by Bibi Gaston
At the Spanish port of Algeciras, they boarded a ferry for Tangier where they applied for their carnets de residence. The plan, as explained to the authorities, was to start a family, write a guidebook to northern Morocco, and perhaps start a little export business in oranges, jeep parts, gypsum, and, they didn’t mention, maybe even a bit of uranium. Whether or not their ventures made money, they’d still have much of Rosamond’s $100,000, an island off the coast of Maine, and half an interest in Rosamond’s buildings in New York. If Bill was careful, which he was, and lucky, which he wasn’t, the sum could last a lifetime in Tangier.
In 1955, Tangier was a shady Shangri-la of beat poets and businessmen, a small town perched like a bird on the mighty haunches of North Africa, a Mediterranean mirage of gleaming white boxes leaning up against her hills like neatly stacked sugar cubes. She was a cross between early San Francisco shining on her headlands and the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. Thanks to her international free trade zone and Wild West atmosphere, the city was also something of a Klondike, which meant that according to his calculations, Bill could spend pennies a day and live like King Mohammed V.
The plan seemed simple enough but was an outrage to Frances’s mother. She thought her brilliant daughter’s marriage to a Gaston, any Gaston, would be the mistake of a lifetime. The more Frances’s mother heard about the Gaston family, the more she thought the whole enterprise would end the way the Gaston marriages ended, in disaster. What daughter of hers, who had grown up on a steady diet of opera and Ezio Pinza at the Met and attended the elegant Dalton School in Manhattan, would give up a Radcliffe education, a law degree at Harvard, and the promise of a brilliant future? And give it up to do what? To move to Tangier, Morocco, with a man who paraded around like royalty in a foreign limousine with red leather seats in a place where they didn’t even have washing machines? But Frances thought Bill and his plans for the guidebook were a lot more fun than law school, and he wasn’t going to sit around and wait while she took a swan dive into the cesspool of the legal profession. She was miserable at law school anyway, loved him, wanted children perhaps more than she wanted him, so it didn’t take much to talk her into the mission.
Jeanne Willem Loud, Frances’s mother, and Frances Clothilde Loud, Vinalhaven, Maine, circa 1951
He had the goods. The good looks of a movie star—the angular jaw and blue eyes of Paul Newman, and the self-confidence of James Dean. He had the money, more money than she’d ever seen. He knew history, the kind of history that mattered in the big scheme of things, that the Visigoths had delivered a stunning defeat to the Romans at Adrianople, and that Rome had been sacked twice, first by the Goths in 410, then by the Vandals in 455 so by the time 474 rolled around, Rome was in shambles. He knew who had been where and what towns the Greeks had plundered in what battle for what fort and it was all going to be relevant to the Guidebook to Northern Morocco. He spoke languages, four of them—five if you counted English—and he knew his way around engines, sort of, which he and Frances laughed about and agreed was probably far more useful than all their degrees and almost-degrees from Harvard and Radcliffe put together. Like his father, he was a rebel, which had its appeal, the second in five generations of Gastons who had basically said “screw it” to the legal profession. Big Bill had slogged through the mandatory education at Harvard Law, grudgingly, out of demi-respect to the lineage, and, being a sport, he’d accepted a post as assistant DA in Boston but never practiced after that. Bill the younger took it a step further and kissed the legal lineage good-bye without ever having said hello. He wasn’t a joiner, he said, so he didn’t pay his dues to the Society of the Cincinnati, the sanctum sanctorum of military heritage in the United States. Nor had he signed on to the whole wretched ritual that surrounded the family crest, Fama Semper Vivit, the vainglorious challenge to the progeny to do something, anything, to get oneself noticed, even if it meant emblazoning a ridiculous owl on a lapel and balancing the checkbook, anything one could do to make sure that “Fame Lives Forever.” All that nonsense. He’d scraped by with a history degree, and that was about enough. The languages he knew—Arabic, Turkish, French, and Spanish—were thanks to the Army Language School at Monterey. Nothing to do with Harvard, Kent, or the Gaston family and its owl.
