American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  rehearsing. A dancing master was brought in from Italy to work with the couple on their act as dresses were ordered that would enable Evelyn to do the more acrobatic types of moves that were becoming popular in prewar Europe. The show was Hullo! Ragtime, and every day that passed before the opening made Evelyn more and more nervous. Rumors that there would be demonstrators ready to disrupt the opening performance caused the management to come up with what they considered an ingenious plan. They actually cabled America and asked them to send twenty girls of Evelyn’s height and coloring so that when the chorus appeared, the audience would have to guess at which was Evelyn Thaw. But that turned out to be unnecessary as the opposition to her appearing died down before opening night. Now the only problem was whether Evelyn could perform or not.

  They had decided to put her into the show unannounced on the Saturday before her scheduled Monday debut. As she watched the revue begin to unfold from the wings, Evelyn’s throat tightened. She sat down behind the scenery near the back of the stage feeling faint. Then, suddenly, the little ritual she used to perform as a Florodora girl before going onstage came back to her. It was as natural as breathing.

  Evelyn and her son, Russell, in a poster

  for Redemption, 1917.

  EPILOGUE

  The Fallen Idol

  A former head of Scotland Yard . . . said that he wished girls, at the age of fourteen, could quietly be put to sleep by the State and allowed to remain unconscious until they were eighteen and ready to become harmless and normal women.

  —Frederick L. Collins, Glamorous Sinners

  A woman like a country is happiest when she has no history.

  —Oscar Wilde

  The tragedy wasn’t that Stanford White died, but that I lived.

  —Evelyn Nesbit, 1934

  As the child-woman whose age seemed intriguingly indeterminate to some and of great consequence to others, Evelyn Nesbit came to New York on the quivering cusp of possibility. Within a year, her captivating face and figure set a new, modern standard of beauty by which all others would then be measured. Acting as a mirror to the era’s deceptively intoxicating and provocative charms, she offered an image of idealized youth and beauty imprinted on the collective consciousness of an America in perpetual and lustful pursuit of “the last horizon of an endlessly retreating vision of innocence.” One need only look at the remarkable Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. photo taken of a sixteen-year-old Evelyn in 1901 (see page 6) to see the timeless and irresistible quality of a beauty that remains astonishingly contemporary, long after many so-called beauties of the past have faded from fashion. And memory.

  It was an image too quickly and easily shattered.

  Part Little Eva and part nymphet, proto-feminist and femme fatale, Evelyn Nesbit exposed an entire nation’s sins from the witness box while her own more startling and intimate transgressions were taken up with purple vengeance by the newspapers and promoted from the pulpits as a sizzling cautionary tale. Eventually spread out like a crazy quilt over six decades of the twentieth century, the details of the rest of her life illuminate not only her own personal strengths and weaknesses, but also the brightest and darkest aspects of the collective American Dream she embodied.

  But if Evelyn Nesbit’s early life resonated with the intensity and naiveté of Edison’s melodrama that rushed to depict Rooftop Murder within a week of the rooftop murder, her life after that ghastly night and the trials that followed continued to move along in fits and starts, capturing in brief but vivid flashes an America always deliriously teetering on the brink of self-awareness. Or self-annihilation.

  RÉSUMÉ

  After she “rocked civilization” (her own words) for a second time, Evelyn’s consistently mercurial life lurched forward with the same uneasy, haphazard, and artless misdirection it had since she was ten. Although she tried to pick up the shards of her ruined reputation by embarking on a vaudeville career, Evelyn (divorced from Harry in 1915, and no longer Thaw) Nesbit found to her dismay that she could not escape the tentacles of the press or her own “swinging” notoriety. In August of 1913, Harry escaped from the asylum to Canada, and until he was caught and brought back, Evelyn had to fear for her life since the papers were full of Thaw’s “vengeful threats.” In 1916, Evelyn married her dance partner, Jack Clifford (aka Virgil Montani), who was by all accounts an attentive surrogate father to young Russell, but who eventually split with Evelyn, when being known as “Mr. Evelyn Nesbit” became unbearable. She would never marry again. She tested the shadowy waters of silent film, the first of which was produced by the Lubin Company in exotic Fort Lee, New Jersey. Titled Threads of Destiny, it was, like the dozen or so films that followed between the years 1914 and 1922, a thinly veiled and self-consciously exploitative depiction of episodes from her own life best forgotten. Only stills of those films remain.

