American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  In 1934 she described the same moment this way: And then, because of the unusual quantity of wine I had had, I lost all self-control. I grew dizzy; the room whirled around faster and faster. I “passed out.” . . . Harry Thaw always maintained, afterwards, that the wine was drugged. I have never believed that to be so. I think it was simply a matter of too much champagne.

  Whichever scenario was closer to the truth, the inexcusable result was the same. And whether or not the susceptible teenager was actually or wholly unconscious for some period of time—two hours? sixteen minutes?—all she knew was that when she opened her eyes in an approximation of some form of fuzzy awareness, she was lying on top of the silken sheets in the huge canopied bed next to Stanny, with midnight drawn tight around them. Stanny lay apprehensively beside her, taking in the contrast of her creamy skin against the violet folds of the sheets. She was clad only in “an abbreviated pink undergarment” that covered her small breasts, while White exposed “the naked body of his naked sins,” only slightly receded in the “full flush of his extraordinary physical powers.” She fixated blankly for a brief moment on the haphazard patterns of reddish hairs on his broad bare chest (and was not, at that point, aware of a thin reddish streak on her inner thigh).

  In 1914, this is how she described the immediate scene that followed: I could not realize what had happened. All that I knew was that something terrible had come to me and I screamed. With terror in his face, he tried to stop me. “For God’s sakes don’t!” he pleaded. It was horrible— horrible. I knew without understanding. What happened after I cannot tell.

  In 1934, she added different details: Catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror [above the bed], I think I let out one suppressed scream. I know I started to cry. I was utterly confused, still a bit dizzy, and terribly embarrassed and afraid.

  Stanny hastily threw on a red satin robe, and gave Evelyn the purple-and -yellow kimono that had been tossed at the foot of the bed. She began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Kittens,” he said tenderly. “Please don’t. It’s all over. Now you belong to me.”

  He then sat up in the bed, took her upon his knee, petted her tousled hair, and kissed her on the neck and cheeks. He tried to soothe her and stop her sudden trembling. After dressing in embarrassed haste, as if she had forgotten how, Evelyn was driven home, where Stanny left her alone, in the earliest hours of the morning, sitting in a chair by the window. Unable to sleep, Evelyn was overwhelmed by a sense of immeasurable emptiness: “I felt nothing, neither repulsion nor hate. He was a strange being to me; an aspect of life [had been] revealed in a flash and chang[ed] all my perspectives.”

  As if still in a fog of intoxication, Evelyn rubbed her eyes and raked her mind, as if sifting through grains of sand, for even the smallest broken shells of information and misinformation she had come upon in French novels, the hootchy-kootchy doings she had heard joked about backstage, or the curious behaviors of tootsie-wootsies whispered about at parties. But none of it made any sense, and for a time she let her mind sink back into emptiness. Then her temples began to throb, and her “insides cramped in small waves of pain.”

  “This is what people made such a fuss about,” she finally realized, arriving at the conclusion, “this, then, was what love meant.”

  Years later, confronting the criticism and skepticism of those who could not believe that she could have been a studio model and chorus girl and maintained her innocence much less her virginity until that night, even though she was sixteen, Evelyn countered: “I went . . . that night a child with no knowledge of the big and stunning facts of life. . . . If you say to me, ‘How is it possible that you could live in such an atmosphere as you did, surrounded by significant evidence . . . that the world was less than the idyllic place you pretend, and still be innocent?’ ”

  Her reply?

  “There is an innocence which finds for evident evil an innocent explanation. ” Certainly her mother never told her anything about the “big and stunning facts” in a culture where the long shadow of Puritanism and “mid-Victorian prudery” kept girls in the dark about such things until marriage. Nor had Evelyn ever had so much to drink at one time, having previously heeded her mother’s warning about spoiling her looks (and ruining their livelihood). Then there had been Stanny’s own solicitous watchfulness, which years later she saw as having been motivated much more by his own self-interest: “He wanted control—of when I would have none.”

