Hissing Cousins Read online

  The Hyde Park branch wasn’t without notable ancestors, including a founder of Chemical Bank and a man known as Isaac the Patriot, FDR’s great-great-grandfather, who earned his nickname by refusing to pay taxes to the British government. But over time the Hyde Park Roosevelts gravitated toward lives as landed gentry, aided and, more important, financed by wives who came from wealthier families: Astor, Aspinwall, Penn. James Roosevelt, FDR’s father, brought far less money to his marriage than Sara Delano did. Her father made his fortune in Asia, much of it in the opium trade.

  But by the end of the nineteenth century, the big difference between the branches was their politics: the Democrats in Hyde Park and the Republicans in Oyster Bay.*2 Politics was the wedge that would drive the two sides apart, one insult layered on top of the last, and spread over the twentieth century. The Roosevelts fired each other from high-profile jobs. They disowned each other. When they were playful, they would declare how their side of the family “got all the looks and the money.” When they were being vicious, they’d compare a certain four-term president to the enemy. “Elected four times! Hitler disarmed, didn’t he?” Alice once said.7 The intra-family rivalry ultimately grew so intense the two sides could not even agree on how to pronounce their name: Rose-eh-velt (Oyster Bay) or Rooze-eh-velt (Hyde Park).

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  When Alice and Eleanor were born, in 1884, the family was intact, even quasi-incestuous: Eleanor wouldn’t be the only Roosevelt to marry within the bloodline. The cousins were close as children, born eight months and twelve blocks apart in New York City. Elliott and his wife, Anna Hall, were actually subletting his brother Theodore’s old apartment on Forty-Fifth Street when Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11. Elliott had also been tending to Theodore’s wife, Alice, when she gave birth eight months earlier to Alice Lee Roosevelt on February 12, at the Fifty-Seventh Street home of Theodore and Elliott’s mother, Martha. Theodore had left New York for Albany that very morning with the romantic notion that his wife wouldn’t go into labor before Valentine’s Day, which was also the fourth anniversary of the day they announced their engagement. When a telegram arrived at the capitol on February 13 with news of a healthy daughter, Theodore passed out cigars and went back to work in the assembly, confident that he would be home later that night. Then a second telegraph arrived. Baby Alice was fine, but her mother had taken a turn for the worse. What’s more, Theodore’s mother, who had been nursing what seemed like a bad cold while waiting for her first grandchild’s birth in an upstairs bedroom, clearly had contracted something more serious.

  Theodore left Albany immediately, but much of New York state had been swallowed by an epic fog—“suicide weather,” the New York Times called it—and the five-hour train trip stretched on and on. His younger sister, Corinne, traveling from Washington, arrived before him at the Roosevelt family home. Elliott met her at the front door looking and sounding as grim as an undertaker. “There is a curse on this house!” he wailed. “Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too!”8

  Theodore finally arrived an hour later, at about eleven o’clock. The prognosis was indeed grave: His wife had an undiagnosed case of Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys. His mother had typhoid fever. He went to see his wife first. Baby Alice had already been removed to an aunt’s house, so he sat and cradled his wife’s nearly unconscious body for several hours. He only stopped when his siblings summoned him downstairs to join their vigil by their mother’s deathbed. Martha died at 3:00 a.m., and Theodore ran back upstairs to Alice. About twelve hours later, she died, too, having held her daughter only once and with time to say little more than “I love a little girl.”9 It was February 14, the day Theodore had expected to be magical. Instead, he scrawled a large X in his diary on that date, and underneath it he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”10

  And Theodore soon went out of his daughter’s. A week after the double funeral for his wife and mother, he returned to Albany to finish out his term. Everything associated with his old world now made him miserable, including his own daughter. In May, he gave up his assembly seat and escaped to the Badlands of North Dakota, leaving baby Alice with his sister Anna, whom the family called Bye. “Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can,” Theodore explained to one of his Dakota buddies. “She never would know anything about me anyway. She would be just as well off without me.”11 For the next three years, Alice saw her father only occasionally, in the summers and at holidays.

