A Treasury of Great American Scandals (4 page)

 

The letter was one of the last communications from a wronged mother to her treacherous son. They never reconciled.

A Short, Ugly Story

 

 

 

 

In 1875 James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born Texan to become the state's governor, named his daughter Ima.

Enough said.

With This Ring, I Thee Dread

 

 

 

President Harding's father perfectly captured the essence of his son when he declared, “Warren, it's a good thing you weren't born a girl because you'd be in the family way all the time. You can't say
No
.” It was the twenty-ninth president's fatal flaw. His keen desire to please his friends, coupled with a chronic aversion to conflict, produced one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in American history, as Harding's poker-playing pals used their positions to plunder the government.
¹
Yet it was in his personal life that Harding's debilitating weakness had its most withering effects.

He was twenty-five when he married Florence Mabel Kling DeWolfe, a shrill, dowdy harridan who had pursued him relentlessly. A thirty-year-old divorcée, she was tall and mannish, and the handsome, patrician Harding never liked her. Once, when he was arriving in town by train, he saw her on the platform and tried to sneak off the other side. She spotted him, however, and shouted in her flat Ohio burr, “You needn't try to run away, Wurr'n Harding. I see your big feet.” A stronger man would have kept walking. Wurr'n got worn down.

It was a miserable marriage in which he submitted feebly to her domination. His grudging nickname for her was “the Duchess.” Her shrewish ways literally sickened him, driving him to seek refuge several times in Michigan's famed Battle Creek Sanitarium, J. P. Kellogg's crackpot resort featuring enema therapy. Inarguably, however, it was the Duchess who was largely responsible for his success. She oversaw the circulation of his Marion, Ohio, newspaper with crisp efficiency, increasing its revenues, and zealously plotted his unlikely political ascent. After his election in 1920 she reportedly said to him, “Well, Wurr'n Harding, I got you the presidency. What are you going to do with it?”

Making his own contribution to this unhappy union, Harding engaged in two extended affairs. His first mistress was Carrie Phillips, wife of a longtime friend. The brazen Carrie would often strut down the street in front of the Hardings' Ohio home, to the outrage of the scorned wife. A professor from Ohio Wesleyan University happened to be visiting on one such occasion and later recalled what happened: Carrie was standing on the front lawn talking to Harding, who was on the front porch. “Suddenly, Mrs. Harding appeared. A feather duster came sailing out at Mrs. Phillips, then a wastebasket. Mrs. Phillips did not retreat. Next came a piano stool, one of those old, four-legged things with a swivel seat by which it could be lowered or raised. Not until then was there a retreat. She tossed him a kiss and left quietly.”

The affair ended badly when Carrie demanded marriage shortly before Harding was elected president. Possessing all his love letters, she threatened him with blackmail, even though he had already given her a Cadillac and offered her $5,000 a year. Campaign manager Albert Lasker sought to avoid scandal by paying her $20,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip around the world with her husband—under the condition that they leave before the election.

Overlapping the Phillips affair was another with Nan Britton, who had developed a crush on Harding as an Ohio teenager. She was twenty and still a virgin when they first made love. Their affair continued after he became president in 1921. When Nan visited the White House, they would sneak off to a five-by-five-foot coat closet and squeeze in some sex. Once they were nearly busted by the Duchess. Five minutes after they entered the tiny space, Florence showed up, arms flailing and fire in her eyes, demanding that the Secret Service agent posted at the door get out of her way. When he refused, she ran around the corner to enter the closet through an anteroom. The agent banged loudly on the door to alert the president, who slipped Nan away. Harding had just enough time to slide behind his desk and pretend to be working when the Duchess burst in. Eventually, Nan gave birth to Harding's baby and published a lurid account of their affair.

Though the theory that Florence Harding secretly poisoned her husband in the middle of his first and only term has been largely discredited (he died of heart failure), she certainly must have felt the urge. And death, no doubt, was a blessed relief for him.

Smother-in-Law

 

 

 

 

If Eleanor Roosevelt had any inkling just how monstrous her new mother-in-law would be, she may very well have begged new husband, Franklin, to make their European honeymoon permanent. The young bride was facing a formidable lady who liked control, especially over her only child. Sara Delano Roosevelt was so domineering that she even moved near Harvard so she could keep an eye on Franklin while he studied there. Needless to say, she didn't relish the prospect of sharing her precious son with another woman. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote in her journal after hearing he had proposed to his distant cousin Eleanor in 1903.

“I know what pain I must have caused you,” Franklin wrote his mother, “and you know I wouldn't do it if I really could have helped it.” Eleanor, too, tried to be consoling about the announcement Sara was treating like a cancer diagnosis. “I know just how you feel and how hard it must be,” she wrote the woman who would torment her for years to come, “but I do so want you to learn to love me a little.”

In an effort to placate the threatened matriarch, the young couple agreed to her demand that they keep the engagement a secret for one year, during which time, Sara hoped, the romance might cool. To that end, she took her son on a cruise to distract him from his intended, and even tried to arrange a job for him out of the country. Poor Eleanor had no clue about her future mother-in-law's machinations and wrote Franklin upon his return from the cruise: “I knew your Mother would hate to have you leave her, dear, but don't let her feel that the last trip with you is over. We three must take them together in the future . . . and though I know three will never be the same to her, still someday I hope that she really will love me and I would be very glad if I thought she was even the least bit reconciled to me now.”

