by Bibi Gaston
The Loveliest Woman in America
A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries,
and Her Granddaughter’s
Search for Home
Bibi Gaston
For Rosamond and Little Billy
Contents
Requiem
Author’s Note
Cycle One
1. The Miracle
2. The Landscape of Memory
3. A Chronology of Chaos
Cycle Two
4. A Synonym for Love
5. The King of Jeeps
6. Paradise
Cycle Three
7. Our Town
8. The Topography of the Brain
9. Beauty Sessions
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Requiem
I saw her lying there so calm and still,
With one camellia placed beside her head.
She looked the same, and yet, her soul and will
Being gone she did seem dead.
I thought if one so loved and beautiful
Should wish to leave, perhaps there was a voice
That called her back—and she was dutiful.
Somewhere the gods rejoice.
In some far place, where all the lovely things
Of earth are born, the gods no longer weep.
She has returned to them. And what she brings
We lose, but always keep.
—MARY PINCHOT (MEYER),
Rosamond’s sister, written in 1938,
published in the New York Times, January 25, 1940
Author’s Note
It is said that a suicide affects a family for ten generations. This is the story of three people over three generations who barely knew one another: my grandmother, my father, and myself. Under the best of circumstances, a parent shares sixty years of life with a child. My father spent nine years with his mother and I spent eight with him, which left a lot of time not knowing the story of one another’s lives or the chronology of our days. In piecing together the story of my ancestors, I discovered that patterns proved more instructive than chronology. Separated by minutes or miles, patterns of family repeat.
The author requests the reader’s patience. In the story you are about to read, chapters rotate between the three main characters, and time, like life, is sometimes cut short. The people we love appear, then disappear, then reappear. The reader is asked at times to take a leap: between generations, over continents, and, most important, of faith. Displacement, disjunctures, and ruptures have hidden advantages: far from home and what is familiar, we wander, we carry on, we look for clues. When lucky, we encounter each other in the most unlikely of places. We find where we fit in the pattern. With luck, we find what we are searching for.
CYCLE ONE
1
THE MIRACLE
For forty-three years, all I knew was that Rosamond was beautiful and that she had killed herself. I may have spent the rest of my life knowing just those two things and everything would have gone on the way things do. After all, who really needs to dredge up something you can’t do anything about? But in the summer of 2003, I went back to the Forester’s Pool in Pennsylvania where I had distributed my father’s ashes in the waters where he had learned to fish and swim with his mother, Rosamond. That day, I was given a plain cardboard box containing a thousand pages of Rosamond’s diaries that people thought had vanished. For seventy years, her diaries and scrapbooks languished in airplane hangars, flooding basements, and dusty closets. They disappeared into the dark corners of a family’s pain. Retrieved from darkness, the diaries changed my life forever. Through them, I learned a good part of Rosamond’s story and found a home in the words of my grandmother.
Like a bird sighted in the forest that everyone thought was extinct, Rosamond’s scrapbooks and diaries just showed up. When I started digging around, her obituary also showed up. It told of her death at thirty-three, on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold. I could have placed everything on a shelf or in a closet for another seventy years and that might have been the end of it, but the artifacts were suddenly taking up a lot of room. I was confounded by the series of events that brought them to me, so, smitten by circumstance, I found myself piecing together Rosamond’s brief but beautiful story. While discovering her life, I came to know the members of two remarkable families, the Pinchots of Pennsylvania, a family I never knew was mine, and the Gastons of Massachusetts, who Rosamond said were “not good for the blossoming of the soul.” I came to understand how Rosamond, the woman who had been called the loveliest in America, and my father, the enigma to end all enigmas, and I, a woman who had yet to find a place to call home, had each inherited the extremes of everything a family has to offer.
Rosamond. When I first heard it, her name made me think of all the roses in the world. Not just the cultivated hybrids that require a gardener or the finicky tea roses you see in all their perfumed perfection at a flower show, but the rambling floribunda and the rugosas that flourish where nothing else will, those wild shrub roses that flood our days and nights with scent and blossoms that fade all too quickly. She’d never had time to fade with the rest of us. Her name spoke of warmth and light and summer. When I see her name, I think of what we ourselves become when we are willing to love not just what is beautiful, but what is not always easy to love, what is wild, sometimes dangerous and rare.
I’d always been inquisitive, some say intrepid, so when I received the diaries, it was as if I’d discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls or excavated the underground passage to a secret golden room. There wasn’t one thing about my family that didn’t warrant a serious investigation. I was always searching for clues. After hearing at about five years old that Rosamond was beautiful and that she had killed herself, beauty and death went together, which said a lot about what might happen to a girl. Forty years later, I had grown up and I’d learned to separate beauty and death. I had also learned that Rosamond had wrung a lot of living out of thirty-three years. Much of it had been documented by her, except that the last four years of her diaries were missing. That seemed peculiar, of course. But what I found even more strange was that for some reason the diaries and scrapbooks were all handed to me.
