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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!") toward 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 greatgrandchildren, 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 matter how busy her life may 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, a firm 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.
*Winston Churchill's phrase.