American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  And what, after all, did Evelyn know about moral boundaries? Or the opposite sex? About true love? Or honesty? Or normalcy in any kind of relationship, familial or romantic? She had never dated any boys in Tarentum, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. With a truncated childhood and maternal negligence as her only experience, Evelyn was ill equipped to cope with repeated betrayal, disappointment, and loss at the hands of fate and her so-called guardians. Thrust into a world of grown-up men and responsibility while still a child, she was invariably surrounded by adults alone, first in the studios and then on the stage, where the emphasis was on her looks rather than her character. Her harried, self-centered mother offered little if any ethical guidance, and exerted just as little control over her daughter after repeatedly placing her in harm’s way, then conveniently disappearing.

  For better (or much worse), Evelyn’s unfortunate choice to marry Harry probably gave her some little satisfaction by “putting it over” on the mother who had repeatedly put her in so many precarious positions— with strange families, strange boarders, strange “artistic” types, strange married men, and finally the strangest one of all, Harry Kendall Thaw.

  FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO A CAULDRON

  Weakened by Thaw’s relentless pursuit of her, compounded by the fact that her options were severely limited, that the theater world under Stanny’s considerable shadow had lost its patina, and that Harry professed to be madly in love with her (and only her), even though he knew “the horrible Truth,” Evelyn finally relented—and went from the frying pan into a cauldron. In February 1905, she had a sudden attack of searing pain where her appendix used to be and had to go back to Dr. Bull’s sanatorium for treatment of internal adhesions and a month’s rest. One month later, much to their chagrin, instead of a corporation or another coronet, the Thaws of Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue and Smoky City society, who “might have added further luster to their brand-new escutcheon,” got a common little chorus girl. And, as always, Harry got his way.

  On April 5, 1905, twenty-year-old Evelyn Nesbit married Harry K. Thaw in a private ceremony at the house of the Reverend Dr. McEwan. The only people in attendance were Mother Thaw; Josiah Copley Thaw, one of Harry’s brothers; and Frederick Perkins, the man who could claim to be perhaps Harry’s one and only genuine friend from the days of his youth at Wooster Academy. Attempting to initiate her own familial reconciliation, Evelyn also asked that her mother be invited. So, against Harry’s and his mother’s wishes, Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Holman came to the wedding. In a startling flaunting of tradition, the young bride wore black (with touches of deep brown), the bridal outfit having been hand-picked by Harry himself; it consisted of “a three-quarter-length opera coat trimmed in rare lace with Persian floral designs and a velvet hat with a silk entwined brim and a gorgeous feather of three shades of brown.” The reason for the choice of costume, Evelyn explained to reporters later on, was that she and Harry had to leave immediately for their honeymoon, so it was more sensible for her to wear the traveling outfit. But perhaps she was already in mourning for the life she had to deny ever existed. Or perhaps Harry had instructed her to wear black as a rueful reminder that he was willing to take her as his bride even though Stanny had taken her first. Whatever the reason, if one were superstitious, it seemed more an unhappy omen than a practicality.

  Throughout the brief ceremony, Evelyn never even took off her coat or hat. Harry had thrown his coat over the banister near the front door, only blocks from the door Evelyn’s mother had been turned away from in disgrace. And now, in another ironic twist of fate, Evelyn would spend the next year living in that same mansion on fashionable Beechwood Boulevard where, as the newspapers saw it, like a number of Florodora girls before her, Evelyn had become “the Mistress of Millions.”

  From Evelyn’s perspective, after having done everything she could to prevent the marriage, “after much discussion, after many heartaches, after great searchings of conscience and of soul”—all on the part of Mother Thaw—she had been allowed to marry Harry “in a Presbyterian church, within a larger Presbyterian circle, and sentenced in the terms of my marriage vow to live forthwith in the charmed circle of a Presbyterian home.” Like the mirror image of Dante’s Beatrice, in her own circle of Thaw hell instead of the brief paradise she had known with Stanny, Evelyn fully understood the Thaws’ dilemma, even if they didn’t. As she saw it, they were the ones at a disadvantage with regard to her presence. Among the things Evelyn did not fully recognize, however, was that she had traded one kind of monstrous mother for another. And that Harry’s monomania regarding the great White was fired up again and threatening to blow.

  THE GILDED CAGE

  Evelyn and Harry occupied a wing of the Lyndhurst mansion, maintaining separate bedrooms as was the custom for married couples of the time who could afford such a luxury (and much to Evelyn’s relief). Lyndhurst’s interior was less like an English manor house than a Teutonic fortress, which on certain nights had a subliminal and awful resonance for Evelyn. The requisite predictable ivy, which overran the façade, only added to the damp gloom inside. It was not a cheerful place by any stretch of even a limited imagination. In addition to the ivy, heavy velvet drapes kept the sunlight out of every room, which to Evelyn was not such a great loss, considering “the distinctive lack of any great or even good art in the place.” Harry, she said, was the only family member with any artistic side at all, the only one with any sense of how to decorate. Seeming at times morosely resigned to her fate and her “new family,” Evelyn recalled in her memoirs that the “Pittsburgh home was never a home for me.” But as she also stated unequivocally, she was a patient and faithful wife and Harry was “as good a husband as one might wish for.” Compared, one might ask, with whom?

