Milestones, Jun. 28, 1937

Wedding-of-the-Year

(See front cover)

In tiny Christ Church at Christiana Hundred, Del. next week, retired Powder-maker Eugene du Pont will give in marriage his eldest daughter Ethel to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., third son and namesake of the U. S. President. To hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens for whom the Duke & Duchess of Windsor’s nuptials were more notorious than romantic, the union of Ethel du Pont and Franklin Roosevelt is Wedding-of-the-Year. No two families figure more prominently in the nation’s industrial and political history. And no handsomer couple is likely to exchange vows anywhere on earth this June than the tall (6 ft. 4 in.), slim, Harvard oarsman and the lissome sportswoman who becomes his bride. But position and pulchritude were not so responsible for the Roosevelt-Du Pont wedding’s capturing public imagination as the fact that it culminated as bang-up a love story as Kathleen Norris ever turned out, complete with secret trysts, irreconcilable families, desperate illnesses and a happy ending.

Love Story. The U. S. Public, which followed with unanimous interest (and mixed emotions) the two divorces and two remarriages (Anna’s and Elliott’s) in which the President’s children participated during his first term, became aware in April 1934 that Franklin and Ethel du Pont were companions. The discovery was inescapable because the pair was attending a wrestling match in Philadelphia and Franklin, objecting to being photographed at the ringside, made a flying tackle at the Ledger’s photographer and smashed his camera. “This man was taking a photograph of me,” explained Franklin, “and I don’t like to have my photograph taken.” A member of his family has since revealed that a good part of Franklin’s dislike of being photographed at Philadelphia may well have been due to his anxiety lest another, and at the time steadier, girl friend find out that he was having a date with Ethel. However, Franklin and Ethel were already old friends, having met, they now dimly recall, at a Groton dance several years before. And he was subsequently her guest at a dance at swank Ethel Walker School (Simsbury, Conn.).

Two months after the Philadelphia wrestling match episode, Franklin was a guest at Ethel’s debut at Owls Nest, the Du Ponts’ Greenville, Del. home. He subsequently visited her there and at a summer place at North Harbor, Me. When they appeared together at other debuts in Boston and Philadelphia the same year, society columnists began to predict a match. “Absolutely untrue,” snapped Father du Pont. Nevertheless, Franklin bought a roadster in Wilmington and gave his address as Owls Nest Road.

Following winter, Franklin’s sophomore year at Harvard, he and Ethel continued to play together up and down the Middle Atlantic seaboard with other rich young debutantes and collegians. Late in 1935 Ethel, aged 19, was packed off for a trip to Europe. At Harvard, Franklin devoted himself with unaccustomed energy to his studies. There were no additions to his list of undergraduate motor vehicle violations and there was a curtailment of his propensity for moodily beating up cameramen. Earlier, Franklin had caused lifted eyebrows even among the gilded youths of his own Fly Club by breaking up the Vincent Club Show, a debutante theatrical, with a rowdy beer party in the second balcony. These japes, while in the brawling tradition of the Harvard toff, had caused less spectacular classmates to view Franklin with some alarm. Under Ethel’s influence, Franklin seemed to have toned down.

When Ethel came home from Europe in March 1936, eager Franklin lost no time getting to her side. Like a princeling of storybook royalty, he was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter and dashed out to the incoming Carinthia. Newshawks spotted him at once. “No pictures,” he ordered. “I’m warning you.” Later reporters found him in the ship’s bar, wanted to know when the engagement would be announced. “I’m still in college.” complained Franklin. “I can’t be engaged. Don’t be stupid about it.” As if to substantiate the denial, that evening Ethel went to a prom at New Haven with a Yale boy—and next day unromantic House Republicans glumly wondered how much money the Carinthia rendezvous had cost the Government.

Week later Franklin and Ethel were back together in Cambridge at a Hasty Pudding Club ball. When asked if he and Ethel would permit their pictures to be taken together, Franklin demurred. “The Du Ponts would not like it, I guess,” he said. Thus, on the eve of the Presidential campaign, the Montagu-Capulet angle entered the Roosevelt-Du Pont romance, giving it a new and piquant twist.

