First Grandson
by Jane E. Smith

My mother, who grew up on a small farm in the back of beyond in the 1930s, never forgot the day the lights came on. Courtesy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's rural electrification project, there was no more finishing homework by kerosene lamp, no more doing dishes by candlelight. And what FDR did for my mother he did for all Americans, when during the awful years of the Depression and Second World War he managed to turn symbolic night into day. It's hard not to feel a little proud driving through Hyde Park along Route 9, where the light poles sport yellow flags from which FDR's and Eleanor Roosevelt's faces beam down at passing motorists.

Curtis Roosevelt, eldest grandson of FDR and Eleanor, knows what it was like to be in the beam of the 32nd president and first lady. He lived with them, on and off, from 1933 to 1945, from the day his grandparents moved into the White House to the day his grandfather died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Those years of his boyhood are the subject of Roosevelt's memoir, due out in late October from PublicAffairs Books, called Too Close to the Sun: Growing up in the Shadow of My Grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor.

The book has been a long time coming for the 78-year-old Roosevelt, whose memory is luckily prodigious. And it might not have come at all if he had listened to his mother Anna, the eldest and the only daughter of the five Roosevelt children (a sixth died in infancy).

"My mother had a very strong feeling that the family should not be writing about her parents," Curtis says. His dialect is startlingly like FDR's; there's no r in mother. "She was with my grandfather at the Yalta Conference with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, but she never wrote about it. And she played a rather prominent role in the last year of FDR's life, but not a word from her. So I was very reticent about this. "But I'd started reading Roosevelt books—oh, twenty years ago—I think beginning with James MacGregor Burns's The Lion and the Fox, and I decided that I really had a rather different perspective of these two people, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt."

It's a perspective that is now nearly unique. "My sister and I are the only people alive who actually lived in the White House with Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt," he points out. Roosevelt was just three when he took up residence on the third floor of the White House; his sister Anna was six. Sleek blond children, Roosevelt and his sister (nicknamed Buzz and Sis), achieved a kind of child celebrity in the 1930s—nothing on the order of the Dionne quintuplets' or Shirley Temple's, but enough attention to worry their mother, who made sure her children knew as little about it as possible.

Roosevelt learned early that to bask in the reflected sunlight of his grandparents, to give the least hint that he considered himself to be someone special, was the worst possible offense he could commit, positively un-Roosevelt-like. Monitored by his mother and sister for potential uppityness or excitability, Roosevelt became a guarded boy, excruciatingly polite, whose life, he writes, was controlled by "form and style, rituals of behavior" that "dominated—and always would—my relationships with mother, father, uncles and aunts, grandmother, grandfather, and great-grandmother; literally all adults."

It was a family trait. To her grandchildren, Eleanor Roosevelt was "Grandmère," a six-foot colossus of reserve whose advice about deportment was unfailingly thoughtful and unhelpful. Roosevelt remembers a day she discovered him wailing on the second floor of the White House. Some grand-

mothers might have gathered the child in her arms, others might have asked what he was crying about, a few might have told him to hush. Eleanor was the kind of grandmother who thought for a moment, then suggested that he might want to remove himself to a bathtub, which was far and away the best place for crying.

He did, by the way. Eleanor was showing the Lincoln Bedroom to some visitors when they were alarmed by a dreadful howl, which turned out to originate from the youngster, who was expressing his sorrows in the nearest bathroom. "My grandmother," writes Roosevelt, "seemed to have felt strongly that too much loving attention could actually inhibit a child from achieving the independence needed as he or she matured." Paradoxically, the woman who tramped around the country visiting the unemployed, distressed, and disenfranchised (think of that famous New Yorker cartoon in which she drops in on two alarmed coal miners, one of whom exclaims, "For gosh sakes, it's Mrs. Roosevelt") was far less comfortable expressing grandmotherly empathy when it came to her own family.

But if "Grandmère" wasn't exactly the grandmother he might have ordered from the catalog, his grandfather fit the bill—and then some. FDR, whom young Roosevelt called "Papa," was the closest thing to a father he had, his mother having divorced his own father, Curtis Dall, whom she kept at arms' length from his two children. Kind where Eleanor was thoughtful, spontaneous where she was reserved, FDR seemed to sense just what the boy needed—surreptitious rescuing from a daunting dinner course, a model ship from his own collection, but most of all, fun.

There was the funny-page ritual, for instance. FDR preferred his daily briefings to take place each morning in his bedroom, where he held court from the bed wearing a tatty sweater, advisors like Louis Howe and Dean Acheson clustered round, memorandums scattered on the bed. When young Curtis and his sister arrived to deliver their good morning greetings, FDR would seize a newspaper, demand that his grandchildren be added to his bed, and call a halt to the solemn matters of state so that the serious business of reading the funnies aloud could begin.

And Roosevelt fondly remembers the occasion when FDR, out for a customary drive with them on the leafy roads at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, decided it would be fun to shake the Secret Service men discreetly following in their own cars. With a great deal of whooping and grinning, the president whipped his specially built Ford four-door convertible down rutted roads at speeds that induced eye-shutting and screaming in the children and did no favors for the Ford's suspension.

FDR's thumbing his nose at "form and ritual" (with enormous delight) was probably the saving of his grandson, whose identity—including his very name—was formed to the specifications of family propriety. Because the name he was born with—Curtis Roosevelt Dall—recalled the "irresponsible" husband his mother wanted to forget, she coaxed his teachers into accepting him as "Buzz"; when she married John Boettiger, she convinced her son to assume his stepfather's name. In 1948, after his mother divorced Boettiger (who killed himself soon afterward), his grandmother urged him to take, legally, the name of Roosevelt. The decision made his life no easier. As an adult, he once overheard someone ask his uncle Franklin who Curtis Roosevelt was. "Oh, he's not a real Roosevelt!" his uncle laughed. "He's Anna's son."

But bearing the name of the famous clan didn't turn out to be any less difficult for the "real" Roosevelts. "My mother and her four brothers, my uncles, none of them ever got out from what I call being too close to the sun," he says. The five of them racked up 19 marriages, 15 divorces, and 29 children. "All of them went to their graves still suffering from that phenomenon." Roosevelt suspects that it's been equally difficult for his 28 first cousins, even those who didn't live in the White House or at Hyde Park. "Franklin D. Roosevelt III is now Frank Roosevelt," he points out. "Formally changed his name. The burden of being Franklin D. Roosevelt III was impossible."

Coming to terms with his heritage has been a life's work, he says. He attributes the reason he was able to write Too Close to the Sun to his eventual escape from the heat, but writing the memoir, forcing himself to take an unsparing look at the Roosevelt family dynamics and at himself, drove that process into high gear. Writing was tough going, he says, not just because of the subject matter.

A self-described bureaucrat who worked for the Secretariat of the United Nations for 20 years, he laughs when he says he could write a perfectly good memorandum, but writing a book was a different kettle of fish. "Now I can't live without it." Ideas for the next one, a collection of essays, tumble out of him. There are the three months in 1948 he spent with his grandmother when she was pushing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the U.N. General Assembly. There's much he has to say about his grandfather's paralysis. And then there's his great-grandmother Sara Delano Roosevelt, his "Granny," who was nothing like the beast of popular legend.

Roosevelt now lives with his wife in a small village in southern France. Although he's an ocean away, when he tells me that he won't stop writing until he "pops off," I'm pretty sure he's beaming.