  While the Thaws looked down their pug noses at Evelyn, she saw them as “not particularly well bred,” and they were not “intellectually and socially among the gods.” In her eyes, they moved “on a lower intellectual plane.” But even though she claims she would have at least understood it, they didn’t even try to patronize her. Underneath their upper-crusty surface, Evelyn suspected that such insecurity was based on the fact that the noble Thaws “had risen on very unsolid foundations. They had become financial aristocrats in a night.” Their world was the “plane of materialism which finds joy in the little things that do not matter—the appearance of a new minister, the comforts of a pew, the profits of a church bazaar.” No one and nothing so mundane could occupy Evelyn’s thoughts sufficiently, especially since even reading novels was frowned upon as immoral, while the Bible left her “with the taste of salt in her mouth.”

  Evelyn’s daily routine was always the same. Lunch and dinner with the family in the main dining room, often minus Harry, who was inexplicably absent for both meals with increasing frequency as the months dragged on. While she knew that, in general, “relations by marriage are seldom in sympathy” and that her situation was not extraordinary, Evelyn was at least bemused by the fact that her in-laws were in a terrible bind. As she wrote, “Socially, they felt they were at a distinct disadvantage in Harry having taken an actress for his wife (call me a chorus girl if you like; it makes very little difference which label you stick).”

  Even so, there was literally and figuratively a brief honeymoon period during which time, when Harry was at home, he attended to various duties for his mother and kept his promise to Evelyn about his behavior. As he and Evelyn seemed to settle down to life in Pittsburgh, throughout much of their first year of marriage, Harry appeared to have had a change of personality, like Saul on the road to Damascus, which pleased Mother Thaw and surprised Evelyn. Perhaps Mother Thaw’s prayers had been answered, since Harry seemed to have given up his diabolical hobbies and his pursuit of the white devil. Evelyn remembers that Harry was extremely patient and tactful in those early days, and whenever possible, he even shielded her from oblique attacks on her character from other family members. However, he seemed much less bored with the trivialities of church work than Evelyn, and was �
��a standing wonder—and a cause for admiration” in his various zealous forays into prayer service or organ funds, etc. Evelyn, however, could not work up any enthusiasm. Nor would she pretend. After all, hadn’t she been forbidden to act?

  Life at Lyndhurst, to hear Evelyn tell it, was a “benign and stately procession” of ministers whose wives “said things with a monotony and a sameness which lead me to suppose that there existed somewhere in America a school for ministers’ wives where they were taught to say the same things in identical terms.” One can only imagine that after the highly charged life she had known for five years, first with White, then with Barrymore, and then with Harry, life in the mansion at Pittsburgh held no charms or surprises whatsoever for Evelyn. The novelty wore off quickly as the terrible triteness and atrocious taste of those surrounding her pressed in upon her like a corset lined with jagged stones. Evelyn felt both emotionally and intellectually stifled in the “Presbyterian circle,” whose members were “victims of tight, iron-bound ritualism.” At least, she remembered slightly with tongue in cheek, that others outside the family treated her “with an attitude of forgiveness and charity. They hoped for the best.”

  Although it was understood by all who served in the household that Evelyn had no past (“as if she were Athena sprung full-blown from Zeus’ head”), even though Mother Thaw “had demanded that it should be forgotten, ” and no one ever referred to her modeling or stage days, Evelyn said that she “lived in an atmosphere of grim consciousness” that she was a sinner whose name was “tacked onto the end of a list of distant relations at prayer time.” She surmised that there must have been “a mighty lot of praying” for her behind her back during those days and months. Her own prayers “took the shape of a request that [she] might have the patience to bear the burden of [her] spiritual friends.”

  At first, Evelyn’s curiosity about a type of person she had never known kept her occupied—these people whose views seemed “cute” to her, even though she could not get past the idea that it was somehow all an act. But when she discovered they were in earnest, that they believed in themselves, and that their terrible triteness was real and intractable, she sank into a kind of melancholy that can be read in her face in the photos taken of her during this period. It isn’t hard to imagine how uncomfortable it was for Evelyn, constantly surrounded by strangers who pretended not to know what she had been, and whose obvious attitudes of forgiveness and charity were insincere and unwelcome. Even though it was well known that Harry had been thrown out of Harvard on charges of moral turpitude (he had been given three hours to evacuate the premises), as Evelyn recalled, she was the one chloroformed and squeezed under the microscope of moral scrutiny.

  No longer blithely mingling in the heady atmosphere of Stanny’s luminous Garden or Manhattan’s dazzling and capricious midnight supper society, Evelyn now found herself (as she saw it) at the center of a small-minded church movement, where she was paradoxically an outcast in a clique of people whose lives were solely and in her eyes fanatically bound up in God’s work. These were people to whom the words “Grace, salvation, light, [and] redemption come glibly,” but who all too frequently “reduced to dry husks words that should have moved men and women to tears.” This was Evelyn’s first real exposure to serious organized religion, and perhaps most surprising to her was that the people who did a lot of organizing, shouting at, and criticizing of others, who “knew the rules of the game from A to Z ... could therefore exploit it without exerting themselves to play it.” As she saw it, this sanctimonious Sanhedrin “showed the same interest in religion that the public does in baseball.”

