The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  The night after receiving word from Selznick about her contract, Rosamond cruised back to Pasadena through Beverly Hills when she decided to stop and call Big Bill from the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The clerk connected the call within two minutes, and as soon as Big Bill picked up, Rosamond knew that she was speaking with the Devil McNasty Bill who was in one of his jealous moods. She didn’t share the news of her contract but asked him how he would feel if she brought the boys to California. “All you want is publicity and a career,” he shouted. “Listen, you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” Rosamond demanded an answer and shouted at him, when all of a sudden the phone went dead. Big Bill had hung up. She put down the receiver and burst into tears. How could he be so nasty, she thought, when he could be so sweet? All the time he knew that she loved him, that she’d never really loved anyone else. She didn’t want to take the boys away for good. She’d send them back for their time with him. She vowed to herself to fight him this time even if it meant getting a divorce.

  Rosamond in Hollywood by Cecil Beaton

  Rosamond returned to New York in early March of 1934 when she received final word from MGM’s Thorn about salary. The Hearst papers covered the deal, reporting “Contract Sealed,” but the studio was looking for a film, so she wasn’t due back on the coast until October. She had six months to smooth things out with Big Bill, improve her pathetic little wardrobe, hit the roller at the Colony Club, and lose a few pounds so she’d look sleek. In California, she would start a new life, grow a fresh arm like a starfish. She’d remember who she was and stop longing for things to be different. She’d bring the boys out to Hollywood, and someday Father would come, too. If it was a geographic cure, then fine, she’d eat her dates and fresh fruit and feel completely and utterly new again. That was, after all, the point of a rebound, wasn’t it?

  Rosamond in Hollywood by Cecil Beaton

  5

  THE KING OF JEEPS

  I was seven years old when my father and mother gave me a set of wholly impractical gifts. During one of his excursions to Gibraltar, my father sent me a string of pearls in a blue velvet box. At about the same time, my mother gave me a silver Hand of Fatima from Morocco, a talisman of protection she probably should have kept for herself. She never told me the story of Fatima, perhaps because I was too young, or perhaps because she didn’t consider herself lucky. At sixteen, her father died and she was certain that God had abandoned her. After that, she wouldn’t allow herself the luxury of magic or religion. Declaring herself an atheist, she decided to find her own way to make things right.

  Thus the silver hand fell to me with no explanation. Many years later, when I was forty-five years old, I was cleaning out a drawer and found the Hand of Fatima floating around in a little gold box and decided it was time to deploy it for protection. Learning the story of Fatima, I discovered why so many women across North Africa wear the hand, keep it by their bedsides, affix it to the front doors of their houses. And I began to understand why my mother had given it to me.

  The hand is thought to predate both Christianity and Judaism. It appears in Jewish culture as the Hand of Miriam, and in Islam as the Hand of Fatima. Fatima was the daughter of the prophet Muhammad and was married to Muhammad’s nephew, Ali. She was known as a miracle worker, and according to legend, when she prayed in the desert, it started to rain. One day, Fatima was roasting halvah in the garden when she raised her head to see her husband bringing a beautiful new slave girl into their home. As she watched the two of them pass, she became distracted and started stirring the boiling halvah with her hand. So upset was she, she couldn’t feel the pain of her burning hand.

  Young Bill Gaston

  The Hand of Fatima symbolizes a woman’s patience and faithfulness, but it is also used as a talisman against evil, so that, depending on the circumstances, women don’t waste time in patience and faith. Western therapists might say the hand symbolizes a woman’s sometimes lifesaving ability to dissociate from her own pain, but whatever interpretation is chosen, one version of the legend of Fatima contains a moment of redemption. As her husband and his concubine lay down on the matrimonial bed, Fatima crept into the room above them and peered down through a crack in the floorboard. She saw what she dreaded, shed a tear that landed on the shoulder of her husband, and realizing it was hers, he pried himself from the slave girl and renounced her in honor of Fatima.

