A Call from Hyde Park

In his Manhattan office one day last February, Otis Lee Wiese, 44-year-old editor and publisher of McCall's, got a telephone call from Hyde Park. The caller, whom Wiese has never identified, cried: "Come quick! The lady's feelings are hurt." Wiese quickly decoded "lady" into Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and took the next train north, convinced that somehow the rival Ladies' Home Journal had underestimated the power of a woman.

Editor Wiese did not underestimate her. He well knew that Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the Journal's star contributors. Her 1937 memoirs (This Is My Story) and monthly question & answer page (If You Ask Me) had helped push the Journal to its No. 1 spot in the U.S. women's magazine field (TIME, Oct. 4). He could hardly believe his ears when Mrs. Roosevelt told him that the Journal's co-editors, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, had found fault with her latest volume of memoirs and asked her to let them help rewrite it. Editor Wiese knew a golden opportunity when he saw one; he not only snatched Mrs. Roosevelt's memoirs away from the Goulds, but took her monthly answer page to boot. With a jubilant scrambling of metaphors he described his catch as "the biggest plum in the women's magazine field . . . the Journal's umbilical cord with its readers."

Last week, when McCall's hit the newsstands with the first installment of Eleanor Roosevelt's memoirs (with the author's picture on the cover) Journal Co-Editor Beatrice Gould explained why she had wanted it done over. Said she: "Frankly, we felt that the memoirs were superficial in their treatment of some matters."

A Rootless Family. Eleanor Roosevelt's first installment does have some of the rambling, gossipy quality of a club-car conversation on a long train ride. But from it emerge poignant flashes of the confusion of life with a man who had also married destiny. "As I saw it," she wrote of her reactions to FDR's first election as President, "this meant the end of any personal life for me." She blames her children's early unsuccessful marriages on the fact that in all its peregrinations the family was "not really rooted in any particular home." Surprisingly enough, Mrs. Roosevelt felt rootless herself.

As for Hyde Park, "I had no feeling that it belonged to me" because it was dominated by the President's iron-willed mother, Sara, who bossed everybody with a benevolent despotism and frequently overruled Eleanor Roosevelt's decisions. Waiting to move into the White House during the bank panic in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt worried about getting enough money to scrape by. "[Franklin] smiled and said he thought we should be able to manage . . . I began to realize that there were certain things one need not worry about in the White House."

A Push from the Publisher. Mrs. Roosevelt found there were new worries. The President was soon so preoccupied with national problems, said she, that he had scant time for the troubles of his sons. They discovered, to their resentment, that even they had to make appointments to see him. One of them who went to his father for advice was startled to have the President hand him a paper and say: "This is a most important document. I should like to have your opinion on it." The indignant son told his mother: "Never again will I try to talk to father about anything personal."

With such intimate insights into the home life of the Roosevelts, McCall's Editor Wiese hoped that his magazine's circulation (about 3,800,000) would catch the Journal's 4,522,000. To help it do so, McCall's spent $120,000 promoting the seven-article series with radio, newspaper and television advertising. Said Editor Wiese: I have no hesitancy in saying we expect this issue to be a sellout."

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