  Bye was the oldest of the four siblings (Bye, Theodore, Elliott, Corinne) and the family rock, the one everyone relied on for guidance and support. “There is always someone in every family who keeps it together. In ours, it was Auntie Bye,” Alice said. “I always believed that if she had been a man she, rather than my father, would have been President.”12 “Teedie,” as Theodore was called by his family, was especially dependent on Bye. She handpicked his freshman apartment at Harvard (nothing too drafty, on account of his asthma) and persuaded him to run for mayor of New York. Throughout Theodore’s long political career, Bye would prove to be his most trusted and perceptive adviser. Whenever a new job necessitated a move, Bye turned over her own homes, in New York and Washington. It was a pattern that started when they were young: the big sister looking out for her sickly but irrepressible little brother. Once, when Teedie was beginning his lifelong obsession with animals and taxidermy, the budding naturist placed a newspaper ad for field mice: ten cents each, thirty-five cents for a family. But he had an asthma attack before he could receive any deliveries, and his mother took him to the mountains to recover. When their New York City neighbors began arriving with critters, it was Bye who collected them—and paid the finder’s fees out of her own allowance.

  So it was natural that Bye would collect little Alice, too. When the grieving Theodore ran off to the Badlands, Bye was twenty-nine, unmarried, and, frankly, homely. Though she had deep-blue eyes, richly dark hair, and a pert little nose, she had developed something of a hunchback. For all her adult life, she had to wear a specially made corset to help her stand up straight. She was also beginning to lose her hearing. Naturally, the family assumed she’d spend her days as a spinster, which made her the perfect repository for parentless children.

  Bye clearly adored her firstborn niece. “She was the single most important influence on my childhood,” recalled Alice. “She called me her ‘blue-eyed darling,’ can you believe, and she protected me from my father with his guilt fetish.”13 For the rest of his life, Theodore never mentioned his dead wife—not to his family, not in his autobiography, and not to his daughter. Before his wife died, he had begun to build a house in Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore that he was going to call Leeholm, after Alice’s maiden name. When she died, he renamed the place Sagamore Hill.*3 “It was pathetic, yet very tough at the same time,” Alice said. “I think my father tried to forget he had ever been married to my mother, to blot the whole episode out of his mind. The whole thing was really handled very badly. It was awfully bad psychologically.”14 Aunt Bye was the only person who dared break Theodore’s perverse code of silence. “Finally, Auntie Bye did tell me something very revealing, such as that [my mother] had been very pretty and attractive. And she gave me some of her things, from my father I suppose, some of which (like the jewelry) were fun to have later on.”15

  Her father’s almost cruel reticence made Alice defiant. She came to loathe being shielded from the past or pitied in any way. “Early on I became fairly hard-minded and learnt to shrug a shoulder with indifference,” she said. “I certainly wasn’t going to be part of everyone saying, ‘the poor little thing.’ ”16 She had an excellent role model in Auntie Bye. Recognizing his eldest daughter’s ever-thirsty mind, Bye’s father sent her to France when she was fourteen to study with the freethinking proto-feminist Marie Souvestre, who specialized in grooming awkward girls with untapped leadership potential. Mlle Souvestre helped turn Bye into a voracious reader and a vivacious conversationalist, the kind of person
who somehow commands attention no matter how crowded the room. “She [Bye] was certainly not beautiful—she was a great big handsome man of a woman—but oh so attractive!” marveled Alice. “She was both crippled (they say she had been dropped as a child, but I think it more likely that she had had infantile paralysis) and deaf, but somehow she managed to overcome these handicaps and certainly never made one aware of them.”17

  Bye held the rest of the world to her same unforgiving standards. She might have employed a spoonful of sugar now and then, but she believed in strong verbal medicine. “Aunt Bye had a tongue that could take paint off a barn while sounding unusually syrupy and cooing,” remembered the newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop, whose grandmother was Bye’s younger sister, Corinne Roosevelt. “For example, when Auntie Bye would sum up a foolish woman, she would almost coo as she said commiseratingly, ‘Poor little irrelevant Mary.’ ”18

