American Eve (3 page)

It also seemed that no matter what the hoity-toity, the hardworking, or hoi polloi pouring through Ellis Island at a rate of half a million a year overlooked in the humming and drumming of their daily lives, as the century turned, a magical metamorphosis was occurring. And, as critic Leo Marx asserted, the machine had entered the garden.

The telephone, the phonograph, the electric light, the “flickering tintype”—all the wonders of American inventiveness—seemed to have materialized overnight, sprung full blown from the fertile minds of an indomitable generation of technological demigods. The first rapid-transit subway system was geared to open in New York City as ironnerved Irish, Italian, and Chinese sandhogs blasted and burrowed their way under the heaving metropolis. And, while the roaring el train rained blinding ash and hot cinders onto the hats and heads of the pedestrians below, the first American auto show was held in New York City. As expensive battery-powered hansoms began to appear intermittently on the streets of Manhattan, most at first were simply oversized toys for the inherently curious or idle rich. Stanford White was one of the former. The peripatetic architect immediately took a shine to the “horse-less carriage” and took advantage of the mobility it afforded him in his Herculean attempts to redesign and lift a reinvented city on his shoulders for all to admire. New York society interloper Harry K. Thaw was one of the latter. He was the first automobile owner to make headlines by driving a car through the plate-glass window of a shop on Fifth Avenue, ostensibly after an argument with a salesclerk. Maybe Thaw wanted to prove to the city’s architects that their buildings, unlike their social clubs, were not inpenetrable. Or, if he couldn’t “break into” New York society, perhaps he would simply break as much of it as he could into pieces. If not, he would have to find another way to infiltrate the private Garden of the New World. Perhaps by wooing its very own Eve.

AMERICAN EVE

Evelyn Nesbit, image of an age, its sins, its soullessness . . .

Most don’t know that her given name was apparently Florence Mary. She was not-so-plain Flo to her family and “Flossie the Fuss” to the chorus. She was “Kittens” to Stanford White, “Evie” to John Barrymore, and “Boofuls” to Harry Thaw. She was “Mrs. Thaw the younger” in London, “Le Bébé” in France, and “Mrs. Harry” when in Pittsburgh. Schoolgirl. Florodora girl. Gibson girl. “Angel-child.” “Snake-charmer.” Vixen. Victim. The ur-Lolita. The very first “It” girl before anyone know what “It” was. She could be what anyone wanted her to be. And inevitably was, even if it wasn’t what she wanted. To anyone familiar with E. L. Doctorow’s novel
Ragtime,
the name Evelyn Nesbit may evoke the mauve-tinted crucible of the sentimentally inclined and cynically named Gilded Age.

Postcard pose of sixteen-year-old Evelyn for Sarony, 1901.

To others it may signify passion and perversion, murder and scandal, “love, hate, villainy, perfidy, and outraged innocence.” The extinction of an era. And a red velvet swing.

Herself a product of the Victorian past but with an approach to life that was unconsciously and uncannily modern, Evelyn Nesbit unwittingly embodied the country’s paradoxes and ambiguities at its trembling turn into the twentieth century. At times she seemed the very picture of nineteenth-century sentimentality and girlish purity, yet her naturally bewitching Mona Lisa smile promised something dangerously new and enticing. A self-inventory of her visible assets tells the story: the curled pink ribbon of a mouth (painted red only for the stage) contrasted with “slightly olive-hued” skin; huge, dark, sultry eyes set in an angelic face, all framed by a “profusion of burnished copper curls.” It was an image that spoke of both the vitality and freshness of an antediluvian world and the brave new world of the Century of Progress. As with Eve before the Fall, Evelyn’s natural charms and air of innocence created an overwhelming and immediate impression of incorruptibility in certain poses. Yet the deceptive maturity of her heavy-lidded gaze and ever so slightly openmouthed expression of apparent self-satisfaction in photo after photo suggested an Eve who had already tasted forbidden fruit.

In those first few years of what would prove to be a thrilling and ingenious decade of crusaders and con men, cakewalks and coon songs, contradictions and coincidences, class wars and conspicuous consumption, Evelyn Nesbit became its most precious commodity, even though, as the newspapers reported, she had come to New York with “nothing but her looks.” But her face was her fortune (as her parasitic mother well knew), and Evelyn’s mercurial rise to fame and equally precipitous plunge into notoriety only five years later reflected the era’s accelerated, intoxicating, and uniquely schizophrenic mood.

All the feminine myth and mystique of the ancient world seemed to coalesce with contemporary American freshness in Evelyn and form a “beguiling new creature.” She was Freud’s “eternal question,” embodying both “contemporary social types like ‘the charmer’ and ‘The New Woman,’ ” as well as more universal abstractions such as “virtue, progress, etc., raised to nearly mythological proportions.” Like the nation itself, she was poised fearlessly on the brink of uncharted discoveries but apprehensive about abandoning the illusion of security or sentiments of the past.

To the reporters who followed her every move and unprecedented rise as a celebrity before there was any discernible evidence of a singular talent to justify such attention (we of course no longer harbor any delusions with regard to the modern cult of personality), she was a startling silky contradiction, “a vision who assailed one’s senses like a perfume at once delicate and heavy, overpowering and yet faint.” As the American Eve, her delectable budding underage appeal proved irresistible to the renegade creator who wanted to cultivate her as the rarest flower in his Garden of too-earthly delights. Yet no matter how different she may have looked from one image or photograph to the next, the public felt they knew her. Women wanted to be her; men wanted to own her. She became a maddening object of desire, and tragically, a victim of her own beguiling beauty during the “gaudy spree,” which she would help bring to a stunningly shameful end.

