American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  —Thorsten Veblen

  Mrs. Nesbit kept turning over in her head the suggestion that her coveted daughter might have a more profitable career as a photographer’s model in New York City. After a few more turns, despite Florence Evelyn’s regular income posing for a satisfied spectrum of Philadelphia painters, illustrators, and sculptors, in mid-June of 1900, Mrs. Nesbit packed up her few belongings in a ratty carpet bag and set off for New York, alone, with no plan of action whatsoever, leaving her children behind once again. What she did take with her were some letters of introduction to a few well-known metropolitan artists—but she told herself that she would use them only as a last resort. In the meantime, a confused and anxious Florence Evelyn, who, for the first time since her father’s death, had felt a pleasing sensation of security, was pulled off her pedestal and shunted back to Pittsburgh to stay with family friends, while Howard was once more planted on a family farm out in Allegheny from which he had already been uprooted twice before.

  As the weeks stretched into months with no money and only a few perfunctory postcards from her mamma, a discouraged Florence Evelyn was alternately bewildered and annoyed. She wondered why she couldn’t have kept working while her mother was away, especially since her mamma took all the modeling money she had earned in the last year and a half to allegedly stir this latest pot of gilt veneer. She wondered where and how her mother was looking for a position. She wondered why the New York artists weren’t clamoring for her services, not knowing that for reasons only she knew, her mamma had felt it necessary to withhold the letters of introduction.

  Instead, whether out of fear or sheer ineptitude, Mrs. Nesbit had once again borrowed money from the “good penny,” their ubiquitous family friend Charles Holman, who was making a name for himself back in Pittsburgh, where he had positioned himself to become secretary to the Stock Exchange. At the time, Holman’s continued charity to the little Nesbit family and persistent refusal to let her mother “isolate herself in widowhood” seemed an admirable thing to young Florence Evelyn, who never wondered how it was that her mother managed to communicate with Mr. Holman but not with her or Howard as she supposedly scoured Manhattan for work, month after month.

  During one of her last sessions posing, the fetching model had begun to calculate how many hours she needed to work in order to pay back all the people her mother had “unhappily imposed upon” in the last year alone. But it now appeared that the career that had begun so unexpectedly and fortuitously was on the verge of ending just as suddenly. It briefly crossed Florence Evelyn’s mind that in a fit of reactionary perversity, her mother had sabotaged her fledgling career out of jealousy, cutting off her nose to spite her daughter’s prettier face. But at fifteen, all she could do was sit and wait and stare at the walls. And not get paid a penny for doing so.

  As of late November, Mrs. Nesbit had not found a job, although it’s anybody’s guess where she looked, how strenuously, and what type of job she looked for in the five months since leaving Philadelphia. But the intensely vibrant, swirling city that offered such glorious opportunities to so many others seemed to wrap itself around Mrs. Nesbit like a winding sheet. Thrown eventually into a state of panic, then paralysis, by the sheer impossibility of it all, with the hatchet edge of winter approaching (if the Farmer’s Almanac was accurate), after securing a second-floor, back-room apartment on Twenty-second Street, Mamma Nesbit finally sent for her refugee children. She supposed that if nothing else, they might all find positions at Macy’s department store as they had at Wanamaker’s.

  With her sixteenth birthday only three and a half weeks away, an elated Florence Evelyn went alone back to the country on money borrowed from a family friend to reclaim Howard, while a third friend provided the money for the children’s railroad tickets to New York (her mother apparently having spent all of Florence Evelyn’s earnings during her five unaccountable months in Manhattan). The trip from Pennsylvania to Manhattan, however, was far less dismal than the one to Philadelphia a year earlier. Fully revived, Evelyn recalled in later years that on the way to New York she began to foment images of a “splendid future for her and her brother.” Her mother was, noticeably, excluded from that particular vision.

  As predicted, winter in December 1900 descended like a sledgehammer. Reunited with her underdressed and overwhelmed children, according to the adult Evelyn, her mother continued to try to look for work as a designer or seamstress. Part of Florence Evelyn still believed (or hoped) naively that in New York City her mother would become a well-known designer, and that their combined efforts would finally pull the family forever beyond the relentless, grappling hands of unfeeling bank presidents, callous courts, and mustard sandwiches. But Mrs. Nesbit’s nebulous efforts proved futile. Everywhere she went, the same questions were asked.

