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Sometimes, however, the banter and argument among her children became angry and sarcastic. She would try to stop it, but if unsuccessful, withdrew into herself. Her children were able to hurt her in the way few other people now could. Their quarrels and divorces plunged her into the deepest of depressions. She turned silent and remote—a vestige of her old “Griselda mood.”* She had made self-discipline a ruling principle in her life. “I have a great objection to seeing anyone, particularly anyone whom I care about, lose his self-control,” she wrote, explaining that she had seen what lack of it had done to her father, her brother, and her Hall uncles (those on her mother’s side). The Roosevelt children had inherited from their father as well as mother enormous vitality, but they never achieved the self-mastery of their parents. She had always subordinated immediate gratification to duty and long-range purposes, while the discipline of the years when he was winning his victory over polio gave FDR, she believed, the patience and determination that played such a great part in his later achievements. Her children lacked self-discipline. That seemed to her to be at the heart of their difficulties. And they seemed to be endless. “All of us made life hard for her,” Elliott later said. “All of us failed her.”25
There was a special sadness over the breakup of Anna’s marriage. Mrs. Roosevelt was very fond of John Boettiger, but after the war and FDR’s death he seemed lost. She had encouraged Anna and John to buy a shopping weekly in Phoenix and to try to build it up into a daily newspaper, and had helped them to raise the money for the venture from some of her friends. When it failed, John withdrew from Anna. “Something has happened to John, he seems like a shell. . .,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Maude, adding that he was off on a ranch, alone, writing articles. Separation led to divorce. John remarried, but a few months later committed suicide.26
Mrs. Roosevelt was terribly shaken. At a Belle (Mrs. Kermit) Roosevelt musicale she encountered Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, a distinguished psychiatrist, and, agitated by what was happening to her children and almost oblivious to the crowd about them, she began to query him about psychiatry and analysis. Then she apologized for interrogating him so determinedly at a social occasion and invited him to spend a week end at Hyde Park:
That Sunday we drove alone around the country after church and she brought up very frankly her sense of guilt over John Boettiger’s suicide, that he had written to her out of his depression and she had brushed it aside with hearty impatience and now felt that this had been insensitive and ruthless etc. She then turned to her concern over Elliott who was just then moving towards his divorce from Faye Emerson. This led Mrs. FDR to talk of all the children, of her role as the disciplinarian, and of the President’s role as the comforter, and of what it had done to each of them to have him disappear into illness, into the governorship, into the presidency, into the war; until they had to make appointments in order to see him. She talked of how this had hit each in turn, and especially of how it had destroyed Elliott, which was why she felt such concern for him and did so much more for him than for the others.
Dr. Kubie was deeply moved and impressed with the subtlety of her insights, but she had a bias against psychiatry and, despite many discussions with Kubie, never quite overcame it.
She would catch glimpses of what I meant, understand it, and then lose it again. She never completely freed herself from the feeling that if one had courage enough, guts enough, and worked hard enough, one could hoist oneself up by one’s own emotional bootstraps. . . .I do not think the arguments left a trace of anything except perplexity, and on my part at least, a warm and affectionate admiration.27
Another person with whom she talked freely about her problems with her children was Dr. A. David Gurewitsch. One evening two of her sons nearly came to blows at her dinner table. When she tried to restrain them, both turned their accusations against her. The next day, when she encountered David, she was in a deep depression, wishing, in fact, that she were dead. “My children would be much better off if I were not alive,” she said. “I’m overshadowing them.” They walked up and down the street for a long time.
Her ability to talk about these matters with David Gurewitsch was a measure of the extent to which this new friend had established himself in her affections. When she had left Washington in 1945 and no longer had the government’s medical facilities available to her, Trude Lash, the author’s wife, had recommended David, who was her doctor. They had known each other from student days in Freiburg, Germany, where David, a slim, elegant figure, had arrived to study medicine. He was the son of Russian émigrés. His mother was a remarkable healer, and from her he inherited gifts of empathy and sympathy, which, when combined with blue eyes and continental gallantry, had a magnetic effect upon both men and women. He was a stimulating conversationalist, a worldly, cultivated man, and a physician who cared about his patients.
