American Eve (14 page)

Notable New Yorker photograph of
Stanford White, circa 1900.

CHAPTER SIX

Benevolent Vampire

He was a generously big man—and infinitely mean; he was kind and tender—and preyed upon the defenseless. . . . A crude expression offended him; yet in some things he was shameless.

—Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days

Stanford White was a member of a small clique of men who had vicious tendencies . . . performed frequently without remorse, with the sense that he and his friends were immune to the laws of the land.

—Evelyn Nesbit, My Story

September 1901 was nearly a week old, and although Evelyn was only a “utility girl” in her third giddy month in the New York City production of
Florodora,
her nightly presence onstage in the “temple of feminine pulchritude” made her a not-so-obscure object of desire for some prominent and powerfully connected devotees. One was the well-known director of “the Garden” at Madison Square, who had seen the show forty times since it had opened. And there was the usual coterie of bankers, businessmen, and robber barons. More than slightly farther uptown, however, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on that same Saturday, a different kind of drama was about to unfold, one that threatened to shatter the cavalier confidence of a barely broken-in century. And in an unlikely setting named the Temple of Music.

President William McKinley stood at the head of a long queue of men in straw boaters and women with colorful parasols. The line snaked its way around the Greco-Roman-style building where many had waited patiently in a late-summer sun for hours to shake the president’s hand. Although a number had struck up pleasant conversations amongst themselves, one young man, whose hand appeared to be bandaged, waited his turn in colorless, edgy silence. When he reached the president, before anyone knew what was happening, he raised the hand waist-high, covered not by a bandage but a handkerchief. Two shots rang out, fired into the president at point-blank range. The noise reverberated with callous force through the great hall. A stunned Secret Service man stood by, stupidly immobile, “while a Negro man who had stood on line behind the assassin wrestled him to the floor before he could fire a third time.”

A wounded but conscious McKinley was rushed to the nearest hospital. One of the bullets had miraculously deflected off a brass button on his vest. But the other had torn its way into the fleshy part of his considerably fleshy stomach. As the news spread, a stunned nation held its breath. It was the opinion of the attending physicians that although the bullet was not fatal, speed in tending to the bleeding wound was still a priority. The only doctor available to operate was a gynecologist, and neither he nor his assistants bothered to put on caps or gauze masks as they hastily probed the deep hole for the offending bullet. They closed up McKinley with a cauterized sewing needle from Woolworth’s.

At the same time, the young man who had shot the president was already in custody. He was Leon Czolgosz, born and raised in Michigan (in spite of, as one paper put it, “his ugly-sounding foreign name”). He told authorities that he had purchased the gun, a .32-caliber nickel-plated revolver, for three dollars and ten cents (plus seventeen cents’ postage) through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. A self-proclaimed anarchist, Czolgosz had targeted McKinley, not because of any specific political beliefs the president espoused, but rather as a symbol, “an empty figure-head. ” Several hours later, as the would-be revolutionary sat in a cell, the doctor and his assistants wiped the clotted blood from their hands and closed up the president without finding the second bullet. Nonetheless, they declared the operation a success. The nation exhaled.

The following day’s reports indicated that the president seemed to be improving. Then, just as suddenly as the attack had come, McKinley began to fail. Eight days later, Czolgosz graduated from anarchist to assassin as the president “expired,” the victim not of a fatal gunshot but of a botched operation—he died of gangrene.

Justice was extremely swift but not exactly painless for Czolgosz, who was sentenced within a matter of weeks to the electric chair. New technology being what it was, the deadly-looking apparatus did not quite work as promised. After several sweat-stained attempts by the nervous executioners, who increased the voltage with each try, as the room filled with the young man’s cries and the choking odor of burning hair, the assassin was finally and satisfactorily electrocuted (duly reported in gruesome detail in the newspapers). On the day that McKinley died (September 14), Theodore Roosevelt, who had been sworn into office immediately, promised to get the nation back on track. And, as one paper optimistically announced a week later, just like that, “Night turned into Day.”

