American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  ONE-NIGHT STAND IN NEWPORT (AUGUST 25, 1902)

  As far as the press was concerned, a particularly newsworthy story involving Evelyn emerged when, in August 1902, it was announced that Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of White’s clients (and perhaps at his suggestion) , had hired the entire company of The Wild Rose and its orchestra to perform at the fabulous “cottage” in Newport named Beaulieu, which White had designed for her. The papers reported that the “hundred or so citizens of lower Broadway were to entertain the 400” at Beaulieu and proclaimed cheerfully that, “Real Darkies Will Also Give a Genuine Cakewalk.”

  With the exception of two cast members and their well-known manager, the company from The Wild Rose, as well as “a troupe of nine Negroes engaged by the Lederer amusement company” were to set sail for Newport. Lederer did not accompany his players, feeling his presence was needed at the rehearsals of his new piece, Sally in Our Alley, at the Broadway Theatre, so his brother, James, went in his place.

  The papers seemed as intrigued by this curious adventure as if it were an authentic savage safari, except clearly the view was that the unruly natives were the ones invading the little Rhode Island haven of civilization carved out of pink-and-white Italian marble. It was advertised that “Negroes will play in a pagoda erected in the theater for their accommodation and concealment, and “Williams and Walker will sing ‘When Sousa Comes to Coon Town’ and ‘The Coon with the Panama’ ” (referring to the cigar). All of this, of course, was perfectly in keeping with the attitude of the age, in which tourists from Hoboken and the Bronx could see actual Zulu warriors “on display” at Coney Island in the same vicinity as the “Fairy Floss” concession stand, and an “honest-to-goodness Eskimo family” was camped on the boardwalk next to live babies in a new invention called an incubator.

  It was also considered newsworthy that “Miss Mazie Follete and Evelyn Florence Nesbit who had expected under proper chaperonage to make the trip to Newport aboard the private yacht of a wealthy friend did not realize their expectations and took the plebeian route.” “Miss Nesbit however was accompanied to the pier by a young man who if not the proprietor of a yacht certainly looked the part and dutifully toted the suitcase of the diminutive Evelyn.” According to the story, although Evelyn was satisfied with her accommodations, Mazie Follete complained that she wanted a larger room with a bath, as her people suffer from a hereditary disease, a “mal de mer.”

  STANNY CLAUS

  For Evelyn’s seventeenth birthday, on the day before Christmas Eve 1901 (since, as she knew, her paramour would be spending the holidays with his family), a jolly Stanny turned his Garden Tower room into a wonderland, a veritable hothouse of flowers, even though it was December. There were American beauty roses, long-stemmed calla lilies, milky white gardenias, mauve and purple and green and yellow orchids, the largest number of hydrangeas she ever saw, and potted holly bushes placed around the room in splendid variations of color. To add to the effect, Stanny had sprinkled confectioner’s sugar on all the blooms to simulate snow.

  He sat Evelyn on one of the divans and told her to close her eyes. Then, for the little girl who had to pretend she had been given a stray cat as her only gift a few shabby Christmases ago, Stanny produced from behind his back an oversized red velvet stocking with “a lovely large pearl on a platinum chain . . . a set of white fox furs which were a novelty at the time . . . a ruby and diamond ring and two diamond solitaire rings.” She jumped from the sofa and draped the furs around her shoulders, twirling and laughing, then kissing his hands and the tips of his fingers in appreciation. She teased him and called him “Stanny Claus” (a much better model than the stiffly tedious James Garland). Stanny told her she would have to be photographed with her furs and also laughed, perhaps imagining what kinds of artful arrangement he could achieve with such elegant props and his little Galatea.

  True to his nature of never doing anything by half, as the weeks passed, Stanny continued to spend an immoderate amount of money he didn’t really have on Kittens (and her mother and brother) in his acknowledged public role as patron and paternal protector. He had, for all intents and purposes, become Howard’s father, a consequence of which was that

  Postcard photograph of Evelyn wearing

  Stanny’s gift of white fox furs, 1902.

  Stanny’s secretary, who handled all of White’s personal financial transactions, had also developed a relationship with young Howard that some suspected was of too intimate a nature, given the additional speculation that White’s secretary was one of “Nature’s bachelors.”

