WHEN ER WROTE WITH RELIEF THAT THE “STORM AND stress” of her emotional life were behind her, she could not have foreseen that she was about to embark on a series of intimate relationships that would involve passion, excitement, and occasional upheaval.
ER greeted the romantic passions of her mature years with a new freedom. Having worked so hard to be free, she refused to be fettered. ER did not want to possess another, or to be possessed. Her definition of love was very specific: simply to want the best for the one you love.
Earl Miller was the first romantic involvement of ER’s middle years. A state trooper, Corporal Miller had been assigned to the executive mansion during Al Smith’s administration. FDR was delighted to see Miller in Albany. They had first met in 1918, when FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, touring battle areas in England, France, and the North Sea, and Earl Miller was a chief petty officer assigned to guard the visiting dignitary. Although Miller was one of a “12-Man detail,” he became FDR’s “#1 escort.” One suspects that his robust and appealing charm had something to do with his privileged position, but Miller credited his special status to his having recently won the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Middleweight Boxing Championship.
Tall and handsome, with a warm and affectionate manner, Miller was primarily interested in athletics. A circus acrobat, an award-winning swimmer, horseman, and marksman, he had also been an alternate boxer on the U.S. Olympic team at Antwerp—as well as a member of the floor-and-horizontal-bar gymnastics team, until his professional-circus past disqualified him from actually performing, “after weeks and months of gym training for the event.” Before his political assignments, he taught judo and boxing at the New York State Police Academy.
In 1929, FDR assigned Earl Miller to the First Lady of the Empire State as her bodyguard. When ER refused to be driven in the state-appointed limousine, insisted on her right to drive her own car, and especially rejected the presence of a chauffeur (except during official ceremonies), FDR insisted on a bodyguard.
Earl Miller and Eleanor Roosevelt were in odd ways well-suited to each other. To begin with, they were both orphans. ER, orphaned at ten, had a ready sympathy for Earl, who had become homeless at twelve, then wandered about finding odd jobs—as a contortionist, stuntman, and circus acrobat. Generous, flirtatious, and sentimental, he had a great gift for friendship; but he was often unlucky in love. ER sensed his loneliness and encouraged him to tell her his story. They confided in each other and remained for over thirty years intimate and profound friends.
Many of ER’s other friends considered him showy, self-absorbed, just a touch too vain about his body, which he kept in perfect shape. But he charmed Eleanor Roosevelt. And he was charmed by her. With him she was relaxed, frequently carefree and frolicsome. With her he was unfailingly attentive, and chivalrous. She was forty-four and he was thirty-two, with a reputation among his barracks buddies as a womanizer generally in pursuit of very young women. They were surprised by his attentiveness to that “old crab,” but he called her “the Lady” and turned aside all teasing remarks with protestations of adoration.
They laughed together, journeyed for weekends through the countryside and along the shore. At night, in front of the fire, ER frequently read aloud—poetry, stories, novels. With friends, especially Miller’s show-business friends Mayris Chaney and Eddie Fox, they often sang around the piano. Earl Miller loved to play the piano and sing, much as her father had. ER particularly cherished those evenings.
In ER’s several volumes of autobiography, she referred substantially to Earl Miller only once. In This I Remember, which she wrote more as a memorial to FDR than as a personal memoir, she tells us virtually nothing about Earl Miller or his place in her heart. She tells us only of his kindness to children, the gift he made to her of riding lessons and her horse Dot, and the fact that, at Warm Springs over Thanksgiving, “Gus Gennerich and Earl Miller …used to play the piano for the children by the hour, to the great joy of them all.”
Earl’s ability to bring music and song back into her life meant a lot to ER. In 1943, when she moved into a new apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, her friend John Golden, the Broadway producer, offered to buy her a piano. But she refused. She would not be using the apartment sufficiently “to warrant such expense.” Besides: “I’d rather have Earl’s [piano] in the future for purely sentimental reasons.”
