Customer Reviews

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White: The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century

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3 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the first years of the 20th century, one of the most famous women in America was a teenager, Evelyn Nesbit, a model for artists and photographers and New York showgirl. She was ubiquitous in advertisements and magazines, and had a kind of innocent beauty that also possessed a measure of sophistication. She was courted by many stage-door millionaires, but it was Stanford White, renowned architect, who made her his mistress. Later she would marry an unbalanced millionaire, Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh, who would learn that White spoiled his child-bride and during the summer of 1906, in the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, a building White designed, Thaw would murder White and cast Nesbit as the focal point of the first American trial that would become a media circus.

Nesbit's story, and the tale of murder and insanity that accompanies it, is brilliantly told in Paula Uruburu's book American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the "It" Girl, and the Crime of the Century. While the appelation It Girl is incorrect (that was Clara Bow some twenty years later), Nesbit was certainly the first model to gain national attention. Her humble upbringing from a Pittsburgh suburb to full-time model at age 14 is layed out in scrupulous detail, as is her seduction by White and courtship with the mad Harry. What Uruburu seems most keen on doing here is setting the record straight--Nesbit was vilified by many in the press at the time of the murder and trial. As Uruburu points out, she was more sinned against than sinning, a girl who was neglected by her mother and allowed to be exploited by the rapacious men of the age. Uruburu's book is Evelyn's story, told largely from her viewpoint (making large use of Evelyn's two memoirs) and by the end of the book it is clear that she was a victim of circumstance and her own beauty.

The book is carefully researched, with as much detail as the reader would want without being bogged down in too many facts and figures. The chapters describing White's seduction and subsequent deflowering of Evelyn read partly as history, partly as erotic novel, with the reader's senses saturated to overflowing. The chapter depicting the shooting is as tense and exciting as a thriller, and the trial (there were actually two) is rendered in novelistic fashion, with the emotions on display, rather than laborious recitations of transcripts.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is the style of writing. This is no dry academic tome, nor is it a non-fiction novel. It is biography and history, but with a delightfully mordant drollery. Uruburu never passes up a chance to inject levity into the proceedings, whether it be referring to a low-rent lawyer's reputation being as checkered as his suit, or Harry Thaw's sisters looking like Harry in fright wigs. She also allows frequent glimpses of what was going on in the first decade of the 1900s, interspersing other headlines of the day in context, whether they be the assassination of President McKinley or the electrocution of Topsy the elephant.

Anyone having an interest in true-crime, sensational trials, a history of the sexual mores of America, or the time period when the horse and buggy was giving way to the automobile would be advised to read this book. You will learn a lot--that the Thaw trial was the first to require a jury to be sequestered, that the term "sob sister", referring to women journalists covering the trial, was coined in this instance, and that on the same day Thaw shot White, a hippo at the Central Park Zoo passed on due to heat prostration. This book is as tasty as a snack and fulfilling as a meal.

I've been waiting eons for this book to be published, and it was 10 years in the making.

Uruburu's look at the life and tragedy of Evelyn Nesbit is a fascinating page-turner that finally places Nesbit in her correct time period. Although she looks modern, she was a girl trapped and exploited by the standards of her time. Her beauty lifted her into the high life of 1900s New York City, but it also led her down a tragic path of madness and murder.

Although the previous reviewer is correct that the term "It Girl" didn't come into play until Clara Bow in the 1920s, author Uruburu states that Nesbit was the "It Girl" of the turn of the last century, and I agree. Nesbit's life and the 1906 murder of Stanford White still fascinate, and this is one of the best books on the subject.

Paula Uruburu's AMERICAN EVE: EVELYN NESBIT, STANFORD WHITE, THE BIRTH OF THE "IT" GIRL AND THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY is a first-rate, spirited and entertaining chronicle involving sex, celebrity, murder, media frenzy and a dead hippo.

Uruburu's exhilarating tale begins in NYC during the final hours of 1899--an "Eden" where Nesbit, the titular Eve and "Little Sphinx," rises from poverty and obscurity to become the preeminent model and pin-up girl of the day. Part Ophelia, part Salome, the inscrutable Nesbit (also an actress and Gibson girl) captures the fancy of famed architect Stanford White, the "Pharaoh of Fifth Avenue" whose contributions to the "priapic city" included the gilded bronze weathervane of a scandalously nude Diana--appropriately, the goddess of the hunt and chastity--that sat atop the second Madison Square Garden (which White designed).

