by Bibi Gaston
The next morning at 11 A.M., Selznick still hadn’t given up. His secretary called to set up lunch with Rosamond, or cocktails, or whatever she wanted. She declined. Later he called again and Rosamond had her assistant, Clara, claim that she’d gone to the country.
Several weeks after the melee at the River Club, Rosamond was too busy to worry about her charging buffalo boss-to-be, David O. Selznick. Bennett Cerf was proposing marriage, but he was too busy, so not for five years. She was too busy, too, getting her miserable little wardrobe together to please Cukor. Clare Boothe Brokaw had also managed to convince Rosamond that she would be perfect for a part in a new play, about an unhappy marriage, entitled Abide with Me, about her former marriage to her millionaire alcoholic husband, George Brokaw. Several nights before the performance, Rosamond confessed to Zoe Akins that she still couldn’t figure out what it was she so mistrusted about Clare except that Clare had cast her as an ugly, wicked bitch of a woman whose marriage was hideous. Rosamond wrote Zoe:
For some reason, I seem always to play the unhappy wife. This part I play calls for a bitch of the lowest order. That’s such fun and comes very easily to my nature. God knows how I’d flounder in a comedy. But I’m going to try it. Even if I don’t ever become an actress, this experience has at least rid me of one of my nightmares, the dread of being on stage. Thank you dear Zoe for driving me into it. I’ve simply got to earn some money and perhaps the theatre is the way for me after all. If my trust fund has any more cuts made in it I may have to either be an actress or a kept lady. Which do you think is easiest?
If there was a role written as much for Rosamond as for Clare, it was that of Nan Marsden in Clare’s Abide with Me. But according to the papers the wicked one was not the wife at all, but the husband:
“Abide With Me,” Clare Boothe Brokaw’s melodrama, which will have its premiere at the Beechwood Theatre in Scarborough on Tuesday evening, deals with the problem of a young and charming society woman married to a secret and sadistic drunkard. Rosamond Pinchot will portray the leading role, that of Nan Marsden whose marriage to the outwardly sanctimonious Henry Marsden is a continuous torture behind closed doors. Paul Guilfoyle will play opposite Miss Pinchot in the role of the dipsomaniac husband…. The character of Charlotte Field, the girl Henry Marsden marries after Nan divorces him and whose misery at the hands of Marsden arouses Nan to violence against him, will be played by Dorothy Hale.
Later in that summer of 1934 Rosamond starred in Aren’t We All, a play about another miserably married woman. At the time, she confided in her diary that she wondered what it would have been like if she’d never met Reinhardt at all but had settled down in some calm, respectable marriage to a conventional young man. Not a Bill Gaston or a Bennett or a Selznick, but a Fred Roddell perhaps.
She wondered where, indeed, all the men she’d once loved had gone. Where had Reinhardt gone? There had been such a fondness between them. The press sometimes reported on them as if they’d been man and wife, sometimes speculating he loved her. In February 1933, the fire in the Reichstag sent the wealthier Jews fleeing Germany, and she suspected Reinhardt was among them. Hundreds had been killed in Vienna and Linz in Austria’s brief civil war. Reinhardt once told her how he had been chased through the streets of Vienna as a child. Now he was probably driven out of Berlin and she imagined that he couldn’t return to Vienna, either. She wondered what had become of the Schloss Leopoldskron.
In New York that summer of 1934, Rosamond began to think that her husband, Bill Gaston, was a “distinctly evil fellow.” He was still making mincemeat of her reputation and telling people that her bedroom was a gymnasium. She hadn’t been a nun, but Big Bill was no monk. “Well, if he does any more of that,” she wrote, “I’ll let go and say what I know about him.” Her friend Gloria Braggiotti knew something about Big Bill that he wouldn’t like spread around about him. Everyone knew Bill liked his women, but not many people knew he also liked them black and from Harlem.
