The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  After the private funeral at what society writers called Bessie Marbury’s “Amazon Enclave” of New York’s most powerful and liberated women, Eleanor asked Rosamond to join her in her car to attend the mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral where two thousand people had gathered to celebrate the life and mourn the death of Bessie Marbury. On the way, they were escorted by New York City’s finest. Rosamond recalled the spectacle:

  …the train of cars was stopped. Some boys in the street spotted Mrs. R. and lean[ed] in the window of the car for autographs. She gave one with rather poor grace, writing on a newspaper. Then we drove to the cathedral. There was a crowd and police dividing off the avenue. As we went up the steps, cameras snapped. We walked down the aisle in twos, solemnly. The coffin was carried ahead. Al Smith with bowed head led the pallbearers. The Mayor was behind and countless others. There were people of all kinds, many of them absolutely obscure, many famous. There were writers, businessmen, actresses, producers, society women, politicians. No one had friends from as many walks of life.

  That afternoon, Rosamond sat in the same pew with some of America’s most prominent women, women who had also attended the Sutton Place gathering and who knew Bessie Marbury like a sister. At home that night, Rosamond wrote:

  Now that she is gone, there is an empty place. How many happy interesting hours we spent together…she seemed to have an endless fund of anecdotes. She’d tell about JP Morgan, what an old tyrant he was—how he couldn’t get anyone but worms to go on his yacht. She’d tell about Isadora Duncan and her two illegitimate children. She’d tell about her own youth on Long Island. She started earning her living selling eggs and writing articles for a local paper. I remember that she told me that her father used to read her classics instead of Peter Rabbit stories when she was a tiny child. Perhaps that accounts for her use of language. I was always surprised by her words. Not that she talked in a literary way. She just used extraordinarily fresh, exact expressions…. Goodbye dear friend. Life in New York will always be a little bit empty without you. I will never forget.

  Eleanor, Liz, and Bessie all struggled with how a woman, particularly a woman who had been more or less dismantled through marriage, could be a fine influence in the world and on men. On the day after Marbury died, Rosamond was asked to write an obituary for the New York Journal. She hesitated for fear it might be in bad taste to appear to be cashing in on her friend’s death. But she decided that she could say yes because Bessie had urged her to write for the newspapers, even proposing that the New York Journal feature a regular column of Rosamond’s thoughts. Mary Dougherty, the Journal editor, thought that Rosamond would be a hit. “You must have very definite opinions,” she said. Rosamond countered in her journal, “I having definite opinions! I who never knew what I thought about anything!”

  During the winter and spring of 1933, Rosamond wrestled with what to do next. She knew that a bad day for her was nothing compared to the day-to-day existence of millions of Americans standing on food lines or off in the hinterlands eating roots, berries, and woodpeckers. While Cornelia was usually at the table, Rosamond felt surrounded by men like her father; Uncle Gifford; his young handsome speechwriter, Fred Roddell—men who huddled under the vines at the Finger Bowl debating the perils of economic tinkering:

  During all the talk, I felt quite without ideas—a complete and miserable fool. Yet I realized that it was talk and people like this who would finally find the answer to the terrible economic and social problem that confronts the world. None of [them] had any real plan—Inflation? Limitation of working hours with a minimum wage law? The more vigorous trimming of the great incomes? An almost 100% inheritance tax? Government ownership? My mind couldn’t grasp it all and yet there was Fred three years younger than I with enough understanding to be actually writing Uncle’s messages to the legislature. What’s the answer to that. I guess it’s that I’m a woman and he’s a man. I just can’t get terribly interested in the big impersonal things. Though I know I should. My interests are vague and uncreative.

