A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [165]
Rose was stricken with fever in late November. Six days later, the former First Lady was dead. Evangeline gave a moving account of these final days, calling Rose “one of the noblest, truest, and really greatest characters I have ever known.” Her coffin was draped in the American flag, and by edict of the mayor of Bagni di Lucca, all shops and places of business were closed and flags were flown at half-mast. Evangeline rode in a carriage behind the hearse followed by a silent procession of Italian villagers. Rose was buried in a cemetery on the banks of the Lima River, and when Evangeline died in 1930, she was laid down in a grave next to Rose. Eve’s will stated that her personal letters remain sealed for fifty years. Only then was her forbidden romance with the former First Lady made known.
Frances Folsom Cleveland was raising her four surviving children when, four years after Grover Cleveland’s death, she made the surprising announcement that she was remarrying. Her fiancé was Thomas Jex Preston, a fifty-year-old professor of archeology and art history at Wells College. Preston had had an unusual career path. He had studied at Columbia and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and gone to work for the family kerosene business in Newark, but in his late thirties, he quit and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne for two years. Afterward, he enrolled at Princeton University, where he met Frances. In time he earned a doctorate. Frances used her connections at Wells College, where she was a member of the board of trustees, to obtain a professorship there for Preston, and after less than a year on the faculty, lo and behold, he was named acting president. Eight months later, he and Frances announced their engagement. Preston, after grumbling that he could find no suitable accommodations for himself and his bride-to-be in rustic Aurora, New York, except for a vacant apartment over Hickey’s store, resigned his post at Wells. He returned to Princeton to be with his fiancée.
Preston was six feet tall and broad shouldered, with jet-black hair streaked with gray and a black mustache. He had a sarcastic sense of humor and was quite the connoisseur, smoked cigarettes, and played a “rattling good game of tennis.” He was also the subject of much chatter among the young ladies at Wells who were intrigued by the racing car he drove and his reputation for being “light on his feet.” The girls called him “Arty,” because he taught art history. They could not believe he was approaching fifty—he looked a decade younger. It was remarked that Frances Cleveland had endowed an art history chair at Wells specifically for Preston—“where she knew she could find him.”
Stout but still winsome at age forty-eight, Frances said her engagement to Preston gave her a sense of contentment. She told her friend Helena Gildor, “I feel sure you will like him . .
. This is not the enthusiasm of a girl—it is the settled conviction of a mature woman—whose standards of men you know.” Frances indicated that all her children approved of the match.
Others were not so sure. Jean S. Davis, who had been a playmate of Baby Ruth Cleveland, found it distressing that President Cleveland’s widow was marrying. No fan of the groom, Jean Davis recalled the “unpleasant shock when I read the headlines reporting the engagement. . . . And that it was Mr. Preston!” Frances Cleveland was to her a “national monument, and it distressed many of us to learn that the base was of clay.”
Preston