Franklin And Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley, MUP, $36.99.
Fifth generation cousins, once removed, the famously acronymed FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and wife Eleanor left indelible impressions on US generations serving four terms (1933-1945) as US President and First Lady.
In this definitive biography, Hazel Rowley packs in just as much as the energetic FDR and Eleanor did in their lives. FDR got a “whiff of the White House” when he met his cousin, niece of then President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, on a train.
Though closely connected through bloodline, their actual childhoods could not have been more different — Eleanor shipped to grandma’s gloomy Manhattan brownstone at barely 10, when both parents had died; FDR one of the “River” families whose magnificent estates dotted the Hudson, bought his first yacht at nine.
With movie star looks, FDR enjoyed a lifetime affair with social secretary Lucy Mercer (the bottom dropped out of Eleanor’s world on discovering Lucy’s love letters). Eleanor (who gave birth to their daughter and five sons) was herself passionately involved with Lorena Hickok, the nation’s foremost female political journalist.
Most astounding are Rowley’s covert details of how FDR, who contracted polio at age 39, successfully hid his paraplegia from the public for the 12 years of his presidency. His studied calmness and refusal to be an invalid, saw him deliver rousing speeches and make stands at rallies — invisibly held up on the arms of one of his strapping sons — all the while enduring the excruciating pain of heavy hip to heel braces and a steel corset.
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