The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  After Little Billy was born, Big Bill and Rosamond resumed their busy lives. He went back to work on the island house that spring; Rosamond bounded back and forth between Milford and New York while still managing to squeeze in a trip to Corsica in July. As usual, the public was curious about her travels and where she was off to next. On the docks of lower Manhattan, she answered reporters, “Rockland, Maine!” where she would “rejoin her husband and her young son.” But she reminded them that she intended to keep up her career and planned to take a test for the talkies soon. On August 3, 1929, just a few days after returning on the Conti Grande, she appeared in a colorful advertisement in the Literary Digest for an elegant convertible roadster, in which she was identified as “among the distinguished women who drive the New Century Hupmobile.” The advertisement read:

  Rosamond and Little Billy, 1930

  She adores horses, motor cars, and motor boats…Peel of London makes her riding boots and Nardi her habits…Her favorite luncheon place is the Voisin where she always has a certain corner table…they know her in Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, New York, and points west as the Nun in The Miracle. And all over Europe as a member of Max Reinhardt’s Repertory company…she shuttles between New York and an island off the coast of Maine by train, car and speedboat…Her personal car is Hupmobile. She drives it herself. One admiring Westchester motor cop has said…And how!

  In the six years since she had met Max Reinhardt onboard the Aquitania, Rosamond Pinchot, the young woman who had once envisioned a career in the outdoors, became Rosamond Pinchot Gaston, actress, wife, and mother. She was also a woman of the future, a woman with unrepentant mobility. That’s what her audiences wanted to know, that Rosamond Pinchot was unstoppable, not just in her new Century Hupmobile, but in her life. It was all so hopeful, how she’d burst from childhood through youth and onto the stage of adulthood with an identity that Reinhardt had ascribed to a kind of deliverance. Providence, he called it, and those who knew her were certain there’d be a fine second act.

  2

  THE LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY

  I suspect that most Americans are lost. I believe we each belong to a patch of ground close to where we started, where we breathed in our first scent of roses or hint of mint, but we usually end up miles, if not continents, away. I’ve been curious why people live where they do, so, wanting to get to the bottom of things, I’ve conducted an unscientific survey to uncover the reasons: Do you feel like you belong here? If not, where do you belong? Do you ever feel lost where you live or uneasy? Do you long to go back to where you were born? If you could, would you go back there? And if not, where would you go?

  Most people’s lives are determined by other people. Mine has been determined by landscape. My faith lies in geography. Where I was born, where I have been, and the nature of those places, has shaped and colored my life. In those places I met this person, not that; I navigated this trail, not that. I decided to become friendly with places. I oriented myself by topography and the cardinal points. When I didn’t know whom I was with, at least I knew where I was and that’s when it didn’t really matter where I went.

  In the fall of 1991, I moved to Seattle and became interested in the use of memory as a design tool. I grew up in the East, so the West was disorienting, and like many people who pick up and go somewhere else, I was under the spell of the past. I missed the four seasons and the cities with parks that couldn’t be sold to a developer. I longed for old estates where blue-haired ladies sat behind rickety desks with their tickets and their straw donation baskets just waiting to tell me a story. Something in my eyes told them I was like them, daydreaming of the exquisite: the ellipse garden at Dumbarton Oaks, the Monets at the Hillstead Museum, the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra—places they’d visited on great big buses, got out, walked around and mingled with ghosts.

  It wasn’t that the West didn’t have old buildings or a brief, interesting history; it just seemed to me that while people knew how they’d come west, they couldn’t tell me why—it didn’t seem that they appreciated the West or even knew it. One time, I unleashed my unscientific survey and learned that a person lived where he did because that’s where his car died, so he stayed. Thankfully the car died in a spectacular location, so he said that Providence had led him there. If the place had been a hellish cow town, he likely would have blamed the car. Wanting to believe our hearts are moved to live where we do, and that where we live is a matter of choice not circumstance, I longed for a different answer: that someone shed a tear over the view of snow-tipped mountains from downtown Seattle or found his or her true self fishing for steelhead on the Deschutes. One spring night, he or she noticed the sweet scent of the prairie and whispered, “I’m home now.” Instead, I found the West to be a corridor, a flight path to somewhere else.