A month before she was due back in Hollywood, Rosamond consulted a publicity woman, Eleanor Lambert, to fine-tune her image. Over lunch, they talked hair and makeup. When Rosamond asked what she thought the public’s impression of her was, Lambert said that in the eyes of the world she was “a very rich girl who had gotten all the breaks because she was so beautiful.” The public, Rosamond told her, was in for quite a disappointment when they saw her up on the screen. “Always be dignified, always be a lady,” advised Lambert.
The next day, the discussion continued at the Colony Club, this time with Grace Moore and Cole Porter over lunch. Porter complained, “Because I went to Yale people won’t believe I can write movies.” Rosamond agreed, “Society people think I am a Bohemian actress, and theatrical people think of me as a society girl. So I am an outcast.” There was no winning. That afternoon, back in Milford, Rosamond napped and dreamed she was a houseguest of Greta Garbo. There was Garbo, tall and sleek, welcoming her to her home and being so very nice. Solitude was Garbo’s way of coping. Rosamond had seen her lie down in the bottom of her car to avoid being spied as she left the studio. She had hidden herself, Rosamond thought, and they called her mysterious.
After six not-so-exhilarating months in New York, Rosamond and the boys boarded a flight for Los Angeles. That October in Hollywood, David O. Selznick told her he was crazy for her, she dressed in rags just to annoy Cukor, and in November 1934, she received news that there were now six Pinchots, not seven, on the Social Register. She’d been dumped. The reason stated under her photograph in the San Francisco Examiner was “Divorce,” but she hadn’t divorced Big Bill. She wasn’t a divorcing woman. The real reason she’d been excommunicated was reported in the New York Times:
The Social Register for 1935, which is now being distributed to its subscribers throughout the city, contains some startling omissions from its pages, notably the exclusion of the names of those who have turned to the stage or screen. Also those who, from the viewpoint of the Social Register Association, have had too much adverse publicity are missing…. Mrs. William Gaston, the Rosamond Pinchot of stage fame, who is niece of Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania and who was a star in the original production of The Miracle, is not listed in the 1935 Social Register.
No men of the stage had been dropped, but Rosamond was in good company. An Astor and a Roosevelt made the excluded list, as did a relative nobody named Mrs. Mildred Tilton Holmsen who had been dropped not only for her 1934 divorce but because she had “caused much more than usual comment in Reno because of her walking around in shorts.” Still, the publicity people at MGM were all in a dither demanding Rosamond make a statement, which she did: “If this is the worst sacrifice that I’m asked to make for going into the movies, I think I’ve had a break. Now at least professionals will no longer be able to point scornfully at me as a social registerite dabbling in the arts.” It was only later she felt a pang of sadness, knowing that both of her grandmothers had been listed in the first Social Register of 1886. She wrote,
It’s as if some tie with my own people had been cut. But the socialites aren’t really my people any more so I shouldn’t mind. There’s never been any scandal attached to my name though heaven knowing, [sic] there might well have been. Lots of other professionals are in the Social Register but I guess they haven’t had such a hullabaloo about their business. Oh, hell, forget about it.
But George Cukor wasn’t about to forget about it. The next morning at seven, he called Rosamond to say he’d decided to do “the big thing” and go on seeing her. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t tease her. Or she him. That day, Rosamond dressed in her worst pair of raggedy overalls and went to his house for a lunch with Kate Hepburn and several of George’s friends. When Hepburn arrived, George disappeared, and after a while, Rosamond bounded outside to see what was going on. Kate greeted Rosamond with an icy silence. George had told Hepburn to be her bitchiest self and to act horrified that one of her own, a crusty easterner, would be tossed off the register. Once Rosamond realized what was go
ing on, everyone yelled and laughed, retiring to a huge Hungarian lunch. Afterward, while George sprawled out on the lawn making wisecracks and wrestling with his cat named “Miss Pinchot,” Rosamond decided that no matter what people said about her, she liked Hepburn, a lot. Her face seemed so lean and intelligent.
