PERSONAL HISTORY
MEMENTO MORI
"The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."
- Henry James
Preface
It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and
the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from
which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton,
1978]. I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their
stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as
possible into the realm of autobiography.
One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff,
recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own
experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my
parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an
experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal
book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that
they may know better a part of their own histories.
Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own,
have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the
grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and
beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty
of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as
I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become
difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others,
from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For
those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the
father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments
of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and
through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of
him when they were young.
My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member. Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.
[continued]
John Boettiger was covering the campaign for the conservative and indelibly Republican Chicago Tribune. It was his first real venture out of Chicago where his immigrant working class grandparents had settled 70 years before. He had taught himself to write, and worked up the ladder of apprenticeship to become one of the Tribune’s senior reporters. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother, was the eldest child and only daughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who traced their patrician American lineage well over 100 years before the War of Independence. That family history already included one distinguished American president (my grandmother's uncle Theodore), and was about to include another whose impact on this nation and the world would be even greater.
I was born in Seattle, Washington, on March 30, 1939, toward the end of my grandfather’s second term as president, and as the world was about to go to hell. My grandmother Eleanor, who was in later years to become my most significant mentor, held her daughter’s hand during the hardest part of my difficult delivery, and very likely sat quietly knitting during the rest. My father’s politics (to the limited extent he had any in 1932) had undergone a sea change, as had his modest Middle Western life. In 1939 he was publisher of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, then as now one of that city’s two daily newspapers. My mother first edited the paper’s women’s section and, by 1940, growing in her skill and familiarity with the newspaper world, became associate editor.
The P.I. was part of the empire of William Randolph Hearst, a colorful, consistent, vocal opponent of FDR; but there was less irony in that fact than one might think. The paper was in deep and manifold trouble, losing ground precipitously to its locally-owned competition, The Seattle Times. Hearst had made a characteristically shrewd deal in 1936 when, despite his editorial fulminations, Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected in one of the great landslides of American history. Putting his paper into competent hands which also belonged to the Pacific Northwest’s resident Roosevelts could be simultaneously a reconciliatory gesture toward a newly empowered FDR and a good business decision. The only piece of the contract that must have rankled was his grant of editorial freedom to his new publisher.
My parents were a graceful and glamorous couple, absorbed in each other, in the challenges of their work and in the social demands of their notoriety. They were loving parents, but inevitably, in that time and swirl, I lived more with my nurse Marian, a housekeeping couple, Katy and Ivan, and Secret Service agents whose names I still remember and whose companionship I treasured. I loved and needed my parents, but I did not have much of them, and their absence, their bewildering comings and goings, loomed large in my world. My mother was aware of my loneliness. On one occasion when I was three, my mother wrote to her own mother, “Johnny look[ed] up at me most wistfully…and ask[ed]: ‘Is Mummy going to stay in this house for just a little while?’ I almost wept because we had to leave for Spokane that same evening!”
My father was tall, energetic, a public speaker with a decided platform presence and a clear, articulate, resonant voice. His romanticism, drawn as I later found from a richly expressive family, lent him an attractive verve in his public life. As Richard Neuberger (later a fine Senator from Oregon) noted at the time in an admiring Saturday Evening Post portrait, “he might be a Roosevelt born instead of a member of the family by marriage.” No one but his wife knew clearly of his lifelong struggle with depression that ran like a deep red line through his family history, nor of the ways in which that struggle accelerated, threatened to break the bonds of his determined self-control, with his new prominence and sense of responsibility as one of the nation’s first family.
My mother Anna was six years younger than her husband—thirty when they moved to Seattle as newlyweds. Vivacious and beautiful, tall, long-waisted and slim, of independent and lively mind, she still harbored a sense of insecurity from childhood. She had something of the chiseled fine-featured face of her father when he was younger, as well as his open, broad humor. As much in love with her new husband as he with her, she was more realistic, insightful and cautious. She wanted success for him, was a willing partner in his ambitions, but was by nature more of a private person, more worried on his behalf than she was able to act upon, fearing his anger and disappointment. A woman of her time, she could deflate his sometime air of self-importance, but found it difficult to say no, to confront him directly when her judgment differed from his. She knew better than he that life in the Roosevelt clan was often enough something other than the field of roses from which its Dutch name derived.
