American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  women to always have at least one hand free to liberate themselves from the tenacious ice and rubbish trapped within their treacherous trailing folds.

  In 1901, being in fashion inevitably meant being incapacitated and in pain from head to toe, the result of “induced pathological features” for all aspiring models of “pecuniary decency.” All, that is, but the nation’s newest model, who would help to change the feminine ideal. In spite of her steady employment, Florence Evelyn could not afford most of what she modeled, and unless it was necessary for a photo session, the petite sixteen-year-old had no need for the confinement of corsets, bras, or layers of underclothing; she was happily unrestrained by the contraptions of comeliness and “vulgar tradition,” which she nonetheless helped sell to an eager female population.

  THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

  Within a short time, Florence Evelyn (or some part of her) was selling everything from subscriptions for the Woman’s Home Companion, Fairy soap, ocelot furs, Lowney’s chocolates, Sunbonnet Oleo, and sewing machines to Rubifoam dentifrice, an early form of powdered toothpaste, which she admitted in later years “tasted like gritty talcum.” Nor did it take long for the girl who had begun her career assuming childish heavenly poses to find herself on beer trays, cigarette and tobacco cards, celluloid pin backs, cigar labels, advertising fans, wallpaper, pyrographic pillows, playing cards, and pocket mirrors with the unfortunate “good for ten cents in trade” often written around the circumference of the mirror encircling her photo. Given out mainly in hotels from New York to Wyoming, these were innocent enough advertising tokens, although many of the men who were the predominant patrons in the hotels kept them in secret places, hidden from wives and girlfriends.

  As part of her newly minted celebrity, Florence Evelyn also became the first recognizable and bona-fide pinup girl. She was a calendar girl for such notable entities as Prudential Life Insurance, Swift’s Premium, Pompeian face cream, Youth’s Companion, and Coca-Cola, for which the images of her marketed for public consumption were of the maidenly variety.

  Another natural place for her image was sheet music, which was itself a kind of mania at the turn of the century. But while imaginary Daisys and Rosies had their place at pianos in countless households, the very real Florence Evelyn had songs written especially for her by lovesick admirers who paid to have their pieces published. One was Vincent Spadeo, who wrote the cleverly named “Nesbit Waltz,” whose sheet music had on its cover a photo of Evelyn identified as the “Kimono Girl.” Another piece was written by a smitten physician from New Jersey and titled “Love’s Pleading,” also featuring a photograph of an angelic-looking Florence Evelyn and published in a Sunday supplement.

  Looking back on the first months of her mercurial success at such an impressionable age, Evelyn recalls in her memoirs that her youthful dreams were still vague at that point, and nothing in particular grabbed her attention beyond the happy accidental career that landed her in the Garden of the New World. While she was not “insensible to the possibilities of a career on the stage,” as she described it, her “enthusiasm was for the present.” One thing she seemed sure of, however: given the limited sphere of influence and choices that she said bound women “like so many Chinese feet,” she was determined she would never become a domestic drudge, a wifey, or a drone. As she describes it, by sixteen she “already look[ed] back upon the life domestic with the interests and curiosity which the mountaineer reserves for the plains he has quitted.” She had seen what a dead end that proved to be for her mother and her wretchedly extinguished spirit. And so she began to nurture the notion that she should go on the stage.

  As Florence Evelyn’s father became a fond memory and a more remote presence in his daughter’s mind, initially Mamma Nesbit seems to have attempted to make up for that void by becoming overwhelmingly, stiflingly present, relentlessly peddling and protecting her daughter (badly), sheltering her (badly) even as she exploited her youthful looks. But contrary to popular myth, Mrs. Nesbit was not the archetypal ambitiously shrewd and calculating stage mother, which meant that her daughter’s accidental career seemed to move forward with its own careless and inadvertent momentum.

  As the weeks passed, Florence Evelyn’s theatrical urge buzzed in and out of her bonnet. By the fall of 1901, the model, her mother, and Howard were all living off her still small but respectable wages in a boardinghouse on West Thirty-sixth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Although Florence Evelyn’s earnings were more than what the three Nesbits combined had made at Wanamaker’s, they were hardly enough to pull them all safely out of the shadow of sometimes mean and meager survival in the costly life of Manhattan. Nor were they likely to fund Evelyn’s dreams of becoming one of the “smart set.” Howard became an increasingly infrequent inhabitant and “lost soul,” being sent away usually for at least two weeks out of any given month, since Mamma Nesbit fretted that the city might be an unhealthy place for such a sensitive boy.