  “Have you been to Paris lately?” Or, “Have you had experience with similar firms?”

  She had even less success than she did in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, since the impediments that had blocked her way in the other cities were magnified a thousandfold in New York. On the contrary, however, Manhattan offered exceptional head-turning possibilities for an aspiring young model of equally exceptional head-turning looks.

  Even though the three Nesbits shivered in a poorly heated room for several days, Mrs. Nesbit maintained her profoundly puzzling and inexplicable inertia regarding the letters of introduction. When it seemed she was on the verge of capitulating, she confessed to Florence Evelyn that she was simply unsure how to proceed. Moreover, she said she was worried about the propriety of her daughter becoming a New York model. Staring at her mother’s vexed expression and empty purse hanging limply on the closet door behind her, the girl asked why it was all right to pose in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia but not New York. Her mother had no answer. A day later, when the all-too-familiar press of insistent hunger squeezed them (each had only a cup of cheap java and a biscuit the entire day), Mrs. Nesbit surrendered.

  She took the Ryland Phillips photos and a letter of introduction to James Carroll Beckwith, a well-known and respected New York painter. After seeing the photographs, Beckwith said he wanted to see immediately if this “perfectly formed nymph” really existed in the flesh. The very next day, the diminutive poser and her mother came to Beckwith’s studio on Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue. The gray-haired artist was instantly struck by what one reporter would describe as “the soul of beauty trapped behind big melancholy eyes.” Beckwith was particularly affected by her haunting pubescent loveliness and the uncommon mixture of innocence and ennui in her expression that others had already noted.

  The artist took Mrs. Nesbit aside, spoke to her about the business side of posing, and said that indeed he would be very happy to use her uncommonly lovely daughter as his model. He gave his credentials, in a show of politeness, since it was obvious Mrs. Nesbit had never heard of him and knew nothing of his work or the New York art scene. Florence Evelyn listened intently from the sidelines. When Beckwith mentioned that he taught life classes at the Art Students League, the girl involuntarily gasped and waited nervously for her mother’s reaction.

  She had heard about the school while listening to conversations in the Philadelphia studios, and, true to form, when her mother understood that life classes meant “posing in the nude,” she “went to pieces.” Beckwith assured a frantic Mrs. Nesbit that he had no intention of allowing her little girl to pose like that, whereupon, in an uncharacteristic show of proactive involvement, Mamma Nesbit said she would see for herself, since she would be at all the sittings. Within a month, however, she seemed to have forgotten her pledge.

  MODELING AND MIGNON

  After only ten days in New York, Florence Evelyn was already scheduled to pose twice a week for Beckwith, whose staunchest patron was John Jacob Astor. The elderly painter expressed his concerns for her welfare and took a grandfatherly view of the sweetly inexperienced adolescent with her equally unsophisticated mother, particularly given all the dark and dodgy corners in a city where people
whispered nervously about white slavery and the less morally scrupulous routinely sought to procure images popularly known as “mignon.” These were photo postcards of barefoot, fresh-faced young women or girls in Gypsy-style or rural costumes. Only a few degrees of attitude and clothing removed from the more salacious French postcards depicting fully nude “jeunes filles” smuggled in from the Continent and circulated throughout the city’s thriving pornographic underground, mignon photos were in some ways more disturbing and subversive, disguising pedophilia as sentiment and pandering to the closeted connoisseur of “young filets.”

  When Florence Evelyn told Beckwith one afternoon soon after she had begun posing for him that she planned to seek out additional modeling work on her own (since her mother seemed incapable of finding work but moaned incessantly about their not having enough money), the artist raised his hands in dismay.

  “You are not the sort of girl,” he cautioned, wagging his finger, “that should go knocking at studio doors.”

  He offered to give her some new letters of introduction to respectable artists in New York, men whom he described as “eminently safe.” As he went to a dilapidated desk to search for pencil and paper, the girl’s thoughts reached back to the Pittsburgh boardinghouse and the unsavory prospect of asking for the rent from boarders at her mother’s urging. Thanks to Beckwith’s intervention, however, the teen soon found herself posing for a number of legitimate artists, including Frederick S. Church, Herbert Morgan, and Carl Blenner, without having to knock on any strange men’s doors.

