ON THE SAME TRIP TO Europe during which Elliott and Eleanor went donkey riding, and during which Anna began to show signs of being pregnant with Hall, the family took a house in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris, for her confinement. Well, most of the family. It was a small abode, and thought to be too small for Eleanor, what with nurses hovering and friends and family coming to call. And the place was certain to feel even smaller when the baby was finally born. That, at least, was the excuse for sending Little Nell, then just five, to a convent school for a few months, where she would be out of the way.
Eleanor did not want to go. She “saw this as banishment. She was made to feel like an outsider by the other little girls, whose religion she did not share and whose language she spoke awkwardly.” It was not a happy experience, not nearly like her later years at Allenswood with Mlle. Souvestre. “I was not yet six years old,” she later wrote, “and I must have been very sensitive with an inordinate desire for affection . . .”
One day, a classmate of Eleanor’s swallowed a penny, and all the girls were titillated by the feat, admiring her, even jealous of her courage. “[S]he was the center of everybody’s interest,” Eleanor said. “I longed to be in her place.” So she tried. She let it be known not only to the other students at the convent, but to the nuns who presided over the school in typically draconian manner, that she, too, had swallowed a penny. But her story was unconvincing, obviously untrue, and lying, no matter how inconsequential the topic of the lie, was a sin.
The nuns sent for Eleanor’s mother to pick her up and take her home. She had been banished from her place of banishment. Eleanor recalled Anna’s appearance at the convent, so pregnant that it appeared as if she had attached a balloon to her midsection.
She took me away in disgrace.
I remember the drive home as one of utter misery, for I could bear swift punishment far better than long scoldings. I could cheerfully lie any time to escape a scolding, whereas if I had known that I would simply be put to bed or be spanked I probably would have told the truth.
This habit of lying stayed with me for years. My mother did not understand that a child may lie from fear; I myself never understood it until I reached the age when I realized there was nothing to fear.
What is most interesting about the incident is not Anna’s believing that she had cause, yet again, to be disgraced by her daughter’s behavior, nor is it Eleanor’s admission that she had become a liar as a result, which, if true, was a habit that did not last long. No, what is most interesting is her father’s reaction. Elliott, rapidly becoming an intolerable burden to the entire family, was drinking more than ever, and his addictions to morphine and laudanum were worsening, destroying his health and beginning to erode his sanity. “I am sorry to say,” Eleanor wrote about her father’s ongoing presence in Paris, “he was causing a great deal of anxiety, but he was the only person who did not treat me as a criminal!” [Italics added.]
And so the pattern continued: Even at his worst, Elliott was the best man for, and to, his daughter. Against all odds, through his fog of liquor and drugs, he managed to convey his certainty that Eleanor was a worthy child. He let her know, as soberly on this occasion as on so many others, that she deserved not only love but respect, even though his own life affirmed to his family that he himself deserved neither.
AND HE HAD NOT YET reached the bottom of his abyss. But the nadir was soon to come, and would arrive in stages, each more embarrassing and self-destructive than the previous one.
After Eleanor was dismissed from the convent school, Elliott checked himself into another sanitarium. It was his fourth, the previous place of incarceration being Mariengrund in Graz, Austria, prior to the family’s moving on to France. Fortunately for the Roosevelts, this was all happening abroad and the press did not learn that Elliott had been institutionalized. But just as the treatments at Mariengrund proved anonymous, so did they prove ineffective.
Elliott’s next attempt to rid himself of addiction came just outside the French capital, but it was not like the others. To the others he went willingly. This time he did not want to be put away, especially in what was commonly referred to as an asylum. In fact, he claimed that his wife and his sister Bamie had kidnapped him, handing him over to physicians at the Château de Suresnes against his will. No one believed him, however; no one should have, and thus he began yet another round of futile treatment.
As he did, Anna, Bamie, Eleanor, and her brand-new baby brother sailed back to America, with Eleanor’s pleas to stay behind being ignored. She wanted to remain with her father—near to him, at least. She was still too young to understand either the details or the causes of Elliott’s breakdown, continuing to know only that there was something “seriously wrong” with him, something about which she was told more often than it was something she observed. But this was all the more reason, she believed, for her to stand by his side, as he was always standing by hers.