  Not surprisingly, Mother Thaw was a stickler for propriety, and try as she might (although she frequently didn’t try very strenuously), Evelyn found it extremely hard to conform to the silly and restrictive social demands made upon her as the weeks crawled into months. As for so-called society life, the insipid and uninspired parties, receptions, and “at-homes, ” which generally ended by seven, with only the crumbs of crustless tasteless deviled ham sandwiches as a memory, drove Evelyn beyond the edge of boredom toward the catatonic. After escaping from one particularly dull function, Evelyn made her way to the back of the house, where in her exploration she found some rat holes in an outhouse. The prospect of flushing them out with a hose she borrowed from the gardener was more appealing to her than Mother Thaw’s reception. And, she felt, as an exercise it put her in the company of creatures that were more honest, “since at least the rats knew they were rats.”

  Evelyn’s life at Lyndhurst did little to change her attitude toward people in general, or her understanding of certain types of people at extreme ends of the social spectrum when comparing Broadway to Beechwood Boulevard. She tells of how the clergyman who married her, “a very nice, very fair specimen of Christianity,” was a frequent visitor to the house: “One morning when we were sitting in front of the house, a dog of mine came along, and in its light-hearted fashion jumped upon the knees of the reverend gentleman. His reward was a kick that sent him flying.” To his horror and the consternation of those Thaws who were present, Evelyn jumped from her seat and swore like a sailor in as violent a language as she could summon at the good reverend. She admits that perhaps it was not the most tactful thing to do, but as “a great lover of animals,” she just couldn’t control herself.

  As each dulling day crusted over, the younger Mrs. Thaw (or Mrs. Harry, as she was referred to when at home) began to harden into deep resentment at all the moldy holier-than-thou types she was forced into contact with nearly every day. Luckily she had learned patience in the studios, and so she made the best of an unpleasant situation as she had many times before, occupying herself with “good works” and planning social gatherings for “brainless socialites,” if only to please Harry.

  In 1915, Evelyn observed that the sob sisters who wrote tearfully during the trial of her tragic circumstances and life’s wasted opportunities didn’t understand in the least that she had never wanted to be simply “a shining figure in humdrum society.” As she put it, she had no desire to be imprisoned by the “four walls of shapeless domesticity,” and had assumed, wrongly, that life with Harry would be a series of trips to the Continent, fancy balls, and shopping sprees abroad with some time left for the occasional domestic bash. Admitting that her marriage to Harry was a mistake, she nonetheless asserted that no matter how much the Thaws chiseled and scraped away at her soul with their blunt little instruments in an attempt to fashion her according to their design, they could never impress upon her “unsympathetic surface the dim image of their God.” For all their wealth and attempts to recast her, she considered them “puny” and “inartistic.” Unfortunately, Harry was even less suitable to prolonged domesticity than Evelyn. And the honeymoon was about to end.

  THE BEAST

  Possessed by an earnestness perhaps inspired by the omnipresent cabal of professional reformers who surrounded him when home, near the end of 1905 Harry had resumed writing letters to Anthony Comstock and other vigilance societies trying to expose White and others in his crowd. With “boyish enthusiasm” he began an impressive campaign championing righteousness. And then a zealous Harry converted—back to his old ways. After months of seeming miraculously to forget him, Harry was suddenly more determined than ever to paint White as the blackest of sinners whose evil influence upon the young needed to be exposed. Fanatically preoccupied with White’s continuing power and influence, and full of his own overblown self-importance, Harry also sank his teeth into a new bone: paranoia over White’s movements in New York.

  Evelyn recalled that Harry “imagined his life was in danger because of the work he was doing in connection with the vigilance societies and the exposures he had made to those societies of the happenings in White’s flat.” He was convinced that White had hired thugs from the notorious Monk Eastman gang to “fix him.” “Because of this fancy,” Harry began carrying a revolver for his own protection. He was advised to do so, he said, by a former policeman turned de
tective named O’Mara who had befriended Harry somewhere along his twisted road.

  Evelyn (and the rest of the household) became aware of the gun only one cloudless day when, to everyone’s alarm, Harry started taking pot-shot target practice out back near the carriage house, aiming at and sporadically hitting rocks, leaves, and anything that did not move. She remained unaware, however, that Harry was paying huge sums to private detectives to have White watched, in a vain effort to catch him with some coltish soubrette and prove him a monstrous ravisher of pure American virgins. But while Evelyn saw that her husband’s virgin complex was but one of his mental aberrations, as she would later testify, she never thought Harry would have the courage to use the gun or act physically against Stanny. In fact, Evelyn never feared for Stanny’s life. She feared rather for her own, on certain nights, usually in the pitch blackness of her bedroom.