My parents gave me his name—with the addition of a Roosevelt middle name to recognize its prominence in our lives, and so that I would not be John Boettiger, Jr. For my father, it was a heartfelt wish shadowed by deep self-doubt about his capacity to be a parent. There is a photograph of him lying happily on the floor holding me aloft in his hands. I still have a copy, inscribed to his father, the grandfather I never knew: “To my dear old Dad, with a hope I’ll do as well for my Johnny as you always did for yours.” His father died in May of 1940, never having seen his son’s only child.
My father’s hope was real. He tried in those early years of my life, before being swept away in the vortices of ambition, depression and world war, tried and in some tenuous but real measure succeeded. I am no stranger to his fear or his depression, but I also recognize how much of my own capacity for warmth and devotion, for hard work and playfulness, are his gifts, how much my love—and my romanticism—owe to his.
Judging from the photographs and home movies of the time, I was a lively and venturesome infant. I made my first cross-country trip by train at eight months, when our family returned for Christmas to The White House. There is a picture of the assembled Roosevelt family in which my willingness to pose was overcome by my urge to explore. I was christened at The White House on Sunday afternoon, December 31, 1939.
From the mist of those earliest four years of my life, before my father left for the war, I can draw from my memory only these fragments, shadows of his presence. After waking from a bad dream in the middle of the night—was it only once or more often?—I walked down the hall and lay in front of my parents’ closed bedroom door, afraid to knock or go in, even to call out. I remember his black tar soap in a tin and the sweet tasting bright pink medicine he poured from its bottle into a tablespoon. I have returned most often to a memory of the rough feel and musty smell of his tweed jacket against my cheek.
Although he was not of an age to be drafted (born in 1900, he was 41 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II), my father felt the need to volunteer. Compelled most by his wish for the respect of his father-in-law, the Commander-in-Chief, and by my four Roosevelt uncles’ decisions to enter the service, he left us in 1943 for North Africa. My mother and I moved into The White House, where she served for the last two years of her father’s life as his personal assistant. They adored each other, and were thoroughly at home and relaxed together.
For her it was the realization of a dream to be that close to her father, needed and relied upon. She accompanied him to the Yalta Conference in early 1945, shortly before his death.
My mother made a difficult decision to welcome one secret guest to The White House: Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the woman with whom my grandfather had had an affair thirty years before. Lucy became again, in the early 1940s, one of a small group of women who put my grandfather wholly at ease—his cousins Margaret (Daisy) Suckley and Laura Delano were others, as was Princess Martha of Norway, and his secretary Missy LeHand. My grandparents shared a devotion to each other and mutual admiration, but my grandmother had her own compassionate political agenda—enormously useful to FDR but not often offered or received with comfort.
My own life in The White House seemed, in retrospect, a wondrous adventure for a small boy: playing on the floor of the Oval Office with toys my grandfather kept on his desk, roughhousing with him on his bed in the mornings, commandeering the self-service elevator, watching cartoons in the theatre alone like a young Cecil B. DeMille, accompanying The White House guards with a uniform like theirs and a rifle on my shoulder, even being visited once by the Lone Ranger and riding with him on “the great horse Silver.” My mother slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, and I in what had been a large dressing room next door.
But, on balance, it was a lonely time. My father was gone and my mother preoccupied with her work. The nurses and servants were too numerous now for me to find in them real companionship, and I had no peers with whom to play in the vast space of the third floor I had virtually to myself. Many years later I found a snapshot, no doubt taken by one of my caretakers. I am standing, solemn and alone, on the south lawn of The White House, in a fountain drained of water.
