FDR - Jean Edward Smith [97]
The romance began innocently enough. Franklin was again in Washington alone for the summer and continued his usual round of social engagements. Lucy was often present at those functions, and FDR, as was his wont, flirted brazenly. Lucy, who in many ways was as strong-willed as Eleanor, flirted back. One thing led to another, and soon Franklin was inviting her for cruises aboard the Navy’s yacht Sylph and long drives in the Virginia countryside. The cruises were always well attended by a host of guests, but the drives were strictly private.
“I saw you twenty miles out in the country,” Alice Longworth teased Franklin, “but you didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”
“Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?”67
FDR was happy in Lucy’s company and she very much in his. Unlike Eleanor, Lucy was uncritical in her affection and saw no need to direct his activities or admonish his behavior. She knew instinctively how to please him, to bolster rather than challenge him. Elliott recalls that Lucy had “the same brand of charm as Father, and there was a hint of fire in her warm dark eyes. In the new circumstances of Father’s life at home, I see it as inevitable that they were irresistibly attracted to each other.”68
Friends recognized that as well. A number, such as British Embassy counselor Nigel Law and Franklin’s Harvard classmate Livingston Davis, often provided cover, posing as Lucy’s escorts, while others, such as Alice Longworth and Edith Morton Eustis, provided safe houses for the couple to meet. “Franklin deserved a good time,” said Alice. “He was married to Eleanor.”69 Alice, though she had been Eleanor’s maid of honor, had little good to say about her cousin in those years, and her decision to provide succor for Franklin and Lucy was spiked with malice—perhaps because her own marriage to Nicholas Longworth had turned sour.
Edith Eustis, one of five attractive daughters of former vice president Levi Morton, was a Dutchess County neighbor of the Roosevelts and had known Franklin since childhood.70 She admired his work in Washington and adored Lucy, a cousin of her husband, William Corcoran Eustis. Their elegant Washington mansion, Corcoran House, had been built in the earliest days of the city for Lucy’s ancestor Maryland Governor Thomas Swann. It stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and H Street, directly across from Lafayette Park, astride the route Franklin walked each day to and from the Navy Department.71*
Eleanor sensed something amiss that summer. Franklin’s letters were intermittent and perfunctory, and he visited Campobello for only ten days, an aberration for someone who enjoyed the island so much as he. A polio epidemic raging along the East Coast kept Eleanor and the children at Campobello for four months instead of the usual two (the island proved to be insulated from the disease), and she did not return to Washington until after the election in November. “From a life centered entirely in my family,” she wrote many years later, “I became conscious that there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us.”72 The comment in her autobiography is interlaced between references to the growing menace posed by imperial Germany in late 1916, and it is easy to believe that ER was referring to the international situation. Elliott and others believe she was referring to something more personal. “By ‘all of us’ she meant not the country at large, but her family. She was talking about trouble much closer to home.”73
The relationship between FDR and Lucy intensified in 1917. On June 24, ten weeks after the United States entered the war, Lucy enlisted in the Navy as a yeoman (female) and was assigned secretarial duties in the office of the assistant secretary. To believe FDR did not have a hand in the assignment is to believe in the