The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  Suddenly, the presidential greeter Ike Hoover reappeared to advise Mrs. Roosevelt that Premier Richard Bennett of Canada wished to have a word with her. Hoover led Rosamond and Eleanor down the stairs, followed by Major, a yellow and black police dog that spied Premier Bennett and suddenly flew at him, biting him in the thigh. Bennett was taken aback but tried to calm the situation. “It’s all right,” he said, “he didn’t draw blood.” Trying to calm the situation in her own way, Rosamond turned to Eleanor and noted that Major appeared to be an ideal dog for the White House.

  While Premier Bennett limped away waving good-bye and clutching his leg, Rosamond and Eleanor Roosevelt convened at the front door of the White House. The two women bid adieu the way women do, sometimes, without words. Rosamond’s struggle with Big Bill was a struggle so personal that it could barely be spoken of, even in private. Eleanor’s debacle with Franklin was information that Bessie told Rosamond to keep to herself. Confiding the truth indirectly and through intermediaries, knitting a gossamer web of intricate, sometimes unspoken connection, women cradled each other by their presence, through the bad days, the days when the gods weren’t doling out reparations. Separated by age and experience, Rosamond and Eleanor were joined in a greater than normal grief and the desire to put that grief behind them. Rosamond wrote of her last visit to Eleanor at the White House: “The light fell on her grayish face and large yellow teeth. I felt a real affection in her presence. A great woman.”

  The summer of 1933 saw temperatures of 110 degrees in Milford. There was barely a hint of relief under the trees or near the river, which had all but evaporated. In part because of the heat, Rosamond thought Milford seemed subtly different that year. The countryside around Grey Towers was infinitely beautiful, but at twenty-eight, Rosamond felt lost idly sitting around. “Is that age setting in?” she wrote.

  Perhaps I’ll lose that old delight in nature. I have no center here in Milford anymore. Father’s house isn’t home and I’m a guest in this house too. Cornelia is very sweet to me but if I’m around too much she may change. I must try to make myself scarce. Uncle is too busy with his job and his callers to notice. At least I hope so. Maybe I am just tired but anyway I feel depressed.

  At almost twenty-nine she felt old. At 110 degrees she felt hot. At 145 pounds, she was having Aunt Cornelia’s doctor inject a strange gland solution into her endocrine system so she wouldn’t feel fat. She also felt bored, so one night Rosamond reached for her diary and created a list of her family members and ranked them in order of her favorites. Her father was at the top, naturally, followed by her brother, Gif, and Aunt Cornelia. Uncle Gifford would have made it to the top had he not been such a straight arrow and a prude, so he held up the middle. Her stepmother, Ruth, and her blossoming young stepsister, Mary, ranked dead last.

  Rosamond couldn’t have been more annoyed by the new regime at Milford. Mary looked so very sweet in her little blue skirt that fit closely over her slim hips, she wrote, “Being an ardent reader of movie magazines, she’s hot for love and romance already at 12.” Mary, it seemed was stealing the spotlight and Rosamond thought she was the competition.

  That summer, Rosamond contemplated whether she needed Grey Towers the way she once had. She told her diary that she found herself with the “on tops” of Manhattan. Hers was a life of friends and engagements that would have made other women flagellate themselves in fits of envy. Returning to New York after a Milford weekend, she’d find notes, flowers, and invitations piled up in the foyer, but she’d reject most of the offers. Her antennae weren’t just raised, they were raised for the type of man she could feel passionate about, a man who could erase the memory of Big Bill. She wasn’t likely to find such a man droning on and on beside the Finger Bowl. “I don’t think I could stand public life,” she wrote one afternoon in Milford. “It involves too much tiresome conversation about nothing and too much sitting around. There were twenty people at lunch today and among them there weren’t four amusing attractive people.”

