A Boy's Best Friend?

By Laurence I. Barrett

AN UNTOLD STORY:

THE ROOSEVELTS OF HYDE PARK by ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT and JAMES BROUGH 319 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

As even the most casual reader of Rooseveltiana knows, Eleanor's life was full of woe. Her beloved father, a problem drinker, died young, and early death claimed her mother and brother as well. She grew up shy and lonely, self-conscious about her plain looks.

Marriage to Cousin Franklin seemed a lucky break, but Mother-in-Law Sara turned out to be a meddlesome tyrant, and Franklin himself had a few flaws as a husband. To this list we can now add a posthumous problem for Eleanor: her son Elliott seems bent on committing the equivalent of literary matricide.

His Untold Story has attracted pre-publication attention because advance excerpts identified F.D.R.'s second girl friend as Missy LeHand, who eventually succeeded Lucy Mercer in that delicate position around 1922. As Elliott tells it, all five children knew about his father's relationship with Missy. They eventually took it for granted, over many years, as did members of the official White House family. Eleanor herself acquiesced to an amazing degree. She treated the younger woman as a daughter-- to the point of buying her clothes when Missy was "too busy" with political chores.

The Missy affair occupies only a small part of the book, however, and is really beside Elliott's point. He under took this reminiscence ostensibly be cause historians have so idealized Franklin and Eleanor. The cosmetic job has been such, Elliott says, that to the Roosevelt children the two emerge "as total strangers, not the father we loved and the mother we respected." Note the distinction: it is what passes for subtlety in Elliott Roosevelt's account.

In the service of ultimate truth, then, Elliott tells of a sometimes cold, sometimes wretched relationship between his parents. That she took no pleasure in sex we know from other sources, including Joseph P. Lash's first volume. Elliott treats this as a great revelation and reminds readers about it perhaps a dozen times in his small book. Father, on the other hand, matured into a lusty chap whose interest and prowess were undiminished even by the aftereffects of polio. For the sake of skeptics, Elliott cites a medical report and even translates the Latin.

Eleanor had done her duty for the preservation of the line, had exiled Lucy Mercer and had even offered Franklin a divorce. Lonely, frustrated, hurt, in the 1920s she began undertaking assorted good works and political activity (the latter for F.D.R.'s benefit).

Self-sacrificing? Praiseworthy? Not as Son Elliott sees it. His mother was a poor housekeeper, he reports, and did not feed the children as well as Granny Sara did. Girl and woman, she was a dissembler. She let on that her father was simply a boozer, failing to mention that he also had a brain tumor. To ingratiate herself with the bigoted Sara, she feigned anti-Semitic notions. Much later, as a columnist, she had the nerve to "picture herself as a calm, contented woman," rather than as the "detached, harried, faultfinding wife and parent we knew." To Daughter Anna she was insensitive. Not only that, but Eleanor was poor company on a camping trip.

The other Roosevelt children have disassociated themselves from the book, and any reader must wonder about Elliott's inner motives. Could F.D.R. have been such a prince of a pa while Eleanor was so base a ma? Why does Elliott give so few pages to the period when Eleanor became an international figure? Perhaps Eleanor was wrong to put in the past tense her suggestion that Elliott "suffered for a great many years with a rather unhappy disposition." The explanation for this strange and dreadful book probably has as much to do with Elliott's psyche as with his mother's. "

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