DESPITE ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S PRIVILEGED AND DIStinguished heritage, her childhood was a time of anguish and tragedy. If she was “born into a secure golden world,” it was also in the end a world shattered by disappointment, alcoholism, and betrayal.
Anna Hall Roosevelt was twenty when she gave birth to Eleanor, a year after she and Elliott married. Uneducated and self-indulgent, determined to cast off the limitations of her own dour childhood, and the responsibilities she had shouldered after her father’s early death, she wanted little more than to enjoy society’s youthful rituals—the round of dances and dinners, tennis, and the hunt—available as one traveled with the seasons from New York to Long Island to Newport. Anna was entirely unprepared for life’s sharp corners. And she knew little, if anything, about meeting the needs and demands of her dashing and troubled husband.
Long-suffering, apparently helpless, occasionally desperate, Anna Hall protected and excused her husband for as long as she could. She became bitter in the process and had very little energy for anyone else. Overwrought and frequently exhausted, she continued, in vain, to seek release and comfort in society’s extravagances. Unable to find any real comfort anywhere, and under ever-increasing pressures from her desperate family situation, Anna forged a hard, untouchable armor that warned those around her to keep their distance. Once forged, that armor seemed to her firstborn daughter created expressly for her.
As completely as she felt scolded and scorned by her mother, Eleanor felt understood and loved by her father. He encouraged his little daughter to excel, to be courageous and bold. He promoted her interests and her education. He wanted her to be self-reliant and self-fulfilled. Eleanor adored her father, but she never knew when he would abandon her, emotionally or literally. At least once, when she was six or eight, she was left standing under the canopy of his club when he had flown in for a drink and forgotten his “little Nell.” There she stood waiting, holding several of his dogs on their leashes outside the Knickerbocker Club for over six hours. Finally, she saw her father, unconscious, carried out. Yet she kept waiting until a kind doorman escorted her home.
Like most children of alcoholics, Eleanor felt that she could never do enough to protect her parent, to care for him, to ward off danger, to change or try to control the situation. But she never knew when his eruptions of rage, self-pity, or despair might occur. With him, the world was always on the verge of spinning out of control, leaving her insecure and powerless. Over the years, in a variety of ways, ER re-created her father in her imagination. She brooded over his letters, romanticized his flamboyant life, and continually enhanced and intensified memories of what were only fleeting moments. The father she loved so absolutely and unconditionally was in part her own creation.
Exactly when Elliott lost his lifelong race against the effects of alcohol is unclear, but the problem began sometime during his adolescent years on the Western frontier. Almost two years after their father’s death, Elliott and Theodore embarked on a jolly summer’s hunting spree through the “Wild West” of Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. Although they never reached the “real west,” beyond the Minnesota-Dakota border, they had a splendid jaunt, took incomparable risks, and almost drowned when their overloaded rowboat capsized. They hunted and met exciting frontier folk, all of whom—women and men—were attracted by Elliott’s easy manner.
Their trip was marked by regular visits to Chicago, to rest and restock. There Theodore wrote a letter to Corinne that was to haunt the family’s future:
We have come back here after a weeks hunting in Iowa. Elliott revels in the change to civilization—and epicurean pleasures. As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite…. Elliott says these remarks are incorrect and malevolent; but I say they pay him off for his last letter about my eating manners.
Actually, it was then still TR’s health that concerned his family. Given over to dramatic bouts of asthma and “cholera morbus,” he never knew when an attack would keep him up all night gasping for air, or doubled over with cramps and discomfort—“very embarrassing for a lover,” he once confided to Corinne after a trip with his future wife, Alice Lee. What nobody knew was that TR had been told by a college physician during a routine examination the previous March that he had serious heart trouble and should spend his life quietly, without physical exertion of any kind. He kept this consultation secret, and vowed to live his life as vigorously as humanly possible.
