The Press: First Lady’s Home Journal

Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt graciously greeted a gathering of writers, critics and reporters last week at the Manhattan “editorial workshop” of Philadelphia’s Ladies’ Home Journal. Momentarily lost in the bulky herd of Rockefeller Center office buildings, Mrs. Roosevelt had arrived a little late and out of breath at her own party. Its purpose was to inform the world that Ladies’ Home Journal will appear next week with the first installment of “This Is My Story,” Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt’s autobiography. These memoirs were billed as the first ever —written by a First Lady while resident in the White House. The Journal editors promised that Mrs. Roosevelt’s writings would be “unusually frank.” The stark honesty of the first installment, released at the announcement party, made plain that this was one editorial boast which was likely to be fulfilled. Extracts:

“My mother [Anna Hall of New York City] was always a little troubled by my lack of beauty, and I knew it, as a child senses those things. She tried very hard to bring me [the eldest child] up so well that my manners would in some way compensate for my looks, but her efforts only made me keenly conscious of my shortcomings. . . . My father [Elliott Roosevelt, brother of Theodore Roosevelt], charming, good-looking, loved by all who came in contact with him. high or low, had a background and upbringing which were alien to her pattern. He had a physical weakness… Whether it was some-weakness from his early years which the strain of the life he was living [in Texas] accentuated, whether it was the pain he endured, I do not know. . . . He began, however, to drink, and for my mother and his brother, Theodore, and his sisters began the period of harrowing anxiety which was to last until his death in 1894.”

Last big job of magazine writing by Mrs. Roosevelt was “Mrs. Roosevelt’s Page,” a feature of Crowell Publishing Co.’s sturdy Woman’s Home Companion for two years from August 1933 to July 1935.* Last autumn, Mrs. Roosevelt began dictating her autobiography, carried it up to the Democratic National Convention of 1924, showed the manuscript to Franklin Roosevelt when it was done. The President suggested no changes, and Mrs. Roosevelt’s dapper literary agent, George T. Bye, made the sale not to Crowell’s Companion but to Curtis Publishing Co.’s Home Journal. Proceeds of Mrs. Roosevelt’s writing and broadcasting have hitherto been donated to various charities. What charity would receive the Journal’s undoubtedly large check (probably upwards of $50,000), Mrs. Roosevelt last week did not say.

Whoever benefits from Eleanor Roosevelt’s remuneration, publication of her recollections was a bright feather in the Journal’?, editorial and promotional cap. Since July 1935 the Journal’?, editors have been a man & wife, Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould, only such team at the head of a major U. S. magazine. Circulation success has attended the efforts of the Goulds and of Promotion Manager Richard Ziesing Jr. to keep the Journal up where it was in its great days under the late Edward Bok. Last week in the trade press, the Journal was announcing that its January circulation had hit its all-time high of more than 2,900,000 copies. The advertisement also took note of the spectacularly wrong editorial guess which led off the record-breaking January Journal: a frontispiece and full-page color portrait of Edward VIII, “BY THE GRACE OF GOD, OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AND OF THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS, KING. . . .” The Journal’s coronation story by able Writer Henry F. Pringle and its accompanying pictures of Edward VIII were made up in the autumn. Last week’s Journal trade announcement pleaded: “It took editorial courage to advertise Henry F. “ringle’s article, when some of the facts in it might turn into fancies overnight.”

*For United Feature Syndicate (United Press), Mrs. Roosevelt has written the daily column “My Day,” now in 65 newspapers, since January 1936.