Chapter 5

Daisy

It was shortly afterwards that another woman, Margaret Suckley, entered Roosevelt’s life. Born on 20th December 1891, she was the fifth child and first daughter of Robert Brown Suckley (pronounced “Sookley”), the son of a Hudson River gentleman, and Elizabeth Montgomery, the daughter of an Episcopal clergyman. She was known in the family as Daisy, from the French word for that flower, marguerite.

Robert Suckley had a New York law practice, but, as Daisy later put it, “he never worried much about it”.1 At the age of thirty-two, he had inherited his father’s considerable real-estate fortune and preferred to spend summers abroad and winters on an iceboat on the Hudson. They lived at Rhinebeck, in New York State. Their family home, Wilderstein, had been a fairly simple two-storey Italianate villa when he inherited it from his father in 1888. He felt it was not grand enough to bring up his own family in, though, and employed Arnout Cannon, a Poughkeepsie architect, to transform it into an extraordinary turreted, five-storey Queen Anne mansion with thirty-five rooms.

The Suckleys’ fortune took a turn for the worse following the collapse of the property market in 1893 and the failure of some other investments four years later. The family simply shut up the house, which required a staff of nearly twenty to run, and decamped to Château-d’Oex, in Switzerland, where they spent ten years. It was an unusual existence: they lived at the Hôtel Rosa, and Daisy and her three brothers and two sisters were taught by a Mademoiselle Blum, who would rap their knuckles with a ruler if they failed to remember their lessons. There were few other children in the hotel, which meant they lacked playmates. Instead, the Alps became their playground: in summer they would go on family outings walking in the mountains; in the winter, they would do cross-country skiing.

They returned to Wilderstein when Daisy was fifteen. Her father wanted her to go to college, but her mother was opposed on the grounds that it made girls “unworldly” and, worse, unmarriageable. Daisy, who was to gain considerable experience in maintaining the peace within her turbulent family, proposed a compromise: she would go to Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, but for just two years and then return home to help her mother care for the family.

Attractive, bright, witty and well read, Daisy always looked and acted much older than she really was and would dress according to the fashions of her parents’ generation. This did not prevent several men from courting her, but Daisy did not come close to marrying any of them. She seemed, according to one relative, “adamantly uninterested in sex” – a reflection of the attitude of her mother, who considered it such an ordeal that she invariably wept at weddings at the thought of what horrors lay in store for the bride.2

The First World War broadened Daisy’s horizons: during the summer she sold war bonds door to door in Rhinebeck and in winter she worked as a nurse’s aide on Ellis Island. It also marked the final decline of the Suckleys: in 1917, her eldest brother, Henry, on whom the family’s hopes had been pinned, was killed in Salonika, Greece, when the Red Cross ambulance he was driving was hit by a German bomb. Then, four years later, her father, whom she had worshipped and whose side she had taken in his frequent arguments with her mother, died of a heart attack, aged sixty-five.

From then on, Daisy resolved to look after her mother and her surviving brothers, Robert and Arthur. She had her work cut out. Although both attended Harvard, neither graduated or held down jobs, and they both continued to live at Wilderstein. To add to the family’s woes, Robert, who had been left in charge of most of what remained of the family fortune, in the early 1920s invested much of it in German marks, which were rendered worthless by hyperinflation. All but a little of the rest went in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In order to keep the house going, Daisy took a job as paid companion to her elderly invalid aunt, Sophie, who was Mrs Woodbury G. Langdon. This meant spending part of her time at Langdon’s apartment on Park Avenue in New York and the rest at Mansakenning, her summer house just down the road from Wilderstein. By the early 1930s, the Suckley family’s fortune was close to its nadir: they no longer had any servants, had been forced to sell their home in Manhattan and were largely dependent on the salary Daisy was paid by her aunt.

It was in 1910 that Daisy had first met Roosevelt, a sixth cousin once removed, through William Beekman, a member of another influential family. It was at a New Year’s party, one of the few such events Daisy attended, at Crumwold, a huge chateau owned by Archibald Rogers, down the river from Wilderstein. Daisy was just eighteen; Roosevelt was twenty-eight, and already married to Eleanor, but, as Daisy later told a friend, she never forgot the sight of him whirling partner after partner around the dance floor. She would go on to see him from time to time when he visited Hyde Park while pursuing his political career in Washington.

