The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  But women just didn’t express that kind of anger, at least proper women didn’t, so Rosamond didn’t, and when she died, Cornelia instituted a full-court press of denial, insisting on the narrow explanation of the coroner’s report. Rosamond, she announced, had simply been exhausted and had taken Benzedrine to stay awake. After keeping one up, Benzedrine could have a mean down. Case closed. Nothing to the white dress, nothing to the suicide note, nothing to the anniversary Rosamond should have spent with Big Bill, nothing to the missing diaries, nothing to the bizarre attraction and loyalty to the meanest man on Broadway. Nothing, nothing to it. Cornelia wrote to her friend Mildred Bliss at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown to thank her for the cyclamen, the extended letter, and phone call. She wrote Teddy Roosevelt, son of the president, “…what’s the use of talking about it—there it is,” insisting Teddy come up with Eleanor and his son to do some fishing in the spring.

  In the days and weeks following Rosamond’s death, Cornelia had her hands full negotiating with Bill over the care of the boys. The Pinchots had every intention of taking custody of the children, according to Rosamond’s wishes. Final negotiations proceeded apace, until, according to Gifford’s son, Gifford, something happened that would change the boys’ lives forever. One day, something came up and things turned nasty over the phone between Amos and Big Bill. Suddenly plans were dropped. No one ever discussed whether the boys were going to live with the Pinchots or the Gastons. They were most definitely going to live with Big Bill. No questions asked. Cornelia arched her back and knew these were times that demanded the finesse of a woman. She took over all communications with Big Bill. Her letters to him regarding the boys were conciliatory, even generous.

  Uncle Gifford didn’t talk about Rosamond’s death except to refer to it as a terrible tragedy. Gifford knew the best medicine was to carry on the good fight. He wrote his brother, Amos, on January 29 to congratulate him on his superb open letter to FDR and to thank him for the nice words he’d included about the Forest Service and himself. “That was mighty fine,” Gifford wrote, and signed his letter “Your loving brother.” Meanwhile, Amos’s grief at first caused temporary blindness. When he could, he responded to hundreds of condolence letters, describing his loss as irreparable and deep. Then he went back on the warpath, lambasting Franklin Delano Roosevelt with greater ferocity than ever. But he couldn’t escape from the truth, that he had lost his dearest, kindest friend on earth. Two years later, on January 24, 1940, he wrote a tribute entitled “To Rosamond” and sent it to the Herald Tribune:

  Weep not, poor soul, nor ask to know what sun

  Doth course above that broad and shining land,

  Where she finds rest, and where full rivers run

  In silent splendor to the tidal sand.

  But ride as she did ride her steed in pride

  Across the hills. And give as she did give,

  To those whom God, prejudging, has denied

  Compassion and the generous strength to live.

  She was the glow of dawn that leaps afar

  O’er fertile fields to touch the barren height.

  She was the lovely discontented star

  That leans from heaven to give to earth her light

  And each forsaken creature man or beast,

  She loved the most as it became the least. A.P.

  The day after her death, January 25, 1938, Jed Harris was reported to be “deeply shocked” at Rosamond’s death, telling reporters that he had seen Rosamond on Saturday night in Princeton, where, he said, “She looked radiant and she seemed in the best of spirits.”

  Our Town opened at the Wilbur Theatre to mixed reviews and poor attendance. It closed after one week. Amid the chaos of Rosamond’s death, Jed Harris scrambled to decide whether to rewrite the script or close the play altogether. In Boston, the play faced an uphill battle. Boston audiences knew Rosamond Pinchot. She was Rosamond Pinchot Gaston, estranged wife of the playboy grandson of the former governor of Massachusetts. What more did they need to know? Dead was dead, and tragedy was tragedy, even in the land of the stiff upper lip. Wilder wrote to his friend, the decorator Sibyl Colefax, of the Boston opening: “Audiences heavily papered. Laughed and cried. The wife of the Governor of Mass. took it on her self to telephone the box-office that the last act was too sad. She was right. Such sobbing and nose-blowing you never heard. Matinee audience, mostly women, emerged red-eyed, swollen faced, and mascara-stained. I never meant that; and direction is responsible for much of it; Jed is now wildly trying to sweeten and water down the text.”

