On the morning of January 27th, 1957, a housekeeper unlocked a Georgetown townhouse and found a thirty-one-year-old woman dead in her bed. The only child of one of the most feared women in American political history lay under the covers with a bottle of sleeping pills on the table. Her name was Paulina Longworth Sturm. Her mother was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, the sharp-tongued Washington legend the press had once called Princess Alice.
The country had watched Paulina grow up. She had been born on Valentine’s Day 1925, the most photographed baby in Washington, nicknamed the Valentine Princess before she could speak. For nearly seventy years, the story of what happened inside the relationship between Alice and Paulina, and how a president’s granddaughter died alone at thirty-one, remained buried. Alice Roosevelt learned early that love could cost the giver everything.
She was two days old on February 14th, 1884 when her mother, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died of kidney failure in one bedroom of a New York City house while her grandmother Martha died of typhoid fever in another. Her father, twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, watched both women die before sundown. He wrote in his diary, the light has gone out of my life. He did not mean the baby.
The baby was the reason her mother was dead. Two weeks later he left for the Badlands, leaving Alice with his sister Bamie, who became the only mother she knew. When Theodore remarried in 1886, three-year-old Alice was sent to live with his new wife Edith, a dignified and distant woman. Edith filled the house at Oyster Bay with five more children.
Alice was the one who did not belong. By ten she could make grown men laugh by saying what no one else dared. By sixteen she was dangerous, having learned that the only way to survive a household where you are quietly unwanted is to make yourself impossible to ignore. When Theodore became president in September 1901, seventeen-year-old Alice became the most written-about young woman in America.
She smoked on the White House roof to defy her father, kept a green snake in her handbag named Emily Spinach, and danced until dawn. Her father’s famous remark captured the dynamic: I can either run the country or control Alice. I cannot possibly do both. In 1906 she married Nicholas Longworth, a charming, wealthy, hard-drinking congressman from Ohio, in the East Room of the White House.
For nineteen years there was no child. Alice miscarried, no one recorded how many times. Then, on Valentine’s Day 1925, exactly forty-one years after her mother and grandmother died, she gave birth to Paulina. Washington whispered from the start.
The baby’s birth certificate named Nicholas Longworth as father, but few believed it. Standing off to the side in a family photograph from that spring, separate from the Longworths, was a 60-year-old senator from Idaho named William Borah, the most powerful isolationist in the Senate. Washington knew Alice slipped out of dinner parties to meet him. Nicholas knew.
The senator’s wife knew. Paulina’s birth certificate said otherwise, and almost no one in the city believed it. For the first six years of Paulina’s life, the Longworth house ran on a brittle brilliance. Nicholas became Speaker of the House.
He drank bourbon and played violin at parties, charming everyone, fathering no one. Alice ran the dinners and kept Paulina upstairs with a nanny, bringing her down at six in a clean dress for exactly fifteen minutes. By three, Paulina had a stammer that came and went depending on which adult was in the room. The nanny noticed and said nothing, having been told Mrs.
Longworth did not wish to hear of small difficulties. Nicholas Longworth died of lobar pneumonia in April 1931. Paulina, six years old, was not brought to the funeral. Alice sold the M Street house and bought a larger, darker one on Massachusetts Avenue.
There she turned the third floor over to her daughter and the first floor into a salon that for the next fifty years would host every important senator, cabinet secretary, justice, and columnist in Washington. She also began an experiment on her own daughter. She decided Paulina would be cleverer, sharper, better educated than she was. From the age of seven, Paulina was tested at meals in front of guests.
The questions were not cruel in content. They were cruel in the setting. The stammer settled in permanently, a catch in the throat before any sentence beginning with I. She carried it for the rest of her life.
Paulina was sent to boarding school at twelve. She did well academically, poorly socially. She kept in her dresser drawer a small framed photograph of a tall, white-haired man she would not name. When William Borah died in January 1940, Paulina was fourteen.
She heard it on the radio in the common room and sat on the edge of her bed for two hours without speaking. She called her mother, received an answer in under three minutes, and told her roommate, I will not be going to the funeral. She never spoke the senator’s name in public again. She kept the photograph, wrapped in tissue paper in a small envelope with no inscription, and it was found after her death in the bottom drawer of a writing desk.
After Borah’s death, Alice hardened into the legend Americans remember: the white-haired woman in the broad black hat, the pillow embroidered with her signature line, if you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me. She was lonelier than she had ever been. By 1945 her father, stepmother, husband, and three half-brothers were all dead. She had one living person who belonged to her, Paulina, twenty years old, drinking heavily, and about to do something her mother had not prepared for.
In October 1945, Paulina, granddaughter of one of the most defiantly Protestant families in American politics, asked to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. She told her mother by letter, unable to say it in person. Alice read it at the breakfast table and made exactly one comment: well, now she has found a way to embarrass three generations at once. She did not write back for almost a month.
Three years later, Paulina married Alexander McCormick Sturm, an heir to a Chicago publishing family, a writer and firearm designer who would co-found Sturm, Ruger and Company. He was clever, charming, and in the grip of deep depression, drinking heavily. They had one daughter, Joanna, born in 1946. Alex Sturm died in November 1951, officially of hepatitis, at twenty-eight.
Paulina was twenty-six. She was left alone in the New York apartment with a five-year-old for almost three weeks before her mother sent a car. In those weeks she began drinking alone, after the child was asleep, and would not stop. She moved to a small Georgetown townhouse a few blocks from her mother.
