By the end of the month, the former stock girl was a Florodora chorus girl. Because of her luxurious brunette hair and sultry eyes, she was cast as an unnamed “charming Spanish maiden.” Putting on costumes and makeup, spending hours doing repetitious actions, being directed to look a certain way or strike a certain pose was nothing new to her. She had learned from the business end of the so-called glamour of the studios, and now, somewhat to her disappointment, she would get the same view of the stage.
When thinking back on this first phase in her theatrical life, Evelyn recalls that her initial reaction to the general shabbiness and banality of the reality of life in the theater did not dampen her enthusiasm completely. Her heart rose at the prospect of being onstage. And, as she already had in other ways in her short life, she quickly dropped her illusions and accepted the machinery of the whole enterprise, the long hours of hard work, and the frequent run-down state of the sets, where “a beautiful garden from the front of the house is drab, tattered and discolored close up,” and “lovely dresses as seen from the auditorium are too often bedraggled and soiled upon close inspection.” Even if the reality of the theater was a “bare, cold barn of a floor, inexpressibly dull when seen in the unromantic light of morning,” and knowing that hers would be an insignificant part, Florence Evelyn prepared herself with juvenile high spirits. Anxious to perfect herself for her anonymous part, the girl considered the world she was about to enter as a “terra incognita” with the promise of novel and exciting rewards all its own.
While the other chorus girls went backstage after their number to the communal dressing room, Florence Evelyn would stand in the wings and watch the featured sextet “dancing gracefully . . . and wonder a little ruefully whether [she would] ever be tall enough or skillful enough to do the work they were doing. . . .” As she writes, “in my innocence I regarded them as the most wonderful part of the show, and, certainly the best paid.” For the girl who, until recently, always seemed to just barely keep her family’s head above the bog of insolvency (if one were to believe her mother), the evidence of the sextet’s success was, for her, the beautiful clothes and jewels they wore offstage. While performing in their wedding-cake gowns, with seven layers of lace like strawberry icing, their long throats decorated with black velvet chokers and wearing long black gloves as they clutched pink parasols, the sextet seemed the height of smartness and elegance to the girl from Allegheny County. Their signature number, “Tell Me Pretty Maiden,” was the highlight of the show each night and frequently the cause of a standing ovation by enthusiastic audience members—predominantly male—before the number was even completed.
Each night, as the dapper, clean-shaven, square-jawed Gibsonish men in their gray cutaway coats, black silk top hats, and pearl gray gloves got down on their knees to serenade the six buxom, statuesque Florodora beauties, the audience clapped with delight, waiting for the response to the question “Are there any more at home like you?” And every night a new cordon of stage-door Johnnies then went to wait outside to find out.
While appearing in the show, the youngest member of the company was billed as Florence Evelyn. Her constant primping and preening, however, caused her to be christened “Flossie the Fuss” by the cast and crew. After weeks of teasing, the fledgling chorine considered giving herself a nom de théâtre to go with her new career, one that she hoped would put an end to her unwelcome nickname. Two months and a day later, “Flossie the Fuss” disappeared when Florence Evelyn insisted that her new name was Evelyn Nesbit. Another perhaps unintentional but no less compelling reason may have been to assert herself and coincidentally usurp her mother. If there was going to be an Evelyn Nesbit, she would be it. So she dropped Florence for good (although her mother and the family back in Pennsylvania continued to refer to her as Florence). Her mother said nothing.
In her memoirs, Evelyn tried to dispel the objections that “ever excite the moralist” when it comes to the stage’s bad influence on the young and unsuspecting.
“I can speak only for myself when I say it did not corrupt me. If being brought into contact with people who are loose of speech or who have exaggerated views on the flexibility of morals is corruption, then the streets of New York, of Paris, of London, of any city, are unfit for a young girl.”
To the adult Evelyn, if life in the theater entailed “a certain freedom of speech and a certain frankness in dealing with relationships which exist between people,” it also offered the “protection which comes from the destruction of illusion.” The way she remembered it years later, Evelyn saw that there was, contrary to popular belief, a keen appreciation of duty toward the inexperienced among the theatrical people with whom she was involved at this early point in her life. As she put it, “I can speak only for myself that such anxiety was displayed to hide the ugly truths from the novitiate.” This was due in large part, of course, to the fear of the crusading Saint Anthony of Comstock, who had set his sights on the theater, with its exploitation of fresh-faced femmes and its “injurious effects on susceptible young things.”
Since the well-publicized and gorgeous little Evelyn would be the obvious object of such scrutiny, the company made a particular effort to “treat her with kid gloves” and keep her in the dark about certain facts of life on and off the stage. Although the naturally curious Evelyn quizzed her fellow chorus girls and talked to a number of worldlier if not wiser cast and crew people around her about life in the big city, they now dubbed her “the Kid” and “not one of them attempted to lift the veil,” which hid certain realities from her eyes. As she put it, invariably when she came within earshot of a particularly juicy conversation, the next and only thing she would hear was “Shhhhh! The kid.”