  My father kept a pied-à-terre on Rue Balzac in Tangier for nearly thirty years. It was while in Morocco that he started carrying a straw bag with short little handles that was part briefcase, part toolbox, part market basket. Inside the bag, the contents stayed the same: a copy of the newspaper the Dépêche Marocaine he’d fold around a nest of bananas, a can of Spanish sardines packed in olive oil, a socket wrench, a few spare parts dirtying the works, a can opener in case of emergency, and the Rolleiflex like the one his mother had. The Rolleiflex was his constant companion in a peripatetic life of appreciating various forms of beauty. It was to beauty that he pledged allegiance, more than to, say, marriage or blood relations. He carried his camera thinking that a photograph can freeze time and halt dishevelment. Women vanished, got fat, and lost their glow; places that had once been pristine fell to wrack and ruin. Even kids, kids who were once so damn cute, grew up and asked for money.

  He knew that it wasn’t accepted practice for foreigners to photograph rural Moroccans; nevertheless, my father took thousands of photographs during his years with my mother in Tangier. He was the first to tell me that Moroccan women lift their left hand, the hand Fatima burned in her vat of halvah, to ward off the influence of the evil eye that is said to be lodged in the lens of a camera.

  While the Hand of Fatima may protect a woman from evil, nothing halts dishevelment. Rosamond wrote that her greatest fear was that of growing old and losing her elasticity. Like most women, she quietly considered herself an ugly duckling. But it wasn’t just men who noticed when women were losing their magic. Rosamond had just turned thirty when Liz Arden told her that she was allowing her “little beauty to slip.” Rosamond told her diary, “The hell I am!” Long before Cukor assailed her “pathetic little wardrobe,” she spent entire days working on “clothes,” deciding what fit and what went with what. She was always prepared to be interviewed or examined, prodded, photographed, and posed by the great fashion photographers of the day. Makeup people smoothed gobs of Vaseline on her face, and she wondered why on earth a woman would want to live after she was no longer much to look at. Sometimes Rosamond longed to dive headfirst into a plate of mashed potatoes or stuff her cheeks with petits fours but instead she went days eating nothing but buttermilk and lettuce.

  After receiving Rosamond’s diaries, I thought long and hard about definitions of beauty. In the landscape, there are no ugly ducklings, only places that could use a bit of straightening and a dose or two of magic. By removing a crumbling stone wall, adding an eye-level hedge, or contributing a fresh new focal point, the eye is rewarded with some previously unknown loveliness. A landscape contractor once told me that early English gardeners moonlighted as magicians. By day, gardeners turned a lackluster spread into a serenely beautiful setting, and by night, they’d wipe off the dirt and perform their sleight of hand. The basis for most magic tricks is the art of misdirection, in which the magician draws the eye to one location while he performs his sly manipulation in another. Since Cleopatra first batted an eyelash, women have mastered the art of misdirection. Magic and makeup disguise the truth, but true beauty has nothing to hide. True beauty can allow itself to slip and still be truly beautiful.

  YOUNG BILL: 1938–1969

  The years between 1938 and 1942 were rocky ones in the annals of Gaston father-son relations. Big Bill found more important things to do than spend time picking up after the emotional turmoil of his children. In January of 1938, Big Bill had headquartered himself in a rustic château in Cascade, Colorado, where he went to ski and romance western maidens at the foot of Pike’s Peak. That winter, he returned e
ast and at Cornelia Pinchot’s urging, re-enrolled the boys at the Green Vale School in Old Brookville, Long Island, where Little Billy was a straight A student. The Pinchot family was relieved to see that Big Bill was showing signs of maturity when he hired Ida Hanninen, Rosamond’s cook, and Miss Tuck, Little Billy’s beloved nursemaid. But the following summer, Big Bill dismissed Miss Tuck, claiming that she was not glamorous enough for Crotch Island. Big Bill wrote Cornelia Pinchot, “I think she is going to get on my nerves in time. She’s got quite a grim visage, if you’ve noticed, to look at steadily for three months, three meals a day, with no relief. Then she’s taken to wearing shorts and her legs are no landmark of beauty. These latter remarks are facetious, of course—still, I’ve known smaller things to upset a nobler household.”

