A gleaming open automobile awaited the famous visitor. But when she climbed in, she did not sit down. She faced the applauding crowd, bowed her head and folded her hands together in the Hindu posture of namaskar. It was a gesture, which would have horrified and infuriated a proper mensabib of the old school, and few Western women could have attempted it without seeming fantastically silly or fasntastically melodramatic. But Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, standing motionless under the Indian sky in her grandmotherly, garden-club dress, just seemed a little awkward and very earnest.
The crowd reacted with a roar of delight. It surged 15 deep against the police lines. It jostled and milled across the hotel lawns, and smashed flower pots in a wild effort to get closer. It chanted: "Eleanor Roosevelt sindabad!" (Long live Eleanor Roosevelt!)
The tumult went on. After a while Mrs. Roosevelt straightened and dropped her arms. But the cries and applause increased. Time after time she bowed her head, folded her hands. Finally, overcome either by faintness or emotion, she swayed. An aide caught her arm. She sat down, unsteadily, and the car moved off.
Eleanorean Durability
It was an amazing display, not only of the Eleanorean character and its impact upon the feverishly nationalistic (and often anti-American) East, but of Eleanorean durability. Mrs. Roosevelt is now 67 years old. She had just concluded three exhausting months as a delegate to the United Nations session in Paris. She had flown through the Middle East with rubberneck stops at Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She had prefaced her tour of India with a fast week of seeing slums and soldiery, of meeting voluble Moslem dignitaries and veiled Moslem women in the Pakistan cities of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.
Her tour has not been without moments of conflict. Her visit to Pakistan aggravated a female feud between Begun Linquat Ali Khan, widow of Pakistan's late Prime Minister, and Miss Fatima Jinnah, sister of Founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. The Begun had invited Mrs. Roosevelt to Pakistan. Outflanked, Miss Fatima stonily boycotted the famous guest and ordered the Pakistani Girl Scouts, whom she heads, to boycott her too. Mrs. Roosevelt immediately asked to call. Miss Fatima at first refused to receive her.
When a meeting was finally arranged, however, Mrs. Roosevelt was so bland about it, so pleased, so regally unaware of any intended rudeness, so utterly, utterly nice that 1) the Begun's followers were able to say that Miss Fatima was small, 2) Miss Fatima's followers were able to announce that Miss Fatima had a truly magnetic personality, and 3) both camps were left with the uneasy feeling that Mrs. Roosevelt had scored some kind of indefinable female victory over both.
Silken Pathway
Although Mrs. Roosevelt was traveling as a private citizen, she was treated almost like a visiting head of state. She addressed the Indian Parliament, was feted by scores of officials from Nehru on down. Newspapers ran her every word as front-page news. "Please", she pleaded at one point, when she was questioned about American race problems, "do not read Uncle Tom's Cabin and believe it represents the United States today."
Indian Statesman Sir Benegal Rau spoke of her as a U.S. phenomenon comparable to Niagra Falls. In Bombay an admiring Indian textile worker spread 100 yards of silk in her path up a tenement district stairway. She went right on being Mrs. Roosevelt. She "performed namaskar" repeatedly, once giving some wealthy hosts the jim jams by using it to salute the footmen at dinner. She crept into native mud huts, worked an ancient spinning wheel in New Delhi, accepted a handmade revolver from Khyber Pass tribesmen, showed some Pakistani teenagers how to dance the "Roger de Coverly."
In the seven years since she has become the world's most famous widow, Mrs. Roosevelt has hardly been still a moment: kind, literal, awesomely helpful and endlessly patient, she has trotted up & down the stairways of the world, year after year-straightening its curtains, eyeing its plumbing, and occasionally admonishing the landlords of those political slums behind the Iron Curtain, in sharp but hopeful tones.
