The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  I wondered if the diaries might be the longest suicide note in history. Day by day, I discovered the opposite. At first, the names were a mystery. Who was George? Who was Liz? Who was Amos? As it turned out, George was George Cukor, the legendary director and Rosamond’s most lovably annoying friend. Liz was the coy, irrepressible Elizabeth Arden. And Amos was Amos Pinchot, my great-grandfather, crusader for those less fortunate and, I was proud to learn, a man who defined Progressive politics in America. There was Mrs. Roosevelt who was, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin, who called Rosamond by her first name. As I read on, I could hardly believe what a life Rosamond had lived in so few years. Was this indeed my grandmother? I had thought the only thing she’d ever done was to have committed suicide. I soon discovered the record of a fascinating life, but every bit as much of a surprise, I recognized myself in her words.

  Rosamond’s diary was her best friend, ever-present, and nonjudgmental. Like Rosamond, I picked her “book” up and put it down and laughed and cried. I copied certain passages. I went to sleep with special pages on my pillow thinking I would discover in sleep what Rosamond meant by the things she wrote. I liked Rosamond and then disliked her. Sometimes I felt embarrassed for her or angry with her and couldn’t read on. She could be generous and compassionate, then nasty and critical. She judged her mother ruthlessly and evaluated her children the same way. She hated the Jews, she loved the Jews; she was disparaging toward people who were fat, yet she struggled with her own weight. She wrote about her cars, her Grasshopper and another she called the Green Bug. She wrote about loving mean, impossible men and knew that she could be mean and impossible herself. The torture of life with Big Bill was as bad as the torture of life without him. Her life was equal parts nirvana and a hell realm of hungry ghosts, and like me, she found the need to record it. Strangely enough, not one of her friends knew she kept a diary.

  I discovered that the diaries themselves had been on quite a journey. From Rosamond’s desk they made their way into Big Bill’s clutches in 1935. He read what he needed to, and then the diaries made their way back to 9 East Eighty-first. But it is unclear when and whether he returned them all or just some of them. Amos wrote a friend that he retrieved photographs and her diaries from 9 East Eighty-first Street following her death, so it was possible that Big Bill returned them the day of her funeral, this time as an invited guest. On March 16, 1938, just a week after Mary Pinchot Meyer wrote her poem “Requiem” in honor of her half-sister, Mary wrote in her own diary that Amos and Ruth had the diaries:

  Apparently Dad has asked Mother to read R.’s diary and take out parts from it that she thinks people (the family) would like to read. I think this is a very wrong plan, in fact it shocks me that they would even suggest such a thing. I know that R. wouldn’t want it done, and I don’t think anyone has a right to so much as glance through what she has written. They should be destroyed at once, and it worries me that they aren’t. Mother has gone on reading R.’s diary and hasn’t argued with Dad about it. I suppose she is right. He said that he just couldn’t bring himself to burn them because they are so much a part of Rosamond and if he feels that way, I guess they should be kept. After all, it is more important to think of those who are still alive than the wishes of one who doesn’t live anymore. But I know that she would want them destroyed.

  Rosamond’s diaries had somehow survived, except for the years 1935 to 1938. At some point, they’d been handed off to James Gaston who had them for nearly thirty years, barely telling anyone. When I asked him who had given them to him, he said he couldn’t remember. Perhaps it was Dr. Giff, the governor’s son, or Kay Halle, a longtime friend of Rosamond’s and Big Bill’s who, some believe, completed the scrapbooks Rosamond started for the boys. It struck me as strange that my uncle had hired someone to write a book about his mother and her diaries but could not remember where they had come from.

  That fall, I unpacked the contents of my father’s green garbage bags. Here again were artifacts from a life I knew vitually nothing about: report cards from the Green Vale School, ribbons from the Tucson Kennel Club, dispatches to Richard St. Barbe Baker and his antidesertification caravanserai, and the correspondence to and from his father over Rosamond’s money. There was the manuscript for the guidebook, impeccably typed on onion skin, fragile now; there were photographs of foreign women, pages from my mother’s diaries, proof of her unhappiness, swiped during their divorce. And finally, the correspondence he initiated with Lady Diana Manners, wanting to know, at forty-four years old, about his mother.

