ELLIOTT BULLOCH ROOSEVELT, TWENTY-THREE YEARS old, and Anna Rebecca Ludlow Hall, nineteen, were married on December 1, 1883, at the Calvary Church in downtown New York, two blocks from Elliott’s birthplace. It was, according to the New York Herald, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season.” The New York Times was almost identical in its language, calling the ceremony, “One of the most brilliant weddings of the season.” The event proved such an attraction that, according to a few reports, the crowd was standing room only, with latecomers squeezed against the church’s back doors.
The groom’s attire was not mentioned, but the bridal gown “was of white satin, covered with point lace: the point lace veil fastened with a diamond crescent and caught at the shoulder cut orange blossoms.” The bridesmaids’ dresses were also described in detail, one of which was that the sleeves “were in the Catherine de Medici style.”
Standing at an altar covered with tropical flowers, the couple “pledged a life together to be filled with the sunshine of their happiness.”
Valentine Hall was not mentioned in any accounts of the ceremony, and no one to commented on his daughter’s posture.
After the church service, the bride’s mother hosted a reception for family and close friends at her Manhattan residence.
The following day, the newlyweds headed south. Stopping in Philadelphia, Elliott wrote to Anna’s mother. “Dear Lady,” he said, “do not fear about trusting your daughter to me. It shall be my great object all my life to comfort and care for her.” Prior to the ceremony, the widowed Mrs. Hall had pleaded with the bride and groom “to enter their union with their hearts turned to God.” They assured her they would.
FOLLOWING THE HONEYMOON, ELLIOTT WENT to work for Anna’s family, which managed what was perhaps New York’s leading real estate firm at the time. He had never had any experience in real estate, and was certainly not qualified for a top position in the field, but such was the property boom in the early 1880s that the company almost ran itself, something of a perpetual motion machine. All Elliott had to do was go along for the ride and observe carefully. He did not need the money, of course, but accepted the job because its purpose, at least as far as the Ludlows were concerned, was to help embed him among New York’s most powerful men of commerce. Elliott was appreciative. He persuaded himself that there was nothing wrong with working. A lot of Swells worked, and even J. P. Morgan had a job, didn’t he?
As for Anna, she became one of New York’s youngest society matrons, the position preordained for her and one that she thought, most of the time, would suit her to perfection.
The newlyweds moved into a brownstone in the Thirties, which was uptown at the time. They entertained as much as they could, but there were some people they could not invite, some who would consider a request for their company from the Roosevelts a presumption. “Their income,” it was noted, “although comfortable, did not permit them to receive on the scale of such friends as the Cornelius Vanderbilts. Nevertheless, they were prominent members of New York society and were invited to dinners, dances, or theater parties nearly every night.” The dinners were sumptuous, the dances often lasted into the early hours of the morning, and the theater parties were almost always followed by indulgence in the kind of conviviality that flows from bottle to glass to brain.
YES, ELLIOTT AND ANNA WERE leading the life they had expected to live, the one they had already known. Yet after their marriage, it all became too much for the groom. He could no longer meet his social responsibilities, did not want to meet them. Nor was he able to meet his responsibilities, limited though they were, at work. He might have moved in exalted circles, but he was beginning to wonder whether he was living the life he had expected to live, or if he had been forced into the life he was doomed to live. The question haunted him. After a time, and a remarkably short one postnuptially, he could bear it no longer. He decided to leave not only society and his vocation behind but, for the time being, his country as well.
In the spring of 1887, Elliott, nervous, moody, and worn out from a ceaseless round of games and dissipation, quit the Ludlow firm and sailed to Europe with Anna and her sister, Tissie. Anna had pleaded for the trip, believing that time away from Elliott’s Long Island cronies would make him healthy enough to resume his rightful place as head of a household in one of New York’s most respectable families. . . . Elliott’s moods switched on and off between depression, delight, self-disgust, and enthusiasm.
They continued switching when he returned.
ELLIOTT FOUND ANOTHER JOB, ESCAPING from real estate and the Ludlows and becoming a banker and investment counselor for his uncle, James King Gracie. Once again, a position about which he knew little or less, and for which he cared little or less. And, once again, a position whose purpose had more to do with gaining status than achieving vocational goals. More and more, Elliott spent his spare moments at Meadow Brook, riding to the hounds as well as playing polo. But, as had been the case during their courtship, Anna was beginning to feel bored and abandoned, with physical distress the inevitable result. She was reluctant to discuss the matter with anyone in her family except the man who was causing it; with him, she could not have been more blunt. “My dear Elliott,” she wrote during one of his absences, “I have just come in from playing tennis and my hand is shaking so that I can hardly form a letter. Do you know that I think your influence on me must be a very weak living one. I used to be able to play tennis all day, & now before I am through with one set I am perfectly exhausted. All I seem to be capable of is sitting still.” In another message she complained to him that “I am really not the same strong girl I used to be. . . . All I can do is sleep & yet I feel I must not give in to it too much. . . . It comes to me more & more every day how much of my liberty I have given up to you. . . .”