Sense & Sensibility
Her own countrymen are divided on the question of whether or not Mrs. Roosevelt is a woman of sense; but even the hardest-shelled Republican or deepest-Southern Democrat would probably agree (with oaths) that she is a woman of sensibility. Ever since she first appeared on the scene as the faintly ridiculous but somehow not altogether laughable national hostess - and on through the accelerating days when she became the galloping delegate of the New Deal and advocate of its social (and socialistic) suggestions - her calmly ladylike assumption that she is on the side of the reforming angels has turned her opponents livid with impotent and incoherent fury. They are positive that something about her is just plain wrong, but they can't quite put their finger on it. In their phrase (severely edited), she doesn't make sense. One of her favorite expressions, which appears often in her conversation and in her columns, is "I feel..." Not "I think," but "I feel." It might be her motto.
The harsh limelight of publicity beats upon her as fiercely as it ever did during the years of the New Deal. Her vigor has prompted her friend & admirer, Anna Rosenberg, to call her "the jet plane with the fringe on top." But Mrs. Roosevelt has changed during her years alone. For one thing, in her appearance. Although she has aged visibly, more than one fascinated Frenchman, watching her speak this year in Paris, murmured: "Madame Roosevelt is becoming beautiful."
This new look stems, in part, from an automobile accident which occurred one day in August 1946, as she was driving down New York's Saw Mill River Parkway on her return from Hyde Park. Her car collided with two other automobiles. Mrs. Roosevelt's face was smashed against the steering wheel. Four other people were also injured.
Friends who saw her afterward recall that Mrs. Roosevelt-a stoic who feels deeply that one pays bills on time, keeps engagements on the minute, and does not give way to emotion - paced the floor slowly with tears squeezing slowly from between her eyelids. She was not crying for herself. "I went to sleep," she said bitterly, "It was the sound of the motor. Those poor people!" When Major Harry Hooker, her husband's old law partner, cautioned her in some alarm that there was nothing to be gained by advertising the fact that she had dozed at the wheel, she cried "But I did! That's what caused it all."
She confessed her negligence at great length to reporters and the police --practically forcing authorities to take away her driver's license for 3 1/2 months, and prompting some nameless wag to erect a sign at the highway's edge :MRS. ROOSEVELT SLEPT HERE. But the aftermath was a happy one. Everyone recovered. Mrs. Roosevelt's protruding front teeth were broken in the accident; the porcelain caps which replace them subtly changed her whole face and gave her a sweet, warm and gentle smile.
In seven years she has gained weight and now has a comfortable and matronly air. Frequently, these days, she allows herself the luxury of red fingernail polish. But Mrs. Roosevelt is still not a woman who cares for frippery - she bought only one dress, an evening gown, this winter in Paris, and then only because she forgot to bring one from New York. She uses no lipstick and no powder, and keeps nothing on her dressing table but a big, black, old-fashioned comb, a hairbrush and a faded picture of F.D.R. as a young man.
The changes her admirers most note in her are more than skin deep: a serenity, a confidence, and at times, an incisive if grandmotherly air of authority, which are startling to those who have not seen her since her days in the White House. Her voice is pitched lower, and she seldom breaks into the shrill upper register in which her early speeches were delivered. She has almost lost the nervous giggle, the nervous gestures which the nightclub comics mimicked for two decades.
The Goldfish Bowl
The Eleanor who amazed and sometimes annoyed the U.S. by her gadding in the '30's was, in many ways, a shy, nave, and often gullible person. She is still a warm and simple woman, but she is not longer as nave.
In fact, she is one of those rare humans (like her husband and her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt) who have a talent for public life, for living naturally and even comfortable in the public gaze, like a goldfish in its bowl, and for instinctively evading female critics, enraged politicos and other predators with little more than a lazy movement of the fins. Like a good dinner hostess, she is able to dart into controversial subjects (birth control, Senator Joe McCarthy, racial segregation) and out again, getting her strong opinions across in a deceptively mild way. She has a gift for the unquotable sentence: those who attempt to pin her down on the evidence of her words find her vagueness irritatingly artful. It is - but the manner has by now become second nature to her. She knows what she wants to say, and when to punctuate it with a smile, an irrelevance or an ambiguity.
Many an editor presumed that her newspaper column would die a natural death when she left Washington. But "My Day", the chatty daily diary of her travels, opinions and dinner conversations is currently running in 75 newspapers (at its peak it averaged 90) in the U.S. and abroad. Mrs. Roosevelt writes a monthly question and answer page for McCall's magazine. Before this year's U.N. session, she was doing five radio interviews and a half-hour television show every week.
