Mamma Knows Best

When her eldest son Jimmy began running for governor of California, it became virtually mandatory that Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt travel west and say a good word for the boy: the omission of such a rite would have given the Republicans a chance to boast that even his own mother wouldn't stump for him. But to Mrs. Roosevelt, who must reconcile the duties of motherhood with those of politics, the journey presented complications.

For one thing, she could not go to California without also giving a cheer for her longtime friend, Democratic Senatorial Candidate Helen Gahagan Douglas. And Candidate Helen was not seeing eye to eye with Candidate Jimmy at all. Her backers, in fact, were complaining that Jimmy was not only failing to help her, but failing to help himself. Many another Democrat was sore because Jimmy was giving talks on public utilities and happiness instead of trying to paint Governor Warren as a drooling Republican fiend.

An Austerity Diet. But when Mrs. Roosevelt arrived in Los Angeles one morning last week, she seemed no more disturbed than a veteran kindergarten teacher who has heard a little minor scuffling in the back of the room. She greeted both Jimmy and Helen with cries of matriarchal affection and rode off to Jimmy's Beverly Hills mansion with them as tranquilly as if she were taking both to be fitted with teeth braces and sensible shoes.

At the Roosevelt home she hugged & kissed Jimmy's two-year-old daughter, Anna Eleanor and told her son severely: "She has a chin like mine. You'll have to start her exercising her chin." Then she turned to the problem presented by a houseful of reporters, most of them thirsting to embroil her in argument about local politics. She solved it by discussing the United Nations--so firmly, so energetically and with so much of the air of a Hokinsonian clubwoman doing flower arrangements that the press fidgeted, breathed heavily and resigned itself to an austerity diet of Larger Issues.

A Few Vitamins. Mrs. Roosevelt kept on talking about world problems all day. At Bixby Park in Long Beach, she devoted only one minute to the California campaign. At one point she even seemed to be making a lefthanded plug for Republican Warren. She had always been impressed by his program. Now, she suggested mildly, "The Democratic Party and someone who has had a background in it might do a better job" of putting the program through. But by the time she had gone to a Democratic reception at the Hollywood Brown Derby, had been televised and had spoken --amid tremendous applause--to a big crowd at the Biltmore Hotel's ballroom, none could say she had not put in a good word for both Jimmy and Helen.

She was as cheerfully placid when she left as she had been on arrival. After 24 hours without sleep, she got on a plane for San Francisco announcing that she had to get up early to see her grandson John Boettiger in the morning. Wasn't she tired? "Oh no," she said, "I don't feel tired at all--but sometimes I do take a few vitamins."

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