by Bibi Gaston
Later that afternoon, Rosamond and Billy bought a Christmas tree and had it tied to the car. Recovered from her earlier drama, Rosamond went off to a dinner party that night with Freddie March, Myrna Loy, and the Selznicks. When she brought up having been on the Copperfield set that afternoon, David’s wife, Irene, told the guests that George and David considered Copperfield not just a movie, but a mission. David’s father, Lewis Selznick, had grown up in terrible poverty in Russia, she explained, where day after day he read Dickens to learn English so that one day he could come to America. Lewis worked so hard once he got here so that his son, David, wouldn’t have to take the bus to and from Culver City. Things hadn’t always been this good. David Copperfield wasn’t just Dickens’s story, Irene reminded them, it was the story of Lewis Selznick and boys all over the world.
On Christmas Day 1934, Elizabeth Arden sent Rosamond perfume from New York, the Selznicks sent her a purse, and George brought her a purring kitten he’d nicknamed “Mr. Cuke,” although Mr. Cuke was a she. Rosamond didn’t need a kitten so it wasn’t much of a gift; in fact, it was more of a return volley since she’d sent him Miss Pinchot several months earlier. Everyone sat down to Christmas dinner sporting paper hats. Zoe insisted on eating Christmas dinner out of Little Billy’s baby bowl while Billy ate like a grown-up off her plate. Jimmy rushed from room to room dismantling the tree, demanding trains, and tearing at packages indiscriminately. A huge box of tuberoses arrived from Reinhardt with a message of affection. In the afternoon, the adults got tight on champagne and nibbled on imported cheeses. Going on and on about how glad she was to be away from New York, Dot Parker held court in a coat of red flannel and gray fur that Rosamond thought should have been hanging on the Christmas tree.
In the spring of 1935, Rosamond was still waiting for MGM to find her an assignment. One night at a party, she met Jed Harris, one of New York’s most influential stage directors, who was in Hollywood waiting for his next big break. She was thirty years old and Harris was thirty-five. In the swing of the evening, Harris, who hated parties, crept behind a curtain to escape the fray. He hardly knew the hosts and wasn’t prone to small talk, so as he stood behind the curtain contemplating his next move, he looked over and noticed someone else was standing beside him. It was Rosamond. They turned to each other, confessed their dismay at parties, and, as Isabel Wilder, the sister of Thornton Wilder, would later recount, Harris said, “You have two children, don’t you?” Rosamond told him yes, she had two boys. Fussing with the curtain, she said “I hate them.” “Nobody hates little boys,” Harris said. “Well, I do,” Rosamond said. “Well, I don’t believe you. They must be very attractive little ones; imagine, boys with all their privileges.” She insisted she hated the boys and didn’t know how to be a mother and did not know what to do with them.
Josef von Sternberg and Jed Harris
Jed Harris had children, too, but he didn’t admit to not knowing what to do with them. He had a child named Abby by his second wife, Louise Platt, neither of whom spoke to him, and a son, whom he did not acknowledge, named Jones Harris, by the actress Ruth Gordon. It wasn’t the time or place to tell her his name wasn’t really Harris, that he was born Jacob Horowitz and had grown up in a slum in Newark. Or that he told people that he was born in 1900 in Vienna when he’d actually been born in Lemburg, a small town in southeast Austria. Whatever else Jed Harris was or said he was, most agreed he was one of the most brilliant, successful, manipulative, and infuriating producer-directors the American theater had ever seen. In September of 1928, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. By the age of twenty-eight, he had produced four consecutive Broadway hits over the course of eighteen months. By thirty, he was a millionaire who was rumored to be making $40,000 a week. But in the process, he’d left dozens of members of New York’s theatrical community screaming to the rafters and calling him a dirty, rotten crook. Sir Lawrence Olivier had used the word diabolical to describe him, while others applied terms like consuming and devouring.
When Rosamond met Jed that spring, he had recently completed two mediocre stage productions, The Lake starring Katharine Hepburn, about which Dot Parker wrote, “Miss Hepburn’s performance ran the acting gamut from A to B,” and The Green Bay Tree starring Olivier, which received solid reviews but closed several months later. Rehearsals with Harris were notoriously tense, but Olivier’s experience with Harris on Green Bay Tree was legendary. They’d never gotten along, and on opening night, as Olivier walked onstage, Harris whispered, “Goodbye, Larry, I hope I never see you again.” Olivier managed to perform beautifully but vowed revenge. During rehearsals, Olivier watched Harris’s every move, his every expression. One day, he swore, he’d use it.
