LJ Idol Season 9 - Week 16 - A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
She was, undoubtedly, a beautiful girl with her well-balanced and spiritual features, her full red lips and her abundance of copper hair. She would have made a fine artist's muse at any point in history and in any place and so she was in her own time, at the turn of the 20th century. Evelyn Nesbit was known as the original Gibson Girl, a muse of the artist Charles Dana Gibson who depicted the ideals of the beauty of American women.
Yet even muses must eat, being real girls. They have the need for food, water, shelter et all, much like the rest of us, even like those of us who have never or seldom been considered beautiful. Perhaps they are better able to obtain life's necessities, for as animals we associate attractiveness with good health and good genes, all the better with which to enrich our own lines. Of course, Evelyn Nesbit was part of the animal kingdom which we call 'humanity' and that brings additional complications.
She was born in 1884 in Pittsburgh. Her father was a lawyer who died young, leaving the family penniless. Her mother tried various means of keeping the family alive, but the greatest success came when young Evelyn found work as an artist's and photographer's model. By the time she was 15, the family had moved to New York for the furtherance of Evelyn's career. Her success was marked and extended into the theatre where she was first a chorus girl and then given bigger roles.
Here was a child supporting her family in a dirty world. Her mother, widow of a man in a respectable profession, had put up resistance to her daughter appearing on stage, but ultimately gave her consent, especially as so many of the girls in that company had gone on to marry rich men. This was 1900 after all and it was accepted that all girls, or at least all girls' mothers, wanted nothing more than a good marriage. In practical terms, the child's beauty would not last forever or might soon fall out of style; to extend her career would bring only benefits. Mrs. Nesbit very nearly received her wishes for her daughter. Nearly, but not quite.
* * *
“My face is my fortune, Sir,” she said.
Human society is not kind and it was certainly not in in Gilded Age America. It would have been hard to be a woman especially. There was so much deemed not respectable, so many pitfalls and snares to be avoided. Any misstep could blacken your name forever and that would change how people were allowed to treat you. In an age where a man and woman could not exchange so much as a chaste kiss unless they were engaged, could not be alone together unless they were married, protocol was harsh. Imagine the potential for trouble for a teenager who was regularly depicted barely clothed and who disported herself on the stage.
Evelyn Nesbit later claimed that any trouble she got into was down to her going against her mother's warnings and not her mother's lack of care. In my opinion, either her mother was particularly driven by money to the exclusion of all maternal feeling or else an innocent herself, out matched by the realities of the world they now lived in. Certainly the scandal which haunts her daughter's name to this day has its roots in these times.
Creatures of beauty attract all manner of men, some of whom mean to possess them. Some of whom do not see themselves as constrained by conventional rules and may or may not possess their own code in the darkest of night.
Stanford White, celebrated architect, was one such man. He was married, very rich and 47 to her 16. He slyly inveigled her, through the most outwardly respectable means, to lunch at his apartments in a tower of Madison Square Gardens which, as it happens, he had designed. More invitations followed and the girl was showered with gifts and compliments. It all came to a head one night.
Nesbit's accounts varied. He had plied her with champagne, possibly drugged, and put her to bed. When she awoke, he was lying beside her and there was evidence that she was no longer a virgin. In some variants of the story she was horrified and inconsolable and in others happy and pleased. If he deflowered her while she was unconscious, Stanford White was a rapist pure and simple. This brooks no argument. Even if the story is an exaggeration and Evelyn accepted Dutch courage to get through the inevitable seduction, he did wrong. And why might she be pleased with this, the champagne story being true? Her being inconsolable rings more true and, if the drugged champagne part was a fabrication, she would need to depict herself as unwilling.
Regardless, she became his mistress for two years. He had already installed her, her brother and her mother in a hotel before the deflowering occurred and perhaps she felt that she had to pay the piper. There is a chance that her mother merely thought that Evelyn had found a generous patron and innocence thus made her an idiot. In later memoirs, Evelyn recalled this time fondly, saying that she was in love with White and recounting their sexual escapades. Perhaps she wanted to increase interest in her memoirs with a bit of spice and thereby capitalise on her public image as a naughty adventuress and Bad Woman. Perhaps she believed that she could do no better once she was soiled goods; even rape victims still suffer from this perception of their worth.
