Curtis Roosevelt, a White House charmer in childhood and FDR’s grandson, dies at 86

Curtis Roosevelt, who with his sister, Eleanor, charmed Americans in the mid-1930s as Buzzie and Sistie, the towheaded children who lived in the White House with their grandparents Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, died Monday at his home in St.-Bonnet-du-Gard, France. He was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Marina Roosevelt.

Mr. Roosevelt was the son of Anna Roosevelt, the president’s eldest child and only daughter. He became a U.N. official and a Greenwich Village reform Democrat in a movement that challenged the entrenched party machine in New York beginning in the mid-1950s.

He claimed credit for enlisting his grandmother, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, early on to help lead the reform movement in New York state. “I went to her and persuaded her to get involved,” he told The New York Times in 1964.

But it was as a child that he became well known. To Depression-weary Americans, he was Buzzie, the younger of the siblings who experienced what newsreels and fan magazines depicted as a fairy-tale existence frolicking at the White House.

When they were not vacationing at the Roosevelt family’s estate at Hyde Park, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson River, Buzzie, Sistie and their divorced mother lived in the White House for several years.

The children snuggled with the president while he interrupted a bedside conversation with Dean Acheson, then the assistant secretary of state, about the daily price of gold to read the funnies to them.

They invited Shirley Temple over for lunch.

They were treated to an impromptu concert by the contralto Marian Anderson, who sang “Comin’ Through the Rye” accompanied by their great-grandmother Sara Delano Roosevelt’s out-of-tune piano. Their grandmother, Eleanor, championed Anderson’s efforts to break barriers for black artists.

For Christmas in 1944, Curtis Roosevelt got a large model submarine from his grandfather, a gift that had been given to the president by Charles de Gaulle, by then head of the provisional French government during World War II. When Eleanor protested that gifts from heads of state should not be given away, the president replied that de Gaulle was “just the head of some French committee or another.”

Curtis Roosevelt told The Los Angeles Times in 1994 that “when we moved into the White House, I didn’t have a feeling I was moving into some place into which we didn’t belong.” In his memoir, “Too Close to the Sun: Growing Up in the Shadow of My Grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor,” published in 2008, he added, “I found nothing out of the ordinary about an imposing house with a large, gracious staff.”

In this fairy tale, though, not all the characters lived happily ever after.

In his memoir, Mr. Roosevelt revealed that his mother “usually spoke about us but not to us, over our heads, as if we were not there.” The person he loved the most, he wrote, was his nursemaid.

As for his grandmother, Eleanor Roosevelt, he found that her charitable instincts did not necessarily begin at home. While acknowledging her “genuine desire to be of service” and “the broad concern she evinced” for other people, he wrote that “empathy eluded my grandmother when it came to family members, or anyone else for whom she felt responsibility.”

The woman he called “grandmere” may have “felt strongly that too much loving attention could actually inhibit a child from achieving the independence needed as he or she matured,” Mr. Roosevelt wrote. But, he added, “This seems to me a veneer, an intellectual cover for my grandmother’s difficulty in being close to others.”

Mr. Roosevelt grew up apart from his father, Curtis Bean Dall, a Wall Street broker who lost his seat on the stock exchange and much of his fortune when the market crashed in 1929. For Curtis, President Roosevelt, whom he called Papa, was his “father figure,” he wrote.

He remarked to The Los Angeles Times, “It’s amazing to see the great lengths Roosevelt went through to create the illusion he could use his legs,” which were withered from the polio he had contracted as an adult. Curtis Roosevelt survived a mild bout of polio as an adult.

Curtis Roosevelt was told unequivocally, however, to forget about comparing himself with the president.

“I had owned that, when I grew up, I wanted to be like Papa,” he wrote. “Mummy looked at me very seriously, as if I had said something quite rude and offensive, and then she said with finality: ‘You can never be like Papa. Who do you think you are?’ ”

Curtis Roosevelt Dall was born in Manhattan on April 19, 1930, when Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York. The Dall family had moved in with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in their town house on East 65th Street after the stock-market crash in 1929.

Not long after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Curtis Roosevelt’s parents separated, acrimoniously, which may have been why their son was rarely called Curtis. “Even my nickname was a way to create distance from Dad,” he recalled.

He and his sister lived in the White House from 1933 to 1935, until their mother, by then divorced, married John Boettiger, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, whom she had met during the presidential campaign. The siblings were guarded by the Secret Service and were so coddled that when Buzzie went to school for the first time, he had never before unbuttoned his own shirt or flushed a toilet, according to his memoirs.

The family briefly lived in Manhattan while his stepfather worked for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the Hays Office, which enforced a moral code for the movies. They left for Seattle when Boettiger was named publisher of The Post-Intelligencer there; his mother became an assistant editor.

Curtis legally changed his name to Roosevelt, from Dall, when his mother divorced Boettiger to remarry again. Dall, too, remarried, as did Boettiger, who later committed suicide. In the mid-1950s, Dall became a founder of the right-wing Liberty Lobby.

As Mr. Roosevelt put it, he himself “married in the family tradition — four times.” He married Marina Ayles in 1985.

Besides his wife, Mr. Roosevelt is survived by a daughter, Julianna Roosevelt, from his first marriage, to Robin Edwards; his sister, Eleanor Seagraves, who had a career as an educator and librarian; a grandson; and a half brother, John Boettiger. As with Edwards, his marriages to Ruth Sublette and Jeanette Schlottmann ended in divorce.

After serving in the Army and attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Mr. Roosevelt received a master’s degree from Columbia University in public law and government.

Mr. Roosevelt worked in advertising and was vice president for public affairs of the New School for Social Research in New York and the U.N. chief of liaison with nongovernmental organizations. He recently completed another memoir, “Upstairs at the Roosevelts.”

In 2005, Mr. Roosevelt met with two other grandsons of the Big Three leaders of World War II, Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union and Winston Churchill of Britain. He, Winston S. Churchill III and Yevgeni Dzhugashvili gathered at Maastricht in the Netherlands to review the legacy of their grandfathers’ 1945 conference at Yalta.

“History had my family in its grip,” Mr. Roosevelt once said, “and I had no choice but to go along for the ride.”