The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  Women’s flirtations, like those of their so-called friend Clare Boothe Brokaw, were only a part of the problem. Big Bill left a steady stream of clues about the women who were more than just casual acquaintances. At his speakeasy, nights past midnight were common, but there were nights he never came home at all. When Rosamond asked him where he had been, he told her it was none of her business. He didn’t need anyone to ask where he was going or tell him what to do or to notice he wasn’t doing anything or to make him stop whatever he was doing, which was what the Gaston family had always done, famously.

  There are funny drinkers and sloppy drinkers, and there are mean drinkers. And then there are mean drinkers who have someone else waiting in the wings. Big Bill was one of those. He was the kind of drinker who grew more and more silent but turned up the heat with every word. Bill made comments and barbs that brought out the worst in Rosamond, brought out her defensiveness, her sense of indignation that Bill owed her more than his vanishing acts and his nicknames. He compared her to his other broads. Their sweetness, even their nicknames, Biche and Devil McNasty, had vanished. On the bad days, she realized that what she had was a skeleton of love.

  She’d say she wanted a divorce and he’d say he’d take the boys and they’d rant and rave and she even bit him once in the middle of the night, but he didn’t really pay it any mind. There was nothing she could do to stop him from doing what he did. Instead of walking away, Rosamond engaged him like a boxer in the ring. Coming from a family of boxers, Big Bill knew just how to keep her off balance, to give her just enough to keep her wanting something he never intended to give. He’d always have one foot out the door. When he was out, that’s when her love turned to longing, which really wasn’t love at all. But when he was in, they’d fuss and fight and in the middle of the mayhem, he could turn sweet and tender, proclaim a cease-fire, become the underdog, get up, prepare a tray with fruit salad and little toasts and bring them back to the bedroom like a peace offering. For half an hour everything seemed normal. They’d hold each other for a few fierce moments and with a tear rolling down her face, they’d make love, a love that never really resolved anything because the next night the whole damned performance would repeat.

  Rosamond

  Friends of Rosamond’s knew about Big Bill’s drinking, but in the years leading up to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Bill and his friends were drinking more than ever. Still, friends didn’t know about his meanness. To them, he appeared charming. Rosamond knew the other side. He’d say things, things she couldn’t forget, after which she said she felt “a bit cracked somewhere.” On the night of May 26, 1932, Bill told her that everyone found her dull and that she was the “world’s worst bitch.” She could usually control herself, but that night she hurled a flowerpot and a telephone at him and fought back with her own litany of insults. That was the night she told him what her doctor had told her that day, that she was pregnant again, and that if she was smart, given the state of her marriage, she’d do what she needed to do to end the pregnancy. And she was smart, so she began to take the “medicines” the doctor prescribed, but they weren’t enough. At Mordkins dance class, she jumped up and down doing everything to try and get rid of the thing she feared had started. Meanwhile, Bill didn’t have much interest in the situation. Rosamond wrote, “I am just another of his girls having an operation.”

  On the same day Rosamond was photographing society women and their babies for Eleanor Roosevelt’s magazine Babies—Just Babies, she took twenty grams of quinine and trotted her mare ten times up and down the hill above Grey Towers. The next day, and still nothing, she went to see the doctor again. “He still has hopes these many pills may dislodge the poor tiny life that is so unwanted. Nothing could make me have this baby. Then why can’t I just force it out? No I guess something drastic must take place next week.”

  On June 3, Bill stopped by the apartment in New York and strode around saying nothing. “Not once has he referred to my having to have this beastly operation,” she wrote:

  Not once has he expressed the slightest concern or interest. How typical of him! I long so for some man. Not to be made love to but just to be close and friendly with. I used to feel that way toward Bill. We had such fun and so many jokes. Now there’s this emptiness. No one in the world to kiss, no one to give all the tenderness I have to give.

  Rosamond checked in to Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue at Eighty-seventh Street, where, on the morning of June 9, she was given a hypodermic that made her feel slightly drunk. Still, she remembered the details. A black rubber cap was put over her face that made her want to scream and push it off when slowly the marvelous “nothing matters” feeling came over her and she slipped away. When she came to, she wrote, “My first feeling was of disappointment because I hadn’t seen and known more.”