  There were days of vagueness, days the press never captured, and days of spontaneous kindness and creativity when Rosamond struggled up a snow-covered slope on horseback to deliver food and supplies to a little old woman who lived about as far away as one could imagine from Fifth Avenue, Eleanor, and the two Elizabeths. The little old woman was named Mrs. Craft, and she lived alone on a run-down homestead in the middle of a meadow five miles above Grey Towers. In the 1930s, the poorest of the poor didn’t just inhabit the cities, they were living in the woods on land owned by the wealthy such as the Pinchots; and like many Pennsylvanians, they were struggling to survive. The Craft farm consisted of a pre–Civil War frame house surrounded by trees with a barn and a small lake. There hadn’t been any paint on the place for years and Mrs. Craft, Rosamond thought, looked like a witch in a German fairy tale with her gaunt features, bent figure, and strange cap.

  Occasionally Amos and Rosamond would set off to visit Mrs. Craft together, but Rosamond would also make the long, rugged trek alone on her horse, Zeena, followed by Arco, her dog. When she was in the city, Rosamond would stop at Macy’s on Thirty-forth Street to send Mrs. Craft a box of food, but she would also go to Kytes general store in Milford for a case of oranges to strap to her saddle or she would tuck fresh fruit or frozen raspberries into her saddlebags. When she arrived, Mrs. Craft would thank her for the delicacies and light a fire with a few dried roots and twigs she’d stored in her shed. The two women from different worlds would talk about their lives, the death of old Mr. Craft, about the Civil War, and about the woods. Rosamond didn’t want Mrs. Craft to waste her twigs and roots on her, but Mrs. Craft insisted. There were days of crystal clarity, and days others remembered, of her generosity and her kindness.

  That summer, Rosamond wrote wistfully, as if stranded between past and future, about the woods she once loved:

  I wonder how many girls have loved the Falls as I do. Probably not many. In the old days, girls didn’t wander around in the woods as I do and have always done. I know every inch of the stream. What a delight it is on a hot summer day. What clean damp smells. There are lots of little falls. In some places the water has worn strange round holes. Once I almost broke my leg when I stepped into one by mistake. Once I put my hand down and felt the slippery body of a trout. The hole was small but somehow the trout escaped. Now whenever I go to that place I put my hand down but there is never another fish.

  Just after the New Year, 1933, Amos was as excited as a little boy telling his best friend “Sis” that there was something remarkable up at the Craft farm that he wanted her to see, a rare phenomenon of nature, a deer as white as snow. Every day, he said, the deer appeared at the old Craft place and stood under a tree where Mrs. Craft fed it from the palm of her hand. Mrs. Craft called the deer “Silver Star.” Rosamond couldn’t imagine such good luck befalling a little old woman in her stocking cap high up in the middle of nowhere, so, more than curious, Amos and Rosamond fired up the Buick, the sturdy woods car, to go see Mrs. Craft and, they hoped, the white deer. When they arrived, Mrs. Craft welcomed them in a most friendly way, but as soon as Amos asked about the white deer, Mrs. Craft’s face fell. “Silver Star was shot last month,” she said. She wept as she described how a group of men had come and killed her beautiful tame friend, cutting off its head and feet. The body, she said, was gone. It didn’t make any sense, how even if you had nothing, the gifts that drop in as reparations, strange remunerations from Providence, even those might disappear. Perhaps we don’t pick the good days or the bad days, perhaps they pick us; or perhaps they spread themselves out, thinly and without warning, against a backdrop of longing and hope.

  During these years, Rosamond landed an enviable beat when she was assigned a byline by the Universal Press to cover Eleanor Roosevelt during her first days in the White House. Having written only baby articles and shot photographs for Eleanor’s magazine and captions for Vogue, Rosamond was offered a paltry sum of $150, but she had learned to thin
k like Liz and fume like Bessie, so she wrote in her diary, “I felt cheated, expected much more. Well, may clear $50 and it will be good experience.”

  The first leg of Eleanor and Franklin’s move to the White House was a distinctly down-market affair, a send-off by train, surrounded by city and state dignitaries in Jersey City, New Jersey. The Universal Press announced that Rosamond Pinchot would be in “constant news and social contact” with the First Lady during the opening days of the Roosevelt administration. Trying to make sense of what to do when she reached the station, Rosamond first settled into the train car with the newspaper boys who thankfully poured her a drink. Mrs. Roosevelt moved slowly and merrily through the car, and when she saw Rosamond, she asked her back to sit in her stateroom. The two women sat and chatted cordially and when Rosamond got up to leave, Mrs. Roosevelt leaned over to kiss her. Rosamond was sure that Eleanor, an ardent dry, had smelled liquor on her breath. A good slug of scotch might well have loosened up the reportage, but Rosamond was sure it wasn’t the news and social contact the Universal Press had in mind.