  And then the little Sphinx, her eyes trained in another direction, found a new audience, which, unbeknownst to her, included the Pharaoh of Fifth Avenue, whose realm had swelled from his estate, Box Hill, to Byzantine empires and back again to Broadway and the borders of the Bowery.

  Evelyn in The Theatre magazine, 1902.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Florodora

  The only people who never talk about themselves are Japanese, bank robbers, and ambassadors.

  —Evelyn Nesbit, My Story

  Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?

  —Song lyric from Florodora, 1901

  In a city alive with the constant clamor and din of distraction, Florence Evelyn found herself burdened with long hours of confined inactivity and nerve-racking silence, sometimes seven days a week. Her life had become a monotonous rusting chain of sittings and appointments, always lasting into the twilight hours—and almost always within arm’s reach of her wearisome mamma, in tow like a barge incapable of pulling its own weight. So within only six months of her arrival in New York City, the unofficial queenlet of the studio and advertising hearts had already begun to seriously consider abdicating the stifling linseed-stained and flash-powdered skylight worlds she had reigned over, where the high point of her day was having a cup of oolong tea before posing again in absolute stillness for several hours. She also began to wonder if life in the alternately arid or oily airless studios might have a withering effect on her, and at the seasoned age of sixteen feared becoming merely a pressed flower, something formerly moist and thriving, crushed and forgotten between faded pages and kept on a shelf.

  Invariably, the girl model also found herself thrust solely into the company of adults, mostly very grown-up men whose one desire, usually, was that she not speak or move. There were other times when, for a fleeting second or two, she felt that certain lingering looks on the faces of certain artists were not motivated “by a desire to simply achieve the right perspective. ” But as she reclined against a papier-mâché tree, her hand held out to a stuffed bird fastened to a simulated fountain with chicken wire, or fixed her engaging sphinxlike smile on a phantom object of affection, the more she was convinced that the stage offered greener façades.

  Almost from the moment her enchanting face and supple figure appeared in the pages of Manhattan’s magazines and newspapers, Florence Evelyn had begun to receive all manner of dazzling as well as less than shining offers of fame from theatrical “types” who had no knowledge at all of whether she possessed any talent. Most came in the mail; some came right to the front door of her boardinghouse. Theatrical producers, legitimate and spurious alike, showed up only days after some of her earliest modeling photos appeared in both the Journal and the World. The would-be managers laid at her dainty feet mock-up playbills and advertisements with her photos; they talked of commanding high salaries and assured her that she would be a star. One unwitting prognosticator said glibly that the little looker would be “the most talked-about girl in America.”

  But,
whether it was her mother’s tunnel-visioned skepticism about a notoriously fickle and, she suspected, low-paying profession or the near-sighted overconfidence of youth on Florence Evelyn’s part, initially the teenager and her mother rejected outright anyone who offered her the chance to capitalize on her name through “freakish notoriety,” not wanting to risk a week with no paycheck and a return to stale Weetabix.

  Contrary to the popular notion that her mother pushed Evelyn from the womb onto the stage is the fact that Mamma Nesbit was more than reluctant to give in to Florence’s growing desire to pitch posturing for “real acting.” After all, she was making good money as a model—at times almost twenty dollars a week. “They” had developed a faithful clientele of metropolitan artists, illustrators, and advertisers in a relatively short time just as “they” had in Philadelphia, which guaranteed a steady income. As she fretted unceasingly over the family’s financial state of affairs (with Howard at this point once again somewhere with somebody no doubt in need of something), Mamma Nesbit actively discouraged her daughter’s theatrical ambitions. While neither she nor Florence Evelyn had any idea what a chorus girl’s weekly salary was, even if her dreamy-eyed daughter didn’t always take that into account, Mrs. Nesbit did her own accounting. There was, of course, the seedy reputation of the theater to consider (with its loose morals and tight costumes), but that aspect seemed of less consequence to Mrs. Nesbit than the monetary issue.

