The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  Her favorite color is red. Her apartment, a penthouse in the East Seventies, features large red flowers in white vases against white walls. She plays backgammon, doesn’t care about bridge. Her favorite drink is a Haitian rum cocktail. She smokes a lot in public, rarely when alone. She has no superstition about black cats, often has one or two about the house. She likes to be alone a great deal, spends four or five hours daily by herself. Her idea of a good time is going places she’s never been, alone.

  In April, Big Bill was still working on his own semiautobiographical play, Damn the Tears, an expressionistic odyssey of a Harvard attorney from an old Boston family who turns into a baseball player, loses his mind during practice, and ends up a shuffling lunatic on the streets of Manhattan. While Big Bill was ironing the stranger kinks out of Damn the Tears, scheduled to open in January 1927 at the Garrick Theatre, Rosamond was quietly damning her stage fright at rehearsals of Glove. On April 24, 1926, she wrote:

  Came home and slept before going to the Empire Theatre to read for Mimi. I was nervous and felt inferior at the reading. Still they seemed to like me. Damn the self-consciousness. After the rehearsal with Zoe Akins, Louis Walheim, Gilbert Miller and George Cukor and I went with Zoe and we sat in her apartment at the Algonquin. We read and talked. Then Bill Gaston came…later Walheim, Cukor and Miss Andrews. We talked late. I am home and lonely…still it is this human business. I can’t seem to get it. Always the Cinderella feeling and loneliness.

  In her diaries, Rosamond called her bouts of sadness and emotion “the Cinderella feeling.” She described it as a “sinking sensation” that made unexplained appearances, then disappeared for days, weeks, or months. During the bouts, she felt listless, fearful, and suffered things more deeply. Amos, for one, thought his daughter felt things too deeply, advising her not to make too much of things. The Cinderella feeling was likely some form of depression. When it took hold, she longed for things to be different from the way they were, to go someplace, preferably alone, where she wouldn’t feel as though people were watching her. But where she wanted to go and what she longed for, she didn’t know.

  While her success in The Miracle was an entrée to the land of theater people, it was also a passport to the world of aggressive businessmen who sold what the theater critic Alexander Woollcott called the “narcotic opulence of extravaganzas” to a frenzied public. The language they used was the slang of the cheap scam, the term they used was “show business,” and the future was in the “motion picture industry.” Producers like Gest and theater magnates like Shubert started out as ticket hawkers and real estate speculators and became an indispensable part of the Broadway machine, building theaters and recruiting ambitious young directors and actors to “deliver the goods,” and “put one over” on an audience. Business was business. Rosamond Pinchot, a daughter of the old New York establishment, had become a Broadway star and she owed her success, or at least part of it, to the new Jewish theatrical establishment. Men like Morris Gest gave Rosamond and Amos a great big headache, but men like Morris Gest made Rosamond Pinchot a household name.

  In the spring and summer of 1926, Rosamond often visited a woman named Mrs. Witt, a counselor who lived downtown. Mrs. Witt was likely a lay therapist and not a Freudian analyst, given the topics they discussed, such as what Rosamond was going to do with her life and her increasing ambivalence toward the stage. They discussed the subtle shifts in the Cinderella situation, Rosamond’s eyes, her feelings of being watched, and her stage fright. Several times Mrs. Witt went to watch Rosamond dance at Mordkins and Anna Graham’s studio and concluded that Rosamond’s nervousness was justified. The aggressive theater crowd was to blame for her symptoms. She and Mrs. Witt discussed how she might find herself in a field that was more benevolent and conducive to her sensitive nature. “How marvelous it would be,” the two women thought, “if goodness could be made interesting and attractive.”

  Rosamond and Mrs. Witt frequently discussed Rosamond’s parents, Amos and Gertrude, who divorced in 1918 when Rosamond was thirteen. Rosamond idolized her father, calling him “Doly,” while he called her “Sis” and referred to her as his best friend. Rosamond confided in Mrs. Witt, telling her that her father was the one person she knew who managed to make goodness both interesting and attractive. Gertrude, on the other hand, hadn’t managed to make anything interesting or attractive. With her various ailments, she was sickly, cloying, and needy. According to Rosamond, Gertrude was just plain annoying.