A few days later, Rosamond was out of her mind with excitement when she learned that Max Reinhardt was in Hollywood. “How strange fate is,” she wrote. It was as if a great wheel was turning and her far-flung friends of the past eight years were all together again, including Francesca Braggiotti and her husband, John Lodge, Zoe, Cukor and Vollmoeller, who had written the script for The Miracle. Now, at last, Max Reinhardt had also arrived. But not everyone was as excited about her reunion with Reinhardt as she was. When Selznick learned she planned to meet Reinhardt the next day, he launched a whopping tirade of criticism, ripping into both Rosamond and Reinhardt. Rosamond frequently noticed Selznick’s weight but didn’t say anything. This time, it was his turn: “You are too wide. Get that behind off!” he shouted. Selznick carried on about her “complexes” and her “character.” Then he criticized Reinhardt. Later Rosamond wrote, “For David to be anything but humble about Reinhardt is absurd.”
The next day, November 8, 1934, Rosamond made her way along Hollywood’s lively avenues, up and up through California’s canyons of sprawling coast oaks, to meet Max Reinhardt at the Hollywood Bowl. At America’s largest natural amphitheater, nestled in a deep ravine above the city, she found Max, in his element, rehearsing a spectacle of typically massive scale, his interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
He seemed so glad to see me. I was glowing with pleasure at seeing him. I’d dressed up in my nice black and white print with the green tie and wide green belt. My hair curled because I’d steamed it. My face was almost without makeup. I felt pretty, a nice feeling. He gave me a seat beside him and had the rehearsal go on but he didn’t pay much attention nor did I. He asked me about everything, life, career, state of happiness and I told him. Then he watched the actors and gave a few directions. There was one lovely talented girl, Olivia de Havilland. After a while he looked at me and said in German, “Do you remember that day in the Century Theatre when I first told you that I loved you?” I nodded and remembered. Life is strange, very.
It felt like just a few short months since she had seen him, she wrote, when in fact, it had been six long years. Reinhardt looked heavier, and at about sixty, he had aged. His wife greeted Rosamond and described how they had fled Austria not knowing if they would ever return. “We have lived through a lot,” she said. Rosamond thought about how Reinhardt had lost the thing he loved most, his home, and was now adjusting to life in exile. Providence would decide if again he would see his beloved Leopoldskron, its paneled library with the hidden stair, the mirrored banquet halls, the harlequin masks and actors from the Commedia Dell Arte frescoed on its walls, the rose parterres lapping up between the palace and the little lake Leopoldskroner Weiher, his mirror to the Alps.
Reinhardt still had his grand dreams, this time of a star-studded cast for the autumn run of Dream at the Bowl. It would be the perfect performance, needless to say, regardless of cost: Charlie Chaplin as Bottom, Garbo as Titania, Clark Gable as Demetrius, Gary Cooper as Lisander, John Barrymore as Oberon, W. C. Fields as Thisbe, Walter Huston as Theseus, Joan Crawford as Hermia, Myrna Loy as Helena, and Fred Astaire as Puck. He admitted that he hadn’t gotten a single one of them to commit but he had discovered a boy named Mickey Rooney to play Puck and convinced Olivia de Havilland to play the part of Hermia. That fall of 1934, Reinhardt drew two hundred thousand people to ten performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bowl. Max even had a deal in the works for a film version. “How sad it is that he is old now,” Rosamond thought. “To have had a love affair with him would have been a delight and an education,” she wrote.
