by Bibi Gaston
While discussions of reincarnation and the afterlife were all the rage at the time, Rosamond was unconvinced, though she had to admit to a certain curiosity perhaps because of Uncle Gifford’s interest in the occult. While commissioned to design the nation’s first experimental forest for George Vanderbilt at Biltmore, Gifford, then in his twenties, met and fell in love with a young Chicago woman named Laura Houghteling who had succumbed to tuberculosis. After Laura’s death, Uncle Gifford pined for his love for twenty years, carrying on conversations with Laura as if she were still in the room, even consulting with her before giving speeches on the floor of the United States Senate. Gifford kept George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature by his bedside, but his library included treatises on the afterlife and spirits. Rosamond and her mother practiced yoga, but their yoga practice was by no means a spiritual endeavor. When Rosamond stood on her head, she’d prop herself up in the middle of the lawn and think about Uncle Gifford’s obsession with insects, how people looked so unattractive upside down and whether if she fell asleep, she’d fall or if, like a cow, she could train herself to sleep standing up, only upside down.
While “Rosamond Peters” was exploring California, peeling peaches, dodging the press, questioning reincarnation, and doubting the existence of the soul, Morris Gest was sharpening his pencil. The Miracle was crisscrossing the United States and Gest wasn’t tied to any particular Nun when the play reached the coast. He knew that Rosamond was floating around in various states of anonymity because he kept tabs on her in the press. Everyone did, but Morris Gest had a vital reason to; he had lost his blueblood cachet when Rosamond left the cast in a huff, and that wasn’t good for anyone. She’d disappeared into the woodwork, the woods, or somewhere, and who knew what she was doing. Morris Gest was determined to find out.
One night, while still living in San Francisco, Rosamond returned to her green and yellow room after work. Wandering down the hall that night, she struck up a conversation with her neighbor Miss Buchanan, an Australian nurse. The conversation turned to women’s hopes and dreams when the nurse said, “There is one thing I am looking forward to, the time when The Miracle comes out here.” Rosamond’s heart leapt. “I have the book of The Miracle here,” said Miss Buchanan as she looked among some papers and brought out the souvenir book of the play. Rosamond tried to stay calm. The nurse handed her the book and together they looked at the photographs of Lady Diana Manners as the Madonna, and Rosamond as the Nun, lying at her feet. Rosamond was dying to tell Miss Buchanan that it was she who had played the Nun. Rosamond wrote, “I wanted to kiss the paper, to cry, but I did nothing.” There was Reinhardt, the cathedral, the evil piper, even Gest, and all the rest that she knew so well. In a little boardinghouse three thousand miles from home, the nurse reminded her of The Miracle, the play she went west to forget. It felt so strange, she wrote, as though it was all part of another lifetime.
That fall, Morris Gest sent Rosamond a “peace offering,” a pale gold shawl to drape over her blond locks to make her look as pious as a nun. Gest “helped” the San Francisco paper scoop the latest installment of their public estrangement:
CANNOT STAY OUT OF PLAY, WOULD HAVE NONE OF THE NUN
But Now Pretty Heiress Will Try Role Again To Please Gest.
Rosamond was reported to have made up with Gest, explaining, “You see I feel like I owe him a debt of gratitude. He’s a marvelous man and I was entirely wrong when we quarreled in New York two years ago.”
The article went on to disclose the reason:
Miss Pinchot referred to the day she spurned Gest’s $1000 a week salary and broke the contract which would have taken her on the American tour with The Miracle. Youthful, vivacious, she became bored with the famous title role and wanted adventure—so, characteristically she walked out on the producer.
The press could say what it wanted, but the deal breaker wasn’t the salary; the deal breaker was Morris Gest.
Through the first few months of 1927, Rosamond stayed on to play the Nun in Los Angeles, also playing the role of Hippolyta in Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After what had been a longer than anticipated actor’s cure, she returned to Europe that summer for another engagement of The Miracle in Salzburg and Dortmund, Prussia, where she twisted her ankle during the performance and completed her marathon of parts to a standing ovation. She also played A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Salzburg Festival, this time in the role of Helena. Finally, she returned to New York that fall, ready to resume the life she had had when she’d dropped The Miracle to go west. It was as if finally she’d come out of the forest, serene, and knowing that the world had its places that soothed her and made her a better person, a calmer person, confident but more kind.
