Doomed to Fail - Ep 4: Empty Without You - Kelly Anne Bates & Eleanor Roosevelt

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

We are on Episode 4! Today Farz takes us across the pond to hear the story of the horrifying murder of Kelly Anne Bates & Taylor cries about the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and her girlfriend Lorena Hickock. Join us on this rollercoaster from an absolutely unthinkable way to be murdered - to a non-traditional love story that might break your heart.If you or someone you know needs help in a domestic violence situation -National Domestic Violence Hotline (remember internet history cannot be completely erased, press escape twice to leave the website quickly - or use the hotline phone number below)1-800-799-7233 Follow us on Instagram & Facebook!  @doomedtofailpodhttps://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpodPhotos of Kelly Anne Bates and James Patterson Smith via All things InterestingPictures of ER and Hick in the public domain - with exceptions of Hick from the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project.No Ordinary Time - Doris Kearns GoodwinEleanor Roosevelt Volumes 1-3 - Blanche Weisen CookEleanor & Hick - Susan Quinn Eleanor and Franklin - Joe LashThis I remember - Eleanor Roosevelt Diamond Sutra Books Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail with a podcast where we tell you, shit. Keep it in. Keep it in. Welcome to Doom to Fail. the podcast where we are going to call ourselves a comedy show, but we're probably going to make you cry and gross out on this episode in particular.

I'm Fars, joined here by Taylor when co-host. Hi, Taylor. Hello, good morning. Good morning. And we are on to our fourth episode. We launched last week, which was absolutely fantastic. Thank you to everybody who has been listening and commenting and giving feedback and everything else. It's been absolutely tremendous. We're up to the three digits in terms of listeners. So it's a

slow roll, but we're getting there. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. I think that I've gotten such good feedback from people. So really excited for everyone who's listened. I know it's hard to listen to a new podcast and get used to the hosts and all that stuff. So super happy. I wrote down some notes that I am sorry for all the ums, which I just said an um and I'm so sorry because there's so many, especially episode two. Also, in episode two, says South Korea when I met North Korea, and I want to die and I'm mad at you for not telling me that I was wrong. So I need you to be more on top of me. And I also want to note that we're not on Apple podcast yet. Is that still the case? We are. We are now. We are now. Sweet. So we're getting there. Things are coming together.

And then I also want to talk about the dude from my past who listened to the first one and tried to get me to convert to Christianity. That was a ridiculous. exchange that you sent me? He said, among other things, this man who's been hitting on me my whole, for like the past 15 years, this married man was like, you should read the Bible before you review it, like saying that like, you know, I'm being a jerk for talking shit about about it, about it because I haven't read it. And he suggested an app where I could go like verse by verse. And I was like, there's like 200 fantasy books I want to read before I'll consider the Bible. I'm 30 pages into Dune. And I have to

reread the Harry Potter series and pretend someone else wrote it. So I have a lot to do in life is short. So that's a hard note for me. Hard note. I hope he hears that your co-host and one of your closest friends, I was about to go get an upside down pentagram tattoo like a week ago. But I only did it because I literally went and got like this chest thing done. I just noticed that.

Wow. Yeah, I just got that done and was like, maybe I should just chill out on the tattoos for like maybe a few days. But upside down, pedigram tattoo is coming. I already got a place. I already know the artist. And we are not reading the Bible. We were doing that instead.

Yeah, I'm coming back to Austin and getting a match to one. Oh, yeah. That's a plan. Cool. Well, yeah, thank you to everyone. So much. Thanks. So much.

Thank you. And Taylor, do you want to maybe kick us off with what we're drinking today? Yes. So our non-alcoholic drink this morning is the physical act of, hiding the key to your husband's liquor cabinet during prohibition. So just it's prohibition. You don't want your husband to be drinking, so you're hiding the key to the liquor cabinet. And then our alcoholic drink is a beer called Boddingtons from a brewery in Manchester,

and you are going to talk about why we're going across the bond. I'll let you start. And we're going to start off with the true crime side of it. Taylor, this is a really bad story. No. This is really bad. That's why I was thinking of myself that, I can, we can only barely even refer to ourselves as a comedy podcast at this point,

because I'm going to go into the details of what's going on here. So I'm going to start at the top by saying this kind of thing should trigger everybody, obvious. But I know that there are some folks who have gone through domestic violence, their personal life. And if it hits particularly hard for you, then I would advocate skipping ahead to your section, Taylor, and just skipping mine entirely this week because it's going to get pretty bad. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's start by going to the subject of today's episode.

The two parties to this were Kellyanne Bates and James Patterson Smith. Just to tell you the flavor of what we're getting into, I only heard of this story through our mutually favorite podcast. Last podcast on the left, shout out to those guys. During their episode, Worst Ways to Die. Ooh. That's how this story would surface. So, again, disclaimer, that's what we're getting into today.

Oh, it doesn't ring any bells. Those names are ringing any bells. so okay yeah it'll be it'll be fresh for you then so the story takes place in manchester england which is actually where boddington is brewed so there you have it um james we're going to start off with james uh the antagonist of the story um who was actually a t-totaler so he wouldn't have had bottingtons anyways it's a great great beer if you can find it james was a complete utter piece of shift from the very beginning he was born in 1947 in the events we're describing here transpired in 1996

So remember that detail. Okay. He would have been around 49 years old. I'm going to be harping on age a lot. Okay. I feel like after the first episode, I was maybe a little bit agous, and I'm going to be even more ageous during this episode. My sister said, as far as it's not going to get away with that shit,

if you guys get famous. So we were laughing about it, so continue. I know. I know. We have a few more months of doing this before I have to shape up there. James' history with women can only be described as violent. Every documented relationship we had, he was physically abusive. He was not surprisingly divorced, the grounds of which were domestic violence.

And that marriage lasted for 10 years, which really goes to show that it can be incredibly difficult for people to leave relationships that are abusive. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine what this woman endured, given what we're going to learn about James throughout the years, I can only imagine that she experienced what the people that we are about to describe also experienced. I also know far as that the most dangerous time to leave a relationship, like, the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you're trying to leave. So it makes it even harder, you know, for people to leave because at that point, you know, that's when the violence really escalates. Yeah, we are actually going to go into the psychology of that a little bit later because domestic violence plays such a massive part of this.

So that marriage ends. and James has a tendency after that divorce to date much younger than is probably not probably is acceptable the divorce was in 1980 so he would have been 33 just doing the math on when he was born he would have been 33 years old again I'm harping on his age because for me

this is a massive massive red flag I get that most men tend to veer younger in their dating lives but I think a 10 plus year age gap in a couple when the man is already in his 13. 30s is telling of something. I'm not sure exactly what, but I think it is. Like, I'm 38. I don't know a single Lizzo song.

I watch movies like Dunkirk and other biopics. I don't like festivals or events where a ton of people are crammed in together. If I have to wait in the line, I'm usually out. So, like, 20-year-old me really recognized 38-year-old me. So if I ever tell you, Taylor, that I'm dating a 20-year-old, I can only imagine it would be because, one, I'm having a midlife crisis, or two, for whatever reason, I need. an incredibly lopsided power dynamic in a relationship yeah i think it's it's definitely the power dynamic and i think you're right like i have nothing in common with like a 24 year olds so i can't

imagine you know having going out of date with 24 year olds and that i mean not saying that all 24 year olds like that but i feel like for the most part um and just you know it's a big difference especially your 20s because your 20s is such a volatile time at this at my age i've gone out with several people in their late late 20s like 28 29 and even that feels like a insurmountable gap in terms of like where what what things I think about versus what they it's just not I don't know if it works for you it works for you but in this case it definitely does not work and we're going to discuss it I'm going to use this conversation in my second podcast dating far as in Austin where I speak to all the women that you dated so stay tuned for that.