  In spite of his myriad professional obligations, Stanny made sure that Evelyn didn’t suffer from lack of work in terms of theatrical auditions; she made brief appearances in such shows as A Chinese Honeymoon and Under Two Flags, even though the steady demand of modeling assignments for artists, illustrators, and photographers often pushed her fledgling acting career into the shadows, much to her dismay. On those glorious days when Evelyn was actually free from any kind of professional commitment, however, Stanny continued to take discernible pleasure in orchestrating her social calendar, filling her days with lighthearted distractions. There were steamboat excursions to Rye and Oakland beaches in Westchester across the Long Island Sound and picnics in Central Park, raucous outings to Coney Island to ride the Razzle Dazzle and only slightly more sedate evenings at the newly built and hypnotically incandescent Luna Park—all on Stanny’s tab and always with a flock of other girls—but never, ever with Stanny.

  Yet, while they were not exactly Svengali and Trilby, the master show-man maintained a mesmerizing hold on his little dolly, even as Evelyn grew increasingly restless, weary of keeping secrets and being kept in the dark as one of them. She felt, every so often, a slow, dull, binding ache in her abdomen and attributed it to being trussed up in costume corsets, an occupational hazard, since she never wore one otherwise. But as the days continued to tip over nonchalantly into weeks, the wild rose began to wish intensely for some control over her own destiny. Or, at the very least, for selective amnesia.

  White’s impossibly hectic schedule made togetherness either physical or otherwise with Evelyn progressively more difficult, even after hours, when the protective cloak of darkness draped itself over Manhattan (the only time in any day Evelyn had come to believe was hers and Stanny’s alone). Like a frantic vaudeville plate spinner always on the brink of losing control, White dashed back and forth between Broadway and his grand house, Box Hill, in St. James, Long Island, or between Fifth Avenue and somewhere on the Continent, tending to family obligations, overseeing a staggering multitude of projects (up to sixty at a time), cabling, cajoling, creating, and carousing—and secretly wavering on the brink of a personal financial crash.

  But after months of clandestine coupling with the inexhaustible master designer, letting her heart fall into and then languish in his gifted but careless hands, Evelyn began to feel that she and Stanny had reached a kind of impasse. She knew he still cared for her, which she said later in life was not the same as love, “a slightly larger word than sex and therein lies the difference.” And in spite of all the mooning popular songs about the subject, “Love with a capital L,” Evelyn would come to believe, “could be a merciless word.”

  For her part, having misspent her “mossy rose” and squandered real affection on the ultimate fake fakir (whose feats of endurance continued to mystify and entertain his cult of co-conspirators), Evelyn was still an adorable fixture at the usual nocturnal Madison Square Garden revels. But if she began to feel that she had become just another lovely object to Stanny, desperately sought and despicably won, a prized possession increasingly neglected among an excess of superb acquisitions, she did not say so. Like a dark-haired diminutive Rapunzel trapped by fantastic circumstances in a magical Tower, she remained a kept girl, waiting for a princely rescue and the healing tears of happily ever after. In a weird way, all the elements of the Grimms’ tale (which she had read back in Tarentum) were in place—the uncommon changeling
child-woman, the hard bargaining, forbidden fruit, and feminine wiles. The only thing missing was the unseen watcher. Or so it seemed.

  Dashing Jack Barrymore in a postcard

  photograph, circa 1902.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Barrymore Curse

  “Could You Be True to Eyes of Blue If You Looked into Eyes of Brown?”

  —Song title, 1901

  “If Money Talks It Ain’t on Speaking Terms with Me”

  —Song title, 1902

  As far as Evelyn could tell, she was Stanny’s “one and only special dolly.” But even as their furtive Dionysian relationship carried on with a kind of uncontrived momentum, White also continued to befriend and (in Evelyn’s darkening eyes) be overly friendly with an unhealthy number of other young soubrettes. From Adora Andrews to Erminie Earle, Hilda Spong to Augusta True, Stanny’s generosity ran the gamut from A to Z (and back again) as he paid for hospital or dental bills and sometimes rent and wrote affectionate notes and the like, which Evelyn didn’t appreciate at all. Evelyn wrote Stanny her own love letters during a weeklong seaside holiday he had arranged for her in the sleepy south shore community of Freeport, Long Island. She wrote him every day from her hotel room and kept his responses in a silk-lined tufted pink jewelry box, already stuffed with expensive hatpins from Tiffany, a small hand-painted compact full of fashionable faux beauty marks, and theatrical baubles bought on lower Broadway.