  Flowers came from Bill and he offered to come to the hospital, but she said no. The flowers reminded her that he found it easier to send flowers than to be kind and helpful. After spending five days of prescribed bed rest in the hospital, which gave Rosamond plenty of time to think, she made her decision. She’d move out from the apartment at 444 the following Wednesday and go to Reno for a divorce.

  Moving day. I up early. Yesterday a letter came from Bill enclosed in a tin box that held poor old Felix the plush cat who we used to have such fun over in our early days. On Felix’s arm was the wedding ring, pathetic. Yet I was glad. The letter was strange. Bill suggested I come back to him so that he could get an aviation job with Roosevelt. He said we’d start again on a new basis but made no pretense of offering anything concrete. It was a sort of business letter. So this morning I went around to 444 very weary and we got to talking about dividing up the furniture. He grumpy. Then we talked about his letter. I said I couldn’t start again having lost faith in him. He feels his career blasted by this marriage. Poor fellow he wept so. Then I made a great mistake. I told him I was or rather am in love with someone else. That was bad business. His face got hard. But after all why not end all this once and for all. I’m afraid that as a husband he’ll always be a failure. And how darling I used to think him, how wonderful. Now as I write I find myself longing for him and a little bit of the old feeling comes back just enough to make my chest feel strange. Oh Bill dear—poor Bill. He’s probably in bed with some girl.

  On the day she left Big Bill, Rosamond went to Lord and Taylor and bought herself a white net evening dress for $29. Like their marriage, their separation was picked up quickly by the press. The Sunday Mirror announced, “He Wed Two Stars but Couldn’t Stand the Eclipse.” Big Bill, they said, had “hitched his wagon to a star” one too many times. The article proposed a question to its readers: “Can a husband stand to have a wife outshine him? William Gaston found he couldn’t be Mr. Kay Francis or Mr. Rosamond Pinchot.” Nobody came away happy with that article. Except maybe one person, Clare Boothe Brokaw.

  No sooner did the articles appear than Clare hatched the perfect plan to rent Big Bill’s Crotch Island love nest for the summer. Clare knew a romantic base camp when she saw one, so that summer she made her way fifteen miles out to sea where she swam, wrote, listened to sonatas on a rusty Victrola, and entertained her latest conquests under the swaying spruce. Her guests included the conservative political observer Mark Sullivan, a recycled beau named Kerry Skerritt, and William Harlan Hale, a devilishly attractive writer who, for some reason, took it upon himself to help Clare dye her hair in the bathtub with chemicals by candlelight, and in the process, came perilously close to setting the island ablaze. Clare kept a close tally of Crotch Island no-shows, among them, the presidential adviser and financier Bernard Baruch, and the vice president of William Morrow, Thayer Thompson, about whom she complained, “Thayer says ‘I adore you’ as other men clear their throats.” Meanwhile, Clare’s editor, Donald Freeman, also a no-show, was just plain annoyed at the whole island escapade. Suspecting Clare was distracted, Freeman cabled Clare in nearby Vinalhaven, “I suppose you are in the throes of illicit love ot
herwise I would have had a letter from you detailing your bucolic existence.” Clare’s bucolic existence on Crotch Island wasn’t all that bucolic because Big Bill kept barging in, ostensibly to check on the boats and, according to her side of the story, to make his advances. Big Bill was good for an occasional snog in the bracken ferns or the seaweed but his highest and best use was furnishing Clare with the keys to the house on Crotch Island. Clare knew Big Bill made an acceptable landlord but an unpredictable lover, just like Kay Francis knew he’d made a lousy husband but a great date. “The depths of him are like the depths of me,” Clare wrote in her diary, “shifting sands, and we each need an anchor, and we could not anchor ourselves to each other.”