  At forty-four, I sat surrounded by the information that my father sought and, for many reasons, never found. For month after month, I drew up the master plan of three generations. Each draft showed Rosamond at the center of a family labyrinth. At the same time, I began contracting with an architectural firm in New York City and often went to visit my aunt Gail at Seventy-fifth Street where my uncle kept Rosamond’s scrapbooks and the original diaries on the floor of the basement. It was better than the airplane hangars or the dusty closets, I suppose, but sometimes the basement flooded, so, while there, I put the diaries in a plastic box. One night, very animated, my uncle emerged from a crammed storeroom with a shoebox of curling, crumbling photographs. While he tossed the photographs around like a salad, a small piece of yellowed notepaper spun to the floor. I picked it up and read it out loud:

  Mon Washington DC

  Sept 28, ’36

  It has been more than six months since I last wrote regularly in the book. Now I shall make an effort to take it up again. That day that the Rat went into 9 East 81 St. and stole my safe box with all my diaries took them.

  I knew that the note explained Rosamond’s missing diaries. “The Rat” was Big Bill. He hadn’t just taken her diaries, he’d also taken the evidence that he’d taken them. Her husband hadn’t just been a bad husband, the Gastons weren’t just bad for the blossoming of the soul, Big Bill had been a thief and had tried to ruin her.

  His family hadn’t done much better. They’d lived for decades with Rosamond’s diaries on the floor of a flooding basement, removing photographs from her scrapbooks. No one in the family asked why she had killed herself or how one of her children had come to live in the properties she’d bought with her earnings from The Miracle, and the other hadn’t.

  That night, I left Rosamond’s property and headed down Seventy-fifth Street toward Central Park, inconsolable at generations of selfishness. I knew that Rosamond wasn’t selfish and that she never could have imagined or supported such inequity. The light was fading through the elms on Fifth Avenue. I turned up Fifth and passed the southwest Metropolitan Museum of Art landscape where the transverse road dives deep into Manhattan schist, where I’d missed my father by ten minutes that became ten years. It was a beautiful pink-sky night in Manhattan. The streets were cool and the traffic had almost completely disappeared. There wasn’t a soul in sight when I paused, lost in reverie, and looked up to see that I was at the corner of Eighty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, the very corner where a throng of women had gathered, as inconsolably as I, almost seventy years before.

  I saw my father wandering Manhattan several times that summer, or at least I thought I did. The first time, he was at a deli counter staring out a window. The second time, he was darting in and out of a crowd at Grand Central Station like it was the medina. I followed him for blocks, thinking about what I’d do if it was actually him and he hadn’t died after all. Later that summer, I saw him jogging around the Central Park reservoir where he and Rosamond, separated by forty years, ran to keep in shape. I was in heels so I couldn’t keep up and I watched him disappear out of sight. I supposed it was just my way of missing him and my habit, like Great-Uncle Gifford and Rosamond, of longing and never letting go.

  Looking for Rosamond and my father, I was slowly rediscovering my own life. Over the next two years, I continued to expand the sarcophagus of family memorabilia. In the summers, I’d visit Milford and spin up to Maine, enacting an abbreviat
ed version of my father’s annual pilgrimage. In the spirit of Rosamond, I discovered the joys of Medjool dates and the low-calorie delights of buttermilk and lettuce. I threw back Manhattans on autumn days in the theater district. I undertook modern dance and learned how to stand on my head. In the winter of 2006, I was traveling back and forth between architectural offices in Manhattan, a French château in Beverly Hills, and my rug in Colorado. I became quite fond of one client, a former Israeli tank driver, who’d fly me to Los Angeles to talk about fruit trees and roses. When I arrived at his offices, he insisted I sample trays of elegant chocolates for his new Belgian chocolate boutique. We’d talk about his koi pond and debunk shubunkins, puny little koi wannabes inappropriate for the gods.

