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

Bibi Gaston, a practicing landscape architect, has kept a diary since the age of eight.

Her name was Rosamond Pinchot: hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America," she was a niece of Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot; cousin to Edie Sedgwick; half sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK's lover; friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and Elizabeth Arden. At nineteen she was discovered aboard a cruise ship, at twenty-three she married the playboy scion of a political Boston family, but by thirty-three she was dead by her own hand.

Seventy years later, her granddaughter, a noted landscape architect, received Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a search to discover the real Rosamond Pinchot.

Unearthing what appeared to be a glamorous fairy-tale existence, Bibi Gaston discovers the roots of the ties that bind and break a family, and uncovers the legacy of two great American dynasties torn apart by her grandmother's untimely death. This is a tale of three lives and five generations, mothers and grandmothers, longing, holding on and letting go, men, beauty, diets, and letting beauty slip. This is the story of how we make the most of our brief, beautiful lives.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

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 on the corrosive uses of money and class in America and how self-destructive patterns of behavior are often handed down in families…Gaston does a remarkable job piecing together this dramatic family history

1 The Miracle 3

2 The Landscape of Memory 52

3 A Chronology of Chaos 75

4 A Synonym for Love 99

5 The King of Jeeps 148

6 Paradise 177

7 Our Town 199

8 The Topography of the Brain 249

9 Beauty Sessions 300

Afterword 313

Acknowledgments 325

Notes 331

Bibliography 337