Wilderstein in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
ON a secluded bluff in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in one of the most beautiful spots overlooking the Hudson River, a 35-room Queen Anne mansion with a five-story turret is getting final touches on its first paint job since 1910. On one side, its rambling porch shines in bright maroon and green. On the other, where the painters and the grant money still haven’t penetrated, it looks like a crumbling wreck.
This is Wilderstein, a stepchild among the Hudson River mansions, one of the last to be restored and despite its beauty one of the least visited — partly because its owner, Margaret Suckley (usually called Daisy), stayed on so long, cheerfully dispensing tea to strangers and far outlasting her family’s fortune. She died there in 1991, a few months before her hundredth birthday. But on a Wilderstein tour it is Daisy herself who will tell you, in a video made in the 1980s as her house deteriorated around her, that the previous paint went on in 1910. “It was good paint,” she says, laughing.
In the same video, Miss Suckley (rhymes with BOOK-ly) also talks, almost in passing, about the last days in the life of a neighbor and sixth cousin who lived downriver in another mansion: Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was one of the four women with Roosevelt in his Georgia house when he died in 1945, yet she leaves the impression that she was little more than his dog walker. It is far short of the truth.
Until a suitcase of papers was found under Ms. Suckley’s bed in her turret room at Wilderstein after her death — including handwritten letters from Roosevelt with distinctly romantic overtones — the depth of their relationship was a deeply buried secret. Oddly, despite the publication of the letters, Daisy’s diaries and her letters to him in an absorbing 1995 book put together by Geoffrey C. Ward (also author with Ken Burns of “The Civil War” and the scriptwriter for Mr. Burns’s series on World War II beginning Sept. 23 on public television), very few people seem to know the story now.
It comes into play not only at Wilderstein, but also at Top Cottage, Roosevelt’s private hideaway three miles above his estate in Hyde Park — built on a woodland height that he and Daisy referred to clandestinely in the 1930s as “Our Hill.” Tour both places in the same day, and the resonance can run deep. But you may have to do your homework first.
On two recent tours of Wilderstein, guides had much to say about the landscaping by Calvert Vaux and the lavish interiors designed by Joseph Burr Tiffany, a cousin of Louis Comfort Tiffany, but little about Roosevelt beyond the unexciting fact that Daisy gave him his Scottish terrier, Fala. Although Mr. Ward’s book “Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley” was on sale in the gift shop, no one brought up what it reveals.
You may find out a bit more on one of the National Park Service tours given since 2001 at Top Cottage, the last of the Roosevelt sites in Hyde Park to be restored and opened to the public. Or you may not. Every tour there is different, said Kevin Oldenburg, a National Park Service ranger who was leading one in May.
Top Cottage tours are refreshingly informal. Visitors walk freely through the simple rooms and can even try out the furniture, all reproductions made with the help of photographs. They sit on the same bluestone porch where Roosevelt discussed war strategy with Winston Churchill. But the content of the tours varies. One day last August two guides showed a copy of “Closest Companion” and carefully explained Daisy’s role in Roosevelt’s life and in the plans for Top Cottage. On Mr. Oldenburg’s tour last month, when there was no response to his question “Has anyone heard of Daisy Suckley?” he said merely that she was a distant cousin who had helped Roosevelt find the site for the cottage.
In the video at Wilderstein, Daisy is quick to laugh, unassuming, direct and clear in her recollections. She has a plain, unaffected charm evident even to an Eleanor Roosevelt loyalist disappointed to learn of yet another “other woman” in the Roosevelt marriage. (Best known of the others is Lucy Mercer, whose affair with Roosevelt a few years before he contracted polio had so hurt Eleanor, her children hinted — according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account in her book “No Ordinary Time” — that divorce was avoided only with an agreement for separate bedrooms.)
All through the war years, Daisy stayed for long visits at the White House, keeping the president company on quiet evenings. At Hyde Park, he took her on long drives in the car he operated with hand controls. The only two published photographs of him in his wheelchair were taken by Daisy — both at Top Cottage. Yet she seems to have been routinely dismissed, even by the historians who trooped to see her at Wilderstein long after Roosevelt’s death, as the dowdy cousin who worked on the family papers.
Daisy was no beauty, and after the last vestiges of the Suckley fortune, originally built on trade and shipping, were lost in the Depression, she was too poor to dress well. But she was also playing, as she put it in her diary, “my part of prim spinster,” and Roosevelt laughed about it with her. The degree of their intimacy is unknown, and Roosevelt’s apparent instructions to Daisy to burn at least some of his letters have resulted in gaps. But in 1935, something clearly happened between them on “Our Hill” — something, Mr. Ward wrote, “that neither of them ever forgot.”
