The Perfect Wife : ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Volume One, 1884-1933, <i> By Blanche Wiesen Cook (Viking: $27.50; 500 pp.)</i>

An age that divorces readily yet expects its politicians to be blameless monogamists would do well to study the Roosevelts. They made their marriage work. They respected each other’s ideals, and despite widely diverging paths, remained a team.

To be sure, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were very different from you and me. They had more money. They shared the cocoon of class and confidence which enveloped the New York landed aristocracy of the turn of the century. They tolerated separations, disagreements and infidelities which today would send couples flying to the divorce court.

Yet, as Blanche Wiesen Cook makes clear, something stronger than convention helped them stay together. They shared a confidence in the solidity of their privileged world and a wish to help those excluded from it. On one of their early dates, when she was 19 and he 21, Eleanor, who was working as a voluntary teacher of calisthenics in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, took Franklin to see some tenements. He kept repeating that he “simply could not believe human beings lived that way.” Thus “the Roosevelts” were born.

They were cousins. Mrs. Roosevelt was born Miss Roosevelt, in 1884. She suffered the kind of childhood that is the stuff of Victorian novels. Her mother, a beauty, died at 29, leaving Little Nell, then 8, convinced of her own hopeless ugliness. The next year saw the death of a beloved little brother. And in the year after that, her father, the only person who adored her, also died. Elliott Roosevelt was a dashing wastrel and drinker whose memory only Little Nell idealized.

Luckily, the sprawling clan, which included frail Uncle Teddy, then busy body-building with no dreams of the presidency, took charge. Her maternal grandmother took the orphan in hand. She was strict, forcing Eleanor to wear a steel back brace for a year for supposed curvature of the spine, and ignoring for years the child’s torments by a cruel nurse.

At 15, Eleanor was sent, against her will, to London to a progressive finishing school for intelligent girls. She thrived there, and acquired the confident speech, carriage and fluent French that, along with her considerable height, led so many in later life to describe her as a great lady. When, however, she was seen unchaperoned in Paris (on a school trip in the company of the feminist head of the school, a mother figure whom she adored), her happiness was again cut short. Her grandmother summoned her home immediately to the safety of the New York debutante season.

Eleanor and cousin Franklin had much in common when they secretly became engaged during his junior year at Harvard. They both had lonely childhoods and wanted a large family. They admired and needed each other. One of the pleasures of Cook’s biography is her evidence that they were genuinely in love. When Eleanor visited Cambridge (chaperoned) for the Harvard-Yale game, Franklin recorded in his secret diary, “A never to be forgotten walk to the river with my darling.”

Eleanor soon learned that she was marrying the mother of all mother-in-law problems. Sara Delano Roosevelt, Franklin’s doting widowed mother, took charge of every detail of their new home, from choosing the carpets to hiring the staff. And on her wedding day itself, St. Patrick’s Day, 1905, Eleanor learned that her role was to be upstaged by a charismatic Roosevelt. Uncle Teddy, by then President (Republican) of the United States, came to New York for the parade, and at the wedding stole the show from both bride and groom.

At the Roosevelt family seat at Hyde Park on the Hudson, Eleanor and the succession of babies she rapidly produced (and breast-fed) were never anything but guests. Sara sat at one end of the table, her son at the other. The first home Eleanor called her own was in Albany, when Roosevelt became state senator for Dutchess County in 1910. Like his father and unlike the Oyster Bay (Long Island) Roosevelts, he was a Democrat.

From the start, Eleanor was the model political wife. She turned out to have a gift for organization, for friendship with people from all walks of life, and for loneliness. Her husband, in most ways, was utterly unlike her. His career was built on his charm and gregariousness. He loved parties. He tippled and flirted and inevitably succumbed to a serious affair with Lucy Mercer. When Eleanor discovered telltale letters, she did the noble thing: She offered a divorce.

Franklin refused, saying that he was devoted to her “and the chicks,” as he called his growing brood. But Eleanor never regained her primacy in his heart. He continued to see Lucy Mercer, later Rutherford. He also installed his secretary, Missy LeHand as a virtual second wife. Mrs. Rutherford, this book shows, paid him a clandestine visit on his inauguration day in 1933. (Thus John F. Kennedy’s escapades on his own inauguration day nearly three decades later were not as original as he may have thought.) Both of these alternative consorts were at Warm Springs, Ga., with Roosevelt when he died suddenly in April, 1945. Eleanor was in Washington.

The fascination of this book lies in portraying an Eleanor who was something other than a sexless, lonely, do-gooder wife. Drawing on recently opened archives and FBI files, it reveals that Eleanor Roosevelt had a rich private emotional life and--more amazing--that her husband encouraged it. He built for her and a lesbian couple to whom she was very close a cottage on his Hyde Park estate. He supported her lifelong, devoted and probably sexual relationship with her bodyguard, Earl Miller. And he accepted as part of the permanent entourage the Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, with whom Eleanor had her happiest and most enduring passionate relationship.

All of this should have made a gripping tale. It does not; the book has a curious impersonality and leaves an impression of legendary figures without deep emotions. Part of the blame--or credit--goes to Eleanor and her close friends. She destroyed most of her private letters, as did they. Earl Miller, loyally, never talked. Full information, therefore, is not available. but Cook has not patched over the gaps nor stitched together the available fragments very gracefully. She takes clumsy alternatives, either speculating wordily on what the protagonists might have been doing or thinking, or collapsing, with the apology, “We are not playing with a full deck.” (Doesn’t that usually mean something quite different?)

About the Hickok affair, she does produce “proof”--a love letter from Hickok to Eleanor: “I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms . . . that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . .” Yet the letters that leave the strongest impression are those between husband and wife. She called him “Dearest Honey” well into their marriage. He clearly never lost his wonder at her powers. Praising her in a letter for her fund-raising efforts on behalf of poor Jewish children, he begins “Dear Lady” and ends, “Yr Slave, FDR.”

The question remains. Without Eleanor as his conscience, would Roosevelt have been anything but a jaunty, lightweight charmer?

The answer must be yes. In 1932 the nation needed, just as Eleanor had in 1905, a father: charisma, bravado and all. “Millions of our citizens,” F.D.R. is saying in his inaugural address as this book ends, “cherish the hope that our old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever.”

Oh yes. He was the man for his time. It was Mrs. Roosevelt’s tragedy and glory that she played the supporting role so well. She was, for Roosevelt and the nation, the perfect wife.