First Among Men

Change is the metaphor that pervades Eleanor: Her Secret Journey, in which Jean Stapleton gives an affecting and affectionate portrait of first lady and Hillary Clinton precursor Eleanor Roosevelt. Indeed the young society wife and mother transformed herself into one of the most influential people of the Twentieth Century. Despite her birth as an aristocrat, Roosevelt became a champion of the working class, the immigrant, and the politically besieged. The downtrodden in America rarely have had such a gracious or powerful spokesperson. By the middle of FDR's first term, the once-shy debutante was more popular than her husband.

By odd coincidence multiple Emmy Award-winning actress Stapleton shares a similar relationship with her most popular costar. During her reign as Edith, wife to the bigoted, chauvinistic Archie Bunker on the groundbreaking TV sitcom All in the Family, Stapleton recently told an interviewer: "He got all the hate mail. I got the fan letters." Who better, then, to bring Eleanor to life and perhaps illuminate the nature of marriage, womanhood, and public influence? Stapleton, a formidable and inventive performer, sails through the hour-and-a-half solo show as though it were no more work than a vigorous game of tennis. Her skill is too supple to disappear behind a character, however. A consummate technician, she gives a performance that falls somewhere between the miniaturism of Julie Harris and the bold strokes of, say, Colleen Dewhurst.

From a rather limited physical vocabulary, Stapleton articulates a rich expanse of human experience, transforming her own inimitable verbal oddities to fit a new face. The elongated nasal syllables with which Stapleton endowed the passive Edith Bunker somehow also lend themselves to the characterization of the bold and lively first lady. An aunt of mine who, as a child, saw Eleanor on a Washington, D.C., golf course, spoke of the event as though she had seen an angel, so great was the first lady's spell. While Stapleton isn't magical, she certainly is charismatic.

Eleanor: Her Secret Journey, adapted by University of Miami alum Rhoda Lerman from her 1979 novel Eleanor, is full of more idiosyncrasies than secrets. The first lady's family history is quite well-known, as is her heartbreak over her husband's affair with her social secretary, her social activism, her friendship with presidential advisor and intellectual Bernard Baruch, and her antagonistic relationship with Franklin's overbearing mother, Sara. Recent biographies have even reported Eleanor's dalliances with journalist Lorena Hickock and others. The only secret left might be the secret of what made Eleanor tick, something with which the playwright takes great liberties by inventing dialogue for the first lady, the president, and those around them, including uncle Teddy Roosevelt, and Roosevelt successor Harry Truman. Stapleton, who performs alone as Eleanor, also does marvelous impersonations of these characters.

The play's strength is that much of the dialogue, as well as the long monologue Stapleton delivers to the audience, is compelling and evocative. Lerman's talent for storytelling all but makes up for the rather odd chapter of the first lady's life she chooses to illuminate. The play opens in 1945, just after the death of FDR, while Eleanor is contemplating a return to private life. We hear her speak on the phone to President Truman, turning down his invitation to serve at the United Nations, then using this decision as a jumping-off point to visit some of the earlier scenes of her life, most of them set during or just after World War I.

Rather than proffering a backstage peek at the White House during the Roosevelt administration (during which time Eleanor, like no other first lady before her, maintained her own circle of advisers and politicians), the play gives us a glimpse into the life and mind of the young Eleanor, whose husband was then a mere assistant secretary to the navy. ("Make him president," his aging Uncle Theodore told Eleanor years later, when she sought advice about her husband's philandering. "That should keep him home for a while.") Like many Washingtonians, Eleanor was enchanted by the notion of the First World War. "War is passion," she asserts. "I was awakened by war; the city was awakened."

Not until she visits Paris in 1918 does she grasp war's reality. Here and in the countryside, she sees young widows begging. "With men, without men, we have to live," one of them says to her. Horrified by the evidence of carnage, including smoldering corpses left in the field, Eleanor watches women "scratch in the dirt for what is left of their lives," noting that, "shells, grenades, skulls rode in their aprons." Whether Eleanor actually said these words or whether Lerman put them in her mouth, the pictures that emerge are powerful ones. No less than the ones from the story of her return to New York with Franklin aboard a troop ship. As the boat nears the celebrations in the harbor, Eleanor watches as two army nurses throw themselves overboard, repulsed by such gaiety after surviving the horrors of the battlefields.