That will be very, very, very, everybody's excited about that. So going back to James. Shortly after his divorce, he begins dating a 20-year-old named Tina Watson. She gets pregnant with his child. And she is quoted later on discussing the abuse. She says, and this is a direct quote, at first it was now and again, referring to the abuse, just a little tap. But in the end, it was every day. He would smack me in the face or hit me over the head with an ashtray.

he would kick me in the legs or between the legs. Not great stuff. Tina would eventually get out of that relationship. We don't know much about her whereabouts thereafter or the kid, hopefully, and presumably her and the kid recover and everybody was happy and healthy thereafter. The next relationship that started right after Tina in 1982 was with Wendy Motter's head. Taylor, she was 15 years old. No, well, I think that that was definitely a sliding slipper.

slope that he was on. That's that's a hard no. That one's absolutely wrong. That's not just our opinion. That's an absolute no. Yeah. I don't I don't know how we don't have much details in terms of how this relationship came to be. All we know in one abuse he said he came out in the research of this that he he attempted to drown her at one point before the relationship ended. That's going to be a pattern. For some reason, he just really likes to drown women? It's a continuous piece of this it happened with another relationship that he had too

and the one that we're going to talk about here ultimately that's actually what happened to her as well if you look up pictures of him he actually looks very similar to David Turpin like he's got the same mop hair that David has and the horrible horrible skin

he's also a teetotaler and he didn't smoke which good for him but in the 1980s I assumed that made him very unusual Because I think cigarettes were a health item, weren't they? I think by the 80s, people were kind of starting to understand that maybe they were bad for you. But in the 50s and 60s, yeah, 100%. Doctors would be like, I'm smoking while I'm giving you a surgery, you know. But I think maybe the 80s was starting to tear out.

But still, I think it was pretty popular. Like, you could smoke at office buildings in America until the late 90s. So I think that it was probably still pretty popular. And smoking is delicious and awesome. Unfortunately, that is also true. Who knows what was going on in Manchester, England, whether they, you know, I would have, I don't know, maybe they're ahead of us, maybe they're not. But also, look, I understand if you're sober because you have a drinking problem.

But this is Manchester in the 1980s. I can't imagine the pub life had to be awesome to be able to go out and like have a drink with friends and throw darts. I keep going back to that movie. I'm losing it. American Werewolf in London? Yes. Do you remember that the bar scene

before he's attacked by the werewolf? Yes. That's what I imagine these pubs are like that you can just go in and everybody knows you and it had to be, it would have been fun but this guy didn't take part in that apparently. He could have still gone, you know. I don't know.

1980s, if you order water at the bar, that's kind of a... Yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting thing to be like, Like, I'm in England in the 80s and, you know, being a little bit different. I also, the one thing I was wondering is, like, how many men are in Manchester? Is it two? Because I feel like these women can do better.

Yeah, I don't know. I actually don't even know what the population of Manchester is. But, I mean, I've heard of it. Like, we all heard of Manchester United. We know that it's a relatively populous, populous area. But anyways, fast forwarding a little bit, 11 years from Wendy to 1993. So that relation with Wendy and the 15-year-old ended in 82, and now we're in 1993. And this begins to start of his interactions with Kelly Ann Bates.

Taylor, Kelly is 14 years old when they meet. No, and he's just getting older. He's just getting older. That's all right. Yeah, she was a babysitter for a friend of James's. God, the babysitter is so dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, the next two years.

of them knowing each other isn't actually very well documented all we know is that they struck up enough of relationship over those two years so that when kelly turned 16 she moved in with james at his house that's all we know she's 16 this puts him at 46 years old okay that's gross I'm going to look up age of consent in the UK age of consent in the UK I'm going to get arrested if we've been looking this up yeah don't incognito um It's 16. Yeah, that makes sense. I was wondering why they harped specifically on the point that she turned 16 and that was like a thing.

That's probably why. Yeah. Kelly actually seemed to have good parents in this situation. They tried to get her out of this. I don't recall what it was like being this age, but imagine the rebellious spirit of a 16-year-old. If your parents tell you not to do something, you probably try to do it. Trying to do it more, right? Yeah, I'm sure.

And we've talked about, you know, at 16, she could be dating this 46-year-old or she could be Emperor of Rome. It's a very up and, you know, whatever. Yeah. Who knows what you're like when you're 16. No one can remember. I didn't put this in the outline, but there's a story I read where the way she was introduced, the mom was introduced to James was Kelly brought him to their house and they were

in the kitchen. And then the mom walks in. and she looks at this fucking 46-year-old ghoul, and she said that her first inclination was to grab the knife that was on the counter to her right and just start stabbing him. Oh, my God. Yeah, which, look, that's a pretty extreme thing to think.

But you're looking at your 16-year-old daughter in this near 50-year-old man. I mean, I can, you know, one can only imagine what would come of that. So at this time, Kelly's parents didn't explicitly know about the age difference. It was just based on looking at him, that they made the assumption that he was dramatically older. Right. He's clearly not another teen. Exactly. Exactly. You know. Kelly's mom would say when she first met James, this is a quote, as soon as I saw Smith, the hairs on the back of my neck went up. I tried everything I could to get Kellyanne away from him.

She tried. They really tried. They really did their best to try and, you know, get this guy out of her life, but it wouldn't happen. Kelly would move out because of the nonstop arguments, but moved back in with him in November of 1995. Again, I don't know the ins and outs of the domestic violence, but Kelly's behavior around this time seems like it was emblematic of someone enduring a lot. There's things that she was doing and there were indicators. So for example, she would have visible bruises. She became very withdrawn, according to her. the people she quit her job for seemingly no reason and this to me is really the saddest part of reading stories about this i just hate it when someone takes the light out of someone else's eyes it's one of the worst things you could do to someone just getting pleasure out of them being someone that loves you being sad i don't i don't know if that's fixable or not but it really it's one of the worst qualities of being in situations like this is having someone take that away from you totally and taking away like the things that you enjoy until they control everything like little bit at all yeah yeah and also remember the power dynamic 46 to 16 yeah yeah i imagine he's

like if not the same age as her parents that he's older as well yeah yeah yeah probably yeah it's actually a really good point in march of 1996 she apparently sent her parents a card for their anniversary and for a birthday. But the handwriting was that of James and not Kelly. Yeah. Yeah, people at this point are increasingly worried about her well-being. Her brother tried visiting and was told by James that she wasn't home. She probably was because abusers just don't like their victims to be out of their sight.

Right. And a neighbor came by and asked about her well-being. And apparently, James told her to go stand in an upstairs window so that the neighbor could see her. Yeah. he was he was he controlled her every movement he controlled her everything yeah it's her right you know i was thinking about this i could be dead for months or my neighbors would never know but i just don't have that kind of relationship with my neighbors and so to me it sounded like kelly was a outgoing person that people cared about you know right and expected her to like be outside

and say hi to people but she wasn't yeah so one one month after this this all that was march of 96 in April of 1996, James goes to the police and tells them that he accidentally killed his girlfriend during an argument, claiming that she had drowned and he had tried resuscitating her,

but it didn't work. Weird. Yeah. Weird to, why did he go to the police? Now I'm like, why didn't he go to the police? But he just, like, leave. Yeah, yeah, because he already, like, brushed off everybody else's concerns, right?

You already brushed off the, like, the brother shows them. Oh, she's not home. Right. It is an unusual move. Although, if I dwell on it a little bit, I can imagine that as an abuser, you probably think, like, she deserved it. Everybody's going to understand my point of view, you know? Mm-hmm.

So please go to the house and they find Kelly naked in the bedroom. And this is where things get horrible. So, again, skip past. Yeah, poor baby. If you have a particular trigger for gratuitous violence, police found her blood throughout the entire house. This wasn't a single explosion of violence like it was with Tony Tote last week. This was incredibly protracted and deliberate. It was a torture session, essentially.