  After their separation, Rosamond still saw Bill with his broads at their elegant Manhattan venues. She arranged the schedule for the boys to see their father, but there was hardly a doubt in her mind that she’d done the right thing by leaving him. She was free from Big Bill’s midtown Sodom and Gomorrah. She was liberated from Clare’s colorful antics. She could look in the mirror again and like what she saw. Big Bill wasn’t husband material and someday she’d make the trip to Reno to finalize things, but now she’d break her daily interactions and pull herself back together. She’d try to forget the longing or the love or whatever she felt for Big Bill.

  First things came first, so first she went shopping and bought herself a new wardrobe to supplement the white net dress. Next, she marched down Park Avenue to East Sixty-second Street where the woman she called her best friend, Bessie Marbury, a mercurial publicist and literary agent, had organized New York’s first social club for women, the Colony Club. Aunt Cornelia and Rosamond’s mother, Gertrude, and everyone who was anyone was a member, so Rosamond, interested mostly in the indoor swimming pool, a speedy elevator, and a kennel to attend to little Nicolette, signed up for a series of treatments to have her body pulled and rolled like an oat by a great big machine that looked like a medieval torture device. “Each morning I go to the Colony Club and take the roller,” she wrote. “Mother bought a course but can’t take it. It’s a funny business, one stands and heavy springs are run up and down over the behind. There is pain attached to it but I feel very virtuous.”

  Time, distraction, and the roller brought forth a refurbished Rosamond who seemed open to the possibilities of a new love, but for the time being, she would settle for a full calendar and a new round of beaux bearing gifts. Just like in the Miracle days, photographers caught her bounding up and down the avenues, grazing at the vegetable place downtown, and taking Little Billy to his favorite sledding hill in Central Park:

  The hill on 79th Street is very steep, and I always thought it very dangerous. I made Billy begin by going only a short way up. He annoyed me by his skill in handling the sled. Pretty soon he was going right to the top coming down all the bumps with the big boys. I sat on a rock and watched half scared and half very proud. He’s a nervy little cuss and such a darling.

  Rosamond

  One day she noticed that the light and air had changed. “Each day is so happy,” she wrote. “Summer, youth, health, friends, children and a little love too. Just now I went out and looked at the cool sweet night. The dipper very clear. Oh the delight of this time! I feel life again very worth living.”

  In the opening days of her rebound, the new round of beaux simply reminded her of who she longed for. The recruits included the dynamic forester, Bob Marshall, man enough, but who, while on their walks together in Harrisburg, talked too much, inundating Rosamond with tales of Eskimo women and his prediction that socialism would soon sweep America. There were others, like the governor’s handsome young speechwriter, Fred Roddell, who was refreshingly sweet and fun. On weekends in Milford, Fred and Rosamond would disappear for hours and not even the governor knew where they went. Prohibition was enforced at the château, so the two would slip off to the Forester’s Cottage where Amos and Ruth served alcohol, or they’d buzz back and forth to Harrisburg in his car, “Hell Bent.” But Fred looked so young, she thought. He didn’t have the presence of Big Bill, the big beautiful bear of a man she’d married, who, no one needed to remind her, was still her husband.

  Rosamond and the boys, Empire State Building in the background

  One afternoon at Grey Towers, Fred leaned over midsentence and handed her a four-leaf clover. When Rosamond sat down at her desk that night, she pinned Fred’s treasure in the margins with a note and an arrow, “FR found in front lawn of Grey Towers. Perhaps some luck!” It was a lucky day for Rosamond, a lucky day for Fred Roddell, and a luckier day for another “FR.” On Friday, July 1, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated by the Democrats to become the next president of the United States. Rosamond, Amos, and the other adults were sprawled out on the floor of the Forester’s Cottage listening to the radio until 12:30 A.M. when the last of the returns came in. At three years old, Little Billy didn’t know what all the fuss was about and why his mother kept singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The adults screamed the name of state after state but finally settled down when everyone cheered “Roosevelt!” The nation’s luck had turned. At last there was a man to lead the country out of the worst streak of bad luck it had ever known. While the Pinchots didn’t march in political lockstep, in the election of 1932 they voted unanimously. Gifford put his only hope in FDR, exasperating the Republican Party. Rosamond was worried that Roosevelt would win the nomination but not the election. Amos suspected Roosevelt’s New Deal was one more way in which the rich would consolidate its hold on power. He supported Roosevelt for the time being. Were it his choice, he’d be singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

