By Maria Padhila
The other evening as we attempted to relax, Chris and I and a visiting relative watched Hyde Park on Hudson, the story of a love affair between Franklin D. Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Daisy. He found her a sympathetic ear and good company, and they went for many country drives down back roads, and before you know it, he was signaling to the secret service to back off and the two had become, as Daisy’s voice over puts it, “very good friends.”
The thing is, it wasn’t the only love affair the president was having; he was also “very good friends” with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. And Eleanor Roosevelt had her own relationships with women, it’s pretty widely accepted.
The odd part is, it was pretty accepted then, too, apparently. It was the sort of open secret that people with money and power could get away with in those days — being out without being out. Being out to a selected audience, perhaps.
One of my favorite authors of a little after that time, Dawn Powell, apparently had a similar “design for living,” as they were sometimes called then (after the Noel Coward play and movie). People were simply expected to accept the arrangements these eccentrics had made and move along. The media had agreements not to reveal personal details — there’s a scene in Hyde Park where they refrain from photographing Roosevelt in his bathing suit, for instance.
I’m interested in these kinds of “not real poly” relationships in history because they show how there’s a buried history of accepted non-monogamy and nontraditional relationships — one we might be able to learn from. Most say what we can learn best is what not to do: don’t lie, don’t hide, come out, be proud. But there might be ways to mine the sort of brazen casualness of those days that could be applied to now.