Yeah, and there's no blood involved in drowning. Yeah. So, so interesting fact, she actually died of drowning. Well, yeah, totally. But like, also, that's crazy with blood everywhere. So obviously the other stuff was happening. It wasn't like she accidentally drowned and nothing else had been wrong. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's 100%. Oh, God, poor baby. So during the last month of her life, so this is the March to April timeframe, she'd been kept bound to a radiator or to furniture by her hair or by ligature around her neck. Oh, my God. That's the thing. It's a month. That's why that, this is why.

this is why it went on the list of worst ways to die. So I have all the injuries written down here and I almost don't even want to go through them because it's terrible. It's just awful to think anybody endured this. Basically a kid, a child endured this. The list of injuries for a body

just sound like James was essentially possessed. Taylor, is it fair to say we don't really need to go into all the details here? Yeah, I think that's okay. You can look it up if you really are curious. Telly Ann Bates, the the details are out there i don't really feel like it's going to help anyone to actually talk about this but we are going to talk about we are going to talk about one of the injuries because

it's pertinent to what how long this experience dragged on for the one injury that i will bring up is both of our eyes were gouged out oh no oh the reason that detail is relevant is because the pathologist, a man named William Lawler, who examined her body after she was found, said that the eyes were removed, quote, not less than five days and not more than three weeks before her death. So this injury happens, and she just lived for possibly weeks. Oh, my God, that's terrible. That is so scary.

That is so awful. yeah the pathologist also stated quote in my career i've examined almost 600 victims of homicide but i've never come across injuries so extensive oh yeah that's awful she was obviously star she was obviously malnourished and like i said before she did die of drowning yeah so despite all the other shit that james said he was telling the truth about how she ultimately passed right she's just in so much pain. I mean, it's not like Would you get to fight? I mean, I feel like you wouldn't even fight back at that point, right?

I mean, I don't think you would because all the, I mean, all the emotional abuse, what's going to do? Like, he's a grown man and she's a child. And if she's tied to something, then I mean, there's no, I don't know, I don't think fighting back is even like a thing that could be possible. Yeah. Yeah.

100%. And, you know, there was a part of this case that struck me, especially during the trial portion of it. again, we don't have a ton of details about the inner workings of the relationship, but I would imagine that gaslighting was a huge part of the relationship because during the trial, James was quoted as saying, she would put me through hell winding me up. Right.

It's her fault. It's her fault. Yeah, absolutely not. And look, I intrinsically know what gaslighting is, but no matter what, I went and looked it up on Wikipedia anyways. And the way it's described is manipulating someone so as to make them question. their own reality, which I feel goes part and parcel with an abusive relationship. Have you seen, you know, it comes from a movie? Have you seen the movie?

I haven't seen the movie, and I don't know what the connection is to that movie. Like, it's literally, that's where the term comes from. It's called gaslight. It's about a husband who is trying to make his wife think she's crazy. So he keeps lowering the flame on the lights in the house because it was like before electricity and telling her that she's crazy because she thinks it's getting darker. that's the entire plot of the movie yeah and that's where the term gaslighting comes from wow okay learned something new every day so i kept reading more about gaslighting um and found this part to be telling this is a quote i'm going to read from the wikpd article on gaslighting those being gaslighted

must learn that they don't need others to validate their reality and they need to gain self-reliance and confidence in defining their own reality i think that's a talk about part when you're in an abusive relationship, especially with an insanely lopsided power dynamic, is how do you zoom out and gain the self-awareness and confidence that what you're experiencing is real versus what your partner is telling you? I mean, that'll be hard at any age, much less at 16. Absolutely, and totally isolated as well. Yeah. She's trapped in his house. Yeah, 100%. So back to the trial, during the trial, he said that Kelly had dared him to blind and stab her again.

Bullshit, right? Yeah, bullshit. Or it's like, I don't know. Like, I don't think it's like a fun dare. Like, that's not how that's happening. Yeah. No. A court psychiatrist that examined James said that he had

severe paranoid disorder with morbid jealousy and lived in a distorted reality. Again, going back to the gaslighting concept. I went down another rabbit hole on what morbid jealousy means. It's also called pathological jealousy, delusional jealousy, or my favorite, and probably yours as well, Taylor, Othello Syndrome. So you had, yeah, you had mentioned this at the top, which was the most, I think you said the most dangerous time for someone to leave an abusive relationship.

Sorry, can you restate that? Yeah, the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you are trying to leave. So all of the abuse escalates when the partner knows that you are trying actively to get out of their relationship. Yeah. So that ties to this because, I mean, if you know Othello, the Shakespeare play, then you know where I'm going with this. This is a situation. Morvage jealousy is a situation where a person is consumed by thoughts that their partner is unfaithful without any evidence to indicate this. But it's different between men and women.

So for men, predictably, the obsession they have is with sexual and sexual. And for women, the obsession is over emotional infidelity. Totally. In a lot of these situations, it ends how you would presume it would end. It would end, it ends in murder suicide. Yeah. Which kind of, you know, again, that makes sense why it's called the fellow syndrome. Yeah.

So that's the situation that we had here with James and Kelly, which is an extreme example. but I would assume a fairly common example of a situation where someone's in a relation when I was in law school I knew somebody that I was in class with who when we were in our last year before we were going to graduate she was breaking up with her boyfriend in her car and the boyfriend shot her in the face in the car killing her and then killed himself yeah oh far as i'm so sorry that's awful yeah it you know i hadn't thought of that moment very much until i started researching this case and i saw this abelis syndrome being listed here and was like oh my god i remember that um yeah there's there's tons of people in manchester there's 500

000 people there you know like just date someone else yeah don't kill people there's no reason obviously i don't need to say that there's no reason to kill people but like just date someone else there's tons of people so you know i'm reflecting back on my that that that law school experience and it's when it's the man doing it which it almost always is the man doing it it's usually because the woman is like living her best life and yeah he's and he's being left behind totally exactly i mean she was going to graduate and presumably be like a very successful successful lawyer and he was kind of a nobody and she didn't need him yeah you need him and he he had peaked with her and he knew that you know I don't know it's that's really that's true like yeah that does

yeah that's interesting like she's the best he could ever hope to date and so he's like I can't I don't know I can't do any better so you have I have no I have no rationalization behind that but yeah guys if you're if you're if you're in that situation make yourself better yeah like learn go to law school you did it yeah go to school learn an instrument like learn how to do something cool like work with like don't hurt people because they're better than you make yourself better so you deserve someone better um that is such good that is such good advice good job thank you every now I'm gonna bring that up in dating Fars in Austin little nuggets of wisdom um so at the trial they

obviously found James to be guilty and he is sentenced to life imprisonment the jury was offered counseling to deal with having to look at pictures of Kelly's injuries Oh my God, poor people. That's awful. Apparently every single one of them

took the court up on that. That was nice of them, I guess. God, that's terrifying. That's a terrifying thing that you don't even think about being on a jury is how traumatic it could be if you're looking at these Listen to terrible stories

Back on the law school thing I don't know if I told you this But I worked in Death Penalty Defense work So I worked for a law firm That defended people who were Subjected the death penalty in Florida The pictures I saw

Oh my God Fucking nightmare fuel What these people did to people I imagine Oh my God I'm sorry that you went through that This is terrible. I feel terrible. It's eight, it's like nine in the morning. I feel awful. Keep going. Great way to start your Saturday. So let's see. James had his first parole hearing recently. This is incredible. He had a parole hearing in November of 2022. So like fairly recently. He was denied parole. He was obviously he's obviously still in prison to the state. He's now 74 years old. They described the conditions of which he lived as closed. conditions, which sounds like solitary confinement to me.

I mean, he murdered a child. I mean, he's not going to do well. Yeah, he's not going to do well. He's not a tough guy prison person, you know, so he's not going to do well. So I think that they probably, for his own safety, if nothing else, keep him isolated from the rest of the population. And that's where he lives. Hopefully that's where he dies.