  At the advice of Alexander Woollcott and Marc Connelly, Our Town moved to New York, where it played to an enthusiastic audience. Later that year, Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for the play, which, in turn, gave Harris the smash hit he’d been waiting for. After the play closed, however, Harris never saw another hit. Sir Laurence Olivier eventually got his revenge on Harris, claiming Harris as the inspiration behind his performance of the diabolical King Richard III.

  Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her March 1938 column that Our Town “depressed her beyond words,” which prompted Woollcott to question her “progress as a playgoer.” Quoting the late producer Charles Frohman, Woollcott suggested that sometimes it wasn’t the play that failed, it was the public, and that Mrs. Roosevelt should “eat some lettuce…take a nap and go see Our Town again.” That same month, Thornton Wilder paid a visit to Gertrude in Tucson. Though she was in no shape to do anything, she still offered to help him with various projects. Amos wrote Gertrude frequently and worried about her deteriorating health. Gertrude became depressed and told the press that Rosamond was one to make hasty decisions. Kay Francis, who stayed friendly with Big Bill, scribbled a note in her desk diary on the night Rosamond died, “Rosamond Pinchot suicide, got Bill G. on phone en route N.Y. at Cheyenne.” She took a sleeping pill and went to bed early.

  Little Billy’s grades slipped from A’s to C’s at the Green Vale School, and the Pinchots said that they were most concerned about him because he was so sensitive. Little Billy missed his mother terribly, but he didn’t want to worry anyone, so he put his mind on his puppies; but nothing could distract him, not even the attention of his classmates. Like his grandfather Amos, Little Billy developed pain in his eyes and Cornelia insisted Big Bill take him to the eye doctor, but no physical cause was found.

  Friends of Rosamond’s from Rio de Janeiro to Hollywood were grief-stricken. They sent Amos tender, ethereal poetry and the words of philosophers who tried to make sense of the senseless. Others sent donations to local charities where Rosamond had donated her time and used coats. Mrs. Craft in her little goblin’s hat in the broken-down farm high above Grey Towers wrote the family to let them know that she would always cherish the memory of Rosamond as her dearest, most loyal friend. George Cukor and David O. Selznick went on with their lives, yelling and carrying on, this time on their largest production ever, Gone With the Wind, but Cukor was dismissed after two weeks for bad behavior.

  Clare Boothe Brokaw became Clare Boothe Luce when she landed a seriously big fish, the publisher Henry Luce in 1935. She went on, in 1939, to garner wide publicity for MGM’s film version of her play The Women, a satire on the lives of bitchy socialites. But in 1944, she lost her daughter to an automobile accident, explored religion and therapy and dedicated herself to a life of Catholicism and public service, representing Big Bill’s district, Fairfield County, Connecticut, in the U.S. House of Representatives and serving as the American ambassador to Italy many years later.

  And Big Bill, who wasn’t one to waste time, went right on doing what he had always done, drinking, jumping, and sometimes marrying his women. Years later, he finally used his law degree as a strikebreaker in Stamford and ran for Congress. After a narrow loss to his opponent John Davis Lodge, who likened Big Bill’s campaign to something out of vaudeville, Big Bill married Teddy Lynch Getty, a reporter and opera singer from an elegant Greenwich family who had been reporting from Rome when she landed in one of Mussolin
i’s prisons. Big Bill met Teddy when she married one of his best friends, J. Paul Getty, and Big Bill had been Paul’s best man.

  Meanwhile, another Teddy, Teddy Roosevelt, whose father had contended with the Gastons in the ring at Harvard and the Pinchots in public life, wrote a condolence letter to Gifford from his home in Oyster Bay. He first dissected the news, then, sounding like his father, claimed Rosamond as a posthumous member of his own ideological posse. Rosamond wasn’t part of Amos’s “lunatic fringe,” but had nonetheless strayed from the pack:

  Dear Gifford,

  I was shocked to hear today on my return from the West about Rosamond. Though I knew her only slightly I liked her greatly. I saw her mainly when I was up with you and she seemed to be a dear person who had somehow got into the wrong groove in life. It is hard to phrase but I think she was in her personal standards as conservative as you and Cornelia or Eleanor and I. Then she wished to be broadminded to others and did not get the two points of view quite adjusted. Please give my love to Cornelia and don’t bother to answer this.