  She sat staring trancelike out the window in the yellow hours of the morning, her knees tucked under her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, as alternating ribbons of blue-gray and orange rose together over the rooftops. Evelyn conducted for what seemed the hundredth time a mental inventory of White’s character. Or the man she thought she knew as Stanny. Her reason and understanding teetered back and forth from moment to moment. Father. Lover. Protector. Seducer. All of White materialized before her like a roiling, boiling new planet suddenly careening through space on a straight path toward her. As she would later write, “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.” She then hit upon the phrase that summed up for her in an instant the man who had stolen her trust and whose prodigious appetite seemed never quite satisfied: “He was a benevolent vampire.”

  It was in the same chair that Stanny found her when he called later in the morning, drumming on the door and then letting himself in when he got no response to his usual signal. He saw her illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, looking uncannily like the sadly beautiful, stony-eyed bust of Nefertiti in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where not far away in the sculpture hall sat George Grey Barnard’s marble statue Innocence (also known as Maidenhood), which Evelyn had posed for only a few months earlier.

  Stanny immediately knelt before her and began pleading, half expecting the rage of virtue or shuddering tears of regret. He was therefore momentarily baffled by her stony silence. He kissed the hem of her baby-blue dressing gown in an extravagant show of remorse and shivered at its touch. Calling her his “Kittens,” he then began to claim that he had not really done her “the greatest wrong of all.” Evelyn seemed to look through him, motionless, the little Sphinx once again. Stanny proceeded to tell her in tones less frantic than urgent, but insistent, that everyone did what he and she had just done. In fact, he “ran on,” telling her essentially that “everybody was bad . . . [and] evil was the basis of life.”

  He recklessly began to rattle off the names of people Evelyn knew, men and women, whom he painted in the same black hues as himself. No one was excluded—society people, stage people, “people of every rank and class of society, they were all steeped in evil.” Seeing that his Kittens seemed unmoved by this argument, a persistent White altered his tactic slightly and tried to persuade her that at least he was no worse than these others; in fact, he was better, since he was willing to admit to his deeds. He began to illustrate his argument with countless stories, which Evelyn only half heard. He then shifted his focus again, stating with resumed strength his central thrust—that the worst sin of all was to be found out.

  “That was unforgivable,” he told her, and so she must “go along as if nothing happened” in order for people to still respect her.

  Evelyn weighed his words against her understanding of what had happened in the last six hours and turned her head slightly as she slowly began to comprehend her newest position in the universe—and that immense part of it over which Stanny ruled.

  “[It] was a terrible thing to talk. A girl must never talk; she must just keep things locked up in her bosom and confide in nobody,” White continued, then added emphatically, “especially your mother, who would not see things clearly.

  “To tell one’s mother meant all the world knowing,” he warned. White began to name names again, saying, “Look at Miss ——— and Miss ——— . . . If she hadn’t told things about people she would be in a splendi
d position.” He cautioned her repeatedly, ending this particular point with the ominous-sounding directive: “Don’t talk, Evelyn.”

  The stunned girl continued to sit silent and oddly passive while White kept up his veritable barrage of words. What he didn’t know was that the situation had already crystallized for the teenager. She was told not to tell. She had been told to obey him. And she had. The past two and a half years in the studios had been an extended series of daily sessions where she was told by the men in charge of her fate not to speak. Not to move. On the stage she was told how and where to move, when to speak, when not to speak, and how to hit one’s mark. She knew as she stared out at the rooftops of the dreamlike city that White had made over in his own image that she was utterly powerless.

  Still Stanny went on, “pleading, sometimes covertly menacing,” and Evelyn listened, “dazed and bewildered as all the fair fabrics of [her] faith crumbled in the dust.” If she was at all convinced as to the truth of what White was telling her, it wasn’t so much that she knew he was right or that what he had done was acceptable. Rather, because of the huge discrepancy in their age, in class, in education, in wealth, in life experience, in sexual knowledge, in all the things that an adolescent girl can perhaps only dimly comprehend under the best of circumstances, she just didn’t know any better. Nor did she have anyone to turn to.