  Never far from the front pages or controversy, Evelyn suffered again and again in the court of public opinion. She found herself at the center of a censorship battle over her films when some righteous-minded citizens condemned her for allowing her young son, Russell, to appear in several of them, while at the same time tales of public brawls and ether parties with prizefighters at a retreat in the Adirondacks circulated in the newspapers.

  Through the teens and the flaming lawless decade of the twenties, although always threatening to burn out, Evelyn continued to be a commodity, even if she was perceived by most as “damaged goods.” She met with initial if limited success, enough that she could tour the country in her own railroad car for a time. But to the dwindling audiences who watched her rapid decline, she ultimately became merely a curiosity. Unable to live up to her early phenomenal success (and left penniless by the thankless Thaws), Evelyn paid a hard price for her so-called fame. She descended into drug abuse (morphine) and alcoholism, in part to numb the pain she felt from frequent excruciating migraine headaches. She tried several times to take her own life (once by ingesting Lysol), and twice a then teenage Russell was forced to come to her rescue, one time while visiting her in Chicago on Christmas break from boarding school. Her name appeared with colorful regularity in the papers and in gossip columns due to drunken brawls (her nose was broken more than once), nonpayment of bills and evictions, auctions of her clothes and what remained of any furs and jewelry, car accidents, suspected abortions, speakeasy arrests, and associations with mobsters, etc. Her pet boa constrictor, Baby, escaped to the streets of lower Manhattan while she was living and performing in cabarets in Greenwich Village (“He keeps away the bill collectors,” she remarked to bemused reporters).

  There was even the occasional rumor that she was getting back together with Harry Thaw, who came to see her several times in nightclubs in Atlantic City, Manhattan, and Chicago (this after he was released from the Kirkbride Asylum in Philadelphia, after nearly eight years of institutionalization for the “Frederick Gump debacle”). But money that Harry promised to give her “for her son” never materialized (although he did buy Russell a bicycle one Christmas). As time passed, by his twenties, Russell, having inherited his mother’s devil-may-care attitude in his approach to life, became a well-known and daring test pilot whose acquaintances included Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. Sadly, it was around this same time that Evelyn’s unfortunate brother, Howard, from whom she had remained estranged and who always seemed to exist on the periphery of life, succeeded where Evelyn had failed. He hanged himself.

  A devastated Evelyn struggled as a single mother in the Depression and the war years, during which time her mamma died. She made varied and valiant attempts to regain control of her life between the late twenties and 1945. She “sobered up” on a milk farm, ran her own Club Evelyn Nesbit in Atlantic City, opened a tearoom on Fifty-seventh Sreet in Manhattan, and started a line of cosmetics—all of which eventually failed. Gradually, the nightclubs and cabarets she performed in, doing songs like “I’m a Broad-minded Broad from Broadway” and “I’m No Man’s Woman Now,” were seedier and farther away (as far as Pana
ma City) from the fickle and unforgiving limelight. A serialized account of her life in the New York Daily News was part of the inspiration for Orson Welles’s depiction of the pitiable has-been alcoholic singer in Citizen Kane, which many believe is based on Marion Davies. When Harry Thaw died of a heart attack in 1947, he left Evelyn $10,000, the same amount he left a waitress he barely knew who worked in a coffee shop in Virginia. Then, just as she had immediately after the murder that fateful night in Madison Square Garden, Evelyn Nesbit seemed to vanish from the scene. Far from the prying eyes of a capriciously curious and unsympathetic public, Evelyn moved to southern California to live with her son, Russell, and his wife and family, which eventually included three grandchildren.

  A little more than two decades after the Madison Square Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald had proclaimed, “There are no second acts in America.” But he was wrong.