Notorious for plucking ripe "tomatoes" from the stage to add to his Garden, the married, lustful and predatory "Great White" (who was three times Nesbit's age) fawns over Nesbit, wooing her with money, charm and a red velvet swing. Although Nesbit was only 16, White initiates the fall of this Eve during a night of lights, mirrors, a canopied bed and too much champagne. Awakening in "an abbreviated pink undergarment" and with a nude White next to her, Nesbit is told by the architect, "Don't cry kittens. It's all over. Now you belong to me."

Not quite. Enter Mad Harry--Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh--with a carnivorous appetite and penchant for forbidden fruit as well. The heir-apparent to a $40 million coke and railroad fortune, Thaw was a puritanical vigilante with a history of mental illness and a hatred for White. Nesbit is initially wary of Thaw's dichotomous personality--he could be charming and tyrannical, solicitous and sadistic--and her instincts (which she ignores) unfortunately prove sound, as the 17-year-old Nesbit suffers another violation, and one night is raped and beaten with a leather riding crop by Thaw.

Nesbit's relationship with Thaw and White--both men are hedonistic, controlling and bitter rivals--is compelling and, ultimately, sad, as Thaw's virgin complex and mounting obsession with White's despoilment of Nesbit leads to murder and Nesbit's downfall in White's Garden: On June 25, 1906, three shots ring out during a performance of Mamzelle Champagne. As White drops dead to the floor, Thaw shouts in defense, "I did it because he ruined my wife!"

AMERICAN EVE then chronicles the "Crime of the Century" and the media storm that followed--an explosion of yellow journalism and the defamation and assassination of Nesbit's character--the woman who "put one man in the grave and another in the bughouse." Uruburu's depiction of the protracted court case is tiptop and accentuates her greatest strength as a biographer: the ability to inject verve, vitality and narrative flair into a historical account. AMERICAN EVE is peppered with colorful prose, humor and élan that spring off the page. Those wary of dreary, stuffy biographies weighted down by tedious storytelling and a profusion of facts and footnotes need not worry. Uruburu's confident, consistent and dynamic voice is the perfect complement to this lurid, page-turning piece of American history.

Uruburu places these events in their historical context, delineating an America in transition, while also drawing comparisons to today's culture. But the story always returns, as it should, to Nesbit. This is her story, and Uruburu is in no way ambiguous about that. She does not paint this tragic beauty as a flawless saint, nor does she shy away from her subject's sometime inconsistent (and inaccurate) testimony. What Uruburu does, and does well, is give voice to Nesbit's side of the story. It is only fitting that the epilogue is entitled "The Fallen Idol" and underscored by this 1934 quotation from Ms. Nesbit: "The tragedy wasn't that Stanford White died, but that I lived."

In turn of the century New York, Pennsylvania-born Florence Evelyn Nesbit was a famous teen beauty. Her waterfall of dark red hair, heart-shaped face, and expression of unawakened sexuality put her in hot demand as a model, therefore her image graced calendars, sheet music covers, and printed ads. Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery used one of Nesbit's photos as inspiration for the heroine of her bestseller "Anne of Green Gables". She shone in the Floradora chorus and her stage-door admirers included some of the wealthiest men in New York. She had her pick of suitors, and could have married well. Instead, she attracted two moral lepers disguised as rich gentlemen, and let them use her alternately as a sex toy and a pawn.

The first was famed architect Stanford White, who drugged and deflowered her. The second was Pittsburgh millionaire and raging sadist Harry Kendall Thaw, who beat and raped her in a remote European castle, and married her partly out of mad infatuation, partly from a determination that his hated enemy Stanford White should never have her again. Thaw made sure the latter event could never come to pass when he shot and killed White in June 1906. Thaw's trial for murder dominated headlines throughout the world and made Evelyn a universal object of lust and fascination.

When Thaw's family cast her adrift after he was sentenced to an asylum for the criminally insane, Nesbit returned to the stage. She became a vaudeville performer, silent film actress and cafe manager. In 1910 she bore a son, whom she always insisted was the result of a conjugal visit with Harry, but Thaw denied paternity. Evelyn spent years fighting alcoholism and morphine addiction, and attempted suicide more than once. She seems to have regained control of her life in her twilight years: she acted as a technical adviser on the 1955 movie "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing". Nesbit died in Santa Monica, California, in January 1967.