And it was only one week later, during a matinee of
Florodora,
that the wheels of Florence Evelyn’s fate switched tracks once again, engineered by an unwitting, pleasantly plumped chorus girl by the name of Nell King. The thirty-something Nell, who had recently replaced Florence Clemmons as one of the featured sextet, was the bosomy mother of fellow chorus girl Edna Goodrich. Although Nell posed as her daughter’s sister when the stage-door Johnnies came sniffing around (hoping to hook herself a “bigshot rich fish”), their little secret was well-known to the whole company. This particular day, Nell was on a mission.

Stanford White, who had been very open-handed of late to both her and her daughter, asked Nell to arrange for Edna to “bring the little Spanish maiden” to a luncheon he was planning. As Nell was well aware, with a man of such tremendous sway in the dominion of theater-land, the question wasn’t if but when the task would be done. And since, as noted by one critic, “ornament was his passion” (at least one of them), White needed the darkly lovely little maiden to brighten his inventory of rare finds. In his expert estimation, the architect calculated that she would outshine all others.

Nell wiggled and flounced her way through small cliques of actors, stagehands, and various crew members in the cavernous backstage of the Casino Theater, looking for the Kid, who was fretting nervously in the wings. Evelyn wanted desperately to make a good impression on every audience at every show and prove herself to the company. Always anxious before a performance, she went through a little ritual, repeating a childhood nursery rhyme, which she chanted to herself “to chase away the butterflies.” Nell spied Evelyn half in shadow as she played absent-mindedly with the vibrant multicolored scarves wrapped around her small-waisted peasant skirt. As Evelyn silently mouthed her incantation, Nell interrupted the ceremony by putting her hand on the girl’s exposed shoulder.

“Do you think you can get your mother’s permission to go to a lunch party with Edna and some of her ‘society friends’?” she whispered.

Evelyn looked up at her, distracted, waiting for her cue. Nell repeated the question and Evelyn answered that she wasn’t sure. She told Nell that her mother had been hovering more carefully as of late, still apprehensive about the “bad air” of the stage and nervous about crossing paths with Mr. Comstock and his prowling vice patrol, whose exploits were recounted almost daily in the papers. Like all respectable once and future middle-class women of the times, Mrs. Nesbit did not want to be accused of raising her daughter improperly. She surmised, if only dimly, that there was a darker side to life behind the footlights that might reflect poorly on her if she were suddenly thrust in the spotlight, and had to confess she had lied about her daughter’s age—repeatedly.

Yet while she continued to accompany Evelyn to some of her modeling engagements during the day, Mamma Nesbit was not a presence at the theater where Evelyn performed eight times a week, including matinees. Her only attempt at guidance was the inane advice that Evelyn should avoid much contact with show people. Mrs. Nesbit, who was not about to try her own idle hands at gainful employment again, did not consider the absurdity of her words or the foolishness her actions. With her daughter bringing home her combined salaries, Mamma Nesbit reckoned it was worth the sacrifice.

That evening after dinner, Evelyn’s instincts proved accurate. As she stood by the only window in their one-room apartment, she broached the subject: “Mamma, can I go to a society luncheon party with Edna Goodrich?”

Mrs. Nesbit considered the question. “I want to know more about these society people,” she said. This of course was as ludicrous as her admonition about avoiding show people, given the fact that Mrs. Nesbit knew next to nothing about the New York social scene (but had given permission for Evelyn to perform nightly in front of hundreds of men, the vast majority of whom had little or no connections to any kind of society). Nonetheless, perhaps suspicious that any so-called society connections Edna might have would be of the dubious supper-society variety (which included everyone from jockeys and gamblers to Buffalo Bill Cody to “regular Broadway sharpies” such as Diamond Jim Brady, the “overdressed belch”), Mrs. Nesbit refused to give her consent.