Physically, Earl Miller re-energized ER by reintroducing her to long-forgotten sports and activities that she had enjoyed before her marriage—before her husband had discouraged her participation in such things. Earl not only gave her a chestnut mare named Dot, which she rode daily at Hyde Park and later in Washington; he regularly coached her tennis game, and later built her a deck tennis court at Val-Kill for daily practice. He presented her with a growling but well-trained police dog for protection, and taught her to shoot a pistol so successfully that she actually came to enjoy target practice, especially in the country, on an open range, where she wore a holster and shot from the hip.
Then there was her obsession with diving. ER was determined to dive. It took her almost ten years to dive gracefully, with form and an observable spring off the board. But Earl Miller was there every step of the way. Her sons ridiculed her; others were uninterested, or worse; but Earl encouraged her. Every day. Every dive. The head, the arms, the hands, the legs, the toes. After countless belly-flops and much messy splashing, ER learned to dive. She was pleased. For some reason it had mattered, and Earl understood that.
Above all, Earl Miller protected and defended ER. He was an antidote to the petty insults, the ways in which she was taken for granted, the frequency with which her ideas were appropriated without attribution by Franklin. Earl Miller let everybody know that that was his Lady’s idea, his Lady’s policy. She had said it first, argued for it—and there it was. ER appreciated that. Even when her car went off the road because a curve came up too fast while she was talking about something really important, Earl said it wasn’t her fault: She was one of the best drivers in America, and, like all good drivers, she preferred to drive fast. ER appreciated that too. He made her feel comfortable, and she was secure in his friendship. She could always depend on it; she learned to trust him absolutely.
Earl Miller served her faithfully in her efforts to keep family agonies from the press or public. He knew what to do to hide or remove her brother, Hall, if his alcohol consumption during a dinner party or a public ceremony seemed to make him too garrulous or abusive. Miller was imaginative and assertive in the most difficult situations.
On 12 July 1930, ER wrote to her Aunt Maude Hall Gray about a dreadful confrontation at the family home in Tivoli with her alcoholic Uncle Vallie, several family members, and Vallie’s friends, including one particularly disreputable young man who was “working for Vallie and bringing in stuff to drink. Vallie was not drinking very hard but was in rather a weepy stage. I found there was a good deal against [the young man].” He had been arrested twice, once for the rape of a ten-year-old girl, and Earl Miller “decided that he could put up a bluff. We took Vallie off into his room and talked to him for three quarters of an hour. Corporal Miller took charge of [the young man] and saw him pack and depart…. He followed him out of the county and told him that if he returned to the county, he ran the risk of arrest. He admitted everything. We had no warrant for him if he had put up any fight. I think now that Vallie will straighten out…. I reminded him of the consequence three years after a rather more violent spree, and on the whole he took it quite meekly….”
Throughout the Albany years, ER was accompanied by Earl Miller on regular inspection tours of state hospitals, prisons, public projects. She wrote that, because FDR could not walk through an institution to see how it was actually administered, she agreed to do so. During her first tour, she read the daily menu, which seemed to her nutritionally adequate. But FDR asked if she had looked into the pots, and whether the food corresponded to the menu: “I learned to notice whether the beds were too close together, and whether they were folded up and put in closets or behind doors during the day, which would indicate that they filled the corridors at night; I learned to watch the patients’ attitude toward the staff,” to watch for signs of tension, confusion, or fear. ER became an insistent and diligent investigator. She also learned to appear unannounced, a trick Earl Miller suggested. And to return unexpectedly. Issues of food, medical care, overcrowded conditions, hostile and careless treatment of the ill and the elderly, of the orphaned and infirm mattered to ER and FDR, and to Earl Miller. When she arrived unannounced with Earl Miller in full dress uniform, they made a formidable team.
Earl Miller hated to see his Lady taken in, cheated, or bamboozled in any way. He thought she was too trusting. People could be a lot meaner than she was willing to acknowledge, and they were a lot more dishonest. During the summer of 1929, when the family was away, there were only three people living at the mansion, and the bills were enormous. Miller became suspicious, and went through each bill with each vendor—item by item. He went to the butcher and checked every purchase for three months: “They must have eaten a ton of filet mignons while we were not there. I don’t know whether they ate them or whether they were being charged and splitting. That made me check the gasoline pumps. When we left 1400 gallons. When we came back 300. I made out a detailed report, and it knocked the lady right out of her chair.” Earl Miller realized that just the name Roosevelt inflated all prices. He became the unofficial purchasing agent, and for decades monitored household expenses and ER’s every philanthropic penny.