  In the fall of 1991, while teaching landscape architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, I gave my students an exercise in remembering. Between student loans, jobs, and classes, they barely had time to consider where they belonged, so I made my first assignment friendly and titled it the “Landscape of Memory.” I asked them to return to a place they remembered in childhood and to depict, in their choice of media, the landscape that meant the most to them. The project was part design, part sensitivity training with a dose of activism. I believed that half the battle was to discourage fledgling landscape architects from falling prey to developers who were all too eager to rid a site of what landscape philosophers call the “spirit of place.” The spirit sometimes inhabited the forgotten corners of a site, like an old wild meadow of native grasses, a dank, mossy seep, or the perfect snake habitat in a crumbling wall. Architects are trained to anticipate the worst, so I feared that my students would cave in to the arguments I’d caved in to in my first job when the client wanted to eliminate a tiny pond at the entrance to his site and erect a quasi–Roman bath he called an entrance statement. He asked me, “Can’t we just build a water feature and get rid of the one that’s real but really messy?”

  As it turned out, I was surprised and pleased by my students’ multimedia presentations. Navigating their journeys into the past, each discovered that a beautiful story waited for them. The place they selected held the keys to who they were and who they would become. Invariably, the place had several features—a shelter or enclosure, a body of water, and a friend who accompanied them on the journey. As the students told their stories, it became apparent that their memories were clear, but each expressed varying degrees of grief that their childhood landscape had vanished. I’ll never forget one student whose memory of landscape wasn’t like the rest but was every bit as relevant to the loss of landscape memory as to the loss of the landscape itself. He and his companion had grown up playing beneath an overpass where a drainage pipe fed a mud puddle.

  It takes one afternoon with a backhoe to dismantle the spirit of place. It takes a generation to lose a sense of belonging. My loss, like most, was tied to a series of ruptures that tore the fabric of family. While I was touring the country restoring places and teaching students to deepen their connection to the landscape, I had lost my own. I didn’t feel an allegiance to this place or that. I wanted to rescue them all from anonymity, dishevelment, and destruction.

  One photograph can jar the memory from the comfort of forgetting. Like the one taken on a spring evening in 1931, when Governor Gifford Pinchot and his wife, Cornelia, sat down together on a comfortable sofa in the living room at Grey Towers with their two-year-old great-nephew, Little Billy Gaston, son of Rosamond and Big Bill, to read him a book. Behind them stood a Tang Dynasty sculpture of a rearing camel, and, in front, a huge dog nuzzled at the governor to get his attention. Dressed in corduroys, a slightly rumpled jacket, and a paisley tie, the governor brought his reading to the sofa that evening and was just taking off his glasses, when he looked up with a kindly gaze into the lens of a camera. Paying no attention to the photographer, Cornelia and Little Billy huddled together reading from an oversized volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. />
  Of all the photographs I’d found of my father’s well-documented childhood, that one fascinated me the most. I scoured everything in it—the lamps, the books, the jugs, and the rearing camel—thinking something lurked in the scene. I thought I would discover a sign of what was to come or evidence of something that had been missed, but I couldn’t find anything. It was a photograph of a child of privilege with his famous family in a French castle above the Delaware River, surrounded by a beautiful hemlock forest with crashing waterfalls, walking paths, fields and flowers, and animals to play with. The whole story seemed idyllic. Much later, what struck me about the photograph wasn’t what was in it, but who wasn’t.