She has earned a small fortune: in 1949-50, her biggest year, her gross was $250,000. During her years in the White House she gave all her earnings to charity. She still contributes heavily. But although she is a wealthy woman, having inherited more than $1,000,0000 from the Roosevelt estate, she tries frugally to preserve her capital. Her trip to India was no exception: she did not undertake it until Harper & Brothers had agreed to publish a book of her impressions and thus, in effect, underwrite her expenses.
The First Lady
Amidst all these endeavors, she has also become an international figure of tremendous influence and prestige, both as the widow of Franklin Roosevelt and, increasingly, as a delegate to the U.N. To millions in the Western world, who react with uneasiness and doubt to the U.S. atom bomb and U.S. emphasis on material success, she is a symbol of hope, sanity and human dignity. Her earnest idealism, which many of her own countrymen sometimes find a little absurd, is eminently reassuring to great masses of people who are exposed to Communist cries of American warmongering. So is her habit of attacking complex problems in hopeful, homely terms. She is received abroad as a sort of senior "First Lady" of the U.S. At home, the Gallop poll for the past four years has found her the woman Americans admire most.
To many of her girlhood friends, this kind of adulation and the unique achievements which have prompted it are added proof that the Roosevelts, man & wife, "betrayed their class" for the bauble of fame and the doubtful company of reporters, social workers and ward heelers. "Oh," says Mrs. Roosevelt with a smile - a tolerant, contented smile which recalls the ever-righteous crusades of the New Deal - "they think I am most peculiar." She adds "I still see them-occasionally they find it interesting to have a peculiarity to dinner."
Actually, Mrs. Roosevelt's career has been a triumphant assertion of the code of a half-forgotten 400-of that fortlike social world which existed in New York when sleek carriage horses still clopped along Fifth Avenue, when her "Uncle Ted" was President, and when World War 1 had yet to create the disconcerting erosions of the speakeasy age. When she abandoned that world she did not abandon its ways. Its aristocratic accents, its manners, its almost arrogant denial of ostentation, its odd-blindness-even, it seemed, a lady's instinctive feeling that feminine candor would not be betrayed-all went with her to the union hall, the youth forum, the press conference. They were not easily transferable commodities. But the, little about Eleanor Roosevelt's life has been easy; her autumnal blossoming is also the triumph of a shy, lonely ugly duckling. "I must have been very sensitive, and with an inordinate desire for affection and praise -perhaps brought on by...my plain looks...,"she wrote of her childhood. She had a child's uneasy knowledge of tragedy even before she was orphaned at ten; her father had a "weakness" - drink. His wife died before him, and "My grandmother did not feel that she could trust (him) to take care of us. He had no wife, no children, no hope!"
She had few playmates. She began her days with character building sponge baths. She was tall and awkward and at Christmas dances she had to wear dresses cut inappropriately above the knee by adults who knew best. When she was 15, for fear of too much gaiety, she was sent to Mlle. Souvestre's French school (every girl confessed before dinner if she used an English word during the day) outside London.
She felt like an alien when she came home three years later to struggle in dutiful, unhappy competition with the belles of New York society. But when she was 19 her second cousin Franklin Roosevelt proposed marriage-a marriage approved by adults on both sides of the family. She rejoiced, as only a plain girl can, in a handsome husband, solemnly sure that the world was hers at last.
The Millstones
But form the beginning she found herself overshadowed by competitors. "Uncle Ted" attended her wedding, and the bride and groom found themselves standing alone at the reception while the guests crowded up to hear the President tell stories. After the honeymoon her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, treated her like a child. The old lady controlled the family purse strings; she hired the bride's servants, and ruled the bride's house and husband: Franklin always deferred to his mother. A longtime acquaintance remembers Sara Roosevelt saying before company, in thoughtless brutality: "Eleanor, don't act the fool!"
Then Franklin entered politics. The awful cigar smoke of strange men drifted between them.
