Now, Dorothy and Franklin

Like so many men with boundless power, personality and ego, Franklin D. Roosevelt had an eye for women. Not just any women, but tall, intelligent and impeccably well-bred travelers in his own social circles. He married his patrician cousin Eleanor in 1905, kept his dining tables and drawing rooms decorated with bright young women from Chestnut Hill and Tuxedo Park, and from 1913 until the day he died in 1945 carried on a secret but by now much-publicized affair with Lucy Mercer, a daughter of Maryland gentry and for a time Eleanor's personal secretary.

Sexy Guy. It appears that there may have been yet another woman in F.D.R.'s life and libido. Not just any woman, but Dorothy Scruff, coquettish, aging (73) heiress to the Kuhn, Loeb investment-banking fortune and longtime publisher, editor-in-chief and sole owner of the New York Post. In an authorized biography, Men, Money and Magic: The Story of Dorothy Schiff (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; $9.95), to be published in October, Author Jeffrey Potter quotes Dolly Schiff as admitting to a "relationship" with Roosevelt from 1936 to 1943--when she was in her thirties and he in his fifties and early sixties. "Apparently I was considered very sexy in those days, and he probably saw me as a sex object," says she. "This was a warm, sexy guy who was in an isolated position and was looking for a turn-on and companionship, too. In a rather sweet way he was fairly bold, and everything about his body--except his legs*--was so strong."

After New York Times Reporter Nan Robertson got hold of Potter's manuscript and broke the story last week, Schiff denied through her lawyer, Morris Abram, that she had ever had "a romance or an affair" with Roosevelt. But Potter--a fiftyish author of a children's book and a 1973 volume on oil spills, as well as a sometime escort of SchifFs--says that her remarks came from long taped conversations he held with her over the past two years. Publisher John J. Geoghegan reports that Schiff has twice read the galieys of Potter's manuscript and changed nothing.

In the book, Schiff is quoted as saying that she first met Roosevelt at his Hyde Park, N.Y., estate in June 1936, shortly after he had accepted the Democratic nomination for a second term as President. Her husband at the time (she has had four) was George Backer, a New York City real estate operator who worked in F.D.R.'s early political campaigns. Backer had converted Dorothy, then 33, from lifelong Republicanism to an active role in F.D.R.'s 1936 drive. Dorothy and Franklin began seeing each other often at Hyde Park.

One day Roosevelt took her through a "cottage" retreat at Hyde Park: "The Secret Service were standing on the terrace with their backs to the French windows, oblivious as usual. He wheeled himself into the bedroom, and there was this double bed ... I stayed with him because ... you don't say no to the President of the United States ... Besides, I had nothing better to do."

F.D.R. also liked to take her for high-speed rides over back roads in his V-8 Ford equipped with manual controls. "Whenever I would be slid across the front seat away from him," she is quoted, "a strong right arm would pull me back." In the book Schiff calls F.D.R. a "snob," but says of herself, "As to being Jewish, C.P. Snow wrote that once you reach a certain financial level, people don't think of you as being anything but rich." (Dolly Schiff at 30 inherited $9 million.)

Schiff adds that her husband knew of the relationship and warmly endorsed it: "George saw it all in a sort of droit du seigneur way, his wife being tapped by the lord of the manor. He was proud of it, and it gave him tremendous prestige with his friends."

Very Cordial. If George knew, Roosevelt's biographers and surviving close associates didn't--or at least hotly deny that there was an affair. "It would have seemed strange if it had happened and I hadn't heard of it," says Rexford Guy Tugwell, a leading F.D.R. brain-truster. Adds former Aide Jonathan Daniels, who in a 1964 biography first wrote of F.D.R.'s affair with Lucy Mercer: "Dorothy Schiff? I'm perfectly sure that Roosevelt was very cordial to her as a prominent Democrat. But if you make everybody he was cordial to into his mistress you'd have to fill Madison Square Garden to the rooftop."

Still, in the book, Dorothy Schiff says that, toward the end of the "relationship," Post Editor Theodore Thackrey, who later became her third husband, brought up the subject. She is quoted: "At first I was nattered when Ted told me that everybody in the press thought I was the mistress of the President, question mark. Only it wasn't a question mark; it was a period."

*Polio paralyzed his legs in 1921, but the disease does not affect sexual potency.

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