  At nine years old, Little Bill thought Big Bill, with his robust frame, wanted to kill him. Little Bill would spend most of his time in his attic bedroom where he felt safe. It was there he devised his first escape route. There were two windows in his room, and if he jumped on a chair and climbed out one of them, he could lean out over the roof to a tree, slide to the ground, and run away. Big Bill didn’t seem to have a problem with his younger son, James, who had learned to manage his father. But when the boys fought, it was an entirely different matter. Big Bill knew how to put the screws to his oldest son. The younger almost invariably came out on top.

  For four long years, the two Bill Gastons eyed each other like cats, counting the days until the younger, at thirteen, could be shipped off to the Kent School in Connecticut. Seemingly indifferent to the boys’ loss, six months after Rosamond died, Big Bill married a big, redheaded Texan, Lucille Hutchings, and simultaneously began an affair with the children’s writer Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, nicknamed Goldie. In the summers, Little Billy became a gopher for Goldie, running errands while Big Bill would “visit” her at her cottage on Long Cove, a quick boat ride away from Crotch Island.

  By the time Little Bill finally shipped off to Kent, his grades had slipped from As to Cs. At Kent he made very close friends, but he harbored no fantasies about going home. By court order, Rosamond’s estate paid for a room in the house to which Big Bill had moved in New Canaan, but young Bill wasn’t welcome there and it was just as well. In the fall of 1948, Little Bill was admitted to Harvard and at nineteen years old he learned that since Rosamond’s death Big Bill had siphoned $200 a month from her estate. While a monthly administrator’s fee had been approved by the court, Little Bill knew it was an optional fee. So, with that, he’d cornered his first big rat. The dispute led to a flood of warring letters between father and son. Big Bill wrote:

  I gather that you thought you had trapped me in a great secret and conspiracy…. I can no longer contribute anything toward your further education and support. You must do it with your own funds. All the law obligates me to do is to take care of you and provide you with a home. That is here, if you want it, which I’m sure you don’t. It does not compel me to send you to college, if I haven’t the money for it, which I haven’t. I have spent many thousands on you, have had no return at all, as you admit, and hereby sign off, except as to my legal requirements. You are much richer than I. When you come of age, you ought to have about $100,000. This is twice the biggest amount I ever had in my hands at one time. Very few boys have it. In a sense you may be lucky that your mother died when she did, because were she alive today, you wouldn’t have that same amount probably for years and years. It gives you your complete freedom at a very youthful age and I know you are counting on it. At the same time, don’t forget, (as I haven’t) that you have done nothing to earn it—just an accident of birth.

  Big Bill, Jim, Little Bill, Tom, and governess Maggie Philbrook, 1948

  At eighteen, Little Bill began to receive disbursements from Rosamond’s estate that put him in the top 5 percent of what Harvard students spent in a year, but Big Bill still controlled the rate of disbursements until he turned twenty-one. He still used his father’s return address but it was just an address to which he rarely returned. If things hadn’t been so heated between him and the old man, Little Bill might have gone back every once in a while to spend time with his colorful Texan stepmother, Lucille, of whom he was fond. Young Bill still had Milford, where he occasionally went back to visit his aunt Cornelia and his stepgrandmother, Ruth, but other than that, there wasn’t a place he called home. Except his cars, of course, and Big Bill had his opinions on those, calling them the only thing Little Bill cared about and his “symbol of values.”

  Perhaps, as his father said, it was an accident of birth that Bill the younger had inherited his money thanks to his mother’s death, but it was no accident that Bill the younger went on a vehicular buying spree with Rosamond’s money. Young, dashing Bill Gaston, a fifth-generation Harvard man, was known in the Yard for his fleet, including the delectable French Salmson and the Model A and other cars stashed here and there, toys he’d tinker with along Cambridge’s “Fender Alley” instead of attending biology class. Biology class had only one redeeming characteristic, the biology of a size 8, self-assured, chestnut-haired beauty named Frances Loud whom he had discovered amid a swarm of buzzing Radcliffe co-eds.

