The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  I took a risk by calling my uncle, James Gaston, and his wife, Gail, for a place to stay in Manhattan. If my father had known I had entered enemy territory, he probably would have disowned me. I had last seen my uncle in 1986, when my mother took me to Seventy-fifth Street and Third Avenue on a social visit to meet his new wife, Gail. At the time, I didn’t know that where we had gone was to Rosamond’s properties, the ones that had once belonged to the brothers and my father always said put an end to the relationship with his brother.

  While I was planning the labyrinth James Gaston and his wife put me up in one of Rosamond’s old apartments, though at the time, I still knew virtually nothing about her. I simply thought I was staying with my relatives at some apartments they owned. On the last night of the capsule competition, I finished early but didn’t go back to Seventy-fifth Street. I wandered over to Seventy-ninth and Fifth Avenue, to my old project site in Central Park.

  I simply sat there, on a bench, in the cold, until the streetlights came on. On the easterly edge of Central Park, where the transverse road dives deep into Manhattan schist, across from where the Brokaw Mansion once stood with its moat, where the built fabric of street and wall collides with the soft drape of elm, I didn’t know what to do next. For some reason, I kept landing back at that street corner, casing the neighborhood, somewhat like my father. On a bench opposite the playground at Seventy-ninth and Fifth, where owls and squirrels graced the gates to a little playground, I remembered my father and how we had missed each other during construction. I felt guilty for not telling him I was staying with his enemy, his brother. I had wandered and searched, and each turn of the path had been tied to the love of a man. I had come and gone from New York many times, brought back to that street corner for reasons unknown, in a tidal pattern of moods and emotions: restless, enigmatic, mysterious.

  CYCLE THREE

  7

  OUR TOWN

  I spent most of my twenties and thirties filling out change-of-address cards. I don’t think I inconvenienced anyone by all my moving about except perhaps the phone company and the post office. By the time I reached my forties, my parents had died and the men I loved had a habit of vanishing, so one day I sidled up to the cash register at the Museum of the American Indian and bought a bright red pastel drawing of a teepee. A year or so later, I haggled over a one-hundred-year-old Moroccan rug in the Casbah in Marrakech, thinking about how Bedouin women lie down night after night on a rug in the desert. I learned that the patterns of star and arrow are as complex and purposeful as the algorithms of a mathematician, like a microcosm of the world in wool. Now, when weariness and the weight of an atomized family takes hold, I lie down on my rug and tell myself that I am just one in the billions of wanderers. Lying there, looking up, I imagine a dome of sky and stars doing what they have done forever, what Thornton Wilder called “their old, old crisscross journey in the sky.” On my rug in a house in a small town in a state on this earth I call home, I learn over and over to become friends with my closest companion, restlessness, or as the Buddhists say, I settle down with myself.

  In the last months of her life, Rosamond met Thornton Wilder while she worked on the first production of Our Town. While her diaries from 1937 and 1938 have never been found, I know that she would have been interested in Wilder, the man, not because he was fast becoming a celebrity playwright but because he was curious and philosophical by nature.

  In the 1920s, before he became a playwright, Thornton Wilder spent part of a summer with a pickax digging up the streets of ancient Rome while a student at the American Academy. He later said that he would never see Times Square in the same way again. Someday, he thought, archaeologists would come and say, aha, this looks like the site of what once was a city. After teaching for many years, Wilder turned his attention to plays that asked us to consider the meaning of our lives. Americans don’t live surrounded by the archaeological treasures of Athens, or the bas-reliefs of Rome. We worship what is new, our geology is in flux, our contemporary affliction is rootlessness, many of us live and die alone. Wilder grappled with life-and-death themes knowing that Americans live on the surface of things and are generally averse to contemplation; still, each one of us lives in close proximity to a layered, often painful, past.