She would continue to write emotionally wrenching letters for the next year or two, a period when “Elliott partied frantically, with distressing consequences,” one of which was that, occasionally, he didn’t come home at night.
Poor old Nell. I was so awfully sorry for you last night. . . .
Please remember your promise not to touch any champagne tonight. It is poison truly & how I dread seeing you suffer.
I am still hoping you may change your mind & come home this afternoon. Do take care of your dear, dear self.
Ever most lovingly
Anna.
PS Ask any one you like for Thanksgiving night. . . . Do come back in less pain.
Although Anna’s complaints were justified, the content of the initial letter above, about the exhaustion of playing tennis, was almost certainly exacerbated by her first pregnancy, which she found difficult and enervating, so much so that there were times when she wished she had not subjected herself to it in the first place. Anna knew that her brother-in-law Theodore’s first wife had died as a result of giving birth; she began to fear that a similar outcome was waiting for her.
And when her due date arrived, and, right on schedule, labor began, the physician attending her found himself sharing the fear. Anna struggled more than either of them had ever anticipated. But she survived, although not in the best condition, and gave birth to a baby girl on October 11, 1884. The parents had been hoping for a boy, a “precious boy,” and although Anna’s next two children would be male—Elliott Jr. in 1889, and Hall, two years later—her first issue was Anna Eleanor, who would never be known by her first name.
As for Elliott, he surprised everyone in the family by being thrilled, forgetting his desire for a boy the moment he looked at his baby. She was “a miracle from heaven,” he thought. He was enchanted from the moment he saw her, stroking her tenderly, and soon gave her the nickname that had been his own in childhood. To her father, Eleanor became, in all sweetness, “Little Nell.”
Her mother’s response could not have been more different.
ALMOST UNCONSCIOUS FROM HER EXERTIONS, Anna took her first look at the infant and, to say the least, was not impressed. Was that the best she could do? A woman like her? With a man as handsome as Elliott? She did not understand.
For one thing, Anna thought Eleanor’s nose was too long, and blamed it on her husband’s seed, despite the fact that Elliott was not long-nosed himself. Neither, in truth, was Eleanor. Anna also thought her infant was “a more wrinkled and less attractive baby than the average,” and that would in time suggest a nickname for her. As Eleanor later wrote, “I am told that I was to come down at tea time to the library and stood bashfully at the door till my mother saw me and called, ‘Come in, Granny.’”
Granny. The first of her life’s many insults. The child was barely two years old at the time, but to Anna she brought to mind an old woman, an image that had begun to form on the day of her birth.
“She is such a funny child,” her mother told friends as Eleanor moved toward her third birthday, “so old-fashioned.” Her friends seemed to agree.
And so “Granny” she remained for much of her early childhood, at least to a small circle of Anna’s intimates. Remembering the sobriquet as an adult, Eleanor said that whenever she heard it, she “wanted to sink through the floor in shame, and I felt I was apart from [my brothers].” Sometimes she would look into the library with her finger in her mouth and watch her mother play with the two younger boys, so obviously her favorites. Too timid to enter without permission, Eleanor would wait until she heard the familiar “Come in, Granny,” which Anna would invariably speak “with a look of kind indifference.” Then she would sit with her mother.
In time, psychologists would believe that a child who puts a finger in her mouth is expressing a hunger for love, or at the very least attention. That discovery had not been made yet, but would be a fitting one for the young, precious, and lonely little girl.
“From the beginning,” many people believed, “[Anna] made Eleanor feel homely and unloved, always outside the closed circle that embraced her two younger brothers.”
Sometimes Anna would read to Eleanor; at other times, as she grew older, Eleanor would do the reading, perhaps some of the poetry she had begun to write. Her brothers listened, too, although not understanding. After a few minutes, Anna might interrupt to put the boys to sleep. Sometimes she would return. Sometimes Eleanor would wait futilely, as her mother stayed with the boys, or remembered something else she had to do.
In the opinion of biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, it was Anna’s growing doubts about Elliott that were the main reason for her lack of feeling toward her daughter. “Always correct and generally aloof,” Cook wrote, “Anna Hall Roosevelt was not a woman of spontaneous emotion. The problems in her marriage caused her to become more walled off from her feelings, as she struggled to ignore as much as she could, hoping to notice less, to care less, to numb herself from hurt. Since to love a child is to open oneself to the most profound feelings, little Eleanor could only have seemed a threat to Anna’s quest for composure. From the first she was the recipient of her mother’s coldest attentions.”
WHETHER ELEANOR EVER FORGAVE HER mother for her behavior, of which “Granny” was the hurtful summary, we do not know. But in one of her volumes of memoirs, she would explain her mother’s cruel appellation as if she were writing about someone else. She even seemed to excuse Anna, “for I was a solemn child, without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth.”
But Eleanor was not completely lacking in joy. One of her favorite sources was sweets, although she had been warned about eating too many by the family doctor.
I loved candy and sugar, so when we had dinner parties and there were sweets to go on the table, I stole into the pantry, and if I could find a paper bag with any of the sweets, I not only ate them but once or twice, fearing I would not have a chance to eat them on the spot, I took the whole bag and decided the best hiding place was down the front of my dress.