Nonetheless, she did pick up a few opinions while appearing in her first show, not the least of which involved the typical chorus girl’s impressively “frank egotism . . . a quality which is neither to be despised nor condemned.” Evelyn wrote that the other girls in the chorus “had got the trick of thinking aloud, and found speech to be an excellent substitute for thought. I found it took years of study before I could disentangle the real intentions of a girl from her often vehemently expressed view. I have heard people—men especially—who have complained bitterly of the inconsistency and deceptive powers of girls engaged on the stage . . . her code, her method, is unchanged throughout all the centuries.”
Right from the start, Evelyn enjoyed the cast-member camaraderie with those she considered her first real friends, and she claimed that initially, girls she barely knew were willing to do everything they could to help her adjust. Still frequently caught up in her own adolescent sense of self-consciousness when it came to expressing herself with words rather than clichéd expressions, Evelyn admired their ability to put into words what others would only think, especially when compared to her own self-censoring tendencies. How much she may have learned from their thinking out loud is unclear, even as she recognized that their substitution of speech for actual thought could lead to troubling inconsistencies.
She also came to observe human nature at its less than admirable, but saw the audience rather than the actors as posing a threat: “It is harder to please the low brow than the high brow. It is always the man who has just jumped on his wife who hisses at stage villainy the loudest.”
In all her memoirs Evelyn refuted the “provincial accusation” that theatrical people are wholly artificial and insincere. “You must remember,” she would write, “that the average girl who joins a chorus is one who has little or no opportunity for tasting the comforts of existence. Their early days have been spent very often amid the most straitened circumstances. . . . Girls who have not had the benefit of an education often disregard the fact that there is no discreditable aspect to poverty, and because people will look down upon them on account [of that poverty], they disguise their real selves.” Half the artificiality of the theater, she would assert, is due to a “monstrous misconception as to what is essential in a woman.”
Whether or not Eve
lyn was able to see things more clearly than the average aspiring actress, one wonders if subconsciously she knew that she also fit snugly into the typical pattern of most of the girls she met. Evelyn wrote, “It is her first object to secure a line of parentage. . . . The formula does not vary very considerably. A ruined or dead father—a life of noble self-sacrifice and eventually the theater. These are the stories which one hears on every hand from the girls of the chorus. . . . It is very pathetic. A little country mouse who finds herself amid her smartly clad sisters undergoes an ordeal beside which a mere appearance before the footlights is as nothing . . . whatever ambition there is concentrated upon a desire to shine before her newly found friends.”
As for the men she observed, the mature Evelyn wrote, “I know of no more interesting subject to the average man than himself. . . . All men lie when speaking of themselves, and however good or pious they may be, they exaggerate their own qualities.” What the typical chorus girl came to understand about her role, both in the literal and figural sense, was that “she sings, she dances and she dresses with this central thought in mind: I must arouse the interest of men.” Evelyn saw this pattern was not much different for the general population of women. Like the chorus girl, “women in other walks of life do exactly the same thing. . . .They are obeying the same instinct that animates the chorus girl.” It’s just that “their invitation may be more subtle and intimate.” The chorus girl’s opportunity comes after the show, but too often the encounter is disappointing. “I am always sorry for the girl and have very little patience with the disillusioned man, who has to begin all over again reconstructing his ideal as he goes on to discover what was the charm which attracted him to this or that particular member of the chorus.”
About her own feelings at this point in time, like most teenagers, Evelyn said she had only a “vague and nebulous” idea as to which direction her ambitions should run.
“In those days I lived very much in the present,” she wrote.
Apart from the fascination of actual performing, the hurry and excitement of preparations, the exhilaration of the music, the plaudits of the audience, and the rush of changes made at breathless speed all combined to stimulate her as yet untarnished and freewheeling outlook on life. Of course, she acknowledged, after the shows there were numerous parties “given by boys to girls”: “We always went in bunches to these parties. One girl would invite the other, and we would go off to a cafe for supper, and afterwards to some apartment where we could dance. . . . I would emphasize the perfect innocence of these frolics. . . . There was nothing in them but harmless amusement.”
Rector’s was the particular favorite of the theatrical crowd as well as the so-called new cast of characters dubbed “the midnight supper society. ” Nicknamed the “cathedral of froth,” Rector’s stood on Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and it was the place where “one could go to forget and two could go and be forgotten.” It had a number of eye-catching features, not the least of which was a huge electrified griffin (the mythological beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion) affixed over the doorway of its Greco-Roman façade. Beneath the talons of the griffin whirled New York’s first revolving door. The sparkling “glass squirrel wheel,” as it was called, was a clever attention-grabber for curious passersby and a risqué skirt grabber for unsuspecting female patrons who often found themselves “with their skirts flared up in folds nearly past their knees.” The regulars, however, knew how to whirl through the wheel with “nary a ruffled feather.”