Virtually no one except the border officials, not even Frances, knew Bill had already traipsed through North Africa before. He had a curiosity about that part of the world, so in 1949, while nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard, he’d boarded a slightly converted Dutch cargo ship for Rotterdam in mid-July and traveled by train through Brussels and Paris before finally boarding another ship in Marseille bound for the coast of Algeria, where he found himself wandering the streets for eight days with his Rolleiflex. He’d been practicing his escape routes since he lived with his father, practicing so many years he couldn’t remember. There were many times Bill, like his father, had simply disappeared, like the time he played hooky from Kent School for a weekend in 1947 and wound up in Cuba. That weekend, ambling along the back streets of Havana, he just happened to wander into a smoky nightclub where Rosamond’s brother, his uncle, “Long Giff,” performed as a professional Cubana dancer, accompanied by his stunning Cuban wife. That weekend, in what young Bill said was the strangest coincidence of his life, he’d discovered a kind of Providence far from home. Rosamond’s brother shared her joie de vivre, loving landscape more than people, so perhaps young Bill’s escape had taken him exactly where he needed to go. Long Giff was just plain fun, volunteering to teach young Bill the things a man needed to know, about women, about dancing, about how to artfully escape the tragic endings both of them knew so well.
In the spring of 1955, Bill and Frances were full of hope for the future when they found a whitewashed villa, Villa Renny, high up on the Old Mountain in Tangier on Rue Jamaa El Mokra. The Old Mountain was a picturesque part of town, away from the bustle of the old port, where a sizable community of expats lounged around looking out at the view, longing for Tangier in her earlier days. When he wasn’t directing the gardeners Abdeslam and Mohktar on tending the roses or clipping the mint, Bill was darting in and out of a sea of djalabas taking pictures with his Rolleiflex. He’d float through hilltop villages and vast open spaces in a Jeep or a Land Rover, take field notes on features of the Rif Mountains for the guidebook, and then return to a little desk in a garage he’d rented just off the Grand Socco, the proud main square of Tangier. The French had envisioned the Socco as a small version of a place in Marseille or Toulouse, but the land at the edge of the Casbah was pitched at an unmanageable angle toward the Bay of Tangier, so the Socco ended up a rather pathetic, tilting, disagreeable space for café culture, but a remarkable setting for grand traffic jams requiring the constant desnarling presence of a well-dressed gendarme. At the center of things ancient, French, and somewhat tragic, where young Bill found life both meaningful if not ripe for discovery, he opened a little storefront business at Rue Delahaye No. 1. The year was 1957. He called his enterprise “The King of Jeeps.”
Perhaps it was the peak of his life. When he wasn’t off in the Rif or composing letters to the editor of the Dépêche Marocaine, Morocco’s largest daily newspaper, criticizing the authorities for neglecting the scenic potential of Tangier, Bill did a brisk business in used parts for Jeeps, Land Rovers, and desert vehicles. The King of Jeeps was, for all practical purposes, a garage, but to him it was a little home away from home. In the back, he kept his fleet, including the 1930 Salmson S4 coupe, the sleek black convertible Peugeot 203 with a roaring lion hood ornament, the World War II army Jeep, and his prize, King Mohammed V’s limousine, a jet black French Delahaye, custom built as a parade car in 1950, which he’d bought in a moment of sheer inspiration, or folly, or both, from a well-dressed Tangerine named Mohammed el Akra. In the storefront office, he kept Rosamond’s old Corona and his Michelin maps of the desert, spare film for the Rolleiflex, and, of course, a carbon copy of the Guidebook in progress.
When the import-export business in oranges a
nd Jeep parts was slow and when he wasn’t adding up his accounts like a French bureaucrat, he’d turn his attention to the manuscript, which was his kind of work because it offered a vision of hope for the wayfarer stranded in harsh surroundings. Morocco was one treacherous landscape no thanks to its rutted roads and lack of signage, and his guidebook would take the terror out of getting lost. Whether in the casbahs and souks, in the Phoenician-Carthaginian confusion of ancient Lixus, or the gardens of once-lovely Larache where flowers were planted on land that had once been a moat, Bill Gaston and his guidebook would get you there and get you out in one piece.