In 1947, David came down with tuberculosis and was ordered to Davos, Switzerland. He could not get a plane reservation, and Trude went to Mrs. Roosevelt for help, the latter getting him on the plane that was taking her to Geneva for the meeting of the Human Rights Commission. The plane developed engine trouble and was fogged in at Shannon Airport, Ireland, for two days. She took care of the ailing David, brought him milk and read to him. And when he was settled at Davos, she telephoned him frequently from Geneva. His precarious health, his responsiveness to her solicitude subdued her. Like George Eliot, there always had to be someone who was “the one and only.” “Don’t ever worry about being a nuisance,” she wrote him from Geneva as the session of the Human Rights Commission was drawing to an end:
I’ve always liked you & was drawn to you since we first met & the trip just made me sure that we could be friends. I never want to burden my young friends & with all my outward assurance I still have some of my old shyness & insecurity & that is probably what makes you feel shy. I’ve really taken you to my heart however, so there need never be a question of bother again. You can know that anything I can do will always be a pleasure for me & being with you is a joy.
A few weeks later she was explaining to David the relationship of the public to the private in her life.
The people I love mean more to me than all the public things even if you do think that public affairs should be my chief vocation. I only do the public things because there are a few close people whom I love dearly & who matter to me above everything else. There are not so many of them & you are now one of them and I shall just have to try not to bother you too much!
Thus began a relationship that was to be one of the closest in the final years of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life. There was little she did that was not shared with David and, later on, with Edna, his wife.28
Deeply involved as she was in the lives of those close to her, she did not slacken her public preoccupations, but she was most content when she was able to help her children and her friends through her public interests and activities.
She joined Anna in a daytime radio discussion program over the facilities of the American Broadcasting Company, during the 1948–49 season. “It will be an afternoon programme 5 days a week & I’ll record my part twice a week from wherever I may be! She’ll get all the pay & it will help her pay her debts.” The “Eleanor and Anna” show was carried by two hundred stations. “Mrs. R. ranks with the standout commentators on the air,” commented Variety. “She displays more courage and is more positive than most of the others put together.” Nevertheless, ABC dropped it because of lack of a sponsor. “We were very proud to present the comments of you and Anna,” Robert E. Kintner, ABC’s chief executive, wrote her. “I am only sorry that we were unable to obtain commercial sponsorship for you—a failure which I feel was our fault, not yours. . . .” “Tell him,” she wrote on this, “I am happy it is ending! but sorry for Anna’s sake we could not succeed.”29
It was for Anna’s sake, she told friends, as well as Elliott’s, that she had agreed to let Elliott package a show, which he sold to NBC-TV on the basis that few celebrities would turn down an invitation fro
m Mrs. Roosevelt to appear on her television program. She was not sure at first that she wanted to do it, since Elliott had assured NBC that she would have as guests such world-famous personalities as Churchill, Vishinsky, and Acheson, and she doubted she could get these busy men to come on the program or would know what to do with them when they appeared. She was “scared,” she told friends, and would have backed out except that her share of the proceeds were to go to Anna.30
The format of the Sunday afternoon program was that of tea with Mrs. Roosevelt. She presided over a silver urn, sitting on a couch with her guest, as if in her living room. It was a gracious, almost old-world setting, and Mrs. Roosevelt was an old hand at placing people at their ease. And while both Churchill and Vishinsky declined her invitation to appear, Albert Einstein, who intransigently avoided radio and television appearances, made an exception for Mrs. Roosevelt.
