FDR - Jean Edward Smith [29]
While in Paris, Elliott, unknown to Anna, took up with a sophisticated American expatriate, Mrs. Frances Bagley Sherman of Detroit. They lived intimately for six months, and when TR forced Elliott to leave France, Mrs. Sherman was heartbroken. “How could they treat so noble and generous a man as they have?” she asked.31
Elliott returned to the United States in February 1892, underwent treatment for alcoholism in Chicago, then moved to Abingdon, Virginia, to manage the vast Appalachian estate of his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson. Anna meanwhile moved the family uptown to a new and more comfortable mansion in the East Sixties and did the utmost to provide her children a normal life. She declined to sue for divorce, hoping that Elliott would recover. But she was frequently depressed, and shattering migraines immobilized her for days at a time. “I know now that life must have been hard and bitter and a very great strain on her,” Eleanor wrote many years later. “I would often sit at the head of her bed and stroke her head.… As with all children, the feeling I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.”32
In early November, Anna entered the hospital for surgery to relieve her headaches. She recovered from the operation but soon contracted diphtheria. On December 3, she lost consciousness. Four days later she died, her health broken by two years of anguish and disappointment.33 Six months after Anna’s death, Eleanor’s three-year-old brother, Elliott, Jr., also died from diphtheria.
In Abingdon, Elliott fell off the wagon almost immediately. One evening, drunk and naked, he toppled a kerosene lamp and burned himself badly. Friends in Abingdon urged TR to come down, but he refused. “It would be absolutely useless,” he said.34 Elliott attended Anna’s funeral, drank immoderately, sang bawdy songs, and was quickly ushered out of town. He returned to New York surreptitiously in the autumn of 1893, rented a house near Riverside Park under the name of Maxwell Eliot, and took up with another married woman, a Mrs. Evans, who, like Mrs. Sherman in Paris, found him irresistible. He was now consuming half a dozen bottles of hard liquor daily. In May he spent the night in a police lockup, too drunk to tell his cabbie where he lived. “He can’t be helped,” TR wrote Bamie. “He must simply be let go his own gait.”35 On August 13, 1894, seized by delirium tremens, Elliott attempted to jump from his parlor window, fell back in convulsions, and lost consciousness. He died the next evening.
Eleanor’s autobiographical writings depict a lovable, caring father and an austere, self-absorbed mother. Those were the memories of an impressionable young child. But as Blanche Wiesen Cook, ER’s preeminent biographer, points out, Eleanor was off the mark: “She did not relate to her mother’s bitter situation, even in adulthood, after she knew the facts. And she never acknowledged the sacrifice her mother had made for her, an act of love that allowed Eleanor to maintain her romantic image of her father.”36
Unlike FDR, Eleanor was a solemn child. As a youthful relative remembered, she “took everything—most of all herself—so tremendously seriously.”37 After Anna’s death, Eleanor and her brother went to live with Grandmother Hall, dividing their time between the Halls’ stately brownstone on West Thirty-seventh Street and the estate at Tivoli in upstate New York. “Our household,” said Eleanor, “consisted of a cook, a butler, a housemaid, and a laundress.” In the country, there were additional coachmen, servants, and tutors. Grandmother Hall was only forty-eight at the time, and, as Eleanor remembers, discipline was strict. “We were brought up on the principle that ‘no’ was easier to say than ‘yes.’ ”38
Eleanor was tutored in French, German, and music. She studied piano, attended classes in dancing and ballet, and was taken