  At first her workload was fairly light, and the poses Florence Evelyn was asked to hold were not particularly difficult. With her “liquid brown eyes,” “rosy Cupid’s bow mouth,” “softly rounded translucent shoulders,” “wildly abundant tresses,” and “the most perfectly modeled foot since Venus,” Evelyn’s Pre-Raphaelite looks were indeed an artist’s dream in the flesh. As she eased back into life in the studios, within a scant few months, the “girl from the provinces” began to attract enough attention to become a particular favorite of the New York artists (just as she had in Philadelphia). She was soon in demand by a significant number of painters, sculptors, and illustrators.

  One day a reporter came down to the boardinghouse to interview Miss Florence Evelyn, notable as the first of what would soon become a regular routine in her life. Her mother showed him the Philadelphia photographs, one of which was promptly printed in one of the New York evening papers. When the Sunday American published two big pages of photographs, the short fuse of modern celebrity was ignited. Even so, at such a young age and with so little knowledge of how the world worked, the adult Evelyn would come to believe after some reflection, “I do not know that to be brought into the public eye so young is the happiest of experiences.” Nor was it something her mother was equipped to deal with, any more than she had been regarding her husband’s hopeless finances.

  Being interviewed by a bona-fide New York reporter was “a novel experience that first time,” the adult Evelyn wrote in 1934, and slightly less satisfying each time after that, especially when she realized that her mother concealed from her how much money they had and how much she was paid for such frequent “exposure.” As for Mamma Nesbit, she gradually adapted to her role as “manager” of her daughter’s career, despite a complete and consistent lack of business sense and only intermittent concerns about the possible impropriety of life “in the studios” for a girl barely sixteen years old.

  According to Evelyn thirty years later, when she began her career in New York City, “in the main they wanted me for my head. I never posed for the figure in the sense that I posed in the nude.” As her mother would tell reporters, “I never allowed Evelyn to pose in the altogether as did Trilby”—although there is suggestive evidence to suggest otherwise. Evelyn herself describes a painting of her, done by Frederick Church in July 1900, that was hung in the Lotos Club in New York: “[I was] an Undine with water lilies in [my] hair, running down my bare limbs, [with] two striped tigers at [my] flanks.” Another painting, done by Carroll Beckwith in 1901, shows a decidedly demure but partially nude young woman, her hair piled loosely on her head, in an open kimono with one breast exposed; the young subject stares almost straight ahead. It is titled Miss N.

  While the tactic of putting a barely clad young female model in a diaphanous classical costume, surrounding her with cherubs in some spurious mythical setting, or laying her out in an “Oriental posture,” helped both avant-garde and academic artists circumvent middle-class prudery (and sometimes avert censure), to those not interested in serious or high art, a studio model’s real or thinly veiled nudity and seductive poses were either good for cheap titillation or an abomination. Such was the case with the obvious suggestiveness of many of young Florence Evelyn’s poses, intensified by the low-cut, flimsy, or minimalist but strategically placed drapery she wore where less was significantly and scandalously more.

  In a number of pictures, Florence Evelyn gives the appearance of one “just budding into girlhood,” and at times a distinctly peaches-and-cream American girlhood. Another of Beckwith’s paintings, depicting a demure and comely Evelyn in a long-sleeved, high-necked black and red velvet dress is simply titled Girlhood. However, despite her Irish-Scottish-English ancestry, her natural coloring—brunette hair, heavy-lidded dark eyes, alabaster skin, and full-lipped pouty mouth—struck all who saw her as strangely foreign and decidedly Oriental, a loaded word that conjured up “naughty visions” for Americans at the time. As a result, she was frequently asked to model in the garb of “an Eastern girl in Turkish costume, all vivid coloring, with ropes and bangles of jade” about her exposed neck and bare arms.