At first the publicity that swirled and hummed around Evelyn would have you believe that hers was a fairy-tale existence. She was seen as a modern-day Cinderella who came from a city of literal burning ash and coal to become the “glittering girl model of Gotham.” She then made the precarious but inevitable leap from studio to stage. From there it was but a cakewalk to a life of luxury as the “mistress of millions” once she became Mrs. Harry K. Thaw, of Pittsburgh. Or so the newspapers said. And all before she was twenty-one.

An unwitting sexual anarchist draped in a crimson silk kimono and laid out seductively on a pure white polar bear rug, she could incite the wrath of reformers and excite the imagination of the public merely by sleeping. Once the “Madison Square Tragedy” tore its way into the headlines, the “little butterfly” generated more newspaper sales and publicity than Hearst himself could ever have manufactured. Through two trials riddled with theatrical tribulation and shocking revelations, she was the “pale flower” whose petals took on a “bruised pallor,” with sympathetic observers wishing she had “grown wholesomely in a wholesome garden.” Others, like the sculptor Saint-Gaudens, were less charitable, commenting just before he died, in 1907, that “she had the face of an angel and the heart of a snake.”

Throughout her humiliating and protracted ordeal on the witness stand, Evelyn’s ubiquitous and mesmerizing image—and what it represented to a nation of novice interpreters—captivated even the most cynical New York journalists. Irvin S. Cobb, a well-known syndicated columnist and social critic, described her as “the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at—[she had] the slim quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies and the size of half dollars; a mouth made of rumpled rose petals.” Yet even as her startling testimony helped push an unsuspecting and unprepared America into the modern age, while canny entrepreneurs sold hastily manufactured little red velvet swings on the street outside the courthouse, as quickly as Evelyn’s star rose, it fell victim to the very culture that created and consumed her.

But hers is also a more intimate story. Of family. Of class. Of sex. And of monsters in human form. Perhaps the latter is not so surprising, coming at the vestigial end of the Edwardian era’s preoccupation with such double-natured real and fictional monsters as Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jack the Ripper, and Dorian Gray, all of whom, wrapped in the guise of men, seduced, defiled, dissected, or devoured women.

It really begins with two dead fathers, one who left no money and one who left too much. Then there are two grotesquely misguided mothers, one driven by her fear of poverty, who lived off her child, then abandoned her; the other aided and abetted by obscene wealth who indulged one son beyond all reason.

Alternately naive and manipulative, Evelyn’s mother, who in all of Evelyn’s recollections and letters is referred to as Evelyn Florence or simply Mamma, was the vigilantly neglectful mother who oversaw her teenage daughter’s careers as a model and an actress, but who turned a blind eye to her dangerous liaisons with much older married men, which Mrs. Nesbit either clumsily or cleverly procured and tacitly promoted.

Mrs. Mary Copley Thaw, on the other hand, was the pathologically overindulgent nightmare matriarch spawned by the merchant aristocracy who sought to gild (and regild as many times as needed) the family name at any cost, even though her tarnished family tree rivaled Poe’s House of Usher. Mrs. Thaw’s overweening social ambition seemed to know no bounds, even as her public philanthropy atoned for privately funding a multitude of her son’s dirty little sins. Once Harry Thaw committed cold-blooded murder in front of nine hundred witnesses, his mother announced

Evelyn’s mother, Evelyn Florence Mackenzie Nesbit,
circa 1902.

to the world that she was “prepared to pay a million dollars to save her son from the electric chair.” But the cost was much higher.

Then there are the two men, the one described more often than not as a genius, the other as “not quite an imbecile.” But whereas Stanford White was old money, the son of a Shakespeare scholar, Harry Thaw, in spite of the fact that his family roots reached back to post-Revolutionary America, acted out as if “nouveau riche,” the self-indulged son of a coke and railroad “ironmaster” whose business acumen and philanthropic impulses Harry did not seem to inherit. White was driven by his passion for beauty and widely acknowledged as the vibrant force behind New York’s startling metamorphosis at the start of the twentieth century, transforming a dingy brownstone city into one of wedding-cake white and terra-cotta. Among White’s feats were his personal decoration of the Metropolitan Opera House with 15,000 white roses and the ability to transform a portion of his Garden into Venice, complete with Grand Canal and gondolas. Thaw, on the other hand, was a “pygmy wastrel” who was routinely dismissed as a twitchy “good-for-nothing” and only driven to distraction. White was a true pagan, and in his relentless search for rare and beautiful objects, he roamed the globe and put the unobtainable within reach—for a price. Thaw was a pious debauchee who considered himself a modern knight errant, but who was closer to the Marquis de Sade. Yet both men were uncannily, incurably hedonistic, impulsive, controlling, and carnivorous. Stanford White’s gargantuan appetite for beauty and incomparable artifacts took him to Tuscany and the Tenderloin, where ultimately his hush-hush “hive of moral lepers,” two-faced Falstaffian duplicity, and private transgressions led to a spectacularly dramatic public murder. His sinister and decidedly darker doppelgänger, Harry Thaw, a fraudulent Savonarola and deluded savior, operated in weirdly similar ways—all the while believing he was acting as an agent of divine providence. And then there was Evelyn.

It was in early December 1900 that fifteen-year-old Florence Evelyn Nesbit arrived in New York City, where the only thing that distinguished her from thousands of other girls in similarly deprived and unguarded circumstances was an astonishing beauty that was “infinitely appealing.” It would be described by columnist Dorothy Dix as “vague and intangible as that of the lily, or any other frail and delicate thing. It lay over her face like a gossamer veil.” It was a veil that was as enticing for what was concealed as for what it revealed to the gaze of insatiably curious onlookers. Until the veil was lifted.