Then, in the spring of 1922, Daisy received a call from Sara Roosevelt, asking her to come to tea at Springwood. Sara explained her son’s affliction and said he was lonely and needed company. The call may have seemed a curious one for a woman always conscious of the need to maintain the appearance of propriety, but Daisy was somehow acceptable, either because she was dowdy and retiring or, maybe, because she was a relative, albeit a distant one – not that this would have been considered a deterrent among the Roosevelts with their predilection for intermarriage.

That spring and summer, for several afternoons a week, Daisy would sit quietly on the lawn at Hyde Park as Roosevelt dragged himself around a set of exercise bars, keeping her entertained by telling her extravagant stories. “I’m not going to be conquered by a childish disease,” he told her time and again. Daisy, in turn, was impressed by his determination. “My God, he was brave,” she remembered later.3 They continued to see each other through the 1920s. In 1928, when Roosevelt returned to politics and ran for governor of New York, Daisy began to put together a collection of newspaper clippings charting his daily activities.

It was after Roosevelt became president and invited Daisy to his inauguration in 1933 that their friendship really began in earnest. “A Red Letter Day: The President of the United States of America rang me up on the telephone!” she wrote in her diary on 1st August.⁴ Then, three days later, Eleanor called to invite Daisy and her aunt to tea at Springwood. It was while they were there that Roosevelt made a suggestion that clearly thrilled Daisy. “Asked me to drive alone with him on Monday aft,” she wrote. “Haven’t told the family yet!!!...”

Sadly, Daisy’s account of what happened that Monday is all too brief. “The Pres. & I drive in his roadster through his woods – followed by 4 detectives in a state trooper car,” she wrote. “On our return Pres. shows me more books; also illustrations of birds, etc. Mrs [Eleanor] R. somewhat surprised to see me!”

More rides in the blue Ford roadster followed, interspersed with chatty letters. In a diary entry dated 9th September 1935, Daisy recalled a drive in pouring rain with the President, during which they took shelter beneath the trees on Dutchess Hill, a secluded hilltop on the Roosevelt property. From then on the pair would refer to the forested ridge as “our hill”.

Another, on 22nd September, along the winding back roads through the beautiful Hudson River country in which they parked in the same place, appeared to have a special significance. “Something happened in that place on that afternoon that neither of them ever forgot,” wrote Geoffrey C. Ward in his commentary on Daisy’s diary. “Three years later, FDR was still calling it the beginning of a ‘voyage’. Perhaps they simply kissed.” A poem, entitled ‘Eros’, which Daisy clipped and pasted carefully into her diary for that day, suggested that they did. Or perhaps, Ward continued, “they merely confessed to each other the loneliness they felt. Certainly they talked of a special bond of friendship and agreed to share some of their secret thoughts, by letter and long-distance telephone and in person whenever they could arrange to be together.”5

Whatever happened, Roosevelt rather impetuously suggested to Daisy that she accompany him that very night on a train journey across the country to inaugurate the Boulder Dam and then on a fishing voyage off Baja California. Eleanor was due to go as far as the Pacific but not to join him on the ship. Daisy declined – either out of a sense of propriety or because of her commitment to her aunt. Yet she was clearly tempted. In a long letter to Roosevelt that she started almost the moment his train had left, she wrote: “Do you realize the amount of willpower that was necessary to refuse a certain invitation this past week? A slightly righteous feeling, I find, gives no satisfaction whatsoever – only irritation.”6 Daisy wrote many more pages to him in the weeks he was away in a friendly and increasingly intimate tone, which the President reciprocated.

After Roosevelt’s return, there followed many more drives that autumn. Daisy was also finding herself drawn into one of his pet projects: building a cottage for himself on the Hyde Park estate, which he described later as “a small place to go to escape the mob”, and a haven to which he planned ultimately to retire with a favourite lady to write his memoirs and detective stories.

The location was obvious: “our hill”. The first step, as the President noted in a letter to Daisy in February 1936, was to build an all-weather road through the woods to the site. “I need a young woman – resident of Dutchess Co. – experienced in gardening and trees & hilltops to help me to try it out,” he wrote to her on 24th February. “Perhaps by then one will apply for the job – There are other qualifications I have in mind – so difficult – yet I hope, really believe, just the right kind of applicant will turn up. Luckily I am to be the sole judge.”⁷

On 7th March came Daisy’s flirtatious response: “As to the ‘young woman’ specialist you require for laying out your Hill road, I know just the person – only she’s not so young, and she won’t be available until after May 15th [when Mrs Langdon planned to move back to Rhinebeck]. Perhaps the best thing would be for you to lay out the road, earlier, and then get her to approve – It won’t be difficult I’m sure. And I’m quite sure she’d love the job.”8

