Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok Read online

  Other Books by Rodger Streitmatter

  Mightier than the Sword:

  How the News Media Have Shaped

  American History

  Unspeakable:

  The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian

  Press in America

  Raising Her Voice:

  African-American Women Journalists

  Who Changed History

  Empty Without You

  THE INTIMATE LETTERS of ELEANOR ROOSEVELT and LORENA HICKOK

  Edited by

  RODGER STREITMATTER

  THE FREE PRESS

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  Copyright © 1998 by Rodger Streitmatter

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Designed by Kim Llewellyn

  ISBN 0-684-86766-4

  978-0-68486-766-3

  Quote from Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957 [1929].

  To Tom

  When a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue • The Lady and the Reporter

  One

  March 1933 • The Pain of Separation

  July 1933 • A Perfect Holiday

  Two

  September–December 1933 • “Deeply & Tenderly”

  Three

  January–February 1934 • “A World of Love”

  March 1934 • A Holiday Gone Bad

  Four

  March–July 1934 • “To Put My Arms Around You”

  August 1934 • Another Holiday Disrupted

  Five

  August–December 1934 • Letting Go but Holding On

  Six

  1935 • “Life’s Rough Seas”

  Seven

  1936–1939 • Drifting Apart?

  Eight

  1940–1944 • Enemies Abroad; New “Friends” at Home

  Nine

  1945–1962 • Living in Two Different Worlds

  Epilogue • The Long Way Home

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt was, by birth as well as marriage, a patrician—descended from one of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence and married to a president of the United States. At fifteen, Eleanor was sent off to England to a proper finishing school where she learned to speak French and comport herself as an aristocratic lady. She returned to America, married her handsome and ebullient fifth cousin, and proceeded to fill the role for which she had been born and bred: producing the next generation of Roosevelts and standing dutifully beside her husband as his political fortunes lifted him to the pinnacle of American statesmanship. It was a pinnacle not unfamiliar to Eleanor, who had often visited her Uncle Teddy when he had resided in the White House some thirty years earlier. By 1933 when Eleanor became first lady, her five-foot-eleven-inch frame and bolt-upright posture made her the epitome of stately grace. She was not a natural beauty, but she was most definitely a lady.

  The most that Lorena Hickok could claim in the way of lineage was that her great-granddaddy, according to family legend, might have been frontiersman Wild Bill Hickok. When Lorena was fourteen, her tyrannical father—an itinerant day worker—threw her out of the house; she then worked a succession of back-breaking jobs as a dishwasher and domestic. But through luck, pluck, and the ability to turn a graceful phrase, Lorena found her way into the rough-and-tumble world of 1920s journalism. A demon for work, she rose from sob sister to sports writer to news reporter. By 1932, Lorena—everyone who knew her called her “Hick”—was covering the top political stories in the country for the sprawling Associated Press while cutting a wide swath not only because of her hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, ribald-talking demeanor, but also because her 200-pound bulk carried on a five-foot-eight-inch frame commanded attention, even though her shoulders slumped forward and she tended not to walk so much as to trudge.

  Unlikely friends, to be sure.

  But in 1978 when the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library opened eighteen cardboard boxes filled with Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok’s personal correspondence to each other, no longer did the two women—by that time Eleanor had been dead sixteen years, Lorena ten—merely make a couple that oldtimers remembered as a bit odd; they also provided the fodder for a vociferous historical debate. For the 3,500 letters that Eleanor and Hick had written during their thirty-year friendship—the first lady sometimes writing two letters in a single day—documented that these women had shared a relationship that was not only intense and intimate, but also passionate and physical.

  When journalists learned that the correspondence contained dozens of erotic passages written both to and by Eleanor Roosevelt, they dutifully recorded—and helped provoke—the nation’s collective gasp. The National Enquirer headlined one front-page scorcher “Secret Romance of President Roosevelt’s Wife—The Untold Story”; the New York Post announced “The truth about Eleanor Roosevelt!” The nation’s more august news organizations lifted an eyebrow and stuck to what they considered to be the obvious facts. The Washington Post reported that the letters revealed “clear implications of lesbianism,” Newsweek labeled the relationship “a lesbian love affair,” and the Los Angeles Times called the evidence of a same-sex relationship “incontrovertible.” Even the New York Times felt duty-bound to acknowledge that the facts did, indeed, point to Eleanor having been involved in a “homosexual affair.”1

  Such straightforward assessments prompted denials from several quarters. Eleanor had been “an emotionally dependent woman whose entire life was characterized by a hunger for affection,” wrote historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., insisting that the letters reflected Eleanor’s Victorian upbringing when women who had been denied the love of men wrote romantically to each other, even though their relationships were entirely platonic. Rhoda Lerman, who wrote a novel based on Eleanor’s life, offered a modern parallel: “I suspect it is more a case of girl scout camp stuff—you know, where they all have names like ‘P.J.’”2

