Bibi Gaston's The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home is a compelling multigenerational biography of a remarkable though troubled family.
In 1926 when Rosamond Pinchot was only nineteen she was discovered on board the RMS Aquitania by theatrical producer/director Max Reinhardt. She had been on a shopping trip to France with her mother, preparing for her coming out party later that year when Reinhardt spotted her. It was serendipitous as she had originally been due to travel on another ship but at the last minute had been diverted to the Cunard Line. It sounds a little bit like a fairy tale, doesn't it? To be spotted in a crowd of people by someone who wants to make you a star?
Tall and attractive, Rosamond was exactly the face Reinhardt was looking for to star in his Broadway production of "The Miracle". The play was a huge success both in the US and abroad and Rosamond became the next "It" girl. One newspaper named her "the loveliest woman in America". She was sought after by fans and the press even when she spent a year in California trying to get by on her own skills without the help of her famous name or family connections. Some fairy tales don't have happy endings, though.
Born into a wealthy and distinguished family that included governors and an uncle who was head of the U.S. Forest Service, she was destined to lead the life of a socialite before she became famous, no doubt ready to enter the marriage market. She was athletic and extremely close to her father who shared her love for the outdoors. Her fame came fast and furious, but in the end it was short lived. In 1938 at the age of thirty-three, Rosamond's life ended in tragedy when she committed suicide. Estranged from her husband she left behind two young sons and many questions that would take decades to answer, if they could be answered at all.
Bibi Gaston, Rosamond's granddaughter, knew very little about her, only that she had been beautiful and she had killed herself. When dining one evening with friends, she noticed a framed photo from a magazine on the wall of a beautiful woman advertising the new Hupmobile. It was Bibi's grandmother Rosamond. Later when Bibi was given a box full of Rosamond's diaries containing over 1,500 pages of her most intimate thoughts, it would be the beginning of a seven-year odyssey to discover the answers to not only Rosamond's life but her father's as well. Carrying on Rosamond's legacy, Bibi's father abandoned her mother and their family when she was very young.
"Within the first few moments of opening Rosamond's box, I knew that understanding her life would help me to understand mine. I couldn't say why at the moment. Perhaps it was hope. Hope that her diaries might explain the warring tribes and the hoarding of furniture. Hope that I would understand all the straightening, the abysmal choice of men, all my moving about. The Buddhists say that a suicide affects a family for ten generations. Understanding Rosamond's life and death seemed to me like a prerequisite to hope. Or maybe it was hope."
Sometimes it seems that self-destructive behavior is passed down from generation to generation. Bibi was seeking answers to why her own life had followed the same troubled and uncertain trajectory as her relatives. Each generation seemed to appear to make the same mistakes over and over--failed marriages and empty relationships, estrangement from families and siblings. Bibi was determined to change the course her ancestors had set forth.
I found this to be an engrossing read about one woman's search for answers to a past no one seemed willing to talk about. It was also a fascinating look at an era long gone, particularly Hollywood in the 1920s. Some things never seem to change, however, as even then Rosamond was hounded about her looks and weight and pressured into following fad diets and getting injections. The people she hob-knobbed with reads like a veritable who's who list of everyone who was anyone--Eleanor Roosevelt, George Cukor, David O. Selznick, Elizabeth Arden, Katherine Hepburn, Dorothy Parker to name just a few.
Bibi Gaston covers a lot of ground in her biography (too much for me to try and convey to you here). She weaves the stories of the disparate lives of her family together seamlessly into one whole even though the strings attaching husbands to wives and parents to children were broken long before she ever knew it. There were parts that were heartbreaking to read, particularly when she talks about her reconciliation with her father and of course the subsequent search for who her grandmother was. She liberally sprinkles the narrative with quotes from letters and Rosamond's diaries, though to be honest I wouldn't have minded hearing Rosamond's voice a bit more. Still, I found it to be well written and highly readable.