Pasted to the letter was a newspaper clipping from Massachusetts reporting that the local police were clamping down on “one-arm driving”. “Police Chief Frank T. Coughlin does not tend to interfere with Cupid but he insisted today one-arm driving must cease,” said the article. “Swains can park and spark right on Main Street, he said, and police will not bother them. But when the cars are in motion both hands must be on the wheel.” Daisy had underlined the last seven words in pen. “This clipping will make you realize that people really are trying to prevent motor accidents!” she wrote. “I’m sure you approve of such a ruling and that it should be strictly enforced.”⁹

And so it went on. Such flirtatious comments were typical of the correspondence between them. Quite how far their relationship went remains unclear, though Daisy certainly felt nervous about what other people thought. Writing to Roosevelt after a lunch, she said how helpful it had been that his family had been there as well. “It is so much better so, & does not raise so many eyebrows!” she wrote on 21st September 1937.10 On another occasion, she complained about his sending letters by special delivery, which made Aunt Sophie aware of the identity of the sender.

Such was the importance of the cottage to both Roosevelt and Suckley that in the late summer of 1937 they began drawing up their first sketches of it – and of imagining their future life there together. “Part of the time – whether or not induced by the open fire, I don’t know – I was some 12 miles from here, on a Hill, sitting before a fire also – very near the corner of the sofa,” Daisy wrote. “Someone was reading aloud – two french windows on each side of the fireplace, opened onto a porch – Outside – it was dark under the trees & a wind rustled what remained of autumn leaves – Across the length of the back of the room were bookshelves right up to the ceiling – In the middle, a door opening onto a terrace facing East!” A few days later, on a piece of paper with sketches of the house, she wrote: “I have made a quite perfect floor plan – but suddenly realize that the chimney will stick up in a very queer place.”¹¹

In early 1938, Roosevelt sent sketches to Henry J. Toombs, an architect friend who had designed various projects for him, among them Eleanor’s Val-Kill. The plan, as the President envisaged it, was for a cottage in three sections: in the centre was a large living room with an open porch facing westwards towards the Hudson and the Catskills. Two symmetrical wings on either side contained bedrooms, a kitchen and a pantry. It was designed for ease of access for someone in a wheelchair: a ramp ran up to one side of the porch, and inside the floor was completely flat, with no thresholds between rooms. The windows were low. Though described as a cottage, it was actually quite substantial, with some 4,515 square feet of floor space including the porch.

The cottage quickly became a subject of public discussion – not all of it positive. Toombs listed the President as the architect, with himself merely as associate – provoking a stinging rebuke from John Lloyd Wright, the son of the celebrated architect. “The moral breakdown of the integrity and dignity of the architectural profession seems now complete,” Lloyd Wright wrote to Life magazine. An architect from Middletown, New Jersey, noted sarcastically that he awaited “pictures of ‘Doctor’ Roosevelt performing an appendectomy”.12 Others joined in, pointing out faults in the design. Why did a bathroom window open onto the entrance terrace, one commentator wanted to know. Another questioned the lack of suitable wardrobe space in the bedrooms.

Roosevelt’s main preoccupation was the price. He found the original estimate, at $20,796, far too high, but thanks to twenty-four cost-cutting changes, including replacing the slates on the roof with asphalt shingle and leaving the inside walls as bare plaster, he managed to reduce the bill by almost $4,500. At the time a typical local home could be bought for $1,000. “I simply cannot possibly afford to build an $18,000 house,” he protested. He was also irked by descriptions by newspapers of the cottage as “the realization of a dream” or a “dream house”. It was merely “the Roosevelt Cottage on Dutchess Hill”, he insisted.13

Work was completed in spring 1939, but the cottage was still almost bare. “There are now three pieces of furniture in it,” Roosevelt told the press on 30th May. “Probably by this time next year there will be about eight. It will probably get furnished over – I do not know what – ten or twelve years.”¹⁴

Daisy was not the only one who dreamt of living with Roosevelt in the cottage. The President remained fascinated by – and an object of fascination to – several women, even if, as Persico put it, “questions may be raised about FDR’s sexual capacity from a wheelchair”.¹⁵

One of the principal women – and the most obvious rival to Daisy – was Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, who had been part of Roosevelt’s life for almost two decades. Born in September 1898 in a working-class district of Boston into an Irish-immigrant family, she had gone straight from high school to office work, arriving in Washington shortly before the outbreak of war. During Roosevelt’s abortive run at the vice presidency in 1920 she joined his campaign and, though still only twenty-two, quickly proved a key member of the team, dealing with correspondence and helping juggle his packed schedule. Although not a beauty in the same league as Lucy Mercer, LeHand was always impeccably turned out and, with her blue eyes, strong features and dark-brown, if prematurely grey, hair pulled into a bun, she made a striking impression on all who met her.

