I am rewatching he 1976 miniseries biopic “Eleanor and Franklin'' and I find it very moving, much deeper than the romance and marriage of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, who were ninnies who never accomplished anything other than flirt with Fascism and spend the Fifties, as I remember it, living in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and spending their time with cafe society, one evening after the other going to the famous restaurants, nor the even more dull Charles, who cruelly married Diana even though he knew himself devoted to Camilla, the true love of her life, who he reclaimed and who by now will become the Queen Consort when he finally ascends to the throne. The story of Diana is of a rather limited woman overcome by paparazzi though perhaps more so by a reigning queen who could do little else than to muddle with her family, mostly preventing them from marrying the people they wanted: her sister and then her son and finally having to give in to Megan, the divorced American Black woman who within a few years she and her husband spurned the whole family.
No, “Eleanor and Franklin” are about deep stuff, partly because it was based on the Joseph Lash biography, he having been a good friend of Eleanor’s when she was older, and because of Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles who while mimicking some of their peculiarities, such as her high pitched voice and his overly bon honomie, were beyond that and made the two fully human beings, their lives full of flaws and makeshift events and yet determined by both of themselves to make something of themselves, the truth being that neither of them might seem the metal to achieve high achievement.
Great romances are supposed to be about great figures who gravitate to one another despite their differences or because of their similar celebrity. There was Antony and Cleopatra and Tristan and Isolde and Fred and Ginger, the last pair falling in love because they reveal themselves to be great dancers. Eleanor and Franklin, to the contrary, were two figures who had always been personally maladroit and so damaged by their childhoods that neither one of them could be expected to amount to much in life, Franklin perhaps as a landed proprietor and Eleanor perhaps the headmaster of a boarding school, much less become titans in the world, he as the leader of the greatest war ever and she as the first lady, after his death, of the world, in custody as the fomentor of human rights around the world and an inspiration for young women to enter into the professions to which they could in the past barely gain entry. As the story has been often and well told, Eleanor was an ugly duckling and awkward, who was raised by relatives when her mother died and ever devoted to a largely absent father who was a drunk ever in decline. Franklin was a mama’s boy and she dominated him even by the time he was President and certainly earlier on when she wanted him to retire to his estate after he became invalided. Perhaps a few terms as an Albany assemblyman was all that was to be expected. But the two of them persevered and even after Franklin had his affair with Lucy Mercer, not an unusual occurrence in elite society when a woman of high breeding and low income comes into the household. An analogous story is told in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”. The thing is that Eleanor was so offended by the affair that she threatened to divorce Franklin if he did not give Lucy up, which he did because he already had high ambitions for politics and a divorce, in that time, would have been the end of it.
Great romances are also supposed to be, according to Lionel Trilling, ones that break a taboo, as is the case with Romeo and Juliet, who cross over competing families, or overcomeother status differences, as in “Abie’s Irish Rose” or even sexual taboos, as when Humbert was taken with nymphet Lolita, but none of these were needed for Franklin to love Lucy or for Eleanor to persist in her relationship with Franklin after that. Rather, what seems to make a great romance is pain. Eleanor was so deeply hurt by Franklin’s adultery that she never slept with him again. Similar pain was suffered by Samson as a result of Delilah and David must have found it painful to send the letter whereby Uriah was sure to perish so as to clear up the mess created by David having taken up with Bathsheba. There may be people who find safe harbors and stay long term spouses, like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but that is different from a great love affair, which are couples that suffer pain or soon death, Carole Lombard becoming a great love for Clark Gable because she died not many years after marrying him. And Darcy and Elizabeth had mostly personal tussles between the two of them, both of them managing to hurt one another deeply before reconciling, so that even a happy outcome has to persevere over pain.
in later years Eleanor found lovers of both sexes and accepted Franklin’s sexual friendships with Missy Hand and Daisy Suckley and again, later, with now Lucy Mercer Rutherford. But by this time he had become a great man as a result of his charm and affability and his ability at political maneuvering as well as the advantages of his name and fortune. He had serious burdens to deal with and everyone around him catered to him, though Eleanor and his close confidente, Louis Howe, understood that Franklin did not reveal himself to others about his own feelings and hid himself from unpleasant distrace. Eleanor visited the burn wards to see the soldiers and Franklin did not visit the wounded. Franklin did not lose his early shortcomings as an avoider and a selfish person nor did Eleanor ever leave her school marmish rectitude when she was developing doctrines for the post war United Nations, the Declaration of Human Rights, an empty paeon to a Victorian idea of world peace when the United Nations was dead on conception because the collision between the Soviet Union and the West was the only game in town.
So why did she put up with him, become a valuable aid to him in the White House rather than move to Hyde Park as Bess Truman had done when she went back to Missouri rather than stay in Washington? Well, Eleanor had her own work to do, to influence the world and her husband, but also, as the biopic makes clear, there remained an appreciation of Franklin and Eleanor just as Abelard and Eloise retained after they separated, he to philosophy and she to run a convent. That connection endured and so could be said to be part of their love affair, just as did the one between Franklin and Lucy, where Lucy gave him up so he could become President and then was restored to him during World War II to, in part, ease his burdens. Very romantic indeed.