  However, Florence Evelyn’s disenchantment with the alternately mind-numbing and grueling life as studio, advertising, and photographer’s model forced the issue to what would be the next obvious step. Having lived for half a year on the boisterous fringes of the Gay White Way, which shared its sketchy but enticing borders with a number of the studios where she worked, the impatient teen declared to her mother with appropriate histrionics, “I am going to be an actress!”

  As young and inexperienced as she was, Florence Evelyn tried to reassure her mother that she could maintain a sensible perspective about her prospects of becoming an actress. She writes in 1934 that she was not stagestruck in the common sense, even though she did have the enthusiasm of every teenage girl whose “desire for the enlargement of life” sees no possible flaws in such an impetuous plan. As far as Florence Evelyn could see, being on the magical stage, where she could woo an audience full of living, responsive people, was a vast improvement over the decidedly mundane studios populated by dismally sedate artists, many of whom were on the far edge of “decrepitude.” And, in addition to living in such close proximity to the theater district, having already had her picture featured in several theatrical magazines, the celebrated girl model was convinced that she could be “supremely indifferent” to the position she might occupy in the spotlight. As she described it years later, she only wanted to be “in it” and see what else the world had to offer her. And, unlike other girls, for whom the stage would be their first exposure to an admiring or appreciative audience, Florence Evelyn already knew the effect she exerted over people with a mere look or the upturn of her chin.

  For several weeks, mother and daughter seesawed over the idea of her acting. As Evelyn describes it in one memoir, her mother never really stood a chance with her when she wanted something badly enough. After some inquiries, Mamma Nesbit discovered that her daughter could still pose by day and appear on the stage by night (just as she had worked all week at Wanamaker’s and posed on weekends in Philadelphia). And so Mrs. Nesbit’s attitude changed. Whether or not Florence Evelyn saw this too-familiar arrangement as an utterly unhappy alternative, she convinced herself that she could see her mother’s point about the more practical side of having two careers—again: “the very material fact that . . . stage life would enable me to make a double income.”

  If this meant continuing in the alternately suffocating and chilly studios all day, depending on the season, it was the price she had to pay since, as her mother constantly reminded her, the “dollars counted horribly. ” In the end, the combination of Florence Evelyn’s pie-in-the-sky persistence and her mother’s unrelenting hand-wringing about money proved to be deciding factors. One can’t help but sense an undercurrent of desperation in the adult Evelyn’s recollections about this decision, which imply that she was more anxious to distance herself from the grim specter of poverty than she was eager to sustain two simultaneous careers again at such a relatively immature and vulnerable age.

  “Fate,” however, as she wrote, “was moving me inexorably in the direction I was to take.”

  But not everyone was pleased at this proposed shift in the focus of her still unformed professional life. Neither Frederick Church nor Carroll Beckwith approved, and when Evelyn told the much-admired Beckwith during a modeling session of her intentions to pursue a career on the stage, he exploded in anger, scolded her, threw down his brush, and paced up and down his studio.

  “That is preposterous!” he said. “I don’t approve. You are barely sixteen—still a child!”

  But instead of showing appreciation for the painter’s paternal concern, a petulant Evelyn balked at his characterization of her as a child and silently fumed throughout the session. She fared no better with the avuncular Church, whose more gentle insistence also focused on her inexperience and youthful vulnerability; at his urging she came close to abandoning her thoughts of the stage, because, as she remembers it, “he lent art a meaning that made deserting it seem like a sacrilege.”

  THE BABY FARM

  Over the course of several months early in 1901, Florence Evelyn had received a number of letters from a Mr. Marks, a well-known and legitimate theatrical agent who promised in illegibly scribbled letters the req-uisite Double-entendre postcard image of Evelyn from her Florodora days.

  fame and fortune. With no knowledge of the business of Broadway and no ability to discern a genuine from an insincere offer, Mrs. Nesbit and her daughter initially paid little attention to these letters. However, when Marks wrote again in May, saying that he could arrange an introduction to John C. Fisher, the manager of the Florodora company, the curtain lifted.