Whether or not with a premonition of the illness that would soon take his life, PaPa—as we knew my grandfather—wanted as many of his family as possible with him for the Christmas of 1944. In the family photo taken on that occasion, he sits with two of my young cousins on his knees, the rest of us gathered around him. He is smiling, proud, full of his old élan, in stark contrast to the pictures of him taken when he returned exhausted, drawn and gray from the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill a scant nine weeks later. (In the picture below I am in the middle of the front row with a small music box in my hands.)
I didn’t see him then, or ever again, as I was hospitalized with a persistent staphylococcus infection in my throat. My mother wanted to accompany him while he recuperated at his retreat home in Warm Springs, Georgia, but she stayed in Washington to be with me. I vividly remember the evening of April 12, 1945—what American alive then does not? The small bedside radio in my hospital room was on, and I heard the announcement that the president had died. I could not connect the news with my shining, ebullient, larger than life PaPa. A nurse ran into the room to turn the radio off. Soon after, my mother came in to tell me the news, and it began slowly to seep into my heart and mind.
My father’s service in the war had taken him from North Africa to Sicily, Italy, Germany, and finally home again to the Pentagon. I still have in my top dresser drawer the Legion of Merit medal he was awarded and, somewhere, the citation and a picture of the ceremony. He wrote me letters that I asked my mother to read to me over and over again. They included serial hair-raising tales of a four-year-old Arab boy named Mohammed. My mother wrote him that at first I was jealous "and wanted to know if you would bring Mohammed home with you or give him back to his parents before you came." When the war was over, we returned for a year to our home in Seattle. But Hearst’s need for my father had expired with the end of the Roosevelt era, and he was not inclined to sell what had become again a thriving newspaper. My parents embarked upon one last, desperate, and as it turned out, tragic adventure.
Borrowing heavily, in effect mortgaging their future, still somehow hopeful that the Roosevelt magic would carry them through, they built from scratch a liberal Democratic newspaper, christened The Arizona Times, in the rock-ribbed Republican city of Phoenix. The Times’s solidly established and conservative competition, The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette, were owned by Gene Pulliam, a vigorous, canny and reactionary entrepreneur whose pockets were substantially deeper than those of my parents.
The infant Arizona Times was soon on the rocks, and with it my parents’ marriage. My father’s depression became more and more destructive, and our home took on, for me, an increasingly fearful undertone. The rambling stucco and tile-roofed house was shaped, perhaps appropriately, like a motel, with two small bedroom suites extending from each side of a central kitchen, dining and living room: an easy place in which to feel alone and afraid at night.
When they were home, my mother and father would come to say goodnight and listen to me say my prayers. I feared the words "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take," so my father changed them to "Guard and keep me through the night, and wake me with the morning light." My last question of them before they left my room was always, "Where are you going to be?"
My mother was aware that the depression against which my father had fought longer than he could remember was overwhelming him. He refused treatment, and at that time there may have been none that would have truly returned him to himself. As a child will, I sensed darkness descending. I experienced night terrors and the humiliation of renewed bed wetting. I remember lighting a fire in the dry grass of a corral near the house. One side of the bam was scorched before the fire was extinguished, and I could not bear to tell my parents what I had done.
My mother was increasingly frightened of his erratic outbursts of anger, his black moods and pervasive sense of defeat, and the bitterness of their arguments. She even bought a pistol for herself. She wanted to make a last-ditch effort to save The Times; but for him it was all over. She begged him repeatedly to undertake psychiatric treatment; he continued to refuse. Love and death still struggled in his romantic soul, but the wish to die was growing stronger. Finally, at the end of 1947, she asked my father to leave. The marriage was over. Weeks later, she was told by a colleague and friend at The Times that he had been seeing another woman during their last year together. “Anna dear, we didn’t dare tell you.”
The hurt of knowing was compounded by the knowledge that others had known and kept his affair from her. She had said to herself twenty-four years before, when Eleanor confided the pain of her experience of experience of Franklin’s love affair with Lucy Mercer, “here I was growing up, and probably going to get married and have a family, and was this something that I was going to have to face?.... I think I was probably putting myself a little fearfully into Mother’s shoes.”
