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

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.

Read more

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.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 352 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir
  2. Robin Williams: When the Laughter Stops 1951 - 2014 Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir
  3. Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir
  4. Elizabeth Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir

“People who read The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre
  2. Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Actress and the Prince
  3. Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored
  4. Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe

“If you want more of the same (biography), start with these.”

  1. Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple
  2. Madam Valentino: The Many Lives of Natacha Rambova
  3. Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress
  4. Johnny Depp: A Modern Rebel

“If it was the memoir that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger
  2. Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman
  3. Julie Andrews: A Life on Stage and Screen
  4. Seeing Things: An Autobiography

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman
  2. Of Time and Memory: My Parents' Love Story
  3. Mother Daughter Me
  4. Ingrid: A Personal Biography of Ingrid Bergman