  Ted

  Perhaps Max Reinhardt’s telegram to Amos best captured the loss. He was, after all, the one who first discovered her:

  Do let me try dear Mr. Pinchot to convey to you my inexpressible sympathy. I have always esteemed your daughter as one of the humanly and artistically most endowed creatures and am now terribly startled and sad.

  Max Reinhardt

  But as time passed, Amos couldn’t be consoled. He spent the month of August 1942 alone in a darkened room at his uncle Will Eno’s estate, Judah Rock, on Shore Road in Westport, Connecticut. One night he locked himself in the bathroom and slit his wrists. He lost so much blood, there was nothing to do but keep him confined and sedated for the two remaining years of his life. Ruth wrote Amos’s brother, Gifford:

  1165 Park Avenue #28, N. Y.

  February 7, 1944

  Dear Gifford:

  Mary, Tony, Gifford, and I, after consultation among ourselves and with the doctors, decided against a lobotomy for Amos. Payne Whitney felt that they could no longer keep Amos and the Westchester branch of the N.Y. Hospital also refused him on the ground that he was a bed patient.

  I visited a sanitarium in Astoria which seemed unsatisfactory, revisited West Hill sanitarium, and consulted with Dr. Labriskie again about the Hartford Retreat. Hartford Retreat will still take Amos; but it still seems too far away—and so Amos will return to West Hill by ambulance tomorrow to a pleasant little sunny room in the so-called Club House. Dr. Smith will assume charge with Dr. Labriskie as constant consultant.

  I am sorry Payne Whitney didn’t pan out in the way we all hoped it might.

  Cordially yours,

  Ruth

  After Rosamond died, everyone moved on in his or her own way, but two little boys moved on when no one really knew where they were going. They grew up and took their grief into the world, spreading it here and there. My father never talked about his grief because he barely knew what happened. My father’s brother knew more because he had the diaries and the scrapbooks, but he’d never read them and would never talk about Rosamond even if he had. In a universal haste to move on, Rosamond’s story and their story had never been told.

  Amos Pinchot

  In the summer of 2000, my father called me to tell me he had only five months to live. Up until that time, I hadn’t bothered to dig up the past. After he died, I realized that no one else was going to conduct the investigation, so I was going to have to do it myself. Rosamond’s story lingered seventy years later, reverberated right in front of me. Her death was visible in generations of relatives who didn’t speak to each other, in brothers who betrayed brothers, and sisters who betrayed sisters. In the places that had been allowed to sink into dishevelment. In all the things that didn’t add up.

  BILL: 1973–2001

  One month before his forty-fourth birthday, three years after Big Bill died from alcoholism and diabetes, and thirty-five years after Rosamond had killed herself, my father sat in a rented flat in Tangier scouring the Times of London. It was time to craft his dispatch, so he pulled out Rosamond’s Remington portable typewriter and put on his enchanting Little Billy self, the five-year-old self who asked a thousand million questions. His first choice wouldn’t have been the Remington, except that he wanted to impress the recipient, Lady Diana Manners, who was said to be the most beautiful woman in Britain and had once described Rosamond as having “a strange face belonging to valleys and hills rather than gilded rooms and dance bands.”

  5, Rue Balzac

  Tangier, Morocco

  6 December 1973

  Dear Lady Cooper,

  I imagine that in your lifetime you have received hundreds if not thousands of letters from persons whom you have never met nor heard of.

  I came upon your name in the latest copy of the Sunday Times, not for the first time, for I had read excerpts from your memoirs (I think it was called) some years ago.

  However, your name, even before the newspaper articles, was quite familiar to me. I cannot place the time when this became so, but it must have been very early in my life (I am now 44).