  Our Town’s Stage Manager narrates as days come and go. He introduces us to a New Hampshire town, Grover’s Corners, where people live and die and fall in love and walk off in twos. Mothers tell their children they have good features, the wind blows, the clock ticks, the terrain is a thousand billion years old. Young Emily Webb marries George Gibbs, her high school sweetheart, and she dies in childbirth. She is given the choice to come back for just one day to see what her life had been. She accepts and chooses a day before she was married in a white country frock. She comes back at twelve years old, when she was too young to understand just how full and beautiful her life had been. Upon Emily’s return to the graveyard, the character of the choirmaster, a suicide, Simon Stinson, reminisces bitterly about life, reminding Emily of what she has just seen, that to live life means living in “a cloud of ignorance,” and wasting it as if one had a million years.

  In the days and weeks after Rosamond died, the press and the public blamed everyone and everything. Rosamond took her life on the morning between the opening nights of Our Town in Princeton and Boston because, the speculation was, she was depressed over her life, she hadn’t won a role in Our Town, love had eluded her, and the message of the play pushed a fragile creature into fantastical notions of death. The Philadelphia Ledger said she had “caught the mood of the last act of Our Town,” and that the “plot of a new play in which death is depicted as more beautiful than life may have inspired Rosamond Pinchot to commit suicide,” and that she had “heard life spoken of as simply a strange interlude before death.” One news report speculated that the note contained Emily’s famous soliloquy in which she bids good-bye to Grover’s Corners, her mother and father, clocks ticking, and asks the question, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

  I cannot claim to know why Rosamond did what she did. Perhaps she’d had enough. Or perhaps there was a much more visceral reason we will never know, a reason that would not have surfaced publicly at the time, that, for example, she may have been ill or pregnant. What I do know now was that on her best days, Rosamond lived the life that Bernard Berenson described, a life of the not-self, a life of the people, the books, the works of art, and the landscape. It was the life to which my mother hoped I might aspire. On those days, while giving spontaneous gifts of time and thought, Rosamond might have felt as Berenson had, that there was no self left to die.

  In her twelve thousand days on earth, she’d taken a good dose of the world, breathing the salty air, weeping at the sound of the church bells in Milford. By the stream, she bounded from rock to rock like a wildcat. Through her good days and her bad days, through the disintegration of her parents’ marriage and the disorienting years of her own, a home eluded her and she had lost her connection to the place that mattered most, to Milford. From all visual appearances, she seemed graceful and cheerful but few knew how deeply she longed for the love of the one person who would never love her back and the place that allowed her to be who she really was.

  If she could return now to her life, I wonder if she would choose a day before her marriage or whether she’d come back at a later time, for one more afternoon of tennis with Amos, or a day of laughter and nicknames with Big Bill tending peonies and potatoes on Crotch Island, or for a day with her granddaughter to see what she’d missed. We’d meet in our raggedy overalls trying to look chic at Bendel’s lipstick counter, with our hair going every which way and calling for our gland injections. We’d find George Cukor and Dave Selznick at the Voisin, at her certain corner table. We’d order buttermilk and lettuce and a chocolate milkshake for Dave. Cukor would arrive yelling and telling us we were too fat. We needed to look “Sleek!”

  For her sake and mine, I am glad that day will never come.
Just imagine, one day to know someone, one day to know Rosamond. And yet, we meet someone every day of our lives and will never know them or see them again. Given the choice, I hope Rosamond would choose just an average day, like the day she described in her diary:

  My car has been painted a green so bright that people stop in the street to look at it. Truck drivers in coy voices yell, “Can I be your chauffeur?” I love green, it reminds me of nice places, summer shade. This day it poured. I went in search of Harris tweed downtown. Loved to see old New York, hear the Metropolitan chimes. They remind me of being a child in Grammercy [sic] Park.

