Eleanor Roosevelt called them "the lovely ladies who worshipped at his shrine."

She was not among the worshippers, although she was one of the many "remarkable women," as the subtitle to Joseph E. Persico's new history characterizes them -- "President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life."

		"FRANKLIN AND LUCY: PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, MRS. RUTHERFURD AND THE OTHER REMARKABLE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE" By Joseph E. Persico Random House ($28)

Persico, whose many historical works include "Roosevelt's Secret War," writes that women were central to Roosevelt's life. They "satisfied FDR's deep-seated need for adulation, admiration, approval, and respite from the crushing burdens of his office."

The keeper of the shrine was his adoring mother Sara, but the chief worshipper there was Lucy Rutherfurd, nee Mercer, hired as Mrs. Roosevelt's secretary when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy under President Wilson. By mid-1916 he and Lucy were lovers. She became the love of Roosevelt's life.

It has been thought that once Eleanor learned of the affair, she, his mother and FDR's political adviser, Louis Howe, insisted it be ended, and Roosevelt agreed. Their son James said it was the beginning of "an armed truce that endured until the day he died."

The revelation here is that an affair of some kind continued until FDR's death in April 1945, even though Roosevelt contracted polio and Mercer married Winthrop Rutherfurd in 1920, a wealthy man 29 years her senior,

Persico documents the 30-year liaison with recently discovered letters and other writings that were in the possession of Rutherfurd's daughter and that were made available to him by her granddaughters.

Other women gave up lives of their own to share Franklin's. Here too, Persico indicates, in most cases sex cannot be ruled out. As Franklin's doctor told one inquirer, "Only his legs are paralyzed."

Chief among them was Marguerite (Missy) LeHand. She joined the Roosevelt entourage as a secretary in 1920 and remained until dying in 1944. She was a "substitute wife," Persico says, in a strange menage a trois.

In a what's-sauce-for-the-gander-is-sauce-for-the-goose sort of way, Mrs. Roosevelt conducted affairs of her own, both heterosexual and homosexual.

She had long-term relationships with Earl Miller, originally FDR's New York state trooper guard when he was governor, and Lorena Hickok, a former Associated Press reporter. Hick,"gave up the profession she loved for the woman she loved."

The book contains one glaring error. When President McKinley died from an assassin's attack in 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was camping in the Adirondacks, not on a ship at sea.

Otherwise, it is well-written and researched and awash in politics-related sexual peccadilloes (possibly including Princess Martha of Norway).

I found it utterly absorbing, all these connections forming, shifting, adjusting, breaking -- and the self-serving justifications offered for them.