The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  August in Austria was every bit as grand as Kommer had described. Rosamond rode her bicycle through the narrow streets of the Altstadt, the old city, introducing her dachshund, Nicolette, to stout, red-faced market women and admiring men. She toured Reinhardt’s restored theaters in Berlin and posed in silhouette in front of the arches at the Felsenreitschule, again with little Nicolette; and thanks to a marketing scheme whipped up by Gest, she was caught by photographers in a smart white dress and heels, having been arrested by the Austrian police for riding her bicycle without headlights. She donned Tyrolean dirndls for picnics beside waterfalls in the Alps. She rolled through meadows of wildflowers and posed with fellow actors in an ecstatic human sandwich. The photographs tell the story, and Kommer’s promise came true. She did not regret her trip to Austria.

  That summer, at a state ceremony, Rosamond was presented with a gold-embossed plaque from the Austrian government thanking her for her performance as the Nun. Later, at a candlelight feast in the high-ceilinged banquet hall at the Schloss Leopoldskron, Reinhardt and Kommer presented her with a pair of colored lithographs. One lithograph depicted the Schloss and the little Leopoldskonner Weiher with fishing pavilions and Untersburg Mountain looming in the background, while the other showed the outdoor stadium carved out of the cliffs. In both scenes, a tamed and organized foreground gives way to a backdrop of forbidding mountain ranges and craggy peaks. Below the images, penned in a curvaceous German script, the titles read “Leopoldskron,” and “Felsenreitschule.”

  That fall, The Miracle returned to the United States to resume its American tour in Cincinnati under new direction. While Reinhardt and his emissaries tried to keep the cast intact, Lady Diana Manners returned to London to resume married life and notoriety, while Rosamond returned to New York a celebrity.

  New York was booming in 1925. In February, the New Yorker published its first issue with the dandy Eustace Tilley on its cover and a warning inside that it wasn’t “edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” In April, F. Scott Fitzgerald released The Great Gatsby, which initially sold relatively few copies to Jazz Age readers, perhaps because they were having too good a time dancing the Charleston to bother with books. In June, a man named Walter Percy Chrysler launched the Chrysler Corporation in order to provide the American consumer with a comfortable, well-engineered road car at an affordable price. And in October, Rosamond turned twenty-one years old. It wasn’t a bad time to be young and beautiful and rich, particularly if your name was Rosamond Pinchot, and you had distinguished yourself as an unusual young woman, hardly the average debutante from a privileged American family. The Star Company reported, “This Rich Girl Is Happy: Her Father Lets Her Work, That’s Why.”

  The press was right, Amos and Gertrude did encourage their daughter to work and to make herself useful. However, working, much less working as an actress, was still a novelty for a woman of Rosamond’s station. What readers wanted to know was what else she planned to do, particularly who she would marry, and who would have what it took to marry her:

  If this father and daughter had followed the ordinary course, she would have sat around, traveling from New York to Newport, and from America to Europe, waiting for a more or less inane young gentleman to come along and marry her and her fortune. Had that happened, Miss Rosamond Pinchot would have begun Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. John Snooks and she would have been obliterated as somebody’s wife. Now when she marries, which, of course, she ought to do, for marriage and motherhood are the principal duties of women, the man she marries will be “Rosamond Pinchot’s husband.” That may not suit him but that is what he will be. Meanwhile, she can take a walk with her little dog, knowing that she is somebody, that she has done something, that in return for the kindness of nature and her ancestors, that gave her power, that she has done what she could do to be useful in the world.

  Despite the press’s concern for the future Mr. Rosamond Pinchot, Rosamond returned to the life she knew, one of beauty, wealth, and privilege and living with her mother at the corner of Eighty-first Street and Fifth Avenue. She could hardly complain. The galleries of the Metropolitan Museum were practically an extension of her living room and the meadows of Central Park were her de facto front yard. Every morning, entering the park off Fifth Avenue, she’d pass through the rolling greensward just south of the Metropolitan and make her way over to Central Park’s stables, where she’d saddle up a horse she’d bought with money from The Miracle, a French hunter named Fleury, and spend hours galloping Olmsted’s equestrian trails. At night, she’d accompany her father to dinner parties with the Morgans or the Whitneys. She’d spin over to opening night at the Belasco with her mother, or get tight with her friends at the Hotsy Totsy Club.

