Best of Nan Brooks: Travels with Eleanor -- The Beginning

We were the last family in our neighborhood to get a television in around 1951, when I was about nine years old.  I was home from school when the big console with the little screen arrived and the delivery guy plugged it in. A fuzzy black and white image of Eleanor Roosevelt appeared which was thrilling. I knew three essential things about her:

1.  She worked at the United Nations and the United Nations worked for peace in the world. I wanted peace in my world.

2.  Eleanor Roosevelt was ugly. Everyone said so, especially my father, who hated the Roosevelts almost as much as he hated prohibition.

3.  I looked like her with my crooked teeth and odd chin. I knew I’d never be pretty or famous, but maybe I could do some good like she did.

My fascination with Eleanor Roosevelt has never wavered over almost 70 years. Over those years, I read everything I could find about her. 1984 was the one hundredth anniversary of her birth, so there was a commemorative postage stamp and a few new books appeared. I was in undergraduate school in my early 40’s and had little money, but I bought them all. I bemoaned the lack of a feminist analysis of her life and work, which would come with Blanch Wiesen Cook’s three-volume biography beginning  in 1992.

In the spring of 1985, a few Indiana University faculty members and various local artists decided to create a summer arts festival. I think it was an attempt to imitate the Spoleto festival in South Carolina and that the success of the National Women’s Music Festival in town must have been an encouraging sign. In any case, our theatre company was asked to perform. We needed a new work that would be suitable for families. By 1985 it was clear that I was largely responsible, but of course, I wouldn’t do it alone.

The theater company, called WomanShine, had formed in the late 1970’s as part of a fundraiser for a feminist counseling center and bookstore in Indianapolis called the Woman’s Touch. The one-time-only production became a theater company and eventually over two hundred women participated in creating various plays, musicals, and anthologies. Women learned acting, directing, writing, marketing, lighting, stage management, how to collaborate, and much more. When feminists from anywhere else heard we had a feminist theater company in Indiana, they told us it was impossible. But we kept going and toured to churches, colleges, and festivals. Touring was a fancy way of saying we squeezed set pieces, wardrobe, four women and even stage lights into a '77 Pinto station wagon. We made barely enough money to buy gas and print programs. We were all volunteers and we were mighty.

In 1985, the several members of the group discussed script possibilities for the new festival work and realized this was our opportunity to teach peacemaking by teaching history with a focus on women. The goal was to be entertaining and informative, which could happen with good storytelling. 

I began to research Jane Addams and the other women of Hull House in Chicago with the idea that we would focus on acting locally to serve minorities and the poor as a way to create justice, the foundation of peace. There were fascinating stories about the Hull House women and just the right number of women in the WomanShine company to play them. But one by one, company members began to bail. They were finishing doctoral dissertations, preparing recitals, moving out of town, moving into new relationships that needed attention, moving on with their lives. 

At a group meeting in my apartment, they urged me to do a one-woman show. I was reluctant for several reasons, my fear of becoming an arrogant would-be “star” among them. “But who would I play?” I asked with some petulance. 

My friend Jane Winslow said, “Have you looked at the pile of books beside your bed lately?”  

I said, “Eleanor Roosevelt?” as the light began to dawn. Someone else said, “Now, go look in the mirror.”  That settled it.

With no resources to travel or otherwise research primary sources, I simply started reading and re-reading everything I could get my hands on. I found films in the local Indiana University archives and film library. I grappled with whose version of ER’s life to use. There were many opinions about who she really was, whether she was a lesbian, whether she’d had affairs with various men, just how she and FDR really got along, what secrets she kept. Eventually, I decided to rely on the woman herself and I had a wealth of material to use.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote more than one autobiography, a weekly column beginning in her White House years, and a number of speeches and magazine articles. She was interviewed many times. I was a woman obsessed. I sat on my friend Anne’s porch in a small town nearby with a borrowed IBM Selectric typewriter, a pile of books full of yellow sticky notes, and I wrote.

A mere two weeks before opening night, I had a script ready to read to the WomanShine women and a few friends. It was pretty much a cut-and-dried autobiographical piece, a whopping three and a half hours long, and depressing for at least the first hour. With great kindness, the women told me the script had potential.  But I needed to set it in a time when someone close to her hadn’t just died – not particularly easy because she endured so many losses and disappointments. It had to have more humor, especially when addressing her miserable family life, and it needed to be within the age range I could play. Besides the requisite cutting of the script, I needed a clearer point of view and to know who Eleanor was talking to and why. I went to work with a red pen, scissors, and tape. One day, the image of a red-haired young reporter came to me – she was sitting in a straight-backed chair with a tape recorder beside her and a notebook and pen in her lap, looking fascinated.  She looked a lot like Holly Near – and I realized she was Eleanor’s listener and that Eleanor found her charming. It was a start.

In the generosity of collaboration, Jane, and Pat Dunlap went with me to watch films of Eleanor. Watching her talk with wounded men in World War II military hospitals, seeing her laugh with her friends, hearing again and again about how she fought for the marginalized people of the world, I fell in love with Eleanor Roosevelt all over again.

Now we were down to ten days from opening. A few of us had figured out a set and begun to gather furniture and props. Against all odds, I’d found the perfect dress at the local thrift store along with jewelry (fake) that looked like what she wore in many photos, and realized that there were supernatural forces at work. That folderol about “follow your bliss and synchronicities will happen and you will have great success” just might be true. Or not.

My thrift store finds matched this jewelry, ER's favorite rings and watch. 

I still needed to remember the lines perfectly, the bare beginning of creating a character. In rehearsal, Jane and others pointed out that I didn’t have Eleanor’s physical presence. I walked like myself, not like her. We all tried to imitate ER’s walk, but we couldn’t do it.  I knew from her own accounts that her feet hurt most of the time in later life, but I was still struggling until the day I went back to the thrift store and found a pair of shoes perfect for the year of the play. I wore them to rehearsal, painful though they were and when Pat walked in she said, “Oh! You’ve got the walk figured out.” All I’d needed were uncomfortable shoes.

NOTE: If you'd like to keep going with the "Eleanor" series, you can go to the by-author page of the blog's first year by clicking here