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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 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 3½ 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 nightclub comics mimicked for two decades.
The Goldfish Bowl. The Eleanor who amazed and sometimes annoyed the U.S. by her gadding in the '30s was, in many ways, a shy, naive, and often gullible person. She is still a warm and simple woman, but she is no longer as naive.
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 comfortably 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.