  In the sweep of her life thus far, Rosamond told her diary that March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration day, was one of the best days. She was swept up in the rush of adrenaline and the crush of humanity, busy forgetting and remembering who she was. Forgetting about Big Bill, she remembered that she belonged to a great family. She loved its quirky high-strung individuals, like Uncle Gifford and Aunt Cornelia, who both stopped at nothing to do what was right, and who piled themselves into the Studebaker that day and, with flags flying, navigated the congested streets of Washington to the sounds of cheers and drums. Together they rolled through one of the world’s great political spectacles, a tribute to power and compromise between those who had agreed to disagree peacefully. From the Studebaker, Rosamond watched men selling neckties with Franklin Roosevelt’s face crudely painted on. She observed the many famous faces in the stands and she couldn’t help but notice, “Politicians don’t look very well out of doors in the daytime. It doesn’t become them.” Rolling on and on down Pennsylvania Avenue, she and Cornelia laughed and waved when a paradegoer mistook Uncle Gifford for Santa Claus.

  It was the moments she noticed that made it one of the best days. Meanwhile, the afternoon turned frightfully cold. By 5:00 P.M., Gifford had observed the swearing in of the senators at the Capitol and, having fulfilled his obligations of empire, he and Cornelia joined Rosamond on the White House lawn where Rosamond described more of the little things: “Crocuses very yellow and small were blooming in the flower bed. In the White House it was warm. The delight of it! I was surprised to find the place very nice. It wasn’t cold; it was lovely and dignified.”

  Rosamond, Cornelia, and Gifford arrived at the White House before the other guests. Recognizing a prime snooping opportunity, what she characterized as a family specialty, the Pinchot delegation ranged around the upper floors while the crowd was kept downstairs. They snooped through the round room with its greenish blue walls and crystal lights. Just as they were checking out the corners and casing the bookshelves, Mrs. Roosevelt rushed in, which put a prompt end to ranging and snoopage. Rosamond turned her attention back to her assignment, which was to observe Eleanor at close social range. While Cornelia and Gifford perused the canapés, Rosamond took notes about the First Lady’s attire, which, unfortunately, contradicted the glowing reports of competing news agencies. While what she wrote was never published or publishable, Rosamond told her diary that Eleanor’s blue velvet dress with her blue felt hat was a “rather odd costume”; but it was Eleanor’s strained attempt at fashion symmetry that caught her attention. It wasn’t as though the First Lady had to look completely up to date or à la mode—after all, she needed to appear the dignified wife of the dignified president—but what was she thinking when she pinned two bunches of orchids to her dress in two places? Honestly, where on earth was the fashion sense?

  After Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been installed in office for a few months, Rosamond made several more personal visits to see Eleanor at the White House. Each visit was warm and intimate and ended with a kiss. Perhaps the kiss was a simple felicitation, perhaps an awkward and compelling moment of magnetism between two women, one whose beauty was brilliant and the other whose brilliance was beautiful. In either case, the kiss, to Rosamond, was worth noting in her diary, as was Eleanor’s appearance: “By a door stood the President leaning on the arm of his son Jimmy and next to them Mrs. Roosevelt in a clumsy white dress. Her face looked yellow against the white but she was so sweet. I said good evening to the President. He always calls me Rosamond.” After the president called Rosamond by her first name and Rosamond returned his pleasantries, Eleanor took Rosamond aside. Together they sat down on a bench where Eleanor kissed her and asked her to come back to the White House the next day for lunch.