No one listened. No one cared. In fact, her mother and Bamie were growing angry with her continuing displays of affection for a reprobate, the family’s black sheep. Eleanor had no choice but to board the ship that would put an ocean between her and her father.
When the Roosevelts arrived home, Anna stepped ashore with something new and troubling on her mind. It was not that, in his drunken rages her husband had accused her of becoming impregnated with Hall by someone other than himself; she was by this time used to such mindless raving. But in Paris, prior to his hospitalization, he had added a new quirk to his behavior. Actually, something more than a quirk. He was not just drugged and befuddled by liquor, as usual; he was suddenly less communicative, even silent for long periods of time. His stillness was almost worse than his ravings.
In addition, when not institutionalized, he was often missing. It had happened a few times during their courtship, but Anna had not been seriously troubled then. It was nerves, she thought, albeit a severe case, brought about by his upcoming nuptials. And she knew where to find him, or at least thought she did. He was either on his polo mount or alone in his room, sometimes for as long as a day or two. He needed to be by himself, he told her; from the floor below she could hear him pace, and then stop to write down his feelings in an attempt to make more sense of them.
But this was different. In Paris there were nights when he came home later than he ever had before. There were periods of several days when he did not come home at all, and when he did he had nothing to say about his absence. Where did he go? Anna asked. With whom was he spending his time? Doing what? Why? Elliott would not answer any of her questions. For the first time in their marriage, Elliott was becoming not just a burden but a stranger.
IT WAS BECAUSE OF ELLIOTT’S confinement at the Château de Suresnes that the Roosevelts finally ran out of luck. Journalists learned of Elliott’s plight, and in the process began to ferret out the facts about his past, the years of drugs, drunkenness, irresponsible behavior—and they made headlines, big and bold and black. Eleanor might have brought disgrace to Anna; now her father brought disgrace, true disgrace, to the entire clan.
The New York Herald’s coverage was the most sensational.
ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT DEMENTED BY EXCESSES
Wrecked by Liquor and Folly, He Is Now Confined in an Asylum for the Insane Near Paris.
Proceedings to Save the Estate.
Commissioners in Lunacy Appointed on Petition of His Brother Theodore and His Sister Anna with His Wife’s Approval.
Even back then, the New York Times was a more restrained publication.
ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT “INSANE”
HIS BROTHER ASKS FOR A COMMISSION
TO PASS UPON HIS CONDITION
Elliott Roosevelt, a brother of Theodore Roosevelt, is insane, and, upon the petition of Theodore, Judge O’Brien of the Supreme Court yesterday appointed a commission to legally pass upon his condition in other that a committee may be appointed to take charge of his person and estate. He is now in the Chateau Suresnes [sic] near Paris.
Before Elliott left this country for Europe in July, 1890, Theodore says, he saw him very often and he gave many indications of a failing mind. He is unable to state how far this was due to excessive drinking and to other extremes. Before 1890 he noticed that Eliot [sic] was unable to bring his mind to bear upon any one subject for any length of time. . . .
In the Winter of 1890 he says that nearly every time he saw his brother he appeared to be irrational. He did not seem to know what he was doing and on occasions was violent. Three times he threatened to commit suicide.
The Roosevelts, all of them, were horrified. Oddly, it was Anna who seemed most under control. Even when Elliott had disappeared for more than a day, even though she suspected the reason for his absences, she wrote to him plaintively from New York upon his dismissal from the Château de Suresnes. “Try to remember that I do love you and will always be true loyal. Goodbye again[,] darling Boy. Goodbye from your loved Baby Wife.”
Did she really love him? It is hard to believe. More likely, her note was an attempt to placate him. And herself. More likely, what she felt for Elliott was sorrow. She cared about his well-being because it affected her own; she wanted to save his reputation because hers would be saved in the process.
