American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  As she describes her altered relationship with Stanny in the weeks and months following the night she came to call her “unvirgining” (in letters written late in life), Evelyn said in her memoir of 1934, “I couldn’t help but marvel at this strange effect I had upon him. Whether at his office after hours or in the intimacy of his rooms, always when he first put his arms about me—or only touched me—he would start trembling.”

  During certain passionate and intense moments, she went on, “he would tell me I was a constant thrill,” an irresistible angel dropped from heaven or a siren ascended from Neptune’s realm.

  “I was the type he adored and fell slave to.” And much too unbelievably pretty to consider modesty a useful virtue.

  And if Stanny found himself unusually and fatefully smitten, it was because this girl was a unique conquest, the holy chalice in a lifelong quest for pure animated organic perfection. According to even jaded reporters, upon first seeing Evelyn, “she bore no resemblance to any living woman ever seen.” To Stanny, she was the ultimate combination of unfettered intellectual curiosity, singular precocious beauty, and an adorable lack of sophistication, all rolled into one willing and uninhibited child-woman, a real-life Miranda swept up in a tempest of his own devising. In addition, as a keen student of art history and profound lover of composition and color, Stanny, always the painter at heart, saw in Evelyn a Botticelli come to life. With her natural linear grace, smooth unspoiled lines, and unripe contours, she was a timeless masterpiece, her “humid parted lips when in repose” like those seen “in some of the old Italian Masters.” And she was chiaroscuro incarnate, her unblemished skin “fairly glowing” in contrast to the dark spiced rum of her hair and eyes the color of oloroso sherry. As described by another reporter, she had “hair that in the shadows seemed violet-black but which in the sunlight took on a polished bronze hue.” Infatuated with the mere idea of her and the pure sensuality of her appearance, there were times, Evelyn wrote, when Stanny wanted her so perfectly and utterly naked that she couldn’t even wear hairpins in her hair. He would run his face with its bristling mustache or his “tender searching hands” through her long waves and toss aside any offending pin he might find. And just as with her “normal” studies, she seemed a rapt and eager student of the demimonde in White’s shadow world. In 1915 she would write, “In those days I lived very much in the present, and if conscience is an uneasy stirring as to one’s future then I certainly had no conscience.” Nor would she cry over spoiled milk if she could help it.

  In letters she wrote, Evelyn recalls that when he was with her, either at the Garden after hours or in his studio apartment, he luxuriated in her sweet honeysuckle perfume and derived great pleasure from the idea that he was Pygmalion while she was his own charmed nymph—a modern Galatea undergoing a marvelous metamorphosis due to his skilled control and expert tutelage. In response, Evelyn acceded to Stanny’s every whim and stimulus, and allowed herself to luxuriate in his generosity and powerful influence, aided by the balm of forgetfulness as to how he had used both to take advantage of her.

  Over the course of several months, whenever they were together, Stanny invariably sought to combine her instruction with his delight; he wanted to open up the divine world of the arts and the wonders of aesthetic appreciation to this extraordinary ordinary girl who inspired a multitude of artists, but who routinely saw only the backs of canvases, while at the same time he wanted to worship at her irresistible “altar of bliss.” Succumbing to the “subtle brew [of] kisses crushed to kisses” as the supreme “architect of desire,” in the months following Evelyn’s Dionysian initiation, Stanny behaved as if he had to possess her as completely as humanly possible. With her he could indulge himself in ways he could not with any of his other prized objects, since this one was not only gorgeous, but young and responsive and blissfully unguarded. Like the perfect champagne grape, he had picked her at the sweetest moment of her development, when she would be at her most deliciously erotic, susceptible to decadence, but without a sexual history and no equipment for passing sour judgments.

  Often when the couple were alone at the Garden in the drowsy hours after midnight, the beaming creator and his petite American Eve would ride up in the elevator to its last stop and ascend to unrivaled heights by climbing the narrow spiral wrought-iron stairs through the cupola to the turreted top of his Tower. They would stand staring through the violet haze that defined the horizon; sometimes they just talked for hours as November’s cool autumn breezes swirled around them through the filigree fretwork at the feet of the shimmering Diana, herself pivoting gracefully and fearlessly in spite of being so fully exposed to all elements at such a dangerous and dizzying height.