  Landing her role in The Miracle, some said, had been a stroke of luck, but sometimes blessings followed luck. She counted among her blessings an eclectic and sophisticated rat pack of friends who straddled café culture, Wall Street, and bohemia. Among them were Varick Frissell, a young Arctic explorer and adventure filmmaker and his sister Toni, a portrait photographer. One of her closest friends was Francesca Braggiotti, a willowy beauty from a colorful Florentine family who had begun a wildly successful school of modern dance for stodgy Bostonians in the Brookline firehouse and swept up a good-looking husband in the process, John Davis Lodge, the actor-son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Rosamond ran from one engagement to the next, arm in arm with up-and-coming actors, lunching it up with busy young directors like George Cukor, who was gearing himself up to direct the first stage production of Gatsby, and enterprising playwrights like Zoe Akins, brilliant before her time.

  With time on her hands, there were new friends to make, new lines to memorize, and exciting possibilities around every corner. Rosamond hosted a tea every Wednesday, cocktails or “stand up” dinners every other Friday, and on interim nights, she’d whisk herself back to late-night rehearsals or to Conde Nast’s parties on his roof. She took acting classes at DeKanavas School of Russian acting, danced at Anna Graham’s studio and at Mordkin’s ballet school. She alternated date nights with her boyfriends Dwight Taylor and Sherman Jenney, but sometimes all three would stay up late together, drinking champagne and eating takeout cross-legged on the floor. They’d go watch Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the next day, instead of flowers, Dwight would send Rosamond a lovely apple tree in bloom. In the afternoon, he’d come over and they’d lie about on the rug and talk about magic until three in the morning. Friends and family would show up or not—it didn’t matter, no one needed an invitation. During The Miracle, this was the life she missed, the life she longed for.

  Between the moments of her busy life, Rosamond turned to “her book,” her diary, penning brief impressions on friends, work, and performances from Tristan and Isolde to Carmencita to The Emperor Jones starring Paul Robeson. Gradually, she penned longer and more complex entries. On the frontispiece of her leather-bound journal of 1926, Rosamond inscribed the curious words of Joseph Conrad:

  …If one looks at life in its true aspect then everything loses much of its unpleasant importance and the atmosphere becomes cleared of what are only unimportant mists that drift past in important shapes. When once the truth is grasped that one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown, the attainment of serenity is not so far off. Then there remains nothing but to surrender to one’s impulses, the fidelity to passing emotions, which is perhaps a nearer approach to truth than any other philosophy of life.

  Like almost every young woman, she longed for a young man, but given the men who surrounded her, the Reinhardts, the Gests, and the powerful Pinchots, that search was not likely to be easy. A man would have to come equipped with some remarkable qualifications, a story with substance and something to say for himself. As fall turned to winter, the phone rang ten times a day with offers of outings and engagements. Throngs of men phoned or sent flowers but none of the callers were particularly impressive.

  But one nigh
t in midwinter, shortly after copying the passage by Conrad in the front of her diary, it happened. She met a young man with an extraordinary story that in some ways resembled hers. On Friday, January 29, 1926, Rosamond invited twenty friends to dine with her at her father’s apartment at 1125 Park Avenue. She and her friends outfitted themselves in colorful costumes and swept off to the Beaux Arts Ball in the grand ballroom at the Astor, where three thousand invited guests dressed in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century costume were assembled in boxes and bosquets to witness “A Fete in the Garden of Versailles.” Sometime that evening, between the foliage, the lead figures borrowed from the garden of Bagatelle, and the central fountain designed after “Les Grandes Eaux,” Rosamond’s friend Francesca Braggiotti introduced her to a fellow Bostonian, Bill Gaston, twenty-eight years old, six feet, one inch tall, who had come down by train, dressed in masquerade, to join the festivities. After the Dance of the Odalisques, the program read, Miss Rosamond Pinchot was to perform in a minuet arranged by Miss Julia Hoyt, Miss Clare Boothe Brokaw, and five other court dancers. An Italian comedy masque was followed by a Crystal Dance, after which, Bill Gaston asked Rosamond to dance.

