Gotham Diary:
Cheeky Devil
12 May 2015
My attitude toward keeping a Web log — also known as “blogging”; but I never use that word — is to move on. Correct a simple factual mistake if you must, I tell myself, but don’t call attention to it and don’t indulge in a commentary of second thoughts. Nevertheless, I’m a trifle embarrassed by yesterday’s attack on the authors of Hissing Cousins, not so much because I made a mountain out of a molehill — which I certainly did, and had fun doing — but because I regret its hostile tone. “Moving on” has been made difficult, if not impossible, because I have been moving on, quite literally, through the book, and I’ve not only enjoyed it but come to suspect that it might be important. Not just another “untold story,” but the revelation of complicated duet.
If I were younger, and sure of the usage, I might call Eleanor and Alice frenemies.
The story, which begins in 1884, when both women were born, becomes interesting in the early Twenties. In 1918, Eleanor discovered a packet of love-letters exchanged by her husband with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s former personal secretary. FDR accepted Eleanor’s offer of a divorce, but was talked out of it (somewhat at Eleanor’s instigation, once she had cooled down) by his mother and by Louis Howe, his political fixer. The couple embarked on a more companionate, but determinedly sexless, relationship, one in which Eleanor began to find her own voice. Then, in the summer of 1921, FDR succumbed to polio. His political career, if he was to have one at all, depended on Eleanor’s help and cooperation, which she provided, but on her own terms.
By the time of the attack at Pearl Harbor, Eleanor was widely recognized as a remarkable woman. She was a syndicated columnist and an activist in many social causes, and while she never roamed very far from her husband’s party line, she certainly didn’t hang around chiming in harmony. Once the “mousy” housewife, she had by now out-Aliced Alice. (Alice’s syndicated column was relatively short-lived. Eleanor was still publishing hers up to two weeks before her death, in 1962.) Surrounded by lesbians, Eleanor conducted her personal life as idiosyncratically as Alice always had done.
One could say, then, that Eleanor and Alice were well-matched rivals in the Forties. That seems to be how the Washington grapevine preferred to see them. Stories in which one of them bested (or was rude to) the other abounded. But the authors of Hissing Cousins, Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer, show that most of these tales were not true. The cousins’ relationship was more textured. Differences in their political views, no matter how insistently they voiced them, never calcified into personal hostility. The women remained first cousins whose deepest rivalry had always centered on a devotion to Alice’s father, Theodore. TR slighted Alice during her childhood; he disliked being reminded of her beloved mother’s death, and rarely if ever spoke of his first wife. At the same time, he openly adored Eleanor. The girls competed for his regard, not entirely without rancor but never forgetful of the family ties that bonded them. The widespread exaggeration of their mutual antagonism seems to have been the result of an inevitable confusion: as outspoken political figures, they were analyzed as if they were men. And that’s what makes Hissing Cousins important. Had they been men, they would have been enemies.
Take Alice’s oldest half-brother, TR Jr. Ted Roosevelt was not cut out for politics — he’d have preferred a military life, and he would have a military death — but it was only to be expected that his father’s parental ambitions would not stop at merely bestowing his own name on the boy. Nevertheless, Ted managed to occupy a post that both his father and his very distant cousin, FDR, had held: Undersecretary of the Navy. Alas, he had the bad luck to be sitting in this office when the Teapot Dome scandal erupted. (This is not the time to run through that.) When Ted subsequently ran for governor of New York (against Al Smith), Eleanor sabotaged not only his campaign but his political career by having a specially-fitted Buick shadow his whistle stops throughout the state. Known as the “Singing Teapot,” the car featured a spout mounted on its windshield, and handles where the convertible roof ought to have been. The Singing Teapot would stop in a small town, blow its steam whistle, and distribute literature.
Q: What is Teapot Dome?
A: A large body of government oil completely surrounded by Republican cabinet officers.
In a public debate, Eleanor called her cousin “a personally nice young man whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.” Ted Roosevelt never forgave Eleanor, never made nice, never tried to be understanding. If there was anything that Alice would have found unforgivable, it was the Singing Teapot stunt. She was angry to be sure. But she set it aside, business as usual. It’s possible that she was impressed by her once retiring cousin’s audacity.
In the end, Alice would be conspicuously absent from Eleanor’s funeral. (This is how Hissing Cousin begins.) She never explained herself; she never claimed to be boycotting the service, which was attended by the three men who followed FDR in the White House (as well as by the man who would be fourth). My own explanation would be that Alice, a certified fixture of Washington life, wasn’t in the mood for a trek to Hyde Park, and that she told herself that, after all, Eleanor wouldn’t be there, either. A little shabby, perhaps, but Alice was more demon than saint.
***
We’re told that our grandson, Will, objecting to the choices offered for dinner (none of them dessert) challenged, “You’re not my boss, you know.” Will is almost five and a half years old. Overhearing this in the next room, Will’s father called out, “Yes, we are, buddy,” but Will wasn’t listening. He was staring at his mother, who had turned away to hide her smirk. Had I been sitting at the table, I know, I should have said, “Wherever did you get that idea? Of course she’s your boss!” But I’d have said that only because I can’t really turn around anymore, and the only way to hide my smirk would have been to say something quickly. It is very hard to have an adorable wiseacre in the family.
I was a wiseacre in my day, but I was not adored. I was threatened with reform school, more or less continuously. (I was disgracefully old by the time I cottoned to the fact that reform schools no longer existed, and that, even if they did, people of my parents’ station in life could not make use of them. Luckily for all of us, nobody thought to bring up a “military academy.” That might well have led to fatal mishaps.) For about a week once, I took to answering the phone, “Keefe’s Bar and Grill.” This got a few laughs, until the boom was inevitably lowered. What can I say? I have always been a cheeky devil. And when I hear of Will’s daring experiments — he knows that they’re daring; he goes all funny when he makes them, like the green sky before a bad storm — I think how lucky he is to have parents who pay more attention to what he does than to what he says.