The scrapbooks weren’t small and colorful flipbooks people leave around the house so friends can take a peek at the kids; they were huge and heavy, embossed with her name, Rosamond Pinchot Gaston, in gold leaf across forest green covers. The letters are faded now, but through the scrapbooks, I came to know Rosamond like a character in a silent movie. The visuals were spectacular but the silence was deafening. The images struck me not only as beautiful but also as strikingly modern. Rosamond in what looks to be Chanel, Rosamond in overalls. Her look was timeless. They show her in silhouette against the Manhattan skyline, under Hollywood’s fabulous houses of skylights, fishing in the streams of Pennsylvania, and walking her dog on the Upper East Side as though it was yesterday. Her look was always changing. She could be Marilyn Monroe, an Olympic athlete, or Mata Hari; and in the 1920s and 1930s, New York had just as many faces. The city was vibrant and pulsating, and Rosamond’s life straddled one of its more exuberant periods, the Jazz Age. Not only was she a celebrity, she was also a remarkable sportswoman and equestrian. She lived a scintillating social life and could identify each tree in the forest. She had legions of suitors who wanted to “make” her; she ran around New York City’s reservoir to stay slim; she dined with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, and George Gershwin. Her scrapbooks and diaries described a woman of many sides. She knew fashion
, politics, and birdcall. She was simple and sophisticated. She could’t be packaged or contained.
So why had no one in my family ever talked about her or shared even a single detail of her life? It wasn’t as if we lived in the old world where the bodies of suicides were buried at night at the crossroads where it was thought that greater traffic would keep the corpses down. Rosamond seemed to have slipped off the edge of the world. There are a thousand ways of vanishing; a family’s silence is one of them.
The women who knew her and might have opened up to me had long since died. Her sons—my father, Bill, and his brother, Jim—were intent on circling the wagons, a matter of omertà, of honor: if you don’t talk about it, it will go away. After she died, the men said what little needed to be said, set the limits of excavation, and indulged their murky shades of silence. They behaved like gods. When the diaries came to me, the first of her female offspring, I discovered what I had known all along: that her death hurt, and hurt like that doesn’t go away.
My father was nine when his mother died, and he left my family when I’d just turned eight. I didn’t see much of him after that. He’d roll up on Sundays in one of his foreign cars, and I’d see him in the summer on the islands in Maine, but he wasn’t about to ruin a perfectly good time talking about the past. My mother wouldn’t have told me anything about Rosamond even if she knew the story. My mother said she felt sorry for my father, that’s why she’d married him. So no one ever told me that Rosamond’s death was the first in a string of family tragedies and that Rosamond’s half-sister Mary Pinchot Meyer, a mistress of President Kennedy’s, was shot dead on the towpath in Washington, D.C. Her cousin, Edie Sedgwick, died of a drug overdose. There was no point in talking about Rosamond, or Mary, or Edie. So I never knew or thought about the tragic legacy of women in my family.
My father could never talk about his mother because he would have had to talk about what happened on January 24, 1938. After the accounting of who, what, where, when, and how, the papers recalled what everyone really wanted to hear about, the first strange and wonderful turning point in her life. They wanted to hear how she was innocent and how the whole world stretched out in front of her like a most beautiful garden. The day she was discovered onboard the Aquitania, was, after all, the day her life suddenly changed and in a way, began. No one wanted to hear about my father. For him, there was just one buried sentence, that said she had left two boys, William Alexander Gaston, nine, and James Pinchot Gaston, six. Everyone read about him, but wanted to move on, so that’s why, for a lifetime, my father never talked about his mother.
ROSAMOND: 1926–1929
In the last days of October 1923, Rosamond Pinchot, age nineteen, and her mother, Gertrude, boarded the RMS Aquitania in Cherbourg, France, after having gone on a shopping expedition to Paris to buy a trousseau for Rosamond’s debutante party, which was to be held in New York on December 20. Gertrude held tickets on her favorite Italian ship, but at the last minute, she and Rosamond were diverted to the British ship, the Aquitania, queen of the Cunard Line, also known by passengers as “The Ship Beautiful.” On the same day, another passenger, Max Reinhardt, was also diverted to the Aquitania.
Fifty years old at the time, Reinhardt was Europe’s greatest theatrical producer and a master craftsman of enormous, expensive, atmospheric spectacles. He was born Maximilian Goldmann to Jewish parents in Baden bei Wien, Austria-Hungary, in 1873. As a young man, Reinhardt became an actor, but pursued a passion for all the arts, including music, poetry, dance, and set design. In 1902, he became director of several theaters in Vienna and Berlin where, on average, he staged a remarkable twenty performances a year. Always searching for the perfect venue for his work, in 1918 he purchased the Schloss Leopoldskron, a derelict rococo castle in Salzburg, Austria, with commanding views of the Alps, high-ceilinged halls, ballrooms, a personal chapel, and vast garden areas beside the Leopoldskroner Weiher, a small, shallow lake. Over the course of twenty years, Reinhardt transformed the Schloss into a splendid laboratory of stagecraft where he entertained the world’s theatrical luminaries and developed a wide range of productions that dispatched deep, spiritual messages to a troubled world between wars. European theatergoers regarded Reinhardt as a genius who employed the theories of the composer Richard Wagner and German expressionism to create productions rich in symbolism and meaning. American theater audiences welcomed the day when Max Reinhardt would make his way to New York to stage a play on Broadway, which is why he boarded the Aquitania that day.
