Book Club/ April
‘American Eve’: Beauty to kill for
Paula Uruburu remembers the moment when she first saw it. That singular face. She was poking around a box of vintage photographs, trying to find pictures of Gilded Age ladies for a course she was teaching, called “Daughters of Decadence,” about imagery of women at the turn of the century.
All of a sudden, there it was: a photograph of a breathtakingly beautiful young woman, posed under a tree as Eve, and looking both sultry and innocent.
Uruburu was entranced. “There’s something so incredibly appealing and seductive about her gaze, at the same time,” said Uruburu, a dean at Hofstra who previously taught in the university’s English department.
That single photograph— labeled at the bottom with Evelyn Nesbit’s name—set Uruburu off on a 10-year quest.
The result of that decade’s worth of research is the book “American Eve,” which was published last year and is the April selection of The Buffalo News Book Club.
It tells the story of Nesbit, a waif-like American beauty whose career took her from obscurity in a chorus line to international fame as a model, then into marriage to a society millionaire, Harry Kendall Thaw. At the same time, Nesbit carried on a liaison with the famous architect Stanford White, designer of Madison Square Garden in New York and several glorious mansions on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo.
In a crime that exploded with Nesbit at the center of it, a jealous Thaw murdered White on a Manhattan rooftop in June 1906, leading to a “trial of the century” that sparked media frenzies and put Nesbit into an unflattering spotlight.
It’s a perfect book to be reading at this point in American history, in the midst of another great lesson— in the form of economic collapse— about what can happen in the wake of American excess.
Join Buffalo News staffers Charity Vogel and Mike Vogel in a live online chat with "American Eve" author Paula Uruburu next Tuesday, April 14 from 2 to 3 p.m. You'll find it under Paragraph Factory in the Matters of Opinion blog at buffalonews.com.
But “American Eve” all started, for Uruburu, with that first look— and the expression on Nesbit’s beautiful face in the antique picture.
“The more I found out about Evelyn, the more I found there was this chameleon element to her. In one picture she looks innocent, in another she looks seductive,” said Uruburu. “As information accumulated, I began to formulate my agenda — it was to get at the truth behind the fiction.”
She had rich material to work with.
Nesbit, who grew up in poverty in Pittsburgh (her mother once begged for scraps at the door of the Thaw’s mansion), came from nowhere. She was raised by the worst kind of stage mother, Uruburu notes, a woman who wanted Nesbit to make money from her unique dark, childlike beauty, but who did not provide any guidance for her precocious daughter.
“Evelyn was like Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, in terms of being a young girl suddenly thrust into the spotlight,” Uruburu said. “She was the first one with a stage mother. She became the first celebrity — in the modern sense.”
Nesbit got her start as a chorus girl and in still photographs taken for advertisements, magazines and calendars.
By 16, she was famous all over the country, used to sell products and also to serve as the image of lush Gilded Age womanhood. (The author L. M. Montgomery, Uruburu found, used a photograph of Nesbit’s regal profile as an inspiration for the looks and style of her beloved character Anne Shirley in “Anne of Green Gables.”)
“She was a supermodel,” Uruburu said, of Nesbit in her heyday. “Nobody even came close.”
But Nesbit had a weak spot, and she was preyed on by men willing to take advantage of it. One was White, the architect, who took Nesbit as his mistress when she was barely 16.
While involved with White, Nesbit engaged in behavior considered bizarre and licentious when it became public at the murder trial following the architect’s death: she became known as the “Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,” for instance, after trial testimony showed how White lured Nesbit into posing for photographs, sans clothing, while swinging in a red velvet swing contraption in his Manhattan quarters.
Nesbit eventually decided to marry Thaw, the scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, likely after realizing that the married White was not likely to marry her, Uruburu said.
Marriage gained her the prestige of the Thaw name, and a ticket to the social set, but Nesbit paid a steep price: Thaw was verbally and physically abusive to her.
Uruburu said that Thaw and White have been portrayed, down through the decades, as complete opposites. But, she said, in her research she discovered that the two men were much more alike than different.
“They were much more similar than anyone thought,” she said. “They both did the same thing with her: pedophilia, and certainly sociopathic behavior. They were grooming her for the time they would take advantage of her. And they both started it innocently — by inviting her to lunch with another chorus girl.”
“The thing White didn’t engage in is the brutal sadistic behavior that Thaw did,” said Uruburu. “[Thaw] was an abuser in every sense of the word.”
After the 1906 murder, Thaw went on trial in a case that dragged on for months and dominated newspaper headlines for two years.
For legal buffs, “American Eve” offers a glimpse of a unique trial that brought many firsts into the legal realm — the first insanity defense, according to the author, and the first sequestering of a jury.
Though no one knew it at the time, the trial of Thaw for White’s murder was truly the capstone to one period in American history, Uruburu said, and the beginning of another.
“It was the death of the Victorian era. And it was the birth of tabloid journalism, if you will,” she said.
“All of that — centered in this one triangle of people.”
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As always, we are interested to know what you think of this month’s Book Club choice — and any suggestions you might have for future reads.
Send your thoughts to bookclub@buffnews.com , or write us at Book Club, The Buffalo News, P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, N. Y. 14240.
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