FDR and Lucy: Lovers and Friends

Willis does an efficient job of narrating the already well-known facts of FDR's relationship with Lucy Mercer. However, this story has been well told more than once by Geoffrey C. Ward, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Kenneth S. Davis. From a socially prominent but cash-strapped Maryland family, the Catholic Mercer became Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary in 1914, when FDR was assistant secretary of the navy. An affair between Franklin and the alluring Lucy soon developed, only to be discovered by Eleanor in 1918. Eleanor offered FDR a divorce, but his indomitable mother threatened to disinherit him should he abandon his family, and he feared that a divorce scandal would end his political career. Franklin promised Eleanor that he would drop Lucy, but through the years he repeatedly saw his girlfriend on the sly, even after polio struck, and she married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy widower with six children. On one now-famous occasion, Franklin sent a limo to bring Lucy to his 1932 inauguration. As a final insult--of which Eleanor learned soon after--Lucy was in residence with FDR at the Warm Springs, Ga.,""Little White House"" when he died in 1945. Willis, an English professor at Drury University and author of a book about Mark Twain and his wife, tells an interesting tale well, but it's not revelatory. 32 b&w photos.