Learning the 3 r's

As many of you who I've talked to on the phone know, the letter "r" is quite a troublesome letter for me. I used to pronounce "r" in more or less that same fashion as "w" or sometimes "l". However, my "r" is evolving. Lately, I've taken to sort of swallowing my "r"s instead of turning them into another letter. Daddy says that my pronunciation is coming to approximate that of Katherine Hepburn in her many movie roles (although my voice is quite a bit higher than hers---at least in her later years). The other person that Daddy thought of (and he figured Auntie Max would also notice this) is FDR. He's trying to teach me to say:

We have nothing to fe-ah, but fe-ah itself.

So far, i'm not too interested in saying this.