The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  Thornton and Isabel left the shop as quickly as possible with their sandwiches, leaving their half cups of coffee on the counter. Jed never knew they had come and gone. When they left the shop for the Nassau Inn, the storekeeper closed and locked the door behind them as Jed’s voice got louder and louder. “Yes, I love you; of course, I love you.”

  Later that night, Jed picked up Rosamond and the two drove back to New York with Mildred, Jed’s sister. Rosamond continued on to Long Island that night and made the decision that she would not go to Boston the next day.

  Jed and the cast arrived by train in Boston at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday for a reading at the Wilbur Theatre. Later that afternoon, Thornton checked in at the Copley Plaza, then crossed the street with Isabel, who was staying on a church-mouse budget at the YWCA. Isabel checked in and went upstairs while Thornton bought a newspaper and sat down on a couch in the spare, dark lobby. When she joined him a few minutes later, Thornton was sitting frozen, as if in a paralysis. He had put down the paper, but Isabel could see the headlines on the front page:

  LINK SUICIDE TO SHOW HERE

  Rosamond Pinchot Said to Have Been Brooding Over Failure to Win Part in Our Town

  Shaken and trembling, Thornton and Isabel went into a shop on Stuart Street near the hotel to buy paper and an envelope so that they could write Jed a note. They found a coffee shop, sat down, and Thornton wrote Jed to please let him know if there was anything at all he could do. Thornton didn’t go to the Wilbur Theatre, but Isabel did. When she arrived, Jed wasn’t there. No one knew anything. The cast sat around the lobby of the Wilbur, despairing and waiting for instruction. When Jed finally arrived, he shook hands with everybody and told them, “A very sad thing has happened. I will be going back to New York and you should carry on without me. We will make the presumption that the play will go on as usual and the responsibility will fall to the play’s stage manager and Frank Craven.” Harris said he didn’t know what his next step would be. Thornton described Rosamond’s death as “a bomb dropped on the cast.”

  After the opening in Princeton, Rosamond had arrived home in the middle of the night. The next day, Sunday, January 23, she spent quietly, taking a walk and dining at home with the children. Later, after the children had been put to bed and everyone was asleep, Rosamond left the old white farmhouse on Valentine’s Lane and went for a drive. It was another snowy, icy night, and at three in the morning, she picked up a hitchhiker, Colonel Harold Hartney, a retired World War I flying ace with a lame leg. The colonel, who didn’t drive, had been waiting for a friend to pick him up at Roosevelt Field where he had gone on business, but when the friend arrived, he was drunk, and Hartney refused to get in the car. After walking for some distance in the snow, he saw the lights of a car approaching. When it reached him, Rosamond rolled down the window and asked for identification before agreeing to give him a ride. Rosamond said she never allowed anyone to sit in front, but he could sit in the back and she would take him anywhere he wanted to go. He said he lived in Great Neck, so she turned the car around. They got to talking and discovered mutual friends when the colonel asked her why she was out so late. Rosamond said she was returning from Princeton but had been delayed by the bad roads. She said she had had a slight accident on the bridge and thought she would slide off. She laughed nervously. Then there was a silence. The colonel noticed that she handled the car well but that she was sitting tensely over the wheel, and when she slowed to light a cigarette, her hands were shaking. Then Rosamond broke the silence and said that she could not take him all the way to Great Neck and would let him off at the Roslyn train station because, she said, she had to get home to call her husband in Colorado. She was a pretty girl, the colonel noticed, and when she stopped to let him out, he told Rosamond that she had probably saved his life. He thanked her for everything and asked her for her name so that he could write a thank-you note. She turned around to look at him and said, “I am known as Rosamond Pinchot.”

  When Rosamond arrived back at Valentine’s Lane, she pulled the Buick into the three-car garage. She went into the house and set two notes on her bed. Sometime that night Miss Tuck, the boys’ nurse, heard Rosamond go back to the garage. There she took a garden hose, connected it to the Chrysler’s exhaust pipe, and led it through the left rear window into the passenger compartment. She chinked the opening with a piece of burlap so that the fumes would not escape, started the motor, and lay down on the backseat.