MGM’s six-month contract with Rosamond was almost up. By April, Selznick still hadn’t found her a part, so she went east for three weeks with the boys. While in New York, RKO Pictures called and asked her to play Queen Anne in The Three Musketeers, a remake of the Alexandre Dumas classic, to be directed by Roland V. Lee and starring Walter Abel as D’Artagnan. Production was scheduled to start in June, so she left the boys with Gertrude and returned to California on the Union Pacific’s Overland Route, stopping along the way in dusty towns like Ogden, Utah, and treeless waysides in the Nevada desert, where she walked her dog, Panella. On arrival, she wrote Cornelia, “Dearest Cornelia: I survived the trip. This afternoon Miss Panella and I arrive in California where we will be met by a sinister young man.” The sinister young man was Jed Harris.
In her role as Queen Anne, Rosamond was cast as the unhappily married wife, this time of the French king Louis XIII. Instead of running off with the man she loves, the English prime minister, Duke of Buckingham, she sacrifices true love and the royal jewels for the sake of peace between France and England. During production, Rosamond’s worst fears came true. She didn’t look sleek. Thanks in part to the grand gowns and baroque jewelry designed by Hollywood costume designer Walter Plunkett, she described herself as looking like a mountain on legs. She was taller than the two men who played opposite her. The camera caught her looking matronly, hunching and uncomfortable. After filming finished, she wrote Aunt Cornelia, “I still feel very depressed about myself in the picture. In fact, it is all I can do to get myself into the projection room to see the rushes. The cameraman has done absolutely nothing to make any of the women in the picture look presentable.” There was, however, one person who did look presentable: a tiny, blond tornado of an actress named Lucille Ball, who played Rosamond’s lady-in-waiting.
While Rosamond was still in Hollywood working on The Three Musketeers, Jed Harris invited himself to Grey Towers to survey the manse and meet the illustrious Pinchots. On July 2, 1935, Rosamond wrote a note to Cornelia to follow up on the visit. “A very strange telegram,” she wrote, “couched in formal phrases, came from that weird pixy, Jed Harris, when he was in Milford. I wish I could have seen him against the family background. Father’s impression must have been amusing. Jed isn’t exactly the type he approves of, particularly for his hare-brained daughter.”
In the late summer of 1935, with no contract renewal in sight, Rosamond said farewell to Hollywood for good and joined the boys at 9 East Eighty-first while Gertrude took a house in Tucson to recover from her heart and lung conditions. Rosamond accepted a summer-stock engagement to perform in the play Petticoat Fever in Falmouth, Massachusetts, directed by her friend and admirer Alfred de Liagre. That fall she spent more time with Jed Harris, who was still anxiously searching for the perfect play.
The theater was filled with extreme personalities, and Harris was one of them. He was know to be as recalcitrant as a child, retiring to his bed on opening night until the performance was over. Jed had a Svengali-like effect on women. There were women, smart women like Isabel Wilder and Geraldine Morris, the wife of agent William Morris, who excused the fact that he had infuriated half of Broadway because he had a compelling wit, a discerning mind, and a superb knowledge of the theater. Some thought it peculiar that he only whispered an
d forced the listener to lean in to hear him, and they wondered if it was manipulation—that is, until they learned that Harris was for the most part deaf. As Rosamond grew more fond of Jed, she ignored the stories: how he kept the poet E. E. Cummings waiting three hours outside his office for a meeting; how he humiliated hopeful young writers by sending them with their scripts to the office of his archrival, the “Great Collaborator” George S. Kaufman. Harris knew Kaufman wouldn’t look at anything that came via Harris, so those young aspirants were sent packing. How he’d cheated the director George Abbott in the aftermath of their smash hit Coquette, changing the terms of their deal. Harris was the only man George Abbott ever said he hated; and no matter how fond Abbott was of Rosamond, he refused to be in the same room with Harris.