  Proximity was just part of the problem. Soon after Amos and Gertrude divorced, Amos temporarily moved into one of the many clubs he belonged to in the city, while Gertrude bought the four-story brick town house at 9 East Eighty-first Street. Rosamond and her brother, Gifford, known as Long Giff, went to live with their mother. When Amos married his second wife, Ruth, in 1919, Amos bought an apartment at 1125 Park Avenue, but he also owned properties all over Manhattan, including all four corners of Eighty-fifth Street and Park Avenue where he hired the architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a town house adjacent to one of the corners. At Gertrude’s town house, just seven blocks away, Rosamond enjoyed all of the comforts any young woman could want, but neither parent’s home felt like home. Home to her was Grey Towers, her father’s ancestral estate, high above the banks of Sawkill Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River, in rural Pike County, Pennsylvania.

  If New York was like her mother, Grey Towers was like her father. If New York was the backdrop for Conrad’s “aimless masquerade,” Grey Towers was its antidote. In her diary, Rosamond frequently reported hearing the call of the whip-poor-will, a close relative of the owl and the only species that is known to hibernate by burrowing down in the duff of the forest floor or hiding away in the sides of cliffs. At Grey Towers, the Cinderella feeling rarely staged an appearance.

  As a child Rosamond had a wild side; some called it exuberance, but others were alarmed by it. At four years old, she learned to ride, and at eight, she was entering equestrian competitions at Madison Square Garden. By the age of thirteen, she rode five jumpers in one class. Exploring Milford’s forests and fields on horseback or on foot, she was frequently alone, but never complained of loneliness or being left alone. Quite the opposite, she preferred it. Dodging her uncle’s foresters and her father’s writers and politicians, she often wandered down from the château to walk her grandmother Mary’s serpentine paths by herself, but other times, smiling and carrying on, she would entertain Uncle Gifford’s young forestry students hard at work in the woods. In 1912, a year before Mary died, she wrote Amos, concerned about his eight-year-old daughter: “You are going to have your hands full with that bewitching little coquette of yours. I’m afraid she is going to be too fond of attention—especially from men—to whom she is irresistible, and probably will be. Her flirtations with the foresters are amusing now—but she will soon be getting too [fond] of their admiration.”

  There were no neighboring children to play with at Grey Towers, so typical childhood summers for Rosamond meant tinkering and dithering with her brother, Gifford. One summer when she was nine, an argument spun out of control. Over lunch, the two siblings engaged each other in a debate over the stained-glass windows in Milford’s little church that quickly escalated into war. Rosamond insisted the windows were “BEAU-tiful,” while Gifford said they were not. A relative looking after the children took Gifford’s side in the matter; Rosamond, seeing no respite from the agony of her opinions, made hellacious noises as she seethed, hissed, and sputtered. Hurling evil looks over her shoulder like a little blond Medusa, she sped off into the woods, announcing that she wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Some hours later she emerged, calm and dignified, only to be apprehended by the butler, who carried her directly to her room.

  Gertrude Minturn Pinchot by S. D’Ora

  Amos Pinchot

  Rosamond, her mother, Getrude Minturn Pinchot, and her brother, Gifford Pinchot

  Grey Towers

  In June of 1926, after the final performance of Pardon My Glo
ve, summer was at its peak and the woods around Milford were the best refuge that Rosamond could imagine. She drove out to Grey Towers feeling liberated. In her rearview mirror, the skyline of Manhattan faded over the Meadowlands. Cinderella was in abeyance. She didn’t care what Cukor said; she knew she hadn’t put on a stellar performance. It was one of the longest days of the year, so she made the best use of the summer sun, wandering through the remnants of a Civil War landscape above Grey Towers and remembering her childhood. Like the best of friends, her childhood landscape invited her into a conversation with herself:

  All ugliness, all hurry, all heat seemed so far away. I feel happier than at any time in months. As I write this I am lying naked taking a sunbath in a little clearing in the woods. The year is at its height. The trees and the grass are fresh and unburned. The air smells of the warm ground. Oh if only I could express the delight of this summer day! I went over the hill back of the camp and came to the edge of the woods. There was a stone wall and a lot of old lilac trees. Once there must have been a house. Below the woods were very green…down the road is a beautiful spring full of water plants. Yesterday there was a medium sized bullfrog in it and I teased him by tickling his eyes with a blade of grass. It was hot so I took off all my clothes. What a marvelous feeling! I ran around the meadow like a horse, jumping over azaleas and watching my shadow. It was risky but I didn’t care. I started off to the woods. The wind and sun were warm and I ran along. There was a chance of meeting someone but that didn’t make any difference.

  Grown up now, she still preferred having the woods to herself. She’d wander for a while, then, beneath a perfect parting of the canopy where the sun was warm and bright, she’d strip off her clothes and prance about the forests in the nude. Sometimes she’d sprawl out beside a rock to daydream or curl up in the leaves like a nesting bird or lie down atop the cool duff to take a nap. Then, rested and warm, she’d rise, as if from a dream, to a world that seemed brand-new. She was refreshed by the glow of the sun. “Sleep,” she wrote, “is the secret of happiness.” And sleep in the woods beat back the blues in twenty minutes, cut down on the volatility, and stemmed the Cinderella longing. A clearing in the woods was a beauty session.

  With the encouragement of Mrs. Witt, in the summer of 1926, Rosamond decided to take a hiatus from New York and fashioned a plan to go west. Characteristically, her mother was unsupportive and her father was supportive; but her parents knew she didn’t need their support. Rosamond knew exactly what she was going to do. Gertrude thought her daughter’s decisions were frequently made in haste, but hasty or not, Rosamond had navigated Vienna, Berlin, Salzburg, Syracuse, and Cleveland, so California seemed like a reasonable destination for an unescorted twenty-one-year-old.

  Before she left New York for San Francisco by train, Rosamond played an odd little game with herself. She had squirreled away $10,000, like a ruthless bank teller, but she took only $263 with no way of getting more. She told people that she was going to California to work and take in the scenery but what she didn’t tell them was that she planned to force herself to survive without her family, her name, or her bank account. She wrote in her diary, “I have no idea how long I will be gone or what I am going to do.” What she did was change her name to Rosamond Peters, a “gentlewoman in reduced circumstances.”

  Rosamond Peters arrived by train in San Francisco on July 27, 1926, and checked into the YWCA. The next day, she scanned the papers for an apartment and a job. Several days after arriving she wrote:

  Saturday July 31, 1926

  At last I have done some real work. This afternoon after coming home from downtown, I got desperate and decided that it was time that I took advantage of my opportunities there and really do something besides pose as a gentle-woman in reduced circumstances. So I put on the pink cotton dress that I had bought for $2.98 in Rochester, an old pair of shoes and my shabby blue coat. Then I fixed my hair in points the way all the girls do here, and I put on my hideous little straw hat over my eye. When I was dressed I felt very sure that no one would be surprised or interested in anything I might do. I looked awful, particularly when I slumped over in the approved fashion. Once dressed I went out and took the Fillmore streetcar. I had seen an advertisement of the California Canneries so I went in and asked for a job. Crowds of women were everywhere. I asked for the head floor lady and finally found her among a crowd of women that were cutting fruit at a long table. I expected to be told there was nothing; one is always told that it seems. But this time it was different. She was such a nice woman, Mrs. Mabri. She asked me if I had had experience and I of course said I had. Then she asked me if I wanted to can that night. I answered yes….

