Eleanor and Franklin (80 page)

“I hope not,” the captain said doubtfully, but complied. Americans were “wonderful,” she said. “I simply can't imagine being afraid of going among them as I have always done, as I always shall.”
²⁵

She refused to succumb to fear. By self-discipline she had conquered her childhood dread of animals, of water, and of physical pain, and she kept these fears at bay by simply defying them.

She was an inveterate air traveler, sometimes pressing air personnel to fly even when they thought the weather too hazardous. The fledgling airlines found her a stalwart advocate of air travel, quite willing to lend herself to their promotional efforts; the country was benignly responsive to her sense of adventure and her delight in sponsoring the new and promising enterprise. In order to impress the public,
especially women, with the ease and safety of air travel, Amelia Earhart invited Eleanor to join her on a flight to Baltimore in evening dress. Hall Roosevelt went along, as did a few newspaperwomen and Miss Earhart's husband, George Palmer Putnam. How did she feel being piloted by a woman, she was asked. Absolutely safe, was her reply; “I'd give a lot to do it myself!” She seriously discussed learning to fly with Miss Earhart and went so far as to take a physical examination, which she passed. But Franklin thought it was foolish to spend time learning to fly when she would not be able to afford a plane and she came to the same conclusion.
²⁶

Not long after she was settled in the White House she made her first transcontinental flight, to Los Angeles to see Elliott. Such a journey still was an event, and it was even more so when undertaken by the First Lady. From Fort Worth to the Coast, C. R. Smith, the president of American Airways, accompanied her, as did Amon G. Carter, the publisher of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. Both men admired her stamina and poise; “her rapid air tour,” wrote Carter, “twice spanning the continent, was a physical feat calculated to take the ‘bounce' out of a transport pilot.” She came through it “smiling.”
²⁷
Will Rogers found her performance sufficiently impressive to write a letter about it to the
New York Times
. Yes, it was a real boost for aviation, he said, “but here is really what she takes the medal for: out at every stop, day or night, standing for photographs by the hour, being interviewed, talking over the radio, no sleep. And yet they say she never showed one sign of weariness or annoyance of any kind. No maid, no secretary—just the First Lady of the land on a paid ticket on a regular passenger flight.”
²⁸

Not since Theodore Roosevelt's days had the White House pulsated with such high spirits and sheer animal vitality. Colonel Starling took the Hoovers to Union Station and on his return to the White House a few hours later found it “transformed during my absence into a gay place full of people who oozed confidence.”

“You know how it was when Uncle Ted was there—how gay and homelike,” Roosevelt had remarked at Cousin Susie's before the inauguration. “Well, that's how we mean to have it!”
²⁹

As the official residence of the president, tradition and law limited the extent to which 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could reflect the tastes and habits of the family that occupied it, but within those limits the Roosevelt personalities soon placed their gregarious and buoyant stamp on the historic dwelling.

There were grandchildren all over the place. Anna was separated
from her husband, and she and her two children Sisty (Anna Eleanor), six, and Buzz (Curtis), three, stayed at the White House. Betsy and Jimmy and their daughter Sarah often visited, James to do chores for his father, Betsy because she was a favorite of her father-in-law. Franklin Jr. and Johnny, lively teen-agers, were in and out. There were nurseries on the third floor and a sandbox and jungle gym on the south lawn. There were also Eleanor's dogs Meggie and Major, both of whom had to be exiled to Hyde Park before the end of the year, Major for having nipped Senator Hattie Caraway and Meggie after biting reporter Bess Furman on the lip.