  Few nineteenth-century women dared to be that frank, even opinionated. Those who weren’t shocked by her were often smitten, especially—against considerable odds—men. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the British ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice, and various other friends of Theodore’s became enamored of Bye’s sharp mind and tongue. Teddy called them her “potpourri of admirers,” and they included a dashing eighteen-year-old Scot named Robert Munro Ferguson (Bye was thirty-two when they met), and fifty-year-old James Roosevelt, her fourth cousin, who asked her to marry him after his first wife died. Bye was twenty-three, and she said no. It was a decision which arguably changed the course of American history, given that James went on to marry Bye’s good friend Sara Delano.

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  Aunt Bye, the family fixer, also came to the rescue of the other lost girl of the Roosevelt family. Eleanor’s troubles didn’t start as early as Alice’s, but they were, if anything, more heartbreaking. Her father, Elliott, met Anna Hall when she was almost nineteen and already a legendary beauty, with milky skin, saucerlike eyes, and golden ringlets worthy of a Botticelli. The New York Tribune noted that Anna was already “celebrated for her pale loveliness,” and she and Elliott quickly became one of New York’s It couples, mainstays of the society pages and on Lady Astor’s “400 list” of the city’s most prominent families.19 Their December 1883 wedding was, according to the New York Evening Telegram, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season.”20

  Unfortunately, Anna never considered plain and dour Eleanor worthy of her parents’ place among the beautiful people. Eleanor certainly didn’t win much of Anna’s time, which was largely spent hobnobbing at charity balls and performing in amateur theater productions. When Eleanor was six, her great-aunt Elizabeth Ludlow was appalled to discover that no one had taught her how to read. In fact, Anna had sent her daughter away to a French convent school the year before with these words of encouragement: “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.”21 (Defiant and desperate for attention, Eleanor promptly got herself expelled, after the nuns accused her of fibbing about swallowing a penny.) Back home again, Anna’s disparaging comments about Eleanor’s appearance were the one consistent source of maternal attention she would offer. “My mother was always a little troubled by my lack of beauty, and I knew it as a child senses those things,” she wrote. “I can remember standing in the door, often with a finger in my mouth, and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said, ‘Come in, Granny.’ ”22

  Eleanor’s relationship with her father was just the opposite—complete, mutual adoration. He took her on carriage rides, bought her a pony, and doted on her as only a father can, calling her “Little Nell,” a chip off his old childhood nickname. On the day she returned home after that disastrous stay at the convent school, her father was “the only person who did not treat me as a criminal.” He was her savior in every sense. On May 18, 1887, two-year-old Eleanor and her parents set sail for Europe aboard the Britannic. The seas were calm, but the second day out was extremely foggy, well into the afternoon. The ship had been clanging its fog bell for hours when, at about 5:25 p.m., the entire vessel seemed to jump in the water. The Britannic had been rammed by another steamship, the Celtic. (As it happened, both ships belonged to the White Star Line, whose Titanic sank almost exactly twenty-five years later.) There was pandemonium on board. At least six Britannic passengers were killed instantly when the prow of the Celtic sliced it like a knife through a cake, boring ten feet into the steerage cabins; all that was found of one victim was a severed leg. The Britannic’s captain had to brandish his gun and threaten to shoot the men who were pushing ahead of the women and children into the lifeboats. Eleanor remembered only one thing: her father, standing below her on a lifeboat, reaching up for her as a crew member dropped her safely into his arms. “With my father I was perfectly happy,” Eleanor said. “He dominated my life as long as he lived and was the love of my life for many years after he died.”23

