Review: 'Franklin and Lucy' by Joseph E. Persico

Eleanor Roosevelt called them "the lovely ladies who worshipped at his shrine." She was not exactly among the worshippers, although she was one of the many "remarkable women," as the subtitle to Joseph E. Persico's Franklin & Lucy (Random House, 418 pages, $28) accurately characterizes them, who helped shape Franklin D. Roosevelt's life and career.

Persico, whose many historical works include Roosevelt's Secret War, writes that women were central to Roosevelt's life. Women "formed and reveal him"; they "satisfied FDR's deep-seated need for adulation, admiration, approval, and respite from the crushing burdens of his office."

The keeper of the shrine was his adoring mother Sara. "Sara Roosevelt's influence over what her son was to become is beyond reckoning," Persico says. "Raising her child became the core of her existence."

But the chief worshipper there was Lucy Rutherfurd, nee Mercer, hired as Eleanor's secretary when Franklin served as assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson. By mid-1916 he and Lucy were lovers.

Lucy became, in fact, the love of Franklin's life. It has been thought that once Eleanor learned of the affair, and she -- and Sara, and FDR's political adviser, Louis Howe -- insisted it end, that it did. The big revelation of Franklin & Lucy, however, is that an affair of some kind -- whether it was always sexual or just affectionate or one of kindred souls -- continued after Franklin contracted polio, after Lucy in 1920 married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy man 29 years her senior, right to the day of Franklin's death in April 1945.

Persico documents the 30-year liaison with recently discovered letters and other writings that were in the possession of Lucy's daughter and that were made available to him by Lucy's granddaughters. "There was never a complete break between Franklin and Lucy," Persico says.

Where, then, does this leave Eleanor, the shy, repressed, poor little rich girl who had married her handsome distant cousin? Until she broke out to become a person in her own right (and eventually a woman of the world), Eleanor existed in the shadow of her husband and his imperious mother.

Sara diminished Eleanor. She ran things; she ran Eleanor. Franklin patronized her, while keeping her perpetually pregnant (five children, six pregnancies).

That state of affairs ended -- along with Eleanor's sharing the marital bed -- when Eleanor discovered love letters from Lucy to Franklin. Their son James said it was the beginning of "an armed truce that endured until the day he died." But, as Persico demonstrates, it didn't end the affair itself, nor forestall others from sprouting.

Indeed, in a what's-sauce-for-the-gander-is-sauce-for-the-goose sort of way, Eleanor went on to affairs of her own, both heterosexual and homosexual and both likely involving sex, period. She had long-term relationships with Earl Miller, originally FDR's state trooper guard when he was governor of New York, and with Lorena Hickok, a former Associated Press reporter. Hick, as she was affectionately called, "gave up the profession she loved for the woman she loved."

Other women gave up, in effect, lives of their own to share Franklin's. Here too, Persico indicates, in most cases sex cannot be ruled out. As Franklin's doctor told one inquirer, "Only his legs are paralyzed."

Chief among them was Marguerite (Missy) LeHand. She joined the Roosevelt entourage as a secretary in 1920 and remained until her death in 1944. She was a "substitute wife," Persico says, in a strange menage a trois in which "the other woman" was not easily discernible.

When people came into the Roosevelts' lives, they tended not to go completely out, though they might be relegated to the background for years. For instance, when Dorothy Schiff's star began to wane, Margaret (Daisy) Suckley's began to rise.

The entire book -- well-written and researched and well worth reading -- is awash in politics-related sexual peccadilloes (possibly including Princess Martha of Norway, a war refugee). I found it utterly absorbing, all these connections forming, shifting, adjusting, breaking -- and the self-serving justifications offered for them.

Roger K. Miller is the author of the novel Invisible Hero and writes the blog graustark.blogspot.com.