FDR - Jean Edward Smith [36]
Throughout the trip Franklin teased Sara about his and Eleanor’s purchases and the money they were spending. From London he wrote that they stayed in the Royal Suite at Brown’s Hotel for £1,000 a night (actual cost £36). In Paris he reported buying “thousands of dollars worth of linen.… Eleanor got a dozen dresses.… I am getting Eleanor a long sable coat and a silver fox coat for myself.” From Venice, “3 or 4 old tapestries and a Tintoretto—the latter in his best style.… Also an old library—about 3000 books—and had them shipped to London.” Back in Paris, “I got some Rembrandt engravings and a cunning little sketch by Claude Lorraine.” At one point he suggested they were planning to expand the trip into a tour around the world—“It is only a step or two.” At another he suggested buying the woodwork and mosaic floor tiles from an old Venetian palace: “It can be got for about $60,000. If you care to have it cable me.”13
From Europe the newlyweds pressed Sara to find a house for them, preferably the rental property of their Dutchess County friends the Drapers, at 125 East Thirty-sixth Street—just three blocks from Sara’s Madison Avenue address. “It is just the right situation and size for us,” wrote Franklin. “Our one hope is to hear very soon that you have got it for us. It would be so nice to feel that all is settled before we return.”14 Eleanor wrote Sara, “you are an angel to take so much trouble about the house, but I am glad you are going to see it and I do hope you will take it if it is possible.”15 When Sara replied that she had taken the house for two years, Eleanor was delighted. “We are so glad and think you have done wonders for us. It is very nice that the work can be begun before we get home … and we will get settled so much sooner than if we waited to choose a house on our return.”16
The Draper house was temporary. At Christmas 1905, Sara informed Franklin and Eleanor that she was building a town house for them. “A Christmas present from Mama—number and street not yet quite decided.” The following year Sara bought an expensive plot on East Sixty-fifth Street just off Park Avenue and hired a well-known architect, Charles A. Platt, to draw plans for two adjoining houses—one for herself and one for Franklin and Eleanor—similar to the Ludlow-Parish houses on East Seventy-sixth Street. The drawing rooms and dining rooms of the two houses opened into each other, there were connecting doors on the upper floors, and a common vestibule. Construction began in the spring of 1907 and was completed the following year. Sara retained title to both houses, and upon her death in 1941 FDR sold them to the Hillel Foundation of Hunter College for a modest price.17
Franklin, who loved to design things, immersed himself in the construction of the houses and worked constantly with the architect, the builder, and the decorators. Eleanor was consulted but chose not to become involved. “Instead of taking an interest in these houses, one of which I was to live in, I left everything to my mother-in-law and my husband.”18 One evening shortly after they moved in, Franklin found his wife in tears. This was not her home, she sobbed. She had not helped plan it, and it was not the way she wanted to live. FDR was bewildered. Why hadn’t she said something before? he asked. They had gone over the plans together—why hadn’t she spoken up?19
As Eleanor recalled the incident, “he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.”20