In 1979, Alice Roosevelt Longworth was a long, long way away from her days as a wild child -- in every sense. But a wild child she had been. In her heyday, she could generate more newspaper print than her father, if she cared to. And this when her father just happened to be the President of the United States. She tipped off newspapers about where she'd be and what she'd be up to, then pocketed the cash for the info. Of course she did it to stick a finger in his eye. Of course she did it to get back at him for not loving her the way she needed.
She was born before women could vote, before cars were invented, before electricity lighted homes. She was brilliant before women were allowed to be brilliant. She was beautiful, rich, and privileged. But she was also shy and so learned how to control the media from offstage.
She carried a dagger, a snake, and the Constitution in her purse and became the first woman to drive a car forty-five miles an hour. When her father told her she could not smoke under his roof, she climbed to the top of the White House and smoked there, on the roof.
Coming of age when birth control was a matter of rhythm, she said, "Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches." Which included sex. When she was a teenager, her stepmother, Edith Carow, begged her husband, then the Governor of New York, to send his daughter to a boarding school because "she had the habit of running the streets uncontrolled with every boy in town." The wild child straight-out told her father, "If you send me, I will do something that will shame you. I tell you, I will."
-- White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America (BOOK | KINDLE) by Shelley Fraser Mickle, Imagine! Books/Charlesbridge Publishing, 2023