Yeah, awful, awful story. Again, the list of shit that this girl. went through, there was 150 separate injuries to her body. Not if you want to know, go look up the details, but it was a, it was an awful, awful experience. And if you were ever in a situation that is veering towards violence, find your support system and hold on to your support system, your family, your friends, and do your best to get out of it. I'm going to put some resources in our notes um i know there's some places that you can go to where like you can erase your browser history so someone if you're worried that someone's checking that for you and things like that so

you can get help kind of anonymously without your your abusive partner knowing um how how how will she drown like in the bathtub yeah in the bathtub oh poor kid poor thing yeah he apparently drowned her in the bathtub then took her body and put it in the bedroom yeah yeah I don't know what he thought would happen when police was her eyes were missing right it's not that's not all the blood everywhere it's not like she accidentally drowned in the bathtub and everything else perfectly fine like there's blood everywhere her eyes are missing she's obviously been tortured for a really long time but oops i killed her yeah it was just like a fun in games like that's not fun in games and i almost feel like we're lucky that he did that because he didn't do it again that he was abusive but at least he only killed one person because he's not funny games because he almost feel like we're lucky that he did that he did that he was abusive but at least he only killed one person because he's definitely would have killed another person i would imagine as we're discussing earlier when someone's life is going one direction and the man feels like they're being left behind the fact that the abuse escalated from like him punching and kicking the wendy girl earlier on when he was like younger

or earlier on in the in the timeline maybe because he was approaching his 50s he went over the hill from 40s and maybe he just realized like this is the end like life is i'm never going to get anyone as young and whatever as he thought Kelly was and that was kind of the impetus for that's her graduating law school moment essentially is like that's the best I'm ever going to do from here on out and I wonder what he is thinking like he's now he has been in jail for 30 years you know so it's not like his life ended his life continued but I guess he just I don't know how he has now he has zero girlfriends so you yeah what what is a shit total piece of shit hope he rots and fucking misery in jail for the rest of his life but that's our story and like taylor said we'll we'll put resources in the

show notes if you're in a situation that you think you should extricate yourself from so we'll move on to a probably incredibly upbeat uplifting happy joyous tale that Taylor's going to tell us, right, Taylor? That's right. So I was thinking maybe someday that we should, like, video record these and put them on YouTube because people really like that. But I'm like, my face is 50% like terrible frown and 50% like shock. And then also I'm like out of frame because I'm like crying.

So I don't know if I'm ready for that yet because I do not make good faces or this podcast because I'm like about to die. So that was terrible. To be fair, we're recording this on Zoom. So we could do that at some point. I know. And I think that we should, but I need to work on my resting terrible story face. Fair.

And then we'll do it. Fair enough. So, okay, well, let's switch over to our historical story of a relationship that was doomed to fail. And as far as this is, this is a love story. I texted you last night that I was crying and reading and drinking whiskey. And I was listening to you. the last book that I listened on this. I have a pile of books.

This should be in our visual medium. I'll put this picture. I have this huge pile of books, these books that I've read kind of on these women in the story. And I finished the last one last night via audiobook while I was doing a laundry. And I just sat on my bed just like sobbing because it's just I feel very emotional towards these people. And so it's a love story.

It's complicated. There's so much more that can be told than what I'm about to tell you right now. but I'm going to tell you sort of the cliff notes of this of this story. And I'm going to tell you the red flags right at the beginning so that that we're telling us that this relationship was never going to last and never going to be a forever relationship. So the two biggest red flags is one person in the relationship is the wife of the president of the United States. She's the first lady. And the other person is the woman reporter assigned to cover her. So it was ever going to work out.

They were, you know, both women in the 1940s and one of them was the first lady. So there was a lot of, you know, probably not going to make it. But in the meantime, a lot of stuff happened. So a huge pile of books that's taking me years to read through. I want to read a couple, tell you what a couple of them are. There's No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearne's Goodwin, who's my favorite historian. And there's Eleanor Roosevelt volumes one through three by Blanche Wieson, Weeson Cook. There's Eleanor and Hick by Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Franklin by Joe Lash.

And then Eleanor's book herself, this I remember, that she wrote in 1945. And I wanted to do a shout out to Aaron Montejo at Diamond Sutra Books in Las Vegas. He's been a friend of mine since eighth grade and he owns a bookstore in the arts district in Las Vegas. And he found me a first edition of Eleanor's book. So it's really beautiful. And I'm super excited that I have it. It's very special. So thank you, Aaron.

And if you're in Las Vegas, go to Diamond's Sitter Books. It's in the Arts District. So there are thousands of books written about the Roosevelt's talking Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, 1940s, World War II America. This is the New Deal. There's thousands of letters that Eleanor wrote. She would constantly be writing letters to people. She also wrote tons of articles, tons of books.

So this is just a tiny piece in the Roosevelt puzzle of this story. I'm also already like pre-upset that I'm not going to get to every detail and I'm going to miss things in this story. So I just want to encourage people to DM me at Doom to Fail pod on Instagram and tell me what I missed and I want to talk more about it. And I'm also not a queer historian. Like I don't this isn't and I'm not historian. This isn't my expertise at all. So I also want to make sure like I'm happy that your story was in England. I want to, you know, diversify it, go all over the world and I'm not going to talk about white people.

So definitely let me know if you have any other ideas, UFARs and the world. So I'd love to learn a little bit more and have some suggestions on other relationships I could cover. Taylor, can I interrupt real quick? Uh-huh. Please do. I mean, I've known you a very long time. And the story you're going to tell us about Eleanor Roosevelt feels like it has been on your mind of very, very long time. And I'm curious why that is.

Or if the story you're about to tell is going to highlight that force anyways, then we can just forget this part and move on. But it's been living in your head for so long. I know. No, you're totally right. Like I'm looking around. I'm like, oh, I have a painting of Eleanor on my wall. You know, I definitely, like, have read all these books about her.

I feel very, like, just continue to be interested with her. I would read all these books again. I was reading Doris Kieran's Goodwin because she is a really good, you know, historian. She wrote the team of rivals, Abraham Lincoln one that everybody knows about. She wrote a really great one on leadership in turbulent times about like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. And I like her books a lot. And so I was reading those. And then I read No Ordinary Time about Eleanor and Franklin.

And then I was at my in-laws house and I found Eleanor Roosevelt Volume 1. And that is what actually our friend Lindsay told me to read because she knew I was reading another one about Eleanor. So I found that and I've been kind of like working my way through that three-volume set. And it's just like, I'll talk a little bit about her life, but it's just, and this is also something that I read in another book, oh my God, about Winston Churchill. I've just decided to become a historian in the past couple years. I don't know. It was a pandemic. I had nothing to do.

So, I mean, I had a lot to do. but I decided to also do this. And there's a book about Winston Churchill, and the way that that book opens is like, I'm interested in people who live a full life, like people who really fucking just live the shit out of their lives, you know? And they took opportunities and there were ups and downs, but you can really look at their story and be like, yeah,

they fucking live their whole life and they live the shit out of it. So I think that Eleanor definitely did that, And that I think is really fascinating and something that, like, I don't want to be, like, you know, step by step and everything that she did. But I think that the idea of, like, living your life to the fullest is really powerful because a lot of people feel like they're not. I love that. Yeah. Makes sense. Oh, okay.

