‘I think I’d notice if my husband moved another woman into the next bedroom’

Bloom -- who is currently writing the screenplay for a TV series based on her latest novel, White Houses, which tells of just such a long-camouflaged if richly rumoured real-life relationship between that sainted iconic First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a trailblazing newspaperwoman, Lorena Hickok -- acknowledges that no novelist could make up current events in American politics.

“It would take a combination of Monty Python and Philip Roth and David Sedaris working 24 hours a day to write about this White House,” she sighs. What if Melania moved in a beloved friend -- as Eleanor did with Hickok? “Oh, Sarah Huckabee Sanders would stand up and say it didn’t happen. That there is nothing wrong with it anyway. If you say there is, you are not a patriot,” says Bloom who grew up in a staunchly Democratic family. “My parents were New Yorkers and Jews so of course they supported Roosevelt and everything he stood for.”

While researching her best-selling last novel, Lucky Us, which tells of half-sisters in search of fame and fortune in 1940s’ Hollywood, Bloom (64) found the Roosevelts ubiquitous. “Eleanor, Teddy, Franklin, the cousins, all that intermarrying... They are just everywhere in American history. I read the biography of Franklin then turned to the excellent biography of Eleanor by Blanche Wiesen Cook and there is this woman, referred to as the ‘First Friend’ and the ‘First Press Secretary.’

“I found that there were 3,000 letters between Eleanor and this woman journalist, Lorena Hickok -- “Hick” -- and that she lived with [Eleanor and Franklin] in the White House -- that big boarding house which was then very, very shabby -- on-and-off for 12 years.

“I read all the letters -- Hick burnt about hundred because she felt they were too explicit -- and I thought, ‘Oh, this was a great love affair and an enduring friendship!’ Then I wanted to know what was it like to be a great admirer of the President and a great supporter of his, as Hick was, and be madly in love with his wife who is madly in love with you? Franklin and Eleanor were, after all, the New Deal power couple.

“When her book came out, Wiesen Cook was crucified for writing about Eleanor and Hick’s relationship, which was at its peak from 1932 to 1936. All the other historians -- male! -- were rude and disbelieving and kept asserting it was her own agenda because she is a lesbian, that Eleanor was a Victorian lady who was just effusive in her language. Eventually, however, they all spent the next five years writing notes of apology, saying, ‘Oops, I did read the letters and that is a very reasonable conclusion to draw.’

“The letters have things like, ‘I look at your ring on my finger and think, oh, she must love me or I would not have this.’ Or, ‘Oh, I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close.’ These are [itals]love[enditals] letters, physically specific about romantic intimacy.

“As close as I am to my girlfriends I have never written to one of them, ‘I long to kiss you on the south-east corner of your lips and lie beside you all night.’ This relationship was eliminated from American history. Hick was actually cut out of many photographs. FDR was a great President, of course, but he was definitely not a perfect man since he had many affairs, the most obvious was with White House secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, whom Eleanor picked for the job because she knew Franklin needed to be adored.”

Did he know about the affair between his wife and Hick?

“You know, I think I would notice if my husband moved another woman into an adjoining bedroom!” exclaims Bloom. “After Hick quit her job at Associated Press, FDR sent her on the road as an investigator for his Depression era Federal Emergency Relief Administration. But I think those 3,000 letters really broke up the narrative of American history, which is that the Roosevelts fell in love, that Eleanor adored him and he broke her heart by having a big affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer, then she discovered [itals]their[enditals] letters and offered him divorce.

“He didn’t take it because his mother said she would cut off his funds. Then he became this great President changing the country so Eleanor took her broken heart, became a saint and did good deeds. That is standard American history, but then ten years later she actually fell in love with a woman -- and it was passionate, tender and physical, and it changed her life. And that’s a very different narrative.

“Sure, FDR made our country different, but it’s the other side of Me Too. Nothing stays behind closed doors forever. Once that snowball starts rolling down the hill, it is going to pick up some traction.”

White Houses, Bloom’s fourth novel, is related by Hick, who rose from a brutally abusive, dirt-poor childhood in South Dakota, to become a tough, successful newspaperwoman. Bloom admits it took her a while to find her voice. “Still, I love Hick as a narrator. She’s a straight-talker and she’s not a lady like Eleanor. As she said, she will forever be identified with servants because that’s how she made a living. But she also covered major news stories, particularly the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, and was the first woman reporter to have her byline in the New York Times.”

The novel spools back to tell Hick’s story. Employed as a hired girl after being raped by her father, she runs away to join the circus and has an affair with a hermaphrodite.

Is this true? Or is it fake fact?

“Sorry,” Bloom apologises. “I made that up -- so little is known about Hicks’ early life and I’ve always wanted to write about the freak shows and the carnivals.” Which is hardly surprising given that I first met Bloom some years ago -- over coffee at Grand Central Station -- to discuss her intriguing non-fiction book, Normal (2002), a collection of essays subtitled, Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites With Attitude, which grew out of a piece she wrote for the New Yorker’s then editor Tina Brown. The book, in which she suggested that there was no such thing as “normal” on the sexual continuum, caused a sensation since she also wrote with great insight about the troubled lot of the female partners of cross-dressers.

It was clearly years ahead of its time. Surely it should be reprinted?

“Thank you,” she replies. “I agree!”

A native New Yorker, who grew up in Brooklyn, Bloom now lives in a sequestered corner of Connecticut with her second husband, Brian Ameche, an architect. (She has three grown-up children from her first marriage, which ended in divorce.) She dislikes talking about her personal life -- but has described herself as bisexual -- although she’ll speak endlessly of her curiosity about people and the abiding subject matter of her fictions -- “the gorgeous, dangerous puzzle of sex. What really interests me is people -- and sex and love, not only romantic love, but love and death. A lot of people drop dead in my fiction.”

The daughter of journalist parents, Murray and Sydelle Bloom, she studied at Boston University before transferring to Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, where she is Professor of Creative Writing. She was a social worker then a psychotherapist for 20 years. Now she writes and teaches full time but still sees a couple of private patients. Much of White Houses was written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, “which is as close to writers’ heaven as I ever need to be.”

Despite her years as a therapist, which taught her never to jump to conclusions about people, you sense that writing was an occupation waiting to happen for Bloom. She was a late bloomer, in her forties, when she began selling stories to the New Yorker. Soon nominated for prestigious awards, she also created and wrote the TV series State of Mind, about a group of therapists, and worked on a treatment for a musical for Francis Coppola and Barbra Streisand. “That was hilarious. You might just as well have thrown me into a pool of piranhas.”

Now she’s enjoyably slaving over that White Houses screenplay, which Emmy award-winning director Jane Anderson, who made Olive Kitteridge starring Oscar-winner Frances McDormand and based on Elizabeth Strout’s wonderful novel, is developing for TV.

“I love how Jane describes it,” says Bloom. “It’s the ragtag American version of The Crown.”

White Houses, by Amy Bloom (Granta, £12.99).