Rosamond shared Thanksgiving with friends at a beautiful sprawling house she’d rented from MGM’s famous Latin lover, the movie star Ramon Navarro, who was born José Ramón Gil Samaniego in Mexico and whose parents had escaped Mexico during the revolution. She invited many of the friends she’d rediscovered in exile. Everyone, it seemed, was from somewhere else. There was George Cukor, who grew up in Philadelphia, the son of Hungarian refugees, and Francesca Braggiotti, whose family had escaped Italy when their villa was turned into a hospital and, at thirteen years old, Francesca ministered to wounded troops. Francesca, of course, was accompanied by her husband, John Lodge, the actor who was fleeing the shadow of his grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge. Joining them were George Oppenheimer, who had fled his East Coast upbringing and Brown education and landed as a screenwriter for MGM, and another colorful Austrian American film director known in Hollywood as the Jewish Fu Man Chu, Joseph Von Sternberg, who had added the Von to his name when he arrived and whose father had been in the Austro-Hungarian army before leading his family to a better life in New York City. Last but not least was the long-lost Reinhardt, who had narrowly escaped the führer, who was poised to take over the Schloss. On Thanksgiving day, while Von Sternberg sat in the corner advising Reinhardt on the casting of the film version of Dream, Rosamond instructed Little Billy on how to carve off pieces of a plump turkey, a species that somehow managed to escape becoming America’s national bird, and that George, her butler, had mutilated beyond recognition. No one knew where George came from, but for the moment, everything seemed just right with her crazy quilt of reassembled friends.
From October through December, Rosamond primped and exercised and watched her intake of fatty Medjool dates and took her sunbaths and held her glamour parties with the Barrymores and Gary Cooper and Gloria Swanson. When she thought no one was looking, she abandoned her hostess duties and vanished into the backyard to lie down under the jacaranda tree, staring up through its dark branches and pale blue blossoms. Like many Hollywood contract workers, she spent her nights saying things were fabulous and her days gnawing on her fingernails wondering whether the studio would find her a movie and if her contract would be renewed. She’d visit Selznick in his offices to discuss possible parts, including one he thought she’d be perfect for, Florence Nightingale. She waited and wondered until December 17, when she went to see David in his vast drawing room where he was sitting on the couch drinking a chocolate milkshake. “Nightingale is off,” he bellowed. “Paramount beat us to it!” Rosamond suggested that if MGM had kept their plans a secret, it might have gone through. David yelled, “Yes, but you can’t keep anything secret in Hollywood!” Sucking down a second milkshake, David picked up the phone, dialed the scenario department, and started yelling at the woman in charge, “Stories for Pinchot! Stories for Pinchot!” He got off and told Rosamond she would have to be patient. On her way out, he put his arm around her and pressed his face against hers. At least, she thought, he was trying to get her a lead.
A few days later Rosamond returned to ask David for a favor. This time, she took Little Billy with her, his first visit to the lot. While they waited, they went to see Cukor, who was delighted with the fine German accent Little Billy had learned from his nursemaid, Miss Tuck. When David’s secretary called for Rosamond, Rosamond left Little Billy with Cukor, who kept making him repeat words in German, then took him over to see W. C. Fields on the set of David Copperfield. While Little Billy watched the child actor Freddie Bartholomew play young David Copperfield, Rosamond was once again being accosted by Selznick. She had gone in to ask David for a screen test for her friend Bob Chatfield-Taylor, but as soon as she stepped into his office, David started kissing her and working himself into a frenzy. His face was unshaven, and she observed the large pores on his nose. He took off his glasses and blinked. There was something distinctly unseductive about him—in fact, she found David rather disgusting—but he was humorous, which made the whole situation ridiculous and this time more playful than threatening. David quieted down, stopped sputtering, and Rosamond took her glove to gently wipe the lipstick off his face. “I hate to go out into t
he office with my hair like this,” she said. Barking back, David said, “You always look rather like that!” They both laughed.
Rosamond left David, slipped past the secretaries, and went over to the Copperfield set where Little Billy was watching Freddie Bartholomew stagger and fall along George Cukor’s nineteenth-century London streets while being drenched by rain from indoor sprinklers, blown by a wind machine, and scared to death by fake lightning. Cukor presided over the scene like an ogre. When Rosamond arrived, she found Little Billy wincing and screaming in horror, “I don’t think the little boy likes it!”