Between these millstones, the character of Eleanor Roosevelt was slowly shaped. She strove with almost panicky dutifulness to be a good mother and a helpful and understanding wife. Doggedly, despite shyness, awkwardness and naivete she also strove, as the decades passed, to break out into a world of her own.
In a sense, her husband's election to the presidency was a triumph for her - after his attack of polio his mother had done everything in her power to keep poor Franklin at home by her side in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But Usher Ike Hoover recalled Eleanor Roosevelt's first day in the White House - he discovered her hard at work tugging furniture into new positions, as if by that housewife's gesture she could make a home out of the halls in which Lincoln and a million tourists had wandered.
She had already ventured experimentally into the world of unions, of feminist movements, of the "ill fed and ill housed." She began the incessant traveling, the incessant high-voiced speeches, the incessant do-gooding of the New Deal.
Pretty Harsh Things
If statesmen should be tried retroactively for their past mistakes, and perhaps shot - they are, in other countries - Mrs. Roosevelt should certainly not get off scot free. As the semi-official advance woman for the New Deal, she consorted with Communists, she was an enthusiastic member of many Communist-steered organizations, for years she must have been regarded by the Communists as one of their most prominent and influential cat's paws.
Like many Americans, she was so preoccupied with the evils of Hitlerism that she naively failed to ask herself whether the allies were as evil as the enemy - or more so. Asked the difference between Communism and Fascism, she would say things like: "Though Mr. Stalin is a dictator, his efforts have been to help the people prepare themselves for greater power." In the late '30''s she became a godmother to the American Youth Congress, lent it her name and gave it money. Then, hearing that it was Communist-inspired, she called some of its leaders to her White House sitting room, and told them "If any of them were Communists I would quite understand, for I felt they had grown up at a time of such difficulty...However, I felt it essential that I should know the truth." Everyone present of course denied Communist connections. "I decided to accept their word, realizing that sooner or later the truth would come out."
Even after "I was fairly sure that they were becoming Communist-dominated," she sponsored their convention in February 1940, at a time when Hitler and Stalin were buddies, and the A.Y.C. was denouncing her husband as an imperialist warmonger. Even at this late date, she invited the leaders to stay at the White House, begged Cabinet wives to take others in, got the Army to provide cots for the rest at Fort Myer, Va., and asked Franklin to address them from the south portico of the White House. "Franklin's intent to be kind and understanding was evident, but he felt obliged to say some pretty harsh things." They booed. She later wrote: "Although I could see how the young people felt on this occasion, I was indignant at their bad manners and lack of respect for the ...President." Later that year, she summoned a few of the leaders to Hyde Park for a night and ""old them plainly that I was no longer to work with their organization. I promised, however, to give them a small monthly contribution for their work among dispossessed sharecroppers."
It is characteristic of Mrs. Roosevelt that eight disillusioning years later, she could write in This I Remember: "I have never felt the slightest bitterness towards any of them," and with her unflagging ability to see the brighter side, would regard the whole episode as "of infinite value to me in understanding some of the tactics I have had to meet in the U.N."
It is an indication, however, of the peculiar hold she has had on the U.S. heart that not even Joe McCarthy has suggested that Congress investigate Mrs. Roosevelt. The congressional imagination, indeed, would pale at such a possibility.
She was 57 when her mother-in-law died. She was 60 when the bleak news of Franklin Roosevelt's death came from Warm Springs. For 40 years - years she could not have imagined as a bride - her life had been irrevocably part of theirs. She was a lonely widow. But the 40 years had pushed her far out the rushing stream of events. Harry Truman asked her, as custodian of the Roosevelt name, to serve the U.S. in the United Nations.
The years since have made Mrs. Roosevelt (to the U.S. delegation she is simply "Mrs. R") a sagacious and useful member in the U.N. struggles. When she feels called upon to chide the Russians, she never treats them as baleful bogeymen but simply as naughty - and rather ignorant - boys. She does not hide her amusement at the fact that the most exalted Soviet official dares not speak privately with a Westerner without another Russian beside him to eavesdrop.