  The on tops included acquaintances such as Elsa Maxwell. Rosamond wrote, “that toadish adventuress, instructed me to come to her party as Ethel Barrymore. That involved a great effort.” George Gershwin, another on top, required a different kind of effort, namely, patience. He would talk all night about himself and his newfound love of painting, and everyone piled in the car to go see Gershwin’s portrait, of himself. Gershwin at the keys or at the canvas, who could ask for anything more? One night Rosamond dressed hectically for dinner at George Kaufman’s. Later she wrote:

  All the men at the party were Jews. Every woman except I had married Jews. There was Ellen Berlin, Irving’s famous Catholic bride—and Margaret Swope and the Sam Goldwyns and the Bill Paleys. I drank three cocktails to buck me up—sat on an elegant yellow damask couch with a man named Bennett Cerf. He was Jewish too and very attractive to me. Nearsighted to an amazing degree, we exchanged specs. I felt cool and self-confident. Know I was making a hit with Cerf. Sat next to him at dinner, too.

  Bennett and Rosamond were ambivalent on tops, so naturally they hit it off. A few nights after dinner at the Kaufmans, Cerf held a party for Bill Faulkner and when Faulkner didn’t show, that meant more champagne for those who did. Cerf was scheming up a new enterprise with his partner, Donald Klopfer, an outfit named Random House, claiming that they would “publish anything under the sun that came along—if we liked it well enough.” Five years later, their vision of randomness was coming to fruition. Bennett, like many of Rosamond’s theatrical crowd, became a frequent visitor to Grey Towers, skillfully navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of the Pinchots’ political and social archipelago, which, true to the times, didn’t include many Jews. While Bennett and Uncle Gifford discussed publishing his next tome on forestry, Rosamond wrote that Bennett also fit in well with Amos on the tennis court and carried on marvelously with Aunt Cornelia under the vines, discussing everything from politics to children’s books. Cerf kept Rosamond apprised of his book deals. “Today was the day he was to fly down south to see Eugene O’Neill about publishing his future works,” Rosamond noted in her diary. “I hope he gets them.” Cerf wasn’t just good at business; Rosamond found him simply good fun. “There’s something good about him,” she said. Bennett took her places where Big Bill might have taken her, and, it seemed, he didn’t just bring himself to Grey Towers, he brought out literary offerings from the city. On May 29, 1933, she wrote:

  Read Bennett’s book about the children on a pirate ship. Feel I must finish it. But I’m not as fond of it as I should be perhaps. This is the second time in less than a year a young enamored man has given me his favorite book and I’ve had to fake enthusiasm. Fred gave me “The Breed of Basil.” That was much worse. In fact it was romantic drivel. This is very literary delicate writing, Wouldn’t it be funny if Bennett didn’t really like it at all, if he’d given it to me just to make an impression. I feel as if he must like something stronger and perhaps a little more vicious than this. But then Beatrice [Kaufman] describes him as a gentle soul.

  Rosamond wasn’t accustomed to the gentle souls like Bennett and Fred. Still, they had a redeeming intellect that kept her mesmerized. “The secret to my success,” she wrote, “is to show interest in the lives of other people.” That wasn’t difficult with Cerf, except when he decided to kiss her. She described Bennett as having a girlish way of kissing. Bennett, she wrote, “isn’t man enough for me…. Too bad I had to find that out.” Bennett, she thought, looked like “a bear in a bathing suit.”

  Probably unknown to Cerf, Rosamond ventured out on one dead-end date with his partner, Donald Klopfer. Bennett wasn’t man enough for her, but Klopfer disenchanted in a different way. She wrote:

  He’s big and tanned and Jewish. But after a while I found that he has about as much personality as a Pekinese. In fact he bored me almost to death. He’s not a bit gay and humorous like Bennett. He’s a snob too. He even mentions things like “Socially prominent people,” the “400” and other horrors. We saw a perfect
ly lovely movie called “Red Top.” It was French, about a little boy. Donald didn’t get it at all. I kept wishing I was with Bennett. We went to the casino and ate and danced a little. He was a bum dancer too. Poor creature—his inferiority complex about being a Jew has ruined him.

  One night, Rosamond was all dressed up and ready to go out with Bennett when the phone rang. Zoe Akins was on the line and wasted no time telling Rosamond that she wanted her to play the lead in a new play she’d written based on Somerset Maugham’s story, “The Human Element.” Rosamond reminded Zoe that she had wanted her to play every lead in every play she had ever written since they’d met seven years before. Rosamond knew Zoe was just being Zoe, so that night, Rosamond and Bennett changed their dinner plans and sped off to the Waldorf to discuss the play.

