TITLE: The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home
SPEAKER: Bibi Gaston
EVENT DATE: 03/17/2009
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 62 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
Rosamond Pinchot was dubbed "the loveliest woman in America" at 23, yet 10 years later she was dead by her own hand. An acclaimed actress, socialite and sportswoman, she was the toast of Broadway and Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. Bibi Gaston, who took a remarkable journey to discover the truth about her forgotten grandmother, discussed and signed "The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home."
Speaker Biography: Shortly after the death of her father in 2001, Bibi Gaston received a cardboard box filled with more than 1,500 pages of her grandmother's diary. Thus began Gaston's quest to tell the story of Pinchot and the tumultuous account of her life. Not until Gaston began to read the diaries did she realize just whom Rosamond Pinchot was and what she might have meant to her family had she lived. "In hundreds of images, her look was timeless," Gaston writes. "They show her in silhouette against the Manhattan skyline, under Hollywood's fabulous houses of skylights, fishing in the streams of Pennsylvania and walking her dog on the Upper East Side as though it was yesterday. Not only was she a celebrity, she was also a remarkable sportswoman and equestrian. She had dined with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis and George Gershwin. So why had no one in my family ever talked about her or shared even a single detail of her life? Rosamond seemed to have slipped off the edge of the world. There are thousands of ways of vanishing; a family's silence is one of them."
Related Webcasts
SERIES: Books & Beyond