Earnest squire, dedicated athletic coach, reliable companion, Earl Miller was also a delightful minstrel. ER’s leisure time with him was filled with laughter, music, pranks, and surprises. They made silly home movies of high jinks and adventure like The Pirate and the Lady, in which Earl Miller dressed as a pirate (in bathing suit, rolled-up pirate shirt, painted-on mustache and goatee, bandanna, and eye patch), kidnapped ER, by then the president’s wife. He bound her wrists, tied a blindfold around her eyes, and carried her off into the sunset. There were other characters in the film: Earl’s friend, dancer Mayris Chaney (“Tiny,” who subsequently became one of ER’s great friends), and her dance partner, Eddie Fox; Nancy Cook, who sat on a porch imitating the First Lady. She took the curious role of rocking and knitting and waiting for ER’s demise so that she might replace her and inherit her mantle. At last, two state troopers appeared in a canoe through the mists of Chazy Lake during the last minutes of the 450-foot film to rescue the Lady, left by her pirate tied to a rock.
Some of ER’s friends, notably Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, were distressed that Earl Miller “manhandled” her, and deplored what they considered his indiscretions, his familiarities. There was his arm around her waist and then around her shoulder, even when they were both in bathing suits. There was his hand in hers. Above all, there was his hand on her knee, in that time-honored expression of intimacy. And there was her hand on his knee, just casually there as they talked, knee to knee, at poolside. Then there were those meals she prepared especially for him, and her special Christmas parties just for him—and, in the 1930s, one for him and one for Lorena Hickok.
ER was criticized by her friends because she seemed to cater to his every whim, and on more than one occasion got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed his kitchen floor. Occasionally he was rude; occasionally he was gruff. Her friends considered him spoiled and demanding. And she never reproached him or seemed to disapprove. Then, too, they were disconcerted that she kept a room for him wherever she was—whether at Val-Kill, in the apartment she rented during the 1930s in Esther Lape’s and Elizabeth Read’s 11th Street house in Greenwich Village, or in the White House.
One evening, Esther Lape went upstairs to the 11th Street apartment to visit unannounced. After she rang the bell, she heard ER hurry to the door. Dressed elegantly for very special company, ER flung open the door with an uncommon enthusiasm. Her great warm smile disappeared instantly, Esther Lape recalled: ER could hardly conceal her disappointment. She said, “Oh, I was expecting Earl, but do come in.” Esther Lape left quickly, convinced that ER was a woman waiting for a lover. Unlike Dickerman and Cook, Esther Lape was more impressed than disapproving. Later, Lorena Hickok also disapproved. But she was more specifically jealous.
ER’s son James Roosevelt believed that ER and Earl Miller were more than boon companions, more than devoted friends:
I believe there may have been one real romance in mother’s life outside of marriage. Mother may have had an affair with Earl Miller
Mother was self-conscious about Miller’s youth, but he did not seem bothered by the difference in years. He encouraged her to take pride in herself, to be herself, to be unafraid of facing the world. He did a lot of good for her. She seemed to draw strength from him when he was by her side, and she came to rely on him. When she had problems, she sought his help…. He became part of the family, too, and gave her a great deal of what her husband and we, her sons, failed to give her. Above all, he made her feel that she was a woman.
If father noticed, he did not seem to mind. Curiously, he did promote a romance between Miller and Missy, but that did not last. Miller, who’d had an unhappy first marriage, later married a cousin of his first wife, and that ended the gossip about mother and him. But this was not a happy marriage either….
All the while, Miller had continued to see mother and frequently was a guest at Val-Kill. He saw other women, too, and she encouraged his romances. He married a third time in 1941, though he continued to see mother regularly. This marriage was a failure too…. Maybe because of mother. Their relationship deepened after father’s death and ended only with mother’s death….
James Roosevelt believed that to diminish Miller’s role in ER’s life, “as though to protect her reputation,” was a great “disservice to her” and only suggested “that because of her hang-ups she was never able to be a complete woman.”