  Even under normal circumstances, however, Elliott was the most unreliable of parents. As much as he loved her, he couldn’t possibly take care of her. He could hardly take care of himself. That ill-fated voyage on the Britannic had actually been Anna’s attempt to get her husband to dry out, away from his polo pals and assorted drinking buddies. She and Elliott still made the trip a few months later, but Eleanor now stayed behind with her great-aunt Gracie, Elliott’s mother’s sister, and Gracie’s husband in Oyster Bay. She lived with them for six months, and initially it was a shock. “She asked two or three times in the train coming out here where her ‘dear Mamma was & where her Papa was,’ ” Gracie wrote to Corinne. “I told her, ‘They have gone to Europe.’ She said, ‘where is baby’s home now?’ I said, ‘baby’s home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle & Aunt Gracie,’ which seemed to entirely satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came near the Bay driving by Mrs. Swan’s she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed way ‘Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat.’ It was really touching.”24

  Baby soon thrived, removed from the stresses of her unhappy parents and enveloped for the first time in a family who appreciated her for herself. “She has such a gentle, affectionate nature. It is impossible not to love her,” Aunt Gracie wrote to Bye.25 What’s more, she acquired a steady playmate. Aunt Bye was overseeing the construction of Leeholm, just down the road in Oyster Bay, and in the spring and summer of 1887 Alice and Eleanor became fast friends. Aunt Gracie, who had taught their fathers how to read, made a point of reading every day to the young girls. They played on the lawn and on the porch and even, after a time, by the water. Oyster Bay became a kind of haven for Eleanor that year and beyond, and Alice was at its center. “Aunty and Uncle Bunkle took Alice and Eleanor sailing yesterday. They did enjoy it so much,” Anna wrote to Elliott the next summer. “She won’t hear of going home; as she says, she would not have Alice any more.”26 On another occasion, after Eleanor had spent several days with her, Aunt Gracie wrote to Corinne, “Sweet little Eleanor was sent for Friday and I felt very sad to give her up. I love her dearly. She has such a gentle, generous, affectionate nature. It is impossible not to love her. She talked incessantly and a great deal of it is about ‘Baby Lee’ [Alice].”27

  Alice was adjusting to a new chapter in her life as well. On one of his periodic visits back east from his exile, Theodore ran into an old friend leaving Bye’s house. Edith Carow grew up with the Roosevelts; there is a famous photograph, taken in 1865, of young Teedie and Elliott standing at their grandfather’s window to watch Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession near New York’s Union Square. What can’t be seen is little Edith, age three, who was playing with them that day. She began to cry when the black-robed masses started to file by, so the boys had locked her in a back room. Edith later went to school with the Roosevelt clan, and she and Theodore became high school sweethearts with an eye toward marriage. But during his junior year at Harvard, Theodore met the stunning (and wealthy) Alice Lee, and plain, middle-class Edith was left behind (though as Corinne’s oldest and dearest friend, she was the only non-Roosevelt i
nvited to Theodore and Alice’s wedding). Just over three years later, when Alice died in childbirth, Theodore made a point of telling Bye not to ask Edith to her house, where he stayed when he was in New York. According to his Victorian moral code, a man must remain faithful to his wife even after death, and he feared that if he saw his old flame again, he might weaken. And so he did. The “chance” meeting—Bye would never say if she’d arranged it, despite her brother’s orders—happened in October 1886. On December 2 of that same year, they were married.

  Having capitulated on the marriage issue, Theodore intended to stand firm on the rest of his solemn commitment to widowerhood. He planned to leave Alice with his sister in perpetuity. “As I have already told you, if you wish to you shall keep Baby [Alice] Lee, I of course, paying the expense,” he told Bye just before his wedding.28 “He obviously felt tremendously guilty about remarrying, because of the concept that you loved only once and you never loved again,” Alice later said.29 But Edith objected. Three months later, he wrote to Bye from his honeymoon in Europe: “I hardly know what to say about Baby Lee. Edith feels more strongly about her than I could have imagined possible. We can decide it all when we meet.” When Theodore and Edith arrived back in New York, at the end of March 1887, it had been resolved. Alice appeared at the top of the stairs at Aunt Bye’s house, wearing her best dress and clutching a bouquet of pink roses. She walked down slowly and handed them to “Mother,” as Edith insisted on being called. “Alice was hardly four years old,” Bye said, “and it almost broke my heart to give her up.”30