Just as I have tried to keep my citations as concise as possible, citing directly quoted material and omitting only those citations related to facts that are widely known and accepted (as well as quotations taken from periodicals and newspapers of the period for which I had clippings or parts of clippings but no other identifying source), I have also tried to let Evelyn speak for herself as much as possible, since her voice is the one that has been the most muffled and misinterpreted over the last hundred years in spite of her best (or worst) efforts. I therefore apologize if at times my relating of her recollections leads to some factual errors or seeming inconsistencies, particularly regarding her early life. Unless noted, her quotations are taken from The Story of My Life, Prodigal Days, The Untold Story, and unpublished letters in private collections and interviews with family members. Unless otherwise noted, Harry Thaw’s quotations are taken from his book, The Traitor.
INTRODUCTION: THE GARDEN OF THE NEW WORLD
3. men like E. H. Harriman Multimillionaire politician, financier, and railroad magnate Russell Sage was the target in 1891 of a dynamite-toting anarchist. Although miraculously Sage was unharmed, his secretary was killed, along with the would-be assassin. Another member of this exclusive club was Henry Clay Frick, who was the target of an anarchist one year after Sage. A disgruntled worker raided Frick’s office armed with a revolver and a steel knife. In spite of several serious wounds inflicted upon him before his attacker was shot, Frick was back at his desk only a week later.
3. “dishearting middle-brow indifference” Collins, 86.
3. potter’s field The Washington Square area was farmland until the Common Council of New York purchased the land for a new potter’s field, or public burial ground, in 1797. The potter’s field was used mainly for burying unknown or indigent people. But when New York went through terrible yellow fever epidemics in the early 1800s, most of those who died from yellow fever were also buried here, safely away from town, as a hygienic measure.
5. “Envious, suspicious” Collins, 110.
CHAPTER ONE. SIREN SONG
8. “unruly” and “self sufficient” Whitman, “Mannahatta,” from Leaves of Grass.
8. apocalyptic feelings that seem From Elaine Showalter’s insightful study of the sexual anxieties at the turn of the last century, Sexual Anarchy.
9. “loads of babies” From Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
9. street Arabs The term, coined by social reformer and photographer Jacob Riis, describes the virtually homeless children (predominantly male) abandoned by their families, and given over to the dirty, dangerous streets of the Bowery and Five Points areas to fend for themselves.
10. the machine had entered the garden From Leo Marx’s critical study of American culture and literature, The Machine in the Garden, which examines the impact of industrialization and technology on a predominantly pastoral America, which saw itself as the virgin wilderness and “New Eden” prior to the Civil War.
11. image of an age In homage to Nabokov’s Lolita, a girl who also generated a great deal of controversy in her day and whose circumstances, although fictional, are an uncanny parallel to Evelyn’s (including a dead father, feckless mother, precocious intellect, theatrical aspirations, and identity as the sex object of two adult men, one of whom is a dark doppelgänger of the other).
13. “love, hate, villainy” Atwell, 12.
13. “contemporary social types” Banta, 7.
14. “a vision who assailed one’s senses” Collins, 62.
15. “grown wholesomely in” Collins, 63.
CHAPTER TWO. BEAUTIFUL CITY OF SMOKE
22. fire consumed all records In all versions of her childhood, in spite of the fact that Tarentum was known for its glass and bottling industry (in addition to salt and oil drilling and the manufacturing of bricks, lumber, and other such products), Evelyn characterizes her earliest experience as rural, most likely because she spent so much time with relatives on outlying farmland. As for her correct age, the IRS had to rely on the sworn testimony she gave during the murder trial that she was born in 1884 to decide the issue of her receiving Social Security. But Evelyn was never quite sure if that was the correct year and always believed, as she wrote in a number of letters, that she was born in 1885 (which I also believe, given the furor over her turning eighteen in December 1903, referred to in various accounts of events).
25. Florence Evelyn was around eleven Evelyn’s own memory of her actual age when her father died varies from eight to eleven in different accounts of the story. If, as she testified, she was born in 1884, then she was almost eleven when her father died.