  Big Bill

  Behind the mask, Big Bill Gaston was remarkable. He had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1923, and everyone knew the Gastons because of Gaston Snow, the family law firm established in Boston in 1844. His grandfather had been the governor of Massachusetts just as Rosamond’s uncle was the governor of Pennsylvania. His father bested Theodore Roosevelt in the boxing ring and her uncle Gifford had trounced Roosevelt as well. He was from one of the oldest New England families, and he’d been awarded the Navy Cross for valor in World War I during an aerial encounter in Belgium. He was a Son of the Cincinnati, an honor deeded through primogeniture to the first sons of the original soldiers of the American Revolution under George Washington. But aside from all that, what Rosamond noticed about Bill was that he was magnetic, entertaining, and very, very good-looking. She wasn’t the only woman who had noticed Big Bill Gaston. On the night she met him, he was married to Broadway’s best-dressed actress, the sultry, sophisticated, and ambitious Kay Francis, and there were probably only three people on earth who knew it: Bill, Kay, and Kay’s aunt.

  Big Bill was married to Kay Francis, but not in any traditional sense of the word. Onstage, Kay Francis usually played a long-suffering wife or someone who had stumbled into trouble unknowingly. In real life, her story was quite the opposite. Like Rosamond, Kay kept a diary; but while Rosamond called her diary a “book,” Kay kept an annotated desk calendar in which notes were spare and precise. When she wanted private matters to stay private, Kay switched to shorthand. Big Bill was usually referred to as “Billy G,” but when the matter was not for public consumption, he was “B” or “BG.” On October 19, 1925, as if waking with a hangover, she wrote in shorthand, “Married to Billy G., my God. I told Aunt G of BG and me—swearing her to secrecy.”

  Neither Kay nor Big Bill seemed to remember why they had married, nor did they think it was it was a good idea to tell anyone. On December 2, after a little more than a month of so-called marriage, Kay recalled, “My seduction of B! My God does he know how to kiss.” But Kay’s desk diaries refer to B. only sporadically over the next two years. Their marriage remained a mystery and a closely held secret until Big Bill’s best friend, Bill Laurence, a New York Times science reporter, told Kay that her husband, who hadn’t always been present but was always available, was making himself available to another woman, Rosamond Pinchot.

  When Big Bill met Rosamond, he had put aside his Harvard law degree to try his hand at something he loved, writing plays. His first ironic drama, Damn the Tears, was in production. He had recruited Norman Bel Geddes for set design and his friend Reginald Barlow, a colorful actor and native of Boston, to star as his leading man. Rosamond soon learned that Big Bill had ideas, slightly strange ideas, about even stranger characters, but enough of an imagination and enough of what it took to get his plays out of the typewriter and onto the stage. There were men who bored her to tears, and then there were men like Big Bill who came equipped with a life, a story, and a plan. His was to buy an island off the coast of Maine where he’d build a house with a stage, where he would cook and write and grow alyssum and potatoes by the sea.

  Meeting him, Rosamond felt as if she was on a precipice, the way she felt when she’d met Reinhardt onboard the Aquitania. Bill Gaston was exciting. Like her father, he was an attorney and commanded an audience with his mastery of words. There was something about a man who, for half a moment, prolonged a glance, a glance you didn’t quite know what to do with. There was something deeply familiar about him that women fell in love with, something in his bright blue eyes, sensitivity perhaps, loneliness perhaps. He was reserved at first until he was certain of the company, and then, she noticed, he could concoct an argument about as good as she had ever heard. When a man with a build like Bill Gaston held his power in reserve like that, waited before saying anything, there was something irresistible about him. Something that let you know there was more to him than most people could see, perhaps something that Rosamond had seen in the not so average run of life.