Of the brief remainder of my father’s life I remember very little. He took me during the summer of 1948 to two dude ranches in Arizona. I recall the land—forest and desert—and fearful moments, like snapshots: the crack and jump of a pistol he tried to teach me to use; falling from a horse; standing on a stump holding a bucket of slop, surrounded by hungry pigs; a tarantula crawling next to a swimming pool; waking in our cabin at night to the sound of an intruder, afraid to call for help. But of my father literal presence in that time I remember nothing.
Fear, longing, anger, bewilderment: all must have melded in those years after he left us. Packages came from FAO Schwarz at Christmas and on my birthday, and postcards from "Your devoted Pops." I was guarded, shut away. My mother and I did not speak of him: she was waiting for me, I for her. She struggled with a large burden of debt from The Times’s failure, and needed to work.
I have sought especially a memory of him on his last visit with me in Los Angeles, just weeks before his death. I recall an observatory we visited, the rental car he drove, a maroon Ford with a dent in the front fender on the driver's side. I even have a picture of the two of us. It was taken in one of those little booths where we feed coins and must sit close together. Our heads are touching. I think our eyes look alike. My dimpled smile seems less my own than a self-conscious imitation of his.
The live person who was my father vanished before I began to search my memory for him.
Although he remarried in 1949, the last three years of my father’s life were those of a lost and wandering soul. The final and most desperate of his leave takings was his suicide on October 31, 1950. Unhinged by war and business failure, convinced of his uselessness, believing his life had become no more than his to take, wishing to offer some small benefit—his insurance policies—to those he loved, he could not see the greater legacy of love lost. By then he was living in New York City, working without heart for a public relations firm. His wife Virginia, visiting friends in California, sent him a check shortly before his death. He returned it with the words “I love you” written across the front.
By the autumn of 1950, living in the Weylin Hotel on 54th Street, he was determined to die. He tried first with an overdose of sleeping pills, and failed. Again refusing hospitalization and psychiatric treatment, he agreed to have a young male nurse, Joseph Payne, stay with him in his seventh-floor room. The two of them talked intermittently through the night of October 30th. In response to my father’s request for fresh air, the nurse cautiously opened the window and stayed alert. At dawn, my father threw back the bed covers and moved toward the window. Payne grabbed him by the arms. “Joe,” he said, “let go of me. Goodbye and be a good kid.” Half out of the window, Payne had no choice. “I had to let go or go along too. I watched him go down. He landed on the curb on the 54th Street side. It was horrible.”
My father was fifty years old. I was eleven. Many years later I leaned out of the window from which he jumped, imagining the impact of the sidewalk below. The news of his death came to my mother by telephone in the small home she and I shared in Berkeley, California. I remember the phone ringing, my mother speaking. I could not hear her words clearly, but I somehow knew. I remember her sitting on my bed to explain; but—eyes that would not see, ears that would not hear—I had already created a world for myself in which not he, but some father and I, continued to live. (At a similar age—she was almost nine—my grandmother Eleanor had done the same after the disappearance and death of her own self-destructive father, Elliott Roosevelt, the younger brother of Teddy. For us both, that imagination brought both self-healing and a lifelong vulnerability to depression.)
I had a paper route then, delivering a free shopping news. It was tedious, but as I walked, folding and throwing the papers, I remember talking with God. I knew that the voice might be my own or another’s, not His. So I agreed with myself that only He could say the word "altar." That was the sign of His authenticity. Later I was fired for dumping most of the papers in a hedge.
There was no funeral, no grave. My father had asked that his ashes be scattered over the mountains of Arizona which he had loved, and where we had last lived as a family. In 1953, after my mother had married again, I found an unmarked grave in a veterans' cemetery near our home and called it his. I also found, in my mother's files, a note he had left for me saying that it would be all right if I wanted to change my name to something other than Boettiger, as others had always found it awkward to say and spell. I ran away from home that day, but returned by nightfall. I was thirteen and frightened of the dark.
