Out and About

National Review, Nov 9, 1998 by Florence King

READING other people's love letters is a bummer, especially when one of the parties is a professional writer and the other a commaless wonder. Then you get a choice between parsed sweet nothings and dangling sweet nothings. Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were polar opposites. Where ER was puritanical and abstemious, "Hick," as she was known to her Associated Press colleagues, was a cussing, drinking, chainsmoking newspaperwoman and a hulking butch lesbian whose sexual proclivities were common knowledge.

The daughter of a South Dakota itinerant laborer who disowned her when she was 14, she had pulled herself up by her bootstraps to become one of America's top political reporters. In 1932 the 40-year-old Hick covered FDR's first presidential campaign and developed a starry-eyed crush on the candidate's 49-year-old wife. For her part Eleanor Roosevelt began to single Hick out of the press pack and show her favoritism. The crop-haired, baggy-suited reporter was invited to breakfast alone with the future First Lady, stay in her Hyde Park cottage, and accompany her on family visits. In return Hick gave Eleanor a diamond-and-sapphire ring that had been presented to her by opera diva Ernestine Schumann-Heink in gratitude for a flattering interview. Eleanor not only accepted it, but wore it. Hick's editors pressed her for the inside stories and scoops she was in a position to get but she would not risk losing ER's trust. Worse, she committed journalism's unforgivable sin when she let FDR's advisors vet her copy. By the end of the victorious campaign her objectivity, and hence her newspaper career, was gone. Invited to spend Inauguration week in the Mayflower Hotel with the Roosevelt party, she sealed her professional fate when she was shown a final draft of FDR's First Inaugural address and failed to report its contents to her AP boss. Shortly thereafter she quit the AP and went to work for the New Deal as an inspector of relief programs, driving around the country and writing up reports. Between trips she lived in the White House, sleeping in a room adjoining ER's. When Hick was on the road she and ER began a correspondence that would continue, with diminishing intensity, for the rest of their lives. The most significant letters were written in 1933-35 when their intimacy was at white heat. These caused a sensation when the collection was made public by the Roosevelt Library in 1978. Since then, Roosevelt scholars with a penchant for Gay Liberation have insisted that ER and Hick had a lesbian affair, while traditional Roosevelt scholars have just as insistently countered that the letters evince nothing but the lavish affection that otherwise repressed Victorian ladies sometimes poured out on their friends. The Victorian theory does not fit the decidedly unladylike Hick, who, though born in 1892, was not repressed. She had been "out" since girlhood, had lived with a female lover in Minneapolis, and had made a pass at a woman reporter when the two shared a hotel room. As for ER, she was Victorian, repressed, and a lady, but she was known to hang out with lesbians. In the Twenties she was a regular visitor to the Greenwich Village digs of lawyer Elizabeth Read and her companion Esther Lape; and was fast friends with Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman, who built a cottage on Hyde Park property where Nan made hand-crafted furniture, carving their three monograms, "E.N.M.," in each piece. Hick's most explicit letter to ER recalls with longing "the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips." ER's letters typically begin and end with intimate sentiments: "Hick my dearest, I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight, you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you even though I'm busy every minute." She then launches into a breathless description of her White House day, closing with a wish "to put my arms around you." After they had talked on the phone while her son was in the room she wrote: "Jimmy was near & I couldn't say 'je t'aime et je t'adore' as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying." The ring: "Hick darling, I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort, I look at it & think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it!" Hick's photo on her mantel: "Oh! how I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in print. I went & kissed your photograph instead & tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I'm here for most of mine is with you!" In 1933 when Eleanor could still move about unrecognized the women motored alone through the remote Adirondacks. In Reluctant First Lady, the biography Hick published after ER's death, she describes a revealing incident in a tourist cabin: "Mrs. Roosevelt started thrusting her long, slender fingers in my direction. I was so ticklish that all she had to do to reduce me to a quivering mass of pulp was to point her fingers at me." In no time, she confessed, ER had her "writhing out of control." Was this highly symbolic language a code for something more? Whatever their relationship was or was not, by 1935 the dew was off the rose. Now we find ER writing: "I know you often have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind but I feel I love you just the same . . ." As ER pulled back, Hick's letters descended into lovesickness: "At times life becomes just one long, dreary ache for you." Always moody, she now spoke of life not being worth living and hinted of suicide. Nonetheless, they kept in touch, exchanging some 3,500 letters by the time ER died in 1962. Of these, 300 were chosen for inclusion in Empty without You by editor Rodger Streitmatter, whose previous books include Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. Although his commentaries leave no doubt that he hopes ER and Hick had a full-fledged affair, he believes that the more important question is: "What impact did the relationship have on each woman?" He credits Hick with inspiring ER's activist First Ladyship and hints that without her ER might have stayed home and baked cookies. This is a stretch; she had taken up socialistic meddling in the Twenties before the two met. He is correct, however, in his claim that Hick made a writer out of her. The former star reporter edited ER's early efforts, teaching her how to organize her feverish thoughts until she was able to write an autobiography and a syndicated column, "My Day," that ran six days a week for 27 years. Meanwhile, Hick, too old to return to newspapering, was reduced to writing publicity for the World's Fair and books for "young adults." In a supreme twist of irony, this masculine woman was thrust into the feminine role of the supportive wife. Once a respected professional, she had sacrificed her career and identity on ER's altar and wound up in obscurity and genteel poverty. That she regretted her decision is clear from her reaction to a patronizing description of herself in ER's autobiography: "In those days I was somebody in my own right. I was just about the top gal reporter in the country." Did they or didn't they? I say no, but Streitmatter, like most Eleanor writers, is too respectful of her lauded humanitarianism to see her for what she was: a tease. It's clear to me that a lot of hugging and kissing went on, but when Hick tried to go further ER hit the brakes while at the same time behaving in ways that would encourage Hick to try again. The tickling episode is a case in point: ER employed this horseplay as the repressed often do, as an innocent way of "accidentally" touching forbidden places. She also dragged the obese Hick along on vigorous hikes, then laughed when she got short of breath and lectured her about her smoking. Here we see the insecure, unattractive woman who at long last has found someone even more insecure and unattractive than herself, calling attention to her companion's gaucherie in order to feel, for once in her life, like the belle of the ball.