Trials of Passion (37 page)

That famous head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), seemed – if not altogether to condone the murder – certainly to agree with Thaw about White. A US postal inspector and the time's leading campaigner against moral turpitude, Comstock even had a law named after him. It had been passed in 1873, the same year as his society had been created. This law forbade the posting of any materials that could be considered ‘obscene, lewd or lascivious', or linked to birth control or venereal disease. In 1905, Comstock had campaigned against Bernard Shaw's play about prostitution,
Mrs Warren's Profession,
and had it suppressed. Shaw retaliated. pronouncing that ‘Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States.' This hardly deterred Comstock from his determined attempt to wash America clean: his work led to some four thousand arrests as well as suicides, and the confiscation of approximately fifteen tons of books, plus pictures and press plates.

Alerted by Harry Thaw to his plight on the morning of White's
inquest, Comstock sent one of his agents to the Tombs, but the man failed to gain access to Harry. Nonetheless, Comstock told the press that he was ready to provide the Grand Jury with evidence about Stanford White's nefarious activities. Thaw had alerted him to the architect's vices some eighteen months earlier, before his marriage to Evelyn Nesbit. He had done so, Comstock contended, on the ‘purest' of motives. ‘He seemed to think that White was a monster who ought to be put out of the community.'

Comstock had sent agents to stalk the apartment in Madison Square Garden as well as White's other haunts. Thaw knew of ‘revolting orgies' and ‘atrocities perpetrated on girls' whom White had invited home. Thaw had provided him with names, and Comstock had taken evidence from underage girls, of seduction or worse by White. But either because they were dissuaded by their families or had been bought off and made mysteriously to disappear, Comstock hadn't been able to mount a solid legal case against White. He was ‘morally convinced' of the man's guilt, but he had had to drop the idea of having him ‘indicted on the evidence I had obtained'. His lack of success seemed ‘to depress Thaw. As to whether I believe this depression could cause Thaw to commit murder I do not care to say.'

Comstock stated that he was willing to appear before a grand jury to testify to White's ‘atrocities'. In the affidavit he made to the trial in Thaw's defence, he also stated: ‘The last time I saw Harry Thaw was only two or three weeks before he shot White. He appeared to be in a desperate state – like a man who is well nigh frantic. He said to me wildly, “You must keep on, you must stop this man, he must be stopped now – at once.'”

Like Harry Thaw, the Reverend Anthony Comstock seemed to think that in the pursuit of a purer America, in the war on vice, murder was simply another weapon and need incur no punishment. He may not have considered Harry Thaw quite the valiant hero that half the press and Thaw himself seemed to want to make of him. But nor did Comstock pause to consider that his statement, which gave support to the murder being long premeditated, might send Harry to
the electric chair – developed in the ever inventive Thomas Edison's workshop and in use since 1889. In the eyes of the law, only a plea of insanity might save him, and insanity meant that he could have no responsible understanding of his crime.

The wild and frantic Thaw that Comstock describes is consumed by passion. It is a passion that has lasted for years and overrides any common understanding of reason. But if the murder in the Garden was a crime of passion – an ‘irresistible impulse' – it became increasingly clear that Thaw's passion was all about Stanford White. That passion certainly pre-dated any the renegade millionaire had for Evelyn Nesbit, the child-woman with the Renaissance angel's face, the woman he called ‘Boofuls'.

The habit of being consumed by the vice of others while keeping one's own hidden, sometimes even from one's own eyes, was hardly new to Puritan America.

30.
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

Fifteen-year-old Florence Evelyn Nesbit arrived in Gotham with the new century. She was the daughter of Florence MacKenzie and Winfield Scott Nesbit, a handsome, gentle and oddly unambitious lawyer who foresaw a Vassar education for his lovely, clever daughter. She was a girl who could dance and sing, play the piano and recite, and who, encouraged by him, loved reading almost as much as she loved her father's praise. Evelyn's two-years-younger brother, Howard – like his sister, delicate-limbed and with wide liquid eyes – was his mother's favourite.