  Over the next few days, Evelyn contemplated what she had to substitute “for the place trust once inhabited.” At first she felt absolutely nothing. Not repulsion. Not hate. Just a numbness. Stanny now seemed an alien being to her as an “aspect of life [was] revealed in a flash, changing all her perspectives.” Years later, the adult Evelyn described needing a “new scaffolding, a shell from whence to work.” At first she played the scene over and over in her head, but that proved too alarmingly hurtful. Then, as with all other unexpected turns in her short life, she decided she would just block out the pain. Just as she had the loss of her father. Just as she had the eviction from her home and the loss of all her childhood treasures. Just as she had all the unhappy or callous scenes that had punctuated her unpredictable and precarious existence up to that point. In its place she substituted “a dull sense of helplessness, accepting [White’s] conception of life.”

  And love.

  Falling back on both habit and well-honed psychic survival tactics, Evelyn dropped into wary, leaden silence. She would be especially sure not to enlighten her mother upon her return from Pittsburgh, unable to even imagine what her mamma’s reaction might be. (And never admitting to herself that perhaps her mother had known better. And left anyway.)

  What many people at the time of the trial claimed they could not understand (and something the district attorney would ask point-blank) was why she never expressed the obligatory deep-rooted horror of Stanny, the man who stole her innocence and violated her trust, either immediately after that fateful night or any time since.

  Her answer was simple: Neither then nor now can I conjure a pose as the conventional world demands. . . . Not even for the purpose of pleasing those who demand, according to the rules of melodrama, a more bitter and more prejudiced view, can I represent him other than he was. . . . I have no doubt in my mind that in many of the things he did he was actuated by the purest kindness. Such was the complexity of the man’s character that he could at one and the same time be the disinterested patron and the scheming roué.

  A monster in human form.

  It was a momentarily frightening, then bitter revelation that broke upon her. She considered White’s darkly elegant shape-shifting abilities that allowed him to seduce unsuspecting maidens with a minimum of blood-letting—although, unlike the typical vampire, Stanny surrounded himself with mirrors that helped dazzle his captives and reflected the glittering subterranean world he had created for his own amusement. In trying to describe her feelings about her "seduction” by the paternal White and her subsequent role as his teenage mistress, she wrote in 1915: It may seem a shocking thing that I did not become melancholic or so depressed as to take no interest in life, but a healthy child . . . abhors bad memories and all the gloomy morbid machinery of introspection, and I found myself almost as I had been before that night, with interests as keen . . . though a change had come to me.

  She continued, and not surprisingly, her train of thought ran to her father: Doctors say that children who lose their limbs in accidents come to maturity with a sense of having been born as they are, without any recollection of previously having been better equipped for the battle of life. Young people who lose their parents . . . have the greatest difficulty in retaining a memory of those parents, however kindly and however apparently indispensable they may have been in their lifetime.

  Having lost so much already, Evelyn knew that she had nothing else to lose. She then considered what she had to gain after having been robbed of the only currency of any value a girl had. So she accepted this new development in her relationship with Stanny and buried any halfhearted attempts at adolescent “gloomy” introspection or judgment. After twenty additional years of careful, calm reflection, viewing things through the lens of adulthood and subsequent experience, Evelyn concluded, “I would dare not say of him that he ruined my life. . . . He merely made a way for me, a painful way . . . which was inevitably mine.” She also writes, “Stanford White was a great man. That is how I see him after all these years. That he did me wrong, that from certain moral standards he was perverse and decadent, does not blind my judgment.”