TR and Alice Lee were married on his twenty-second birthday, 27 October 1880. Elliott postponed a long-planned trip to India to stand by his brother—TR had told him that, if he would not be his best man, he would have no other. The ceremony at the Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the reception at the Lee home were full of flowers and sunshine, resplendent with joy. Soon after, in November, while his newly married brother remained at 57th Street with his “little pink wife” and his family, all of whom adored Alice Lee, Elliott Roosevelt embarked on a hunting trip that took him around the world. Bored, without ambition or plans, he had decided to spend part of his inheritance on a year of total self-indulgence in order to find himself. He hunted elephants and tigers and had an incomparable adventure.
From the beginning, he was treated like royalty by countless friends who dedicated themselves to his care. En route to England, he wrote his “Dear Little Mother: Everybody on board has been very kind and good to me, Mr. and Mrs. James Roosevelt, of Hyde Park (who pass for my aunt and uncle) particularly so. While I am in London their rooms are to be home.”
Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were inclined to favor Elliott. They had, after all, been introduced to each other the previous April by his mother and his sister Bamie, who was Sara’s dearest friend. James, then recently widowed and over fifty, had fallen in love with and proposed marriage to Bamie, who was young enough to be his daughter. But Bamie did not reciprocate his feelings. Mittie cleverly invited him to dinner with Bamie’s friend Sara Delano, who was tall, beautiful, and imperious and, at twenty-six, resolved to remain a “spinster.” At Mittie’s, Squire James “never took his eyes off” Sara, and within the month he invited Mittie, Bamie, and Sara to his home at Springwood, in Hyde Park on the Hudson. Like Theodore and Alice Lee, Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were married in October 1880, and they spent their honeymoon aboard the Germanic, where they grew even closer to Elliott, whom they subsequently asked to be godfather to their son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Elliott began his journey to India via England and Italy, learning Hindustani en route.
When Elliott finally arrived in India, he was surrounded by friends, many of them his chums from New York, and all of them hard-drinking, fast-living, dedicated sportsmen accustomed to luxury and service. Elliott was twenty and impressionable. It “was all too Arabian night-like.” He was fascinated by the endless colonial privileges of the ruling classes, stunned by the trappings of imperial splendor, and appalled by the poverty but not particularly adverse to the servility of the impoverished classes. In fact, he rather swooned over the manners of “the quiet service—no sound of boots for the boys go without them, and the clothes make no noise. They are certainly wonderful servants….” At a dinner for six in his honor, “each man has his own servant to wait on him and a boy to keep him cool….” Still, he made a point of endearing himself to his host’s servants, since he believed “that true judgment comes from below….” And he was genuinely disturbed by their political and social situation. “The more I see of India the much more ready I am to lift up my hand and hold my breath for the future development of the world.”
One of the first Americans to travel extensively throughout India and make an effort to understand its complexities, Elliott was also an enthusiastic shopper. He sent home as many of the totems of his travels and hunting expeditions as he could: hides and skins, rugs and tapestries, tiger teeth, carved boxes, and vast quantities of gold and silver. Clearly it was from her father that Eleanor derived her enthusiasm for buying and giving presents. Like him, ER would buy with precise thoughtfulness presents in great number for all of her friends and an amazing number of relatives. As Elliott wrote his mother, “I think to buy pretty things is one of the greatest pleasures in the world don’t you?”
Elliott decided to return home to attend his sister Corinne’s marriage to his friend and partner, Douglas Robinson. Although his time in India was thrilling, he had a profound fear of becoming isolated, unwanted, or neglected, forgotten even by his family. He earnestly courted approval, and when Corinne wrote that she both needed and wanted him to return for her wedding, he was overcome with sentiment: “I cried like your own dear little self and a perfect ‘Baby’ when you called me ‘Father Brother.’”
Elliott began his journey home via Ceylon and China. He was ready to return, since he had been in delicate health for months. Indian fever, a mysterious and recurring malady, had wrecked his sport through the summer of 1881, from May to August, and was to plague him for the rest of his life. But his letters remained stoic and jaunty. In Ceylon he “picked up an awfully jolly little European servant…. I’ve no doubt we make a very rummy couple traveling together but all the men say he is the best servant they ever saw….”