ER’s friendship with Earl Miller has been and remains an amazing study of denial and lost documents. No other friendship has been so well covered up. Although there are photographs and home movies, there are no diaries, no memoirs, no letters to detail their relationship, or to help us characterize or appreciate its precise nature. There are rumors that a voluminous correspondence between Earl Miller and ER was anonymously purchased and destroyed, or purchased and locked away. Without those letters, the inevitable questions loom larger still: Who was responsible, and what was the need to bury those letters? What would they have told us? Without them, what can we know? In the absence of any significant contemporary account, we have only the fact of the cover-up to fuel our speculations and theories.
In 1971, Joseph Lash wrote in Eleanor and Franklin: “Eleanor wrote him faithfully, letters full of warmth and affection.” But in 1982, in Love, Eleanor, Lash referred to “Eleanor’s many letters to Earl, which have disappeared.”
The only other reference to specific letters relates to the 1947–48 divorce proceedings between Earl and his third wife, Simone Miller, in which a packet of “endearing” letters was introduced and evidently sealed by the court. Whatever their contents, and whoever their author, Mrs. Miller was awarded a considerable but undisclosed settlement and custody of their two children—Earl, Jr., age six, and Anna Eleanor, three. ER was godmother to both children. The rather sensational divorce proceedings received a flurry of press attention. On 13 January 1947, New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan noted: “Navy Commander’s wife will rock the country if she names the co-respondent in her divorce action!!!”
Earl Miller told several different versions of his marital troubles. According to one, it was true that he got married in 1932 and again in 1941 to quell rumors about himself and ER. After 1929, they had become constant companions; they were seen everywhere together; the gossip abounded. “Mrs. R was going to stick with [the] Governor until he was elected and then she and Sergeant were going to get married. That’s why I got married in 1932 with plenty of publicity. I got married with someone I wasn’t in love with. Same with second marriage. But I was never successful in killing the gossip.”
According to Miller, even his affair with Missy occurred in order “to run interference for the lady.” Earl Miller evidently told Joseph Lash that he played a courtly role: “When I heard that story of Lucy Mercer my heart went out to her—that he should have hurt her so.” Then, when ER told him “about the situation” with Missy LeHand, “I said I would break it up”: “I played up to Missy—carried on an affair with her for two years. At that time she was not having anything to do with the Governor. Missy had me put on night duty so that I could come to her room [at Warm Springs]. My main purpose in playing up to Missy was because I knew the lady was being hurt.”
But Miller had not counted on Missy’s becoming deeply involved with him. When she found out that he was also “playing around with one of the girls in the Executive Office,” she took to her bed and cried for three days. ER, dismayed by Earl Miller’s behavior toward Missy, “made me go up to her room and see her and make amends.”
Earl Miller told a different version of the story to his friend Miriam Abelow in 1972:
I squired Missy for all the time FDR was Gov. up until I married at Hyde Pk late in 1932. It was common knowledge to all. I admired Missy very much & was attracted to her by her devotion to family as I was. Missy & I spent our free time together wherever we were with the family & both the “Boss” & Lady encouraged. I suppose that could be misconstrued also. When I told the Lady I had fallen in love with Ruth she was concerned for Missy as she felt that Missy was in love with me. I had no such conviction…. But Lady had impression our relationship was more serious than it actually was. I had already written Missy in Washington of my [engagement] plans. Her reply was most gracious. But it wasn’t until Missy didn’t attend the wedding at Hyde Pk that I realized she had concealed her real feelings. I only saw her casually after 1932 when I visited the W. House. She was then going with Bill Bullitt….
Whatever version was true, the downstairs staff had a busy time trying to figure out the doings of the upstairs folk. Lillian Rogers Parks, then a White House maid, recalled that they
sometimes thought backstairs, that Missy was going to try to have a life of her own away from FDR. For a time she dated Earl Miller, who we heard was romantically involved with Eleanor…. For a time, Missy also dated the wealthy William Bullitt, whom FDR made the first Ambassador to Russia and later appointed Ambassador to France.
We wondered if FDR engineered these romances just so Missy would see how much better off she was with him. Some speculated that FDR used Missy to get Earl away from his wife, just for his own amusement. It gave us a lot to think about.