  During the day, I was busy, but in the evenings I holed up at the swank Beverly Hilton where movie stars and wealthy blue dog politicians sashayed about the lobby. Soon enough, I felt like a spy, although a spy who left a trail of mud leading to her hotel room. Sometimes I was lonely and the decadence of Beverly Hills made me sad so I’d send for the car and cruise the neighborhoods, top down, nibbling dates at dusk, when the world was pink and Rosamond was hovering in the nebulae. Before Cinderella could set her hooks in me, I’d wander up to the Hollywood Bowl or through the streets lined with jacaranda and over to Venice Beach, where Big Bill’s last wife Teddy Getty Gaston lived. At ninety-two, Teddy was insistent, “Your grandfather came from good stock, the best, he was an extraordinary man. I should know, I married him!” she crooned. “If he hadn’t been such a drinker I would have stayed married to him. But your parents, it seems, did you a disservice. They loved each other, they were perfect for each other. Look at you, I’m proud of you. I was the same, parading around alone and brave. People thought Paul helped me financially, but the truth was, I did it all myself. He made me pay him back, for Christ sakes!” She showed me the canceled checks, it was true. It seemed to me that all the Gaston women who’d amounted to anything had done it by themselves.

  One night, I headed over to the UCLA Film Archive where I ordered up a copy of The Three Musketeers and saw Rosamond onscreen for the very first time. She was as beautiful as I’d imagined, but I knew she hadn’t aspired to a film career. She’d wanted to bring Amos to California to lie down by the sea. Like my mother, she’d wanted to take her children camping, beat it for the West, to escape the Gastons. She had sold her “little beauty” to do it. First to Liz Arden, then to Selznick, and it just went on and on until finally, she had nothing left to give or to sell. That left an opening in which Jed Harris came along to finish her off. I left the screening room wiping my tears.

  That night, instead of going back to planning my client’s roses and fruit trees, I perched myself in the lobby to watch the sashayers arrive in their elegant sports sedans, jewels, and high-flying agendas. From the diaries, I’d learned that Amos had told off J. P. Morgan on his yacht and that Rosamond wore no jewelry at all. In my bones, I knew what killed her. It wasn’t just her abysmal choice of men. Certainly she’d lost Big Bill, but he had become like a bad habit, and Harris, a mean and temporary fix.

  But before either of them, she’d lost herself in Joseph Conrad’s “aimless masquerade.” Perhaps her thoughts were to be found in the words of her frontispiece of 1926: “When once the truth is grasped that one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown, the attainment of serenity is not so far off.” By the end of her life, she questioned who she was and whether she had “lost that old delight in nature.” Not just any nature, Milford. She knew there are landscapes of memory, places of belonging, where we become who we really are, bold and lovely, masculine and feminine. She’d just allowed herself to forget:

  Monday, June 12, 1933 Milford

  Toni (Frissell), Billy and I went down to the Devil’s Kitchen. Billy slipped on the pine needles. He was very courageous. The sun was hot by the water. Toni stripped and showed her amazing pregnant figure. Billy worked seriously taking stones from one side of the stream and piling them on the opposite bank. Once he fell and was quite angry. I swam up the Gorge to where the water comes through a gap two and a half feet wide. Hanging on to the rock in that bubbly live water I thought how like the sea it was. After lunch, Father’s piece on Walter Lippman was read by Cornelia…. Oscar flew around and lighted on the very top of the cedar tree. Strange place for a parrot. At 7:30 Toni and I went to fish. The stream was at its loveliest. All the Spring freshness is still there. I stood in the middle of the stream and cast a little spider fly. Four nice trout were foiled. A whip-poor-will began and the other birds gradually quieted down. It grew cool. The night smells that I love so became noticeable. Toni drove the car home. I walked in the darkness. There were stars and fireflies. I went through the meadow where laurel shone white in the darkness.