Some staid officials found the Roosevelt exuberance a little unsettling. The housekeeper was instructed to keep the icebox full for midnight snacks, and White House guards to let the teen-agers in even if they turned up in the early hours of the morning. What kind of place is this, an indignant Johnny wanted to know, when a fellow can't get into his own house? Eleanor had her own run-in with a too literal interpretation of regulations when Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III, in charge of public buildings and grounds, informed her that she could not attach an old-fashioned swing to the limb of a White House tree because it might injure the bark. “Well, of course, I shall do whatever he tells me, but for the life of me I cannot get this point of view.” Eventually the children got their swing.
³⁰

But she would not do anything that detracted from the mansion's dignity, because it was a house that belonged to the nation. “I think it is a beautiful house with lovely proportions, great dignity, and I do not think any one looking at it from the outside or living in it can fail to feel the spell of the past and the responsibility of living up to the fine things which have been done and lived in that house.”
³¹
The family quarters on the second floor were spacious but not intimidating. There were four large two-room suites, one at each corner of the floor, the larger room twenty-six by thirty feet, the smaller fourteen by seventeen feet. On the southern side the two corner suites were separated by the Monroe Room, a sitting room which Mrs. Hoover had furnished with authentic reproductions of Monroe furniture, and the Oval Room. On the opposite side of the house, looking toward Pennsylvania Avenue, there were two smaller guest rooms. The whole floor was bisected by a regal hall, eighteen feet wide, and the ceilings were seventeen feet high.

When Eleanor returned from the inaugural, she found the high-ceilinged rooms and the long hall devoid of all personal belongings
a little depressing, but with the help of Nancy Cook and a White House warehouse full of old furniture, the family rooms soon bore the Roosevelt imprint.

Franklin took the Oval Room as his study, covering the walls with his naval prints and his desk with the gadgets and curios that he had collected all his life. Flanking the fireplace were the flags of the United States and of the president, and over the door he hung a pastel painting of Eleanor of which he was very fond. A door next to his desk led into a small bedroom. Eleanor felt that the bed there was too cumbersome and large, and ordered one made at Val-Kill. There were two bedside tables, one usually covered with documents and memoranda, the other with pencils, pads, and a telephone. Eleanor often left letters on this table with sections underlined and a notation in the margin, “F—read.”

Her own suite was next to Franklin's in the southwest corner of the floor. The larger room had been Lincoln's bedroom, but she slept in the dressing room and used the other as her sitting room and study. She liked to be surrounded by photographs, and her walls were soon adorned with the framed portraits of family, friends, and people she had known and admired. Her Val-Kill desk was by a window overlooking a handsome magnolia that had been planted by Andrew Jackson. The view from her desk, as from the president's bed, swept across the south lawns to the Washington monument. Louis occupied the southeast suite and Missy had a small apartment on the third floor that had been used by Mrs. Hoover's housekeeper.

The western end of the second-floor hall had been used as a conservatory by Mrs. Hoover, who had fitted it out with heavy bamboo furniture, a green fiber rug, palm trees, and large cages of birds to give it an outdoor, California-like air. Eleanor turned it into a family sitting room where she presided over the breakfast table in the morning and the tea urn in the afternoon. The small silver tea service had been a wedding gift from Alice and the silver statuette of Old Mother Hubbard—a dining-table bell—had belonged to her mother. It was always at her right hand, its head, to the delight of the children, nodding solemnly back and forth when she rang.

When Eleanor saw that the breakfast tray had been brought in to Franklin, she would go in soon afterward to say good morning and exchange a few words. She did not stay long because he liked to be left alone to eat his breakfast and glance through the papers. In times of crisis there were always officials waiting in the hall to see him before
he was wheeled over to the executive offices. Normally the three who went in after he had finished his breakfast to discuss the day's schedule were Louis, press secretary Steve Early, and Marvin McIntyre, who was in charge of appointments. The executive offices were practically under the same roof, but Franklin was “just as much separated as though he went to a building farther away,” according to Eleanor. His day was taken up with a succession of people and crises, and he had little time for private affairs. It was sometimes hard on the children, who were having problems. Anna had decided to divorce Curtis (“So the news of our family is out,” Sara lamented). Elliott was settling in Texas—“nothing could pay me to go back East again”—and was also separating from his wife. “That is terrible about Elliott and Betty,” Johnny wrote from Groton, wanting to know whether there was anything he or Franklin Jr. could do. He, too, was making important decisions. He intended to work that summer at camp as a counselor, and “I'm going to Princeton College.” Franklin Jr., senior prefect at Groton and bound for Harvard, alone among the children seemed to be serene. “It must be very satisfying to feel you've been married twenty-eight years,—especially in these times,” he wrote his parents on their wedding anniversary, adding, “But to get to the point, first of all please don't forget to bring my full dress, all my stiff shirts. . . . ”