A further peculiar angle is the disparity in ages between the two. In very few cases is a 47 year old man to the tastes of a 16 year old girl, but we have a words for the kind of 47 year old man who likes 16 year old girls. White, apparently, had a history of 'squiring' teenage girls. Today we may look at Courtney Stodden and shudder for all manner of reasons. We may look back to the case of Mandy Smith and Bill Wyman who began dating when she was 13 and he 47. Her mother allegedly just thought he was a 'nice friend', which begs many more questions still. They join the throng of forsaken girls left to flounder. Nesbit admitted that her family had been so desperately poor, but under White's aegis they had lived well at last. What a burden upon a child's shoulders. She was, effectively, alone and, lacking experience, it was not going to end well for her.
* * *
By the time she was 18, White showed signs of tiring of her. He had other liaisons and shipped her off to boarding school to prevent her from forming any of her own. Her time there was cut short by the need for an emergency appendectomy. This may have been a euphemism, as she had at least one more of these operations during her life. During her recovery, another ardent admirer stepped into the fray and insisted upon taking Evelyn to Europe for her convalescence. Naturally, her mother must come too, as chaperone.
Beauty can be a curse. For Evelyn, this meant that she attracted the attentions of Harry Kendall Thaw. He was the eldest son of a millionaire robber baron from Pittsburgh and the original playboy. He had so seldom been refused anything in his life that when something, anything, was refused him, his reactions were epic. Between this and a natural proclivity for mayhem, his own career can not be described so much 'chequered' as pitch black. His doting mother spent millions buying him out of trouble. In one instance, he was expelled from Harvard after chasing a cab driver with a shotgun. On another, he had kidnapped a bellhop and tied him up in a bathroom so he could whip him. He was a trasher of restaurants, a beater of showgirls, an all round bad egg. Not the type of person with whom to go to Europe nor with whom to associate.
Yet he wanted her, Evelyn. He rapidly sent the mother back to the States after picking a quarrel about a parting gift given to her by Stanford White; White had sagely guessed that the pair may need an escape fund.
Then he had Evelyn to himself. When she refused to marry him, he demanded to know why and then she made what she later called 'the costliest mistake of my life ' and told him of White's seduction of her as she wanted to be honest. She did not know that Thaw had a grudge against White who he believed had engineered various forms of social ridicule against him, from stealing party guests to blackballing him from clubs. That his own dire reputation may have proceeded him did not occur to him. That White had already possessed his new, favourite toy compounded the obsession.
There followed multiple severe beatings and sexual assaults fuelled not only by his jealousy but also by cocaine, a drug which would not have helped his multiple issues. He never explained or excused the beatings and they continued. She was effectively imprisoned in a castle in Austria for a while until he let her leave. And then, in 1905, she married him.
Why? Why, Evelyn? Why on Earth? Perhaps she really did believe that she was soiled goods and deserved no better. Perhaps she suffered from battered woman syndrome. Perhaps, because she and her mother were now estranged, she feared being alone. Thaw had continued to pursue her obsessively and promised to change his ways. She must have been in fear of falling back into poverty. She was so young and so beaten down.
One year later, Thaw murdered Stanford White, shooting him three times in the face at a party on the roof terrace of Madison Square Garden. ”I probably saved your life,” he told Evelyn as he was led away.
* * *
"Stanny White was killed," Nesbit once said, "but my fate was worse. I lived."
Harry Thaw spent a mere 9 years in a mental institution for his crime, family money being good for keeping him out of the electric chair. He went on to live his life in much the same violent and criminal manner as before, dying at 76.
At the trial everything came out, every last sordid detail. Evelyn was now enshrined in the public's eye as 'that woman'. There was a suspicion that she had fanned the flames of Thaw's hatred of White to have revenge for his abandonment of her. She had been White's mistress for two years. She had been unchaste and traded herself for money, possibly doing it all again for Thaw's fortune. She testified to his monstrous treatment of her in a move to help establish Thaw's pre-existing instability and although she was very clearly the abused party, that was buried in the flurry of titillating details. ”She has been ruined,” the press said, sometimes saying that this was something done to her and sometimes saying that she had done it to herself.
She and Thaw divorced upon his release and there followed for her decades of nothing much good. She was a burlesque dancer, ran a speakeasy, taught ceramics, She was also addicted to alcohol and morphine. A second marriage was short-lived when her notoriety became too much for her husband to bear. The 'lethal beauty' brought up Thaw's son, refused to have any artworks associated with her modelling past in the house and mostly lived in the penury she had feared as a girl. She just wanted it all to be forgotten.
Still her pictures exist everywhere showing her great beauty but belying how much she was abused and misused because of it.