  Since the debate took fire twenty years ago, a few scholars have mined the most titillating nuggets from the letters, each offering what he or she purported to be the definitive interpretation of the letters. In 1980, Lorena’s biographer, Doris Faber, announced to the world—in a decidedly defensive tone—that the romantic language in the letters “does not mean what it appears to mean”; early this decade, Eleanor’s most recent biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, tipped the balance in the other direction, quoting one of the most graphic letters in the correspondence to insist that Eleanor and Lorena most certainly had engaged in a fervent love affair—“A cigar may not always be a cigar, but the ‘northeast corner of your mouth against my lips’ is always the northeast corner.”3

  Despite the passage of two full decades since the provocative correspondence became public, however, neither journalists nor scholars have offered the reader more than bits and pieces that have been quoted, requoted, and re-requoted. None has allowed Eleanor and Lorena to
speak with their own voices and in the full context of their lives.

  This book contains more than 300 of the letters that Eleanor and Lorena wrote to each other between March 1933, when Eleanor became first lady, and September 1962, two months before she died. It is an attempt to reproduce the rich and highly textured conversation as the two authors created it—letter by letter, day by day, year by year. It is necessarily only a portion of their total correspondence, which runs in its entirety to some 16,000 pages. I have concentrated on the years 1933 and 1934 when the relationship was at its most intense, and on 1935 when the relationship went through an important transition. I also have omitted letters in these years if they were not particularly substantive in content or vivid in presentation. Each decision I made while choosing and annotating the letters was guided by a single intent: to provide readers with the closest approximation possible to an unobstructed window into the lives and minds and hearts—perhaps, on occasion, even the souls—of the two women.

  Eleanor and Lorena were both extraordinary. In the early 1930s, Eleanor was evolving into a woman who, before the phrase women’s liberation had even entered the language, insisted on her right to self-identity. She became a woman of consummate power and courageous vision who today stands tall—with precious few, if any, peers—as a symbol of integrity and humanity. Lorena, also a woman before her time, became one of the first to succeed in the competitive, male-dominated endeavor of political reporting, while also daring to create her own unique style—wearing bright red lipstick and colorful silk scarves on the job, switching to flannel shirts and work boots on her own time.

  Also remarkable was the world in which these women lived. Their most intense letters were written between 1933 and 1935, against the backdrop of three of the most monumental events in American history: the Great Depression, the New Deal, the first rumblings that ultimately led to World War II. During these days of unprecedented crisis, Eleanor and Hick were in the very eye of the storm, as both women were living at the White House. (In the summer of 1933, Lorena quit the Associated Press and became the federal government’s chief investigator of relief programs. Between trips around the country, she slept on a daybed in a room adjoining Eleanor’s bedroom.) So Eleanor and Lorena both had daily contact with FDR—who called Hick his wife’s “she-man”—as he altered forever how the world’s greatest democracy serves its citizens.

  The letters are written with a degree of candor and introspection comparable to a private diary, allowing the reader to gaze into the innermost thoughts and feelings, fears and joys, insecurities and motivations of their authors. In those pre-television and pre-videotape days, the letters offer the single best way we have to gain a sense of the private side of these two women and their relationship.

  Lorena was not the only person Eleanor wrote with ardor and affection. After their correspondence became public, ER biographer Joseph P. Lash was so appalled at the suggestion that the first lady may have engaged in a lesbian affair that he published two volumes of her most effusive letters. Lash reproduced more than 1,000 pages of letters—hundreds of them beginning with “Dearest” and ending with “Devotedly”—that Eleanor wrote to male as well as female friends—including Lash.4 None of those letters, however, approaches the emotional intensity found in Eleanor and Hick’s correspondence; only these two women spoke of lying down together and kissing each other on the mouth.

  One of the most intriguing themes in the correspondence is the glimpses it gives of an Eleanor Roosevelt who is strikingly different from the icon she has become. Many of her sentences ramble on and on and on with many twists and turns, comma splices, misspelled words, and challenges to coherence. More fundamentally, the figure who emerges from between the lines is not a paragon of virtue but a woman who could be not only sarcastic and funny, but also catty and judgmental, snide and petty. Of course this should not diminish Eleanor’s stature, but rather should serve to reassure us that she was, like all of us, human. The first lady of the world had feet of clay.