  When the photograph was taken, Governor Gifford Pinchot had just been elected to a second term and there were few signs of hope in a deepening depression. In 1931, the construction of the Empire State Building, designed to look like a pencil, was completed with steel from Pennsylvania steel mills. With a staggering height of 1,250 feet, it became the world’s tallest building. Construction of the George Washington Bridge, then known as the Hudson River Bridge, connecting New Jersey and New York, was under way. With a span of 3,400 feet, it was double that of the previous record holder for length. But despite these great civic works and the jobs they created, almost a million people were unemployed in Pennsylvania alone, and the governor himself decided to donate one quarter of his annual salary to relief efforts. Released prisoners voluntarily returned to prison to avoid life outside the penitentiary; many Pennsylvanians were living on roots and grasses, and one woman was fined $17.90 for killing a woodpecker to feed her children.

  Governor Gifford Pinchot, Cornelia Pinchot, and Little Billy

  In 2004, almost thirteen years after teaching students to remember their childhood landscapes, I began the journey back to discover my own. I remembered what the Zen poet Gary Snyder wrote in The Practice of the Wild: how each of us has a map inscribed in the brain where the elders once sat by the fireside and told us stories of the tribe, the land, the fish, the water, and the birds. In my peripatetic existence, I’d learned a lot about the natural world, but not from the elders who told stories by the fireside. I had lived in more than a dozen cities in the East and a handful in the West, not knowing I was searching for a place I had been taken to when I was four years old, behind Grey Towers, where my ancestors spent their summers and where Gifford, Amos, and Rosamond taught my father to swim and fish as a child.

  LITTLE BILLY’S FIRST SUMMER, 1929

  In June 1929, when Little Billy was just six months old, Rosamond decided it was time to take him for a spin. She sat him down beside her on the passenger seat of her bright green car she called “the Grasshopper” and headed east through the Holland Tunnel and over the grassy marshlands of northern New Jersey. She passed through rural hamlets, fields, farms, and openings before reaching the mixed deciduous forest that cloaked the Kittatinny Ridge. Crossing the Delaware River, she noticed how the landscape shifted, and in that crossing, a certain wildness took hold. She thought it was on account of the vegetation or the topography, but whatever it was, she imagined Little Billy would appreciate a dose of wildness in his first summer of life on earth.

  Little Billy

  At Grey Towers, Little Billy was the center of attention. In the summer of 1929, his great-uncle Gifford was no longer the chief of the United States Forest Service. Between his first and second terms as governor of Pennsylvania, he and Aunt Cornelia and their son, Gifford, had just set sail on a nine-month scientific expedition aboard their schooner, the Mary Pinchot, to explore the South Pacific, which meant that Grey Towers was quieter than usual that year. Still, the Pinchots’ “summer castle” was a very busy place, teeming with politicians, artists, writers, bankers, and businessmen who flew in and out to speak with Little Billy’s grandfather, Amos. Even in the quiet times, the grounds were frequented by family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and governesses who fussed and fiddled over Little Billy. When she came out from the city, his mother, Rosamond, added to his crowd of admirers by bringing her theatrical friends with her. They hovered around inhaling the scenery and fawned over its adorable new addition. And to the little addition’s amusement, a parrot named Oscar flew into the front foyer of the château every night and slept sprawled out on the floor. When Little Billy’s grandfather Amos wasn’t sparring with his political opponents or entertaining the literary and business lights of the day, he carried his grandson down through the forest and pointed to the wily brown trout in the dark pools of Sawkill Creek. Uncle Gifford’s foresters still surveilled the grounds, checking on the diameter of trees, and in his absence, recited the botanical names of insects, correctly pronounced and spelled so that Little Billy got the right start—the Pinchot start, an education in the natural world.

  Grey Towers was a sight to behold. Designed by the premier architect of the day, Richard Morris Hunt, the estate sat high on a hill between the Delaware River, Sawkill Creek, and the Pocono Mountains, just outside the small town of Milford, in Pike County, in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. Amid the fields, forests, and rivers of Grey Towers sat several old farmsteads with families who had been there since before the Civil War. With thousands of acres of remarkable scenery and opportunities for fishing, riding, and swimming, it provided the perfect bucolic retreat. Located just an hour and a half drive from New York City and three hours from Philadelphia, the estate also served as a great backup babysitter for the loveliest son of the loveliest ingenue on the go.