I have a bottle of tissues. I'm already going to cry this. Makes no sense. So the relationship between Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt is complicated. It had many twists and turns, but there was lots of hurt and lots of love, lots of. lots of respect, and they are, you know, an inescapable teamwork between the two of them. So there's definitely that between the two. Some characters I want you to remember that kind of romantic characters are going to come in and out of their lives. For Franklin, remember Lucy Mercer

and Missy LaHand. And then for Eleanor, remember Joseph Lash, Earl Miller, the actor David Gurewitch, I know I was going to get it wrong. David Gurowich. And then the person we're talking about today, writer Lorena Hickok. So we're going to talk about Eleanor and Hick. That's our couple that was doomed to fail. And we'll start with Hick. She was born on March 7th, 1893 in East Troy, Wisconsin. So terrible place to be born, terrible time to grow up. She was poor. She had a very hard Midwestern life. Her father was an abusive alcoholic. She left home at a young age to work as a maid. So very young, like 13, 14, working in other people's homes. She didn't really get a chance to go to school. Eventually, a relative in Chicago was able to take her in and allowed her to get an education. And so she began writing as like a girl reporter in, in like Minneapolis, in Wisconsin, in like the Midwest. And, you know, it was a time when like women were given the, you know, tell me about the biggest pumpkin and town stories. You know, like it wasn't like a woman. It was a hard hitting reporter.

But Hick was a hard hitting woman. And she wanted to, you know, move up and do other things and really get, move forward with her writing. And she was very talented. So Hick was also a lesbian. She had an eight-year relationship with a woman named Ella Morse, a fellow reporter. But Ella counts, they were very happy. Hick was diagnosed with diabetes in, you know, in her 30s. And Ella took time off to take care of her.

But then unexpectedly, Ella met a man that she had once known and left Hick to marry him and start a family. So that sucks. Hick was devastated. You know, obviously they lived like together as like companions and friends because it was the, you know, the 30s and 40s. But she did, you know, have a long-term relationship. relationship. And she moved to New York because she wanted to kind of get away from the memories of Ella and what they had together. So in 1932, where our story starts, Hick is the most popular women reporter in the country. She was the first woman to have a byline in the New York Times. And she calls herself, well, I said that I said this already, but she called herself, quote, the top girl reporter in the country. So that's awesome. Yeah. So she was really like top of her game. Yeah, absolutely. breaking down barriers yeah and um so if you got to picture her she's stocky you know she's a little bit you know she's just kind of short kind of stocky she's smoking constantly and she's drinking

and telling stories she just sounds like a blast so she'd have its hard life now she's in new york she's an associated press reporter things are going really well for her so we have hick it's 1932 let's go back to eleanor what i just googled eleanor roosevelt and lorna hickickickickick to get a picture of what she looks like and the very first thing that came up was a um it's incredible it's it's a book that it's entitled empty without you i can see why this hits you everyone i mean it's like a heartstring story yeah okay absolutely absolutely but so now you see their picture is like eleanor is tall and hick is like a lot shorter than her yeah as you can kind of see them together yeah and so eleanor roosevelt was born anna eleanor roosevelt on october 11th

1884 so she's nine years older than hick she was born to a rich family her mother wasn't very nice to her but she adored her father unfortunately her father was a severe alcoholic and he passed away when she was young so that's something that actually have in common losing their parents and they're young, Eleanor's mother died pretty quickly after that. So she was raised by family and sent to London to study at Allen's Wood Academy, which was a girl's school in London in that time. And if you look it up, it's like this beautiful old building and they knocked it down to make projects, which is gross. So like a great job, London. But it was run by a woman named Marie Servest and she was from France and she was very forward thinking and she was also a lesbian.

So Eleanor would travel with Madame Syres all over all over Europe and there was another book that came out later that another student wrote about like actually being madly in love with this teacher and with this headmaster of the school. So Eleanor was around lesbians and like knew about these relationships from, you know, in her teens, which I think is interesting because it was like the 20s. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine in any culture. sure I would imagine that there's the ability if you want to learn to go and find out about stuff like that. Right. You're right. There's always been gay people. Yeah, exactly. So they've passed around. Absolutely. Totally totally right. So Eleanor has a great time there. And she comes back

to New York to have her coming out party. She's obviously from a rich family because she's a Roosevelt and she ends up marrying Franklin Roosevelt who was her father's fifth cousins. They're like practically strangers. They're not related. They're from different branches of the Roosevelt family. They just happen to have the same last name. right yeah her uncle is teddy roosevelt to her dad is teddy roosevelt's brother and t r does give her away at her wedding because her dad had already passed so she is close to him so she's already like been to the white house you know and like been around the presidency because her uncle was president right so she's married to franklin um he's also just kind of like a rich kid i wish i could do like

an accent that that they can do but they're just like you know rich kids from upstate new york and eleanor spent her 20s having babies she has six children one died as an infant, and she was a terrible mother, which I also think is interesting because when I'm reading about like, first ladies and women who are really successful, there's always something that gives. And like, Ellen Roosevelt was just not a good mom. She didn't really care. Makes her human. I mean, everything else she said, she sounds incredibly privileged. And it's like, well, you got to flop somewhere. Yeah. I think it's because she had no examples because her mom was very mean to her. But she would do things like if her daughter was crying, she just like put her

outside on the terrace in New York City, like whatever. And then the neighbors would complain. She'd be like, oh, I thought she needed light, you know, like, I don't know, I don't know what to do with this child. So she had a pretty bad relationship with her kids, their whole lives. And, you know, some of her, some of her sons, you know, did go to World War II. They all came back. But her kids had like also terrible relationships. So her, of her five children, there were like 15 marriages among them. They all got married like a ton of times. So she was also like a little disappointed in that, but she was never really that close to them um okay that wasn't um i apologize for it i think i'm doing okay let me know make like jazz hands if i started doing too many ums i can see you so okay

so now we're in 1913 franklin is assistant secretary of the navy which is a job that t r had as well and they lived in dc and a woman named lucy mercer who we heard about before was one of eleanor's secretaries and her and franklin had an affair there was like a little bit of like flirtation between them and then Eleanor found some love letters and that confirmed it and she was obviously devastated and thought her marriage was over but her mother-in-law and FDR convinced her that they could work through it and you know they would be able to you know be okay so this is when it's 1921 and the big thing happens to FDR can you think of the big thing that might have happened to FDR when he was younger like in his 30s yeah he was stricken by

is polio right right correct yep and in 1921 they're at campabella which is a house that they have in canada they have a bunch of like vacation houses and he goes swimming one night with the kids comes home wakes up says i have some chills and then he never walks again he got polio somehow from swimming i don't know i didn't look that up but that's kind of the story that that happens and another question that i have for you far as as a texan did you know that great I think Greg Abbott is in a wheelchair? Yeah. I didn't know that until very recently.

And I thought that was interesting because both my husband and my father-in-law were talking about Franklin Roosevelt for Christmas, of course, and they were like, you couldn't be president in a wheelchair today. They both said the same thing. But I'm like, hey, you could. Greg Abbott is doing tons of damage and being such a dick from a wheelchair, you know? Like, I don't think that that really matters. Like, I didn't know for a long time until I saw a picture of him, but it wasn't, it wasn't

like the lead in his story. So I don't think it would be for anyone now. well i i would say that from what i can gather from seeing you know news articles about him they kind of make it a point to not show yeah wheelchair as much as they possibly can apparently it was a pretty traumatic thing it wasn't like he was born no it was a car accident right oh no tree fell on him when he was jogging yeah oh that's awful yeah yeah crazy yeah but i think it's interesting that you can still you know be in be in american politics and be in a wheelchair these days. It's not like a deal breaker. Like I think we're told it was a deal breaker

when we were little or the American president or something. Yeah. Well, the way that they constantly hid Roosevelt. Right. So nobody could see that he was in a wheelchair, which is very really. I don't think that'd be anything anymore, thankfully. Yeah, it's not like propping him up against other people, like having you pretend to walk around. Right. We definitely did that with Franklin, for sure. So this was like, obviously devastating and Some people wanted him to just like retire and like become, you know, just like live with his family forever. He really wanted to continue to be in politics. So for about nine years, Eleanor was his eyes and ears around the country.

