American Eve Read online




  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE - Siren Song

  CHAPTER TWO - Beautiful City of Smoke

  CHAPTER THREE - Poses

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Little Sphinx in Manhattan

  CHAPTER FIVE - Florodora

  CHAPTER SIX - Benevolent Vampire

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Through the Looking Glass

  CHAPTER EIGHT - At the Feet of Diana

  CHAPTER NINE - The Barrymore Curse

  CHAPTER TEN - Enter Mad Harry

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Worst Mistake of Her Life

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The “Mistress of Millions”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Curtains: June 25, 1906

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Aftershock

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Dementia Americana

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - A Woman’s Sacrifice

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - America’s Pet Murderer

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2008 by Paula Uruburu

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

  or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do

  not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  All photographs are from the author’s collection except those on pages 16, 194, 264,

  293, 364, 366, and 372, which are from the Nesbit/Thaw family archives.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Uruburu, Paula M.

  American Eve : Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the birth of the “It” girl, and the crime of the century /

  Paula Uruburu.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-2976-1

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at

  the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors,

  or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control

  over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  FRONTISPIECE ART:

  American Eve, at sweet sixteen, posed for the Campbell Art Studio.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Come slowly, Eden!

  Lips unused to thee,

  Bashful, sip thy jasmines,

  As the fainting bee,

  Reaching late his flower,

  Round her chamber hums,

  Counts his nectars—enters,

  And is lost in balms!

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  For Brian

  Campbell Art Studio postcard photo

  of Evelyn, 1901, The Tiger Head.

  Diana atop the Madison Square Tower, circa 1900.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Garden of the New World

  For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

  —John Winthrop, sermon, 1630

  God gave me my money. . . . God has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America and all it holds for all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man.

  —John D. Rockefeller, 1900

  Rockefeller did the things that God would have done had He been rich.

  —Anonymous

  Nature is very cruel . . . and if civilization has overlaid us with delicacies and refinements, nature works on just as though social laws had no existence.

  —Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days

  Little more than half a century before a winsome, waiflike, and wide-eyed Evelyn Nesbit, not yet sixteen, found her way to the island of Manhattan, Nathaniel Hawthorne had written a modest allegorical tale titled “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” It is the story of an intense but immature medical student who becomes obsessed with an exquisitely lovely and innocent young woman. The girl has never ventured beyond the walls of her outlaw scientist father’s garden, a man-made paradise filled with marvelous-looking but unnatural species of fatally toxic plants and flowers. The illicit garden is the envy of a less than brilliant rival scientist, intent upon finding his way into the forbidden sanctuary and learning the secrets of his seemingly untouchable rival. Upon seeing the splendid flora and the rare beauty of the girl, the young man wonders, “Is this the Garden of the New World?” only to find out subsequently that the girl and everything in the garden are poisonous as a result of her father’s unsanctioned experiments. When he realizes he has become contaminated with the poison through exposure to the beautiful girl, the young man viciously turns on her and blames her for his condition. The girl, betrayed and brokenhearted, decides to sacrifice her life for him by releasing the poisons in her system via a lethal antidote. She dies slowly and painfully at their feet as the medical student, her father, and her father’s rival look on, respectively horrified, mystified, and triumphant.

  The island of Manhattan at the turn of the last century was uncannily like Hawthorne’s fictional New World Eden. It was a walled-in, man-made wonder, filled with dazzling but lethal temptations, bitter rivalries, and dangerous secrets. It was run by a handful of powerful men, a number of whom acted with impunity outside the boundaries of conventional practices in their ruthless pursuit of both profits and pleasure. In what would prove to be a decade of overindulgence that would nearly devour itself and sink with titanic hubris only a few years later, the chosen class of calculating Calvinists who sat at the top of the food chain ruled over their classless empires of excess, believing they were blessed with “divine right.” Having reduced their methods of acquisition “to an exact science,” they amassed astonishing tax-free fortunes, lived in magnificent mansions, rode in fabulous private Pullman cars on the railroads they built and monopolized, and sailed on luxurious yachts that were themselves “floating palaces.” When asked about his yacht, the Corsair, J. P. Morgan replied famously, “If you have to ask how much it cost, you can’t afford it.” It was social Darwinism at its best—or worst.

  By February 1900, New York’s John D. Rockefeller, the president of Standard Oil, asserted, “The growth of a large business is merely survival of the fittest, a law of Nature, and of God.” Then he crushed all his competitors into blackened viscous muck. Within a year, months before
Christmas, Pittsburgh’s Andrew Carnegie gave himself an early present. He sold his interest in Carnegie Steel to New York’s J. P. Morgan for a whopping $480 million. So, while the average working stiff’s salary was slightly less than five hundred dollars a year, as the story goes, Carnegie retired on a pension of $44,000—a day.