Within months of his return to New York, Elliott met and fell in love with Anna Rebecca Hall. In February 1883, Elliott wrote his thoughts on “My Love” in his diary. Rambling, romantic, repetitious, and maudlin, Elliott’s diary glorified women as God’s own pure invention of inspired and unselfish devotion to their male kin.
“When my worship for women began,” he wrote, “I cannot tell.” Perhaps it was when his “poor little Mother turned to me …called me her loving son and only comfort.” Perhaps it was when he realized that his “two sisters unselfishly and with thoughts often only for us boys” laid aside their own lives and dedicated themselves to “our interests, our lives.” Elliott’s reverence for the women of his family was complicated by his fear, disdain, distrust, and hatred for “the life and character of the generality of women that I have met.” Over time, in his travels, he had been hurt and disappointed by, and “learned” a “contempt” for, “thoughtless” women and “really bad women.”
Now, however, in Anna Hall he had at last found “a Sweet Hearted, a true, loving Earnest Woman who lives the life she professed. Womanly in all purity, holiness and beauty an angel in tolerance, in forgiveness and in faith—My Love Thank God our Father—And in her true promise to be my wife I find the peace and happiness which God has taken from me for so long.”
For Elliott, Anna Hall embodied perfection. He romanticized and mystified his fiancée—to the point of being torn by self-doubt. “She seems to me so pure and so high and ideal that in my roughness and unworthiness I do not see how I can make her happy…. How can any single love make up for the lavish admiration of the many.”
For her part, Anna Hall also had doubts about their impending marriage. She worried that his exaggerated visions of her perfection would inevitably be disappointed. She feared his sudden explosions of jealousy. She was concerned about his morose and mercurial moods, which caused him to disappear for days, behind the locked door of his room, writing, drawing, smoking. Was he drinking as well? She did not ask, and the possibility was not mentioned.
Anna Hall did not agree to be Elliott’s bride immediately. Though flattered by the vigorous pursuit of one of the most popular men about town, who had just returned from a rare round-the-world adventure, she feared his unpredictability. Eventually, however, like so many of the women of their circle, she found Elliott irresistible. Unlike Theodore, who hopped when he danced and howled when he laughed, Elliott was attractive, suave, and correct. Marriage to him promised a life of comfort, glamour and joy, a path beyond her responsibilities to her widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. But she was not unmindful of what even then seemed certain risks, the danger of unnamed but enormous challenges.
On 8 August, shortly after their engagement was announced Anna wrote to reassure Elliott, who was in a morose mood.
All my love and ambition are now centered in you…. I shall indeed always tell you everything and shall not be happy unless I feel that all your troubles, joys, sins and misfortunes are to be mine too. Please never keep anything from me for fear of giving me pain or say to yourself “there can be no possible use of my telling her.” Believe me, I am quite strong enough to face, with you, the storms of this life and I shall always be so happy when I know that you have told and will always tell me every thought, and I can perhaps sometimes be of use to you….
I think for the future as far as I am concerned, you will have to bury [your] fierce doubts….
She was nineteen; he was twenty-three. Yet the heavy, solemn tones of their correspondence reveal a specific absence of the kind of carefree, youthful gaiety they both craved.
After their engagement, Elliott’s favorite aunts—Ella Bulloch (Irvine’s wife) and Annie Gracie—wrote letters of congratulations in tones of such overwhelming relief that one pauses to wonder about his actual condition even in July 1883. Aunt Ella, for example, wrote: “This happiness of yours seems the direct answer to so many prayers! & I feel as if God must through it have brought you so near to him! Out of darkness into light, & joy & perfect faith again—.”