CHAPTER THREE. POSES
37. hustling bustled and burgeoning Once the shirtwaist came into being and swept the country as a revolutionary fashion accesory (in imitation of the man’s detachable celluloid collar and cuffs), women had greater freedom of choice and slightly more freedom of movement. The colorful shirtwaist was cheaply made and gave the appearance that one had a larger wardrobe than in actuality.
37. “escagators” Nickname given to the newly invented escalators that posed a real threat to the long skirts of women shoppers.
39. ripped down the hems At sixteen, a girl was no longer considered a child, which meant from that point on, her legs were hidden beneath skirts lengthened to their “proper” height just at the ankle. In a popular poem titled “Goodbye Legs,” widely reprinted in various newspapers, a young woman sighs, “I shall be legless until my death,” lamenting the end of childhood freedom and the restrictive clothing adult women wore.
40. Charlie Somerville Working for the New York Evening Journal, he would become one of the most prominent reporters to cover the Thaw murder trial.
41. “create possibilities for their future” Habegger, xxxvii. In Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature, author Albert Habegger argues that adolescent girls benefited from their reading of the popular romances that invaded the best-seller lists at the end of the nineteenth century, providing them with both models of behavior and the promise of greater opportunities.
47. “a dreary adult” As her grandson Russell Thaw related in one of our conversations, even in her sixties and seventies, Evelyn never really thought much or cared for money in the sense of one who is covetous. When she had little or no money, she made the best of the situation, and when she had it, she was both a soft touch and a spendthrift, which meant she didn’t have it for very long.
CHAPTER FOUR. THE LITTLE SPHINX IN MANHATTAN
58. Miss Florence Evelyn In her earliest incarnation, Evelyn was identified variously as Florence Nesbit and Florence Evelyn; frequently her last name was misspelled as Nesbitt, which meant she was also sometimes confused with a more mature actress named Miriam Nesbitt.
59. titled Miss N. Not to be confused with the famous photograph of Evelyn of the same title, taken by Gertrude Käsebier and discussed at length in chapter 6.
61. “flash into public view as a famous beauty” Atwell, 12.
64. Sandow the strongman Popular vaudeville performer whose nude muscular posing in photographs (from behind) came under Comstock’s fire.
65. other plays suffered similar fates When Ibsen’s A Doll’s House premiered in New York City, the first American audiences remained seated after Nora’s heroic exit; in spite of the furious blinking of house lights, they awaited Nora’s repentant return to provide the expected conventional happy ending. Comstock’s unrelenting condemnation of the play led to its closing.
66. "The Statue That Offended New York” Title of an article on Saint-Gaudens’s Diana and its colorful history from American History Magazine.
67. showgirls bursting out of pies Stanford White’s first close brush with notoriety, which signaled to some that he had experienced “more than a whiff of the Tenderloin,” was the “Pie Girl Incident.” Along with his business partners and most intimate friends, White gave a party at 5 West Sixteenth Street, the home of society photographer James Breese, founder of the Carbo
n Studio. The word studio itself conjured images of depravity and licentiousness among the general public, and this party would only reinforce that notion once the details of it were made public during the Thaw case. (It also gave rise to the expression “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?”)
At the outset, two young models in haremlike costumes, one blond, the other auburn-haired, poured wine, whose color matched their hair and complexion. The centerpiece of the bash was a huge pie wheeled into the center of the room. On cue, out popped four and twenty real blackbirds and a scantily clad fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl named Susie Johnson. Wrapped seductively in the sheerest of black gauze, the nubile teen also wore a stuffed blackbird on her head and danced seductively on the table, her bare feet adorned with exotic feathered toe rings.
When gossip quickly began to spread about the debauchery of the “Pie Girl Incident” (within two days the Gerry Society began a search for the girl), although White managed through begging and pleading to keep the story out of the papers, rumors of the degenerate party made their way into Hearst’s pseudo-moralistic American. It was reported that Susie Johnson’s mother had found gold coins in her purse and shoes when the girl returned home in the early-morning hours. It would ultimately come out at the first murder trial that “the poor Johnson girl” later married, only to be “thrown off ” by her husband when he heard about her role as the infamous Pie Girl. She killed herself and was buried in a potter’s field.