  But, to get to the point, The Miracle often came up in conversation of my elders and I was given to understand that it was my mother that played the Madonna. Or was it the Nun, I do not know. The story was that, at about age 18, she was discovered by Max Reinhardt aboard a ship crossing the Atlantic and so captivated the producer that he cast her in The Miracle. Old photos and diaries (the latter long since vanished) show her to have been involved with persons and places German in the 20s, until she married my father in 1928. I hardly knew her, as I was just nine when she died. The rest of her life (after The Miracle) seemed to have been an anti-climax, an unsuccessful fling at Hollywood about 1934, followed by summer stock appearances during the next three years. Someone once told me she was “too tall” for the theatre, but I suspect there was a more complete explanation to it than that. Perhaps another case of “too much too soon.” I do not say this critically, for could anyone, at her age, afford to reject what suddenly came her way? Rarely, in recent years, have I met anyone who knew her, and she has remained a stranger to her son.

  So I hope you will not judge harshly this letter from a stranger, one who feels himself intimately tied to “The Miracle,” its time and its participants.

  Yours truly,

  William Gaston

  10 Warwick Avenue W2

  My dear William,

  I was devoted to your beautiful mother. All you say about Reinhardt seeing her on the ship is accurate. It must have been in 1923. We met at rehearsals. I immediately realized how right the professor was. I was engaged to play the Virgin and so was Maria Carmi, Princess Matchabelli. We were to act alternate nights. Your grandparents said that Rosamond, in that case, should only play alternate nights. They tried and failed to find another Nun for the other days so it was given to me to play her part when Maria Carmi was taking the Virgin’s role. The Nun’s was a grueling tour de force involving running up and down the huge auditorium, miles a performance. When we took The Miracle to Dortmund in Germany it was shown in a vast sort of Madison Square place. We had a motor in the corridors to get us to the entrances in time. Then your mother sprained her ankle at the dress rehearsal. I was landed with both parts twice daily. It all but killed me. She was the perfect athletic Nun—with a coltish grace of extreme youth. No amateurs like her, me, Iris Tree and many others who took these two roles ever succeeded on the stage afterwards. I didn’t try as I was married to a statesman and had a different task to deal with.

  We played in New York and over the states for three seasons but I think your mother was not on the road with us…. To my sorrow, after the performance in Dortmund I lost sight of your mother. We were both pursuing our own fates. I knew your very good-looking father, also his brother and his wife. There was a man named Rudolph Kommer—known to us as Kaetchen who looked after us all and who we were all totally devoted to. He could have told you
so much more but he like most of us are dead. He told me vaguely about Rosamond, but not much more than of her marriage, her 2 sons, her work with Reinhardt and others, her untimely end. I have photographs stuck into albums—I would so love to show them to you—do you ever come to Europe? I am so glad you wrote. Iris too is dead not so long ago. She loved Rosamond dearly. I wrote three books of memoirs under the name Diana Cooper. They were made into Penguins here also hard backs also in US—alas all out of print—the second volume will tell of all those days. You might get them second hand: The Rainbow Comes and Goes, The Light of Common Day, Trumpets From the Steep. Thank you again for your letter and putting me back into those far away adventurous days.

  Yours,

  Diana Cooper

  As far as I know, my father never went to England to meet the Madonna and to see her albums. Back in New York, my mother’s school of attorneys was circling for the kill, so he stayed on in Tangier through the 1970s, resigning himself to Morocco’s increasing Arab-ness, to its dusty plastic markets of kitchen utensils, heaps of cheap transistor radios from Taiwan, and faux Moroccan bags that never quite held up like the ones he’d bought with my mother. He had once loved most everything about Tangier, her bouillabaisse of cultures swirling through her whitewashed streets, her incomparable setting high on the haunches of North Africa, and her light that made for his prizewinning pictures. Now he thought of Tangier as a snake pit in hell, but a snake pit in hell was better than facing my mother’s attorneys whose primary mission he felt was to attach themselves to his prime asset, Rosamond’s buildings. Eventually, however, he returned to face his fate in a New York City courtroom, lost his half of the buildings to his brother, and was granted a divorce.