  So, instead of condemning him as a monster, Kittens took a deep breath and joined the routinely astounded and admiring coterie of friends and contemporaries who saw White as one of those men who “loom into life.” After all, if tycoons and their socialite wives, great artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and inventors succumbed to his persuasive charms, who was she to resist? So the child-woman who “had nothing but her looks” gave herself over to this force of nature: “One remembers an earthquake without blaming or condemning the seismic forces which produced the phenomena. White was an earthquake which shattered to the foundations the fabric of innocence.”

  Accepting her fate, Evelyn did not rail at the natural or unnatural forces that brought her to Stanny. At sixteen, she decided it was “profitless to ask ’Why?’”

  Seductive modeling pose, circa 1902-1903.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At the Feet of Diana

  “Methinks,” mused Petronius, “that one naked woman is more alluring than a thousand.”

  —Frederick L. Collins, Glamorous Sinners

  His art was loving; Eros set his sign.

  —Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  According to legend, the only way a vampire can enter a potential victim’s house is if it is invited across the threshold. Mrs. Nesbit, either foolishly or with contemptible consciousness, had done so with open arms. In trying to “keep the wolf from the door,” she not only welcomed him in, but offered him exclusive rights to her daughter, then left. By the time the feckless Mrs. Nesbit returned from her ten-day Pittsburgh holiday, thanks to what she said was their benefactor’s “wonderful thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit,” it had become painfully clear to Evelyn that there was more than just a generation gap between herself and her mamma. An adult Evelyn came to believe that at sixteen, she was “probably the greatest enigma” the world offered her mother, and that she was “outside and beyond the range of her [mother’s] understanding.” At the time, Evelyn saw her mother as hopelessly old-fashioned, one of those people “who no longer desires to do the things which they criticize.” Compared to Stanny’s youthful exuberance, Evelyn’s mother, who was in fact ten years younger than the architect, seemed to Evelyn “a relic of another age.”

  “I could not in my wildest moments,” Evelyn said, “imagine her in her wildest moments greeting the dawn from the wrong end of the day.” It appeared to her that her mother knew nothing about unconventional behavior except to condemn it, while Stanny reveled in it and damned the cost. Depending on one’s persp
ective, White was “a connoisseur of beauty, of art, the epicure in all his fleshly wants” a “fashionable degenerate, ” or “an apostle of beauty in a nation that was maddeningly slow to embrace it.” One thing Evelyn knew for sure—he was someone who could never let himself be limited by dreary, respectable “New Englandism” or, what she referred to in later years as “Pittsburgalism” (“a Pittsburgh provincialism that robbed your soul”).

  As promised, Evelyn obeyed her unorthodox father-lover and did not tell her old-fashioned mother what had happened as a result of her too-convenient absence. Instead, in spite of what Stanny had done and how he had done it, within a matter of days, Evelyn accepted her new role as his toy mistress and fell under the spell of her benevolent vampire—even though, true to form, he could only come out safely at night.

  And because she was still only a girl, and he was a man from whom an entire city took its cues, the minor Evelyn also tumbled recklessly into major adolescent first love. Surrounded by luxury and sumptuousness whenever she was with Stanny, she easily and happily surrendered to it and to him. Nor was the forty-eight-year-old Stanny immune to the incomparable charms of his little Persephone, the newest diminutive queen of his dim and secret rites, caught in White’s shadowy underworld, where “if a girl danced on the tables in the Tower room, she did not scratch the mahogany.” For Evelyn was unlike any other girl he had ever encountered—she was the one about whom “penny-a-line newsmen waxed lyrical.” She was “a soft petal torn from a rose,” a “will-o’-the-wisp” with “languorous eyes” who “cast tender shadows wherever she walked.” She was the “fluttering fair flower of American girlhood” who had, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, “blossomed in a mud puddle.” And even if Stanny no longer needed to guess what mysteries hid themselves behind those “wells of paradise” and “coy half-smile,” he nevertheless felt the familiar White heat of excitement at the possibility of further exploration.