Aunt Gracie (Annie Bulloch married New York banker and realtor James King Gracie) had noted in her journal that she had gone to church when Elliott returned from India in March 1882, to pray to God “to cure him.” “Ellie is very ill.” Ecstatic about his engagement, she warned him: “You must be very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna—”
The New York Times on 2 December 1883 featured the “Roosevelt-Hall Wedding” on page 3, calling it “One of the most brilliant weddings of the season.” Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Livingston Ludlow Hall represented the pinnacle, the very essence, of New York’s younger society. They were the people Edith Wharton described in The Age of Innocence, that “little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.” Although Elliott had been best man and ringbearer when TR married Alice Lee, Theodore was neither best man nor even usher at Elliott’s wedding. He was merely listed as one of the guests, along with scores of Astors, Gracies, Haddens, Halls, Livingstons, Ludlows, Swans, Vanderbilts, Hoyts, Tuckermans, Leavitts, Sloans, Bigelows, and Roosevelts.
This wedding was to be the last time the Roosevelts ever again gathered for a joyous occasion. Only two months later, on 14 February 1884, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt and Alice Lee died within hours of each other, quite suddenly, Mittie of typhoid fever, Alice Lee of Bright’s disease, or nephritis, which had gone unnoticed until the birth of her daughter, Alice, on 12 February.
Once again, as at the death of his father, Elliott was the son at home and in attendance, and once again, Theodore, unaware that there was any trouble, was absent. Then a New York State assemblyman, TR had remained in Albany on pressing business after receiving a first telegram that informed him he was the proud father of a healthy and beautiful baby girl. Only hours later, Elliott dispatched a second quite different telegram to his brother, and to Corinne and Douglas Robinson, who had taken a trip to Baltimore. When the Robinsons arrived in New York, Elliott greeted them at the door with a dreadful expression that distorted his face, and a message of horror: “There is a curse on this house! Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”
Surrounded by her four children, all summoned by the sudden transformation of what had appeared to be an ordinary cold, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt died at three in the morning. Alice, just a floor away in the 57th Street house that had so recently seemed a home of increasing bounty and good fortune, died eleven hours later, at two in the afternoon. Mittie was forty-eight, Alice twenty-two. There was a double funeral service, and they were buried together in the family plot at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The family was stunned by the shock, devastated by their losses.
Everything was changed. Elliott especially had considered his “little Motherling” his own particular charge. She had been his anchor. The struggle he had been waging against the effects of the fever he had contracted in India, and against his recurring bouts of depression, now intensified as never before.
He was for a time inconsolable, and drank with abandon. Anna, in her first month of pregnancy when the deaths occurred, was given over to her own despondency and fear. The months that followed were tense, unrelieved by any healing intimacy.
Then, on Saturday, 11 October 1884, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born, and the first hint of gladness returned to the troubled family. By all accounts, including her own, ER was greeted by her father with unalloyed joy. To him, she wrote, “I was a miracle from heaven.” But to her mother she seemed, practically from infancy, wanting and unlovely.
Always correct and generally aloof, Anna Hall Roosevelt was not a woman of spontaneous emotion. The problems in her marriage caused her to become even more walled off from her feelings, as she struggled to ignore as much as she could and hoped always to notice less, to care less, to feel less 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.
By contrast, Elliott Roosevelt doted upon his daughter, while his wife increasingly received the scrappier end of his attentions. He spent hours and days, entire weeks, cavorting with his friends. Even when working in New York on real-estate ventures with his brother-in-law and partner, Douglas Robinson, or in finance with his Uncle James King Gracie, he spent hours at such favorite watering holes as the Knickerbocker Club. Then there were weekends, and frequent holidays, when all care was suspended for the pleasures of the hunt. Elliott rode to the hounds at Hempstead and played polo at Meadowbrook. Anna was not idle, but she was increasingly bored, lonely, discontent. During the spring and summer, she spent most of her time at her mother’s house in Tivoli, while Elliott remained in New York and at Meadowbrook. She had no appetite; she had frequent and monumental headaches; she took to her bed for days at a time. She wrote her husband that he had ruined even her ability to sustain a tennis game: “My dear Elliott 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.”
