Eleanor and Franklin (92 page)

She had a cultivated diction and pronounced her words with a singular clarity, although a few patriots objected to her preference for “
sh
edule” to “
sk
edule.” Her platform voice was no longer a monotone but an instrument of shading and cadence, capable of a controlled intensity or easy relaxation. But it remained high-pitched until she
was taken in hand by Mrs. Elizabeth von Hesse, a voice teacher: “Our Dear First Lady—may I speak frankly and to the point? I am a teacher of speech, particularly of tone production. . . . Mrs. Roosevelt, if I were permitted I would give you a simple set of exercises for the development of resonance and depth of tone that would give you richness of quality. You could project your voice without losing any of its beauty.” The exercises were such that she could do them while dressing, even while riding. Eleanor was about to reply that she was “too busy” but changed her mind. What would they cost and what did Mrs. von Hesse think could be accomplished in two or three days “if I gave you an hour each day?” Not everything could be done in one week end, Mrs. von Hesse replied, but a set of exercises and speech habits could be established that would give her more effective use of her resonant chambers on which depended the richness of tone and would help her achieve “better diaphragm control.”
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Mrs. von Hesse came down, charging $50 for the week end, and within a few months Eleanor was being congratulated on the improvement. Her voice did “carry better and more easily,” Eleanor agreed, but she was playing truant from her exercises when she traveled: “I could probably exercise my head and my voice, but my body is out of the question because trains and hotel rooms do not lend themselves to space enough and there is a feeling the floor may not be clean which may have something to do with it.”
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Because of her success with Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. von Hesse's professional reputation boomed, but when Mrs. von Hesse discussed with Colston Leigh lecturing under his management, Eleanor hastily wrote “I would not want to be used as Exhibit A, with a comparison of my defects and improvements,” adding, however, that it was “quite all right for you to state in your publicity that I have had lessons from you.”
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A “one-season-wonder” in the lecture field, Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen wrote disparagingly in their newspaper column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” As reporting, this was wildly inaccurate, since in November, 1938, when the column appeared, Eleanor had been lecturing for three years; as prophecy it was even worse since until nearly the end of her life she was one of Colston Leigh's most sought-after speakers. Evidently Pearson and Allen recognized their blunder because a few months later they wrote that “a check-up of Mrs. Roosevelt's lecture audiences shows that she has definitely made friends for her husband, despite large fees charged by her agent.” The
columnists particularly admired the way she subjected herself to a “grueling fire of questions” after her lecture, and her effective replies. In Akron, Ohio, she was asked, “Do you think your husband's illness has affected your husband's mentality?” Except for a slight firmness about her jaw, she betrayed no emotion as she read out the question, and replied: “I am glad that question was asked. The answer is Yes. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.”
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The audience rose and gave her an ovation.

Because she spoke from notes rather than from a text she had to think about what she was saying, and this kept her speeches “a little fresher,” she thought, and prevented her from becoming bored.
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The naturalness, good sense, and spiritual energy, which made her a durable presence on the lecture circuit, also explained her success as a newspaper columnist. Two months after her arrival in Washington the United Feature Syndicate asked her to do a daily two-hundred-word article “on topics of general interest with particular emphasis on the home.” Regretfully she had turned it down because of prior commitments to the North American Newspaper Alliance and to the
Woman's Home Companion
. In 1934 the latter publication, on its own initiative, increased her fee, but in 1935 it decided that “two years was about as long a time as we should continue a special feature of this type.”

A few months later the United Feature Syndicate renewed its invitation to do a daily column, a diary of some four hundred to five hundred words in length. “When do I start?” was Eleanor's speedy reaction; her second question was, “What's my deadline?”
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On December 31, 1935, she sent off her first piece of copy, carefully marking it
PRESS RATES COLLECT
.