  In 1954, in true Hollywood fashion, Evelyn Nesbit emerged from the shrouded depths of insignificance and infamy when she sold her story to Twentieth Century-Fox. Hired as a consultant for the film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, with a twenty-one-year-old Joan Collins in the title role, Evelyn basked once again, however briefly, in the twilight of kinder and nostalgia-inspired publicity. After a decade-long career as a sculptor and ceramics teacher, Evelyn ended her days confined to a wheelchair and then a bed in a series of convalescent homes. Nevertheless, her mind remained sharp and vibrant as she kept contact with the outside world through hundreds of letters written to several friends. She died in 1967 “of natural causes.”

  FINALE

  In those hypocritical years when the scandal she ignited simultaneously shocked and titillated the public, Evelyn attempted to wear her notoriety with tenuous, shrinking dignity, though she barely succeeded in keeping her head above water. And although in some ways she remained hopelessly naive and childlike until her last days, she was, however, shrewd enough not to reveal “the whole truth” about her story while she lived. Perhaps this enabled her to negate her past and any guilt she may have felt about the murder of Stanford White, the only man she said she ever truly loved. Perhaps she came to realize that the only control she would ever have over her life was how much or how little of it to disclose, telling the truth, but (as Emily Dickinson might say) telling it slant (“success in circuit lies”).

  She resented being considered merely a cultural oddity “like something in Barnum’s museum,” but the questionable publicity she was routinely engaged in did ultimately provide a living for herself and her son, whose paternity Harry Thaw denied to his dying day. She had, according to all those who knew her personally in her later years, “great presence and an assured manner and she could never, never become an obscure housewife. ” Into her eighties Evelyn was, as described by her daughter-in-law, “a free spirit,” even though she was forever bound up in the mythology surrounding the “girl in the red velvet swing.” Her name now resides in that realm where fact has fused with fiction.

  Florence Evelyn Nesbit lived more than most in the first twenty-one years of her early turbulent life and then spent the next sixty contending with the myth she had become and helped invent. And reinvent when the occasion presented itself. Yet even at eighty-two, one could see the spirit of the young model come to life when someone produced a camera; she instinctively struck the characteristic pose that made her famous— her head tilted slightly back and to the side, her eyes seductively half-closed, an enigmatic smile on her face.

  American Eve.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are so many people over the course of a decade who helped me with this book that I am sure to forget to thank someone; I apologize in advance.

  I want to thank Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for my parents, Martin and Estelle. I’m indebted to my mom and thank my sister, Pam, for her unwavering faith in me, and although I miss my dad, who offered his keen endorsement at the start of my book, I am very happy to have Michael Martin, my nephew, born halfway through this process, who seems at uncanny moments to channel my father’s spirit. I want to thank the Winks of Seaford Manor for their continued encouragement, and the Pittsburgh branch, who offered a base of operations for my research in what seems a lifetime ago. Then there are my own “kids,” who not only understand my madness but share it—Tammy Baiko, Eric Chiarulli, Nick Mougis, Allyson Smith, and Brian Smyth. And of course, none of this would have mattered as much were it not for Lisa Cardyn and Lorri Ford, whose friendship and perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds are a constant source of inspiration.

  This book would not have been as meaningful and vivid were it not for Russell Thaw, Evelyn Nesbit’s wonderfully supportive grandson, and his mother, Barbara Thaw; their generosity and assistance with this project from its inception made me fearless in the face of a hundred years of mythology. I also would not have been able to complete this book were it not for continued institutional support from Hofstra University, its Faculty Research and Development Grants, and leave time. As for creative minds and kind hearts, I am particularly grateful to Paul Baker, Kevin Brownlow, Carl Charlson, Stuart Desmond, Ed and Helen Doctorow, Adolph Grude, George Hatie, Suzannah Lessard, Joe McMaster, Jay Maeder, Jim Petersen, and Ira Resnick. Their assorted acts of benevolence, encouragement, and advice have helped me greatly.