  At 6:15 A.M., Ida Hanniven, the cook, found her dead dressed in a white evening gown with an ermine wrap. The two boys were asleep inside the house.

  The Syosset precinct of the Nassau County Police was called to the scene. Amos was reached in New York and drove out to the house with Rosamond’s friends Kay Halle and Gloria Braggiotti. Cornelia, staying at the Colony Club in New York, first called the house in Old Brookville and then spent forty-five minutes speaking with Gifford by phone in Washington. Amos identified the body. Inspector Harold King of Nassau County declared Rosamond’s death a suicide on account of two notes found on her bed “confessing her suicidal intentions and distributing her property.” The assistant medical examiner recorded the time of death as about 6:00 A.M. According to his report, Rosamond was “Working hard. Getting ready for production. Was taking Benzedrine tablets. Probable motive—committed in fit of reactionary depression from late hours and reaction following wearing off of drug.” A blood test was taken, which revealed carbon monoxide poisoning. No autopsy was performed that might have revealed the level of Benzedrine in her blood or any other complicating factors, such as pregnancy or illness. No report was made confirming damage to the car or that Rosamond had been in a minor accident.

  The Syosset police force, which had existed for only thirteen years at the time, banned the press from the estate, but the next morning, January 25, 1938, headlines screamed across the front pages of newspapers across the country and around the world. Across four columns of the World-Telegram: “Rosamond Pinchot Found Dead: Hose in Garage Indicates Suicide.”

  The first reports revealed that she had been discovered in a white evening gown with silver slippers and an ermine wrap, but Amos corrected that account the next day when he released a different version to the New York Times: “Mrs. Gaston was found dead early this morning in the garage of her house at Old Brookville, Long Island. She was dressed in sports clothes and a sweater. She left a note of farewell for her parents and friends. The funeral will be held at 9 East 81st Street on Wednesday at 11 a.m.”

  Newspaper clipping, source unknown

  On Wednesday, January 26, New York’s Daily Mirror reported that Rosamond Pinchot’s diary was “found” the day before. While the papers did not reveal who found it, they reported that she had made two notations that “may have indicated her thoughts had at last turned to divorce, which through five years of separation from her husband she had refused to contemplate.” The paper went on to say that “William A. Gaston, who is the father of her two small sons, arrived here yesterday, after traveling by plane from Denver to Newark.”

  In the early-morning hours of January 24, Big Bill had been notified at his mountain retreat in Cascade, Colorado, just east of Colorado Springs, and quickly went to the airport to board a flight in Denver. A few minutes before the plane took off, Bill was reportedly in a very bad mood. Accompanied by an unidentified woman, he seized a sandwich from the lunch counter and stomped out of the café, throwing his money all over the floor. His plane landed in Cheyenne, where he made several phone calls and told reporters that Mrs. Gaston’s death was “none of your business.” He arrived at Newark the next day, wearing his raccoon coat. Appearing tired and bloated, he barked at reporters before taking a car to 9 East Eighty-first Street, where he barked again, “How would you like it if this happened to you?” When asked if he had had any recent communication with his wife, he quieted down and replied, “No comment.”

  Bill hadn’t been back to 9 East Eighty-first Street for some time. He certainly hadn’t been invited back after
he broke in to steal Rosamond’s diaries a year and a half before. On January 26, 1938, instead of spending the day on Pike’s Peak, Bill spent the day in Rosamond’s mother’s house with his wife, who was dead. Jed Harris spent the day, no doubt, thinking about why Rosamond was wearing a white gown reminiscent of Emily’s wedding dress, and whether it was a message meant for him. Bill and Jed probably couldn’t face each other. And Amos probably spent the day blaming every last bit of Rosamond’s troubled life on earth on himself. He’d been too busy fighting off the enemies of the state to realize that internal enemies had taken refuge inside his daughter.