70. a population obsessed with iconographic images Banta, 7.
70. Charles Dana Gibson’s “Eternal Question” Probably the most ubiquitous and best-known image of Evelyn as the quintessential Gibson Girl, it made its first appearance as the centerfold of Collier’s magazine in 1903. It was also the advertisement for a collection of Gibson’s prints and drawings called The Weaker Sex, and nearly eighty years later was used in the ads for the 1981 film Ragtime. Even before Evelyn, Gibson’s popular illustrations, gracing the weekly centerfold in Life magazine, reigned supreme. Embracing, however naively, Gibson’s often satirical vision of themselves, Americans basked in the “stylized and sardonic” national identity depicted in Gibson’s drawings. According to the New York World, before Gibson synthesized his ideal woman into the Eternal Question, “the American girl was vague, nondescript, inchoate. . . . As soon as the world saw Gibson’s ideal it bowed down in admiration saying, Lo, at last, the typical American girl.”
70. much like the Garden’s Diana Thanks to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, one of the myths that has entered the cultural consciousness is that Evelyn modeled for Saint-Gaudens’s Diana. She was nine when he created the statue.
70. Harrison Fisher, Howard Chandler Christy, Henry Hutt, and Archie Gunn Four of the most prominent, talented, and successful illustrators of the period; each in his own way developed a signature vision of the American girl that complemented Gibson’s vision.
73. the all-consuming desire of manufacturers Banta, 8.
73. Restricted circulation of a wholly different kind The Victorian view of feminine modesty required five layers of clothing for women—beneath the skirt a woman was supposed to wear a slip or petticoat, then a cotton chemise, and then rough underwear. Clothes at best provided for decorous immobility and at worst painfully restricted the ability to breathe, let alone move. The rib-crushing whalebone corset of the nineteenth century was replaced with the technologically advanced metal model.
73. hair rats Made of wire mesh, these rat-shaped fixtures were set in place with hairpins on top of a woman’s head to lift her hair for the requisite Gibson-girl coiffure.
73. picture hats Abnormally huge and unwieldy hats thought fashionable and named for their ability to totally block an unfortunate patron’s line of vision seated behind a woman wearing one at the “picture show” or nickelodeon. This prompted theater owners to insert the card “Ladies must remove their hats” into the opening title sequence of the movies they showed.
CHAPTER SIX. BENEVOLENT VAMPIRE
99. “Night turned into Day” To many it appeared that as soon as Roosevelt assumed office, changes took place that reflected the character of the newly appointed young, flamboyant, and fervent president. Roosevelt’s leadership signaled the start of a period marked by acceleration in industrial development, land acquisition, foreign trade, immigration, international finance, and unprecedented economic growth in building construction. Ironically, McKinley’s untimely death provided Roosevelt with a number of timely opportunities, one of which was to move the United States into the arena of world politics, which included helping Cuba establish itself as a nation, and annexing the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
119. Gertrude Käsebier Respected and talented portrait photographer and part of the Photo-Secession movement who exhibited at the prestigious 291 along with Stieglitz and Steichen.
123. “sugar-daddyish mix of altruism” Michaels, 114.
123. “selling her to the highest bidder” Michaels, 115.
124. “none more fully” Michaels, 115.
129. “little butterfly” This is probably the most famous photographic image of Evelyn. It won Eickemeyer a prize and was the image used at the murder trial as proof of her unsavory character. It was also the best-selling of all the postcard images of Evelyn.
CHAPTER EIGHT. AT THE FEET OF DIANA
146. “a connoisseur” . . . “an apostle of beauty” O’Connor, 131.
148. “architect of desire” Title of Susannah Lessard’s engrossing and elegantly written autobiographical book detailing her family history and the legacy of her great-grandfather Stanford White.
149. “just a fairy out of wonderland” Atwell, 12.
159. Svengali and Trilby The manipulative hypnotist/impresario and his lovely model/victim in George Du Maurier’s best-selling 1894 novel Trilby.
