* * *
—
Everywhere we looked, there was need. Farther downtown, Ned opened a public kitchen of his own near the neighborhood known as the Village, and I loved him for it. I pressed my fortunate friends to join our efforts, too, calling on them as I raised money for the Salvation Army. I held a gala for the Samaritan Home for the Aged and hired opera singers to entertain my well-dressed guests. I gave teas and dinners to raise money for medical clinics. I served as a chair for the Unemployment Relief Fund and even stood by myself out on street corners to make my case to passersby, urging them to donate either time or funds.
Reporters and journalists had always been ravenous for details of my life, and so I decided that I could now use that for some good. I invited them to tour the Hoovervilles around the city with me. I invited them to visit my canteen. I invited them to see the shelters and the breadlines that had seeped into the landscape of our city streets. “Why, Mrs. Hutton, you’ve got more money than all of these poor folks out here combined,” one reporter remarked as we walked side by side down Manhattan’s ravaged Tenth Avenue.
“That may be so,” I said, looking the young man squarely in the eyes. “And that’s why I aim to keep it moving. I make it work, make it create, make it do good, and make it help in many hundreds of ways.”
I didn’t do any of it for fame or recognition. But of course I appreciated it when it came, nevertheless. Particularly when the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, invited me to the White House so that she might thank me in person. Ned was not overly fond of her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and I knew that our First Lady was at odds with her cousin, my longtime acquaintance Alice Roosevelt, but I did not bring any of that up when I met the kindly lady at the White House. Instead I smiled and returned her thanks, noting with surprise that Eleanor Roosevelt seemed a bit shy, perhaps even a bit insecure. “It’s wonderful, what you are doing for people, Mrs. Hutton,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.
“Well, the feeling is mutual, Mrs. Roosevelt.” The First Lady smiled, that wide, toothy grin I’d seen on so many newspaper pages, and then we turned together and posed for the swarms of photographers, alongside her other guests, including Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh.
* * *
—
Closer to home, another Eleanor was also demanding my attention. That spring, my daughter, my lively and lovely Eleanor, stunned me by eloping with a man she’d only just started seeing, a divorced stage writer by the name of Preston Sturges. I didn’t mind that he was divorced; I wasn’t that much of a hypocrite. Nor did I mind terribly that he was so much older than my girl, who was barely more than twenty. I didn’t mind that Eleanor had chosen him even though she had countless suitors and could have had her pick of any number of suitable, respectable—and respectful—men. Men who would have shown the decency of first asking for her hand and then marrying her in a church in broad daylight. What I did mind was that this man, who was not wealthy and yet was known as a wild spendthrift at speakeasies and other questionable night spots, had talked my girl into running away with him to the Catskills to do the thing quickly and in secret.
Many of my friends, aghast and heartbroken at the news, asked me if I would disown my daughter. I couldn’t. As hurt and disappointed as I was, I loved my girl with the very same ferocity that had gripped me on that night some twenty years earlier, when I’d held her new body, tiny and febrile, and prayed that she would not be taken from me. I couldn’t disown my Eleanor, no more than I could slide the bone out from under the skin of my arm. No matter the husband she’d chosen, I wanted my daughter in my life. I wanted to know her children, if and when she had them. I did cut off her trust and stop her allowance, but that was as much for her protection as it was for her punishment. Eleanor was bad enough with finances—she went through cash as if it were water—and I wasn’t going to have her money falling into the hands of Preston Sturges. But I would not disown my beloved President of the Mischief Club. I had been young and foolish once, as well. I had been impulsive in love and had married the wrong man. What right did I have to punish Eleanor for doing the same, even though I knew how it would end?
Chapter 29
Winter 1934
It was a difficult time to be in America. In an age when half of our country’s families couldn’t manage to put supper on the table, my wealth stood in cruel contrast, and I was as aware of that as the many reporters who continued to trail me, ravenous to snap my photograph and report on my comings and goings.