She would travel. She would tell him what was going on in the state and in the country. She would meet people. She worked really close with his advisor, Louis Howe and kept the Roosevelt name out there. And this was really cool for her. She hadn't lived her own life for so long. She had just been a mom and had a bunch of babies and her mother-in-law was very controlling. She was under Franklin's shadow, but now she was the one who had to be out there because Franklin physically couldn't be.

He spent time in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had a spa, like healing waters that he had, you know, purchased and made for people who were afflicted and trying to, like, get himself better. But while he was doing that, Eleanor was the one who was out there really doing things, like writing and talking to people. And so I think that, like, the affair and the polio gave her two big things that really changed her life. it gave her a pass to have very deep emotional relationships with a lot of people. So now she was like, oh, I can go and have my own relationships and like live my own life. And then it also gave her a sense of non-permanence for relationships, like for marriage, for other relationships. So she did some weird things where she like held on too tight and put herself from relationships where she didn't belong because I don't think that that like sanctity of a permanent relationship meant anything as much as it did before to her. and Susan Quinn in Eleanor and Hick,

she describes Eleanor's relationships as triangular. There's always someone else involved. You know, it was always like a wife or a partner or like something. She's always kind of in other people's things. And Franklin's affair was the trigger for that. I think so. Yeah. And then the polio because the polio made her kind of be able to step up and do things

that she wasn't able to do before and she felt the freedom to do it because she was like, well, now I can do whatever I want, which is exciting for her. And kind of lets her go into her own, do her, own things. So she starts a school in New York City. She's like the vice principal and teaches there with some of her friends. She starts a furniture company up in Hyde Park with her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, which is another lesbian couple that she was close with. So they lived on their property in Hyde Park and had a furniture factory for, you know, decades. So there's a lot of photos of her with them. And so she was really, like she would have an apartment in New York City

where she would go to like to the village and hang out with the gays, things like that. So she was definitely like still in that community and that'd be so fun oh my god it's so fun back to the smoking i mean she did all her didn't like to smoke or drink because she had that alcoholism in her family and all of that which is why she would lock the cabinet and not want her husband to drink during prohibition but still sounds real fun yeah because that that was um that was free stone wall so a lot of the interactions had this kind of like naughty quality to the it because you had to be in private. It had to be able to speak easies and like getting together in friends' houses because you

weren't allowed to congregate me late. Yeah. Kind of wild. We talked about speak eases last time too. I love it. I love it. I know they're played out, but I love them. And so FDR is elected president in 1932, blah, blah, blah.

A whole bunch of stuff happened to get him there, but he's president. Do you know how many times he was president first? He was three. He got elected three times and died halfway through his third term. And that's when Truman took over. Is that right? Close. It's four times.

Damn. Was I right about Truman? Yes. Okay. Yes. When, this is not in my notes, but when FDR died, Eleanor was the one to tell Truman. And Truman said, is there anything I can do for you? And she said, oh, no, no.

Is there anything I can do for you? You're the one who's in trouble now. Yeah. Yeah. At that time to be an incoming president. Yeah. He didn't even make it a year into his fourth term. But after that, they did make it a rule.

The two-term rule was more of a guideline. after Washington had, you know, resigned after two terms, but it's an official rule now. But the America, you know, wanted Franklin Roosevelt to get them through that war. So there's a lot. And there's so much. Yeah. Yeah, because he got them through. If I remember my American history, right, Herbert Hoover was president during the Great Depression. And he basically didn't do jack shit. And then Franklin is, that's the position on which Franklin Roosevelt got elected right was i'm going to fix the economy he started all these different uh associations and organizations that could hire people for day labor work and stuff like that and yeah got america out of

the great repression yeah exactly that was the new deal you know a lot of like social programs you know let's build all these big roads build all these big post offices just like get get people back to work and um also this is not my notes just a thing that i haven't to know is like this is the time when like he really wanted like universal health care he his his administration is responsible for unemployment benefits and social security and you know things like that that america didn't have before this so really trying to like make sure that people were supported by the government so okay so it's his first term as 1932 and this is like the shortest i can make this and hick is assigned to eleanor as her like ap-reporter so it's 1932 hick is at the top of her game

She's like the best gal reporter in the country. She's assigned to Eleanor. She's 39 years old. And she's not even going to make it a year before she leaves her job. So top of her game, she doesn't even make it to the summer of 1933. She has to quit because she's so close to Eleanor. So it probably starts in a train car on the campaign trail. They kind of were avoiding each other.

They like didn't, you know, Eleanor was like, oh, another reporter who's like following me around. And then there was an instance where one reporter named John got a, invited to a Eleanor Roosevelt family party and Hick was like, that's weird. I want to go too. And Eleanor let her come and happened to be because John was having an affair with Eleanor's daughter, Anna, like the kids are terrible relationships too. But they started to become friends.

And they spent this overnight riot in a train car where they told each other life stories and they had so much in common. Like they didn't have parents who were there for them and they felt inadequate and all these things. Even though they were totally different socioeconomic points, they still felt, you know, very, very, you know, very similar. So one thing that I find, like one story that I think is hilarious is in her book, and this I remember, Eleanor says, you know, Hick interviewed her the night of the inauguration. So many people were trying to interrupt them that they had to finish

the interview in the bathroom of the hotel they were staying in in D.C. And it was innocent enough. And, you know, in Eleanor's story, she brings that up. But I read another book that was like, they were already in love at this point. And it was inauguration night. And Eleanor was overwhelmed. She didn't know if she wanted to be a first lady. And, And her and Hick kind of escaped into the bathroom. And I imagine that this is like, it's cold outside. You know, when you're in D.C., the heater is like hissing, you know. So it's like hissing from the heater is cold outside.

They're sitting on the cold tile floor. And they're just like, they have each other during this really crazy time. So it actually feels much more romantic than obviously than Ellen was in her book. But it's a time when they really like worked together and really needed each other. And, you know, Hick helped E.R.'s career. She encouraged her to host press conferences for just women. And she also wrote to, they wrote letters every day, like 10 page letters to each other every day when they were apart, which is crazy.

And Hick said, you know, you should tell people what's going on in your letters. So Eleanor created a newspaper column called My Day, where every single day for decades, she would write a couple paragraphs at what she did, and it would be published in a bunch of different newspapers, which is pretty cool. Hick was a principal for that. So these are all these letters. So we go out of the timeline and think about these love letters. So they're literally, you know, written on paper.

There's thousands of pages of love letters. Hick burned some of the more intimate ones after Eleanor died, which is a bummer. So we don't have those. And then she kind of gave up because it was like a big task. So she gave them to the museum in Hyatt Park and said, don't open these until 10 years after I die. Wow. So she just like wanted them to be, to remain kind of like a secret. Yeah, that's part of what I saw here when I was trying to find this picture and found

this incredibly touching title of this book called Empty Without You was that I was looking at when Hicks died and looking at when all these rumors started coming up. And I was like, wow, that's weird, 10 years, huh? That's how long I heard people to start caring about this. It makes sense now. Yes. Oh, exactly. Good job.

That's exactly why, because they weren't allowed to open them. I mean, they were, they could ever if they want, whatever, but they respected her wishes and didn't do that. So unfortunately, this prude of an author named Doris Farber who wrote Hicks biography is the one who opened them first, and she sucks. And she immediately wanted to put them away. It was like the 80s and she was like, nope, no. And she said, quote, how could any reasonably perceptive adult deny that these were love letters? So she was like floored that like Eleanor Roosevelt would have like a physical lesbian relationship with another woman while she was first lady. And she wanted them put away.

She asked them to put them back for a couple more decades. And she also tries to get around it by saying, you know, in Victorian times, people sent more love letters to Platonic friends. So you maybe have more flowerly language, you know, which I think is great. We should bring that back. You know, like there's some letters from Ted Roosevelt and Taft where they're like, you are the best.

I'm so excited that we're friends. That's great. We should do more of that, you know. Let me do it. Yeah. And there's more also like, you know how people are like, Abe Lincoln's gay because he slept with dudes in the same bed. Do you remember those rumors?