  Rosamond found undercover work as a peeler with Armenians on the peach line. She rented a cheerful yellow room with green-blue trim in a boardinghouse on Jackson Street with two interior decorators. She took shorthand and typing because she thought it would help her become more efficient. It was time she bought a car, so she loosened up the purse strings and bought an ancient Buick. On the weekends, she toured California, with its gleaming freshness and fecund countryside of oranges, tangerines, and dates. During breaks on the packing line, the Armenians wanted to find her a husband. Her fine rolled stockings attracted attention. Before her coworkers noticed one more thing that didn’t add up, she quit, scanned the papers again, jumped in the Buick, and signed up as a photographer’s assistant for $14 a week in Los Angeles. She didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles and didn’t want to. She wrote that she was “fleeing from the horrors of George Cukor’s Rochester stock company.” A Rolleiflex became her constant companion and she spent her weekends spinning through the blues and golds of California, through canyons of dry, crackling live oaks, between the vast coastal range and miles and miles of ocean. Landscape reconnaissance was lonely, but at last, she could hear herself think. California’s cities were white and clean and fresh. “I loved the abundance of California,” she wrote, but “there was not much that was beautiful where people had been.”

  She wrote little during her trip west, but the press filled in the gaps. Reporters, curious about her mysterious wanderings from one end of California to the other, soon discovered her swimming in the Bay and loafing with the locals in the Imperial Valley. Times Wide World Photos tracked her to the University of California at Berkeley where they reported that she’d enrolled as a special student of English and psychology. It wasn’t entirely true, she was only taking a class or two, but she was still every bit the celebrity, and an enigmatic one at that. When she’d registered at Berkeley, word got out she was on campus, and, according to news accounts, more than one hundred students enrolled in her English class just to see her. The teacher announced that he was glad for the increased enrollment, but several days later, her appearance caused pandemonium and the class was canceled.

  For the better part of six months, Rosamond cruised California in her Buick, dressing in overalls and dodging the press. Her friend George Cukor telegrammed from Rochester in August that he hoped she was happy in her new role as the “Girl of the Golden West.” He wrote, “You are sorely missed in this little city of homes, but let us dream true…and remember noblesse oblige.” What Cukor meant was that she could vagabond about and catch her breath, but in time, she’d remember where she came from. If you were a Pinchot, you plunged into the forest to get the blues out of your system, but then you emerged to do the people’s work. James Wallace Pinchot, Rosamond’s grandfather, spent a year on horseback in the southern woods to recover from entrepreneurial overexuberance as a purveyor of dry goods in New York. His doctors referred to his treatment as the “naturalist’s cure.” But when Rosamond went west, the only prescription she had was her own. Her diagnosis was the Cinderella complex, so she went undercover and made believe there was no way back.

  After The Miracle, she couldn’t go back. Not to bit parts or to play stock in Cukor’s little cities of homes. In 1926, few people had heard of George Cukor, but everyone knew Rosamond Pinchot and that, for a whil
e at least, she’d fled. The actor’s cure had taken her to a spectacular landscape of exotic fruits and vibrant people with their maps and their cars. They had all moved on from somewhere and she wasn’t the only one changing her name and pretending to be someone they weren’t. Everything about the place was transient, shifting. California had what topographers call ample prospect and encouraged a liveliness in a person, so finding no refuge, her world opened up instead.

  She wrote that she was on a great adventure. In November 1926, she went to hear the British social reformer and mystic Annie Besant speak in San Francisco. Besant was a lightning rod, a contemporary of Gifford’s, Amos’s, and Cornelia’s, and shared elements of their progressive thinking. She had married and divorced a minister of the Church of England, become an atheist, and written a tract advocating birth control for which she was charged with selling “obscene literature” but never prosecuted. Besant had allied herself with the theosophy movement, become a scholar of mysticism and Eastern spirituality, translated the Bhagavad-Gita, and written books on yoga, but the subject that night was reincarnation and the existence of the soul:

  An interesting, yet somehow ridiculous evening. I went to hear Annie Besant speak on reincarnation. To me her arguments were foolish and unconvincing. It always seems absurd when anyone speaks with authority on the future existence of the soul. There cannot be any definite data on which to base it. She spoke of the gradual progression of human beings from the lowest stage as represented by the savage or criminal to the highest as represented by the successful man, the leader. She made no effort to explain why man should have to start in sin and horror. Plants do not. She spoke of reincarnation as the only hopeful philosophy. But what is the use of living for the next incarnation if you are never able to recognize it or personally enjoy it. I would far rather feel that I became just a part of the world like a dead leaf, than return here to fight this battle again.