Word: elliott
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ROOSEVELTS OF HYDE PARK by ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT and JAMES BROUGH 319 pages. Putnam...
Marriage to Cousin Franklin seemed a lucky break, but Mother-in-Law Sara turned out to be a meddlesome tyrant, and Franklin himself had a few flaws as a husband. To this list we can now add a posthumous problem for Eleanor: her son Elliott seems bent on committing the equivalent of literary matricide...
...Untold Story has attracted pre-publication attention because advance excerpts identified F.D.R.'s second girl friend as Missy LeHand, who eventually succeeded Lucy Mercer in that delicate position around 1922. As Elliott tells it, all five children knew about his father's relationship with Missy. They eventually took it for granted, over many years, as did members of the official White House family. Eleanor herself acquiesced to an amazing degree. She treated the younger woman as a daughter- to the point of buying her clothes when Missy was "too busy" with political chores...
...Missy affair occupies only a small part of the book, however, and is really beside Elliott's point. He under took this reminiscence ostensibly be cause historians have so idealized Franklin and Eleanor. The cosmetic job has been such, Elliott says, that to the Roosevelt children the two emerge "as total strangers, not the father we loved and the mother we respected." Note the distinction: it is what passes for subtlety in Elliott Roosevelt's account...
...resemblance between Chandler's book and this movie is not only coincidental but probably libelous. The private detective Philip Marlowe was Chandler's surrogate knight, his field of battle what Chandler called "the shadow line," his adversaries the people who walk it. In his present incarnation (Elliott Gould), Marlowe becomes a chain-smoking shlemiel. Gould looks less like a private eye than like a junkie half on the nod slouching along Sunset Strip looking for a fix. The only dope here is Marlowe himself. He stumbles into a job of playing wet nurse to an alcoholic fount...