The Spur

ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN by Joseph P. Lash. 765 pages. Norton. $12.50.

Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood sounds almost too bad to be true. To her father Elliott, she was "a miracle from heaven," but Elliott was usually drunk. Her mother Anna was a New York beauty who wanted "a precious boy." Aunt Edith took one look and concluded: "Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future." When she proved to be a solemn child, her mother took to referring to her as "Granny."

There were other misfortunes. For two tender years she painfully wore a metal back brace to correct a spinal curvature. On an 1887 ocean crossing--following a European tour that was unaccountably supposed to divorce Elliott from alcohol--the Roosevelts' ship was rammed by another, and Eleanor was treated to a 77tam'c-style scene of tragedy and hysteria that left her with a lifelong fear of water.

Shortly afterward, her parents separated; when Eleanor was eight, her mother died of diphtheria. The child frankly hoped that at last she would see more of her adored father. What usually happened was more like the afternoon he took her and three of their fox terriers for a walk as far as the Knickerbocker Club and parked his charges with the doorman. When father had not emerged six hours later, the doorman took child and dogs home.

When Eleanor was ten, Elliott died --literally from falling down drunk. The little girl went to live with her maternal grandmother Hall, who still had five unruly offspring at home in Oak Terrace, her Dutchess County mansion, and was none too quick of wit. There, too, liquor flowed as surely as the water in the Hudson near by. Eleanor's Uncle Vallie, only 25, was a mean, unpredictable drunk who, among other things, took potshots at people walking on the grounds. Unsteady of aim, he always missed, but such pastimes made daily life harrowing. Eleanor befriended the laundress and spent hours in the cellar cranking the wringer and learning how to iron.

God knows what would have become of her if her grandmother, surveying the Gothic shambles at Oak Terrace, had not shipped her off to an English boarding school in 1899. Miraculously, it was an enlightened place in which Eleanor blossomed. She excelled at studies, developed poise, and made the joyous discovery that the very traits that bored her family--candor, compassion, energy, an aversion to sham --could be highly valued.

This was the girl whom Franklin Roosevelt, a remote collateral, fell in love with and married in 1905, when she was 21 and he was a handsome, dashing 23-year-old law student. The marriage eventually proved a durable public triumph, but a pitiful private disaster. As one astute cousin put it, "She had already lived through so much unhappiness and then to have married a man with a mother like Cousin Sally."

Sara Delano Roosevelt was a rich, idle, unintelligent widow who worshipped her son. Aged 50 when Eleanor and Franklin married, she had 35 years of relentless meddling left in her. It was she who bought the couple's houses (near or adjoining hers), furnished them with her own dreadful taste, staffed them with cadres of servants. When the six children began arriving, she contested Eleanor over every matter of upbringing. Franklin Jr. once recalled: "Granny referred to us as 'my children,' adding, 'Your mother only bore you.' "

This triangular menage was apparently just fine with the cool, emotionally evasive Franklin. But why didn't Eleanor, who hated it, have the matter out with both of them? For one thing, she had no confidence in her femininity. Franklin loved gaiety, wit and late-night revels. Eleanor was serious, humorless and terrified of alcohol. As his political career progressed, her duties multiplied. She entertained thousands. What with homes in Hyde Park, Campobello, New York City and wherever Franklin was working, a menage the size of a small army had to be moved several times a year.

This whole hectic, unrewarding world collapsed in 1918, when Eleanor, then 33, discovered that Franklin was having a serious affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer. Eleanor offered a divorce but, thinking of his political career--and for once encountering opposition from his mother--Franklin agreed to leave Lucy. Thereafter, according to Lash, the intimate side of their marriage was over. As time passed, private relations in general deteriorated even further. Polio was for Franklin the permanent blow that Lucy Mercer was for Eleanor. He spent increasing amounts of time seeking cures in the South, especially Warm Springs, where Missy LeHand was his selfless secretary and hostess.

Actually, Eleanor was at home mostly among women. In the '20s, as she began her public career, she made several close women friends. "She always felt she had shared both her husband and children with another woman," writes Lash. "She needed people to whom she was the one and only and upon whom she could lavish help, attention, tenderness." With two such friends, Nancy Cook, a Democratic party worker, and Marion Dickerman, a teacher, she even built a house near Hyde Park. She considered it home; linen was initialed jointly as EMN. Later the three quarreled, and Eleanor turned to younger proteges. Among them was young Joseph Lash, then a member of the leftist American Student Union.

The First Lady and the young radical became intimate friends. The greatest praise that can be given his book is that it manages to bring all of Eleanor alive to those who remember her and those who don't. The public Eleanor, at first the subject of cruel jokes, eventually all but sanctified as U.N. ambassador, is more familiar. This Eleanor's range of activity was extraordinary, her energy atomic. In the Depression she fought for every project to create jobs, feed children, advance blacks. During World War II her tours of hospitals exhausted Admiral Halsey and left the redoutable Clemmie Churchill collapsed on a staircase. Eleanor went on.

Lash examines all her major public activities: the famous column, the radio broadcasts, the political campaigns. But the book's real fascination is in the private material. Eleanor was, as Robert Sherwood wrote, "the keeper and constant spokesman for her husband's conscience," the unyielding idealist to the maneuvering pragmatist. She was fearless in pressing her convictions upon him. "Mother, can't you see you are giving Father indigestion?" asked Daughter Anna during one dinner-table diatribe.

It wasn't the only way Eleanor assaulted his stomach. Personally oblivious to what she ate, she insisted on supervising White House menus. When it got to the point of sweetbreads "about six times a week," F.D.R. fired off a memo: "I'm getting to the point where my stomach rebels and this does not help my relations with foreign powers. I bit two of them today."

Though Lash insists that she yearned to the end to be closer to her husband, she had really built an independent life. Anna was his last White House hostess. When he died on vacation in Georgia, Lucy Mercer, then a widow, whom he had been seeing again for a year or so, was with him. Eleanor wrote: "He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be. Nevertheless I think I sometimes acted as a spur. I was one of those who served his purposes."

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