"The most intimate thing (Russian U.N. Delegate Alexei Pavlov) ever said to me, "she says, "was this year in Paris at my apartment in the Crillon. He brought Mr. Borsilov along, and as they were leaving, Mr. Borsilov lost his hat behind a chair. We walked to the door as he was searching for it, and Mr. Pavlov whispered quickly to me: Do you like Tchaikovsky? I do!"
Does Mrs. Roosevelt, at last, understand more about the Russians than the hopeful fact that some of them have a secret and subversive passion for Tchaikovsky? Does she really understand what they are up to? Does she know, with her feelings as well as with her mind, that Russia is a terrible and terrorized police state, ruled with complete cynicism by "a gang of ruthless and bloody-minded professors"? That is a question which still troubles those who find it not difficult to resist her charms.
Yet, just because she is as she is, Mrs. Roosevelt is highly effective in the U.N. debates. Her Republican partners in the U.N. are the first to acknowledge that she can often be more effective than they - and not simply in answering a Malik or a Pavlov with the right arguments, but in winning the sympathy and the support of the Indians or the Arabs or the Indonesians. Before lunching recently with Iraq's Mrs. Bedia Afnan, a woman often stiffly opposed to the U.S. position on human rights, Mrs. Roosevelt said: "She will not trust me, or believe what I say. But she will turn it over in her mind, and, perhaps, in time..."
Not the least of Mrs. Roosevelt's effectiveness in the U.S. cause stems from the simple fact that she is a linguist. She has broadcast in German, Spanish and Italian. She speaks facile though slightly accented French; at the behest of the State Department last winter she not only delivered a weekly Sunday radio talk from Paris to audiences in France, Belgium and Switzerland, but was able to make them respond with a surprise volume of mail.
She is almost constitutionally unable to resist friends or acquaintances who plead for her time or her help. When the late Serge Koussevitsky urged her to do a recorded version of the musical fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf, she hesitated only long enough to be sure he was serious before hustling obediently off to Tanglewood to synchronize herself with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Look Out, Little Bird!
The result, to say the least, was unique: Republican dowagers have been refreshing their souls ever since by putting on the records, leaning back with smiles of dreamy malice, and listening to Mrs. Roosevelt and the wild, shrill piccolos, excitedly warning a little bird that the cat is creeping ("Look out!") towards its perch. Mrs. Roosevelt is content to know that her grandchildren enjoyed her performance immensely.
Her preoccupation with "the family" is fully as great as with world affairs, and she stays in constant and benign communication with all its branches. The chore involves writing and sending gifts to five children, 18 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, assorted cousins and nine daughters-in-law and ex-daughters-in-law. But by awesome attention to dates, awesome budgeting of her time, and by sitting up in bed to write letters almost nightly before going to sleep, she manages it, no mater how busy her life must be.
Few mothers have been criticized more bitterly, publicly, and privately, than Mrs. Roosevelt, for their sons' scrapes, business deals and divorces. Few have been more fiercely loyal to their children. The Roosevelt penchant for wholesale wife-shucking and remarrying has never shaken her firm belief, founded perhaps on her own youthful resentment at domination by her elders, that children should lead their own lives.
Restless, thrice-divorced son Elliott - who announced last month that he is moving to Cuba with his fourth wife, perhaps to pick up a radio network, now that his father's old admirer Dictator Fulgencio Batista, has taken over again - is Mrs. Roosevelt's favorite son. She addresses him, with maternal pride, as "Darling". She was delighted when he formed Roosevelt Enterprises, which has largely devoted itself to selling her services as a radio and television personality.
Eleanor Roosevelt's busy life is lived in a satisfying and exhausting, self-imposed and all-inclusive sense of duty. Duty had taken her to India - and duty had prompted her to stop off conscientiously in Bangkok, Singapore and Manila on her way home. When she arrived in San Francisco this week after five months abroad, she planned to turn temporarily from gallivanting - although not simply to rest. She had to hurry East to entertain her old friend Queen Juliana of Holland, and then, after settling down at Hyde Park she had to dictate her book. She planned nothing but a furlough. As long as she has the strength, Eleanor Roosevelt will be laboring over the horizon, shaking hands energetically with reception committees and discovering hopeful evidence of a better world to come.