American Eve (28 page)

While the parents of students from elite families were dismayed by the disruptive presence of a soubrette in the midst of their precious and impressionable daughters, it was a different story as far as their daughters were concerned. As Evelyn saw it: “I found myself among these girls as something of a heroine . . . a real live actress transplanted in their midst.” Once the identity of Stanny’s Kittens was out of the bag, the girls at the school quizzed Evelyn relentlessly about the New York stage and life in the studios, finding out that she was featured in some magazines they were not allowed to read or didn’t even know existed. They all played at acting, putting on little skits and making homemade cosmetics with Evelyn’s help. Having had to improvise due to lack of money in the not-so -distant past, Evelyn knew that “tooth-powder, laid on with a piece of cotton wadding, was an excellent substitute” for face powder.

“I shudder to think of the substitutes we employed for rouge and lip salve,” she later wrote.

At first, a crushed Jack Barrymore, who had tried unsuccessfully to soak his sorrows in gin gimlets and boilermakers, made numerous attempts to contact Evelyn. He even went as far as Pompton Lakes, where he pinned poems and lovesick letters and drawings to the trees and bushes near the grass tennis court on the school grounds. But to no avail. That episode was over, and once again, force of habit and fear of poverty as well as the remnants of loyalty to Stanny and “their secret” forced Evelyn to take the path of least resistance and make the best of a disagreeable situation.

For several months at least, the little girl from Tarentum who had turned away millionaires and their floating palaces found herself once again on the lee side of normalcy. After classes each day, Evelyn participated in extracurricular activities that naturally involved some form of theatrics, however amateur. But there were other days when she felt strangely under the weather and had to take quinine water and cod liver oil to ease a persistent pain in her stomach. It was unlike anything she had ever felt, even after too much “disgustingly rich food” at one of the Garden’s numerous feasts.

As with nearly every turning point in her life up until then, normalcy was relatively short-lived for Evelyn. For one thing, she was always just a postmark away from the intrepid Harry Thaw, who was determined to remain a presence in her consciousness, even as he sat in a casino on the Riviera. As he had from the start, Thaw kept up a steady correspondence with Evelyn, praising her innocence and determination to succeed in her studies and offering her his full emotional support. He also sent her gifts of food and clothing, inquired about her general welfare, and was still on his very best behavior. Then there was Stanny. In spite of his busy career, White paid a number of visits to the school to check on the progress of his “ward,” and at other times, Evelyn went to see him in New York. According to one source, one day when White arrived at the school in a big touring car, he invited some of Evelyn’s classmates for a ride. During the ride, his conversation was “of such a nature” that three of the girls insisted on being let out of the car and returned to the school on foot.

While it is not clear whether White knew of Thaw’s attempts to foster a more significant relationship with Evelyn, when he did learn of Thaw’s unshakable interest in his Kittens one day, Stanny told her again that she should stay away from him, just as he had warned her about the Racquet Club “boys.” This, of course, was not unlike the warning Garland had given her about White, and White about Barrymore, and Thaw about White. And Evelyn had ignored them all.

Then, as bad luck would have it, two things happened to splinter yet again the insubstantial framework holding up Evelyn’s trembling corner of the world. The parents of the girls whom Stanny offended during his joyride in the country caused an uproar. Each in turn demanded that Evelyn be taken out of the school. And while Mrs. deMille was trying to decide what to do, the decision was made for her—and Harry Thaw’s window of opportunity to insinuate himself fully into his “Boofuls’s” life was thrown wide open.

One day in late April 1903, just after classes finished, Evelyn felt a sudden searing pain in the area around her stomach, worse than any she had felt before. Within the hour it moved up her right side and seemed to burn for several more hours. Then she “turned absolutely green” and began to vomit from the pain. Mrs. Nesbit was contacted by the school nurse, who said she suspected appendicitis. Evelyn’s frantic mother tried immediately to reach Stanford White, but he was out of town on business. She then turned to the next worst thing, the man she loathed, Harry Thaw, who had returned only recently from his European trip. Within the hour, Harry brought the second-best surgeon money could buy to the school (since his first choice, Dr. William Bull, was unavailable).

The doctor and two nurses arrived around six the next morning in an electric car Harry had hastily rented, and set up a makeshift operating room in the classroom where, appropriately, biology was taught (as well as geography). After a cursory examination, the doctor told a feverish and frightened Evelyn in rapid succession that her appendix was near bursting, that she could have died from peritonitis, and that she was to be anesthetized. The nurse also warned her that the aftereffects of the ether might cause her to vomit even more violently than she had for the last five hours or so. They left to wash up, and Harry entered the room.

Neither he nor Evelyn said a word—she was too feverish and nauseated to talk, and a gravely concerned Harry fell to his knees as he had the first day they met. He merely kissed her trembling hand. As a hazy Evelyn looked to her side, the last things she saw as she succumbed to the effects of the ether were a still-kneeling and distraught Harry, a chromolithograph of tropical plant species, and a map of the route for the Panama Canal. The operation was performed in haste, with the ether administered in large and unregulated doses from a big brown bottle on a soaked piece of cheesecloth.

During the operation, which took about an hour, Harry and Mrs. Nesbit discussed Evelyn’s future in the gardens surrounding the school’s main building, even though, as Evelyn felt at the time, “there seemed at that moment to be little future for me.” When it was reported that the surgery had been a success, an elated Harry left, promising to come back as soon as possible. When Evelyn awoke from the effects of the operation and the ether a day later, there kneeling beside her was Stanford White.