  Holding hands, Evelyn and Stanny would look out over the railing at his city; from their vantage point, the entire island appeared as a lush and simmering paradise, and they were the world’s only two inhabitants. At times she would reach up as far as she could and touch the heel of Diana’s foot, feeling a warm electric thrill run through her. As Evelyn gazed up at Diana with eyes “the color of blue champagne at midnight,” White could see reflected in them the blinking starshine from above, mimicked in the tiny incandescent bulbs (which he turned on just for her) that looped the fringes of the empty rooftop theater far below them. Evelyn listened dreamily as Stanny told her of hallowed or mysterious places he had visited and his extraordinary finds. He would then whisper to her that she was his most remarkable find, a tiny star dropped from the heavens, one he wished he could wear on his lapel.

  To Stanny, she was his kiddie or sometimes his little sparrow (although her appetite was anything but birdlike). He would tease her, asking if she were “just a fairy out of wonderland,” and then pinch her smooth white shoulders, feeling, he said, for her wings. She learned to respond to him in kind, which prompted White to remark to one of his friends that “Evelyn plays with me as a kitten.” She could often see the effect she had on him; there were instances when he gasped in admiration at her exquisite, unfolding, flowerlike loveliness, especially when a particular multihued light on his magical bed fell on her in a certain way, softening and enhancing the already exotic palette of her natural charms. Afterward, he would kiss her passionately and swear by the moon that he had never seen such perfection, reflected as it was from every conceivable angle by the surrounding mirrors. Had she read Shakespeare’s play about star-crossed lovers before that time, she might have asked her considerably older Romeo to swear by the sun instead.

  As her own intensifying affection for Stanny constantly renewed and reshaped itself, once the initial blush and shudder of sex was no longer a mystery, Evelyn began to flaunt her lithe and flexible figure, teasing him in ways he found irresistible. And, as she came to see it, they also transcended “mere sex.” They were not just “Satyr Pursuing Nymph.” As it would be described in one paper during the first trial, White was the “intellectual epicurean trying his master hand at a new medium,” while another speculated that, “it must have pleased White’s queer artistic whims to form her.” Indeed, with her classic looks and natural gift for posing, refined in the skylight world during daylight hours, in the twilight time after business or the late evenings when White was free, Evelyn could become an enchanting tableau vivant. Stanny would put her in specific positions and arrange all the elements around her in a startling impersonation of the fabulous paintings he saw in the Louvre or sculpted figures he had imported from the porticos of Italy and Greece. The effect on him, she remembers, was palpable.

  Because Evelyn was also just a “mere slip of a girl,” yet athletic and graceful, Stanny could raise her with ease onto his broad shoulders or literally bounce her on his knees. There were times, after posing her as Olympia or Odalisque, complete with sequined and silken seraglio embellishments, when Stanny would lift the naked Evelyn onto his shoulder as she pretended to be the statue of Bacchante on his piano. He would place a wreath of fern leaves wound into a halo on each of their heads and ride her around the circumference of
the Tower room, whirling past the realistic-looking orange trees scattered about with bulbs resembling actual oranges nestled in their branches (even though it was winter in New York). An ardent and equally naked Stanny would place one arm around the small of her back to steady her, while the giggling, limber Bacchante would hold a bottle of Pommery Sec by its neck in one hand, eating red grapes with her free hand and dropping them into the sparkling crystal flute that Stanny held up to her as they spun around the room. The two would ultimately collapse onto one of the plush sofas or oversized ottomans in childlike laughter, her luxurious hair falling out of its crown of leaves in a tangled cascade over his and her faces like sweet Spanish moss.