I wasn't prepared to like this book because I simply don't find Evelyn Nesbit to be a sympathetic figure. She let herself be used by two wealthy and powerful degenerates, and married a man who'd whipped her bloody not too long before. While I retain my negative opinion about her moral standards, "American Eve" has shown her to be quick witted, intelligent, and sensitive. In reconstructing the early years of this `child woman', Paula Uruburu relies heavily on Nesbit's two published memoirs, therefore injecting a lot of her subject's voice and personality into the book. She also interviewed Evelyn's grandson, Russell. The result is a well-written biography that may be the closest we will ever come to knowing Evelyn Nesbit personally. Even if you're not too fond of her, you can't help but enjoy "American Eve".

The author made a serious mistake when she chose to open many chapters with epigraphs selected from Evelyn Nesbit's two autobiographies. Given Ms. Nesbit's lack of much formal education, one wonders if both books weren't ghostwritten, but if they really are her own words, then she missed her calling-- whoever wrote the quoted material was keenly observant, had some interesting things to say, and said them well. Would that one could say the same of the author of this book-- an associate professor of English should know better than to use the phrase, "sufficient enough", and that's just one example of the awkward writing found throughout that more than once made me want to hurl the book across the room. I stuck with it, hoping it would get better. It didn't. Ms. Nesbit deserves a better book, one that doesn't contain such overblown passages as, "Evelyn Nesbit, image of an age, its sins, its soullessness..." (that fragment, quoted here in its entirety, constitutes an entire paragraph on page 11), and one that doesn't race through the last 56 years of her life in 16 pages. One would like to know how an intelligent woman who lived into her eighties managed to cope for decades with the weight of the notoriety she attained when barely out of her teens. Don't look for the answer in this book.

The girl in the red velvet swing captivated the imagination of turn of
the century America. Paula
Uruburu, the author of American Eve managed to make the tale of the murder of Stanford White the premier architect of the century by Harry Thaw,Evelyn Nestbit's husband
a tedius read.
The final disappointment was that readers probably
were interested in what happended to Evelyn after
the infamous murder trial and the rest of her life was condensed into one short chapter.

Late in his life, after a decade and a half absence from the stage, John Barrymore toured the country in an execrable play entitled "My Dear Children." Barrymore was reduced to engaging in bad self parody to earn sufficient sums of money to satisfy his numerous creditors. The play itself was a poorly conceived variation upon "King Lear" with Barrymore playing a once famous Shakespearean actor whose drunken and hedonistic excesses bore more than a passing resemblance to his own personal foibles and marital difficulties.

Notwithstanding the shoddiness of the script, the play enjoyed a measure of success as theater patrons flocked to the box office to witness the once great actor engaging in self deprecation. When Barrymore was tired or when he had forgotten his lines, he simply engaged in ad libs. Pouring himself a drink from a prop liquor bottle, for instance, Barrymore once reduced an audience to fits of laughter by observing in an unscripted aside, "God, I wish this were real!"

After finishing one night's performance with a touring company in Chicago, Barrymore settled into a booth at the Rush Street cabaret, the Club Alabam. In the darkened room, he recognized a face. Years had faded the beauty of his former love, Evelyn Nesbit, but he called to her and he announced to all the assembled cabaret patrons that Evelyn was the first woman that he had ever truly loved. Both Barrymore and Nesbit were reduced to tears by their chance reunion.

Barrymore at the height of his powers was considered the greatest actor in the world and could sometimes command six figures in weekly wages. Nesbit was once the prototype for the celebrated Gibson Girl illustrations, but she ended up being a model for the drunken "has been" character of Susan Alexander in "Citizen Kane" (other sources suggest this composite character was based upon Marion Davies, but the character incorporates aspects of several female entertainers). Almost four decades previously, Nesbit had rejected Barrymore's sudden proposal of marriage to continue acting as the kept mistress of Stanford White, a prominent New York architect. Barrymore was a penniless artist at the time while White was a wealthy patron of the theater who frequently seduced chorus girls. This arrangement was agreeable to Nesbit's avaricious widowed mother who seemed perfectly content to sell her daughter to the highest bidder.

When White refused to divorce his wife and marry his mistress, Nesbit took up with the sadistic millionaire Harry K. Thaw, the heir to a coal fortune, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When Thaw murdered White in 1906 on account of his obsessive jealousy, which was fueled in part by his belief that White had blocked his advancement in New York society by blackballing him at several exclusive clubs as much as by his learning that White had once been balling his wife, Evelyn played a key role as a defense witness at her husband's two murder trials.

