to Europe to reason with his brother. He found Elliott in terrible shape. But he succeeded in persuading Elliott to return to America, enter an alcoholism treatment center, and set up a trust to care for his wife and two surviving children. In return, Anna would agree to drop her lawsuit against him. But Elliott's stay at the American clinic lasted only a week or so before he was back at his old routine. When Anna refused to let him back into her house, he disappeared again. Eventually he turned up at a relative's farm in Virginia, and Anna and her children moved to a house in mid-Manhattan.

The family's troubles, however, were far from over. Within a few months of her husband's return from Europe, Anna Hall Roosevelt became ill with diphtheria and died in her New York house. Her looks gone, withered by illness, she looked much older than her twenty-nine years. Even on her deathbed, she refused to see her husband. Two years later, he too was dead from injuries suffered in a fall, presumably when drunk. Thus Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan at ten with a baby brother to care for. Over the next years, the two children—sometimes separately, sometimes together—would be taken in by a long series of relatives and family friends, some of whom were more caring than others. During this period, also, Eleanor would watch her uncle Theodore become president of the United States and her cousin Alice, whom the press had dubbed The Princess (and who had been Eleanor's best, if not only, childhood friend), cavorting delightedly in the public spotlight.

Against this backdrop of family discord, financial and emotional chaos, neglect, and psychological abuse, it is perhaps astonishing that Eleanor Roosevelt would emerge as a woman who, in periodic polls of most admired women in the world, is still ranked near the very top of the list.

Or perhaps hers was a case of “class will tell.”

Class, however, did not tell in the case of Eleanor's little brother Hall. Like his father, Hall Roosevelt was sent to Groton and Harvard, where he was a superior student and seemed destined for great things. But then something happened, as had happened to his father. He married, had a son, Danny, divorced, and began drinking heavily. One day at the family mansion at Hyde Park, in a drunken rage, he picked up his young son and hurled him to the ground, breaking his collarbone. Though drunk, Hall insisted on driving Danny to the hospital and, on the way, turned his car over in a ditch. The trip to the hospital was completed by a New York state trooper. For a while, the family's hopes centered on young Danny, but he was killed in an airplane crash while still young. Hall Roosevelt's drinking increased, and he enjoyed taking his young nieces and nephews—who thought it all marvelous fun—on barhopping and nightclubbing adventures in New York, unbeknownst to their parents. He died at age fifty, a failure and a disgrace, and the despair of his sister, who loved him dearly.

Perhaps, by the nineteenth century, the American aristocracy
had begun to believe that it could behave exactly as it chose and that any aberrant carryings-on could be tolerated and brushed off as mere upper-crust “eccentricity,” just the way titled eccentrics have long been tolerated and even encouraged in England. In Boston, for example, it has been said that if an Adams chose to stand on her head in the middle of Boston Common, her friends would merely comment, “By the way, I saw Abigail Adams today. She was standing on her head in the Common,” and that would be that. Certainly many aristocratic American families tend to speak almost proudly of their eccentric relatives, and the Roosevelts are no exception.

In the James Roosevelt branch of the family—the so-called Hyde Park branch, as opposed to the Oyster Bay branch—the first James Roosevelt had a son named Isaac, the bank president, and Isaac had a son named James, whose passing was noted by Philip Hone and who had a son named Isaac, who had a son named James, and so it would go. (The practice of re-using first names in alternating generations was common among a number of old families; because the first John Jay had a son named William, William had a son named John, and Williams and Johns have taken generational turns in the Jay family's naming process right down to the present day.) The second Isaac Roosevelt was the first family eccentric. He was a doctor who refused to practice medicine because he couldn't stand the sight of blood.