Nor did she want to jeopardize the mounting interest of a Mr. James Garland, a millionaire banker, who had taken a fancy to her little girl after seeing her in
Florodora
every night for two weeks running from a coveted front-row seat. Several weeks earlier Garland had asked one of the librettists to introduce him to the little Spanish maiden, then “abruptly but with marked courtesy” asked if he might call on her mother. Evelyn gave some sort of evasive reply and promptly ran out the door, not giving it another thought. But a few days later, returning from a matinee, she found Garland sitting in the common front room of their boardinghouse talking to her mother.

As far as Mrs. Nesbit was concerned, Garland provided more than enough society for both of them on his Sunday yachting trips up the Hudson, for which they had a standing invitation. She was apparently less concerned (if at all) about the fact that the dour banking baron was a married man more than four times Evelyn’s age, old enough to be her grandfather.

The disappointed Spanish maiden went back to Nell King the next day.

“Mamma says she doesn’t think it’s such a good idea.”

Wanting badly to please White, and fearing that Edna might tumble from her present position of favor, Nell was unwilling to take no for an answer. For several days, she pestered Evelyn, who simply repeated her mother’s reply. But White had specifically requested that Edna bring the dark-haired, diminutive chorine to his luncheon, and he was a man used to having his orders followed—as one would a blueprint. Nell decided to alter her line of attack. She arrived the next day at the boardinghouse in the West Thirties between Fifth and Sixth avenues in White’s electric car, which visibly impressed Evelyn’s mother.

“I assure you that everything is on the level,” Nell said to Mrs. Nesbit. “The party is with some of the nicest people in New York society.” She provided a laundry list of people’s names, none of whom would actually be at the party (and some of whom were dead). With such smiling reassurance from another mother, coupled with the fact that it was not a dinner party, Mrs. Nesbit agreed to let Evelyn go. Nell heaved a busty sigh of relief as she got back into the car and adjusted her bosom. She knew the Pharaoh of Fifth Avenue would be pleased.

The day of the much-anticipated luncheon, an exhilarated Evelyn was in danger of wearing a hole in the already threadbare carpet, pivoting from mirror to bed to window to mirror. Mamma Nesbit pleaded with Florence to stand still as she dressed her in a simple homemade white outfit with black piping, pleated skirt, and a large white sailor’s collar. Made from any available materials, including the occasional curtain or bedspread, the dresses Mrs. Nesbit made for Evelyn (to save money on buying new clothes) were the only remnants of her self-professed talent with needle and thread.

This particular dress was markedly different from those Evelyn wore back in Philadelphia when her mother had intentionally lengthened all the hems of her dresses and stretched her age to secure her the job at Wanamaker’s. On this occasion, her mother made the skirt so that it would fall just at the knee, signifying a deliberate albeit useless gesture to turn the clock back on Evelyn’s already amputated childhood. Indeed, without any stage makeup, her long hair tied in back with a large black taffeta ribbon, Evelyn looked less like a chorus girl and more like a girl in grammar school. Almost immediately upon her entrance into the theater world, Evelyn’s age sparked rumors and speculation both backstage and in the yellow press. Certain green-eyed actresses insisted that they knew for a fact that she was at least twenty, while others suggested that her slyly ambitious mother covered up the fact that Evelyn was in fact not even fifteen in order to get her on the stage and satisfy the Gerry Society. The fact that her mother began to shave a few years off her own calendar only obscured the truth further.

As for the “Goodrich sisters” (who also lied about their ages), neither realized the implications at the time of White’s insistence that Edna bring Evelyn to lunch. Confident that White’s habitually roving eye was still fixed on her shapely, more mature nineteen-year-old daughter, Nell was either too empty-headed or too full of herself to think that the sophisticated clubman could find the wraithlike, undeveloped child more attractive than ample Edna. She was woefully wrong.

Edna Goodrich arrived at the Nesbits’ boardinghouse in a hansom cab, attired in a floor-length lavender dress that White had commented on approvingly several weeks earlier. Her brown hair was swept up in a fashionable pompadour and held in place with an artificial orchid and a multitude of hairpins. Before Edna could get out, Evelyn ran from the building and down the steps. She nearly vaulted into the cab.

“Where are we going?” she asked Edna, who acted more than a little patronizing as they pulled away from the curb.