It has been reported elsewhere that Evelyn received as much as $200,000.00 from Thaw's mother to commit perjury while on the witness stand to help secure Thaw's acquittal. The defense relied upon the theory that Thaw had acted from the purest of motives in avenging the loss of his wife's honor by killing the man who had seduced and raped her. The first trial resulted in a hung jury. During the retrial, Thaw's defense counsel introduced evidence of his client's long term history of mental instability over Thaw's own protests and the prisoner was spared the death penalty and sent to a prison for the criminally insane.

Did White actually drug and rape his mistress? Possibly, but there is evidence to suggest that Evelyn Nesbit was sexually precocious. She had been hospitalized for appendicitis and had to undergo an emergency operation a few years earlier. This was a subterfuge. Nesbit had undergone "an illegal operation," namely an abortion. In attempting to short circuit Thaw's defense that he acted out of honorable motives, the prosecuting attorney William Travers Jerome attempted to present credible evidence that Nesbit had undergone as many as three emergency appendectomies in her young life and had been sexually active. In all likelihood, at least two of the abortions were intended to terminate a pregnancies that resulted from Nesbit's sexual relations with Barrymore. Many of Nesbit's embellished stories of being a victimized virgin first surfaced during her courtroom testimony and were repeated in her numerous attempts to capitalize upon the sensational media circus created by the two trials and her own subsequent notoriety in two autobiographies. Nevertheless, she sometimes claimed to have been in love with Stanford White.

Unfortunately, you will not find all of these stories in "The American Eve." Paula Uruburu has neglected to review of all of the literature on the subject. Her bibliography omits John Kobler's magisterial biography of John Barrymore "Damned in Paradise" which contains the facts that I have recited. Similarly, she omits to refer to the autobiography of Cecil B. De Mille. The famous film director's widowed mother operated a private boarding school for young ladies which Nesbit attended after White and her mother sent her packing from New York as a means of breaking off her affair with Barrymore. De Mille politely described Nesbit as so much trouble and her latest feigned appendicitis attack occurred while she was at the school. It is interesting to contrast the behavior of two widowed mothers: De Mille's mother opened a boarding school to support herself and her family, Nesbit's mother was willing to allow her daughter to become a glorified courtesan and to live off her earnings as a chorus girl and a model while encouraging her to pursue wealthy male admirers and to become a fortune hunter.

After the trials concluded and Thaw was sent to the sanitarium, his mother cut Evelyn off without an additional cent. When Evelyn bore a son a few years later, she alleged that the child was conceived during a conjugal visit with Harry K. Thaw. Her crazed former husband vehemently denied paternity of the boy. Following his release from the prison for the insane, Thaw routinely refused to support his divorced wife and her child. On rare occasions, however, he provided Nesbit with token sums of money. She remarried and attempted a career on the stage and screen, but subsequently divorced again and became an alcoholic and a morphine addict. Her suicide attempts were unsuccessful and she died of natural causes in 1967.

Hollywood has sought to depict the scandal of the "Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" on several occasions. Joan Collins and Ray Milland appeared in a sanitized version of the story (if it is possible to use the word "sanitized" in the same sentence with the name of a Hollywood harridan like Collins -- her casting couch nickname was once "The British Open"). The relationship between Stanford White and Nesbit is treated as an almost innocent relationship between two lovers who are unable to marry due to societal conventions beyond their control. Not surprisingly, this film used Nesbit as a consultant. A more plausible portrayal of Evelyn Nesbit occurred in the adaptation of the E. L. Doctrow novel "Ragtime" in which Elizabeth McGovern played Nesbit as a sexually promiscuous and money conscious woman on the make who could not control her lunatic husband.

In James Cameron's feature film "Titanic," the writer/director borrowed freely from other film adaptations of the shipwreck tragedy and he created composite characters that appear to be based upon Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw, and the supporting cast of real life persons that played bit roles in the murder trial of the century. Frances Fisher plays the ambitious mother pushing her beautiful daughter to marry an insanely jealous millionaire. At one point, she explains to her daughter the necessity of a woman entering into a loveless marriage solely for financial security. Kate Winslet (Rose) and Billy Zane (Cal) can easily be viewed as simple variations upon Evelyn Nesbit and Harry K. Thaw while the penniless artist played by Leonard DiCaprio (Jack) approximates Jack Barrymore. The only composite character diminished in the screenplay is that of Stanford White. Victor Garber plays the ship's architect (Thomas Andrews) who seems to have a platonic or paternalistic love interest in Rose`s character, not unlike Ray Milland's sympathetic 1955 portrayal of White in "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," but this character is sidelined from the love triangle. Cameron's script turns history on its head as Rose opts for the starving artist rather than the rich madman before the ship collides with the iceberg. Some tragedies do bear dramatic repetition.