His son James was more a rebel than an eccentric. He married twice. His first wife was Rebecca Howland, and this was considered a respectable union. Breaking the son-naming pattern and adding a new, Roosevelt fillip to it, their only son was named James Roosevelt Roosevelt, who came to be known as “Rosy” Roosevelt. When Rebecca Howland Roosevelt died in 1876, her widower made a second marriage that was considered less respectable, to Sara Delano. There was nothing wrong with the Delanos, of course, except that she was twenty-six and her husband was fifty-two, twice her age. Even that might have been acceptable if Sara had not been exactly the same age as her husband's son, Rosy. It was whispered that Sara was more interested in Rosy than she was in his father. In any case, James and Sara Roosevelt's son was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sara became passionately devoted to her only child and ignored her husband. Mother
and son made long and frequent journeys to Europe, leaving James Roosevelt behind.

James Roosevelt's older son, Rosy, was also rebellious. Having married, quite properly, Helen Astor, he had a son, James IV, and then divorced his wife—the first divorce in the family—and proceeded to marry an English barmaid named Betty, which was a scandal because Betty was obviously a “commoner.” Though many members of his family refused to accept Betty, Rosy and Betty's was a long and happy marriage.

Rosy's son James was less fortunate. He became involved with a young woman who, it was said with confidence, was no better than a streetwalker. When he insisted on marrying her, he was both disowned and disinherited by his father, and his marriage, unlike his father's, was not a success. Still, this James was not as unhappy as he might have been. His mother left him a nice share of her Astor millions in a trust fund that yielded him an income of sixty thousand dollars a year, though he ignored this windfall. After his streetwalker returned to the pavements, he became a recluse and lived in an abandoned garage in the Bronx. When his trust officers asked him how he intended to spend his income, he told them it was none of their business. Certain members of his family, knowing he was rich, tried to befriend him and lure him back into the Roosevelt fold, but he told them to leave him alone. When he died, just in case they might have been remembered in his will, his relatives gave him an expensive funeral, “as would befit a Roosevelt.” But when his will was read, all his millions were left to the Salvation Army.

Aunt Laura Delano, Sara Delano Roosevelt's youngest sister, was also a little “different.” Having been jilted by a lover who had left her to marry one of her other sisters—there were eleven Delano children in that generation—she had become a spinster, and invited a distant unmarried female cousin to live with her in spinsterhood. Theirs became a lifelong, passionate relationship. Though they quarreled frequently and bitterly, there were always tearful reconciliations. As Aunt Laura Delano grew older, her oddities grew more pronounced. She dyed her hair a bright purple and developed a fixation that the end of the world was at hand. One morning she awoke to find the skies unnaturally dark. Her maid explained that a solar eclipse was taking place. But later Aunt Laura appeared at the family breakfast table, dressed in her
finest traveling costume, gloved and hatted and carrying her jewelry case. “Despite what they say,” she announced, “this is clearly the end of the world. I have dressed for the occasion. I have my jewels and I am ready to go to heaven.”

But of all the troubles that have seemed to plague the Roosevelt family, perhaps the most baffling is the longstanding enmity that existed between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their mutual cousin, the famously sharp-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth. As children, Alice and Eleanor—they were the same age—had been the closest of friends. Alice had been a bridesmaid at Eleanor's wedding (accepting the invitation, Alice had written, “It will be too much Fun!”). And yet, during FDR's White House years, Alice had only the most rude and caustic things to say about the couple residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She enjoyed comparing her own father's robust physique with Franklin Roosevelt's physically handicapped one, and once declared that FDR was “dragging the whole country into the wheelchair with him.” At parties, she performed hilarious, and cruelly accurate, imitations of Eleanor Roosevelt, mimicking Eleanor's fluty voice and somewhat lisping speech. Fluttering her hands helplessly about her, Alice would say, “Oh, dear me, we never did know what to do with these big flippers, did we!” Once, having heard of these performances, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Alice Longworth to demonstrate one for her. Wickedly, gleefully, Alice launched into one of her imitations. Whether Mrs. Roosevelt was hurt or amused by Alice's act she was too much a lady to let on.