Scattered facts and fragmentary letters, conjecture and gossip, give us only hints of the texture of a relationship between two passionate and complex people that lasted for over thirty years. It is perhaps enough to say that countless images preserved through snapshots and home movies give us ample evidence that they enjoyed each other’s company. With Earl Miller, ER developed a capacity for fun and relaxation only suggested before. We have the contours and the time frame of their relationship, but not the songs they sang, or the poets they read aloud; nor do we have the details and the dailiness of their correspondence. To date, not a single letter from ER to Earl Miller has surfaced.
Among the widely scattered facts are some unexpected characteristics: Earl Miller loved to cook, to bake, and to keep house. He adored Julia Child, and after 1963 watched her faithfully on TV. He collected spices, and lined them up “militarily” in his enormous spice rack. One of Earl Miller’s few letters to ER that survived, buried among her daughter’s papers, written in October 1951—long after the most intense years of their friendship—concerns food and house fixtures. We know too that he was profoundly political, progressive, and forthright about his convictions. He had a great sense of public relations, and of timing.
When FDR began to consider the possibilities of becoming a presidential candidate, Earl Miller believed that photographs of him on a horse would silence all the Republican propaganda that dismissed the governor as too sick to be taken seriously. He also believed that FDR’s leg muscles might benefit from riding. After the appearance of local Georgia editorials mocking FDR’s health, and suggesting that if elected in 1932 he would not last through the first term, “I had him atop a horse and invited the Atlanta Journal reporter and photographer in. They spread it in the Rotogravure brown section full page. We rode 4 miles that day (at walk of course) but they didn’t follow and didn’t know he didn’t trot or canter. It was enough to stymie the health angle.”
Miller was also mindful of ER’s public appearance, and encouraged her to project a positive and warm image if journalists were around. When she was being posed, he stood behind the photographer making ridiculous faces until she smiled, relaxed, laughed. After 1928, ER’s rigid unhappy glances and strained looks away from the camera were replaced by a direct gaze and a gracious smile.
And what of Earl Miller? This greathearted squire who adored his Lady? Personally, he appreciated her more completely than any other man ever had. Miller believed that ER “would have made a better president” than FDR, and he resented FDR’s lack of appreciation for her work, her visions, her contributions. “Her influence with him was great.” But “I don’t think he ever gave her credit to her face—ever.” Miller thought that, whereas FDR went off looking for “a return in the voting booth,” ER was more dedicated and “had a keener insight into what people of the country needed…. She had a helluva time on the child labor business. He thought he might antagonize important groups. Only thing he didn’t pull any punches on was Wall Street.”
Politically, Earl Miller and ER agreed on many issues and had more actual “sympathetic understanding”—the kind that mattered to ER for “happy companionship”—than has ever been realized. Everything ER considered important, and every one of FDR’s policies introduced from 1929 on, were also important to Earl Miller, and were condemned as radical, Miller wrote to his friends decades later. Today, “Old Age Insurance, Social Security, etc [are] accepted as normal.” But in 1929 they were attacked as “just too far advanced.” “Anyone that took up the cudgels for the underdog was a pink or radical.”
Earl Miller took pride in what he was able to do in behalf of the “underdog,” and was particularly proud of his efforts to combat the most revolting aspects of racism. Assigned by FDR to inspect prisons in Georgia and Florida, he was, ironically, accompanied by Lucy Mercer Rutherford who was now a highly regarded philanthropist. Earl Miller thought it significant that Lucy Mercer “copied” ER in her political interests, and she had become “quite the ‘all-out’ worker & giver of her time & money to many underprivileged.” Together Miller and Rutherford made “many tours through the Georgia countryside to check on living and factory conditions.” According to Miller, Lucy Mercer even asked questions the way his Lady did, and sounded “like her former boss.” He concluded: “A. person could just not be associated with the Lady without much of her ‘do-good’ rubbed off on you.”
Miller recalled his role during the Roosevelt administration in exposing prison conditions “after that boy died in a ‘Sweatbox’ in Fla. for not saying ‘sir’ to his White Trash Guard.” He worked vigorously to end the violent brutality of Southern prisons: “I got a conviction and abolishment of the boxes in Ga. & Fla.” And Lucy Mercer wrote him that “she was proud that she was part of it.”