Nineteen twenty-seven was a year of firsts. In March, the world held its breath between Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff in New York and his successful landing in Paris. In April, for the first time ever, television was displayed before a live studio audience at the Bell Telephone Building in New York City. That fall, in October, Rosamond turned twenty-three years old, and in December, the Ford Motor Company retooled its assembly line and rolled out the first Model A, the successor to its popular Model T.
While Rosamond was in California and Europe, she kept in fleeting contact with Big Bill, but it had been almost two years since they’d first met at the Beaux Arts Ball. Since she’d been away, Big Bill had had quite a time of it. In January 1927, the critics torpedoed his play Damn the Tears, calling it Damn the Sneers and “young Gaston’s first gasping effort.” But that damning evidently did not go far enough. They also called his play a “conglomerate and heterogeneous mess.” Poor Bill went into something of a tailspin when Burton Davis of the Telegraph wrote that he was utterly bewildered by the story of the peculiar and brilliant young law student who came out of a family wrangle writing poetry and unable to adapt himself to life. While Davis appreciated the stagecraft, particularly the strange, leaning structures of Norman Bel Geddes, whom he described as the good fairy of all unusual drama, he still couldn’t fathom the play: “As a piece of literature,” he wrote, “I have a suspicion that Mr. Gaston’s work might be worth reading. As a piece of stagecraft it drove about one third of its friendly first night audience, by twos and fours and half dozens, out into the ugly sanities of thirty-fifth street.”
Big Bill didn’t pay much attention to the papers after that. The critics would say whatever they wanted to say and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. He knew how the publicity machine worked. If you didn’t have a Gest, a Shuman, or a Belasco on your side, you might as well forget it. He’d still keep writing his plays and maybe next time he’d get the breaks like Rosamond had. Perhaps next time someone would understand him and what he was trying to say—if there was a next time.
When Rosamond returned from Salzburg that fall, she was only back for three months before the newspapers had something more pleasant to report. No one knew exactly how long plans had been in the works or how two public figures had managed to escape the eye of the camera or the ear of the press. On January 26, 1928, Rosamond, twenty-three years old, married Big Bill Gaston, thirty, in a secret ceremony in the parsonage of the First Baptist Church in West Chester, Pennsylvania. There were no eyewitnesses, but the coverage was juicy nonetheless:
The social world of Philadelphia, New York and Boston would have been keenly interested in the little group that disembarked at West Philadelphia station on the 3 o’clock train from New York but not even a porter paid them any attention…. Miss Rosamond Pinchot, niece of former Governor Gifford Pinchot, who went from stage stardom to a job in a California canning factory and back to stage acclaim in the space of a few years, used Philadelphia as a jumping off place yesterday on her way to be married—a wedding she tried to keep a deep dark secret, but without success. Accompanied by her father and mother, Amos Pinchot and Mrs. Minturn Pinchot, who are divorced, but who allowed themselves to be reunited for the afternoon, she hastened out to West Chester from whence she departed an
hour or so later as the bride of William Gaston, 2nd, lawyer by profession, playwright by choice, and a member of one of Massachusetts oldest and most socially elect families by right of birth.
It was the sporting Rosamond, the Rosamond who wore no rings or jewelry, who wed Big Bill on January 26 in her light blue traveling suit. She dispensed with all the white dress business and dressed as a modern bride. She didn’t tell others why she’d married Big Bill; she knew what she was doing. He was the best-looking man she’d ever laid eyes on. He had his plays, his boats and his gardens, and the things he cared about. He knew so much about the world and came from a long line of people who had opinions, the way she did, people who dissected the angles of right and wrong, but then they laughed about it, knowing they could be entirely wrong about what was right. As for the formalities, neither was hell-bent on extravagance. As for the “ceremony,” they were in and out in less than an hour. One article noted that Rosamond “married without any particular fuss, she detests ceremonies.”
