FDR - Jean Edward Smith [98]
That summer Eleanor delayed her departure for Campobello as long as feasible. She and Franklin had words, there were arguments and upsets, but it was all vague. FDR was eager for her to take the children out of the Washington heat; Eleanor was reluctant to leave Franklin alone in the city. Finally, on July 15, she packed up her family and went off to Campobello. FDR wrote her en route, part apology, part smoke screen: “[Y]ou were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo.… I know what a whole summer here does to people’s nerves and at the end of this summer I will be like a bear with a sore head … as you know I am unreasonable and touchy now—but I will try to improve.”75
Scarcely had Franklin written than The New York Times published an earnest interview with Eleanor that made matters worse. Under the headline “How to Save in Big Homes,” the Times snidely described the Roosevelt ten-servant household on N Street as a model of wartime thriftiness: “Mrs. Roosevelt does the buying, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, and each servant keeps a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of the others; and all are encouraged to make helpful suggestions in the use of ‘leftovers.’ ” Eleanor was quoted as saying that “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.”76
FDR responded with biting sarcasm:
All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband to the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo of the family, and ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.
Honestly you have leaped into public fame, all Washington is talking of the Roosevelt plan and I began to get telegrams of congratulations and requests for further details from Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco and other neighboring cities.77
Eleanor was mortified. “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way,” she replied. “I feel dreadfully about it because so much is not true and yet some of it I did say. I never will be caught again that’s sure and I’d like to crawl away for shame.”78 The flap ended quickly. It was ER’s first experience at the hands of the press, and she had no idea how her candor could be exploited. She was never “caught again,” and never again referred publicly to her household staff.*
In early August FDR came down with a serious throat infection that hospitalized him for four days. Eleanor rushed to his side and remained in Washington for almost two weeks. They evidently quarreled again, and Eleanor insisted he come to Campobello by the end of the month.79 “I hated to leave you yesterday,” she wrote on August 15. “Please go to the doctor twice a week, eat well and sleep well, and remember I count on seeing you on the 26th. My threat was no idle one.”80
The precise nature of ER’s threat is unknown, but the context is clear. Some authors suggest she meant to bring the children back to Washington immediately if FDR did not appear.81 Elliott, who edited his father’s papers, is more explicit: “There was no mystery; she threatened to leave him.”82
Whatever the case, FDR made it to Campobello in time to forestall a crisis, and that autumn the Roosevelts moved into more spacious quarters at 2131 R Street. “Whether ER was consciously aware at this time that FDR spent as many hours as possible with Lucy Mercer, we shall never know,” wrote Blanche Wiesen Cook. But members of the family knew, so did many of ER’s Red Cross co-workers, and, in Cook’s words, so did “almost everybody else of importance in Washington.