  In the last year of her extant diaries, 1934, Rosamond wrote of a young man, Henry Murray, whom she met aboard a ship but would not allow herself to love because he was married. During their brief flirtations, Henry suggested that they saw life differently. He was a “thread” person, while Rosamond was a “bead” person. He told her that she saw the disparate, fleeting events in life but didn’t see that they were connected and how they might add up to a necklace. To others, perhaps it appeared that Rosamond was a bead person, scattered and unfocused. But there was a Rosamond that people rarely saw or knew—the Rosamond of her diaries that I felt I knew—the Rosamond of her diaries who found herself a home:

  The Falls of the Sawkill

  I love the country; and at our home in Pennsylvania where I could walk and ride and swim, I was intensely happy. There is a beautiful waterfall on our place. I always keep a photograph of it beside my dressing table at the theatre; and when I am blue or discouraged, I look at that picture. Somehow the thought of that waterfall, going on and on without interruption, helps me. In the first place, it will always be there; a bit of loveliness to which I can go back. But even aside from that, it gives me a sense of the steady flow of life itself; the big unbroken current, in contrast with which turbulent streams of our individual lives seem so trivial.

  ROSAMOND: 1934–1938

  After her screen test for a film titled Rebound, Rosamond left Hollywood for New York thinking she had something to offer the world. Rolling east by train, she remembered how the producer-director Alfred de Liagre told her that her eyes were like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean, and MGM’s David O. Selznick yelled, “You have a thousand times more than Kay Francis.” Selznick was one to know. Kay wasn’t just the woman Rosamond called her “predecessor,” she was the darling of the Warner Brothers lot and at the time, one of the highest-paid women in America. So Rosamond knew that when she returned to Hollywood next time, she could feel confident that she had a thousand times more of something—she wasn’t sure what—but more important, she had a signed contract. She’d forget the things that appalled her about Hollywood: the yelling parties and the latest wisecracking zinger from Cukor, this time on Valentine’s Day, when he told her that she looked far better in her screen test than she did in real life. She could settle into Los Angeles, pursue her acting, save money, buy a little house by the beach, take her sunbaths beside the sprawling coast oaks, and starve herself of everything but waxy brown Medjool dates.

  On the first day of the five-day journey, she wrote slowly in her bunk, swaying to the rhythm of the long sleek liner as it crossed the New Mexico desert. The train reached Tucson before breakfast, where she got out and ran through the streets for exercise and bought a bright red bandanna at a Sears Roebuck store, then climbed back onboard for the trip to El Paso, where, again, she got off and ran through the streets and markets strung with bright bulbs swinging wildly in the dust and dirt. The warm night was filled with people who looked dark and wicked, men standing guard over their fruit stands and women presiding over peanut brittle piled high in Toltec pyramids. The train rolled on through Texas, as flat as a billiard table and far less green, where, Rosamond wrote, “miserable treeless towns stood scorching in the sun.” She noticed how pathetically thin the cattle were and how their ribs stood out through their shaggy skins. The train reached San Antonio by three, where she saw a sign that read ZIMMER, VIOLIN LESSONS. If there had been time, she would have gone in to visit the “poor music-loving German marooned in a hideous Texas town.” The train stopped in Houston, then ground to a daylong halt in New Orleans where she wandered off groggy and tired.

  Before eight in the morning, she found her way to the St. Charles Hotel, threw on some old white tennis shoes, and roamed the streets of the Vieux Carré. The old French Quarter called itself French but was, architecturally speaking, Spanish. “As I walked along, I caught glimpses of myself in shop windows. What an unattractive girl, tall, rather fat in the waist and behind—bespectacled and messy. How the hell could any movie company want to hire her?” She crossed Canal St. to Royal, tooled through the antique shops and narrow streets, over to the levee and then back to the Vieux Carré where the generous Spanish arcades of the dark gray Pontalba Building with its odd mansard roof nudges up beside the St. Louis Cathedral. She lingered for a while in the cool shadows of the New Orleans morning and wondered about the Pontalba family as if they were the Pinchots: “Were they planters or merchants or soldiers? Were they handsome or ugly? One thing is sure, they were people of great energy.” Inside the peaceful cathedral, she mused about how cleverly the Catholics built their dark places of worship. “Always when I go into a church I think of The Miracle and I kneel as I did then. Near the altar, candles flickered in green and blue and red glasses, I went up and lit one for Bill. He is always the first person that I think of. I lit a candle for Zoe and later one for each of the little boys—oh and one for father.” When rested, she continued back out into the bright streets, admiring the iron balustrades and verandas.