By the time Jed met Rosamond, he had formed a fascination for actresses who hailed from the American establishment, like the doe-eyed Margaret Sullavan and Katharine Hepburn; but those relationships had ended badly. So badly that Hepburn would never breathe the words Jed and Harris in public again. Jed hadn’t found the play that would relaunch his career, but in 1935, he agreed to stage a comedy written by his sister, Mildred, Life’s Too Short. The critics agreed that life was too short and ten performances were too long. Rosamond sat in on rehearsals and invited Cornelia to come to the opening, but Cornelia, who had met Harris when he invited himself to Milford, politely declined, citing “meetings” and a slight antipathy toward the young man. She wrote Rosamond, “I don’t believe it means anything in Jed’s young life whether I turn up or not. Otherwise I would try to manage it.”
Cornelia wasn’t making excuses. Between running for a congressional seat in Pennsylvania and helping her sister-in-law, Ruth, massage her membership application for the Colony Club—asking Ruth if she preferred to be an “Out of town member or a 100% bonafide, genuwine old New Yorker”—Cornelia was in fact busy. At Christmas, she bought Billy and his brother beautiful red sleds and sent them to the house on Eighty-first Street while they went to Tucson with Rosamond to celebrate the holidays with Gertrude. When she returned from the West, Rosamond bounded around as usual, attending parties with her friends, seeing Jed as time permitted, and frequently stowing the children with Cornelia or Miss Tuck, the boys’ German nursemaid.
That winter, while Big Bill was working in Washington for the Roosevelt administration, he learned that his wife was consorting with Harris and there’d even been talk of marriage. Everyone knew Harris was a legend, and Bill knew that New York loved its spoiled little rich girls. Social Register or not, a Rosamond Pinchot marrying Jed Harris, formerly Jacob Horowitz, wasn’t what New York’s upper crust had in mind or what the Pinchot family needed in the way of publicity come the next Senate campaign. Bill might have been a philanderer of the highest order, but there was no law against philandering. Bill didn’t want a divorce, but if Rosamond did, then it would all come out in the press. Harris hadn’t just made enemies: his ex-wives had cut Jed’s face out of their scrapbooks, and his own daughter wouldn’t speak with him. It was one thing for Big Bill to be seen with his women, but it was another thing for Rosamond to be cheating on him with Jed Harris and now wanting to marry him. He’d spread the rumors about her and Bobby Lehman, but this time he had her cornered.
For short stretches that winter, Rosamond left town, but for the sake of the children, she kept everyone, including Big Bill, apprised of her whereabouts. In late March of 1936, while she was away and the coast was clear, Big Bill broke into Gertrude’s townhouse at 9 East Eighty-first Street and stole Rosamond’s leather-bound diaries and her safe box. He called the diaries she’d been keeping since 1926 her “hate books,” but he was searching for evidence of love. He planned to excise anything that made him look bad from the years of their cohabitation, no small menu of matrimony’s dark side. If he had possession of the diaries, everything she’d say would be hearsay, inadmissible in a divorce proceeding. If Rosamond went through with the divorce, he’d send her “hate books” to the press or use them in court to show she hadn’t been much of a mother, she’d been unfaithful to him, she’d called her bedroom her “gymnasium.” What she wrote in her diaries would sink her. She’d sacrifice anything to protect the Pinchot name. If she wasn’t careful, he’d give her publicity all right—just not the kind of publicity she wanted.
From June through August 1936, Rosamond went back to playing summer stock in New England. She played to rave reviews and then in the fall and winter, she and the boys went back to Tucson where they joined Gertrude in an unlikely landscape, but one in which she found a new kind of solace, the desert. Pale and tired, Rosamond loved the spare, rugged simplicity of Tucson enough to want to stay. She rode out in a beat-up pickup truck through the arroyos and up the mesas to look at real estate. In the vast expanses of cactus and sage, the Cinderella loneliness appeared then disappeared quickly. The desert wasn’t lush or conducive to her beauty sessions so she wondered whether this was her place now, a landscape where the scale of emptiness reminded her that it was over between her and Big Bill.
There are places that show us who we are, bold and lovely, masculine and feminine. The place that made Big Bill who he was, was Crotch Island. It was the only place that made him happy. It was there he engaged the little things, the domestic earthy things, the cooking and gardening, the fishing and reading. Those things redeemed him, made him whole again and used him up. Those were the things she would always remember loving about him. But here, in the spiky gray desert in the winter of 1936, she remembered her trips back and forth across America, in part to forget him and to shed the Cinderella loneliness.