The invitations were drafted by Elliott but went out over her signature. To John Golden, the producer and old friend, she wrote reassuringly that they would sit as “if we were here in my apartment” and reminisce; to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that “Elsa Maxwell is coming as a guest and I think we could have fun on this program if all four of us were there besides the solemn people who do the serious discussing.” But there was also serious debate, sometimes on the touchiest subjects, such as the recognition of Red China. One invitation upset her. “Dear Miss Tucker,” she wrote Elliott’s assistant:
I was appalled to find that a telegram in my name was sent to Mrs. Truman asking her to appear on my program. If I had known of this beforehand I would not have sent it because I know that she does not do anything of this kind and that I should not have asked her. When Elliott does not feel that he can sign himself, I am quite willing to sign but I must know to whom messages are going in my name.31
The program was a lively discussion show, the predecessor to such programs as the “Today Show,” the “Dick Cavett Show,” and the like. Mrs. Roosevelt’s guests were variegated, the presentation of controversial political issues balanced, Mrs. Roosevelt herself a gracious impresario. But the program was unable to get a sponsor. Mrs. Roosevelt was controversial, and even though she agreed to NBC’s request to drop Paul Robeson as an invited guest, when the protests poured in, the networks were skittish and commercial sponsors even more so.
In 1950, Elliott, in addition to the television show, signed a contract with WNBC on behalf of his mother and himself for a daily forty-five-minute radio program at noon on which he would be the announcer and handle the commercials. Listeners were stunned and her friends nonplused to hear Elliott reminding the audience that “Mother uses” this kind of soap or that kind of brush. “The show proves,” wrote Billboard, “that a boy’s best friend is his mother.”
She brushed aside the criticism. Although she said she did the television and radio shows to help Anna and Elliott, she enjoyed them, too. They gave her access to a large audience, and she wanted that. When Lawrence Spivak invited her to appear on “Meet the Press,” she accepted with alacrity. They had had “a wonderful reaction,” he wrote her afterward, and she was often invited back. After Elliott moved away from Hyde Park, Henry Morgenthau III became her television producer and Thomas L. Stix her agent.32
There was an element of showmanship in her. She accepted Sergei Koussevitzky’s invitation to come to Tanglewood and appear as narrator in Serge Prokofieff’s musical fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf. “Republican dowagers have been refreshing their souls ever since,” wrote Time, “by putting on the records, leaning back with smiles of dreamy malice, and listening to Mrs. Roosevelt and the wild, shrill piccolos, excitedly warning a little bird that the cat is creeping (Look out!) towards its perch.” Howard Taubman’s evaluation of her performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was more generous:
Mrs. Roosevelt spoke her part simply and charmingly. She did not have the professional polish of an actor, but her unaffected approach had a special quality all its own. She sounded like a grandmother reading a pleasant little story to her grandchildren. She seemed to take a personal relish in the fable, and she was as alert to all her musical cues as though she had always done this kind of thing.33
She read well. Eileen and Richard Harrity, theatrical agent and writer respectively, were friends of Elliott who had bought a little farmhouse near Val-Kill. One week end the Harritys invited her and her houseguests over to eat a dinner cooked by James Beard and to listen to Colin Keith Johnston, the star of Journey’s End, read some poetry. Johnston invited Mrs. Roosevelt to read one of her favorite poems, and without demurral she proceeded to recite “The Calf Path,” and did it with such gusto, expressiveness, and elegance of diction that Johnston spent the remainder of the evening reciting poetry to her, until a disgusted Tommy said later, “He was practically in your lap.” But she had enjoyed the evening. She did not get up to leave until midnight; usually she took her leave at ten so that she could get at her mail.34
Mrs. Roosevelt’s taste in poetry was far from avant garde. Her preferences were for writers like Benét, Emily Dickinson, MacLeish, Robinson, and Sandburg, writers whose rhythms were compelling and whose meanings were clear. “Much of the modem poetry of today seems to be both obscene and senseless but I do not think that my opinion would count for much with any of those who are considered good judges,” she replied to a request that she join a poetry competition jury.35
In 1949 she finished her book on the White House years. It had not written itself easily and fluently as had This Is My Story. At times it was sheer agony. “The book moves slowly, but it moves,” she wrote Maude, adding, although not as an explanation, “we only have seven children here now & it seems very quiet!” Campobello, to which she retreated in order to escape the telephone and visitors, had other impediments to concentration. “There are good & bad memories there,” she wrote a friend as she was about to leave for the island, “but the bad get the better of me when I’m there alone. I’ll read a lot & practice typing & the lamps aren’t too good for night reading & there the night has a thousand eyes.”