  But as time went on, Evelyn came to see that the majority of White’s other girls fit a disturbingly familiar pattern. They were invariably underage, from poverty-stricken or disadvantaged families with dead or absent fathers; they were usually naive or emotionally needy, starved for attention, many feeling abandoned and sometimes desperately alone in the city. A handful might have been worldly beyond their years, or disillusioned with the romance of the theater, but whatever the scenario, Manhattan’s “Lord of Misrule” did his best to keep them all sated and amused and spinning within arm’s reach.

  By January 1902, Evelyn was a month into bittersweet seventeen, a rebellious and reckless age when a child-woman who has convinced herself she must be in love can swing wildly between impulsive spite and the silly romantic sentimentalism encouraged by popular songs or by the continual and sometimes lavish attentions of an urbane lover who still shook with delight at her slightest touch. Although Evelyn never seemed to give much if any thought to the existence of Mrs. Stanford White, the “wifey” usually deposited safely somewhere out in Suffolk County, she racked her brain trying to find a way to bridle Stanny’s interest in the countless Mazies and Daisies who populated the back row of each new show (whom she imagined were scheming to get a leg up, so to speak, on fame or fortune by taking advantage of Stanny’s weakness for pretty young things).

  She also knew what Stanny knew—that none of the rich old lobsters who came to see her perform who might offer her extravagant gifts and jewelry, even marriage, interested her in the least, since they “lacked the artist’s immense and complex soul.” So Stanny could act with impunity, secure in his knowledge that she had turned away probably half a dozen millionaires already and was compelled to share her “downy fan” with only him. It seemed as if she had taken to heart what he had said about the illicit nature of their affair and how “darker chocolate is much richer and sweeter than the milk variety.”

  One practice of Stanny’s was particularly galling to Evelyn—his sending extravagant birthday bouquets to girls whose names he marked down in his little black book. Stanny’s book was bursting at the seams (what with Ada, Anna, Bettina and Blanche, Bella, Della, Edna and Elsie; Dora, Flora, Gertie, and Goldie; Inez, Josie, Lottie, and Lydia; Mabel, Maggie, Maude, and Moiselle, Sadie, Susie, Violet, and Zanita), and one afternoon in a spasm of pique, Evelyn threw the infuriating thing into the wastebasket. An amused Stanny merely retrieved it, which drove her to distraction, but also to a plan of sorts, aimed at penetrating her lover’s seemingly impervious heart.

  Evelyn decided to fight fire with fire. Initially, she tried to stir up jealousy by accepting dinner dates with several eligible young bachelors, part of a clique at the Racquet Club. One was Bobby Collier, the son of the publishing magnate; another was James “Monty” Waterbury Jr., a well-known and handsome young polo star.

  One night, in their sophomoric efforts to woo Evelyn, a number of these potential suitors played a game called “shadows.” Making her stand on a chair behind a fairly translucent drape lit from behind, they fed her oysters over the top of the drape and then asked her to guess who had just given her the icy bluepoint splashed with a squeeze of lemon. When Stanny heard about this and other similar “dates,” however, all he said was that she should be careful of “those boys.” Clearly, as far as the renowned architect was concerned, none of them could hold a twelve-watt bulb to his far more inventive and mature parlor games or ultra-sophisticated lighting and visual effects. And then, one night, an inadvertent opportunity presented itself to Evelyn.

  At one of Stanny’s Tower affairs, as Evelyn sat at a small side table, nibbling on salty Russian caviar and savoring sweet African peaches in brandied melba sauce, perhaps rolling around in her mind Stanny’s constant admonition that “a girl should never let herself get fat,” Evelyn was approached by two men. The taller of the two was determined to obtain an introduction to the intriguing little ingenue and well-known model. As he extended his hand to her, Evelyn looked up to see John Barrymore, known as Jack at the time, sporting the whisper of a newly grown mustache, which he pinched several times out of nervousness.