  On January 26 at 11 A.M., several hundred mourners, mostly women, crowded the corner of Eighty-first Street and Fifth Avenue. Held back by a detail of a dozen policemen, the onlookers were kept on the opposite side of the street so that Rosamond’s friends and family could pass. The funeral was small, mainly for the family, but was also attended by forty of Rosamond’s friends and associates, including Kay Halle, Gloria Braggiotti, Miriam Hopkins, Tilly Losch, Tommy Hitchcock and Mrs. Hitchcock, Miss Chelle Janis, Dudley Field Malone, Lady Hubert Wilkins, the Thayers, the Damrosches, the photographer Cecil Beaton, and a friend of the family who offered to take the boys for the day, Miss Isabelle Pell.

  Rosamond lay in her bed on the third floor. After the viewing, the group assembled on the second floor for a short Episcopal service officiated at by the Reverend Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary. There was no eulogy and Dr. Coffin made no reference to Rosamond’s death as a suicide. Big Bill was reported to have sobbed throughout. Amos leaned heavily on his cane. Governor Gifford’s face was a “white mask.” Cornelia looked like a steely-eyed Amazonian queen ready to defend the Pinchot name. Mary and Tony wept constantly. Jed Harris hid in the corner while Morris Gest ran outside to speak with reporters. “I cannot understand it,” he said. “She was getting along so wonderfully well. She was devoted to her two lovely children.” Gest paused and then exploded, “My God, she was dynamite. She could run faster than someone else could skate. She was so full of life.” Amos Pinchot refused to say anything, as did the rest of the family.

  That cold January afternoon, in a bronze casket covered with a carpet of snapdragons, white orchids, lilies, and branches of apple blossom, Rosamond was carried out of 9 East Eighty-first and taken to the little mausoleum at the top of the hill in the Milford Cemetery where she was laid to rest. No one had answers for what had brought her to that point. But many formed their conclusions when they learned in the press that on January 26, 1938, Rosamond Pinchot should have been celebrating her tenth wedding anniversary with her husband, Big Bill Gaston.

  8

  THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BRAIN

  It would be convenient to attribute my abysmal choice of men to my father’s disappearing act or my mother’s self-destruction. But then, my father could blame his behavior on Rosamond’s death and Big Bill’s philandering. Ascending the paternal family tree, Rosamond could claim that her miserable marriage to Big Bill was due to the fact that Amos fooled around while married to Gertrude, and Amos could say he’d been miserable with Gertrude and possibly even more miserable with Ruth because his father, James Pinchot, crowned his brother, Gifford, king. The explanations would go on and on until I was left with a domino theory of wretched choices, a genealogy of unhappiness. But that wasn’t very satisfying to me. What I wanted was a decent, honest, intelligent, attractive man in my life, one of Cornelia’s breast-forward men. I suppose, perhaps, there was a reason that Gifford was king.

  I had another alibi. I was in a deep sleep when I chose the men in my life. I was perfectly present, but my eyes and ears were closed to truths that others heard quite clearly. When I saw or heard things that didn’t add up, I chose to call them something else. One could say it was denial. My lover wasn’t bankrupt, he had financial issues. The torrid love letters I found in my boyfriend’s desk drawer were notes from a friend. He didn’t really love his ex-wife, he loved me. The truth of abandonment and loveless love was too much to bear, so I became very, very sleepy and closed my eyes.

  My mother was convinced that, in order to solve my man problems, I should go to Mongolia. She didn’t know that she was dying when she read about the latest archaeological discoveries of the noble tyrant Genghis Khan in the New York Times and suggested I go on an archaeological dig to retrieve his artifacts and fend off ennui. I think she wanted me to get out of Florida, where I was sad, where, on her last visit, we walked along a dismal network of streets, talking about love at right angles to the sea. She had decided that despite my romantic losses, I belonged to a race of conquerors and I would find a husband among huge men on horseback who galloped off into bleak and barren plains. A good man was waiting for me in Mongolia, she said, and all I needed to do was hop a plane, sift through a pit of shards, and find him.