“There is no reason why I should not tell you that I miss you very much — It was a week ago yesterday — ” Roosevelt wrote her immediately afterward from Boulder Dam, where he had gone for a dedication ceremony. He called her “M. M.,” for “my Margaret,” and “C. P.,” for “a certain person” whom he had to “bite my tongue” to keep from talking about. “I have longed to have you with me,” he wrote from a cruise to Panama.
Before long they were writing back and forth about Our Hill as the perfect setting for a cottage. “I think a one-story fieldstone two room house ... one with very thick walls to protect us ...,” he wrote her in October 1935. “Do you mind — then — if I tell you fairy stories till it gets very late?”
Daisy responded excitedly, with detailed plans — her sketch of a larger structure that looks something like the real Top Cottage is reproduced in a book about the cottage restoration published by the project architects in 2001. Daisy even began assembling books for “O.L.” — the cottage’s library.
The bubble seems to have burst when Roosevelt gently shifted the plans. “What an excellent idea,” she wrote in late 1937, her tone suddenly restrained, “for you to have a ‘Retreat’ on the top of your wooded hill.”
Top Cottage was built in 1938, and it was Roosevelt’s alone. He designed it to resemble the Dutch colonial architecture he admired and to accommodate his wheelchair — it is one of the first accessible structures designed by a disabled person — and it gave Roosevelt a freedom of movement he enjoyed nowhere else. He used it as a quiet retreat and to entertain foreign dignitaries. Mr. Oldenburg, speaking as his tour group sat on wicker chairs on the Top Cottage porch, described the famous party there in 1939 in which the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the king and queen of England.
Daisy, often a guest at the cottage, was there that day, Mr. Ward noted in “Closest Companion.”
THE friendship lost its romantic edge but never its intimacy. With her, Roosevelt told Daisy, he could escape the demands of other people’s expectations and just relax. She quotes him: “I’m either Exhibit A, or left completely alone” (and, of course, he was largely immobilized by his paralysis). In 1944 he was still writing, at a time when they were apart, “I wish so you were here.”
“He told me once,” she wrote in her diary soon after his death, “that there was no one else with whom he could be so completely himself.”
And he could be honest. He wrote Daisy from the ship where he first met Churchill: “He is a tremendously vital person & in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia! Don’t say I said so!” He told her about his plans for a new postwar peace organization, later named the United Nations. “He would like to be chairman,” she wrote in her diary. In a long letter from Casablanca in 1943, he reported, “De Gaulle a headache — said yesterday that he was Jeanne d’Arc & today that he is Georges Clemenceau!”
After Roosevelt died, his daughter, Anna, and a friend came upon a cache of Daisy’s letters, hidden in the box from his stamp collection that Roosevelt took everywhere with him. There is no indication that Anna read the letters or understood their significance, but she offered to let Daisy have them back, and Daisy accepted carefully. She supposed, she wrote to Anna, it had been “just easier” for him “to toss them into the stamp box rather than bother to tear them up & drop them into the waste-paper basket!” And so her letters to Roosevelt, along with his to her, found their way to the suitcase in the turret bedroom.
A weakness of the tour at Wilderstein is that it does not include climbing up into the turret, or even going beyond the first floor — though further restoration might someday make that possible. Surely every visitor would like to see Daisy’s room, with its majestic view of the Hudson and the convenient hiding place under the bed.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Tours of Wilderstein Historic Site (330 Morton Road, Rhinebeck, N.Y.; 845-876-4818; www.wilderstein.org) are given from noon to 3:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday from May through October and cost $10 for adults. To reach the house from the New York State Thruway, take Exit 19 (Kingston), cross the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge over the Hudson River and drive south on Route 9 into Rhinebeck. Go straight at the stoplight in the center of the village and then take the first right, Mill Road. Drive 2.2 miles and turn right onto Morton Road. The Wilderstein entrance is a quarter-mile on the left.
Top Cottage tours (845-229-5320; www.nps.gov/hofr; $8) begin at 11:30 a.m. Thursday through Monday from May through October. They require reservations and depart from the Henry A. Wallace Visitor Center at the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, 4097 Albany Post Road (Route 9), Hyde Park. The entrance is on Route 9, about 11 miles south of Rhinebeck and 3 miles north of Poughkeepsie.
Mrs. Nesbitt’s Cafe in the Wallace center is a good spot for a light meal. More elaborate fare is nearby at the student-run restaurants of the Culinary Institute of America (www.ciachef.edu/visitors/hp/), just south of the Roosevelt home on Route 9. Reservations are suggested for the institute’s four formal restaurants (845-471-6608), which serve a variety of cuisines and are closed on Sundays; its Apple Pie Bakery Café is open weekdays. In Rhinebeck, Terrapin (6426 Montgomery Street; 845-876-3330) serves well-prepared American dishes (dinner entrees from about $18 to $30) in a converted church.
“Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley,” edited by Geoffrey C. Ward (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), is out of print but available at both Wilderstein and the Roosevelt site and from online booksellers.
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