  That night, Zoe liked Bennett and Rosamond agreed that Bennett was likable; but Zoe didn’t want to talk about men or her new play. What she really wanted to talk to Rosamond about was coming to Hollywood that winter. Her home in Pasadena, Green Fountains, was surrounded by five enormous eucalyptus trees, she said, and Rosamond could take screen tests and investigate a film career. Akins was already an insider at MGM with an office in a bungalow at the back of the lot. Everyone, it seemed, was headed west, as the film studios were expanding. The action was now on the coast, not on Broadway. Rosamond knew what Zoe was saying was true. Her friend Francesca had headed out to do her Italian voice-overs for Garbo, and Francesca’s husband, John Lodge, was feverishly making a name for himself at RKO, sidling up to Cukor for a part in Little Women with Katharine Hepburn. Rosamond wondered if she would be next. She told her diary that the years and the sorrows and the two children and the happiness and the loves had helped her to remember who she was. Perhaps it was time to go back to what she’d been. “I’ve been telling people for the past year or so that I was all through with the theatre,” she wrote. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  The familiar faces didn’t know that she felt rootless or lost; they didn’t need to. They didn’t know what had happened since The Miracle. They didn’t know she’d decided that it was better to stay with what she knew, acting, than to try something new. They didn’t know how Father was suffering from arthritis and financial problems and how he had his new family, which made her feel left out, or how Mother was as needy and cloying and sickly as ever. They didn’t know about Big Bill and his broads or how he had told her all she cared about was her career and that even if she’d wanted one, he wouldn’t grant her a divorce. Big Bill hadn’t run off with anyone in particular, he’d run off with many women; so that wasn’t like running off to be with someone else—it was more like running off with himself. He couldn’t do much better than Rosamond Pinchot. Anyway, she didn’t believe in divorce, and neither was in any rush to end it. No one knew that; they didn’t need to. She only told people what they needed to know. The rest she kept for her diary.

  In January 1934, at Zoe’s invitation, Rosamond boarded the Cunard Line’s SS Franconia II bound for California via the Panama Canal, leaving the boys with her mother. Onboard, she avoided the predictable onslaught of vacuous suitors, spending most of her time with the popular author, artist, and history professor Hendrik Willem van Loon, who, though more than twice her age, was three times as interesting as anyone else onboard. Van Loon’s critics accused him of writing about history “as if he enjoyed it,” variously improving on fact, and every so often inserting himself into the narrative. Rosamond was riveted by van Loon the way she had been by Bessie Marbury, describing van Loon as a mountain of flesh, but delighting in his sketching the landscape and lecturing on venereal disease in detail at the dinner table. After discussing the formation of islands and describing the deep holes in the Pacific, he interjected several dirty jokes, then spun off into a discussion of history that sounded strangely familiar. While lounging like a whale at the bow of the Franconia, van Loon bellowed, “Balboa happened to settle in Panama, probably the most vital military stronghold in the world. He is almost unknown. But Columbus quite by accident happened to land on the West Indian islands and his fame is vast. So you see it’s all chance.” Van Loon concluded, “Everything is getting the breaks.”

  When Rosamond arrived on the docks at San Pedro on January 24, Zoe met her in her grand car and whisked her back to Green Fountains for a luncheon in her honor with Cukor, Billie Burke, and a number of “antique ladies” she called Rochesterites. It was good to be back in California, Rosamond wrote:

  Memories kept coming back, oil wells, the smell of petroleum, orange groves, the open air markets with food piled in horn of plenty profusion. The mountains where I’d written all night on Annie Besant, owl drug stores. I remembered how I’d first come here eight years ago fleeing from the horrors of George Cukor’s stock company. I took a room and got a job at $14 a week in a photographer’s shop. No one knew my name. I knew no one. It was fun living that way and completely carefree. I knew obscure people. Now I know the ones on top.

  She remembered California, but not this California.