Anna’s letters were full of her distress: “Though I have no news dearest Elliott, yet I sit down to write you as usual…. 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….”
While Anna languished at Tivoli, with her mother, five younger siblings, infant daughter, and visitors who neither attracted nor interested her, Elliott partied frantically, with distressing consequences. Anna said only that she hoped Elliott might change his ways, and suffer less.
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.
Anna too enjoyed parties, and she organized countless charity balls. She was the founder and creative director of an “Amateur Comedy Club,” in which she, her brother Valentine Hall, and their friends Elsie de Wolfe and “the Misses Lawrence and other well-known amateurs made histrionic successes.” 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.
For years Anna went about resolutely covering up the situation with a layer of threadbare gaiety. She missed Elliott awfully when he was away, even though she could not stand his progressively wanton condition when they were together. They made and broke promises to each other on a regular basis. “Have you had any doubts since you left? Try to remember that I do love you and will always be true and loyal. Goodbye again darling Boy. Goodbye from your loved Baby Wife…”
She worried about his health; she wondered about his activities. He rarely returned when he promised to do so. There were growing hints of scandal. She spent more and more time alone. The situation was untenable. Finally, during the spring of 1887, they decided that a change of climate, scene, and society might restore Elliott’s health and their sagging marriage. Accompanied by two-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor, Eleanor’s nurse, and Anna’s sister Tissie (Elizabeth Hall), they boarded the Britannic on their way to Europe for an extended tour of the Continent.
The first day out, in the fog, the Celtic, an incoming steamer, rammed their ship. Suddenly they were surrounded by screams of agony and hideous sights of carnage. One child lost an arm, another child was beheaded. Many passengers were killed, hundreds injured. Elliott helped his wife, sister-in-law, and the baby nurse into a lifeboat, and then called for little Eleanor, clinging frantically to a crewman, to be dropped into his waiting arms. But Eleanor would not let go. She screamed and cried. The din all about her was terrifying. Her abiding memory was her profound fear of being dropped from the deck into her father’s arms. The crewman finally freed her fingers, and Eleanor always remembered that fall, the feel of plummeting from the deck high above into the pitching lifeboat below, surrounded by “cries of terror” and shouts for help.
While newspaper accounts verify Eleanor’s recollections of the fearsome din, the sight of blood and dismembered limbs, Anna Hall wrote Bamie a strangely tranquil letter of the turmoil: “The strain for a few minutes when we all thought we were sinking was fearful though there were no screams and no milling about. Everyone was perfectly quiet.”
Eleanor’s ship-board trauma was compounded when her parents embarked again for England, leaving her with the Gracies at Oyster Bay. Anna explained that Eleanor simply refused to join them, she was so afraid of the ocean. Anna and Elliott evidently seized the excuse to leave their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter at home. Without the immediate opportunity to face her terror again, the accident left Eleanor with a fear of heights and water that was connected to a lifelong sense of abandonment. If she had not cried, if she had not struggled, if she had not been afraid, if she had only done more and been better, she would be with her parents. This theme would be repeated again and again in her young life.
But her parents were off on a different mission, more than a holiday, and it was easier for them to have Eleanor safe in the caring company of “gentle and patient Aunt Annie Gracie, my dearly loved great-aunt.” Aunt Gracie wrote Corinne that “our sweet little Eleanor” was “so little and gentle & had made such a narrow escape out of the great ocean that it made her seem doubly helpless & pathetic to us.” She asked several times where “her ‘dear Mamma was, & where her Papa was, & where is Aunt Tissie?’” When she was told that they had gone to Europe, she asked, “‘where is baby’s home now?’ I said ‘baby’s home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle & Aunt Gracie,’ which seemed to entirely satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came near the Bay …she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed way ‘Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat.’”