  Yet with the exception of a fistful of trust-busting politicians, certain resolute muckrakers, and the occasional enterprising anarchist, the huddled masses seemed unable to comprehend and unwilling to consider the colossal inequality between themselves and America’s staggeringly wealthy untaxed multimillionaires, men like E. H. Harriman, Russell Sage (who, it was rumored, was so cheap he didn’t wear underwear), and Henry Clay Frick, who proclaimed that “railroads are the Rembrandts of investment.” (The latter two even managed to survive violent attacks by anarchy-minded assassins.) These fittest Philistines “bought paintings like other people bought penny postcards,” and even if the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Goulds, and their socially well-bred peers did not always know good art, they knew what they liked to buy. If they didn’t, they called upon Stanford White to decide for them.

  The self-ordained purveyor and pillager of high art for America’s highest society (whose approach to art was usually either a “disheartening middle-brow indifference or a more positively demoralizing vanity”), Stanford White was the most conspicuous partner of the preeminent architectural firm of the day, McKim, Mead, and White. Like White himself, the firm grandly embraced both the public and the private. Their jewels included the Admiral Farragut Memorial; the Tiffany, Whitney, Pulitzer, and Vanderbilt mansions; St. Paul’s Church; Judson Memorial Church; the New York Herald Building; the girded wrought-iron wonder of Pennsylvania Station; and the marvelous Washington Square Arch, now New York City’s most elaborate tombstone (being located near what was a potter’s field for the indigent and then a burial ground for yellow fever victims, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000).

  Über-society impresario, aesthetic prophet, protean clubman, and all-consuming libertine, White was the creator of Manhattan’s own “Garden of the New World.” Morgan and Carnegie were two of its major share-holders (along with White himself). A block-long business and entertainment complex located at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the Garden was an oasis of splendor situated adjacent to the formerly unassuming Madison Square. (The present-day Madison Square Garden arena, still colloquially called “the Garden,” is actually in its fourth incarnation, located between Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets and situated on top of the second Pennsylvania Station.)

  Overlooking the Garden’s splendid and innovative open-air rooftop theater was its gleaming tower, modeled after the Giralda in Seville, and the tallest point (at the time) in an increasingly priapic city over which the preternaturally and passionately inspired White held sway. Topped with a gilded bronze and scandalously nude Diana, Madison Square Garden was White’s supreme architectural achievement, the envy of those who sought a coveted office or studio within its tiled and terra-cotta confines—and the site of its creator’s not so original sins, which would eventually cause him to be cut down in the shadow of the goddess. And prove his mortality. And all because of another goddess, one that was flesh and blood.

  But if Manhattan at the turn into the twentieth century was a city overwhelmed by its own prosperity in some quarters, it was overpopulated with the teeming poor in others, where the bodies were less effectively hidden than those under the Washington Square Arch. It was a metropolis of mind-boggling incongruities and inequities, symbolically reflected in the proximity of Wall Street to the Battery Park seawall, beyond which stood the Statue of Liberty, and only slightly closer to New Jersey, Ellis Island. It was a city where an Astor-owned block on the Lower East Side crammed five hundred immigrant families into gruesome rat-infested tenements, regular firetraps with a death rate rivaling Calcutta’s.

  In the same general vicinity stood the forbidding Tombs Prison, behind whose thick granite walls and iron bars one multimillionaire’s banjo-eyed, baby-faced son, the infamous Harry K. Thaw, would find himself for the brutal murder of the creator whose corrupted Garden stood at the roaring heart of a projected sky-scraping city he would never see. During two sensational trials that stretched over two years, with the private no longer assiduously guarded from the public, the curious crowds of ten thousand or more who mobbed the street below Thaw’s prison cell could afford to buy a souvenir penny postcard of the Tombs or the “Bridge of Sighs,” which connected the prison to the courthouse on Centre Street. Most spectators, however, scrambled to procure one of the hundred or more postcards of the murderer’s devastatingly lovely child bride and White’s former teenage mistress, the twentieth century’s American Eve and “the cause of it all.”