“We laugh about it a great deal when I formally make an appointment for the children to see their father at given hours when something comes up which really must be discussed and decided but it is not as much a laughing matter as we make it out to be. . . . ”
³²
Usually Eleanor did not see Franklin until he returned from the executive offices to get ready for dinner. They rarely dined alone, and while conversation flowed freely at the dinner table, it was inevitably of an impersonal sort. After dinner, officials often came in to work with the president, leaving Eleanor to entertain their guests and bid them good night. Then she would go to her desk to work on her mail. Before she went to bed—“and sometimes that is very late”—she took her dogs for a walk around the White House circle and drank in the beauty and stateliness of the White House, with its portico “lighted only by the lights from the windows, and yet shining out in its whiteness against the darkness.” Sometimes during the first few months officials stayed until the early morning and Eleanor did not dare to go to bed for fear of missing something that might happen while she was asleep.
³³
In any event, she did not go to bed before going in to say good night to her husband, sit on his bed, and chat for a while. It was often the
only chance she had to talk with him about the things she really had on her mind.

However late she stayed up, her day usually began at 7:30
A.M.
with exercise or a ride in Rock Creek Park. Her horse, Dot, which she had bought from Earl, was stabled at Fort Myers and brought over to the park in an army van. Missy was occasionally her companion on these rides, but more often it was Elinor Morgenthau, with whom she was closer than any other woman in official Washington. Eleanor, in her riding habit and with a velvet ribbon around her soft, light-brown hair, became a familiar figure along Washington's bridle paths. Once her horse reared, frightened by a newspaper that blew across her path, and she was thrown. “I slid off very gracefully right into the mud,” she told the reporters, who inevitably heard of the mishap.
³⁴

After breakfast she went to her desk and saw in turn the head usher, the social secretary, and the housekeeper. Ike Hoover, who had come to the White House during the administration of Benjamin Harrison and who died soon after the Roosevelts arrived, was succeeded as chief usher by Raymond Muir, a tall, dignified lawyer from the Veterans Bureau—always polite, always unruffled. The usher's room, which was at the right of the entrance as guests came in, was the clearing house of the establishment. Muir kept track of everyone who came into the White House living quarters—family, guests, people who had appointments with anyone in the White House. He saw that guests were met by a White House car and escorted them to their rooms if Eleanor could not do so herself. Mrs. Edith Helm was Eleanor's social secretary, as she had been Mrs. Wilson's. Mrs. Helm was tall, distinguished, erect, and correct, and bore the unmistakable stamp of someone who had grown up in one of the services. The daughter of an admiral and the widow of an admiral, she knew Washington's customs and conventions. Every morning she and Eleanor went over her lists and invitations and table orders. And finally Eleanor talked with Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, who did the buying, prepared the menus, and supervised the household staff. Ike Hoover had been concerned because Mrs. Nesbitt was not a professional housekeeper, but Eleanor preferred Mrs. Nesbitt to a professional manager because she was conscientious and something of a business woman, and she was grandmotherly and unpretentious. She would do Eleanor's bidding, not vice versa.
³⁵

By the time Eleanor was finished with Mrs. Nesbitt, Tommy (now Mrs. Frank J. Scheider) had gone through the mail and taken out all
the personal letters, communications from government officials, and any other letters that looked as though they might require immediate attention—some fifty letters a day, only a small proportion of the mail that Eleanor received. “Letters and letters and letters,” she said of the first weeks in Washington. “Wire baskets on my desk, suit cases of mail going home even on Sundays” with Tommy, “a sense of being snowed under by mail.” That first year 300,000 pieces of mail came to the White House addressed to her, and she loved it.