No columnist had a more newsworthy setting or a more fascinating cast of characters upon whom to report. Her first column described the White House family quarters teeming with young people during the Christmas holidays. Her husband was in bed with a cold, she reported, “so I said a polite good night to everyone at seven-thirty, closed my door, lit my fire, and settled down to a nice long evening by myself.” There had been sixteen that day for lunch, and one young guest had burst out, “Every meal is different in this house. Yesterday we talked about philosophies of government. Today we have talked about movies and punging.” Eleanor did not explain, although a good reporter would have, that “punging” is a form of sleighing. The discussion about philosophies of government had been occasioned by
Franklin Jr. and John who, in discussing a sociology course at Harvard they were taking with Professors Zimmerman and Boldyraeff, had described the professors as being highly critical of the AAA, whereupon the president had suggested inviting the professors to dinner so they could confront Henry Wallace and Chester Davis. Eleanor's concluding comment revealed that she was not going to shun controversy: “There are so many things which you do not have to consider if you are developing and studying a thing in a classroom. . . . It is quite different to be faced with actual situations that have to be met in one way or another in a given period of time.”
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It soon became evident that her appeal as a columnist was not based only on her relationship to the president. Readers were enchanted with the personality that disclosed itself in little flashes such as “I sallied forth and in two brief hours ordered all my Winter clothes” or how she had spent “half an hour having a whole new monetary system thrust upon me,” or how, when speaking about the District Training School for Delinquent Girls, she had stated, “Never have I seen an institution called a ‘school' which had so little claim to that name.” She discoursed on plays and books, expressing her judgments crisply and unambiguously. “Crude in a way because the thoughts hit you like hammer blows,” she said of Irwin Shaw's anti-war play
Bury the Dead
, “but it was a great performance.” “One line from S. N. Behrman's play
End of Summer
will stick in my head for a long time—‘At the end of every road you meet yourself.'” She had just finished Santayana's
The Last Puritan
: “There is altogether too much concentration on himself in Oliver's makeup. He was a fine character but missed, I think, the greatest fineness which is the ability to minimize your own importance even to yourself.” John Golden was “funny” when he said there will never be any great women writers in the theater “because women do not know as much as men.” The assumption of male superiority amused her “because as a rule women know not only what men know, but much that men will never know. For how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?”
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She stayed away from politics but sometimes could not resist a gentle if oblique thrust. When the Supreme Court climaxed a series of rulings cutting down New Deal measures with its decision holding the AAA unconstitutional, she painted this picture of a relaxed reaction in the White House: she had gone down to the White House swimming pool for what she thought would be “a rather quiet and subdued swim at six o'clock. . . . My husband was already in the water, and before I
reached the door, I dropped my wrapper, plunged into the water, and swimming about very quietly, I inquired hesitatingly how they were all feeling. To my complete surprise instead of either discouragement or even annoyance, I was told that everyone was feeling fine, and on that note we finished our swim.” At dinner instead of the events of the day they discussed, violently, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance. At midnight she went in to say good night: “With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”
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It was a picture of grace under pressure and at that moment of constitutional crisis her portrait of a steady-handed, non-vindictive president was worth more than a score of political pronouncements. As Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote two years later, after the tension-filled days of the Munich crisis, “No one should underestimate the reassuring effect on public opinion of the figure of the many-sided father of a family who slips in and out of the diary of the accomplished White House character who manages to sublimate the typical American woman in the person of the First Lady of the Land.”
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Sometimes readers complained because Eleanor refused to be a pundit or to deal with serious matters all the time. “I am asked to write a diary and I cannot write on politics,” she replied to one such critic; “I simply tell small human happenings which may interest or amuse the average reader. . . . Daily happenings are trivial, certainly, and not worth your time to read, but it may help some people to feel that lives they think must be important are after all filled with homely little things.” To another faultfinder she wrote, “I learned a long time ago that too much crusading for any cause is almost as bad as too little. People get weary of too much preaching.”
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She loved doing her column and longed to be accepted as part of the newspaper fraternity. She noted approvingly that at a Hyde Park picnic “before long we had to find a quiet spot where Mr. [Heywood] Broun could write his column.” She wrote and filed her column under the most adverse circumstances; neither illness, travel, nor crowded calendars were permitted to interfere. She would arrive late in the day, she informed Flora Rose, the head of Cornell's Home Economics Department, and would ask if she could have a stenographer when she arrived “as I will have to do my daily column and get it off right away.” When winter storms forced her to take a train rather than fly to Washington after visiting her daughter Anna in Seattle, her biggest worry was where would she file her column: “Yesterday all wires were down along the railroad for almost five hours and I thought I would
never get my column filed in time. Today I'm taking no chances and am getting it off while we wait. . . . It is good for my typing anyway, as I have to do it myself, but I am a bit sorry for those who have to read it.” On another occasion she dictated the column to Tommy, who was balancing her typewriter on her lap while Elliott drove them from Denton to Fort Worth, Texas.
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In September, 1936, she came down with the grippe and a fever so high that Franklin canceled some campaign speeches to hurry back to the White House to be with her. Who was doing Mrs. Roosevelt's column? he asked Tommy, and said he would be very glad to do it for her. “His offer was deeply appreciated,” Eleanor reported to her readers. “We want to pass it on to you so that you will realize what you missed, but we refused courteously and rapidly knowing that if it once became the President's column we would lose our readers and that would be very sad.”
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“Mrs. Roosevelt is a magnificent trouper and a real newspaper person to carry on under such circumstances,” George Carlin, the manager of the United Feature Syndicate, said to Tommy.
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Eleanor's fellow-columnists enjoyed giving her advice, usually in their columns. “Of course Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt is new at the column-and-diary profession or racket and one should not be too harsh,” wrote Franklin P. Adams, whose “Conning Tower” in the
Herald Tribune
was devoted to a diary in the style of Samuel Pepys once a week. “In . . . yesterday's ‘My Day,' . . . she tells of having tried to get, though not where, a Chuddar shawl for Colonel Howe, probably Louis McHenry Howe. She tried in three places, unnamed, and at the fourth, also unnamed, found that an effort would be made to get the shawl. . . . We are not her editor, but if we were we would say, ‘Get names.'” The manager of the syndicate sent the column to her, saying “I agree with his comment heartily.” She had not wanted to advertise the shops, she replied, or to use names without asking people's permission, but she would try to do better in the future. “I fear I have been trained to be too careful.”
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Similar advice was offered by Damon Runyon a year and a half later. He wanted to know what she had for lunch, who were the interesting people to whom she referred, and what was interesting about them. She took the criticism in good spirit and tried to bear it in mind, but when she was hurried, which was often the case, her sentences were sometimes wordy, her verbs weak, her nouns abstract—so much so that the syndicate occasionally felt obliged to delete. Of one such
paragraph, William Laas, the managing editor, complained that “the guests are not named, nor are the organizations they represent, and the question under discussion is not stated in so many words. These essential details are left rather mysterious.”
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“I realize you are right,” was her contrite reply.

She was not the only Roosevelt to begin a column in 1936. Alice Longworth had been recruited by a rival syndicate and was enlivening the Republican press with her political asperities. “I think Alice is having a grand time,” Eleanor wrote their mutual friend Nan Wood Honeyman. “She certainly writes well. I wish I were as free as she, though I do not wish ever to be as bitter.”
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