About eighty kilometers north of Fès, just past the crossroads at Ain Aicha, the road climbed toward the great plain of Ketama, winding and twisting its way into Morocco’s most rugged chain of mountains, the Rif. Before reaching the top of the world, the road hugged the cliffs and narrowed to a single lane where it looked as though it were squeezed out of a tube to form the ragged makeshift roadbed, every inch fought over by passing vehicles. “Few of the roads in northern Morocco,” Bill wrote in the preface to the Guidebook, “will bring joy to the motorist’s heart.” The roads, he wrote, “winding over cedar topped mountains and through rock-bound canyons, are year round prey to the ravages of the seasons.”
His favorite place to take photographs was in the forest around Ketama, high in the Rif, where there was very little asphalt to speak of, simply a rough dirt road. It was a good road and straight, except for a gentle bend where the Moroccans had made way for a majestic Atlas cedar, a species that made this area of the Rif ecologically notable. Young Bill had seen trees as noble and notable as this one in the hemlock forest around Milford and the camps in old growth built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. But the Atlas cedar didn’t belong to the Rif at all. It was native farther south in the mountains near Azrou. He deigned to notice the things that didn’t belong where they landed. The Atlas cedar, therefore, was more than a mere curiosity. He called it a “vagary,” something that required one to think long and hard about what belonged where, how it got there, and how it survived, like the Portuguese forts along the coast that the Moroccans said were Spanish. With his Moroccan bag and his meal in a can and his Rolleiflex, Bill never knew what to expect or what might bring joy to a motorist’s heart. Perhaps the bend in the road, high in the Rif, might become important, as important as remembering what he recalled of Milford, her moat, and the Good Ship Rhododendron that struggled each day at the base of the falls. Four thousand miles away, he discovered a single tree, like a replacement landscape or a foster mother with her welcome of greenness and promise of cover.
On a Wednesday, market day, in the fall of 1955 in Ketama, the town given the same name as the wide rolling plain, young Bill Gaston pulled over and stooped down to the dusty ground at twilight and pointed his Rolleiflex at a classic Moroccan street scene of white-robed townspeople moving in a cloud of dust through the town’s serrated arch. The following year, the photograph won him the coveted first prize from the Dépêche Marocaine of Tangier. He proudly stood on a podium with Frances and various Tangerine dignitaries to collect his prize, but a few days later the locals decided that a Westerner had no business exposing poorly dressed rural Moroccans to the evil eye of a camera, so his title was unceremoniously yanked. But he’d managed to make off with the prize, an impressive faux silver cup that read “Premier Prix” on a little round stand that declared his photograph the winner.
If there’d been a part of himself waiting to be found somewhere in the world, he’d found it high up in the Rif with the startlingly blue-eyed Berbers. Few foreigners ventured to places like Chauen and Ketama in the 1950s because there wasn’t much in the way of accommodation and no real reason to go. For the sake of those who found one, Bill approached each town like a choreographer. Like a cross between Rommel of the desert and Reinhardt of the stage, he’d study the portals, arches, and gates to ancient villages. “One should never,” young Bill Gaston wrote, “for the first time, approach Chauen from the north, for this is to enter the loveliest town in northern Morocco by the back door.”
Morocco was still a traditional society in the mid-1950s, but that didn’t stop Bill from posing Frances in the middle of the desert in a bathing suit on the hood of his British cab. They were accomplices in this romantic field trip, so by early morning light in Tangier, they’d rise and rev up the World War II army Jeep and take off into the Rif. Sometimes she’d play the jiggling stenographer in the front seat, in which case their notes would be neat and well organized. Sometimes he’d go by himself because she looked uncomfortable in military garb surrounded by djalabad tribesmen. She’d stay home washing clothes in the sink, ironing, and wailing to Portuguese fado or bounding around the Villa Renny to “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” with Harry Lauder, whose broadcast from Gibraltar was aptly named “Scots on the Rocks.”