  Young Bill at Harvard

  Frances looked damn good in a bathing suit, so at first their courtship progressed swimmingly. In the summer of 1948, after capsizing his dinghy together in Boston’s Back Bay, Little Bill confided to Frances that he longed for her so deeply he wouldn’t survive the three-month summer break from college without her. Bill wrote her that he was terribly depressed and considered ending it all, like some members of his family, but Frances didn’t take Bill’s long, sorrowful letters seriously. She thought he was just exaggerating, horsing around as he was known to do, and she couldn’t believe that he would manipulate her that way or that someone who appeared to have everything could possibly say that he only had her. While he longed for her, Frances was too young and too thrilled at the prospect of being in love to know that longing isn’t love, it’s longing.

  Young Bill had no plans to follow the Gaston family tradition by attending Harvard Law. After receiving his BA in modern European history in 1951, being conservative by nature and aware that when it came to luck in life he’d been given the mixed end of a very mixed bag, he decided to outwit an enthusiastic draft board by signing up for a three-year tour instead of getting drafted for two. In May 1952, he qualified for the Army Language School at Monterey, California, and undertook a rigorous yearlong stint by the sea studying Turkish. On her visits to Monterey, Bill showed Frances around the base and took her for long drives up and down the coast where Rosamond had once driven her old Buick, singing to herself and taking pictures. Frances and he were so hopeful. She called him her Dear Rake and he called her Floud. She was feisty and self-confident; they’d survived their separations. She didn’t understand all the business about ending it all, but she felt sorry for him and his extenuating circumstances.

  With his gift for languages, young Bill had aspirations toward becoming a member of U.S. Army Intelligence. In 1953, he was transferred to Fort Bragg, and in what could hardly have been called a hardship post, he was assigned to cover base parties and photograph the Miss America Beauty Contest from the snazzy Ritz Carlton on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. While working the pageant, he wrote to Frances, who he thought could have been a contender herself, that he secretly rooted for the dark horse, Miss Kansas. He thought she had suffered unfairly at the hands and legs of Miss California, who bested Kansas in the swimsuit competition. When Miss Kansas came up with a lackluster performance in the talent stint, Bill broke down and reported that she had a voice that sounded like a day-old sparrow. It was tragic, he said, but boy, Kansas looked good.

  When his father heard about young Bill’s military assignment, tensions began to diminish. Big Bill sounded practically envious of his son when he declared in a letter,

  Your life doesn’t sound like the army at all. It sounds more like a country club, with t
erraced and flowered lawns, tennis, swimming, yachting, the best food and weekends to the mountains with beautiful sirens. You know, in all the time you’ve been in the Army, I haven’t seen you in uniform once. When you become a Turkish expert there are only three things I know about you can do: rugs, candy paste and a harem. Not so bad at that.

  In the summer of 1954, after serving three years in the army and receiving his honorable discharge, young Bill convinced Frances to join him in a mission. It was more his plan than hers, but still it was a plan, and she was indispensable.

  Recovering from a grueling first year at Harvard Law, Frances was staying with relatives on the French Riviera when young Bill buttoned up the fleet near Boston, flew to Paris, bought an Austin London taxicab, and surprised her with a ring in Nice. On December 7, 1954, they married on the Promenade des Anglais in a civil ceremony just blocks away from where Frances lived with her kindly French uncle, Henri Willem, her mother’s brother who lived on the historic harbor and traipsed around the Promenade dressed in a Moroccan djalaba, slippers, and a fez. The ceremony was brief and unpretentious. Like Rosamond, Frances dressed in a blue traveling suit. Like Rosamond and Big Bill, they were in and out in half an hour. Young Bill gave her a classic diamond-ruby-diamond that made things official.

  After spending six months tooling around the south of France and tending to the underbelly of the London cab, young Bill and Frances headed north through the Rhône on a little detour before turning west toward the Straits of Gibraltar. To her surprise, the man Frances had married, who supposedly knew everything about engines, somehow forgot to put oil in the car. They were waylaid for several weeks at the Hotel de Paris in the city of Rhône awaiting pinion gears and gaskets. But no worry, they’d cross the Straits and leave expensive troubles like that behind.