Wishful thinking!

Eleanor Roosevelt's letters of the period reflect the shy, awkward, somewhat needy young woman she was at the time—far from the powerful liberal icon she would become. Orphaned since she was just nine years old, the sad little girl grew up desperate for love and acceptance, a condition Sara Roosevelt recognized and of which she took full advantage. When it became clear to her that she would not be able to stop the marriage, she determined to dominate it instead. Her daughter-in-law, reluctant to upset the old lady, offered little resistance. She even took to parroting Sara's narrow and bigoted opinions in a vain effort to please her. “[Eleanor] had already lived through so much unhappiness,” a cousin later remarked to
Eleanor and Franklin
author Joseph P. Lash, “and then to have married a man with a mother like [Sara].”

Mrs. Roosevelt helped get the marriage off to a nice healthy start when she built the couple a home in New York City—directly adjoining the one she had built for herself. To make it easier for her to pop in any time she pleased, Sara had all four floors of the twin houses conveniently open up to one another. “You were never quite sure when she would appear, day or night,” Eleanor later said of the suffocating arrangement. And if living right next to her son and his wife wasn't stifling enough, Sara felt free to take charge of their household as well, leaving Eleanor with nothing to do but sulk. One time Franklin found her weeping and asked what was the matter. “I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine,” she later recalled, “one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.” Having grown up under Sara's strong thumb, Franklin saw nothing odd about the living arrangement and was bewildered by his wife's tears.

The already untenable situation grew worse when Eleanor and Franklin started to have children. For Sara, it meant a new generation of lives she could order and control. “I was your real mother,” she later told her grandchildren, “Eleanor merely bore you.” In the quest to become the adored focus of the children's lives, Sara acquiesced to their every whim and habitually countermanded all parental discipline. “We chicks quickly learned that the best way to circumvent Pa and Mummy when we wanted something they wouldn't give us was to appeal to Granny,” James Roosevelt wrote.

Good old Granny was particularly helpful when Franklin became paralyzed with polio in 1921. She resented all the aid and support her son received from his friend and political supporter Louis Howe, whom she saw as an outsider usurping her exclusive domain. When “that ugly, dirty little man,” as she described Howe, moved in with the Roosevelts to better assist them, Sara seized on the opportunity to pit her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Anna against Eleanor, who had invited him to stay. Howe was given Anna's bedroom, leaving her to sleep in a smaller cubicle. Sara quietly stoked Anna's adolescent fury over the setup. “I agreed completely with Granny that I was being discriminated against,” Anna later remarked, ignoring the fact that Eleanor was sleeping on a small cot at the time to make more room for her sick husband's care and treatment. “Granny's needling finally took root,” Anna continued. “At her instigation, I went to Mother one evening and demanded a switch in rooms. A sorely tired and harassed mother was naturally anything but sympathetic; in fact she was very stern with her recalcitrant daughter.”
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Sara's constant interference added enormously to Eleanor's stress, but it characterized their relationship for years. “That old lady with all her charm and distinction and kindliness hides a primitive jealousy of her daughter-in-law which is sometimes startling in its crudity,” wrote Eleanor's close friend Caroline Phillips. Sara rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Eleanor, whether over her choice of friends, the way she dressed, her care of Franklin, or the way she raised children. The barbs were often covered with a veneer of sweetness, which made them all the more annoying, and continued until Sara's death in 1940. Eleanor, who was by that time a well-seasoned First Lady, had grown increasingly stronger and more confident—and much less willing to take any guff from her mother-in-law.

“What ironical things happen in life and how foolish it all seems,” Eleanor wrote a friend after Sara's death. “I looked at my mother-in-law's face after she was dead and understood so many things I'd never seen before. It is dreadful to have lived so close to someone for thirty-six years and feel no deep affection or sense of loss.”

One Bad Apple Tree

 

 

 

 

“My mother is a nothing,” John F. Kennedy reportedly said once of family matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Ungenerous as this assessment may sound, it bears a certain truth. For when it came to shaping the destinies of the Kennedy children, especially the sons, Rose's influence was mostly incidental. It was Joseph P. Kennedy who, in the words of his wife, served as “the architect of our lives.” With his wealth, power, and all-consuming ambition, he built the political careers of his sons. But he laid the foundation with his own corruption.

Joe Kennedy wasn't a terrible father in the sense that he beat or abused his children. On the contrary, he was devoted to them and deeply involved in their lives—when he wasn't out womanizing or away making his millions. The problem was that he wanted to mold his sons to be men in his own image, extensions of his own ego. In this he was remarkably successful, yet with his own moral compass so hopelessly off kilter, it was a terrible disservice.

“Daddy was always very competitive,” recalled Eunice Kennedy Shriver. “The thing he always kept telling us was that coming in second was just no good.” Winning was the paramount virtue to Joe Kennedy. He had achieved great success and fortune, often through ruthlessness and cunning, and he wanted his children to be winners as well. “Not once in more than two hundred letters did he put forward any ultimate moral principles for his children to contemplate,” writes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “On the contrary, he stressed to his children the importance of winning at any cost and the pleasures of coming in first. As his own heroes were not poets or artists but men of action, he took it for granted that his children too wanted public success, and he confined himself to advising them how they could get it. All too often, his understanding about their desires and his practical advice were fruits of his experience and his dreams, not necessarily theirs.”