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Orphaned at ten, Mrs. Roosevelt was left some $30,000. She is a partner in Manhattan's Todhunter school for girls. Profits go back into the business, which is operated by her boon companion, Marion Dickerman. With her other inseparable friend. Nancy Cook, a tousle headed. unfeminine. effective woman who often dresses mannishly and smokes cigarets in a holder at the side of her mouth. Mrs. Roosevelt operates Val-Kill shops, an enterprise which manufactures antique reproductions at Hyde Park. This is a non-profit concern. In the past five years Mrs. Roosevelt has picked up some $25,000 from endorsements, radio talks and writing. The Roosevelts maintain a summer place at Campobello. New Brunswick, another country place at Warm Springs, Ga., and their Manhattan town house. Hyde Park belongs to the President's mother, as does the Roosevelt fortune. The Franklin Roosevelts are not rich. It therefore behooves Mrs. Roosevelt to live in the White House within the $88,750 salary paid the President by the Government. To this end she has reduced the staff from 32 to 23.
Her friends credit Mrs. Roosevelt's austerity to her orphaned childhood. Her Grandmother Hall raised her at Tivoli, on the Hudson. Mrs. Roosevelt recalls that twice a day she was expected to walk up & down a road on the estate with a cane hooked under her arms behind her back. She was two and her sixth cousin Franklin was four when they first met. Franklin rode her on his back. Says she: "I was a solemn child without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth."
Public Character. Born of a strain that feels perfectly comfortable in the public eye, and prepared for the White House spotlight by four years in Albany's executive mansion, Mrs. Roosevelt has let the Press in on her most private comings & goings to an unprecedented extent. Her prodigious publicity has had several effects: to pain people who think the First Lady should be her husband's wife, not a front-page solo character; to gladden people who think it is fine that the country has a woman at its head as vitally interested in almost as many public movements as her husband; to reveal Mrs. Roosevelt, either as publicity-glutton or genuine, warm-hearted woman, in hundreds of little acts of graciousness and trouble-taking— visiting a sick White House correspondent at the hospital, taking for an automobile ride a state policeman hurt on duty, going to see her son's divorced wife and their baby (to whom she did not take a present because, "I don't believe in giving presents to babies who already have everything they want.")
Her impulsive bobbings in & out of the President's office may seem incorrigibly undignified to her husband, but they make good copy. From her Monday press conferences, which she innovated, comes many a little human interest yarn. Fortnight ago she started another of her countless crusades, this time against poisonous cosmetics. In the Department of Agriculture's "chamber of horrors" she had discovered two photographs of a horribly blinded victim of "Lash Lure." Showing them to the ladies of the Press, she pressed the pictures to her breast and exclaimed: "I cannot bear to look at them!"