  As the nation slipped even deeper into the Depression, Rosamond pieced her life back together with the help of remarkable friends. Although they were separated, Big Bill seemed to be in a competition with Rosamond for their friends, so there were his friends and her friends and the friends they fought over. In Bill’s camp was the banker Bobby Lehman and his friend Bill Laurence; he took the Barrymores and his theater crowd, and, of course, his revolving bevy of beauties. But he didn’t have much in the way of family. And there were people in Rosamond’s camp; her many theater connections, and people who were fond of her because they had known her family—such as the Roosevelts, and the Vanderbilts, Conde Nast, the Hamiltons, the Hearsts and the Krocks. Then, there were people they fought over, like Bessie Marbury, who held court with her lover, the interior design fashionista, Elsie De Wolfe. Big Bill took Rosamond to meet Marbury at her house on Sutton Place soon after they were married and Marbury ended up far more fond of Rosamond than Bill. Of course, Marbury was partial to women, anyway, but that didn’t matter, Big Bill could still be jealous. It drove him crazy when their friends doubted him and doted on Rosamond.

  Charmers like Bill wanted charming women like Rosamond, until they realized they’d lost the charm competition. The Great Depression was riddled with surprises, not the least of which was a person’s net worth. Contrary to what most thought, and possibly contrary to what Big Bill thought when he married her, Rosamond didn’t have a financial net to catch her if she fell. She did have her friends and mentors, however, and as Rosamond refashioned her life, mentors were every bit as valuable as money.

  Rosamond, courtesy of the Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library

  Cornelia and Gifford had a lot to lose from having their niece in a controversial profession like acting, considered inappropriate for a society woman. But by Cornelia’s political calculus, the Pinchots had even more to lose if they didn’t help extract Rosamond from the clutches of the man they called “Beelzebub.” And as fortune would have it, 1932 was an election year. While the Roosevelts knew the Gastons, the Roosevelts also knew the Pinchots, and that fall, Eleanor needed an actress, a woman like Rosamond, to stir things up a bit.

  In September, several months before the election, Rosamond received a call from Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, asking her to come down to Democratic headquarters. Rosamond tre
mbled to think what they might want her to do.

  I went up to the office where poor wan Mrs. Roosevelt and clever Mrs. Morgenthau ply their arts. Mrs. M. had her plan all ready. She wants me to direct a Speakers Institute. To get well-known authorities on the salient issues of the platform and campaign to talk to voters in a 2 day session. I’m to get the speakers and stir up the audience. Hard work probably but fun.

  During this period, Rosamond attended Eleanor Roosevelt’s class in economics at Columbia University. Eleanor noticed that Rosamond wasn’t the type of woman who fell into paroxysms of joy over macroeconomic theory. Having been through the travails of infidelity herself when Franklin took up with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, Eleanor had just the answer. Rosamond didn’t need economics, she needed to train women stump speakers for the Democrats and to coach them in political oratory. Rosamond admitted that she was no professional orator herself, but she could tell a good speaker when she heard one. She told reporters:

  Conviction, not complexion, is what counts in a woman campaign speaker. Beauty is no requirement but personality is. A woman speaker must not be the vampire type or too obviously charming. She must not seem to trade on her looks. A sense of humor and the ability to leaven her oratorical loaf with a little lightness and wit are invaluable. But the most important of all is the belief in her candidate and the ability to instill confidence in others.

  That fall, Rosamond found herself happily consumed with work that was deeply familiar, having been subjected to endless hours of droning rhetoric beside the Finger Bowl. Still the press wanted to know about her marriage, so the World Telegram came right out and asked her, to which she responded: “My husband and I have separated but we’re on friendly terms as my lunching with him shows. Divorce isn’t my object at all. Right now my chief interest is to see Franklin D. Roosevelt elected!”