From the Shelves of the Paco Library

Americans’ fascination with celebrities is not a new phenomenon, although one might argue that the threshold for qualification has been significantly lowered in recent years (Paris Hilton? Please). Carol Felsenthal provides us with an excellent biography of an “old school” celebrity in Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, Alice’s birth was marked by tragedy, as her mother died two days after Alice was delivered. TR was devastated, and he attempted to deal with this loss by blotting out everything that reminded him of his wife – unfortunately including his daughter. Although later in life she would become a fanatical supporter of TR’s political career and legacy, and one of the few people whose advice he genuinely respected, the indifference shown to her by her famous father in her early years, compounded by the coolness of her stepmother, Edith Carow, whom TR married a couple of years after the death of her mother, led Alice to develop a lifelong craving for attention, and a singularly wide rebellious streak, as indicated by this description of her behavior as a teenager:

The newspapers reported that Alice had been asked to leave Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel for smoking in the lobby. When her father prohibited her from smoking under his roof, she said “very well” and smoked atop the White House roof. She drove her car unchaperoned around Washington, getting stopped at least once for speeding, at a time when automobiles, not to mention female-piloted ones, were so rare that some states had laws that required a man on foot to run ahead of the vehicle waving a red flag. She regularly bet on the horses, bragged about her winnings, and ignored her father’s increasingly angry lectures.

The book is filled with interesting anecdotes of the figures who strode across the American political stage, extending through Alice’s very long life (she died at the age of 96 in 1980). Her husband, Nicholas Longworth, was a Republican congressman from Ohio (and ultimately Speaker of the House, beloved by members of both parties) to whom Alice was married for 25 years, until his death in 1931. It was a stormy relationship, and practically an open marriage in the years leading up to Nick’s death. Nick had always been a boozer and a womanizer, and Alice’s child, Pauline, was widely believed to have been fathered by Idaho Senator William Borah (to his credit, Nick adored the child and lavished attention on her; ironically, after Nick died, Pauline was subjected to the same indifference from Alice that Alice had received from her father). Nick had very little control over his wife, but one thing he absolutely demanded was that, in view of the rumors surrounding the child’s parentage, Alice discard her original notion of naming the child “Deborah”.

There is a particularly funny anecdote cited by “Fishbait” Miller, official doorkeeper of the House of Representatives for three decades, involving Nick:

Fishbait’s favorite story has the Speaker sitting in the House library, “reading a Cincinnati…newspaper…when a brash congressman thought he’d make a splash by putting down the Speaker on his womanizing. ‘Mr. Speaker,’ he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to say something to you but I’ve never caught you when you were not busy. Your pretty bald head reminds me of my wife’s behind. Is it all right if I rub my hand across it? Then I’ll be sure.’ Without waiting…he rubbed his hand all the way across Longworth’s bald head and said, ‘Yes, it does feel like my wife’s behind.’ He looked around at his audience a bit smugly as he waited for Longworth to explode. But he didn’t. Instead, Longworth lifted his own hand and ran it across his head thoughtfully. ‘I’ll be damned if it doesn’t,’ he said.”

Within these pages you’ll find amusing (and frequently scathing) descriptions of a host of politicos, journalists, statesmen, foreign potentates, labor leaders and famous hostesses, including the long-running theme of the intense dislike that developed between the two wings of the Roosevelt family, TR’s and FDR’s (in his youth and young adulthood, FDR, interestingly, was considered a buffoonish non-entity by the TR side; “the feather-duster”, as Alice nicknamed him). Along the way, you’ll also see how the two main political parties have changed over the years. If one could go back in time, the antecedents of the present Democratic and Republican parties would be largely unrecognizable.

But above all, this book is a fine biography of a remarkably complex woman, who was so wildly popular in her youth that colors were named for, and songs written about, her (Alice Blue Gown, for example), and who personally knew every president from Benjamin Harrison to Ronald Reagan.