The matter that is intertwined with love is death. Whether Samson and Dililah, or Tristan and Isolde, or in “Aida”, love is conquered by or is required by death or has death as its apparently inevitable outcome, though not as callowly as in “Romeo and Juliet” where the two lovers really didn’t have to risk their deaths when they had only to run away to another city, lovers having escaped to other places that can serve as havens for people of mixed race or nationality pr different social classes. Death overshadows Eleanor and Franklin even if he acted jolly, Eleanor always burdened by the death of her father. There was Louis Howe, the always ill political operative who had made Franklin what he became, and Missy Hand, the secretary-lover, and Harry Hopkins, the social worker turned diplomat to Churchill and Stalin, and a child of their own who died young. And there was Franklin, of course, Al Smith sure that Franklin would die before Franklin might become nominated for President because of the ravages of his health as a result of his paralysis, and who did die in his early sixties because his heart had so been overcompensating for his lack of his limbs, every day an extreme exertion. Hitler regarded Roosevelt, contemptuously, as “the cripple”’.
Being disabled for Roosevelt, however, was different from what it is today, where the disabled can identify with their shortcomings and create their identities out of that, being blind or somewhere on the autism spectrum, as the kind of person they are, part of the deaf community or else the survivors of physical and mental traumas who understand what others don’t. Rather, Roosevelt did not embrace his hardships even if he would frolic in the Warm Springs pool with children who had experienced polio. He treated it as a fact to be managed, a true handicap with no advantages even if people like to say his paralysis deepened his character. He was already a progressive, a reformer, from early on, and that may have attracted him in the first place to Eleanor.
If pain is one measure of authentic romance, as it is for Darcy and Elizabeth, who repeatedly hurt one another before arranging terms for one another, he to be ever aloof and she to be ever persnickety, his first proposal selfish and her preference for Mr. Wicker an affront to Darcy, then another measure of romance is longevity. However much she travelled while Franklin was President, her ties to him continued, and they remained familiar if sexually distant, each pursuing their own favorites. Franklin also continued caring about Lucy, who visited the White House and that the relationship resumed as sexual, according to one of the sons, even if Anna, speaking to her mother about Lucy’s visits to the White House, claimed that the connection between Lucy and Franklin was innocent. This is not the way you deal with a woman spurned long ago, when they had been young.
What the miniseries portrays is that both of the two are burdened by their characters, never escaping from his need to devoted women and Eleanor trying so hard to be his daddy’s good girl, and that burden could have broken them but they carried on, all the great successes, he as the leading man of the entire world in an age of great men, and so as the most prominent woman in the entire world, an object of adulation till her dying day. But the burden of character is so heavy that it might lead a person to cry, and that is especially true in a romance because character is highlighted, is on display, as a way to be attracted and to bend character so as to be attractive. Might not people pine to be better or at least different people so as to accomplish a romance, to earn a romance or even to deserve a romance? People pair off because they will try or fail to be out of their league and that is a more important ranking than is academic or athletic or even political success. The true measure of success, of a life, is the private relationship, never mind the outward triumphs, or so it seems at least within romance.
Coherence ties together and tidies the elements of romance. It takes a bit of work for the screenwriter or novelist or reader or observer to connect the strands of life so that the events are seen to be considered a romance. That is because the outsider and the characters within it as well have to weave together circumstantial or coincidental events and show how, in spite of things, they have been fated to be-- even though they are clearly not meant to be. Amidst the give and take of life, like Meg Ryan having a neighborhood bookstore while Tom Hanks has a big chain bookstore in “I’ve Got Mail” something else has to be added which makes the two romantically connected, which in that movie is that the two had an anonymous correspondence and somehow their mutual rhythms of conversation, so I think, makes the real life pairing similar to the electronic one. All romances are quirky. That is what makes them an adventure, a departure into the unknown, original rather than precedented, while arranged marriages, however sensible and long lasting, do not have the sense of being invented rather than reinvented. Every romance finds a way to qualify as a romance.
To generalize and so to deal with generic types: a romance can be comic, as in “Much Ado About Nothing”, where Beatrice and Benedict have to discover they love one another even if the audience knows their mutual barbs to be as sure a thing as Fred and ginger dancing, or a romance can be melodramatic, where exaggerated emotions are expressed and filled with sadness, as in “Persuasion” and between Eleanor and Franklin. But either way, the brunt of the issue is that the romance is problematic, that it didn’t have to happen, and that seems to me to be true to life, a very valid perception of human and metaphysical nature, and far more accurate than is the tragic form, where fates, whether of personal quirks or circumstance, lead to the seemingly inevitable demise, whether to Hamlet or Lear, even if the figures struggle against their fates-- as indeed do romantic lovers, though their fates are regarded as lucky or the intervention of the gods, when tragic figures are taken as having justly been dealt with. Love is not about justice, just wonder at it having come about.Tragedy is remorseless while love responds, as Dante said, to the currents of the wind.