  The striking exoticism in her images inspired men and women alike to make comparisons with legendary beauties of the ancient past. She was Venus, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra all rolled into one sultry and precociously erotic package that belied her years. She was, according to various reporters, Psyche, the Sybil, or “a Siren out of Homer.” Struggling to find the words to describe the hypnotic effect she had on those who saw her newest pictures in his case, one photographer hit upon it exactly—her look was “innocence and experience combined.” She exuded the egglike virginal fragility of Shakespeare’s Ophelia one moment and the brazen sensuality of wicked Salome the next. It was mere speculation on the part of observers which pose might be closer to the truth.

  To most who saw her pictures and photographs, Florence Evelyn appeared at times oddly detached, her expression tantalizingly inscrutable, enough to cause more than one reporter to refer to her as “the Little Sphinx.” Her calm, unflinching gaze was, to the more reactionary, “a bold and impudent coquettish stare” that affected observers in the same way it had unnerved those who saw her when she was a young child. For most, trying to read something into the little Sphinx’s eyes was a perplexing enterprise. It was like looking at a mirage—something of the depths might appear visible but was indistinct and tantalizingly beyond reach, perhaps even illusory. The serenely enigmatic expression on her face intrigued observers, most of whom assumed it was a look she was trained to give. In reality, it was as natural to her as breathing.

  As a result, in keeping with the upbeat tempo of the times, like Cinderella stepping from the pages of her storybook, the little girl from the outskirts of the sooty city rose seemingly overnight from deprivation and obscurity to become what one reporter called the “glittering girl model of Gotham.” Very quickly after that first interview, a steady stream of newsmen came around the boardinghouse, anxious to have a photograph of “Miss Florence Nesbit,” the girl destined to “flash into public view as a famous beauty.” This was also the beginning of some confusion on the part of reporters and the public. Since she was Florence Evelyn and her mother was Evelyn Florence, a number of times the names were confused, with captions that read Miss Evelyn Florence or Miss Florence Nesbit. Broadway Magazine published a two-page spread with the Phillips photographs, but with two different names, as if Evelyn were her own twin.r />
  There was also continued confusion and speculation about how old she was, since her mother invariably increased Evelyn’s age by two or three years to skirt the thorny issue of child-labor laws. But as Florence Evelyn’s popularity rose, the prickly question of her age piqued the curiosity of more than one secret admirer—and sent a red flag up for the vigilance societies, particularly the one run by a bulldozing man who had been a Civil War general and who saw Manhattan as little more than “Gotham and Gomorrah.”

  COMSTOCKERY

  Sex. The stark impropriety of living, breathing models stripped of their previously mandated flesh-colored body stockings. The dubious avant-garde practices of the Art Students League. In fact, the entire question of what defines art as opposed to pornography (particularly if children were involved) was but one battle being waged in the explosive culture wars of the newest century, where, according to Evelyn years later, girls like herself were “sacrificed by straight-laced morality on the altar of mid-Victorian prudery.” It was a decade where the fanatically puritanical still covered piano legs so as not to expose “too much limb,” while at the same time newly coined euphemisms for a woman’s private parts proliferated, including such colorful phrases as daisy den, ivory gate, Cupid’s crown, and Bluebeard’s closet. Like the ancient serpent, the Ouroboros, with its tail in its mouth, the age-old bugaboo of sex wound itself up-, mid-, and downtown in self-propelled vicious circles—and inevitably coiled around Florence Evelyn.

  When it came to sex, the “Naughty Oughts” were of course, for many, a dim and confusing time. Boys were dressed as girls when very young, and girls played boys onstage. One of the most popular productions of the day was J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the story of the boy who never wanted to grow up and become a man—and wouldn’t when played by actress Maude Adams. The whole subject of birth control was taboo in a society where “prophylactic” meant a popular brand of toothpaste. Information, medical or otherwise, regarding sexual activity was virtually nonexistent for women (it would take another ten years for Margaret Sanger to begin her campaign to educate the public about such things, and she would face not only withering criticism but the constant threat of imprisonment). Men, meanwhile, did have contraceptives available to them in the form of sheepskin condoms, but only if they were urbane enough to be “in the know” and willing to procure them “under the counter.” Otherwise, they relied on the ancient methods of withdrawal, dumb luck, abstinence, and perhaps prayer to prevent unwanted pregnancies.