Eleanor: A Life - Hardcover

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David Michaelis is the bestselling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N.C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. He lives in New York with his wife and family.

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Chapter One

ONE

IN FEBRUARY 1884, JUST AS Anna Hall Roosevelt learned that she was pregnant, a blinding fog closed over Manhattan. Thicker and heavier than any in recent memory, it shut the city down for days.1

Late on February 12, the fifth straight night of precautionary bells tolling along rails and rivers,2 Anna’s husband, Elliott Roosevelt, was summoned through the filthy gray cloud to the family townhouse at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street. His brother Theodore’s “flower-like” young wife,3 Alice Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to their first child, also Alice. Elliott wired the happy news to Albany, where Theodore, only twenty-five, was in his third term as the blond, side-whiskered “Cyclone Assemblyman,” crusading against machine politics, corruption, and “that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class.”4

But delivery had gravely weakened the mother, and by next evening everything was falling apart. “There is a curse on this house,” groaned Elliott to his younger sister, Corinne.5 By the time Theodore burst through the front door, his wife was semi-comatose from Bright’s disease while, a floor below, his mother, fifty-year-old Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, sank beneath acute typhoid fever. By three in the morning, Mittie was gone.

By two that afternoon Alice had died in Theodore’s arms, only twenty-two. It was St. Valentine’s Day.

The double catastrophe knocked the surviving Roosevelts entirely off course. Putting the city of death behind him, Theodore stumbled west to his Dakota ranch, leaving his older sister, Anna, known as Bamie (pronounced “BAM-ie”), to take care of little Alice.

For Elliott, twenty-four and unmoored by the loss of his mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt’s death cast a dread of fatherhood over his wife’s recently established pregnancy. Anna herself now feared that childbirth would kill her. The whole family was wracked with apprehensions.6

LESS THAN EIGHT MONTHS LATER, on a fair, breezy Saturday, October 11, 1884, Anna and Elliott’s little girl was born—at eleven in the morning, behind the brownstone front of 29 East Thirty-Eighth Street.7 Her birth coincided with the last rusty quarter of October’s “blood moon,” an orange rind rising over Gotham that night at ten minutes past eleven.8

In years to come, when editing her father’s letters, she would introduce her birth into the family epic as the first clear footprint in a dark trail: “Life treads so closely on the heels of death!”9 So painfully did she associate labor and delivery with inescapable doom that when she recalled bearing her first child in 1906, she dwelled on the resignation that closed over her: “This was something I could do nothing about—the child would come when it would come, as inevitably as death itself.”10

She had no birth certificate. Her parents somehow let her arrival go unrecorded in the municipal archives,11 instead marking her name in a family Bible, at the head of a new page of births: Anna, for her mother and her father’s elder sister; Eleanor, from Elliott’s childhood nicknames, Ellie and Nell.

Her father embraced her as a “miracle from Heaven,” though Elliott and Anna had been hoping for a male heir, a “precious boy jr”12 to put an end to the Roosevelt clan’s “plague,” as one biographer would term the family’s recent “sending of girls.”13 Time was on Anna’s side. She was twenty-one, with a healthy baby,14 a dashing husband, and her horizons open wide.

BUT THE YOUNG PARENTS HAD already begun to drift.

Their first discovery was that each was set on being the loved one. Each deeply needed the other’s attention and esteem: both were acutely sensitive to disapproval.15 One or the other was always pouting in a dark room, injustice hanging its sulky cloud in the hallways, meals on trays creaking with reproachful indignation upstairs.

Time, if still on their side, was carelessly weaponized. Elliott never came home in the evening when he had said he would, and Anna on no occasion appeared downstairs before nine in the morning. To compound her punishment of his lateness, she was eternally declining a previously accepted invitation with the excuse that she was “not feeling my best and… on my back.”16 One languorous midafternoon Anna admitted, “If I followed my own inclinations I would never move off the piazza,” nevertheless ruefully conceding: “But this I know would not do.”

Elliott, bounding off to a drag-hunt, was always just getting back freshly bandaged from a fall. At one Wednesday match in 1885, his mallet went into his eyeglasses, leaving glass particles in his right eye. He raised eyecup after eyecup to cleanse it, suffering agonies until Thursday morning, when a doctor could at last come to pluck out the grit. “It still continues to be very painful,” reported Anna to Bamie, notably on the letterhead of HOTEL SHELBURN, FIFTH AVENUE, N.Y., where she retreated the following Monday.17

The summer of ’85 passed in bouts of moody concealment alternated with bursts of almost willed gaiety. Elliott’s letters are frantic, forever repeating lines already written, oblivious of what he has said to whom. Amid his frothing, not one mention of Eleanor, now ten months old. Instead, both parents endlessly analyze the quality of polo being played, while Elliott is privately consumed by Anna’s snobbery, brittleness, headaches.

At summer’s end, finally, after some “very pleasant old time days” at Oak Lawn, the Halls’ summer house on the Hudson’s east bank above Tivoli, we encounter the first recorded appearance of a one-day-to-be-world-famous feature: “Little Eleanor is looking so well, and her four little pearly front teeth have altered the entire expression of the face to quite a pretty one.”18

HER FATHER AND MOTHER TOOK their little girl upriver from Manhattan to visit Elliott’s elder Dutchess County cousin, James Roosevelt; his young second wife, Sara; and their son, Franklin, who was, Eleanor later liked to say, the first person she remembered.19

The Hyde Park Roosevelts awaited the Oyster Bay Roosevelts at their ornamental farmhouse overlooking the river. Six years before, the widowed James, fifty-two, had met Sara Delano, twenty-six, introduced by Elliott’s sister Bamie at a...