Anna wrote from Paris that her first separation from her daughter was painful. “I do so long for her, but know it was wiser to leave her.” And Elliott, she wrote, seemed vastly improved. Elliott indeed sounded ebullient. On 19 June, he wrote, “Dearest old Bye: If you had only been with us our joy would have been complete.”
The Hall sisters, as always, were greatly admired. Anna’s splendid features and luminous blue eyes inspired painters and poets. On one occasion, poet Robert Browning asked merely to gaze upon her as she had her portrait painted. “Tissie was too jolly for anything, and Anna they fell down and worshipped. She certainly never has looked so perfectly lovely or seemed so strong and well.” Elliott sounded proud and happy to report that the “two girls are having that kind of a dissipated time buying dresses, hats and the Lord know what that I don’t know what will become of mine or the Hall mother’s credit if I don’t get them into less tempting quarters soon….”
On 8 July, Elliott wrote again to Bye: “We have had a glorious time. In England the girls took like wild fire and they really had a great success.” He also boasted that he had “persuaded Anna to give up the Italian Lakes and arranged a very good September in Scotland. It is selfish of me I know but I think she will enjoy it too really when once there…. Anna has been having a headache for six hours….”
Evidently Elliott never connected his wife’s headache with his cavalier insistence that they go to Scotland rather than the Italian lakes. Anna had acquiesced with the mildest of protests, and then took to her bed in agony. However pleasant their European sojourn may have been, nothing really changed. When they returned, full of promises and plans, Elliott rejoined Uncle Gracie’s banking firm, and they purchased ten acres of rolling hills, virgin woodlands, and verdant meadows for a home in Hempstead, which would allow him to be closer to the Meadow Brook Club at Westbury. While their large and impressive house was being built, they rented a place nearby in order to supervise the details.
BY THE SPRING OF 1888 THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS APPALLED by Elliott’s dedication to the sporting life. Increasingly he blamed Anna, whom he now regarded as “utterly frivolous” and responsible for Elliott’s habits. TR wrote Bye: “I do hate his Hempstead life. I don’t know whether he could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.”
However much TR criticized Elliott, he shared his brother’s competitive mania. He too rode to the hounds with total disregard for life and limb. He too finished the hunt, generally in the lead, no matter what the cost. Once, he remounted his horse even after it had smashed into a wall, leaving him with an arm broken in several places and a bloodied face in which shards of his eyeglasses were embedded. After several more jumps, the bones of his arm slipped down, causing it to resemble “a length of liverwurst.” TR boasted that he looked “like the walls of a slaughterhouse.” Still he came in just behind the huntsman. As he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge: “I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit…. I’m always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.”
The hunt took place on his birthday weekend in 1886, on what would have been the sixth anniversary of his marriage to Alice Lee. Since her death, their little daughter, Alice, had been raised by her Aunt Bye; that evening was the first time in months that the two-and-a-half-year-old Alice Roosevelt had seen her father, and the vision served for years as the metaphor of their relationship. She had awaited his return at the stable with Auntie Bye. As soon as he saw his daughter, his dashing hunting-jacket torn to shreds, his head and face bleeding profusely, his arm dangling limply at his side, he jumped off his horse and ran toward her. But little Alice ran in horror. When TR caught her and held her, his bloody face grinning down into her frightened eyes, “I started screaming at this apparition and he started shaking me to shut me up, which only made me scream more. So he shook more.” According to Alice, it went on that way throughout much of her life.
Later that same night, his face blistered and bruised and his arm in splints, TR presided over the Hunt Ball. Edith Carow—a childhood friend whom he was soon to marry—was his guest of honor.
On 6 November 1886, TR and Bye sailed for England for his wedding to Edith. Aboard ship TR met Cecil Spring-Rice, an instant and profound friendship developed, and TR persuaded the dapper British diplomat, who bore an amazing resemblance to Elliott, to stand as his best man on 2 December.