  I am of course extremely grateful to my agent, Katharine Cluverius, at ICM, my editor, Sarah McGrath, whose instincts are right on, and her assistant, Sarah Stein, at Riverhead Books; each has helped me immeasurably to make this dream a reality, and I wish Katharine and Sarah M. the best world possible for their own new additions.

  There is no way I can qualify the unconditional emotional support and intelligent contributions (editorial and otherwise) made by my friends and colleagues throughout this process (listed here in alphabetical order), so I will simply say thanks to Iska Alter, Dana Brand, Joe Fichtelberg, Bernie Firestone, Brad Hodges, Gloria Hoovert, John Klause, Susan Lorsch, Meghan Molloy, Jean Ng, Karen Schnitzspahn, and Chris Svatba. There have been many times when, immersed in my research or my writing, I have felt like Dorothy stuck in Oz, maddeningly unaware how close I was to home all the time, and I could never have made this strange journey without the brains, courage, and heart of Chris Rubeo, Allan David Dart, and Russell Svatba.

  Last, American Eve is dedicated to my captain, the person who taught me the exaltation of an inland soul, Brian Molloy. His resolute spirit, fierce intellect, and joyous sense of humor made this all possible, and I miss him most of all.

  NOTES

  I began working on American Eve more than ten years ago as an accidental tourist in somewhat unfamiliar territory. While doing research for a course I teach called “Daughter of Decadence,” I looked for iconic images of women that would reflect the period in which the images were produced. In an unGoogled, pre-eBay world, I extended my search beyond the usual libraries and archives into the realm of antiquarian books and postcards, private collectors, and “ephemera” shows. At my very first postcard show I was intrigued by a category labeled Pretty Ladies (sandwiched, symbolically, between Perambulators and Prisons). While thumbing through hundreds of postcards I was suddenly struck by one in particular. The sultry gaze of a young girl poised dreamily in turn-of-the-century fashion seemed almost hypnotic. At the bottom it read “The Debutante—posed by Evelyn Nesbit.” Her name was not unfamiliar to me. I had read E. L. Doctorow’s wonderfully evocative novel Ragtime and seen the 1981 film adaptation based on the book; in both she is a featured character. As weeks, then months passed, the face or name of Evelyn Nesbit emerged with astonishing regularity.

  I soon became obsessed with uncovering the facts buried beneath the fictions that had been written about this astonishing-looking young woman and the events surrounding the night that sealed her fate as “the girl in the red velvet swing.”

  When I began this book, no one had written anything that attempted to distinguish objective fact from subjective fancy or that tried to put Evelyn Nesbit’s fascinating and fractured life
into the broader cultural context of her “gilded cage” (and certainly not from a woman’s perspective). I saw this, then, as my task, and soon discovered that Evelyn Nesbit told and retold several versions of the crucial events that shaped her life, first on the witness stand in 1907, again in The Story of My Life (written as Evelyn Thaw in 1914), and then in a second memoir, Prodigal Days (written as Evelyn Nesbit in 1934, and published in the UK as The Untold Story). In spite of sometimes frustratingly variant autobiographical versions of her story, I now had significant pieces of information as well as self-generated mythology that I could begin to sift through and a historical timeline I could piece together to form a cohesive narrative. As I discovered, Harry Thaw also wrote a bizarre version of the events leading up to his murder of Stanford White in his own book, The Traitor (published, appropriately, by a vanity press in 1925), which in its own strange way also helped me stitch together a fuller story.

  The New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the Lincoln Center Theater Collection, the Smithsonian Institution, the Archives of American Art, and the Library of Congress have all been extremely valuable in providing materials that have helped me tie together the “threads of destiny” that hold this book together. It was also my good fortune to have had the support of Evelyn’s family (particularly her grandson, Russell Thaw), who gave me full and unprecedented access to personal family archives, including letters and photos. In addition, I am beholden to the private collections of Ira Resnick, George Hatie, Adolph Grude, Lisa Cardyn, and Lorri Ford, as well as Kevin Brownlow and Photoplay Productions, Inc. The list of works that have been invaluable as source materials are listed under “Further Reading.”