Wilmington is as full of Du Ponts as New York is of Cohens. Eugene du Pont is a distant cousin of the biggest Du Ponts of all—Pierre, Irénée and Lammot. However, it has been 25 years since Eugene has actively participated in the affairs of great I. E. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Since 1912 he has spent most of his time farming, fishing, shooting and clipping the coupons from $10,000,000 worth of Du Pont stock. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, and while Eugene did not contribute to the $620,570 pot that other Du Ponts raised for the Republican campaign fund, he was an active member of the Liberty League which was organized to drive President Roosevelt and his ideas about industrial democracy out of the White House. There was no doubt in the autumn of 1936 that Franklin and Ethel, the young lovers, were politically star-crossed. When Alf Landon went through Wilmington. Ethel was down at the train to meet him. At Cambridge, Franklin harangued his economics class and extracurricular bull sessions on behalf of the New Deal. On Nov. 2 Romeo Roosevelt and Juliet du Pont flew from Boston to Newark, then parted—he to proceed to his very Democratic home, she to her very Republican one. She was not old enough to vote, but he was one of 27,751,612 citizens who re-elected Father Franklin. Fortnight later the story took another unexpected but happy turn when the engagement was officially announced at Greenville.

If there was ever any personal hostility to the match on the part of either family, it was decently and thoroughly submerged. But that a Roosevelt was going to marry a Du Pont was on the face of it startling news. Cartoonist Jerry Doyle of the Philadelphia Record drew his celebrated Shakespearean balcony scene. At Owls Nest newshawks questioned, cameras clicked and Franklin, who was now constrained to recognize the legitimate public interest in his romance, sighed: “This is worse than campaigning with Father.” At this point the tale of Franklin and Ethel must surely have begun to drag had not Fate come forth with another pair of dramatic wallops to invigorate it. Franklin Jr. was smitten with a sinus infection. Rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital late in November, he developed a streptococcic throat. Ethel dashed to his bedside and a new drug, Prontosil, probably saved his life (TIME. Dec. 28). Sales of Prontosil quickly increased 50%. Sick most of the winter, Franklin went to the Du Pont winter home at Boca Grande, Fla. to recuperate in February. He and Ethel then returned to Washington— where she was suddenly stricken with acute appendicitis. It was now Franklin’s turn to stand by Ethel’s bedside. When she was out of danger he went back to Harvard. During the preceding four years he had never spent much more time in the Yard than his mother had at the White House, but he managed to pass the examinations which entitled him to a Bachelor of Arts degree this week.*

Christ Church. All the Roosevelts marry young, some marry well, a few marry spectacularly. Father Franklin was not yet out of law school when he took to wife his fifth cousin once removed in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt on St. Patrick’s Day 1905. Franklin Jr. will do himself just as well, if not a bit better. Already a press bureau has been set up in Wilmington’s Du Pont Hotel to handle the story of the wedding party. Philadelphia’s social arbiter, Mrs. Edward J. MacMullan, had secretaries sending out invitations—plus a train schedule and road map—weeks ago and the accounting of the whole affair has been efficiently organized on a Du Pont big business scale. The happy couple, well-photographed ever since the engagement, has submitted to an orgy of lens-snapping and bulb-flashing (see p. 25). At Owls Nest last fortnight they amiably tennised, golfed, drove, posed in romantic silhouets for the rotogravure sections. It was said that Wilmington had paved some of its streets for the occasion and short of skywriting, nothing has been left undone to make the occasion the most popular and publicized “White House Marriage” since Alice Roosevelt married Nicholas Longworth.