Whatever this substitution may reveal about TR’s and Elliott’s relationship, they had become almost deadly rivals. On 29 July 1888, Elliott competed with his brother in a polo match between Oyster Bay and Meadow Brook. According to Corinne, the game was uneventful until “Theodore rushed after Elliott at terrific speed as he took the ball downfield. There was a thump of horseflesh as brother tried to ride brother out. Suddenly—no one saw how—Theodore was thrown, and knocked unconscious.” TR “neither moved nor stirred, and seemed like a dead man” for several minutes. He was dazed for hours, and did not fully recover for several days. His wife, Edith Carow Roosevelt, who witnessed the game without noticeable upset, had a miscarriage a week later.
The frantic pace of the summer of 1888 continued unabated as did the separations between Elliott and Anna. Elliott spent two weeks with Arch Rogers, racing on Rogers’s boat, the Bedouin. Anna was in Newport with the Fred Vanderbilts, and then at the E. D. Morgans’, where, Elliott wrote, “I am to join her tonight. I am staying at Meadow Brook Club during the week and spent one night with Aunt Annie, to see little Eleanor….”
“Newport has been very gay Anna tells me. A lot of private dances …any number of dinners too. Meadow Brook won all the polo games and cups….”
While Elliott was racing on the Bedouin, Anna wrote from Oyster Bay, where she was visiting TR and Edith:
My dearest old Nellie Boy I am waiting anxiously to see the papers to see if you reached New London safely. We are having lovely weather and are most comfortably settled. I am very lazy and don’t come down until nine o’clock and Baby has a splendid time. Yesterday she went to Lewis West’s party and this morning is to play on the beach with Alice and then she has lessons with Aunt Annie…. Uncle Jimmie [Gracie] wants me to tackle Mrs. James [Sara Delano Roosevelt] for a large subscription for the Orthopedic [the hospital founded by her father-in-law]. I know I shall fail but of course will try. Write when you can. I hope you are enjoying it and find the party sufficiently congenial.
Anna ended her carefree note with an expression of her abiding concern about his health: She wanted Elliott to speak to his friend and physician. “Try and persuade Dr. Lusk to come to town by Sept. 1st. Tell him how worried I am….”
However distressed were the summer and autumn of 1888, in October Eleanor had a delightful birthday. She loved her presents and her party, and Elliott wrote Bye that his cunning little daughter went to bed announcing that she “loved everybody and everybody loved her.”
After the Meadow Brook mishap, Elliott had a more serious accident during a charity circus at Larry Waterbury’s Westchester estate. That autumn, according to his daughter’s later recollections, his “rather gay, sporting life together with his work was beginning to tell on [his] health, and a bad accident when riding in an amateur circus completely broke his nerves.” Elliott’s leg was broken and set once, then had to be rebroken and reset. In 1937, ER wrote that she remembered that day well, “for we were alone in his room when he told me about it. Little as I was, I sensed that this was a terrible ordeal, and when he went hobbling out on crutches to the waiting doctors, I was dissolved in tears and sobbed my heart out for hours. From this illness my father never quite recovered.”
The severe pain, relieved occasionally by morphine, laudanum, and ever-increasing quantities of alcohol, caused Elliott to suffer a nervous collapse.
Nonetheless, on 13 June 1889, Elliott wrote to Bye with unbridled optimism from the Knickerbocker Club. Their new home was almost completed: “Under Anna’s ready hand …it is rapidly growing not only livable but very cosey and comfortable…. Anna is wonderfully well, enjoys everything, even the moving, and looks the beautiful girl she is. Little Eleanor is as happy as the day is long, plays with her kitten, the puppy and the chickens all the time, and is very dirty as a general rule.” But there was a warning, indeed, an urgent plea: “I am the only ‘off’ member of the family and my foot is very bad yet…. Do come to us on your return, dear old girl, just for a little while if you can’t pay us a long visit and help Anna out. I am no use on my sticks and there is so much that your cool judgment and good taste would help her in….”