Years later my mother shared with me another note he left:
My dear Johnny,
Goodbye my son. I love you dearly. I have faith and pride in you. You will make a great and useful man.
I wish I could watch you grow.
I love you.
Pops
I shall never forget a gifted hour with Grandmère—my grandmother Eleanor—three years before her death in 1962, an hour wonderfully reflective of her spirit, her sensitivity and love. I was an undergraduate at Amherst College and lived with her in New York City that summer. I came home late at night and found her in her study, the only light that of a small gooseneck lamp above her desk and the dim coals of a fire in the grate. She was working her way through a pile of correspondence and listening to Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I’d written an article on the United Nations, and had given it to her to read that morning.
When I came into her study, she got up from her desk and drew me over to the two comfortable chairs before the dying fire. She said she had read my essay and admired it. “Your writing,” she said, “reminds me of your father’s.” She went on to speak of him lovingly, telling me that he always began his letters to her, “Dear LL,” for Lovely Lady. She’d been amused and touched, and began to sign her replies to him with the same initials. She wished, deeply, that she could have done something to save my parents’ marriage, to prevent his death. It was nine years later, and the first time someone who loved me and loved him had spoken with me about him.
In the countryside of Vermont in my early twenties, I was driving a motor scooter and the greens of summer were lovely. I imagined he could see through my eyes, and I moved my head slowly like a camera panning, hoping the beauty would give him pleasure, wondering if he would know where I was. A therapist told me, when my children were young, that one day I would bury him. I thought that unlikely, but gradually, slowly, I have done so. For years, until after the last of my four children was born, I lived with the experience of my father's death so powerfully marked in my consciousness that there was no room for his life, and not enough for my own or those I loved.
If I still bear some remnant of his violent death, it is more in my blood and brain than in my heart.
In the mid 1970s, I finally met and came to know his last wife Virginia as gifted and generous, a romantic like my father, herself burdened with manic depression. Our first contact was strangely fortuitous. I was on sabbatical leave from teaching, living in a house my wife and I had rebuilt on the Maine coast, starting to write A Love in Shadow, the story of my parents and their families. I was thirty-seven. I’d been to the F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park, and was full of knowledge of my mother’s family, the extended family I’d known as my own while growing up. I had virtually no documentary evidence of the Boettigers and my father’s early years. I didn’t even know his mother’s name.
One evening during those sabbatical months in Maine I received a telephone call. The voice I heard was quiet, ethereal: “Johnny? This is Virginia.” It took me a few moments to realize who she was, but I knew of no other Virginia who would call me Johnny. She told me she was living in Key Biscayne, and wanted to find me so that she could give me the cartons of my father’s papers that had been stored in a Phoenix warehouse for over twenty-five years. “Your father wanted you to have them when you were old enough to understand.” I came to realize that she still loved him deeply, but I never learned how she had determined that I was old enough.
I did not believe I would live beyond the age of fifty. As it was, when I was fifty, half-aware that it was the anniversary of his death, to the day, I found myself chairing a panel on suicide at the graduate school in which I taught. (One of my students had taken her own life the week before.) Emerging into the parking lot after that event, I was unexpectedly beset by excruciating pain. My wife drove me to the nearest hospital. I had a small and well embedded collection of kidney stones.
I have asked myself: could my father have survived the call of his own destruction, forgiven himself, found again the path he had lost, the path of his own life? That is, of course, a natural question for his son to ask, and it is unanswerable. Like all fathers and sons, his legacy lives in me, and I have lived beyond his years in ways I know and some I probably will never understand.
It has occurred to me that the way my father chose to die had everything to do with the way he had come to live: from very high up it is very far down. He knew where he was in Chicago as a reporter during the 1920s: on a beat, on the ground, at home. After that he rose, to heights of which he had not dreamed, and he never felt again truly at home, in himself or in the world. Would that he had heard, in those years of high flight, the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Zusya who, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
