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

I wish - in fact, I've always wished - that I could write like Patricia "Bibi" Gaston. Especially about family.Landscape architect Patricia "Bibi" Gaston digs far beyond a mere biography or memoir in The Loveliest Woman, a work of thoughtful and thought-provoking human history.Yet, like most lives seen from a distance and with the need to rely on third parties for information, crucial questions remain un-answered in this combination of personal discovery and homage to Rosamond Pinchot Gaston - the writer's grandmother, and the woman upon whom the title was bestowed.But the granddaughter's dogged and steadfast digging to get to the roots of the weeds that threatened to choke off the passions and humanity of the Pinchots - wealth, priviledge, nobless-oblige and a true sense of duty to beauty if not the soil itself - flows and undulates like the hills of Pennsylvania, through the Columbia Gorge on the other side of the country to Morocco and great gulfs of water inbetween.In revealing her grandmother's weaknesses, she reveals her own personal strengths that came, like most hearty plants, through difficult times and conditions. A little bit of sunshine goes a long way for Pinchots, apparently. Would that there had been more of it shining upon her grandmother than shadowed by her extremely bad taste in men - particularly, the "bad boy" she couldn't keep from marrying, because he was exciting and rebelious, who brought the dark clouds of the Gastons into the family mix.A great unanswered question remains: why did her grandmother kill herself? Sadness? Depression? The effects of drugs? Another failed or at least doomed relationship?There are in many, perhaps most, families secrets - people whom you'd rather not mention let alone have your friends or lovers meet, from alcoholics to schizophrenics to terminally ill relatives to just eccentrics.In many ways, then, Bibi Gaston - through writing reminiscent of Tolstoy -sheds sunshine on the darkest corners of her family's history.The writer herself raises the unavoidable speculation that even her father, Rosamond's son, may not have been the mere rootless tinkerer he appeared, but rather that other profession that finds such vague descriptions of occupation the best "cover." Some of that speculation may come from the fact Rosamond's half-sister, Mary Pinchot, was married to an early Company man and, after an alleged affair with JFK, wound up dead on the tow path near her home.Politics, passion and beauty run through this book like the Snake River, fabled for its twists and turns in which lie deep pools that are home to some of the most intelligent trout.I myself speculate that Rosamond may have been the character Rosemary in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is The Night," a companion of sorts not only because it deals with the same time period but with some similar subjects - breaking free of norms in the 1920s and 1930s, women especially experimenting with new hard-won freedoms, including the vote, and yet having some of the same problems as people today, such as infidelity and how couples survive it or don't, whether it's inherent in our species or just a lack of self control and inability to see past momentary gratification of desire to the damage it causes succeeding generations.Regardless, The Loveliest Woman is worth reading. While Rosamond is gone, her spirit lives on - and while we can't discover any more about Rosamond than her granddaughter was able to put together through dogged interviews and intrepid scouring of family and even national history archives, thanks to Rosamond, and perhaps even her eldest son, Billy Jr., and the woman who fell in love with Billy Jr. just as Rosamond fell for Big Bill, we have had the extreme pleasure of discovering Bibi.

Considering the author's extensive setting up of the mouth watering revelation about the discovery of her ill-fated Grandmother Rosamond Pinchot's personal diaries ("a thousand pages") and scrapbooks, I have to say I was disappointed that so little of it all was quoted or incorporated into the book design. Granted, Rosamond Pinchot's name is not known today and this book was more about the effects of her suicide on subsequent generations as well as the ripple effect of absentee fathers that began with her husband "Big" Bill Gaston. So perhaps pages and pages of pictures of Rosamond or her diary would have thrown the book out of key, for it is only a biography of her so much as how her life shaped the author's life (much like John Sedgwick's book "In My Blood" traced the lineage of the Sedgwick tree, which connects where Rosamond's mother Gertrude was the ill-fated Edie Sedgwick's grandmother's sister. Apparently, it was always a family worry that Edie would "turn out like cousin Rosamond", and alas, she did!)Still, the book is called "The Loveliest Woman in America" and indeed it is Rosamond's beauty that "sells" the book and creates its primary interest, so it would be nice to at least have had more pictures of her, if not more of her diaries too. In fact, I wonder if it wouldn't have been more interesting if she had just published the diary instead of this book. None the less, it is well written and interesting, and certainly better than nothing after the bewitching portrait of Rosamond in Jean Stein's "Edie" sparked an interest in the heretofore long-forgotten actress.

Thoroughly enjoyed this very well-written book by Bibi Gaston. Knew very little about Rosamond Pinchot, even though I had heard of her. She married into the Gaston family, which is in my family tree. Liked the genealogical details provided and the stories and insights into the individuals--something that is very hard for a genealogist to find--all laid out in one book. A bonus was learning of the family's interest in conservation and the work they have done to further it themselves. Thanks Bibi for putting your efforts into this very informative book.

This book was heartwrenching. I will start this off by admitting I wholeheartedly cried after completing the emotional rollercoaster you accompany the author on. I bought this expecting a straight forward biography by a writer but instead you are privy to a granddaughter's difficult journey to finding truth behind a family scandal and person nobody would discuss. Great read!

I got it, and I know the author. I haven't started the read yet, but there has been a lot of family drama and intrigue that sadly has still not ended.

Bibi Gaston brings together many talents...writer, landscape architect, historian, psychologist when she shares the account of her search for her grandmother Rosamund Pinchot Gaston. This is a remarkable book, evocatively written, an incredible story of lives, events, and synchronicities and that illustrate..... what is too strange to be fiction is fact. I congratulate Bibi Gaston with enthusiasm on a unique accomplishment...a courageous overlap of memoir and biography...captivating beyond words, full of history and detail. The author invited the reader to join her on a journey of discovery....I was honored to be a companion.

I mostly liked the beginning of the book, meaning the periond when Rosamond was alive.in the end there were too many names and too many people involved