  Through Rosamond’s diaries, I was reminded of something I knew all along and, like her, forgot. I was always searching for a home. I had once discovered a surrogate landscape, a landscape I remembered as a child, with water, friends, and a good dose of history. At the edge of the Oregon desert, where Lewis and Clark once camped and set out to calculate their “stupendious” cascades, where my mother celebrated her initial opening to the Pacific, I discovered, or rediscovered, a home I’d known all along. After seven years of piecing together the scattered story of my family, I went back, and there by a mossy trout stream with an old family name, Mill Creek, I made a decision. Part desert arroyo, part mossy canyon. Mill Creek was antidote. Rosamond never bought her arroyo property and my mother never opened her bookstore in Oregon. Certain, finally, that I would outlive the tragic lives of the women in my family, I could finally settle down, maybe someday open a bookstore, maybe learn to fish in the valley my father called Paradise.

  In October of 2006, I flew to Florence, land of Bernard Berenson’s “wee homunculus.” I boarded a midnight train for Salzburg where, the next morning, I rented a bicycle and spun through the narrow streets of the Altstadt, the old city, in a white dress, without a headlight and without a map. I wandered through the markets, churches, and cemeteries tucked between Monchsberg Mountain and the broad Salzach River, through Max Reinhardt Platz, past the headquarters of the Salzburg Festival, and found myself in a spectacular arcaded theater carved out of the cliffs. I recognized the space as if in a dream. I had discovered the “Felsenreitschule,” the riding school of the Archbishop Leopold, where Rosamond had performed in the summer of 1923. It was the inspiration for the lithograph Reinhardt had given her and my father gave me on his last Christmas.

  The next morning, the sky was the color of the Mediterranean and the clouds flirted with the broad tip of Untersburg Mountain. I woke early and pedaled through the open meadows south of the city, down long allées of sycamores and around small, tidy castles. Thinking about Rosamond and Max, I finally arrived at the little lake, the Leopoldskroner Weiher, and Max’s brilliant white palace, the Schloss Leopoldskron.

  On that day in October in Salzburg, I felt closer to Rosamond than ever. She was at her best, free and mobile. She had loved deeply, and thought she would receive love in return. Guided by countless acts of generosity, she was remembered as vibrant and fully alive. But living vulnerably and loving bravely offered no guarantee. Still she died on her own schedule and, some might say, regardless of others. The effects of what she did would last ten generations unless her family was willing to learn the language of woundedness, and willing to discuss one of the most painful acts the human family will ever know, suicide. In the second generation, pain like that doesn’t go away. In the third, the story is forgotten but the event still reverberates, manifesting in unconscious acts of selfishness and meanness. I’d come to think of a suicide like a diaspora, or a famine. For the ones left behind, there is a sense of unending privation. No matter the harvest, there is never enough.

  I will never know exactly what it was like to be Rosamond Pinchot but I had come to believe that the soul desires peace, and peace is not only an internal affai
r, but an external one, found in the bones and flesh of the world, in wildness, in deep and adequate sleep, in exercise, in earth and duff, in potatoes and alyssum and sunflowers, in plays that torpedo. It can be found everywhere, even in the intermissions between sad, obsessive lives. Rosamond loved the Big Bills of the world, though what they had to give was far from simple or perfect. Gifts come in unlikely packages. Big Bill, my grandfather, as wild as the sea and as placid as a pool, didn’t symbolize her deeper longing; he was her deeper longing. She and I longed to make sense of that which is senseless, that which comes and goes, of what is wild, dangerous, and rare.

  In the afternoon, a young marketing woman took me on a personal tour of the Schloss, now the headquarters for the Salzburg Seminars, a retreat for high-level executives, economists, and politicians. After the tour, she left me to my own devices, so naturally, I felt it my duty to snoop. I wandered from the paneled library, now full of scholars, through mirrored banquet rooms of kibitzing executives, to Max’s cozy study where I found myself alone remembering that Max had advised Rosamond and her fellow actors to “follow the magic of one’s life course.”