Returning to Hyde Park, she enlisted the help of Lorena Hickok. Hick needed the money, and her life was built around Mrs. Roosevelt. She came to Hyde Park and went through Mrs. Roosevelt’s files, making notes of stories and anecdotes and listing questions with which Mrs. Roosevelt might wish to deal. Bruce Gould, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which had the right of first refusal of the manuscript, was impatient. The appearance of Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History “makes me all the more wishful that you would actually get down to the business of writing your book as quickly and as definitively as you can,” but to do so she would have to “give up” some of her other activities. “Tell him I have been doing the best I can,” she directed Tommy, “but I’m no Sherwood. He’ll have the whole thing in a few days now.”36
“At last,” she wrote Maude a few days later, “the book is finished. . . .Of course I suppose I’ll have to do some revising as they (the publishers & those who buy the serial rights) suggest, but the real job is done & it is an immense relief.” But Gould did not like the manuscript. “You have written this too hastily—as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire.” Except for “a few good passages,” the book despite the changes she had made in response to his earlier suggestions remained “very dull.”37
The negotiations over how to proceed became unpleasant. “I’ve had a disagreeable time with George Bye [her agent] and Bruce Gould & had to leave it to Tommy & Elliott to settle. . . .” Tommy was involved because she was to receive half of the proceeds from the serial rights. Gould’s proposal at the meeting with Elliott and Tommy was “three months solid work—day after day with a collaborator and then Mr. Gould only hoped that it would suit him,” she explained to Martha Strayer, a Washington newspaperwoman. “In the first place I would have felt the book wasn’t mine and in the second place I wouldn’t have the time.” Gould not only conditioned his price on
the acceptability of the manuscript but he brusquely warned Elliott and Tommy that if she offered the manuscript to anyone else he would withdraw his offer and reduce his price, and if the manuscript were accepted by a competitor, he would immediately drop her monthly question-and-answer page.
Mrs. Roosevelt refused to accept his conditions. “So we told her,” wrote Gould, “to sell her book elsewhere if she wouldn’t improve it, and her column, too.”38
Although George Bye was her agent she felt that he was not representing her with sufficient vigor. She permitted Elliott to approach Otis Wiese, the publisher of McCall’s. He offered $150,000 for the manuscript sight unseen. He also took the monthly question-and-answer page, paying her $3,000 a month for it, which was $500 more than Gould had been paying her, and giving her a five-year contract where Gould had insisted on a month-to-month contract.39
Wiese was enthusiastic about the book when he read it. So was Cass Canfield, the chairman of Harper & Brothers who had contracted for the hardcover rights and who had considered an earlier version “very badly written.” She had a long conference with him and Marguerite Hoyle, whom he had assigned as her editor. Afterward she summed up his comments, “In general, book gives wonderful pictures of FDR—very vivid. Ms on the whole fresh and unusual.—Main criticism—need some rephrasing.” Soon there were other indications that Gould’s harsh, arrogantly expressed editorial judgment had been wide of the mark. Wiese sent the proofs of the first installment, which was to appear in June, 1949, to Jonathan Daniels. “I have written a letter saying I think it almost the most important memoir of our times in America.” Bruce Gould ate humble pie: “When Beatrice and I returned from England, we found McCall’s selling like hot cakes on the newsstands. . . .It is quite possible that in this instance we were wrong.”40
All summer she worked with Marguerite Hoyle, who, in addition to copy-editing the manuscript, compiled lists of questions designed to jog her memory, fill out a portrait, delete an irrelevancy, heighten a climax. By the end of August she was reading galleys, and in November the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune book-review sections carried enthusiastic lead reviews of This I Remember. In an age of ghosted memoirs, wrote author Elizabeth Janeway, “it is almost shockingly delightful to read a book which could have been written by absolutely no one else in the world than the great and important figure whose name is signed to it. . . .” She is no stylist, commented Vincent Sheean, but in this book words, structure, and style are subordinate “to the character of the author, and therefore it is from the character of the author that the pervading sense of great beauty arises.”41