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American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White: The Birth of the It Girl and the Crime of the Century |
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Sales Rank: 5513
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<B>The scandalous story of America’s first supermodel, sex goddess, and modern celebrity, Evelyn Nesbit, the temptress at the center of Stanford White’s famous murder, whose iconic life story reflected all the paradoxes of America’s Gilded Age.</B>
Known to millions before her sixteenth birthday in 1900, Evelyn Nesbit was the most photographed woman of her era, an iconic figure who set the standard for female beauty. Women wanted to be her. Men just wanted her. When her life of fantasy became all too real, and her jealous millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw, killed her lover—celebrity architect Stanford White, builder of the Washington Square Arch and much of New York City—she found herself at the center of the “Crime of the Century” and the popular courtroom drama that followed—a scandal that signaled the beginning of a national obsession with youth, beauty, celebrity, and sex.
The story of Evelyn Nesbit is one of glamour, money, romance, sex, madness, and murder, and Paula Uruburu weaves all of these elements into an elegant narrativethat reads like the best fiction— only it’s all true. <I>American Eve</I> goes far beyond just literary biography; it paints a picture of America as it crossed from the Victorian era into the modern, foreshadowing so much of our contemporary culture today.
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.
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