Elliott, however, paid her no mind. Not now, not in the midst of such publicity. It was the newspaper stories that consumed his attention, and he had enough coherence remaining to be enraged at them, despite their veracity. He wasted no time in responding to the story of his downfall in a letter to the editor of the Herald.
You publish in your edition today a most astounding bit of misinformation under the title “Is Mr. Elliott Roosevelt To Be Adjudged A Lunatic?” I wish emphatically to state that my brother Theodore is taking no steps to have a commission pass on my sanity with or without my wife’s approval. I am in Paris taking the cure at an establissement hydrothérapeutique, which my nerves shaken by several severe accidents in the hunting field, made necessary.
My wife went home at my request to spend the summer with her mother, Paris not being a good place for children during the hot months. I hope you will give this letter as great prominence as you today gave the invention—or worse—of your misinformant.
Elliott Roosevelt,
Paris, 18 August, 1891
The Herald published the letter, but without comment and without undoing any of the damage already done.
Eleanor knew nothing about it. She did not yet read newspapers and was being carefully protected from the reactions of those who did.
THE HEARINGS OF THE COMMISSION that the Times had mentioned were a jumble of ineptitude and confusion. There were times when Elliott, still in Paris, seemed to cooperate with them, other times when he didn’t, instead accusing Anna of being “abominable,” which made him seem to her a “madman.” Further, the family was not united behind Theodore’s decision to take the matter to court, objecting to the continued public notice. This infighting delayed a decision on Elliott’s fate, and on the disposition of the $175,000 that remained from his inheritance, until finally Theodore had had enough stalling and decided to act on his own.
He sailed to Paris in January of 1982, “[s]poiling for a fight,” and “after a week of browbeating, moral rectitude, specific threats, and familial blandishments,” got the concessions he wanted from Elliott. He told his brother that he would be released from his latest asylum and permitted to come home; the legal machinery that had been slowly grinding against him would cease.
But in return, he had to place two-thirds of his remaining money into a trust to benefit his wife and children. He also had to agree to continue all attempts at ridding himself of his dementia—both in France, where he would not be freed from the Château de Suresnes until he finished his current regimen, and at the famed Keeley Clinic in Illinois, where, if necessary, he would begin his efforts anew. During these periods, he would try his best to find steady employment, and if he found it, he was to dedicate himself to it, nose to the grindstone, while spending his off-duty hours continuing his therapy, keeping his nose to the grindstone at that as well.
As for Anna, she had a demand of her own. After writing tenderly to her husband in the note cited on page 146, the “Baby Wife” toughened. She and Elliott would remain separated for a year while he tried to reassemble his life; there would be no resumption of conjugal life, perhaps a brief visit or two, nothing more. Theodore had an even longer period of time in mind. As far as rejoining the family was concerned, he told Elliott that he would be permitted to do so only after two years of good behavior, which would prove he was a changed man. Two years. That would be sometime in the fateful year of 1894.
One can only imagine Elliott’s reaction. He would not see his Little Nell for more than 730 days! He must have been bereft, spoiling for a fight of his own with Theodore. But what choice did he have? Of course, he knew even when he acceded that he would spend time with his daughter, sneaking in visits at some time or another. He consented only verbally; in his heart he could never agree to Eleanor’s removal from his life.
UNAWARE OF WHAT LAY AHEAD for the Roosevelts, Theodore was proud of himself. “In certain respects,” writes biographer H. W. Brands, “the confrontation represented the climax of the sibling rivalry that had long created tension between the two. Theodore interpreted it so, at any rate, for when he persuaded Elliott to give up a large part of his money and to separate from Anna . . . he commenced his report to Bamie with the single word, ‘Won.’” He continued, in self-congratulatory manner, in his January 21 missive from Paris, with “Thank Heaven I came over.”
When Theodore returned to the United States, he described the brother he had left behind. Elliott “surrendered completely,” he related, “and was utterly broken, submissive and repentant. He signed the deed for two-thirds of all his property . . . and agreed to the probation. I then instantly changed my whole manner, and treated him with the utmost love and tenderness. I told him we would do all we legitimately could to help him to get through his two years (or thereabouts) of probation; that our one object now would be to see him entirely restored to himself; and so to his wife and children. He today attempted no justification; he acknowledged how grievously he had sinned; and said he would do all in his power to prove himself really reformed.”