That winter, Reinhardt was back in New York assembling yet another massive spiritual production, The Eternal Road. Like The Miracle, the production got off to an agonizing start. It began one day in 1933, when a young Jewish producer, Meyer Weisgal, visited Reinhardt in Salzburg with the idea for a biblical drama. Weisgal idolized Reinhardt, stalked him in London, and eventually persuaded him to adapt a book written by Franz Werfel for the stage. The production, he hoped, would be like a Jewish Miracle, a spectacle to end all spectacles. While Reinhardt never fully embraced his Jewish heritage, Weisgal was a Zionist and wanted to bring The Eternal Road to Broadway as a full-throttle political response to the Nazis’ vilification of the Old Testament and to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. Reinhardt did not immediately jump on Weisgal’s bandwagon, but when he learned that the feisty young producer planned to bring together the best talent available, just as he and Gest had done for The Miracle, he was interested.
Werfel brought the ancient story of the Jews into a modern context for New York audiences. The play depicted a group of modern Jews huddling in a European synagogue to escape persecution. Screaming matches break out between doubters and the faithful. Meanwhile the Rabbi reads from the Torah and reminds the Jewish community of its eternal struggle, The Eternal Road. The performance moves back and forth between ancient biblical stories and modern scenes of kvetching and yelling. Eventually soldiers drive the Jews out of the synagogue. Amid tumult and grief, both the faithful and the doubtful are visited by the Messiah, who reminds them that their suffering is not in vain. Darkness turns to light and all is well.
Rosamond as Bathsheba by Roberto Ida
Once again, Reinhardt expressed his grand vision of the theater, sparing no expense. The musical score was produced by Kurt Weill. Norman Bel Geddes was recruited to build a five-story mountain in the Manhattan Opera House where the biblical stories would take place. He directed construction workers to drill down to bedrock to establish footings for his sets. He burned through his budget before realizing that he had forgotten to build the synagogue. The New York Times claimed that Bel Geddes, like Moses, had shown his genius and “struck water out of rock,” when all Meyer Weisgal wanted was for him to show some restraint. Fights broke out between Reinhardt, Bel Geddes, and Kurt Weill, and by 1935 the production was in trouble. Albert Einstein was recruited for a fund-raising banquet at the Waldorf Astoria and save
d the day when he mounted a podium to make the case for rescuing The Eternal Road, basically from itself. The Eternal Road was a “great work,” he proclaimed, and “true friends of culture” needed to support it.
This time Rosamond played the beautiful Bathsheba, otherwise known as the seventh daughter or the Daughter of the Oath. One day after rehearsals, Rosamond ran into an actor on the street she’d first met at the Pasadena Playhouse, a young Texan named Horton Foote. Foote wanted to attend the DeKanavas, the Russian School of Acting where Rosamond studied, but he was just starting out and didn’t have the money, so Rosamond hired Foote to help her practice her lines for Candida, a play by George Bernard Shaw. Practicing in the parlor at 9 East Eighty-first Street, the two struck up a friendship. Rosamond introduced Foote to Max Reinhardt, and through her, Foote landed a small part in The Eternal Road. During production, Foote was awed by Reinhardt, Weill, and Bel Geddes, but he was personally smitten with Rosamond Pinchot. He knew of her reputation as the star of The Miracle and her status as an international beauty, but there wasn’t one thing about her that was snobbish or affected or frivolous. One night, Jed Harris came to watch Rosamond rehearse at the Manhattan Opera House. After rehearsal, Rosamond introduced Harris to Foote, who immediately sensed something was wrong. In an act of spontaneous generosity, she had paid his tuition at the school of Russian acting and changed his life forever. Her kindness had meant a great deal to him. But now, he noticed, Rosamond, “a princess,” had been taken over by an “evil monster.”
After many delays, The Eternal Road finally opened at the Manhattan Opera House on January 4, 1937, thirteen years after The Miracle. On opening night, Cornelia was not there. She wrote to Rosamond that once again, she could not make the performance, but she was grateful for the gift Rosamond had sent: “The scarf you so unmorally sent me is too lovely. I look extremely swank in it—or rather I will, for I thought it was too nice to waste on Milford’s unresponsive air and have not worn it yet. I shall read the theatrical review tomorrow with the keenest interest.”