Princess Alice; A biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. First Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Mike Lein (Back photograph). xii, 335, [3] pages. Illustrations. Index. Minor edge soiling. DJ has some wear, soiling, and tears at bottom front and back near spine. James Brough gives us a sparkling account of the redoubtable daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, filled with candid details and entertaining anecdotes. Tracing her background, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, he has also furnished us with fascinating glimpses into the private life and character of one of the legendary families of America. James Brough, noted best selling biographer known for penning many books about major Hollywood stars and historic figures of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Major titles including: "The Whole Truth and Nothing But" with Hedda Hopper, "We Were Five" The Dionne Quintuplets Story, "The Prince and the Lilly" The Lille Langtry Story", "A Rendezvous With Destiny" with Elliot Roosevelt,and "Margaret The Tragic Princess" to name but a few. Derived from a Kirkus review: Brough would be the ideal biographer for the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and the last of Washington's aristocrats whose lethal witticisms -- of antique or fresh mint -- are collector's items. Brough handles Mrs. Longworth's on-stage memories of her childhood and youth as "America's Princess" with dash, he is respectfully reticent about the strains and tragedies in the life of this complicated and essentially very private person. Brough reviews the years of T.R.'s political ascendancy, during which the family moved from place to place, and young Alice, whose mother died at her birth, was transferred from the care of her beloved Aunt Bye to austere step-mother Edith. While T.R. hurled thunderbolts as "public avenger," Alice created her own mythology. There were dances till dawn, smokes on the tiled roof of the Executive Mansion, parties, domestic and foreign tours, gifts, and that White House wedding to Longworth. Then the Expulsion and the parade of Other Presidents began, including "the Greek tragedy" of that traitorous other Roosevelt. She adored "active vigorous men who could achieve their ends and damn the means involved": Johnson, the Kennedys, Senators Borah and Joe McCarthy, Nixon. A defiant rightist who voted for Kennedy, a wit of intellectual vigor courted by peers of similar enthusiasms, now a self-styled "relic" who survived the death of her only child and raised her granddaughter, Mrs. Longworth at ninety was still an unpredictable force rather than an immovable monument, and still a smasher -- as one of the excellent photographs will testify. The essential Alice has yet to surface but Brough has come as close as anyone dares.