  Three months before she died, my mother gave me a new identity. I suddenly became “her magical daughter.” She sat in her little room in San Francisco where her voice was deteriorating from the cancer that riddled the delicate throat tissues of her esophagus. I read to her over the phone for hours and sent her books on the spirit and healing and a box of thumb-sized winged angels made from pipe cleaners and dressed in tutus. She marveled at my wandering the world, planting, restoring, and transforming myself time and time again through love affairs gone amuck. Through the years I rarely saw her but sent her what she loved most—postcards, small offerings of thought, words of love penned on the sleepless nights of my Bedouin existence. At the end, her words come back to me. The magical daughter appellation was her greatest gift, a tender bookend at the far side of our time together. The other bookend was the Hand of Fatima, of course, the talisman of protection she should have kept for herself.

  When I was forty, the man I called my true love, the Irishman, walked off with another woman while my father was dying and I had gone to take care of him. Besides the memories of eight years together, the only thing he took with him was the Brooks Brothers suit I’d given him for his birthday, so I figured he must have had somewhere pretty important to go. But he didn’t tell me where he was going, he just vanished, saying nothing except that I should read the story of Job and that I was so perfect he wanted to be me. He wasn’t reading Job, he was reading The Power of Now and The Artist’s Way and had concluded that I didn’t live in the present, so he was leaving me for a more glorious future. On his way out the door, I howled like a hyena. He stopped me in midhowl and said, “If you knew who you were, you wouldn’t be begging me to stay.”

  After my father died, I cried every night and every morning for about a year. I wanted to straighten something in the landscape or get on a horse with a brave Mongolian as he battled the wind, but instead, I woke up day after day to all the griefs I’d ever had and let them sweep me away like a riptide takes someone out to sea. I knew not to resist a riptide, so it took me; and I remembered how my mother’s bottomless grief over my father had made such a mess of her life. It occurred to me that it was better to get mad than sad, so I went to a Chinese doctor who put his fingers on my wrist and diagnosed me with broken-heart disease. I wasn’t ready to move on. That was natural, he said.

  Mine wasn’t a lighthearted, I’m-a-bit-angry kind of angry. Easy anger is the understandable fit that subsides after a few weeks while female friends act as aides-de-camp in facilitating relationship demolition work, taking down the scaffolds of he said–she said, and proclaiming every nuance a victory for the embattled feminine. In time, what is awful is laughable and what is unforgivable becomes “experience.” Easy anger merely skims the surface of pain. Hard anger, on the other hand, is when the list of things that don’t add up ceases to fit a category or subside with platitudes. Arguments like “live and learn” go nowhere. The hard anger forced me to retrieve my list of flawed love stories and summon the courage to add things up. The fact was that most of the men I’d loved since I was twenty-three had been two-timing scoundrels. It was more than just bad
luck; I was the common denominator and the stories all sounded the same.

  I could have been like many women of Rosamond’s and my mother’s generations and put a pleasant public spin on my history of deceitful men by saying that there was something good about each and every one of them. I could have pretended that everything was just fine; but the timing of the departure was more than coincidental—it seemed designed for maximum shock.

  What I came to realize was that the women in my family had self-destructed over men for three generations. They had imploded rather than exploded, and implosions hadn’t just taken them out to sea for a few months; they had killed them or otherwise driven them from their brilliant and beautiful lives. A woman was supposed to sit quietly pretending nothing had happened or walk away at midlife from the man she thought she loved. If she couldn’t talk about it, it would go away.

  After Rosamond died, her friends and relatives found ways of adapting to the wrenching, horrible fact that the woman they thought was cheerful and bubbly had suffered terribly and that she’d left them all with one hell of a final act. She hadn’t crept off into a desert arroyo and wailed like a coyote. She’d committed the biggest public fuck-you imaginable. People thought she was craz y, when, in fact, she was angry and mostly at herself for a thought that wasn’t entirely correct: she thought her life had been ruined by her abysmal choice of men. Perhaps, if she’d had the courage to tell the truth, that she’d given everything and gotten nothing, if she’d screamed that fact to the ceiling, she might have settled down. She might have been drowned out by the cackle and stories of the men and women who loved her. She might have fallen asleep to purring platitudes that ferried her through the night. If that hadn’t worked, she might have granted herself the time to float back out to sea, to feel her justifiable rage, and to let the thought of suicide pass.