Very soon after the surgery, everyone agreed that a severely weakened Evelyn should recuperate with a holiday. The doctor in particular warned her that she could not dance for at least a year if she wanted a full recovery, and she needed to be wary of infection. Harry sent his post-operative Angel-Child letters and lounging pajamas and candy and arranged for the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria to send her “no end of tenderloins.” Thaw, who had been looking desperately for a means to worm his way more permanently into Evelyn’s life, grabbed his chance. He suggested in a phone call to Mrs. Nesbit that an ocean voyage would help Evelyn recover quickly and that he could provide the means for such a trip. Mrs. Nesbit, who had always claimed to detest Thaw and had threatened to take a bullwhip to him, instead took advantage once again of an opportunity. She agreed to let Thaw make all the arrangements for the trip. What she did not count on but discovered too late was that Thaw planned to go as well, on a separate ship. His personal valet, William Bedford, a dapper Englishman who had been with the family for eighteen years, would accompany mother and daughter, and they would all meet in England.

Evelyn of course needed little persuasion. Stanny had held her spellbound for countless hours with stories of the great artists such as Tiepolo, Turner, and Raphael, “the magnificent architecture described by Vitruvius and Ruskin,” and the marvelous scenery, often detailing his trips abroad and the “glorious feats of cultural exchange he performed—trading American oil and steel dollars for priceless artifacts and ancient treasures that would find a new home on Fifth Avenue or in Newport.”

Harry, perhaps figuring his best chance was to “get to her” while in a weakened state, wrote Evelyn a day or so after her operation and asked once more if she would marry him. Even in the fog of recuperation she had the good sense to say no.

Did she do so because of lingering feelings for Stanny? Was she afraid of what Stanny’s reaction might be to the news of Harry’s sponsorship? Perhaps she was not completely convinced she liked Harry enough to marry him. Or, she liked him enough to tolerate his millions, but knowing how he apparently felt about purity and virginity, his favorite topics, decided she could not marry him. And of course, since Evelyn was well aware of Harry’s “virgin complex,” he might very well change his mind about her if he knew the lurid details of her relationship with White, which would have meant the end of her trip to Europe.

When Harry proposed for a third time to Evelyn, just before they were to leave, she again refused. In 1915 she wrote, “I realized that I could not marry any man unless he knew everything there was to know about me. This was a matter of common honesty.”

Nor was she prepared to tell him the whole truth and nothing but. It is also possible that since Harry had been nothing but gentle, attentive, and generous to her up to that point, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings—or incur his certain condemnation if he heard about her shockingly immoral behavior. He had already said how he disapproved of her being on the stage, that it was no place for a good little girl like her, and that he detested White. Of course, one of many absurdities is that, in addition to the occasional linking of the two in the papers (where White was always referred to as her avuncular benefactor), Thaw, through his veritable legion of informants and detectives, knew perfectly well (if not in any detail) that Evelyn might have had more than a social relationship with White. It was the reason he sought her out and marked her for his own. And while he didn’t know the specifics, he certainly suspected the worst. Apparently, however, he did not know about “the Barrymore frolic,” having been out of the country for the duration of it.

Perhaps Evelyn even harbored her own romantic delusions, hoping that Stanny would leave his wife—after all, James Garland had been prepared to do the same. And so, it was rumored, had the producer George Lederer. Or, maybe at age seventeen she simply had no wish for the confines of marriage. As she wrote, “I was quite happy in the enjoyment of the present, quite willing to let the past slip from memory and the future take care of itself.” And finally, perhaps she just didn’t like his looks.

All she knew was that the closer she could get to Europe, the farther she could be from the disappointments of love and betrayal in New York, where Stanny’s divided attentions “inflicted deep little wounds” at regular intervals, and dashing Jack came in a poor second. She also didn’t mind abandoning New Jersey, where classes in chemistry and comportment could not compete with haute couture and the Champs-Élysées.

Evelyn at the time of her first European trip, 1903.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Worst Mistake of Her Life

In Domrémy, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Harry wrote in the guestbook, “she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around.”

—Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days

Topsy, an elephant that had killed three men, was executed on the boardwalk at Luna Park by electrocution, “providing entertainment in death as in life.”

—New York World, 1903

According to Evelyn, it must have been “the whim of Fata Morgana” to snatch her away from stage then school in virtually one capricious life-threatening swoop. An impartial observer might wonder, however, what fickle celestial forces were at work with regard to the girl destined to “put one man in the grave and another in the bughouse.” Although Evelyn eventually came to learn that Thaw’s perceived rivalry and his resentment of White’s potent presence in her life (as well as the virile life of the city) predated her involvement with either man, she believed at the time that they were the exclusive and harmless products of Harry’s hyperbolic, hyperactive brain. She never considered until it was too late that Stanny was the reason Thaw had intentionally fixed his sights on her; after all, Harry Thaw almost always seemed to be going off half-cocked on one subject or another. Nor did she consider that Thaw was driven more by envy and loathing of the great White than by her siren charms, which lured so many men her way and drove so many others to distraction. She was also not conscious that her own conflicted but intense emotions on the subject of Stanford White were mirrored, if grotesquely, by Harry. Like the insanely conflicted Montresor out of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” Harry actually admired and envied the man he claimed to hate, and was plotting revenge for similar albeit darker sins that he himself had committed.