In the 1950s, Richard St. Barbe Baker, a British-born Canadian forester from Saskatoon pronounced that the phenomena of soil erosion and deforestation required nothing less than a spiritual devotion to restoration and began a society named “The Men of the Trees.” Baker wrote a gothic, emotive tome entitled Among the Trees, featuring an introduction by the broadcaster Lowell Thomas, who wrote that “men who plant trees love others besides himself.” Like Gifford Pinchot, before becoming a forester, Baker had considered the clergy, but in 1955, he opted instead for a nine-thousand-mile journey to promote reforestation in the Sahara. At one stop, he set up camp at the fashionable Ville de France Hotel in Tangier to deliver a lecture. The Men of the Trees had attracted the attention of men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw, so young Bill Gaston, the self-appointed king of desert vehicles, hoped he could help:
Frances C. L. Gaston and a London cab near Tazenakht, in the Moroccan Sahara, 1955
Dear Mr. Baker,
During your recent stay in Tangier I followed with great interest several articles in the local French paper in which were described your fight against the advancing Sahara. The vastness of your scheme and its vital importance to the future of man proved inspirational to me, for it is not often that men embark on such altruistic endeavors, particularly in Tangier. I have read also of the establishment of the Sahara Reclamation Company through which you plan to effectuate conservation measures.
To put it briefly, I wonder if there exists the possibility of my fitting into your organization. I have not had any formal training in forestry or land reclamation, my only experience along with a great enthusiasm having been gained at the knee of my great uncle, Gifford Pinchot in the United States. I can only imagine how enthusiastic he would be if he were living and knew of your present project.
My training has been in journalism and though this may be a bit removed from your plans it may be that your organization will require a publicist, though frankly I would prefer to be out in the desert planting trees…
Young Bill never landed a job for the noble caravanserai of Richard St. Barbe Baker. Like a mirage, the forester in the desert vanished, replaced by a mission closer to home. In October 1957, a new generation of Gastons—mine—was launched with the birth of my brother, named, what else, but William Gaston, nicknamed, what else, Billy. Between editing and typing chapters of the guidebook and her own articles for Colliers Encyclopedia, my mother gave birth to the towheaded infant at the Clinic California at the bottom of the Old Mountain.
On July 3, 1959, I was born under the whir of ceiling fans in a small whitewashed room at the same Clinic California. Because there was no reigning name for a girl in the Gaston family, my mother and father assigned the name Patricia because of my long, “patrician” fingers. But Patricia was hard to pronounce for two-year-old Billy, who also couldn’t say “baby,” so everyone called me Bibi. My mother told the story of my birth so many times and with such insistence that it seemed to grow tentacles that looped and threaded their way through every interstice of my earthly existence. According to her, I was delivered by a Spanish cleaning lady at the clinic bec
ause everyone had gone home, including my father and the handsome French doctor who was supposed to deliver me. The two, she said, had run off down the hill to a cocktail party and couldn’t be reached. We had been ruthlessly abandoned. My father said that story was hogwash but offered no competing explanation, so the story stuck. On my birth certificate, my mother wrote two addresses, The Villa Renny, Djemaa El Mokra, Tangier, and the Fidelity Title and Trust Company, New Canaan, Connecticut. By 1959, apparently, the Valley Road House, Big Bill’s primary residence, was no longer a return address.
Bibi at the Alhambra, 1962
Bibi in Tangier, 1963
In March of 1962, my mother was depressed about the state of civil unrest in the streets of Tangier. Between daily riots and increasing violence, it was a good time to beat it back to the States. “Gaston, vous avez bien fait,” said people who understood the value of a French franc versus a Moroccan dirham, “you are smart to get out while you can.” At about the same time, my mother had given up trying to cajole a washing machine out of my father but had a third child, Isabelle, in what my mother said was a very painful delivery. Meanwhile, her mother visited Tangier to assist with the laundry, the housekeeping, and the newborn, noticing as well that my father was around less and less; and bottles of wine made their appearance in places where people didn’t commonly keep them.
The idyll was over.
My mother wanted to educate her children in America, so in the spring of 1963, she and my father hauled their belongings off to the bidonville in Tangier’s poor neighborhoods and put the bleached white walls of Villa Renny up for sale. A Scot bought the villa, dismissed poor Mohktar, and hired a high-class flower gardener who made changes to the garden layout. My father wasn’t entirely ready to abandon the import-export business, so he took a dirt-cheap pied-à-terre next to a goat meadow on Rue Balzac. My mother would return to the United States while my father would slowly close up shop in North Africa on the vagary of Moroccan time, which meant later, or perhaps never.