I remember sitting on the lap of my brother’s nurse, who was very strict with me, and when she felt something crackle she demanded to know what it was. I evaded the question, and, of course, was discovered at once. She scolded me, and then I was taken in to my mother, who scolded me again and sent me to bed in disgrace.
Disgrace. Forty years later, the word was still with her. “I was always disgracing my mother,” Eleanor recalled. Eating sweets was the least of it.
ALSO FORTY YEARS LATER, ALTHOUGH she had no more skill at writing fiction than did her father, Eleanor was asked to write a short story for a magazine. The challenge appealed to her. She did not need much time to think of a plot.
The story’s heroine, a woman named Sally, is thinking back over memories from childhood, memories that define her in the present.
Her forty-fifth birthday. . . . As she looked [into the fire] pictures formed in the dancing flames, first, there was a blue-eyed, rather ugly little girl standing in the door of a cozy library looking in at a very beautiful woman holding, oh so lovingly, in her lap a little fair-haired boy. Through Sally’s heart passed the old sensation, the curious dread of the cold glance which would precede the kindly and indifferent “Come in[,] Sally, and bring your book.”
Another magazine asked Eleanor to select the “Seven People who Shaped My Life.”
The first were my mother and father. I suppose it is natural for any person to feel that the most vivid personalities in early youth were those of his parents. That was certainly true in my case.
My mother always remained somewhat awe-inspiring. She was the most dignified and beautiful person. But she had such high standards of morals that it encouraged me to wrong-doing; I felt it was utterly impossible for me ever to live up to her!
My father, on the other hand, was always a very close and warm personality. I think I knew that his standards were nowhere near as difficult to achieve and that he would look upon my shortcomings with a much more forgiving eye. He provided me with some badly needed reassurance, for in my earliest days I knew that I could never hope to achieve my mother’s beauty and I fell short in so many ways of what was expected of me.
I needed my father’s warmth and devotion more perhaps than the average child, who would have taken love for granted and not worried about it.
BUT DIFFERENT ATTITUDES TOWARD THEIR daughter were not the only points of contention in the Roosevelt marriage. In fact, by the time Eleanor was born, her parents’ wedded state was already beginning to fray. As she would write in later years, “I doubt that the background of their respective lives could have been more different. His family was not so much concerned with Society (spelled with a big S) as with people, and these people included the newsboys from the streets of New York and the cripples whom Dr. Schaefer, one of the most noted early orthopedic surgeons, was trying to cure.” For the most part, these were not people of whom Anna was even aware, much less those to whom she would have given her time or attention.
Surprisingly early in the marriage, Anna considered ending it, divorcing Elliott. But it would have been such a drastic step for a member of her class. She would, at best, be whispered about behind her back; at worst, she would be shunned by the very society that mattered so much to her. She felt herself trapped, and for the time being could think of no other course than to immerse herself all the more in the world of the Swells, for which
she organized countless charity balls. She was the founder and creative director of an “Amateur Comedy Club” . . . She liked activity, and she enjoyed engaging company. But she was embattled. More and more, she hid her rage within the confines of headaches and ennui. She became impatient and distraught. Above all, Anna was irritated by her solemn daughter, Elliott’s “Little Nell,” who looked about her with sorrowful eyes reflecting fully the feelings her mother could not express.
The headaches that hid her rage were almost certainly migraines, and there were days when, like her mother before her, she could not get out of bed. Sometimes she remained under the covers for several days in a row.
Migraines had never plagued Anna before, and they produced a heartfelt tenderness in her daughter. “I know now that life must have been hard and bitter and a very great strain on her,” Eleanor wrote many years later. “I would often sit at the head of the bed and stroke her head. . . . As with all children, the feeling I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.”
It is, perhaps, surprising that Anna would allow Eleanor’s ministrations. Even more surprising is that, after her mother fell asleep, Eleanor would ease her way down to the foot of the bed and curl up, joining Anna in slumber, her repose shaped like that of a faithful puppy.
GIVING BIRTH, HOWEVER UNENTHUSIASTICALLY SHE might have felt about it, was probably the most motherly act Anna ever performed. Other than that, she was a woman of “cold virtue, severity, and disapproval, while [Elliott] embodied everything that was warm and joyous in [Eleanor’s] childhood.”
Although Elliott did not read to her as often as Anna, he did introduce her to The Old Curiosity Shop, whence their nicknames had derived. In the first chapter of the Dickens classic, a deeply loving relationship is revealed between Nell and her grandfather, who, on one occasion, is advised by the first-person narrator to take more care of the girl. The grandfather was incensed.
“More care!” said the old man in a shrill voice, “more care of Nelly! Why who ever loved a child as I love Nell?” . . .
“I don’t think you consider—” I began.
“I don’t consider!” cried the old man interrupting me, “I don’t consider her! Ah how little you know of the truth! Little Nelly, little Nelly!”
In Eleanor’s case, of course, it would have been her father, not her grandfather, who was indignant. But in both cases, the feeling was the same. No one ever loved a child as much as the two men, one fictional, the other real, loved their little girls.