  There were many occasions when Stanny would make her laugh so much “her ribs hurt.” He joked about the attempts of lesser artists, who, in trying to re-create their own uninspired versions of beauty with other models, failed miserably. They might as well have been “bumpkins trying to put lipstick on a sow.” At other times, in the intimacy of his rooms at Twenty-fourth Street, before having wild sex on one of the fashionable ferocious-looking tiger or lion skin rugs, Stanny would build a fire in the fireplace and throw something into it that sparked a temporary rainbow of shifting colors amid the rhythmically rising and falling flames. After his own flare of passion subsided, Stanny would put a now casually and shamelessly naked Evelyn on his red velvet swing, perhaps gloating about what a great private joke this was in light of Saint Anthony of Comstock’s limited imagination and naive public approval of one of his favorite deviant pleasures.

  Stanny would watch excitedly while Evelyn flew, as if weightless, in the direction of his unlimited supply of colorful parchment parasols, her bare feet arched and ready. The red-and-amber lick of the flames created a warming, hypnotic effect as they moved with her and cast arabesque patterns on the slender arc of her back and the smooth white crescents pressing on the red velvet seat. Again and again as he pushed Evelyn toward the glowing tin ceiling and spinning circles of paper, Stanny watched approvingly as her hair twisted behind her in lustrous brunette waves. Once she had broken the fragile bamboo ribs of the parasol and shredded its parchment into dangling ribbons, he gleefully threw it all on the fire and put another in its place, pulling the invisible string attached to the new parasol. And her heart.

  A POORE ENCOUNTER

  One afternoon Stanny arranged for Evelyn to have another sitting with photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. But this session was to be held at a house on East Nineteenth Street, which belonged to his friend, landscape artist Henry Poore. As was the case with nearly anything Stanny touched, Poore’s house bore the architect’s unmistakable imprimatur of dramatic brilliance—it contained not only a floor-to-ceiling carved-stone fireplace that had been brought virtually stone by immense stone from an ancient castle in Normandy, but at the other end of the same room there was a remarkable life-size painting set in a recess in the wall instead of framed, normally hidden from view.

  The trompe-l’oeil painting of a nude, fair-haired woman, standing on a Persian rug, was lovely in and of itself. But, as described by Evelyn in her 1934 memoirs, Stanny had a rug woven in the exact same color and pattern as the one the figure stood on in the painting. The actual rug began where the one in the painting left off and then folded over three short steps. The uncanny three-dimensional illusion it created “was startling, ” and according to Evelyn, “her skin seemed to glow like living flesh . . . she had evidently just returned from a ball, for a frilly costume lay where she had just stepped out of it . . . [and] in one hand she held a black mask.” Only a small number of Poore’s acquaintances were ever offered a privileged viewing of this painting in his private drawing room, hidden most of the time by a curtain drawn around the recess. Evelyn felt a little thrill at being one of those few.

  On this particular day, Eickemeyer worked carefully to capture some new and enticing images for his professional portfolio (as well as for Stanny’s personal album), which meant that in a number of the pictures she was dressed in exquisite kimonos and gowns, while in others she wore nothing but a smile. He labored for nearly an hour on one final plate, after which a kimono-clad Evelyn went downstairs to a lower bedroom to dress. Since it was December and nearly five, it was quite chilly and there was a small fire in the fireplace as well as the requisite fashionable black bearskin rug. It was too inviting for Evelyn to pass up, so she took off her kimono and sat, “quite alone and quite naked” before the fire, pensive and warm, just as if she were in one of Stanny’s secret snuggeries.

  “Suddenly,” she recalls, “the door opened and a strange elderly man walked in. In my surprise I simply sat there open-mouthed, staring at him. He stood rooted to the spot in the doorway, staring back.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the man finally said, gravely, and backed out, closing the door. Evelyn dressed quickly and within moments a frantic Stanny came running into the room. He asked if anyone had come in.

  “Yes,” stammered Evelyn, slightly bemused and slightly embarrassed. White ran out of the room, then back in again. She asked him who the man was and an uncharacteristically flummoxed White replied that it was his friend, Henry Poore.