Big Bill’s mother, the impressive May Lockwood Gaston, came down from Boston to serve as a witness before the couple departed for Canada on their honeymoon. Apparently she wasn’t in the mood for a particular fuss, either. Her husband, “The Colonel” William Gaston, had died of cancer unexpectedly in July at their austere columned manse in Barre, Massachusetts, known as Gaston Farm. Unhappily, Big Bill and his father had never made peace before he died. The Colonel thought he’d given his first son everything he needed for a good start in life. Big Bill had received the law degree at Harvard, the family’s alma mater, and become assistant district attorney in Boston; but then he’d blown it when he dropped the law to write plays. Big Bill had hardly been the pillar of rectitude in an old Boston family. The Colonel’s father, William Gaston, had set the standard and done right by the alma mater; he’d been the mayor of Boston, twice. He’d been elected to both houses of the legislature. In 1875, he’d served as the twenty-ninth governor of Massachusetts. He’d been the one to embed the owl and the logo on the Gaston family crest, which read “Fama Semper Vivit,” Fame Lives Forever. Bill’s becoming a playwright and a man-about-town wasn’t exactly the type of fame the governor or the Colonel had in mind.
Like the governor, the Colonel was a man’s man. He had been a wrestler and a runner and played baseball for the Crimson. He’d been Harvard’s champion middle-weight boxer, besting the redoubtable Ramon Guiteras in three ten-minute rounds and, to top it all off, had taken on his classmate Theodore Roosevelt and trounced him on the same day. The Colonel was a lawyer and a banker and a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and Trinity Church. In 1887, he had been responsible for the financial reorganization of Boston’s elevated railway and at the same time established what was at the time the highest wage scale for transit employees in the history of the United States. Following World War I, he was appointed by the U.S. government to arbitrate labor disputes in Hartford, Connecticut, and Bath, Maine, and had served on the staff of Governor William Eustis Russell. It seemed that the Colonel’s only defeats in life had been political, when he’d run for governor three times and for senator in 1922 against Henry Cabot Lodge and lost by a mere 7,350 votes.
No, the Colonel didn’t want to see the Gaston family crest adorning the pages of Big Bill’s curriculum vitae, even if he’d had one. The colonel had gotten wind of the fact that Big Bill was running around with the actress Kay Francis, but, like most people, he didn’t know they had secretly married and divorced. His son’s first attempt at Broadway hadn’t just been an embarrassment, some said it had been a not-so-veiled commentary on him and his legendary relationship with the bottle. The last straw was when the Colonel learned that Big Bill had become a part owner of a speakeasy at 21 West Fifty-second Street. At that point, the Colonel had had about enough and made damn sure Big Bill felt it where it hurt. Big Bill wouldn’t see much of his father’s $7 million after he died. Big Bill was, for all practical purposes, disinherited. The vast wealth, most of it in stock, and the estates in North Haven, Maine, Barre, and Boston went to his brother, John, and two sisters, Hope and Ruth. If fame lives forever in the Gaston family, Big Bill wasn’t going to keep it alive by practicing the law, and he couldn’t count on inheriting the fabulous wealth his siblings had. He’d find another way to keep the fame, if not the spirit, alive.
It seems as though Big Bill had already gotten something of a head start at fame, if not infamy, when he’d married Kay Francis and set up house in his Harvard dorm room. It is said that you never really know whom you are marrying. According to Big Bill, he and Kay had never really lived together because the dorm room didn’t count. From the way Bill described it, they had not really been married either. The Pinchots had socialized with Kay Francis, liked her, so when they heard about Kay and Bill’s marriage in the papers the day after Rosamond was married, they were surprised. But they could understand how Kay, a self-made woman who was used to having things her way, would also want to have her way with a dashing young law student at Harvard, even if it meant setting up house in a dorm room.
