FDR - Jean Edward Smith [431]
Madame is determined to remain in her Avenue George V home so long as it is tenable. She has lived in Paris forty years. All the friends of her whole life are here.… Madame is in excellent health and in excellent spirits. She is not uncomfortable … and is not making any emergency plans.
Sara made a special trip to Paris to try to extract Dora but was unable to change her mind. Eventually Dora left on one of the last ships to depart France, her fiftieth crossing of the Atlantic. She died at Algonac on July 20, 1940, at the age of ninety-three.
93. Unpublished memoir of Captain Edward McCauley, quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 399.
94. 2 Roosevelt Letters 333–336.
95. The remark is that of Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, quoted by FDR, ibid. 346.
96. FDR to ER, August 20, 1918, ibid. 350–351.
97. ER, Autobiography 96.
98. I am indebted to Geoffrey Ward for this insight. First-Class Temperament 410n.
99. ER to Joseph P. Lash, October 25, 1943, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 220. “Mother spent the first seven years of her marriage constantly pregnant, and my father went through World War I being busier and busier and busier,” Elliott remembered. “And my mother was such an insecure person during those first few years that I think it became a tremendous blow to her to realize what was going on. I don’t think she had any inkling that such a thing was possible between two people who had said their vows, and so it was horribly upsetting to her.” Elliott Roosevelt, oral interview, June 20, 1975, FDRL.
100. The oft-repeated Roosevelt version was set forth by Alice Longworth in her interview with Henry Brandon for The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967. “I remember one day I was having fun with Auntie Corinne [Mrs. Douglas Robinson, TR’s youngest sister] … I was doing imitations of Eleanor, and Auntie Corinne looked at me and said, ‘Never forget, Alice, Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom.’ And I said, ‘But darling, that’s what I’ve wanted to know about all these years. Tell.’ And so she said, ‘Yes, there was a family conclave and they talked it over and finally they decided it affected the children and there was Lucy Mercer, a Catholic, and so it was called off.’ ”
Also see Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 95; David B. Roosevelt, Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt 112 (New York: Warner Books, 2002); Linda Donn, The Roosevelt Cousins 158 (New York: Knopf, 2001); and especially Joseph Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 68–71. (New York: Viking, 1982).
101. Letters of Mrs. Lyman Cotton and Miss Mary Henderson (Lucy’s North Carolina cousins) to Jonathan Daniels, quoted in Washington Quadrille 145–146.
102. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 228.
103. Alsop, FDR 70.
104. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 231.
105. Quoted in Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 145.
106. ER, Autobiography 93.
107. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 227. Blanche Wiesen Cook reports that it was during the Lucy Mercer years that Eleanor lost her appetite and that “when she did eat she could not keep her food down.… We now know that one of the results of frequent vomiting is a deterioration of the teeth and gums. During this period Eleanor’s teeth loosened, spread, and protruded more than ever.” 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 235.
108. Quoted in Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism 56 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987); Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 73–74.
109. The first veiled reference to appear in print came in 1946, when Olive Clapper, wife of the famous Washington reporter Raymond Clapper, alluded to “a persistent rumor” in her book Washington Tapestry. Mrs. Clapper wrote, “Mrs. Roosevelt was supposed to have called her husband and the enamored woman to a conference, at which she offered to give her husband a divorce if the woman wished to marry him.