  I’ve never seen a house so completely in tune with the cravings of its owner. This is Zoe. It’s luxurious and slightly formal. Zoe showed me around and I admired it until I was exhausted. My room is the most ornate in the house. Its almost baroque. There’s a throne-like bed that has the most delicious mattress. The walls are pale blue, the doors richly painted. There are rich cherry colored velvet curtains. And what a bathroom!

  That afternoon, a festive lunch was set for ten near the pool, followed by a late-afternoon trip to the city and the studios. “It was such a funny feeling to drive into Los Angeles,” Rosamond wrote. “I kept thinking ‘this is the place that I dreamed of.’ Seven years have passed so probably the cells in my body are all new and they’re a little bit vague about where the old cells visited.” That afternoon, she drove over to Culver City, where, through the gates, Rosamond made out three words in red lights, “Metro Goldwyn Mayer.” She found Zoe huddled in her swell bungalow working late with Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, and Robert Montgomery on Riptide. Soon enough, she felt the excitement of being on the lot, surrounded by stories of the stars and their lucky breaks. Rosamond wrote:

  Norma Shearer is married to Irving Thalberg who is one of the very biggest shots of MGM. Consequently she gets most of the good parts whether she’s fitted for them or not. She’s a pretty, rather determined young woman with a nice smile. But no one could be less fitted to play Marie Antoinette or Iris March than she. After all she has no distinction at all.

  After sitting down to tea with Zoe and Shearer in a little movable dressing room, she noticed Robert Montgomery, “a very winsome young man, but actorish.”

  Just when the day seemed like it was ready to end, Zoe extended one more invitation, to dinner with their old friend Jobyna Howland and a group of “hot, loud mouthed vulgar people.” Rosamond wrote of dinner, “I never heard such language as filthy or clothes so rich. No one spoke about anything. George Cukor was even glad to get home and go quietly to bed.”

  She hadn’t been in California for twenty-four hours before she realized people in Hollywood never sat down to orderly dinners or meaningful conversation. Meals, she discovered, were “yelling dinners,” where there wasn’t a modicum of modesty or kindness. Conversations were screamfests and no one sat around waiting for anything. If you wanted something, you made it happen.

  Like it or not, Cukor made things happen. He directed Rosamond’s screen tests at MGM, using the same cameraman as Garbo used. Cukor’s exuberance was contagious; that is, when he wasn’t poking fun at Rosamond in his ruthless, sniping way. George was George, but he was also in a position to help her. Shortly after she arrived on the lot, Cukor was the one to tell her that David O. Selznick had noticed her, after which she wrote, “I’ve got a face, a real face.” But like Big Bill, Cukor would then undermine her.

  Before long, David O. Selznick had not just noticed Rosamond, he was obsessed with her. With a dose of newfound self-confidence, Cukor announced that R
osamond “was behaving like a star already,” but, he said, she needed to improve her “pathetic little wardrobe,” and if he were Rosamond, he’d be sure to dress up every time she appeared on the lot. “You look dreadful,” he said, “you are much too fat. You must look sleek!”

  For the next few weeks, Rosamond chewed but didn’t swallow her food and on March 2, David O. Selznick summoned her into his office, a great Spanish drawing room at MGM. As she entered, she saw Selznick’s shiny brown shoes propped up on his desk. His eyes were invisible behind his glasses. “We’ve decided to take you on,” he announced. “Oh, have you?” Rosamond replied in her calmest voice, thinking Selznick sounded as if he were engaging a servant. After some awkward small talk, Rosamond was dismissed and sent into a tiny office to talk salary with “a slick young Jew” named Thorn, who immediately told her that he was the only truthful person on the lot. Rosamond pushed for a dollar figure; he pushed back, not wanting to name one, and she pushed harder still, at which time he told her $300 a week with “gradual raises for untold years thereafter.”

  “Laugh at them,” said Cukor. But Rosamond knew there were millions of girls who dreamed of any offer at all. She dreaded the thought of becoming a puffed-up fool, one of the shouting people of Hollywood, but if she could land an important role, she’d be set for life. Father could come to California and recuperate in the sun from his aches and pains and bad financial decisions. She could have a house by the beach for the boys. They could ride in the mountains and go camping in the forest. Perhaps she could even help buoy the Pinchots’ sinking fortunes.