  After a rip-roaring night on the town and sighting Louisiana’s kingfish, Huey P. Long, in a purple nightgown sashaying through the halls of her Washington hotel, Rosamond rose early the next morning and made her way over to Arden’s for resuscitation. “They put me in a sweat bath,” she wrote, “and all the champagne I’d drunk the night before oozed out. At least I imagined it did, which made it just as good. Then the face was massaged and painted, then the hair curled. That all made me feel queenly again. Ready to go to the White House for lunch. The French delegation headed by Herriot were just leaving and the hotel lobby was full of little men who gave me flattering, lecherous looks. Rush, rush to get to the White House in time.”

  Rosamond arrived at the White House in a ramshackle taxi, where “Negro” butlers opened the front door to let her in. Ike Hoover, the presidential greeter, first ushered her into various halls and anterooms before leaving her to her own devices in a room with a group of men half her height. “They were all little yellow Phillipino [sic] men, a delegation,” she wrote. “I pleaded dirty hands and a flunky was assigned to take me upstairs to wash.” Rosamond noted the large luxurious bathroom where little cakes of pink soap had already been used. Surprised by the state of the state soap, and wanting to avoid the other guests, she waited patiently back in the hall for the signal from Hoover that the president and Mrs. Roosevelt were ready to greet her. As if at the theater, she heard a vague shuffling and whispering behind a door as the president, the First Lady, and their entourage prepared for their entrance. The door finally opened and Franklin Delano Roosevelt walked awkwardly toward her, leaning on the arm of his bodyguard. He smiled, then took Rosamond’s hand. “Hello, Rosamond, how goes the writing?” he asked. Mrs. Roosevelt followed him, wearing a light blue dress that was surprisingly au courant; but something else caught Rosamond’s eye: Eleanor, forever the fashion wreck, had sweet peas pinned to her dress that were shocking shades of “discordant purple,” she wrote, and worse still, she wore a big, ugly gold watch Rosamond thought looked like it belonged to a German governess. Her unpowdered, unrouged face, however, wore its usual kind smile.

  After salutations, the president made some “slightly feeble quips” and Rosamond noticed “one of the President’s few unattractive characteristics.” There was something strange in the way he threw his head around that bothered her, but she still admired how he handled himself. “His manners are so genial,” she wrote. “He seems unbothered by the vast, almost unheard of responsibilities that rest on his shoulders. I felt sorry for him.” Rosamond watched as the president was led off by his bodyguard and left the room in his “jerky, paralyzed way.” Eleanor Roosevelt then moved in to direct Rosamond on a personal tour of the White House.

  The First Lady took Rosamond’s arm and together they went upstairs, where Eleanor showed off the White House bedrooms with their high ceilings and their fine proportions. “This was Lincoln’s room,” Eleanor told her. “And this is where Franklin held the talks with Herriot and MacDonald.” Rosamond observed the famous picture collection that hung on the walls and remarked on how many battle pictures there were. The First Lady then took her into Franklin’s bedroom w
ith its plain black iron bedstead. Presidents and their wives never shared the same bedroom, and here was the proof. Around Franklin’s bed was a ring of chairs where he talked to his advisers in the morning while eating his breakfast.

  The tour led from one elegant room to another until the two women finally settled into one of the comfortable White House sitting rooms, where Eleanor reached for her needles and yarn. She was working on what Rosamond observed to be a flimsy white sweater. Eleanor’s voice, Rosamond thought, was soft and lovely, and as she relaxed with her knitting, Rosamond fell into a kind of trance. She gazed out at the green loveliness visible through the windows. “It was all pleasant and emotionally stirring.”

  While Eleanor knitted and chatted, Rosamond mused on the downside of prettiness and the upside of ugliness:

  I thought of the life of the nation, the millions thinking about this one family. I thought of what Bessie Marbury once told me of Roosevelt’s love for some girl and how Mrs. Roosevelt had been fine, had accepted it. I thought if she had not he would never have been President at all. For certainly he owes much to her. She’s a fine dear person and life has given her a richness that makes one forget her ugliness. Her ugliness may have been an asset. The vain silly side that is so noticeable in all of us pretty women is completely absent in her. I don’t suppose that she ever had a flirtation. Certainly she never had a love affair. At least that pain was spared her. And she has accomplished so much.