According to Evelyn, her mother took a dim and conservative view of her partying. Confronting her mother in the wee hours of the morning, Evelyn confessed that it gave her the sense of being “the product of a novel and decadent generation.” She also came to see in her later years what she couldn’t as a teenager, having been let loose, so to speak, in Manhattan while her mother, apparently, sat home waiting: that their temperaments were remarkably and irreconcilably different, and that she shared something of her father’s trusting eagerness to try new things, while her brother, Howard, shared her mother’s cautiousness. She remembered vividly the apprehension she felt at coming home late, awaiting her mother’s inevitable and reproachful “Oh, Evelyn!” (Mamma Nesbit used her daughter’s nom de théâtre only when she wanted to indicate disapproval.)
But if all the teenager cared about was having fun, followed by falling into bed out of sheer exhaustion, oblivious to her mother’s criticism of her imagined outrageous conduct, then Mamma Nesbit’s chief concern was that Evelyn not ruin a good thing by losing any precious beauty sleep. Apparently, the possibility of Evelyn’s moral ruination wasn’t enough of a concern for her mother to put an end to posing, performing, and partying for her underage daughter.
Still very young and immature in spite of her innate intelligence and her role as the family’s breadwinner, Evelyn, unlike most of her chorus girl friends, enjoyed what she describes as her “childish interests,” which a number of potential suitors around her recognized. Some fled in a panic, while others found flirting with dynamite all the more enticing. Amused by her delight at mechanical toys, a fact that should have underscored for them her minor status, to hear Evelyn tell it, many were then “careful to speak so innocuously in front of me as to be downright banal.”
Although alcohol was readily available to the chorus girls, underage or not, it was used more as a prop than anything else. Some of the girls drank, Evelyn recalled, because they thought it was the thing to do: “A cocktail was less a pleasure than part of the ritual of good fun; champagne was something rather amusing,” and she doubted whether any of the girls really liked it, but “since nobody took very much, little harm was done.” With her mother’s voice always in the back of her mind, fearful that drinking might indeed spoil her looks, Evelyn learned how to nurse a glass of sparkling wine for an entire night, limiting herself to “a little liquor and lots of soda water.” She was also painfully aware that she needed to be fresh enough in the morning for her modeling work.
With a typical teenage tendency to view life in this period as some kind of haphazardly structured musical comedy, Evelyn saw herself as a character in “theatre-land,” an indiscriminate but intriguing place where one had to “learn the ropes or hang trying.” It differed only slightly from her previous incarnation as a fourteen-year-old model in the uncharted territory of the “artistic set,” where ordinary girls were “inspired to vacuity by the monotony of sittings.” As Evelyn asserted a mere year and a half after her first career had begun, she felt she had “worked things out” for herself, managing to balance two careers to her mother’s none, and walking the fine line between childhood and adulthood, reason and foolishness, in loco parentis.
The earliest slapdash days and hectic nights of Evelyn’s new life in theater-land passed quickly but happily enough, yet making friends, only to have them vanish overnight to another cast in another show in another city, intensified Evelyn’s chronic if subconscious fear of the impermanence of life. It was the one aspect of the profession that she disliked, the constant entrances and exits, and it was only in the small, quiet moments few and far between that her thoughts drifted back to her father. Given her mother’s resolute refusal to voice her own sense of loss and festering resentment at having been thrust into poverty by her husband’s miscalculations, it is not surprising that eventually Evelyn relegated him to “a hidden place” where he became for her “a fond memory,” “like the pleasant ghosts of people who came and went” in her life.
When pressed to think about her childhood in later life, Evelyn said that the happy times seemed few and far between; they existed for her as if in a dream and only now and then could she “by some trick of memory . . . recall the men and women who contributed to that careless period” of her life:
“Happy times,” she wrote in 1915, “are hard to remember . . . a happy childhood may be expressed in the character of [those] who [have] been fortunate enough to experience it.”
&nb
sp; Nonetheless, with the unadulterated vitality of youth, Evelyn continued to pose by day and perform onstage seven nights a week, rushing to modeling appointments, then performances, then parties around town in the midst of a silly, hilarious blur of other chorus girls. She would always come home, but at one or two o’clock in the morning, “suddenly full of healthy sleepiness,” her mother’s grousing barely registered as Evelyn burrowed in between their very own sheets to recuperate. One had to wonder if there would ever be anyone who could keep pace with the impressionable little Sphinx “with the heart-stopping scarlet stare,” someone who could hold her interests long enough to make an impression on her.
Notable New Yorker photograph of
Stanford White, circa 1900.
CHAPTER SIX
Benevolent Vampire
He was a generously big man—and infinitely mean; he was kind and tender—and preyed upon the defenseless. . . . A crude expression offended him; yet in some things he was shameless.
—Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days
Stanford White was a member of a small clique of men who had vicious tendencies . . . performed frequently without remorse, with the sense that he and his friends were immune to the laws of the land.
American Eve Page 9