During the summer and fall of 1923, the short, handsome, dark-eyed Reinhardt ranged around Europe searching for a young woman to play the leading role in The Miracle, a pantomime he planned to stage at the urging of the German-born New York financier and patron of the arts, Otto Kahn. The play was based on the adventures of a wayward nun recounted in the medieval story of “Sister Beatrice.” But by the end of October, after hundreds of auditions in Europe and America, Reinhardt hadn’t had much luck in finding someone to play the part of the Nun. He sought a young woman who would draw theater-goers by the thousands, one whom audiences could relate to, who was vulnerable, perhaps a tender novice, but a novice who shone like a Grecian goddess or better yet, an Aryan. He was confident that his actress could be found. He would spot her with his “x-ray” eyes and pull her out of a crowd. He would mold and shape her quickly.
Reinhardt first spotted Rosamond, the five-foot, eleven-inch long-legged beauty with a crown of golden hair, shaped in a fashionable shingle cut, as she helped her mother onto a tender pulling up beside the Aquitania in Cherbourg. That afternoon, peering over the ship’s rail, Reinhardt turned to his assistant Rudolf Kommer and the composer Einar Nilson and declared that Providence had diverted him to the Aquitania. He had found his Nun! For the next two days, he and his team furtively paced the decks and lurked behind corners in order to appraise their Nun from every angle. The Aquitania was a favorite ship of the moneyed “on tops” of the 1920s who cavorted in silks and feathers amid the emblems and flourishes of Greek and Roman mythology. To please a seemingly bottomless thirst for champagne, shipboard romance, luxury, and nostalgia, there were big, fine cabins with porcelain baths for fresh water and saltwater, colorful rugs from the Orient, and spacious cupboard-trunks. The public gathering spaces featured swagged, columned, and porticoed dining rooms, a stage for an orchestra, perfectly proportioned halls with chandeliers, niches, painted lunettes, and even exterior garden rooms meant to evoke landscapes in the Cotswolds. Like hunters stalking a trophy elk, on the third day, Reinhardt and his team came out from hiding and made their move.
It was the first calm night aboard the Aquitania after a rough passage during which the passengers had turned green. Rosamund had emerged from her cabin, and was seated with her mother in the ship’s high-ceilinged first-class dining hall, decorated in the style of Louis XVI. Reinhardt was seated across the room keeping an eye on his Nun. A panorama crowned the ceiling, a copy of Nicholas Poussin’s Triumph of Flora, which depicted the romance between the goddess of springtime and Zephyr, god of the wind.
After dinner, a dance was held in the popular Garden Lounge that wrapped the ship’s A deck. Perched in the corner, Reinhardt watched as Rosamond soared, glided, and pirouetted across the dance floor, observing her movements, strong yet graceful, half-human, half-animal. With the broad shoulders of her athletic father, Amos Pinchot, and her six-foot, one-inch uncle, the long-legged Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, Reinhardt said that it was as if she sprung from a race of gods. Rosamond’s parents, Amos and Gertrude, were divorced when Rosamond was thirteen, still they both encouraged their daughter’s pursuit of sports at Miss Chapin’s School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They were proud of her good looks and competitive spirit. Had Amos been aboard the Aquitania that night, he surely would have noticed the three men in the corner.
Close to midnight, Reinhardt got up to leave the dance and sent Kommer, his emissary, to give Rosamond a message. As the music stopped, Rosamond’s dan
ce partner introduced her to Mr. Rudolf Kommer, who, in a few heavily accented words, told her that “Professor Reinhardt,” the director, was onboard on his way to New York to stage a giant production for theater magnates Morris Gest and F. Ray Comstock. Professor Reinhardt had been watching her, he said, and would like to speak to her about taking a role in The Miracle. Rosamond responded that she was not an actress, had no stage experience of any kind, and was only nineteen. Kommer was not easily dissuaded. He had his instructions and a meeting was to be held the next day.
Unfazed by the encounter, Rosamond went on dancing until well past midnight. She thought that when Reinhardt learned that she had no stage experience, he would no longer be interested. Besides, Reinhardt didn’t speak English and hers was only a high school German, so much would be lost in translation. Reinhardt, however, wasn’t worried. As a pantomime, her only speaking lines would be at the end of the three-hour performance when she would recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Reinhardt first produced The Miracle in London in 1911. The play then traveled to seventeen European cities. But Broadway audiences, up to their ears in vaudeville and the Ziegfield follies, were ripe for a redemption story. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud were becoming household names in New York, so the Nun’s journey would traverse the symbolic landscape of dreams: of forest, castle, and cloister. Reinhardt would employ innovative set design and recruit a star-studded European cast. He expected a smash hit on the shores of America.