  On February 18, 1926, Big Bill picked up Rosamond for their first date and took her to see Franz Werfel’s Goat Song at the Guild Theatre on West Fifty-second; it starred the British actress Lynne Fontanne, who was renowned for lying about her age not just in public, but to anyone who would listen, including her husband. Alexander Woollcott, who defended the play, reported that Fontanne delivered one of the most beautiful colloquies of the modern theater, but the play itself was nothing short of a horror story not to mention an unusual pick for a first date:

  In a trans-Danube countryside of the eighteenth century, to the sorrowing lady of its greatest house, a monster has been born—perhaps a curse upon that uncomprehending rooftree, perhaps the seed of Pan strayed back for a little time into a world made uninhabitable for Pan. It is a creature so terrible, so unthinkable that they can neither kill nor look upon him. Then after three and twenty years, even as this darkened house is striving to be a little festive for the betrothal of the second-born, the monster escapes. His apparition falls like a spark in the chaff of the countryside’s discontent. Gypsies, charcoal burners, peasants, clowns, Jews, the nameless, the landless, the human flotsam of the little world, all are fused into rebellion. Primal chaos raises its head—so ugly to all those who are secure or righteous or smug, so beautiful to the despairing…. The revolution was a failure, utter, complete. But what has happened may happen again. For the Iphigenia of that renewing countryside walks the fields with the seed of the monster inside her. On that threat, on that promise, on that prophecy, the curtain falls.

  Big Bill and Rosamond didn’t wait for the curtain to fall. At intermission, he introduced Rosamond to Fontanne backstage, after which they agreed to forgo the second act. Exiting by way of the side door, they beat a path to nearby Town Hall where Bill’s friend Paul Robeson was giving a concert of Negro spirituals. Not just any concert or any musician, Robeson had been singing to sold-out audiences around the country after deciding, like Bill, to abandon his other career, the law.

  One date led to a second invitation, and so it was that Rosamond boarded a midnight train two weeks later to visit Bill and to attend his sister Hope Gaston’s bridal shower in Boston. After the celebration, Rosamond reported in her diary: “much champagne and high Boston society.” And while all was very gay, she wrote, “Bill G. quite tight.” Later that day, they lunched at the Somerset Club where she noted, “He delightful and I feeling easily understood…. Felt myself rather affected.”

  After their date in Boston, Rosamond didn’t see Big Bill for several months. It didn’t really matter, people came and went and there were always enough men around to distract her from fixing her sights on any one in particular. She saw Big Bill twice in April that year, once for a cup of tea at her apartment that extended until well past midnight and once at the Algonquin, where her
friend Zoe Akins was working with young George Cukor on a new play, Pardon My Glove. The play was scheduled to open at the Lyceum in Rochester, where Cukor had set up a theater company; it was set to be produced by the man Rosamond couldn’t get away from, Morris Gest. Zoe had seen Rosamond in The Miracle and decided to have her read for the part of Mimi alongside Billie Burke, wife of Flo Ziegfield, and who would later play Glinda, the Good Witch in the Wizard of Oz. Several days after her date with Big Bill at the Algonquin, Zoe and George handed her the manuscript for Pardon My Glove. Rosamond wrote, “They seemed to want me for the part of Mimi in the play. It seemed like another Aquitania. Such a spring night!”

  This time it was the hand of young George Cukor who reached down and plucked her out of a crowd. Since the encounters with Morris Gest, Rosamond had learned not to put too much faith in the press. Still, news was news, and without the benefit of an agent, she admitted to reporters that she suffered from stage fright and said that she made a better “kennel man” than an actress. “Please don’t say in big headlines that I am a genius or something like that. I know I am not. And please don’t put anything in the paper that sounds romantic.” But the press couldn’t help itself, it was in love with Rosamond Pinchot. In a love affair, right or wrong, glamorous or not, even the details sound romantic. Sometimes, as in one column, “Lights on Socialites,” the press actually got the story straight: