ELLIOTT WAS IN NEW YORK in the summer of 1894, still leading his addled, adulterous life, although having settled into an apartment of his own, no longer a transient, no longer living in sin with Mrs. Evans. It seems that he continued to see her, though, as well as continuing to see Mrs. Sherman, and, most of all, continuing to dispatch expressions of longing to Grandmother Hall, pleading to visit his daughter. But that summer, he began sending letters to a new address.
Eleanor and others from Grandmother Hall’s menagerie had left New York to enjoy the cooler temperatures of Bar Harbor, Maine, where the highlight of the season for her was catching six fish the first time she ever cast a line into the water. She wanted her father to know, to be proud of her, sending him a letter about her success that very night. Did he receive it? Had he made arrangements for mail to be forwarded from Abingdon to New York? It is simply not known. Eleanor signed the letter in her usual fashion: “Goodby dear dear Father I send you a great deal of love I am your little daughter, Nell.”
In July, Elliott sent a note asking her to give his love to “all the dear home people and all of my good friends who have not forgotten me.” He also asked whether she would like a cat; she had had an angora when she lived with her mother and father and perhaps he could provide her with another. She said yes, and eagerly awaited the little pet. Unlike the pony, the cat would never come. Perhaps her letter never reached him, either. A few weeks later, perhaps hallucinating at the time—according to his valet, hallucinations were a frequent occurrence these days—“he drove his carriage into a lamppost and was hurled onto the street.”
“I HOPE MY LITTLE GIRL is well,” Elliott wrote, in what might have been his last communication with Eleanor. Or his last communication might have been an undated letter he dictated to a nurse, who not only wrote it down for him but mailed it. Regardless, he confessed that he had been “quite ill,” probably because the effects of the carriage accident compounded his other woes. He closed the letter by admonishing her to “never forget I love you.”
She wouldn’t. He didn’t have to ask. But something about the admonition chilled her.
ON AUGUST 14, 1894, JAMES King Gracie and Douglas Robinson, the members of the family who lived closest to Elliott’s apartment on West 102nd Street, in the northernmost, least settled, and cheapest region of Manhattan, were summoned by police officers to meet them there. Both knew the reason before they arrived. It was Elliott’s valet who had found him.
The exact circumstances of Elliott’s death are unclear. Some authors state that Elliott, who had contemplated suicide as early as 1890, jumped out of the parlor window of his Manhattan apartment while others claim that, in a state of delirium, he attempted to jump from the window. All historians agree that he died in his apartment bedroom after suffering a convulsion, sleeping quietly, and awaking with a moment of rationality just prior to his death.
The convulsion might have been a seizure and it is possible that he fell victim to it while under the spell of delirium tremens, having taken a brief hiatus from his imbibing. But that is unlikely. As far as anyone knew, he was still drinking several bottles of liquor a day at the time, along with morphine and laudanum, and he was always so deeply under the influence of these mind-altering substances that his mind was very nearly altered beyond even his own powers of recognition. “The attending physician gave heart failure as the chief cause of death,” we are told, “with alcoholism as the contributing reason.”
When the end came, the once-dashing, now demolished Elliott Roosevelt was a mere thirty-four years old.
The obituary in the New York Times settled on “heart disease” as the cause of death. The Times stated that Elliott’s passing “was unexpected, although he had been somewhat ailing for more than a year. . . .
“Mr. Roosevelt was severely afflicted by the death of his wife eighteen months ago. She was Miss Anna Hall, and was the daughter of Valentine Hall. The blow was added to by the death of a son in May, 1893. About two weeks ago Mr. Roosevelt was thrown from his carriage. The shock aggravated the trouble with his heart and hastened his death. Two children survive, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hall Roosevelt, aged respectively ten years and three years.”
The New York World, like the Herald before it, was more melodramatic where Elliott was concerned. Under a headline that read “ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT DEAD . . . HE WAS ONCE KEPT IN A MADHOUSE,” it wrote the following:
The curtains of No. 313 West 102nd Street are drawn.
There is a piece of black crepe on the door-knob. Few are seen to pass in and out of the house, except the undertaker and his assistants. . . . In a darkened parlor all day yesterday lay a plain black casket. Few mourners sat about it. Beneath its lid lay the body of Elliott Roosevelt. . . . To [James K. Gracie] was left the duty of breaking the news to the others. Many of them did not know that Elliott Roosevelt was in New York. Few of them had seen him for a year. At the clubs no one knew his address. Even the landlord from whom he rented his house knew him only as Mr. Elliott. Under that name he has lived there with his valet for over ten months. He sought absolute seclusion.
Many people will be pained by this news. There was a time when there were not many more popular young persons in society than Mr. and Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt.
THEODORE, STILL A STATE ASSEMBLYMAN, returned to Manhattan from his legislative duties the day after his brother died. At first, he seemed impassive. “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now,” he said, but that was as far as he could get without breaking down. His sister Corinne found him “more overcome than I have ever seen him—cried like a little child for a long time.” He told Corinne that he knew how much his brother had been drinking, “But when dead the poor fellow looked very peaceful, and so like his old, generous, gallant self of fifteen years ago. The horror, and the terrible mixture of madness and grotesque, grim evil continued to the very end, and the dreadful flashes of his old sweetness, which made it all even more hopeless. I suppose he has been doomed from the beginning; the absolute contradiction of all his actions, and of all his moral even more than his mental qualities, is utterly impossible to explain.”
It was probably at Theodore’s insistence that no coroner’s inquest was ever conducted, or at least that no record of such an occurrence was ever found. Also possible is that Theodore was responsible for the Times’s not emphasizing the role of alcoholism and drugs in ending his brother’s life. There is no evidence that Theodore had threatened to use his power in Albany against the paper if it told the whole truth; it would not, however, have been beyond him. But the Roosevelt family’s position in society might have been enough by itself to bring about the Times’s restraint.
BOTH OF ELLIOTT’S MISTRESSES CONTACTED the family after their lover had passed away. Mrs. Sherman wrote to Corinne, who was struck by the obvious depth of her emotions. She sent Corinne a letter immediately after Elliott died, and another a year later. “I’ve been sadly wondering about his children,” she told their aunt, “if they are well and strong—and inherit anything of his charms.” It is not known whether Corinne replied. She was, however, touched by the woman’s concern.
And an odd little addendum: In 1914, a full two decades after Elliott’s death, “[a] tender exchange had evidently occurred between [Corinne and Mrs. Evans],” an exchange about which I could find no additional details. But not long afterward, Corinne published a book of poetry whose title verse was dedicated to Mrs. Evans. In fact, the poem, called “One Woman to Another,” was written as if Corinne were doing the speaking and her late brother’s inamorata was the listener. It concludes with the two women hugging—and more.
What! You would kiss me? Yes, I take your kiss;
We are both women, and we both have loved!
THERE QUICKLY AROSE THE MATTER of a burial place for Elliott, something to which no one had given any thought about a man in his midthirties. The logical site, it was suggested would be next to his wife. Theodore was indignant; it was a “hideous plan,” he believed, and he promptly vetoed it. He refused even to allow his brother to be buried in the same graveyard as his wife. Instead, revealing his well-hidden sentimental side, he decided that Elliott should be interred in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, “beside those who are associated only with his sweet innocent youth.”
At the funeral, Theodore noticed to his surprise that among those in attendance was “the woman,” [most likely Katy Mann, not Sherman or Evans] accompanied by two of her friends. He was relieved to note that the three of them “behaved perfectly well, and their grief seemed entirely sincere.” They left immediately after the obsequies, speaking to no one.
ELEANOR FOUND OUT ABOUT HIS father’s passing from afar, her aunts telling her; “but I simply refused to believe it, and while I wept long and went to bed still weeping I finally went to sleep . . .” She could not imagine a world without her father in it, nor could she conceive of a place for herself in such a world. So, she “began the next day living in my dream world as usual.”
But it was not as usual, not for a while. Needing time to recover from the deepest sorrow she would ever know, and which so closely followed the deaths of her mother and brother, Eleanor dwelled more deeply in her dream world than ever before, her flight from reality more complete than had ever been possible in her books. On occasion she did not seem to be aware that others were talking to her, and certainly was not interested in what they had to say. On other, more extreme occasions, she appeared disoriented, not noticing where she was, not particularly caring. It is possible that she had spirited her mind away to somewhere sunny and remote with her father.
Her most intense period of grieving lasted as long as it did because she was not allowed what we today call “closure.” As she later wrote, “My grandmother decided we children should not go to the funeral and so I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on I knew in my mind that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”
Although Eleanor would not have believed it at the time, it was fortunate that her father died when he did. Or so Theodore insisted. “By his death,” Joseph Lash wrote, paraphrasing his views, “Elliott made it possible for his daughter to maintain her dream-picture of him.”
But at what price? By maintaining the dream-picture, some in the family believed that, “her own sense of reality was impaired. She tended to overestimate and misjudge people those who seemed to need her . . .” And because she ignored her father’s shortcomings, she got into the habit of ignoring those of others with whom she worked later in life. She would instead “become closed, withdrawn, and moody when people she cared about disappointed her.”
On the other hand, Lash posits . . .
Although idolization of her father exacted a price, it was also a source of remarkable strength. Because of her overwhelming attachment to him, she would strive to be the noble, studious, brave, loyal girl he had wanted her to be. He had chosen her in a secret compact, and this sense of being chosen never left her. When he died she took upon herself the burden of his vindication. By her life she would justify her father’s faith in her, and by demonstrating strength of will and steadiness of purpose confute her mother’s charges of unworthiness against both of them.
Allowing for its length, only a paragraph, it is as important an explanation as ever written about the transformation of Little Nell into Eleanor Roosevelt.