FIRST, THOUGH, ELLIOTT HAD MORE to do in France than finish his treatment at Château de Suresnes. He had to do something about which no one in the family knew, something that might completely sever the few ties that remained between himself and others with the same surname. He had to write to a woman named Florence Bagley Sherman, an American divorcée from Detroit whose home was now New York, but who was living in Paris for a few months with her two children.
Before Hall’s birth, Elliott had begun an affair with Sherman, even though he was drug-addicted, besotted, and subject to violent and irrational tantrums. Apparently, though, he was on his best behavior with her—whatever “best” meant for him these days—and she satisfied the lusty impulses that his wife no longer tolerated. And he, obviously, satisfied something in her.
Now, however, Elliott had to visit Mrs. Sherman to tell her that their relationship was over. He didn’t want it to be, but his family had left him no choice. Mrs. Sherman told him she understood. She was also broken-hearted.
This morning, with his silk hat, his overcoat, gloves and cigar, E. came to my room to say goodbye. It was all over, only my little black dog, who cries at the door of the empty room and howls in the park, he is all that is left to me. So ends the final and great emotion of my life. “The memory of what has been, and what shall never be” is all my future holds. Even my loss was swallowed up in pity—for he looks so bruised, beaten down by the past week with his brother. How could they treat so generous and noble a man as they have. He is more noble a figure in my eyes with all his confessed faults, than either his wife or brother. She is more to be despised, in all her virtuous pride, her absolutely selfish position, than the most miserable woman I know, but she is the result of our unintelligent, petty, conventional social life.
So Elliott had been, in addition to his other malfeasances, an adulterer.
THE FOLLOWING MONTH, ELLIOTT FOUND himself in Dwight, Illinois, where he began taking the “Keeley Cure” for addiction. There were numerous remedies for alcoholism in the United States at the time, but according to William H. White in his book Slaying the Dragon, none “was more famous, more geographically dispersed, more widely utilized, and more controversial than Lesley Keeley’s Double Chloride of Gold Cure.” It was administered both orally and by injection. Ironically, 27.55 percent of the cure’s oral version was alcohol. The rest consisted of such horrible-sounding chemicals as tincture of cinchona and ammonium chloride. As for the shots, one of the ingredients was sulfate of strychnine. Neither mixture of ingredients contained gold.
Unfortunately, what Keeley provided was all too typical of “cures” at the time. Recidivism was high. Side effects were often painful. Elliott wanted nothing to do with them. Keeley’s notion of medicine was “wicked and foolish,” he insisted, and he wanted to return home so that he could recover from his addictions, once and for all, “in my family with the aid and strengthening influence of Home.”
In fact, even before he went to Dwight, he wanted to see Anna so that she could “see me as I am. Not as she last saw me, flushed with wine, reckless and unworthy but an earnest, repentant self-respecting gentle-man.”
But, whether conscious of the fact or not, Elliott was unable to realize the truth of his condition. Anna knew it, however, and reminded him they were to remain separated for a year. It was harder for her to do than it should have been, but she insisted, nonetheless.
As his treatment at Keeley dragged on, Elliott seemed to mellow, at one point writing to thank Bamie for the books she had sent him on his birthday. “As I regain my moral and mental balance,” he said, “I am able to appreciate more fully the hideousness of my past actions and I grow stronger daily in my determination to live rightly and do anything required of me by my loved ones. . . . Try and think lovingly and forgivingly of me.”
Long after Elliott had died, and long after the adult Eleanor had learned in detail of her father’s addictions, she wrote of them sympathetically. She produced an autobiography and at least four volumes of memoirs, and she refers to her father’s substance abuse in them only briefly, and in a manner suggesting that her father suffered from little more than a lingering cold. About his affairs, she never said a word. Not even about the most notorious of them, with Katy Mann.
This was the bottom of the abyss.