In the autumn of 1889, Elliott Roosevelt, Jr., was born, and ER was sent off to Anna’s sisters Pussie and Tissie in Tivoli. In their letters of congratulations on the birth of baby Elliott, they wrote of Eleanor’s happiness at the news of her little brother: “Totty [ER’s nickname] is flourishing.” Raised by a French governess, Totty was now given French lessons, which were “progressing, although I am afraid the pupil knows more than the teacher.” Eleanor was a golden brown, and played in the sun each day. Pussie wrote: “It is so gorgeous up here now, the trees are one mass of red and gold. I was so glad you were not in that hunt the other day, when Mrs. Mortimer was hurt. What a risk it is every time. But oh! What fun! How I wish I were a man….”
THE BIRTH OF HIS FIRST SON SEEMS TO HAVE PLUNGED Elliott deeper into depression. He worried about money, and feared that he was doomed to failure. He became suspicious of his wife, and wrote jealous notes suggesting that while he suffered at work in the city she was gay and carefree on Long Island. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1889, Anna patiently tried to comfort him in her letters: “Poor darling old Elliott …Please don’t worry darling. Start off firmly making up your mind that you will be happy. Say to yourself that you know I am true, & that you will trust people. It would make you feel so much happier if you truly could, & I tell you there is nothing to fear. Please believe me—And as to success, remember that you are God’s child…. I seldom worry when I tell Him everything, all my troubles.”
As the Christmas season neared and Elliott chose to remain in the city even on weekends, Anna felt increasingly abandoned: “Dearest Elliott, I was so depressed when the carriage came back this afternoon with Douglas in it & without you. I actually sobbed alone in my bed & am beginning again now as I write…. I am anxiously waiting for a letter from you tomorrow.” Anna begged him to give up drinking and drugs: “I shall never feel you are really your dear old self until you can give up all medicine and wine of every kind. I believe the latter has really led to your great difficulty in giving up morphine and laudanum. That is I believe it irritates and makes your ankle worse, as well as ruining your stomach. Do dearest throw your horrid cocktails away & don’t touch anything now you are off for your health you have no business and nothing to trouble you—I wonder if this last is asking too much.”
That year, Elliott decided to spend Christmas away from his family, in Bermuda. Left alone for weeks with the children, Anna hemorrhaged and took to her bed on Christmas Day. “I am so terribly lonely without you. I do hope you are really getting well. Not simply playing Polo & having a splendid gay old time. Perhaps your letter will tell me all. I was taken unwell Xmas morning, but got up & looked at all the presents with Eleanor. (It was very lonely) Then I kept quiet all day, but went to the News Boys dinner, where all the boys cheered you.”
Anna completed her letter the next day, after receiving a note from Elliott in which he acknowledged that he felt “a little homesick.” She was relieved to know he thought of them; it was their first Christmas apart. “Eleanor came wandering down when she heard the postman to know if there was a letter from you and what you said. I told her you would not be here for two weeks, & she seemed awfully disappointed but was quite satisfied when I told her you were getting well….”
After his return, Elliott’s behavior became so offensive that his sisters, Bye and Corinne, feared even to invite him to dinner parties. Meanwhile, Theodore was thriving. He ran a splendid though ultimately unsuccessful race for mayor of New York, which left him with high hopes for his future; and he worked on Benjamin Harrison’s campaign for president, for which he was rewarded with an appointment as a United States Civil Service commissioner. He and Edith were surprised by how very much they really enjoyed Washington society. TR wrote Bye that Edith particularly “likes going round and seeing all the people—queer, social, political and otherwise.”
At this point in his life, with his political star rising, TR wanted nothing to do with Elliott. On 24 January 1890, he wrote: “Darling Bye, It is a perfect nightmare about Elliott: I am distressed beyond measure at what you write. No wonder you dread having him to dinners.” The nightmare was only beginning. Elliott’s disease was consuming him: It challenged love, mocked adventure, destroyed hope.