Poly POTUS: Another chapter in nonmonogamy’s secret history

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.

It also shows that for some people, monogamy simply didn’t work; polyamory then becomes not a new trend all the cool kids are doing but something that has always been done. Some of this was because arranged marriages and marriages for show had to be made, but often in these stories you see that genuine love among all was driving the choices.

There are funny bits where others don’t know what to make of the Roosevelt ménage; the visiting king and queen of England (the event that drives the plot) are puzzled that Eleanor has her own house where she lives with “women who make furniture.” But Daisy, again in voice over, watches the affection between the legal husband and wife and attests that they were not a distant couple at all (the story is shaped from diaries found after Daisy’s death). Odder still to think that the king was experiencing a scandal over extramarital affairs in his own family (his brother and the Duchess).

As the king and president talk, the love and energy they feel for the various women in their lives surfaces — shaped by the sexism of the times, but there nonetheless. Both have disabilities (the king’s stutter and Roosevelt’s troubles with walking after polio — and perhaps alcoholism and depression as well).

Roosevelt (played with opacity and skill by Bill Murray) tells the king how much he appreciates the women: “We don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning, but they get us going.” This could be seen as a typical “angel in the house” variety of statement about the sanctity of women, but as it’s said — while he’s pulling himself laboriously around his study, leaning on furniture — I heard it as the way one feels when, under days of chronic pain or disability, you really don’t want to keep going, but people around you keep you moving through sheer force of love.

At another point, talking about how people look to their leaders, Roosevelt says: “You think they see all your flaws. But that’s not what they are looking to find when they look to us.”

This is probably colored by my own months’-long bout with pain and despair, but to me, the more the better. The people around me do, quite literally, keep me alive.