ER was impressed by Earl Miller’s insights, patience, and tact. In some ways he was a lot like Louis Howe: purposeful and blunt. He understood the press, and he worked every angle. His advice, and his activities, irritated Louis Howe. According to Miller, Howe resented his presence in ER’s life, in the household, and at the dining-room table. Earl Miller represented something new at the Roosevelt hearth. His loyalties were not divided. For him, ER came first. With him, she had a champion of her own.
Competition and jealousy were, over the years, to become recurring themes among ER’s friends. Gossip and criticism abounded, in and out of press range. For the most part, Earl Miller kept his opinions strictly to himself until decades later, when he confided his feelings only to his intimate friends. In 1965, for example, Miller wrote to his friend Miriam Abelow that Joseph Lash “leaned a little too much to the right and at times I felt he influenced the Lady in that direction.” And he criticized Lash and all the others who wrote about his Lady. To the end of his life, Miller sought to protect ER, according to his best lights. He told his friends that he had many stories—but “I don’t cash in on my friends.” After the divorce publicity, he considered it “more important than ever that I remain in the background.” He wanted his friends to know that, during all the interviews, “Joe didn’t get anything from me along that line, I’d rather die first.”
Forever chivalric, Earl Miller never provided any details of his friendship with ER. He did talk to Joseph Lash about his affair with Missy LeHand. He referred frankly to his wives and his troubles. But even in his last years, faced with cancer and chemotherapy, Miller remained silent about Eleanor, or discreet and ambiguous. Because we are not playing with a full deck, only theories are possible. Partly for personal reasons, Joseph Lash has interpreted ER’s friendship with Earl Miller in mother-and-son terms. He used as evidence his own mother-son relationship with ER. While it is certainly true that ER loved Joseph Lash, and that he, more than any of her intimate friends, was the dutiful and devoted son she so longed for, his insistence on comparison does not result in an equation. First of all, Lash tells us that he was not attracted to Mrs. Roosevelt. More than that, he asserts that men generally did not find her attractive, and that ER “underestimated the strength of the sexual drive. Or perhaps it was the inability of men to desire her sexually.” “She carried an aura of greatness that set her apart. Neither Earl nor David [Gurewitsch] nor I was able to call her ‘Eleanor.’” For Lash, ER’s deepest affections never seemed to be more than “exercises in altruism.” She “was unable to let herself go.”
There are two stereotypes at play here: Frumpy older women do not have sex—because they cannot; aristocratic women do not—because they will not. Beyond the stereotypes, we are reassured that Joseph Lash did not find ER sexually or physically alluring: He was and remained a proper, dutiful, and devoted son. But that tells us little about Earl Miller. He never did call ER “Mrs. Roosevelt.” He called her “Lady,” and “Dearest Lady.” And Earl Miller was not a dutiful son. He was a wild child who lived continually on the edges of danger, where passion is routinely known to reside. Contradictory and appealing, he was flirtatious and rude, physically boastful and charming. He pranced and he preened, and involved ER in all of his doings. She dismayed some of her friends by her evident ability to enjoy his company and even encourage his antics.
Loyal and silent, Earl Miller confounded history. Without correspondence or testimony, one of the most enduring relationships in ER’s life remains a mystery. And so, as one explores the vagaries of a woman’s life, one searches for and entertains alternative historical questions, such as: Why not? ER’s friends deplored the fact that Corporal Miller seemed unable to keep his hands off his “Dearest Lady.” And then there are all those photographs and films—carousing moments of play and obvious intimacy. Also, when ER was not working she wanted to enjoy herself. And there were very few people in her life who were as loving or as playful as Earl Miller.