  The remarkably handsome twenty-one-year-old was the younger sibling of Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, both of whom were already well known as the newest generation of splendid talent produced by the combustible forces of the Drew and Barrymore acting families. Ethel was a favorite among Stanny’s theatrical acquaintances and the reason why the architect had befriended a disheveled and hungover Jack late one morning at the Knickerbocker Grille and added him to the privileged Tower guest list.

  Although he already showed ample evidence of the matinee-idol looks he would become known for (“The Great Profile”), Jack had managed thus far to escape the “family curse” of acting and, at least at this stage in his life, did not consider habitual drinking to the point of stupefaction another possible Barrymore curse. As described by one writer, “In the considered opinion of his family and elders, the youth showed every promise of being a bum.” In fact, rather than follow in his family’s prominent and perhaps intimidating footsteps, Jack had gone off in a slightly different but nonetheless creative direction.

  The gossip columns reported that the youngest Barrymore had attended classes at the Art Students League, even though by his own account he had only done so for a day “to get a good look at things.” He did show promise as a cartoonist and illustrator, although for some reason he lacked the ability to draw feet adequately, which might be a drawback for anyone but a Barrymore. One wonders if he had any legitimate interest in developing his talents or whether he was just naturally attracted to the colorful gypsy sensibilities of the art world, which shared its borders and a vagabond kinship with the theater-land he knew so well. When the League’s courses in life studies once again aroused the attentions of the omnipresent Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice, Jack was one of the first to defend the practice to his drinking buddies at the Algonquin (if not in print, then at least in principle).

  Life as a cartoonist seemed the perfect choice for Barrymore, who saw and did everything in bold, broad, and often comic strokes. It suited his overactive imagination and hyperactive temperament as he tossed around in the territory of the fourth estate, where endless rumpled days trailed off into long pickled nights in saloons and hotel bars with his newspaper pals. A puny salary was offset by professional perks, not the least of which were the thrill of deadlines and joining in the throbbing pulse of the swelling city. And while it may not have generally been the case, there was such a thing as a free lunch when Jack
was around. He landed his first job as a sketch artist at the Morning Telegraph. From there he progressed to Hearst’s Journal, thanks to his sister Ethel’s influence. And even though he was positively cocky, Jack wasn’t proud and didn’t mind relying on family or on the kindness of strangers and friends alike to pave and pay his way.

  Jack had seen The Wild Rose more than a dozen times since it had opened in May at the Knickerbocker Theatre, even paying his own way at least half the time—and all because of the bewitching “brunette soubrette” who now sat within a dainty arm’s reach. That night in the Tower room, as Jack looked into Evelyn’s molten eyes, close up for the first time, his heart beat a two-step as it never had before. He was struck by not only her perfect girlish features but also a suggestive eagerness and perhaps a hint of recklessness in her eyes that matched his own. Here was a girl, he told himself, who wouldn’t mind sawdust on her shoes. As for the impression he made on Evelyn, even though she had seen her share of dapper young men whom she could hold at bay for hours with her sphinxlike stare, the color rose perceptibly in her cheeks as he bent and kissed her hand. He was, she would recall in a letter, “positively Byronesque.”

  When White, who had been making the rounds of the room as host, stepped out for a moment to take a phone call, Jack seized the opportunity. He leaned in closely and whispered into Evelyn’s ear, asking for her phone number. In pure Barrymore fashion, he wrote the number with a flourish on his frayed shirt cuff as she whispered it into his ear, leaving a deliciously indescribable floral scent on his collar. Whether or not he was aware that White had more than an avuncular or proprietary interest in Evelyn, within twenty-four hours of Stanny’s departure for his annual two-week Canadian fishing trip, Jack took advantage of Alexander Bell’s invention and the situation. The two made a date to meet for a post-show supper at Rector’s. Whether she did it meaning to rouse Stanny from hopeless complacency or was simply swept off her feet by the charismatic cartoonist with the wicked smile, Evelyn quickly found herself irresistibly drawn to the rakish Jack, who had a distinct advantage over Stanny in that he could take her out in public. And in the daytime.