FDR - Jean Edward Smith [96]
Arthur Schlesinger put the romance into perspective: “If Lucy Mercer in any way helped Franklin Roosevelt sustain the frightful burdens of leadership in the Second World War, the nation has good reason to be grateful to her.”54
Lucy Mercer came into the Roosevelt family in the winter of 1914, when Eleanor, overwhelmed by her social obligations as wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy, hired her three mornings a week to assist with correspondence and help unravel the mysteries of Washington society. Lucy was twenty-three, the impoverished daughter of high-living socialites who had recklessly spent their way through a substantial fortune. She had been raised in Washington, just a few doors from the Roosevelt home on N Street, educated at a convent in Austria, and, despite the hard times on which her family had fallen, was listed in the Social Register in both New York and Washington. She attended the same parties and dinners as the Roosevelts, was accorded the deference bestowed on aboriginal families in the District of Columbia, and found ready employment as a social secretary, a genteel calling that virtually made one a member of the family.
The Roosevelt children adored her. Anna remembered Lucy’s warm smile and friendly greeting. Elliott called her gay, smiling, and relaxed. “She was femininely gentle where Mother had something of a schoolmarm’s air about her, outgoing where Mother was an introvert. We children welcomed the days she came to work.”55
Lucy was nearly as tall as Eleanor, fair, slender, and with the same blue eyes and light brown hair, but was far more graceful and at ease with herself. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled Lucy as “beautiful, charming, and absolutely delightful,” with a really lovely face and “always beautifully dressed.”56 A friend, Aileen Tone, who held a similar position with Henry Adams, remembered seeing Lucy seated on the Roosevelts’ living room floor, the family’s bills, letters, and invitations spread around her in neat piles, “making order of them in a twinkle.”57 Another friend remembered her smile, “the most beautiful and winning I have ever seen.”58 Still another remembered her warm, mellow voice in contrast to the “shrill arpeggios” into which Eleanor’s sometimes climbed.59 Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead), FDR’s most recent biographer, may have said it best when he described Lucy as a young lady of delicate charm, “a quintessential Jane Austen heroine, cast up one hundred years late on the shores of the District of Columbia rather than those of Dorset or Devon.”60
Franklin was thirty-four, nine years older than Lucy, but still so youthful-looking that a cranky Wisconsin congressman ordered him to stub out his cigarette while he waited to testify before a House subcommittee, mistaking him for a junior clerk.61 His appeal for the opposite sex was now considerable. Arthur Murray, Great Britain’s assistant military attaché, spoke of Roosevelt as “breathing health and virility.”62 Bamie called him “my debonair young cousin,” and her elderly husband, Admiral Sheffield Cowles, teased Franklin that “the girls will spoil you soon enough. I leave you to them.”63
In 1915, when Franklin attended the Panama Pacific Exposition with his friend Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, a San Francisco society matron proclaimed them “the most magnetic young men I ever saw. I had no idea that the Democratic party ever recruited that type of person.”64* A Washington doyenne