  The designs are so lovely. Grandfather Pinchot came to New Orleans long ago and bought a lot of that ironwork for the houses in Milford. I recognized the same oak leaf and corn pattern on several buildings. Rather feebly following in Grandfather’s steps, I went to a wrecking company thinking that I might buy some ironwork too. But it was very hot and the iron seemed to be in small scraps and anyway I’m not going to be able to build anything for a long time if ever. So I didn’t buy a thing. As I left, I reflected on how inferior I am to old JW Pinchot. The further I get from Hollywood, the less alluring a screen career seems. Still I have no other career and very little money.

  Before the train left New Orleans, Rosamond found a lunch counter and feasted on Pompano paupiette and a brightly colored planter’s punch. She felt sentimental about leaving the city full of graceful little houses, deep-set French windows, and James Pinchot’s corncob balustrades that probably drove his architect insane. From her berth, she watched anxiously as the last of the little old houses disappeared from sight.

  After hearing so much about quaint New Orleans, I expected to be disappointed but the Vieux Carre is really like a French town. There are the same slanting roofs, the same lovely facades and even the same old hags creeping through the streets mumbling. There is even the same smell, half wine, half mustiness of damp courtyards. The place seemed to be crumbling but gallant. It’s a ghostly place, sad and full of gay memories of romantic people. Perhaps it was the planter’s punch.

  When she arrived back in New York, Rosamond stayed with Amos at 1125 Park Avenue where her sisters couldn’t wait to hear her news. So she told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Her ten-year-old half-sister, Tony, overheard her big sister, the movie star, talking on the phone to her suitors and singing a popular tune, “Love in Bloom”:

  “Can it be the trees that fill the breeze with rare and magic perfume?

  Oh, no, it’s not the trees, it’s love in bloom.”

  Twenty years older, Rosamond didn’t pay much attention to her younger sisters. Amos warned Mary and Tony not to bother Rosamond, that she was a very busy person, but Tony was so excited she could hardly stand it. Rosamond told her sisters she’d seen Johnny Weissmuller on the set of Tarzan and she’d gone right up to Robert Montgomery and pretended to idolize him to his face. The magic oozed in the City of Dreams and her gang had migrated to the coast to chase the
future. The future wasn’t on Broadway—the papers were right—it was in Hollywood, where she was at the center of the action. It was all true, she assured her sisters, what they read about in their movie magazines. She’d landed at the perfect moment when producers and directors had discovered there was money to be made on unconventional types of girls like her. She told her sisters what she told her diary:

  Katherine [sic] Hepburn proved that to be pretty isn’t essential. Certainly I’m not pretty from the usual point of view. I don’t believe I have sex appeal for a single one of those executives either. But I’m what they call different, so they are willing to gamble $3600 more on me.

  She didn’t tell her sisters that Selznick had shouted, “Forget your modesty” and like a tyrant ordered her to rifle through MGM’s wardrobe department, through the tall women’s costumes of Garbo and Crawford to find an outfit that worked! What he and Cukor thought was modesty were waves of stage fright and ambivalence. She wasn’t itching with ambition like Kay Francis, driven like Hepburn, or raging for fame like Clare Boothe Brokaw. Sometimes she knew her being an actress was absurd. She was too tall and everyone knew it. She wrote, “[I’m] a big gangling girl without any real reason (except money) for wanting to go into pictures.” She knew she’d be happier behind the scenes, in technical production, possibly as an assistant director. But she didn’t tell people that. Hollywood assumed she wanted to be a star because she looked like one, posing and primping on the lot. So she told Hollywood what she told her sisters, what they wanted to hear. Neither of them needed to know that she had been so terrified during her screen tests that half an hour before cameras rolled, she’d pulled up to the lunch counter at the Owl Drugstore to down a slug of whiskey.