Big Bill at Harvard, 1919
Big Bill and Kay Francis made sure the ending of their relationship was about as ambiguous as the beginning. Just a month before Rosamond and Bill were married, Kay noted again in shorthand, “Bill said he might marry me again, only it would be the same thing all over again. Also that he hoped to sleep with me sometime again.” Three nights before Rosamond and Bill married, Kay and Big Bill met at her home, went out to dinner and she recalled, “Talk of him marrying RP.” Kay Francis knew that Billy G. was having one very good time with RP, but the talk of marriage was only talk and it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the door open. Big Bill wasn’t good husband material but he made a damn good date.
In the morning of their marriage, Bill and Rosamond were optimistic. He’d married the woman who’d been called the “Loveliest Woman in America” by the celebrated British poet, actress, and adventuress Iris Tree. Rosamond had married the most compelling man she’d ever met. They had a future together. Cinderella was in remission and Big Bill made her laugh. The papers reported that he planned to continue his law practice, although he was actually working on his plays; they reported that she would keep her career as a stage actress, although she quietly longed for a new direction, like volunteering for charity and political work. If she was to go back into the theater, she thought, it would be in production, if at all. She and Bill had a full life. They shared books, the theater, and music. They teased each other and penned little nicknames. He was Devil McNasty and she was the Biche. The sidewalks were hot with the sounds of Bessie Smith in Harlem singing “Mean Old Bedbug Blues,” and the Gershwins at Town Hall playing “Strike Up the Band.” Nineteen twenty-eight was Broadway’s busiest year to date with at least fifty musical productions, and Wall Street was surging because everyone was buying stock.
Bill and Rosamond were in the news, playing host at elaborate dinner parties for the notable and the notorious. Rosamond chaired charity events with the Hamiltons and the Harrimans and the Hearsts and the Krocks. Bill and she had a marvelous apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, with a location their friend Dorothy Parker described, like so many others, as being “way over by the river, so far east I’m thinking of planting tea.” They employed two gracious Japanese cooks, the Watanabis, who prepared fine meals, and dispensed with the annoyances of city life. They lived on the roof in the summer, the Biche in her bathing suit and McNasty with his feet propped on the parapet and a crystal tumbler of his favorite vodka. They’d carry on with their flirtations deep into the night, and as the traffic died down, they’d take their murmurings into the bedroom where they, too, quieted down and shared the sensual results of all that sparring. The next morning, they went their separate ways as any couple would. Rosamond buzzed over to Grey Towers. During the day, Bill went off to some office or other, pursuing part-time projects in banking and the law. But in that first summer, Bill spent most of hi
s time at Crotch Island, Maine, where he had begun to bring his plan to life. The house on Crotch Island would be the escape of his dreams, in the landscape he loved, near North Haven, where he’d grown up in the summers. With the help of his local architect and laborers from the surrounding islands, he began building a cabin of spruce from the island. But this was no ordinary log cabin. Half the first floor would function as a stage, where curtains could be drawn at night. The house looked west over the steel blue waters of Penobscot Bay, toward the mainland, the blue hills of Camden, and Mount Megunticook.
Newspaper clipping, source unknown
But there was a lot more to their lives than their private happiness. Like many prominent New Yorkers, Rosamond gave money, time, and her used coats to help the less fortunate. She focused her efforts on the New York Association for the Blind; the Salvation Army; Faith House, which trained young girls who were unmarried mothers; and the Halton Fund, which benefited single working girls who had no medical treatment. Like many an Upper East Side woman of privilege, Rosamond was everywhere and involved in everything. She hadn’t followed the prescribed order when she chose The Miracle over a debutante party or revoked the stage for the peach line, but now she was back where she belonged, married and about to give birth.
William Alexander Gaston was born at Miss Lippincott’s Sanitarium on January 5, 1929. In photographs, Little Billy is surrounded by doting Gastons and Pinchots, beaming from the benefits of coddling. In the photos, it appears that Big Bill was an enthusiastic father to his firstborn son. Meanwhile, Rosamond, the proud young mother, never looked happier than she did holding the little boy she called “Mow.” He was a lively, good-looking infant, but then this was a very good-looking couple, an unstoppable couple that, from the looks of things, would give everything they had to give to their firstborn son.