I've never heard that. So there's like in like some of his memoirs, he's like, oh, well, I was traveling around Illinois as a circuit lawyer and, you know, my buddy Jeff, who's also a lawyer, we shared a room, blah, blah, blah. But that was just like what you did then because rooms were expensive. And I think the actual scandal there is how gross that must have been. Yeah. That was not like clean sheets.

That was very stinky. All I know is what I learned about Abraham Lincoln. in that vampire slayer movie, you remember that? Oh my God, I watched half of it, I feel like semi recently. And I was like, I, even I can't finish this. It was so fun. I loved it. Maybe I'll pick it up again, but I was like, absolutely that.

So who knows? You know, like, yes, people wrote more flowery letters, but let me read you some of these letters as far as. So Eleanor wore a ring that Hick gave her to the, to the first inauguration of FGR. This is like a few months into the relationship. And she wrote to Hick, quote, Hick darling i want to put my arms around you to hold you close your ring is a great comfort i look at it

and i think she does love me and then she says you have grown so much to be a part of my life that is empty without you even though i'm busy every minute my love unfolds the all night through i mean that's incredible those are love letters that's where that name comes from empty without you yeah and one from hick this one's my favorite so hick wrote that she is trying to remember Eleanor's face when they're apart. And she says, most clearly, I remember your eyes with a kind of teasing smile in them and the feeling of that soft spot, just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. So I think it's Blanche Weisencook in her book where she wrote, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but the northeast corner of your mouth is always the northeast

corner of your mouth. So like, they definitely, you know, we're, you know, we're physical with each other. They traveled a lot and started their time alone. They'd drive through town by themselves and refused Secret Service help. And Eleanor freely writes about them camping together and sharing rooms at friends' houses. They did some domestic work together. They went to Puerto Rico to look at the slums. It was like, and some of her pet projects sort of help people. There was a project that Eleanor did called Arthurdale where she, you know, gave people houses and job training to try to get them to, you know, the bitter lives in like the coal mining town. So a lot of like social services things that they did and you know tons of my darlings i miss you and i love these on the side

they dreamed about growing old together like i can't wait until we have a house together and we can just live there until we're old things like that um they were lovely love letters and at this time it was getting really hard of her obviously hick is not a cannot be an unbiased reporter anymore so she leaves her job and you know starts to get jobs sort of in the government that eleanor hooks like hooked up for her she's able to have i also read on wikipedia and i was just like scanning it for dates do you have the the j edgar movie with leonardo decaprio yes i remember i don't i don't remember it was a long time ago when i saw it but it does did say in wikipedia that that movie alludes that j edgar had proof that eleanor was having this lesbian affair and he threatened

to expose her that i don't see i don't remember that. I don't either, but that I said it was alluded to him in the movie, but I don't know if I want to watch it again, because I feel like it was also pretty intense. I remember I remember, I definitely didn't walk away from it thinking better of Jay Edgar Hoover. No, I mean, of all

people, he obviously has secrets himself. Of all people, yes. Yeah, like great. You're going to be the one to be like, this is exposable, but whatever, he didn't. And so Hick was, you know, working with Hick worked for the World's Fair, she worked for the

dnc she traveled around reported back to eleanor kind of became her eyes and ears and eventually she moves into the white house and i have oh gosh where do i have somewhere in one of these books i have a map a floor plan of the white house at that time and so the way that it was is the the residence floor of the white house eleanor and franklin had different rooms that were side by side and then across a like a sitting room for eleanor's room was a lincoln bedroom which is like a like the famous bedroom because Lincoln has a long bed there or whatever. And on the side of the Lincoln bedroom is a small room and that was Hicks room. And she lived there for years. So there steps away from each other in the White House. Is that, that's not normal for, is that normal?

No. Okay. So the Roosevelt's had a lot of like friends that would stop by and stay there who were like, you know, who would work there. And people would stay for a while. There were always guests. You know, it was never like an empty, you know, an empty place. But. you know having hick lived there for so long and also they kept it a secret so hick would literally like if someone took her out to dinner they'd bring her back to the mayflower hotel and she would sneak out of the back and take a cab to the white house so that's so interesting she wasn't telling people that she was living there but she was loving there which i think is really this is like this is a sad life of loretta hickok because she you know was just wanted to be close to eleanor any way possible

i'm looking at the mayflower see where it is in proximity to the white house oh my god thank you so it is i mean it's not an inconsequential distance away right i guess if you're trying to maintain that level of secret you kind of go to whatever lengths you have to it's kind of like i've walked this i mean yeah like she could have gotten dropped off way closer there's places Well, it was a long time ago, so maybe, maybe not. But maybe this was the closest place she could have gotten dropped off at. Yeah, maybe. Makes sense.

But yeah, you're right. She had to, like, pay for her cab to take her there. You know, it wasn't like free. It's like a walk across the street, you know. Yeah, so I think that's like, that's more, I think, more evidence that, you know, it was kind of a clandestine thing that they were doing and they were sharing. So eventually, you know, when things got really busy, Eleanor was so beloved and so needed. world war two you know like they really needed her out like in the world she was really working hard

to get the united nations started and she often had to break plans with hick and hick was getting sick or with her diabetes and they kept disappointing each other you know being like i wish i could be here with you i can't like i have to like i'm sick i have a job i have to do this and they just kept missing each other in in this time and so unfortunately hick is just like i can't do this anymore and she moves to a small house on Long Island that she lives in until she can no longer afford it years later. And then after that, Eleanor helps her get a place near her in Hyde Park. So she always lives near her.

It's like she was never out of reach. You know, even after the affair maybe had gold, she was never out of reach. And they both had other relationships. Hick tried to make it work with other women. Eleanor had, like I said before, a disposition to like kind of be involved in other people's relationships in like a suspicious way. She would meet like younger men at like, like, I don't know. I feel like I saw that and it sounded weird than I actually think it is, but she would

go to like a youth conference and she met this man, Joseph Lash, she wrote this long book about her and became a lifelong friend, but they were like very close. It was a little bit like her sons were kind of sucked. So she needed a son figure, but also it was a little bit like flirtatious. Yeah. She was like getting older. Yeah. And she also had a bodyguard named Earl Miller. And he, they would do things like put on plays at the White House. And like they have there's like a video that they have of them doing like a pirate show where he's a pirate and he like kidnaps her. He picks her up and he's like carrying her around the White House. And so there were a lot of rumors that they were having an affair. And Earl Miller said he got married at least

twice to kind of start to quell those rumors. And his third divorce, the wife threatened to name Eleanor Roosevelt in the divorce proceedings, but ended up not doing it. So it was like, she played a significant role there. yeah for sure like if you're causing your friend to have three divorces because his wives are sick of you guys hanging out then like that's the thing yeah totally so she was in and out of those things in the end her one of her last relationships was with a a man named dr david gaviravitch he you know was a lot younger than her and then he met someone and when he met someone eleanor was devastated but ended up like letting them get married in her apartment and like traveling the world

with them. So she just, like, didn't want to leave him alone, which is, like, kind of, kind of weird. So to explore it in different times. He's got to pull the rip cord. That's on him. Totally. Totally. So she just needed to be a part of relationships in any kind of way. Franklin also had other relationships. So he's still here, you know, his president, his secretary, Missy LaHand, who's one of the people I mentioned earlier. She devoted her goddamn life to him. She gave him everything. She was always with him. There's a couple, like the Hyde Park movie with Bill Murray. Have you seen that? So there's a movie where Bill Murray plays FDR and they do the weekend where the king and queen of England come to Hyde Park to meet with him. And in that movie, they flat out say that he was having an affair with like another cousin of his and Missy LaHand, his secretary. The weird thing that I think is also kind of interesting about the way that the Roosevelt's think about relationships is that Missy LaHan was fucking devoted to Franklin. She was always with him. if she helps him with everything. And when she, like, she had a heart attack or a stroke going to the hospital, he never visited her.