The family first lived in Tarentum, a place and a part of her life that Evelyn remembers in her memoir as rustic and idyllic, though the town was only marginally less industrialized than Pittsburgh, some twenty-five miles away, and known as the nation's dirtiest city. The family moved to Pittsburgh (then spelled without its
h
) when Evelyn was around ten. A year later, her father suddenly died, at the early age of forty. Utterly unexpected, the death left the family grieving and destitute: it also robbed Evelyn of all sense of security, both psychological and material.

House and furniture had to be auctioned or sold, as did the books her father had given her. The next months and years were spent surviving on family handouts and loans, constant moves, a failed boarding-house enterprise, plus whatever scraps Evelyn's largely incompetent and lamenting mother could amass. The family often went hungry: one bare meal a day was all that there was to be had. When the boarding house was lost, the children were sent to live with distant relatives in the country. Evelyn's mother, once she had managed to closet away her tears, cut off all her old friends and dreamt only of being a fashion seamstress. She never succeeded: she had, after
all, never been to Paris or trained to do anything, but she did go to Philadelphia to try her hand. Here she at last found a job at Wanamaker's department store and sent for her children. Both of them were now taken out of school and went to work in the store. Howard, ever frail, fell ill: labour and the continuing scarcity of food affected both children's health, but Howard seemed to suffer or was permitted to suffer more. He was sent to distant relatives again, this time in Tarentum.

A week before her fourteenth birthday everything began slowly to change for Evelyn. She was spotted in the street gazing into a shop window by a woman who asked her if she would like to pose for a portrait. Disbelieving, Evelyn in her tattered, mismatched clothes said she would ask her mother. When the latter learned that five hours of her daughter's stillness would earn the colossal sum of a dollar, she immediately sanctioned the work.

Now, every Sunday, Evelyn posed for Mrs Darach, a well respected local artist and miniaturist. One of her friends, the sister of the artist John Storm, then told her brother about Evelyn, who in turn introduced her to a local colony comprising talented women illustrators and stained-glass artists.

Evelyn's career was on its way: she had a respect for art; she was versatile; she loved dressing up and the attendant play of fantasy. If she sometimes got bored with the need for stillness, she was nonetheless good at reverie. With her porcelain skin, sultry gaze and pubescent charm she was striking to look at and loved being looked at – let alone being told she was beautiful. Evelyn could appear ethereal, or childlike and androgynous, or as an underage vamp. Violet Oakley used her as a model for her stained-glass windows in churches in Philadelphia and New York. The ‘angel child' – a name Thaw also called her – was soon much in demand. She worked hard, posing five hours at a stretch, sometimes with no break, her neck aching and her stomach rumbling.

Evelyn's mother quit her day job to become her daughter's manager, despite her occasional disapproval of the work Evelyn did.
Willing to sell her daughter's charms, Mrs Nesbit yet had a need to appear respectable, most of all perhaps to herself. By the age of fifteen, Evelyn was supporting the family through her labours. She had no friends of her own age, and her greatest solace was reading: one book, Zola's
Nana,
his novel about an actress-prostitute who rises from rags to riches, had been left at the boarding house by a guest and Evelyn had retrieved it. She had dreams of fulfilling the paternal promise that she would someday go to Vassar. Meanwhile, there was not even the hope of high school.

As Evelyn's brilliance at posing in the ‘skylight world' of the studios became known, it was suggested that photographers, too, might be interested in her. Philadelphia's Ryland Phillips had her in to pose: he made her up for the first time and dressed her in floor-length white satin, draping it so that his model resembled ‘a young Aphrodite'. The photos were reproduced for years, and the local papers talked of this ‘strange and fascinating creature' with ‘a remarkable maturity of repose' for one of her youth. The rare young Pittsburgh beauty with her ‘enchanting combination of youthful innocence and colossal self possession' found herself much in demand, and gained an introduction to a leading New York artist.

Mrs Nesbit took herself off to Manhattan, purportedly to find work for Evelyn. Then, unaccountably, she did nothing for months, the excuse being that she was once more trying to set up as a fashion seamstress herself. The mother's ambivalence towards her daughter and her work was marked. Finally, when work didn't materialize and all Evelyn's earnings had been spent, Mrs Nesbit sent for her children.