  Much farther uptown, surrounding newly minted mansions, many designed by Stanford White and inhabited by the likes of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor (described in the newspapers as being “borne down by a terrible weight of precious stones”), there were ornate gates and formidable wrought-iron fences designed to keep out the “democrats without diamonds.” But the ordinary citizen in New York City (and those beyond its environs) was nonetheless hungry for a tantalizing glimpse into the rarefied world that existed just within those gates and behind those Garden walls. “Envious, suspicious, hopeful of sin,” the people would get what they asked for “in spades and blazing scareheads” once the murder of the century ruptured the nation’s tight-laced consciousness on a hot night in June 1906.

  New York City at the turn of the twentieth century was certainly a New World paradise for some, a circumscribed fantastical Eden with its own strange walls and boundaries. Some were clearly visible; others were less obvious but no less impenetrable. Unless, of course, you were young. And beautiful.

  Portrait of Evelyn at age sixteen (1901), by Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr.,

  that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Siren Song

  She was a human camellia with something of the . . . dying beauty of the

  Narcissus in her delicately-featured face.

  —Newspaper clipping, 1907

  She had the face of an angel and the heart of a snake.

  —Augustus Saint-Gaudens

  Plain girls are happiest.

  —Evelyn Nesbit

  The tantalizing idea of a tabula rasa—a shiny, new, unsullied century—loomed large in the collective consciousness of the majority of Americans in the final hours of 1899. The populace was precariously balanced on the razor’s edge between two antithetical worlds. One was a quickly receding past still deeply mired in the old-fashioned, the other a fast-approaching future riveted to the often hazardously newfangled, where limbs were routinely mangled or ripped out of their sockets in the grinding cogs of unfamiliar machinery, all in the name of progress. Yet while men of gilt-edged sensibilities and iron (or steel) wills forged ahead on a variety of fronts, delighted with their swift evolution, others resolutely clung to the quaint hem of Victorian virtue, identifying themselves as the defenders of the sanctity of wife and home. So even though the Sears-Roebuck catalogue in 1900 featured thirty-seven pages of accessories for horse-drawn carriages and not a single one for automobiles, the old world was fast succumbing to the new. And nowhere more emphatically and ecstatically than in “the garden spot of a spotless new century,” the city that had appeared to Whitman in an earlier manifestation as “unruly” and “self-sufficient,” whose “turbulent musical chorus” produced a perpetually mesmerizing siren song—the island its original natives had called Mannahatta.

  Having emerged, however, from a series of nerve-bending depressions in the 1890s, many Americans were still struggling to simply recover and sit upright as the old century crawled steadily toward oblivion. Even a heavy dose of money offered little immunity from the unsettling apocalyptic feelings that seem to grip entire populations in the terminal phases of a dying age. But America was still naive and nubile eno
ugh on December 31, 1899, to believe in the healthy tug of renewed possibilities—despite intermittent pangs of self-doubt and an unspoken fear that the Day of Reckoning might be at hand. And even though a few of the babbling lunatic fringe indeed shouted in the streets that “the end of the world was nigh,” the New York Times evening edition proclaimed blithely that the nation stood poised upon the “threshold of 1900 . . . facing a still brighter dawn for human civilization.” And the average citizen agreed.

  The idea of a clean, fresh slate certainly seemed infectious. And nowhere was there such a splendidly contagious sense of unreality and invincibility as the glowing metropolitan island where almost no one and nothing was ever average. For the extraordinary occasion, the city’s most superbly unruly son, Stanford White, turned Madison Square Park into an marvelous fairyland with more than 3,000 miniature orange-hued Chinese paper lanterns hung on every available post and branch. The anticipation of a new millennium was absolutely electric as the last minutes of the withering 1800s hung suspended in the frigid air, overripe and ready to drop.

  And then midnight erupted. The Venetian plaster was barely dry in the uptown Fifth Avenue fiefdom where “the Four Hundred” popped Pommery Sec corks and toasted the new year from Mrs. Astor’s exclusive ballroom on high. Meanwhile, in the lower reaches of Mott Street and below Canal Street, the less refined fired off revolvers into the blue-black sky, unconcerned in their soused serf revelry as to where the bullets might land (two were killed and three wounded, according to the newspapers the next day). That night, in the choppy waters surrounding the island, Standard Oil’s omnipresent tugboats sounded their horns, while the intermittent hooting blast of steam whistles from the ferries rippled joyfully across both the Hudson and East rivers. Snow flurries had begun to fall just before midnight, softening the effects of bone-chilling darkness. Illuminated in shimmering, spidery staccato bursts and explosive flashes by a barrage of Chinatown fireworks set off exactly at midnight near the Brooklyn Bridge, the wayward flakes flickered and pinwheeled like multicolored confetti. It was as if God Himself had joined the celebration.