  The letters also reinforce the positive legends about this venerated figure. The daunting list of activities that she participated in day after day testifies to an incredible level of energy. The enormous number of African-American women and men whose careers and agendas she boosted—sometimes inviting musicians to the East Room to perform publicly, other times inviting political leaders upstairs at the White House to plan political strategies in private—speaks to her courage as a civil rights activist. The parade of political, intellectual, and artistic luminaries that Eleanor invited for weekends at the White House—Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Hayes, Will Rogers—reminds the reader of the first lady’s enormous breadth of interests and commitments. Her casual references to joining FDR and his top advisers to discuss political strategy demonstrate that her political acumen had gained her a level of respect that was unparalleled for a first lady—or any woman, for that matter—in the history of the presidency up to that point. In July 1936, for instance, Eleanor wrote Lorena, “I spent 2 hours with F.D.R., Jim Farley, [Charlie] Michelson, Stanley High & Forbes Morgan.” During that session, on the heels of the Democratic National Convention where FDR had been nominated for a second term, the president developed the strategy for his re-election campaign. The letter shows us that FDR relied not only on four men to help him craft that strategy—but also on one woman.5

  Although the goal of this book is not to impose a particular interpretation of the nature of the relationship between the first lady and her first friend, I feel that I would be shirking some implicit duty as the editor of their letters—which I have become intimately familiar with during the last three years—if I did not share at least a few thoughts on the subject.

  Regardless of the boundaries of Eleanor and Lorena’s own relationship, there is no question that they both spent enormous quantities of time with women who loved women. Most Americans living in the early years of this century considered lesbians—or women living in “Boston marriages,” as they were called then—to be loathsome creatures; Eleanor and Lorena did not. Throughout the 1920s, Eleanor spent at least one night a week, sometimes several, in the Greenwich Village home of Elizabeth Read, an attorney and scholar of international affairs, and her life partner Esther Lape, a college professor and successful publicist—having dinner, reading poetry out loud to each other, and talking about the world they dreamed of creating through the progressive social ideals the three women championed.

  Eleanor’s innermost circle of friends also included Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman, another couple who lived in the Village. ER’s involvement with Nan and Marion evolved into a variety of interconnected activities. In 1924, they built a retreat together on the Roosevelt family estate at Hyde Park. Although FDR donated the land for the fieldstone cottage and built a swimming pool beside it primarily for his own physical therapy, he viewed Val-Kill—which he referred to as the “love nest” and “Honeymoon Cottage”—as the private domain of Eleanor, Nan, and Marion. When Nan crafted furniture for the house, she carved the initials “E.N.M.” into the wood, and when Eleanor embroidered towels and bed linens for it, she stitched in that same monogram. In 1925, the three women founded the newsletter Women’s Democratic News to galvanize the Democratic women of New York state. In 1926, they bought the Todhunter School for Girls in New York City, with Marion as principal and Eleanor as teacher. In 1927, they opened a factory at Val-Kill, with Nan as manager and Eleanor as sales agent for their hand-crafted reproductions of early American furniture.

  These intense friendships with Elizabeth and Esther, Nan and Marion show that love between women was definitely not an alien concept for Eleanor. She was a professed believer in sexual freedom—including people acting on homosexual desires. In 1925, she wrote in her personal journal: “No form of love is to be despised.”6

  Hick, meanwhile, had embraced her love of women unequivocally. In 1918, soon after she had begun reporting for the Minneapolis Tribune, she met Ellie Morse and entered into
a same-sex relationship with her. Ellie, two years older and from one of the wealthiest families in the state, had dropped out of Wellesley College to take a lowly job at the Tribune. For eight years, Lorena and Ellie shared a one-bedroom apartment in the Leamington Hotel and became a classic butch/femme couple. Lorena—Ellie called her “Hickey Doodles”—was a head taller and sixty pounds heavier than the waif-like Ellie, whose feet were so tiny she had to have her shoes custom made. Lorena spent as little time as possible on personal grooming; Ellie had her hair curled and wore make-up even when she stayed in the apartment. Lorena covered her bulky body in shapeless shirtwaists; Ellie shopped for stylish fashions that emphasized her tiny waist. Lorena loved reporting so much that she spent far more than forty hours a week on the job; Ellie preferred to wile away her days reading poetry.7

  Eleanor and Hick’s correspondence shows that these earlier friendships continued throughout their own relationship—Eleanor mentions Elizabeth and Esther as well as Nan and Marion dozens of times; Lorena does the same with Ellie. In her memoirs, Eleanor wrote of Elizabeth and Esther, “I have for years thought that Providence was particularly wise and farseeing when it threw these two women together, for their gifts complement each other in a most extraordinary way.”8

  Another relevant point is that, by the time Eleanor and Lorena began the intense period of their relationship, they were worldly wise adults. In 1933, Eleanor turned forty-nine, Lorena forty. Fifteen years earlier, Eleanor had discovered that her husband was having an affair and had agreed to continue the marriage—but not sexual relations with her husband. Hick had felt the sting of betrayal as well; she and Ellie Morse had lived together as a loving couple for eight years until the day in 1926 when Ellie, frightened by Lorena’s chronic depression and emotional flare-ups, had walked out. By 1933, Eleanor and Lorena both had loved—and both had lost.