Anyone else been watching THE ROOSEVELTS on PBS this week?

[LincolnToddFan]

Gene, that's what I always thought about the Franklin/Eleanor marriage too. But it began as a love match, very much so. Unfortunately, they had needs that they expected the other to meet. He wanted an adoring audience like the one his mother gave him. Eleanor was too intelligent and discriminating to be anybody's groupie. She wanted a confidant and soul mate to make up for the loneliness and emotional abandonment that had been her childhood lot.

Franklin could not be that for her. He fell for her secretary who DID worship him and the "marriage-proper" with Eleanor ended forever, but the great political partnership began.

As for Theodore, I was always under the impression that he'd only ever loved his first wife, the lovely Alice Lee, who died giving birth to their first child. I'd always assumed that his second marriage was basically for convenience, much the way some folks say the Abe-Mary relationship happened after the death of Ann Rutledge.

Wrong! TR had a very passionate, very happy second marriage after becoming engaged barely a year after Alice Lee died. Some of his love letters to Edith have me blushing, ol' Teddy was quite the eloquent lover-boy!