Of the 300 guests invited to the wedding, those who will have the best view of the ceremony will be the Du Pont servants, who have been allocated a choir stall. Thomas Elliott, the coachman who was busy carting and uncrating wedding presents last week, and his colleagues will see the Roosevelt family seated in the first row on the left hand side of the middle aisle. Near them will be Postmaster General & Mrs. James Aloysius Farley leading a delegation of Washington officials. Du Ponts and other as yet unnamed socialites will be scattered throughout the flowerdecked church. Two ministers will preside at the altar: Rev. Frederick Ashton, Du Pont pastor in whose present house Ethel was born, and Dr. Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton School, traditional assistant at “Grottie” weddings and indispensable attendant at Roosevelt solemnities. Belgian Organist Dr. Charles M. Courboin will play the processional from Wagner’s Lohengrin and Ethel du Pont, on the arm of her father, will walk to the altar over a white satin carpet. She will be attended by her sister Aimee, her future husband’s sister Anna and five other friends and schoolmates.* Franklin’s ushers include his cousin Frederick A. Delano 2nd, his brothers Elliott & James, his brother-in-law John Boettiger and Eugene 3rd and Nicholas Ridgley du Pont, Ethel’s brothers. John Roosevelt will be best man. The music will stop and Dr. Ashton, assisted by Dr. Peabody, will perform the ceremony.

The ceremony over, there will be a dash for cars to join the 700 other guests under a spacious striped awning on the Du Pont lawn, eight miles away. Jimmy Duffy, favorite saloonkeeper of Philadelphia’s younger drinking set, will pour with his celebrated efficiency. Meyer Davis’ orchestra will play the bride and bridegroom’s favorite dance numbers, Too Marvelous for Words, Tea for Two, The Lovebug will Bite You and Night and Day. Some time during these festivities, Franklin and his bride will slip away to board ship for a honeymoon in Europe. Back home this autumn, they will settle down in a five-room cottage at Charlottesville, Va., where Franklin will go to the University of Virginia Law School. If the light-hearted scenario continues as it has begun, they should live happily ever afterward.

Born. To John Davison Rockefeller 3rd & Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller; a second child, a son; in New York. Name: John Rockefeller.

Engaged. Alexandrine du Pont, daughter of Powdermaker Lammot du Pont; to Howard Alfred Perkins; in Wilmington, Del.

Engaged. Dwight Whitney Morrow Jr., 28, son of the late U. S. Senator, brother-in-law of Charles Augustus Lindbergh; to Margot Loines; in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

Married. Cinemactors Gene Raymond, 28, & Jeanette MacDonald. 30; in Hollywood. Nelson Eddy sang I Love You Truly, Ginger Rogers was a bridesmaid, Harold Lloyd an usher and the whole thing cost $25,000.

Married. Ed Wynn, 51, comedian; to a Frieda Mierse, 25, onetime showgirl; in New York. Same day in Philadelphia, Morris Apt, 65, uncle of Funnyman Wynn, committed suicide by poison.

Marriage Revealed. Denise du Pont, adopted daughter of the late Powdermaker Alfred I. du Pont; to Harvard Graduate Student Carl Zapffe; in Cambridge, Mass.; May 22.

Died. William Patrick Connery Jr., 48, Democratic Representative from Massachusetts, co-author of the National Labor Relations Act, Chairman of the House Labor Committee; of food poisoning; in Washington.

Died. Gaston Doumergue, 73, onetime (1924, 1931) President of France, twice (1913-14, 1934) Premier of France; of an embolism; in Aigues-Vives, France.

Died. Sir James Matthew Barrie, 77, whimsical author of Peter Pan, The Little Minister, Sentimental Tommy; of bronchopneumonia; in London.

Died. Mrs. Champ Clark, 82, widow of the late Speaker of the House of Representatives, mother of U. S. Senator Bennett Champ Clark; in New Orleans.

Died. Right Rev. James Edward Cowell Welldon, 83, onetime (1898-1902) Anglican Bishop of Calcutta, onetime (1885-98) headmaster of Harrow School; at Sevenoaks, Kent, England. Among his Harrow pupils were Earl Baldwin and Winston Churchill. Bishop Welldon recently remarked, “I will probably go down in history as the headmaster of Harrow who was forced reluctantly to punish —nay, even to flog—a rebellious Winston Churchill.”

*Although he received a certificate for having completed his Naval R. O. T. C. course, young Roosevelt’s prolonged illness rendered him unable to pass the physical examination for the reserve ensign’s commission that he normally would have received this week.

*In Baltimore last week Bridesmaid Alyse Matthews Hunneman, 20, died as a result of a fall from a horse.