LeHand’s job came to an end with the defeat of the Democratic Party ticket, but Roosevelt took her on temporarily to help clear up the backlog of work. She did this so well that he asked her to stay on full-time. Despite the gulf between her and Roosevelt’s respective backgrounds, the two soon hit it off. As Persico wrote, “LeHand matched Franklin’s style, combining competence with breezy good humour. She struck a balance of self-worth while knowing her station.” For her part, Daisy was amazed that “someone with ‘no background at all’ could possess such poise, good manners, and the appearance of breeding”.16 LeHand also endeared herself to the Roosevelt children, who had trouble pronouncing her first name: thanks to them, she became known thereafter as “Missy”.

LeHand was to remain at Roosevelt’s side for two decades; she had a room at Springwood and at his house in Manhattan, lived in a private apartment in the White House and accompanied him on many trips to Florida and to Warm Springs. After he became president, she proved the perfect gatekeeper, sorting out his schedule and dealing with problems that crossed his path. In the evening, after dinner, they would continue to work together in his study.

As with the other women in Roosevelt’s life, the nature of his relationship with LeHand remains a matter of dispute. Some historians insist it was never consummated, a suggestion apparently supported by the way Eleanor accepted her presence and even invited her to go horse-riding with her. Others are not so sure. Either way, Elliott Roosevelt claimed his mother resented the fact that she seemed to see less of her husband than Missy, noting a comment she made years later: “Missy was young and pretty and loved a good time, and occasionally her social contacts got mixed with her work and made it hard for her and others.”17

There were other women, too, among them Dorothy Schiff, a rich Jewish supporter of the New Deal, who in 1939 was to buy control of the New York Post. Slim, chic and glamorous, she made an immediate impression on Roosevelt when introduced to him in 1936, and was thereafter frequently invited to Hyde Park, where she would stay at the Val-Kill house. More than two decades younger than the President, she, like Daisy and the others, was invited to join him on hair-raising drives through the country in his Ford. “Whenever I would be slid across the front seat away from him, a strong right arm would pull me back,” she recalled.¹⁸

Schiff’s husband, George Backer, a liberal writer and Democrat activist, did not appear to mind. Much as members of the British aristocracy tolerated – or were even flattered by – their wives’ liaisons with Edward VII and VIII when they were philandering Princes of Wales, so Backer, as Schiff put it, “saw it in a sort of droit de seigneur way, his wife being tapped by the lord of the manor”.¹⁹

A controversial biography of Schiff, which was published in 1976, when she was seventy-three, claimed she and Roosevelt had an affair, based on interviews with her in which she made frequent use of words such as “sex object” and “turnon” and described an occasion on which the President escorted her into the bedroom of his retreat in Hyde Park. Schiff denied the assertion, claiming subsequently: “I want to make it very clear that President Roosevelt never made a suggestion that I become his girlfriend, and Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt was just as good a friend as Mr Roosevelt.”20

And then there was Crown Princess Märtha of Norway, who went with her children into exile in America when her country was occupied in 1940, while her husband, Crown Prince Olav, and his father, King Haakon VII, led resistance from Britain. Feminine, statuesque and looking every bit a princess, Märtha would join the President for cocktails and also go on long drives with him.

Nor did Roosevelt’s break-up with Lucy Mercer – or Rutherfurd, as she had become – prove as complete as he had promised Eleanor it would be. “Given distance and long separations, the signal might become faint at times but never ceased entirely,” claims Persico. “During the first hectic months of his presidency, when it seemed FDR would have time for nothing but matters of state, he made time for her.”²¹ She was rumoured to have attended his inauguration, hidden in the back of a limousine he sent for her. During his first hundred days in office, he received half a dozen phone calls in the White House from a Mrs Paul Johnson, who, it was subsequently revealed by Secret Service agents, was Lucy. In Roosevelt’s late years, he and Lucy would begin to see each other again, and their meetings grew more frequent after her husband died in 1944.

In short, Roosevelt’s personal relationships were complicated, to say the least. The contrast could not have been greater with the settled and loving family life of the man he was about to welcome to Washington and Hyde Park.