FDR - Jean Edward Smith [103]
The Rutherfurds lived together in happy contentment, dividing their time among their estates, the various social seasons, fox hunts, kennel shows, and travel abroad. Lucy helped raise the Rutherfurd children and soon had a daughter of her own. “Seldom have I seen a mother more beloved and respected than was Lucy by her stepchildren,” wrote the Russian portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff.116 Lucy and Franklin maintained a formal correspondence, writing to extend greetings or condolences on special occasions. Other letters, if there were any, have been lost, destroyed, or safely sequestered. But there is no doubt the affection lingered. FDR quietly arranged for Lucy to watch each of his inaugurations from a White House limousine, and about 1940 he began calling her once or twice a week, sometimes speaking in his almost forgotten French to avoid being overheard. Lucy evidently called him as well, and the White House switchboard had standing orders to put Mrs. Rutherfurd directly through to the president.117
In the spring of 1941 Lucy and Franklin began to see each another again. She was given the code name “Mrs. Johnson” by the Secret Service, and her name appears frequently on the White House register.118 FDR enjoyed taking Lucy for afternoon drives through Rock Creek Park, and when Eleanor was away she would be invited by Franklin’s daughter, Anna, to dine with the president. FDR, Jr., home on leave from the Navy, reports bounding into the Oval Office unannounced to find his father having his shriveled legs massaged by an unfamiliar woman whom the president introduced simply as “my old friend, Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd.”119
There was “never anything clandestine about these occasions,” Anna recalled. “On the contrary, they were occasions which I welcomed for my father because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation for a beloved father and world leader in a time of crisis.… Lucy was a wonderful person. I was grateful to her.”120
Winthrop Rutherfurd died in 1944 after a long illness, and thereafter FDR would sometimes stop the presidential train en route from Washington to Hyde Park to visit Lucy at her Allamuchy estate. Once she accompanied him for a weekend at Shangri La, the president’s Catoctin Mountain retreat (now Camp David); they spent a week together at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Hobcaw Manor; and FDR enjoyed nothing so much as driving Lucy along the meandering country roads near Warm Springs. She was with him there on April 12, 1945, and her face was the last FDR saw before he died. What attracted Franklin to Lucy? The writer Ellen Feldman sums it up nicely:
Lucy Mercer had a talent [to] make other people happy. I am not talking about giving up a career to stay at home and raise children, or nursing an aged parent, or other instances of worthy self-sacrifice. I mean a contagious genius for living joyously. Her descendants speak of the insouciance with which she met early hardship.… They mention her soft heart.… They speak of her need to make surroundings beautiful, and days bright, and loved ones glad to be alive.121
In the months following the president’s death, Eleanor came to accept Lucy’s return to Franklin’s life and Anna’s role in making her visits possible. Sorting through FDR’s effects at Hyde Park, she came upon a small watercolor of her husband painted by Lucy’s friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff. She instructed that it be sent to Lucy.122 Anna also called. “Your telephoning the other night meant so much to me,” wrote Lucy. “This blow must be crushing to you—to all of you—but I know that you meant more to your father than any one and that makes it closer and harder to bear.… I have been reading over some very old letters of his—and in one he says ‘Anna is a dear fine person—I wish so much that you