On the positive side, this new biography is lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. Evelyn Nesbit may well have been one of the most beautiful women in America during her prime. I cannot accord this book a higher rating simply because of its omissions. The author seems to have elected to rely upon Evelyn Nesbit's own dubious recollections of the events too often. "American Eve" is not necessarily a bad account of the murder, scandal and the two trials, but it is certainly an incomplete one. For example, the latter sixty years of Nesbit's life are handled in an abrupt and cursory manner.

I haven't finished reading it yet because I'm trying to drag it out as long as I can. First of all, it's a fascinating and terrible story but Ms. Uruburu has done an incredible job in building the plot to just where it needs to go, keeping the tension as tight as possible to propell the reader into the next portion of the story. Outstanding! There is no other word for such a fine piece of writing, such an enthralling piece of writing.

Paula Uruburu has done a magnificent job of telling the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the girl who was the reason Harry Thaw murdered architect Stanford White. You feel as though you were in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York because of her exquisite sense of detail in describing the culture and moral values of the time. Despite all the detail, the story never gets bogged down in minutiae, and it's a remarkably easy and pleasurable (if reading about a woman being brutally beaten can be called "pleasurable") read.

I get the impression, however, that the author and editor were running out of time and space as the deadline for the final version approached, so they cut out huge chunks of narrative at the end. The last few chapters are very spare and choppy compared to what was previously written, and leaves the reader wanting to know more about what happened to the main characters after the trial.

There were a couple minor inconsistencies that I found puzzling. In 1904, Evelyn Nesbit had an appendectomy that left her hair falling out in clumps, so her head was shaved. Cut to a year later, where Evelyn and Harry are married and living in Pittsburgh. Harry gets Evelyn to pose with her head through a hole in a sheet and her hair pinned up above the sheet. She was posing as the wives of Bluebeard, and her head was supposed to appear severed. The hair looks at least a foot long, which is impossible growth in one year, yet the author makes it sound as though it were her real hair.

Another instance is where Harry would enter her bedroom at night and demand to hear the story of White's debauchery over and over again. He insisted that she refer to White as "The Beast", or simply "B". It sounds as though this started when they were married; however, when Evelyn and Harry eat at a restaurant the day of the murder and White enters, there is a flashback to premarital days when Harry, paranoid even then, made Evelyn promise to tell Harry every time she encountered "the Beast". I wonder when his insistence on this terminology actually began.

An index would have been welcome, too. When Thaw's sister was intentionally or unintentionally referred to as the "Countess of Vermouth", I missed the humor because as she was a minor character, I didn't pay close attention to her title. It would have been nice to be able to quickly check the index and see that she was actually the Countess of Yarmouth.

These are minor quibbles, however. Uruburu has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of that time period and "the crime of the century".

I have to say that AMERICAN EVE is a fascinating glimpse of the turn of the century. It seems the author did extensive research. However, it was a bit overwritten with details for my taste and I felt myself skimming along to get to the heart of the story at times.

Perhaps if the writer had started with the trial and then gave us a taste of what led up to it, the beginning of the story would not have seemed to drag on as it did for me.

It primarily follows the childhood and career of Evelyn Nesbit, the "IT" girl of her time. Her life is full of things "new and scandalous" to the people of that period of time (or at least never before spoken of).
The sex, lies, fortunes and misfortunes involving Evelyn and those around her expose an underworld not well-known until the Crime of the Century occurs with all of its sordid details.

There is deceipt, great sums of cash, broken hearts and finally murder spinning around her. It seems that many big men's lives fell apart after getting a glimpse of her. Could she really have been so enchanting?

The only thing I felt was lacking was more information on what happened to Evelyn once she was no longer the IT girl? I would have loved a more complete biography, though to be fair the book is supposed to be about the trial. However, with such a detailed view of her childhood and everything leading up to the Crime of the Century, it leaves one wondering what happened next?