PERSONAL STORY

“I feel I’ve finally learned to tell a story,” says writer Doris Kearns Goodwin, a petite ball of energy perched perilously on the window sill of her 32nd floor Chicago hotel room. “I hope I don’t fall out,” she laughs.

Goodwin’s ability to tell stories naturally and embellished with rich anecdotal detail, either orally or in a trio now of best-selling historical books, makes it hard to understand the occasional glimmers of self-doubt.

“You keep thinking with each book you’ll relax and not worry, but you do until the reviews come out,” says Goodwin, 51, who retains a thick “Long Guy-land” accent from growing up in New York. She was in Chicago recently to promote her latest tome, “No Ordinary Time, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” (Simon & Schuster, $30), which chronicles the years 1940-1945 and the Roosevelts’ special partnership. It has received favorable reviews and been sold to CBS for a miniseries.

Stories spew forth from this masterful reconteur, and the topics are wonderfully varied: The Robert Redford-directed movie “Quiz Show” in which her husband, Richard Goodwin, is portrayed by actor Rob Morrow as the heroic investigative lawyer put the couple on the Hollywood-to-Washington movie-premiere circuit; her talking-head role in Ken Burns’ PBS baseball documentary spread word of her love for the sport; her burgeoning friendship with the Clintons made front-page news in The Wall Street Journal.

But, first there are the inside stories to share about the movie. “Morrow portrayed my husband very accurately,” she says. (Her husband was married to his first wife at the time.) “He came to our house (in Concord, Mass.), listened to Dick talk, got the way he chomps on a cigar and what a messy eater he is,” she says.

She also defends her husband’s portrayal as spearheading the investigation to its conclusion. “Joseph Stone, an assistant district attorney, led a grand jury investigation in checking the rumors. But that investigation stalled. Dick pursued it. He mentioned how helpful Stone was but Stone still is mad,” she says.

The stories about baseball and Goodwin’s childlike enthusiasm for the sport cause her to pause. “My father, Michael Francis Alousius Kearns–who liked to use his whole name and who’s no longer alive, was a Dodger fan,” she says. “I listened on the radio to the games and kept score.”

There are also the stories about President Clinton being photographed carrying her book. “Friends called to ask if I had seen he was reading it, I did.” At the premiere of “Quiz Show” in Washington, which the First Couple attended, he gave her his personal stamp of approval, “I loved your book,” she says the president told her.

After she finished an interview on the Diane Rehm National Public Radio show, Goodwin was told the First Lady was on the line. “She wanted to discuss it. She told me she was reading it, though she had to borrow it from her husband. I told her we could get her own copy, but she liked reading his since he had written comments in the margins and underlined passages. She was interested in knowing how Eleanor dealt with certain situations since she really was the (first) First Lady to be so involved.”

Finally, the stories about researching and writing in longhand the 636-page Roosevelt book, with another 100 pages of notes, bibliography and lengthy interview list, spill forth from the writer.

Goodwin considers the book an important affirmation of her abilities as a historian. “You wonder, `How do you know if it was me who really made it happen?’ ” she asks, referring to the fact she had unusual access to her prior subjects. When she wrote “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream” (Harper and Row, 1976), “I wondered if I could have done it if I hadn’t worked for him,” she says.

Goodwin, who graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, was a White House fellow and received a doctorate in government at Harvard University, started work on Johnson’s memoirs while he was in office and she was a government professor at Harvard.

With her book on the Kennedys, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” (Simon and Schuster, 1986), Goodwin also wondered if she could have written it if she hadn’t be given access to the papers Rose and Joe Kennedy stored in their Hyannis Port, Mass., attic.

Her latest book began with a trip to the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y. in 1988 and required six years to dig through those papers, White House usher diaries and a wellspring of other sources. She made numerous phone calls and met and talked with Roosevelt relatives and friends.

In addition to her concern about extracting original material, she wanted to present her findings in a less pedantic style than she previously used. “I was trained as a political scientist, but I wanted this book to read smoother,” she says.

The approach she settled on was to write in a more novel-like tone that juxtaposes the public world and national home fronts against the personal lives of the Roosevelts. The technique she believes reflects how ordinary events occur in conjunction with major world and national ones. “Life throws up crazy combinations,” she says. “You have FDR complaining about the overly plain food at the same time you have the war going on in Europe.”

But, the book’s glowing reviews are in large part due to Goodwin’s ability to bring to life complex personal relationships:

– There’s the difficult relationship between Franklin and Eleanor, which didn’t end, as has been written, when she discovered Lucy Mercer’s love letters in 1918. Roosevelt promised never to see Mercer again and later approached Eleanor with the idea that they try once more to live as man and wife, according to their son Jimmy. Eleanor turned him down, though Goodwin says they retained respect and love for one another.

– There’s the complex relationship between Franklin and aide Missy LeHand, who had a stroke in 1941 and died at age 46 in 1946. Some believe they were lovers; others just devoted soulmates.

– There’s the demanding relationship between Eleanor and former reporter Lorena Hincock, which Goodwin says can’t be definitively defined as platonic or lesbian. “Hick encouraged Eleanor, loved her more than anything, Eleanor got something from her, too, being central in somebody’s life. There’s no clear evidence, however, when you consider the letter from Eleanor to Hick in which she says, `Of course you should have had a husband & children and it would have made you happy….’ I think Eleanor would have felt wonderful if their friendship provided tolerance today for gays and lesbians, but I don’t think she would have labeled herself that way,” Goodwin says.

– And, there’s the roller-coaster relationship between Eleanor and daughter Anna who acted as occasional While House hostess and arranged clandestine meetings between her father and Mercer, in breach of his prior promises.

“Anna was very torn, about agreeing to her father’s wishes and not betraying her mother. She knew his health was failing,” says Goodwin, who learned of the continuing relationship from White House diaries. Mercer was with Roosevelt when he died. “Eleanor was mad until after FDR died. She traveled and understood the public’s love for him and was able to incorporate more of Roosevelt in her and become a better politician,” Goodwin says.

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What most surprised Goodwin in her research, however, was the extent of the late president’s obsession with his paralysis and his not being photographed in any way that hinted at his disability.

“That’s why I chose to open the book with the passage about his trying to get to sleep by dreaming about his days when he’d sled down a hill and climb back to the top. It set the tone for how much he missed such activity. He feared being trapped in a fire.”

What advice does Goodwin think the Roosevelts would give today’s First Family? “I think Franklin would tell Bill to pull back from the need to be in the news every day, not to talk when jogging or to be on MTV, though maintaining the mystique now of the presidency is harder. The media then was less intrusive.”

As for Hillary “I think Eleanor would tell her not to worry about defeats, to move on, to redesign her role as Eleanor did after she resigned from the Office of Civilian Defense.” Goodwin believes that Hillary Clinton is criticized more for her active First Lady role than Eleanor was because the latter was so ahead of her time.

Now that her book tour is almost completed, Goodwin and her husband will write a book together. “It will be a chronological look at 15 major presidential decisions–such as LBJ and Civil Rights,” she says. How will that affect their 18-year marriage? “It will be fine,” she says, again laughing. “We have separate studies. He works downstairs: I work upstairs. He works on a computer, I write longhand.”