  “This is his house,” Stanny said excitedly, “but I didn’t want him to see you. What did you have on when he came in?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  THE WILD ROSE

  After her engagement in Florodora ended, Evelyn next found herself in a part that again played up her sultry looks. Her role was “the Gypsy girl, Vashti,” in the “gayety” being produced by George Lederer called The Wild Rose, which had come to Broadway after a run at the Garrick Theater in Philadelphia. Lederer stated to reporters in May 1902 that he was startled by the “Raphael-like vision of Miss Florence” when she walked into his office, accompanied by her mother, about six weeks earlier, looking for an “auxiliary place” in the chorus.

  Lederer claimed that after interviewing the girl’s mother, it was clear “she was as desirous of the girl’s adoption of the stage as was the girl.” One wonders about Lederer’s (or the reporter’s) ironic choice of the word “adoption.” Clearly, more and more, Mrs. Nesbit seemed disinclined to assert motherly care or provide guidance for her daughter as long as Evelyn provided the weekly paycheck, supplemented every week by the liberal Stanny. Or perhaps, saying that the mother of the “eighteen year old aspiring actress approved” was Lederer’s way of avoiding criticism and possibly jail by warding off the Gerry Society for hiring such a strikingly young-looking girl for his troupe (despite what her mother was willing to swear to regarding her daughter’s age).

  After first assuring himself that Evelyn could perform, by watching her rehearse, Lederer was then convinced that he had a “find.” Both Evelyn and her mother signed a “singular contract” supposedly giving Lederer exclusive control of the girl’s services for a year.

  It was soon rumored in the papers and gossip sheets (a rumor fed by Lederer himself) that he had named the production after his little Gypsy girl. It was also rumored that perhaps Stanford White had used his considerable influence to help his protégée move up from “utility girl” to featured player in this, only her second production. But according to the press at the time, the little model from Pittsburgh was perfectly capable

  Evelyn as Vashti, the Gypsy girl, with

  another chorus girl in The Wild Rose, 1902.

  of “paddling her own canoe” and “not only opening doors herself, but turning the heads of seasoned theatrical managers on her own.” The extent of her acting talents, however, remained a question.

  As it had with her modeling career, the publicity machine began working overtime once Evelyn began her run in The Wild Rose. A two-page article, which appeared in the centerfold of the New York Herald on May 4, 1902, told the story of the budding Broadway beauty and gave the details of her unique contract for The Wild Rose company. Its headline read, “Her Winsome Face to Be Seen Only from 8 to 11 p.m.” This was accompanied by drawings and photos of “Miss Evely
n Florence in Various Poses.”

  Beginning first by examining the business end of show business, the article described how “rare loveliness in young womanhood is apparently a strikingly valuable asset in the inventories of theatrical managers whose productions depend for their success to a large extent on their possession of good-looking, shapely and graceful girls. . . . Only a few seasons ago only featured players were signed to exclusive contracts. Now a well-known purveyor of feminine loveliness has signed a new beauty whom he recently discovered to such a contract. This agreement has Manager George Lederer as party of the first part and Miss Evelyn Florence as its collateral subject.”

  This unique piece, a new type of public relations, and the so-called actual stipulations of Evelyn’s contract would be quoted again when Evelyn made her first appearance in the July 1902 issue of The Theatre magazine. Unlike other chorus girls, who were destined to remain anonymous or relatively unknown (and certainly never would have their photos appear in such a prestigious and influential magazine, let alone occupy so much space), Evelyn was featured in two photos and would appear in another issue several months later (see page 127).

  Articles began to appear with regularity, focused on Evelyn’s budding Broadway career and filled with full-page photographs or drawings of the model-turned-actress Evelyn Florence (or Evelyn Nesbit or Evelyn Nesbitt). Each article sought a new angle for promoting this “fresh and fascinating theatrical find.” One headline raised the question of whether Prince Henry of Belgium would have married the young British society girl he did marry, a Miss Dolan, had he seen “this American Girl.”