  Just as things Oriental had found their way into the popular culture and marketing of the day, so had the Philippines, newly accesible because of the Panama Canal. Florodora, a “spicy little musical dish,” was the most popular show on Broadway. Playing nightly at the Moorish Casino Theatre, nicknamed the “temple of feminine pulchritude,” Florodora was set in a mythical Philippine Island.

  There is little doubt that in spite of Florence Evelyn’s attempts to paint her mother’s initial reaction as anxious and reluctant to have her go on the stage, it didn’t take long for Mrs. Nesbit to rethink her position. To hear Evelyn tell it in 1934, “I overruled my mother’s objections and went with her one day to Mr. Fisher’s office.”

  The well-publicized fact that several former Florodora soubrettes had managed to snag millionaire husbands may have also factored in the final equation for Mamma Nesbit’s about-face.

  Manager Marks met them at the theater. His flamboyant dress— the requisite black derby, black-and-white-checked suit, and diamond-studded bully-boy red tie—struck Mrs. Nesbit as “vulgar.” Sixteen-year -old Florence Evelyn, however, thought it was “spiffy.”

  When they entered the office, Marks immediately began to pitch his newest find. Fisher held up his hand and took his partner Riley aside. Fisher then approached Mrs. Nesbit and asked about her qualifications for the chorus, mistaking the girl’s mother as the one who had come for the audition. Marks let out a laugh as Florence Evelyn jumped up from her seat and declared that she was the one who wanted the job. Fisher looked over the five-foot-nothing girl in her homemade skirts, with her hair tied behind her and no makeup.

  “So, you want to be an actress?” he asked with mock solemnity.

  He turned to her mother.

  “Madame, I’m not running a baby farm!”

  He went on, explaining that even if he were willing to snatch her from the cradle and allow this little miss to join the company, Comstoc
k’s Gerry Society (which focused specifically on child labor) would be at his door, flaming swords of decontamination drawn and warrants in hand before you could say Diamond Jim Brady. Comstock, with the aid of the district attorney’s office, had of late been stepping up his efforts to crack down on underage children working adult jobs in “depraved environments. ” The theater of course was a particularly sensitive area with Comstock, who saw the entire theater district as an “open sore” spreading filth in the streets. To Comstock, its unsavory atmosphere lured unsuspecting young girls from their homes with promises of overnight success and untold wealth, only to infect them and to have them end up, as he was quoted in one newspaper, “bejeweled Bathshebas, besotted, bedeviled, broken-hearted or brothel-bound.”

  Although Fisher smiled condescendingly at her, a devastated Florence Evelyn broke into instantaneous and very real tears. She looked at her mother in desperation, but Mrs. Nesbit returned an equally distressed look.

  “All right,” said Fisher, unable to resist the girl before him, whose wholesome, unpainted face was so striking against her dark mass of hair. “There is a rehearsal going on upstairs.” He offered to let her take a look at it, and in less than thirty minutes, the specter of the Gerry Society seemed to have vanished from the producer’s mind, displaced no doubt by thoughts of what an impact this unusually beautiful girl would make in his company. He asked her if she knew how to dance.

  “A little,” she replied, suddenly shy and somewhat apprehensive, her dancing (as well as singing and piano) lessons having been abruptly ended back in Pittsburgh when her father died. A woman who played the piano was sent for. Florence Evelyn did an impromptu dance, and offered that she could carry a tune as well.

  “The stage manager was keen on my coming into the theater,” the adult Evelyn recalls, but Fisher was less than enthusiastic and said he would “let them know.” It was not because he thought the girl lacked enough talent to fill an anonymous spot in the chorus. If anything, he speculated that she might be a “find.” The real issue was her age. He took Mrs. Nesbit aside and told her frankly that her daughter’s only chance of joining the company was to “be a little reticent” about her real age. If she did this, he would be willing to give her a trial, even though her diminutive figure, thin, narrow shoulders, and perfectly smooth face indicated someone only playing at adulthood—and not very convincingly. Mrs. Nesbit offered no resistance. The very next morning, the first day of a month of rehearsals began for the model turned chorus girl while her mamma attempted to juggle her schedule of modeling appointments to accommodate the rehearsals.