What then is the nature of romance, of love and passion? What are the varieties of lust and love, of physical and emotional contentment, excitement and satisfaction, in a woman’s life? Historically, in the courtly love story between the squire and his Lady, the intensities of passionate romance dance outside or just beyond the fields of lust. In this very modern saga, did lust remain on the outskirts of love? There are many ways in which a fully eroticized romance between two intimate and caring adults may emerge. ER had a private life. She risked censure and criticism on a daily basis—in order to be alone with her chosen friends, to fulfill her needs and wants as she experienced and understood them. It is obvious that ER and Earl Miller had a romantic friendship, a life-enhancing relationship. Whatever rules they agreed upon, they were two mutually consenting adults who were engaged in a discreet relationship that took them frequently into rustic cabins, high atop the Adirondack Mountains, and occasionally into remote seaside villages along the East Coast. There they sought privacy, relaxation, and comfort and did—whatever they agreed to do.
IN 1931, AT THE HEIGHT OF WHAT WAS THE MOST INTENSE phase of her friendship with Earl Miller, ER wrote an article called “Ten Rules for Success in Marriage.” Written for money during the early years of the Depression, it is a reassuring column of advice to those women who had no interest in stepping outside convention but were faced with new and complex choices. The article tells us much about ER’s life, as well as her concerns and hopes for her children’s marriages. It also reveals what she longed for, and found, beyond the confines of her own marriage. She emphasized socially acceptable solutions, while acknowledging the growing availability of free choice. At once, and in the same article, ER called for greater stability in marriage, condoned divorce, and celebrated “the new freedom between the sexes which is characteristic of our time.”
ER wrote that a marriage failed because the couple lacked ideals or purpose; because one party or the other lacked imagination; because the wife had “no stimulating interests of her own” and her home had become “an exceedingly dull place.” She concluded with ten rules for success:
ER also had words of advice for parents and “in-laws.” “Offer as little advice to the newly married as possible, preferably none.” ER wrote very firmly about this: “I have known many promising marriages to be wrecked because the young people began their life together in the home of their parents or had parents come to live with them.”
ER opposed hasty marriages, and suggested a long, intimate engagement, where you see your intended for weeks at a time, preferably at breakfast and in a variety of difficult ordinary living situations. “Do not misunderstand me! I am not advocating trial marriage! I mean that, short of trial marriage itself, the engaged couple should have almost constant association” to see if “they can really stand the jars and jolts and routine of life together.”
ER discussed trust, independence, equality, and values. “It has always been accepted as a truism that boys should be encouraged to be independent and to take the initiative. I think it is equally important in the education of the girl.” Indeed, ER had the bold belief in 1931 that a girl should be independent by fifteen, and “not be kept under the control of her mother too long.”
Regarding love specifically, ER recommended caution. It was a dangerous state: “We all know that when two people are in love they are easily carried away by their emotions. Some psychologists go so far as to say that love is a kind of sickness owing to the abnormal mental and psychological reactions it produces.”
ER believed that “the new freedom between the sexes which is characteristic of our time” was useful in determining one’s emotional truth. When combined with “character” and proper training, ER was “convinced that the greater freedom of our young people today …will eventually lead to happier lives.”
Between the freedom of youth today and the restraints which surrounded older generations the difference is indeed vast. Our young people “play around,” as we say…. They talk about all sorts of topics …—morality from different aspects, differences in the economic standards of different classes of people, the freedom of the man and the woman, and the development of individuals…. On the whole it is a splendid thing.
On the specific issue of divorce, ER took both sides of the argument. “Many of us lack the stamina to face and see uncomfortable situations through. Today many seem to think that marriage is like a position in employment, which one can leave when everything does not go well. We should think of it as a permanent, lifetime job.”
On the other hand, before exhaustion, depression, and malaise set in, ER counseled divorce. “It is far better for two people who cannot get along to separate than to lead a quarrelsome life.” Especially if there were no children, divorce seemed to her appropriate when either party found that life together had “ceased to have any real spiritual value.” With children, it was more problematic. But in the end, she considered it “better that a home should be broken than that the children should live where the father and mother are continually pulling against each other.”
Ultimately, for ER happy companionship did not depend on class affinities, economic privilege, or “mere physical attraction which at the best could last but a short time.” Rather, there was something more indefinable, some unconscious sense of character that might be called “good taste,” which really mattered—and which transcended class lines and the boundaries of the family circle:
There is something which no real fellow can do without, whether the fellow be boy or girl, namely the feeling which we call good taste, which makes us know instinctively when we meet people, no matter what their outer shells may be, whether they are real people, with that kernel of gold which is the one requisite for a deep and true relationship.