By 1953 the drinking showed in her face, in the tremor of the hand that held her wine glass. In the spring of 1955, at a dinner on Massachusetts Avenue, with a Supreme Court justice, a senator, and a Washington Post columnist at the table, Alice Roosevelt Longworth turned to her daughter and said, loud enough for the entire table to hear: Paulina, you are the only thing I have ever made that has disappointed me. The table went silent. Paulina did not lift her eyes from her plate.
She finished her dessert. She stayed until her mother rose, walked into the drawing room, held a cup of coffee in her lap for forty minutes without drinking it, and went home alone. The eighteen months that followed were the worst of her life. She drank more, ate less, missed appointments at Joanna’s school.
By the autumn of 1956 she was taking a barbiturate, Nembutal, one capsule at bedtime, sometimes two, sometimes three, washed down with whatever was in the glass. Ten-year-old Joanna woke her mother in the chair by the lamp, put the glass in the sink, made her own breakfast, walked herself to school, and on the worst mornings called her grandmother and said in a careful voice: Grandmother, mother is not feeling well today. Could the car come? The car always came.
Alice was, by every account, a deeply attentive grandmother. On the night of January 26th, 1957, Paulina went upstairs at about ten o’clock, locked her bedroom door from the inside, a habit of the last six months, sat on the edge of the bed, poured a glass, and took between five and seven Nembutal capsules. She left no note. The medical examiner ruled it accidental.
Almost no one who had been at the 1955 dinner believed it. Almost no one said so out loud. The housekeeper unlocked the door the next morning when Paulina did not answer. She found Joanna in the kitchen eating a piece of toast in her school uniform.
She knelt down, took the girl’s hands, and said quietly: Joanna, your grandmother is coming to get you. She did not say your mother is dead. That, by long-standing instruction, was left for Alice Roosevelt Longworth to say. What Alice said to her ten-year-old granddaughter in the back of that car has never been recorded.
It was the most important conversation of Joanna’s life, and no one has ever been able to put it on paper. Joanna never returned to the townhouse to live. Within seventy-two hours her bedroom on the third floor of Massachusetts Avenue had been prepared. Alice personally telephoned the headmistress of the Catholic school to arrange a quiet desk, permission to be excused without explanation, and an unspoken agreement that no teacher would ask what had happened to her mother.
Joanna did not weep at the funeral. A photograph from January 30th, 1957 shows a small dark-haired girl in a black coat holding her grandmother’s hand, her face set in the same careful neutral expression Alice had perfected for half a century. She had learned it by watching. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was seventy-three.
Joanna was ten. The house reorganized itself around a fourth-grader. The dinners did not stop. The justices and senators kept arriving.
But upstairs, a child was being raised for the first time in Alice’s eighty years by Alice herself. She read to Joanna at night, took her to the National Gallery on Sundays, attended the parent meetings at the Catholic school, allowed her, at fifteen, to bring friends home for dinner, something she had almost never permitted Paulina. She listened in a way she had never listened to her own daughter. There is a single account of what Alice did alone on the night she was told her only child was dead.
It comes from Janie McLaughlin, a junior staff member who told the story once in old age. At about three o’clock that afternoon, she was sent up to ask if Mrs. Longworth wanted tea. She knocked.
No answer. She opened the door perhaps two inches. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was sitting on the floor of her own bedroom, in her dark dress, her back against the side of the bed, holding in both hands a small framed photograph of Paulina at five years old, in a white dress on the back lawn of the M Street house, smiling at the camera. She was not weeping.
She was making a low, dry, almost wordless sound the staff member had no other word for than keening. Janie closed the door and went downstairs. She did not tell another living person what she had seen for almost forty years. The photograph was the one Alice chose to hold in the worst hour of her life, the version of Paulina who was still small enough to lift, who had not yet learned to stammer, with nothing yet ruined, everything still possible.
She held it for six hours. Alice lived twenty-three more years, and the specific personal cruelty, the kind she had once aimed across a dinner table, was gone. She had used it up on the only person it should never have been used on. Joanna grew up in the Massachusetts Avenue house, attended Holton-Arms and Radcliffe, and lived with her grandmother until Alice died on February 20th, 1980, at the age of ninety-six.
Joanna, by every account, was the person Alice loved most in the world. Joanna never married. She never had children. She never traded on the names of the dead to build a name of her own.
She became the keeper of her grandmother’s papers, the quiet authority scholars approach to verify a date or a quotation. She donated large portions of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s possessions to the Smithsonian and the Theodore Roosevelt Center, making available the materials that allow stories like this one to be told. The pattern that began with Theodore Roosevelt, unable in 1884 to hold his own daughter, passed to Alice, unable in 1932 to hold hers, and to Paulina, unable in 1956 to hold hers, broke with Joanna. It broke because, on the morning of January 27th, 1957, a ten-year-old girl was put in the back of a car, and a seventy-three-year-old woman with a famous sharp tongue decided the chain would break in her hands or not at all.
She raised Joanna as if the answer to the question she asked herself on the floor of that bedroom, whether she could have done it differently, was yes. It was the first honest trade of her life. Paulina never heard the words a daughter needs to hear.
Joanna did, every day, from the woman who got it wrong with one child and, too late, got it right with the next.