CHAPTER NINE. THE BARRYMORE CURSE
166. “In the considered opinion of ” O’Connor, 188.
169. “By God we’ll go to a restaurant” O’Connor, 190.
170. “a slick, penniless, hard-drinking ne’er do well” O’Connor, 189.
CHAPTER TEN. ENTER MAD HARRY
194. Posing under another assumed From the second trial transcript.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE WORST MISTAKE OF HER LIFE
213. “I want to speak with you” This episode, with a few additional details from My Story and Thaw’s The Traitor, is Evelyn’s recounting as described in Prodigal Days.
216. “Burglar-Banker-Father” From an Emily Dickinson poem describing God.
219. a very different way Both White and Thaw were also, coincidentally, enraptured by a specific quality of Evelyn’s distinctive beauty—her exquisitely delicate and “boyish figure”—which may have had more unconventional implications than Evelyn realized at the time. Each man at different times had expressed to Evelyn his severe distaste for “fat” women of the more voluptuous type that was popular in the 1890s, and there are indications that their love of beauty cut both ways in terms of gender.
228. “the shores of Avalon” As a child, Evelyn had read Arthurian romance with her father, who praised the chivalry of knights and the virtue of the ladies whose honor they defended.
233. Olga Nethersole’s production A shocking drama for its day, Sappho tells the story of the “regrettably named Fanny Le Grand.” Several scenes after prostrating herself willingly at the feet of her would-be lover (a position normally reserved for maidens begging to protect their purity on stage), Fanny is carried up the stairs in the arms of her lover. When it became clear to the audience that the man had spent the night with Fanny, they let out a collective gasp. Some rose and angrily stormed out of the theater. The next morning, the unfortunate Nethersole was roused out of bed and taken down to the police station. Hummel took up her case and made her the advocate of artistic freedom during a very brief trial that ended with her acquittal (much to Anthony Comstock’s bilious resentment).
239. Blank the Pimp Harry’s name for White’s secretary, Charles
Hartnett.
CHAPTER TWELVE. THE "MISTRESS OF MILLIONS”
260. sob sisters Before the 1880s, there were few newspaperwomen, and those female journalists who did exist were not permitted to write on important topics. Front-page assignments, politics, finance, and sports were not usually assigned to women. Over the next decade, as historian Frank Mott writes, “women flocked into newspaper work.” The Thaw case, with Evelyn as its central figure, was the impetus for an entire generation of newswomen to take their place at the table with the men in covering the “crime of the century.” The term “sob sister” was nonetheless a disparaging one.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. CURTAINS: JUNE 25, 1906
276. “When I handed him” From the first trial transcript.
284. “a smirking conversation” O’Connor, 191.
287. “Everyone always figured it would be a father” From the first trial transcript.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. AFTERSHOCK
289. “scavenging for the puniest” Most of the quotations in this chapter are taken from newspaper accounts that appeared immediately after the murder. There were twenty-eight newspapers in New York alone in 1906.
300. “The gilding of the figure” Collins, 99.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. DEMENTIA AMERICANA
304. “a creature far meaner and uglier” The majority of quotations in this chapter are taken from Thaw’s account in The Traitor of his ordeal after the murder.
307. Benjamin Atwell The Thaws’ publicist also helped the family mount a play more than just loosely based on the murder case. It opened in Brooklyn while the first trial was taking place. Its central characters are Stanford Black, a “rounder and roué” who seduces then abandons a young girl, and Emeline Hudspeth Daw, the beautiful wife of the young chivalrous hero, Harold Daw. Several scenes after a particularly lurid one in which Black seduces and abandons a young girl, who is then spurned by her family and dies of a broken heart, Daw shoots Black during a musical performance on a roof garden and awaits trial in the Tombs. In the play, Daw proclaims his own innocence, based on the idea of the “unwritten law”: “No jury on earth will send me to the chair, no matter what I have done or what I have been, for killing the man who defamed my wife. That is the unwritten law and upon its virtue I will stake my life.”
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