Evelyn arrived in Manhattan in December 1900. Within weeks, she was posing for the respected and well connected James Carroll Beckwith. When her photographs appeared in a two-page spread in the
Sunday American,
and again in
Broadway Magazine,
she had started on her road to celebrity. Despite her self-deluding mother's ineptitude as an agent, her talent as a model shone. Evelyn would appear as Undine with water-lilies in her hair, in orientalist mode in a half-open kimono, or as an innocent all-American girl in a high-necked blouse.
She could appear in anything at all, and halt the gaze. She would soon become an icon of the new century, her nubile image distributed in any number of forms and settings.

But Evelyn grew bored with solitary modelling for ageing artists. It was a lonely life for a girl who had just turned sixteen. Her aspirations swung to the more exciting world of the theatre, and in May 1901, when the agent who had been wooing her said he had an offer from the producer of the Broadway musical hit
Floradora,
Evelyn made an initial foray onto the stage. At first, she was almost sent home. John C. Fisher,
Floradora
's manager, thought this Evelyn, who looked barely pubescent, would bring Comstock's anti-vice squad down on the theatre. But by the end of an audition that included unschooled dancing and singing, he told her mother that if Evelyn would lie about her age, he would take her on.

The theatre marked Evelyn's first real encounter with a social group whose experience in any way reflected her own. In the chorus line there were other young women from the provinces whose family lives had been straitened by death and poverty. At first the older members of the troupe sheltered the tiny Evelyn, who was still little more than a child who loved mechanical toys more than much else. But she was also a thorough professional. She watched and listened and practised, growing into the exhilaration of music and her new craft. For the first time in her life, she started to go out with other young people. She revelled in the parties, the vibrant Manhattan scene. She loved the experiment that was this new independent life, even if her cautious and envious mother disapproved. Between the arduous routine of modelling all day and performing in the evening seven days a week, plus a matinee, it took a little while for the girl who was nicknamed ‘the Kid' and who could nurse a single glass of wine until the early hours of the morning, gradually to lose her innocence.

Stanford White was a regular at
Floradora
, with its ever shifting chorus line. The little Spanish Gypsy that Evelyn performed caught his eye. Towards the end of September 1901 – that momentous month in which President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist and that
energetic Cuban War hero, member of New York's elite, Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two the youngest president ever, was sworn in to breathe change into the new century – White asked a
Floradora
cast member, Nell King (secretly mother to Edna Goodrich, one of Evelyn's chorus-line friends), to invite her to a society lunch.

Evelyn's mother, perhaps fearful of the daily headlines pinpointing Comstock's vice-suppression squad, not to mention her daughter's reputation, withheld permission. She was interested in another suitor of Evelyn's, a rich banker by the name of James Garland, married and almost four times Evelyn's age, who had come to ask Mrs Nesbit's permission before approaching her daughter. His yacht was at their disposal for Sunday jaunts. Nell King, however, didn't like to displease the mighty Stanford White, and came personally in White's electric car to solicit Mrs Nesbit's approval for the lunch invitation. Mrs Nesbit gave in. Whether to emphasize her own fading youth or her daughter's innocence, she dressed Evelyn in a schoolgirl's sailor frock which fell just above the knee. She didn't know that White's tastes lay particularly in virginal waifs.

On the Sunday Edna brought Evelyn to an unprepossessing door on West 24th Street off Broadway. A toyshop window stood next to it and Evelyn was enchanted by the automata, the painted toys that moved and clattered. At the top of the stairs a second door opened magically and they were plunged into what Evelyn later described as a breath-taking space in a wonderful red, protected from the outside world by heavy red curtains and furnished with carved Italian antique furniture. Fine paintings hung on the walls. Illumination came from mysterious sources. Velvet divans, silk cushions ... The young girl thought she had entered a scene from
The Arabian Nights
, and waited for the carpets to fly. Stanford White, by contrast, seemed at forty-six Terribly old', a potentate but no prince. Evelyn notes that she was equally disappointed when a second man came in, even older than the first, and no Don Juan either.