And when she died, he didn't go to her funeral. Oh, wow. So he just, like, forgot about her in like a, in like that fleeting relationship kind of way, which I think is really sad. And her life is sad. But like we said before, Franklin was president four times. He died during his fourth term pretty early into his fourth term. He was in Warm Springs, Georgia.

And guess who he was with when he died? Eleanor? No, he's with Lucy Mercer, the girl, like the woman that he had that affair with 20 years ago, like 20 to 30 years ago, that started the whole thing. They had started to see each other again. And Eleanor's daughter, Anna, had kind of helped arrange that because they loved each other. And Anna saw that Lucy made her dad happy when her dad was like super stressed out. And her mom never made him happy that way. You know, they hadn't in a long time.

Even though the Roosevelt's loved each other, they still didn't have that like, it just was, you know, different. So after FDR dies, Eleanor is, you know, out on her own, Hick writes some books for young adults. She wrote a book on Helen Keller, and Eleanor actually arranged for her to meet Helen Keller. So that book is like still up there and was pretty popular. Eleanor was in her late 60s and early 70s, and she was still traveling the world. So she was working for the United Nations under Truman. And then Eisenhower took away her actual job with the UN, but she volunteered with it after that. And so she went everywhere.

She went to Russia, the Middle East, Asia, just all over. the world into her 70s and she would visit Hick in her small apartment in Hyde Park near the Roosevelt home from time to time and Hick was very sick with her diabetes. She had arthritis. She couldn't see very well. So she really couldn't go anywhere. She just kind of stayed like near Eleanor's home for that. Yeah. And eventually Eleanor got sick with tuberculosis. One fun thing is in the hospital. She was like, okay, I'm ready to die. And the nurse said, you should wait until God is ready for you. And ER said utter nonsense, which is cute, a cute thing to say. And she ended up being able to go home. And she died in New York on November

7th, 1962 at the age of 78. Eleanor is buried with Franklin in Hyde Park. So obviously, this was devastating for like a lot of people. She was like the first lady of the world. Everybody really loved her. Obviously, Hick especially. And although she was very sick, she lived another five years. And during that five years, she did more writing and kind of put her around the town next to where Eleanor was buried. And during this time, this is when she curated her letters and donated them to the museum and all of those things. And Hick died on May 1, 1968.

In her will, she gave her favorite granddaughter of Eleanor's, the royalties to her Helen Keller book. And they've amounted to, like, you know, over $80,000. So she was able to, you know, finally give someone some money and earn some money from her writing. And she put in her will that she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered by, you know, a tree to help the trees grow, but her ashes went and claimed, and they were buried in a mass unclaimed remains plot in the Rhinebeck

Cemetery, about 15 minutes from Hyde Park, which sucks. And so later, after the letters came out and after people started learning more about Hick and Eleanor's relationship, E.R.'s biographer and some other women would plant a tree in the cemetery and put a little bench, and they made a little

plaque, and the plaque says, I'm going to cry now, the plaque says, Lorraine Hickok Hick, March 1893, to May, 1968, East Troy, Wisconsin to Hyde Park, New York, AP reporter, author, activist, and friend of ER. And that's where her little packets in the cemetery. And I'm crying because it's just, it's very passionate and interesting. And it's like I said before, like it's a, I think Eleanor, her full life. And I don't think that heck did.

And so that makes me really, really sad. This is the worst episode of a podcast ever. It was sad and it was trauma. commentizing and I'm sorry to everyone. No, I think it's hitting for me so many feelings from being honest. You know, I've, the impetus for this podcast, which I don't know if we've even discussed here was a relationship that I was in that was very, I'm going to describe as soulful, that was obviously going to...

It had to end. Yeah. And there's a quality to your story that really hit home for me when it comes to that, which is the universe putting two people together in moments when they really, really,

really need each other. knowing full well that those circumstances that also brought you together are the circumstances that are going to tear you apart yeah totally which is sad oh it is sad but i think it's sad and then it's hopeful because then you can you know you can live many lives and have many you know just don't kill people just love a lot of people and i feel like that you know that's what eleanor did and hit i think you know fortunately unfortunately unfortunately unfortunately, she had her great love and it was Ellen her. So it was, that was, that was kind of it for her. And I'm happy that we're telling her story in, you know, many different books in many different ways because it's such an important part of, part of history to be like, you know, this, this relationship during this time. And, you know, the Doris Cairns Goodwin book is called, um, it's called no, no ordinary time. And maybe because that's what we're talking about. Like, this is a real special time in history and a real special like a relationship and a thing for the entire world. And that during. And that during. this time there was love as well it's like i think really hopeful and sad and interesting and

next week i'm going to do something horrible i need to find something that is like very violent again get more violence into mine you know what what i was also thinking of was um diana yeah because i mean obviously their husbands were dramatically different franklin was arguably the best president the U.S. has ever had. Charles was useless and didn't do anything. But, like, they both ended up in some ways becoming kind of the flag bearer for their husbands and their countries. And, yeah, very interesting. Becoming their own powerhouse, independent of their husbands, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't feel like I'm going to do Diana because she's been done to death part of the fun. There's so many freaking things about her.

leave her alone. I agree. I'm going to let her rest for a minute and a half, that poor lady. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks, Taylor. I am, you know, I'm going to dwell on this. I'm actually leaving after this to drive to Dallas for a family reunion. And there's going to be two things that you left me with. I'm legit going to be dwelling on the entire drive. One is the concept of living the shit out of your life. which I think I've been sleepwalking through most of that for a little bit, and I'm coming out of it, and this story really helped reinvigorate that piece. And the other is, I'm never going to forget this title, Empty Without You, The Intimate Letters of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt.

I don't even have that book. I don't think I could handle it emotionally. What a beautifully titled book. And when you read that quote, I was like, they talked. to each other like this. That's incredible. Yeah. It's so beautiful and so lovely.

And I'll write you a really nice letter later today that tells you that you're the best. I appreciate that. You are not going to like this because I know you well enough to know that you are not a huge fan of Ronald Reagan. But I did go to Reagan's presidential museum while I was a little bit in L.A. That's cool. His love letters to Nancy were like this. Are they really? Incredible.

And they're all over the place. You just go around and read them because he was always on the move, you know, doing his thing. But he wrote incredible letters to his wife. And they're definitely worth the read. I definitely want to go. I want to go to all of the presidential museums. His has an Air Force One too, right? Yeah, but it's like the old.

No, no, I know. Yeah. Is it cool? It's not at 747. Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. It's, they have Air Force one. They have Marine one.

You walk into this giant hangar that has a lot. cafe and it's it's it's I'm trying to remember what city it's in in California I can't remember wherever it is though it faces this bluff that is stunning you you're in this hanger that's all glass based like on the side of a cliff it's absolutely fantastic I need to go Nixon's library is also very close to here too and I just find it delightful that Nixon's from Costa Mesa because I imagine him like with an umbrella and it's raining on just him because he's like from this beautiful place in California he's just like nah And also my, I'm going to New York in July and I will be 35 minutes from Hyde Park.

So I will report back because I'm going to go visit that. I'm going to visit Lorena's plaque. I'm going to cry a lot. I will share photos when I do that later. So cool. Well, thank you, Fars, for this. Have a safe trip to Dallas. While you're there, go to the JFK Museum about the assassination.

There's a place where you can go and stand at the window that Lee Harvey Alde was at. You can do that. And I want to remind everyone to like and subscribe on all the things. Find us at Doom to FillPod on Facebook and Instagram. And keep listening. Thank you. Keep listening. We'll live you with keep listening.

Thank you, Taylor. I'll be funnier. I keep saying that. I don't get funnier. I'm going to go cry. I'm going to weep. I'll talk to later. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording.

I don't know.