Historical Notes: F.D.R. & Lucy (Contd.)

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The romance between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer continued to be the talk of Washington. Since Jonathan Daniels revealed the 30-year romance of the President and his wife's onetime social secretary in The Time Between the Wars, additional details, waves of remembrances and a good deal of gossip have kept the story alive.

> Columnist Drew Pearson, who was close to F.D.R.'s White House, reported that Eleanor Roosevelt chanced to discover the romance "when, driving through Virginia, she saw her husband and Lucy in a parked car"—apparently in Arlington, roughly where the Pentagon now stands, in an area popular during World War I both for horseback riding and as a trysting spot.

> At her Beverly Farms home in Massachusetts, Lucy's daughter and only child, Mrs. Robert W. Knowles, revealed that her mother and father, Socialite Winthrop Rutherfurd, were wed in 1920 in a simple Roman Catholic ceremony in a private home, the unusual location being permitted because one of Widower Rutherfurd's five chil dren by his previous marriage had recently died. Lucy, her daughter said, was a devout Catholic, a fact that, together with F.D.R.'s political ambitions, is said to have kept her and F.D.R. from marrying. After Lucy's marriage, Mrs. Knowles added, she and F.D.R. "saw each other perhaps once a year."

> Many recalled the secret visit that F.D.R. paid Lucy Rutherfurd at her 1,500-acre estate in Allamuchy, N.J., in September 1944, six months after the death of her husband. Detouring on a trip from Washington to Hyde Park, F.D.R.'s private train pulled into Allamuchy around 2:30 a.m. At mid-morning he was lifted off in his wheelchair, visited with Mrs. Rutherfurd until 5:30 p.m. State Trooper Joseph J. Skelly, now 55, recalled that F.D.R., then campaigning for his fourth term, "looked very drawn."

> Although Lucy was with Roosevelt on the day he died in April 1945, at Warm Springs, Ga., the reports of the visit indicate that both she and Mrs. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, an artist who was doing a watercolor portrait of F.D.R. (and who had previously painted Lucy), left the house as soon as F.D.R. was stricken, and went to Aiken, S.C. They were not present when he died.

>Lucy's close friend, Mrs. Eulalie Salley, 82, of Aiken, who recently said that Roosevelt was in love with Lucy, but termed "ridiculous" the hint of some thing scandalous in the relationship, had, if not the last word, at least the most powerful one.

"I have had dozens of reporters descend on me since this thing came up," said Mrs. Salley, "and I have had the pleasure of telling each of them that Jonathan Daniels is a skunk."