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After Daniels' book appeared last week, a close friend of Lucy Mercer's, Mrs. Eulalie Salley, 82, declaring that "to hint that there was anything scandalous in their relationship is perfectly ridiculous," said: "Of course he was in love with her. So was every man who knew Lucy." Mrs. Salley believes nonetheless that Roosevelt would have divorced Eleanor to marry Lucy, "but Lucy was a staunch Catholic and would never have married a divorced man." As Daniels points out in his book, there were other factors mitigating against a Roosevelt breakup, including F.D.R.'s "political ambition plus the mores of the sort of Wharton world in which he was born." Furthermore, Mama seemed to be onto the romance and, says Daniels, Sara Delano Roosevelt "evidently saw threat to the standards of her family and society." In a letter to her son, she defended "the old-fashioned traditions of family life" and expressed the hope that F.D.R. would realize "that I am not so far wrong."
Intriguing Romance. The romance cooled in 1918, and then, writes Daniels, "supposedly he ended forever his relations with Lucy Mercer." In 1920, five months before Roosevelt became the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Vice President, Lucy Mercer was wed to a man 30 years her senior, Winthrop Rutherfurd, a New York society figure whose first wife—a daughter of former Vice President Levi Morton—had died in 1917 after bearing him five children. Lucy bore him one daughter.
Rutherfurd came from much the same blueblood milieu as the Roosevelts, was a descendant of both Peter Stuyvesant, the first Governor of New York, and John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts. His father was first a law partner of William H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, and later a leading astronomer. One of his own descendants, Grandson Lewis Rutherfurd, last month married Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister, in the biggest society wedding of the year.
Rutherfurd himself had an intriguing romance as a youth. In 1895 he had been secretly engaged to Railroad Heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose marriage to the Duke of Marlborough was annulled years later by the Sacred Rota of the Roman Catholic Church on the ground that she had loved Rutherfurd but had been forced to marry Marlborough by her domineering mother.