A man and a woman may come from different backgrounds, they may not have had the same opportunities, and therefore they may lack certain knowledge and education in social customs and habits, but if, at bottom, they are the right kind of people, if the kernel of gold is there, then good taste will recognize and claim unswervingly its mate for friendship and for love with very little chance for future disappointment.
However much Earl Miller, and subsequently Lorena Hickok, possessed that “kernel of gold,” marriage for ER retained its own sanctity. She had offered FDR a divorce in 1918, and renewed rumors of divorce shocked her circle in 1932. When FDR decided to run for the presidency, her most intimate friends feared that she wanted to flee.
ER faced the prospect of the White House with foreboding. From all accounts, she hated the idea. She had seen firsthand what it had done to Aunt Edith, Uncle Ted’s wife. She feared that she would have no life of her own. Her closest friends—Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Earl Miller—all referred in later years to the rumors that ER wanted to leave FDR after the election and marry Earl Miller. The only evidence we have for that rumor is a letter, an almost “hysterical” letter, ER was alleged to have sent Nancy Cook in Chicago with the nominating team. She, in a mild panic, showed it immediately to Louis Howe. He promptly tore it to shreds, warning Cook and Dickerman: “You are not to breathe: a word of this to anyone. Not to anyone.“
FDR biographer Kenneth Davis, who interviewed Marion Dicker-man at length, gave her version of what ER wrote in the letter: ER could not “bear to become First Lady!” Her entire being rebelled “against the prospect of being a prisoner of the White House, forced …onto a narrow treadmill of formal receptions, ‘openings,’ dedications, teas, official dinners…. She won’t do it! She’ll run away with Earl Miller—never mind the fact that Earl has just become engaged to Ruth Bellinger and that Eleanor has been arranging, against her mother-in-law’s contemptuous disapproval, a wedding ceremony for him at Hyde Park. She’ll flee with Earl, who loves and respects her as Franklin never did, nor her sons. She’ll file suit for a divorce….”
When Joseph Lash asked Earl Miller about the accuracy of this version of the letter, he dismissed it breezily—”She may have been down in the depths.” He warned Lash never to trust anything Dickerman ever said. Lash agreed. The jealousies in ER’s crowd were “phenomenal.”
ER referred to this episode only obliquely, and with a vastly different emphasis: “The night before my husband was nominated, we sat up until morning in the Executive Mansion. All the newspaper people, among them Lorena Hickok, whom I was later to know well, spent most of the night in the garage. Finding them still there the following morning when I came down, I invited them to come in and have break-fast with me on the porch.” Two days later, the family flew to Chicago, where, in an unprecedented departure, FDR accepted the nomination in person—rather than wait through the summer months to be notified at home by the “notification committee.” The flight included ER, FDR, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Gus Gennerich, and Earl Miller. ER wrote: “For Earl Miller this was the last trip with my husband. When Franklin left Albany, Earl Miller went into the Department of Correction and became personnel director.”
Perhaps ER’s initial panic and reluctance to become First Lady involved, in some part, her impending geographic separation from Earl Miller—mentioned so casually in her memoir. She had not been consulted in FDR’s decision to take Gus Gennerich with him to Washington but not Earl Miller. Perhaps FDR did in fact intend to separate his wife from her companion, not only when he decided to leave Miller in New York, but also when he encouraged Miller’s romance with Missy LeHand.
Possibly Earl Miller preferred to remain in New York, and had no interest in moving to Washington with the Roosevelts. In any case, unlike Louis Howe, who succeeded in demonstrating absolute impartiality between ER and FDR, Earl Miller’s primary allegiance was to ER. They had become inseparable, until Earl Miller was summarily wrenched from the family circle.
For a time, ER was inconsolable. She dreaded Washington, the White House, and all the changes that seemed so completely beyond her control. Lorena Hickok noticed that ER was unusually quiet, and amidst all the political excitement seemed disheartened. “Hick” was the first seriously to seek the reasons, and played a very large part in the restoration of ER’s equilibrium.