  Grey Towers, circa 1883

  Constructed in 1886, the château and its allied structures took advantage of commanding views to the east, over the Delaware River to the Kittatinny Ridge, and over parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the days of Little Billy’s great-grandparents, James and Mary Pinchot, it offered a bird’s-eye view of little Milford below. The grounds included a carriage house, an ice house, a stable, gardeners’ cottages, and the Forester’s Cottage, a summer schoolhouse built by James Pinchot and endowed as a classroom for the Yale School of Forestry in 1900. There was a handsome new swimming pool and a tennis court and the remnants of the School of Forestry’s summer camp off in the woods where, up until 1926, fifty Yale students resided in tents each summer, planting their seedlings and measuring the duff. But what most visitors raved about was Aunt Cornelia’s Long Garden, which featured a half-moat, a water rill, perennial beds, and various pools. The garden was punctuated by two small classical garden structures, a playroom for her son, Gifford, known as the Bait Box, which terminated the rill, and an office for her husband, Gifford, located beside the central garden axis, known as the Letter Box.

  Cornelia Pinchot, Billy’s great-aunt, was the self-appointed chief of garden design. Constantly approving changes to the grounds and performing little bits of magic in this corner and that, Cornelia never sat still. When she wasn’t the chief of celebrations or running for political office, the grounds drew most of her attention. At the height of the Great Depression, she had a large amphitheater constructed, putting the unemployed of Pennsylvania to work to undo what she called “a huge towered Camelot set on the side of a treeless stony hill, with the usual French dislike of shade, inherited from a Gallic ancestor.” When times were flush, she hired noted landscape architects and designers Chester Aldrich, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Rose Standish Nichols, and Elliot Kauff to design the grounds. When the Depression hit, Cornelia weeded and maintained the gardens for the most part by herself, keeping copious notes on her blue-eared Manchurian pheasants and their Grow-All pheasant food, on her three-banded Italian honey bees that came in three-pound packages, her Mount Hood blue columbine and her daffodils, iris, and lilies from the Carolinas.

  Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, courtesy of Grey Towers, USDA Forest Service

  There was no more glorious place to be a child than in the garden of the remarkable Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. Often during Little Billy’s childhood, Aunt Cornelia offered to take him at Grey Towers because “Tiny” needed a fresh-air es
cape from Manhattan, and Rosamond needed that vacation to Corsica and no one needed the headache of what might happen to a small child with his father at a construction site fifteen miles off the coast of Maine. So, perched in the turret room of the château like a little owl, Little Billy could watch Cornelia meet with Bottomley, the architect, who’d stand as upright as a board on the terrace below the bust of Lafayette, or with Stroyan, the big strong yard man Cornelia called a “high-grade man,” who came with lots of other men to dig things up. She’d point and they’d talk and she’d point again and suddenly the other men who’d been leaning on their shovels would spring to life like little soldiers. Stroyan barked at his men like a drill sergeant and they’d start digging. A new tree was wheeled in from the woods and voilà, magic, the tree looked like it had been there forever.

  There were two landscapes at Grey Towers. The first was Cornelia’s comfortable domesticated landscape of pool, terrace, and hand-troweled edge that wrapped itself around the château and civilized the surroundings. Hers was the landscape that everyone saw, where politicians and visitors strolled the rill consulting with each other and pondering public things. When the situation called for privacy, they wandered down to the sunken, frothing moat where voices were drowned out to the croaking of bullfrogs. Cornelia had the moat built when a visitor to Grey Towers, remarking on the loveliness of the château, noted that it was reminiscent of a castle but lacked one thing, a moat.