The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home

In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Rosamond Pinchot was hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America." At thirty-three, in a sudden, shocking, and highly public act, Rosamond took her own life, setting in motion generations of confusion in the family she left behind.

Nearly seventy years after her demise, her granddaughter Bibi received a box of more than 1,500 pages of Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a seven-year journey to make sense of the silence that surrounded Rosamond's death and to discover the grandmother she never knew. An acclaimed beauty, actress, socialite, and outdoorswoman, Rosamond became the key to Bibi's understanding of her enigmatic and adventurous father, her glamorous but painfully divided family, and herself.

Through the silent labyrinth of a brilliant but troubled family, Bibi pieced together Rosamond's life story — her magical embrace of nature, her love for two compelling but difficult men, and her circle of "on tops," intimates, and mentors, including Elizabeth Arden, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Cukor, and David O. Selznick. Bibi also discovered the tragic legacy of the women in her family, including Rosamond's cousin Edie Sedgwick and her half sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose murder in 1964 has never been solved.

As if looking in a mirror, Bibi found parts of herself in the complex, tragic, yet beautiful story of the high-spirited Rosamond Pinchot and designed a mission at midlife: to outlive the often difficult, but exuberant and passionate, lives of her ancestors.

"The life of Rosamond Pinchot Gaston has the makings of a great story. In 1926, the 20-year-old debutante was headed home from France when a Broadway producer on the ship discovered her and launched her acting career. But the same year, Rosamond also fled fame and wealth to toil at a cannery in California. 'She planned to force herself to survive without her family, her name, her past, or her bank account.' By 1927 she had returned to the stage, though her continued stardom didn't bring happiness: Rosamond committed suicide in 1938. Bibi Gaston, Rosamond's granddaughter, learned about the star only when she received a box containing Rosamond's diaries and scrapbooks. But the author fails to draw us into Rosamond's story. Gaston writes in summary rather than scenes and gives an incomplete sense of Rosamond's character: Rosamond's diaries don't always explain her motivations, such as why she took her 'hiatus' in California. Gaston also writes about her own life and how learning about her grandmother's dramatic life affected her, but the memoir aspect of the book is a distraction from the juicy part of the story. 50 b&w photos. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

People write memoirs for so many different reasons!

Bibi Gaston, a well-known landscape architect, seems to have written this one to honor the memory of her grandmother, Rosamond Pinchot, and to leach the mystery and disgrace from Rosamond's suicide, which happened years before Bibi was born. But "The Loveliest Woman in the World" also turns out to be a kind of Dreiserian treatise... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) on the corrosive uses of money and class in America and how self-destructive patterns of behavior are often handed down in families. "Awareness precedes control," the New Age adage says, and by casting a light on the events before and after her grandmother's suicide, Bibi hopes to keep these horrid patterns from cursing generations to come.

We are all born into families whose drafts of personal history have already been heavily edited. We can only know what we are told or what we figure out. Bibi Gaston always knew that her father's mother had killed herself and that no one in the family spoke of her, but only in the vague way of a little child.

One of three children, Bibi grew up in a 200-year-old picturesque old mill 20 miles outside Princeton, N.J. Her father "never went to work," she writes, "but I didn't think it strange because no one in our family ever went to work." He spent life as a world-class eccentric, never without a Moroccan bag filled with bananas and other goodies that he had brought back from his travels. He taunted his wife for the "worst sin imaginable": "accumulation of gross poundage." In 1969 she filed for divorce. An enormous battle over money began, but Bibi didn't understand where the money was. Bibi's mother barely eked out a living as a paralegal, and her father, who claimed relatives with "vast wealth," didn't seem all that well-off either. It wouldn't be until later that Bibi would realize that her Grandmother Rosamond had earned the money herself and had purchased two buildings in Manhattan that her relatives were viciously squabbling over. By 1986, when Bibi graduated from the University of Virginia, she had pretty much had it with her whole seamy, disorganized family: "I was in no hurry to leave because I didn't have anywhere to go."

The same week of her graduation, a college friend asked Bibi along to a dinner party given by novelist John Casey. As she lingered in the hallway, Bibi found a framed magazine advertisement featuring a beautiful woman, "Rosamond Pinchot (Mrs. William Gaston)," as the driver of a "New Century Hupmobile." At the dining table, John Casey surveyed Bibi and said, "She looks like a Pinchot." Through conversation that evening, it became clear that, indeed, the beautiful lady in the magazine ad was Bibi's own grandmother — the one who had scarcely been spoken of in her own home. Bibi's grandmother had been the success; Bibi's grandmother had been the one with the money. (Mrs. Casey was Rosamond's niece — a whole other story.)

It would be years before she would piece together the story. Rosamond Pinchot, Bibi learned, was the niece of Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Forest Service and governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and '30s. Rosamond's father, Amos, made his home in Grey Towers, a replica of an ancient French chateau. Teddy Roosevelt was a family friend. The young Rosamond, on an Atlantic crossing with her mother, was discovered by theatrical mogul Max Reinhardt, who asked her to star in "The Miracle," a mammoth religious pageant he was putting together for a Broadway run. Rosamond didn't have to act — just run up and down aisles a lot and look astonished. She became an instant celebrity, was dubbed "the loveliest woman in America" and from then on was stuck trying to figure out what all that meant.

Rosamond kept copious diaries, which are excerpted in the book. In them, she writes about belonging to the upper crust of Manhattan, or as she called it, the "on tops." She made a lot of money and bought those two buildings in Manhattan, a decision that would bring her descendants distress and extended drama. She was not a particularly good actress, but she went to Hollywood, where her screen test didn't pan out. Her life then took a downward turn: She was dropped from the New York Social Register in 1934. She had married a brute, "Big Bill" Gaston, with whom she had two children. But he maintained strings of girlfriends, and ultimately they divorced. Bibi realized, two generations later, that "the women in my family had self-destructed over men for three generations." Rosamond eventually began living on lettuce and buttermilk in an effort to lose weight. She went from Belle of the Ball to Hard Luck Girl. She took up with Jed Harris, the director of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," and killed herself on opening night. The ugly fight over who owned the Manhattan buildings began. Two prominent New York families — the Pinchots and the Gastons — began to crumble from within.

Bibi Gaston does a remarkable job piecing together this dramatic family history, but two questions remain: Bibi's father's younger brother is said to have acquired (somehow) those two buildings and the income from them. How did he manage that? But that's a Dreiserian question, outside the scope of this memoir. The other question: Has Bibi Gaston thrown off the family curse by writing about it? That, of course, remains to be seen.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The discovery of her grandmother's diaries has taken Gaston on a journey not only of family and home but also of celebrity, politics, death, betrayal, and, eventually, understanding and hope. Highly recommended." Library Journal

"Gaston paints a dynamic portrait of her grandmother, making liberal use of Pinchot's youthful diaries to reveal a privileged, conflicted girl...Heartfelt and accomplished..." Kirkus Reviews

When author and landscape architect Gaston discovers her grandmother Rosamond's lost diaries, scrapbooks, and letters, she embarks on a midlife journey around the world to find the unspoken truth about the tragic actress's rise and fall.

Bibi Gaston has been a practicing landscape architect for twenty years. She divides her time between New York City and Oregon's Columbia River Gorge, where, like her grandmother, she is learning to fish and tie her own flies. She has kept a diary since the age of eight.