Trials of Passion (38 page)

The food, however, shipped in from Delmonico's, was a revelation to the ever hungry young woman, who gorged herself on oysters and
Lobster Newberg, devilled eggs, sweetbreads, preserves and cherry pie à la mode, washing it all down with the single glass of champagne that White permitted her. The voluptuous corseted Edna, unlike Evelyn, could only dip into cucumber salad. White was intrigued by this lithe Twiggy of an adolescent. As Evelyn later reflected, comparing herself to Edna and the popular type of the Gay Nineties: ‘I was smaller, slenderer; a type artists and, as I learned later, older more experienced men admired. I had discovered in the studios that artists cared little for the big-breasted, heavy-hipped, corseted figure, preferring to paint the freer, more sinuous, uncorseted one with natural, unspoiled lines.'

Welcome in the photographic twentieth century: thin women reproduce better, on film at least. White would soon recommend thinness to Evelyn.

When the fourth member of their party left them for business on Wall Street, White ushered the young women towards more splendour, two floors up, at the top of the building. Here everything was a deep forest-green, and at one corner of the studio space there was a ‘gorgeous swing with red velvet ropes around which trailed green smilax [a glossy vine], set high in the ceiling'.

‘Let's give this kiddie a ride,' White said, and Evelyn jumped on. He sent her soaring up towards a large many-coloured Japanese parasol, which Edna controlled with an undetectable string. Evelyn was encouraged to kick at it as it twirled before her eyes. She tattered several parasols and laughed uproariously at the game, as did White, who also shuddered and clapped each time her foot tore through the paper. At around four the game drew to an end. White had to go. But before doing so he took Edna aside and told her he wanted her to take Evelyn to the dentist to have a slightly discoloured front tooth fixed, something the older woman only revealed to her once they were on their way. This was a Pygmalion who loved perfection.

When Stanford White asked Mrs Nesbit to come and see him a few days later, it seems neither she nor Evelyn suspected his motives. She was altogether taken with White's courtesy and concern: he had once more recommended his dentist, assuring Mrs Nesbit that he had
tended to the teeth of all the girls in
Floradora.
Only later did Evelyn take up the offer. But when White's next invitation to her came, her mother was happy to let her go and visit the man the newspapers described as intense and masterful. Evelyn liked him too. ‘He was a compendium of information on all subjects, likely and unlikely. He was an authority and teacher ... gifted by Nature beyond the average.' He was also very kind, as her mother had pointed out, and felt very safe. White was a ‘charming, cultured gentleman whose magnetism undid all my first impressions of him. He emerged as a splendid man, thoughtful, sweet and kind; a brilliant conversationalist and an altogether interesting companion.'

White might have been all these things, and indeed was a more than suitable replacement father for an Evelyn who had lost her own and was eager for intellectual stimulus. However, if White was ‘clever', and a useful patron and benefactor for a rising teenage star over whom he exercised a ‘fatherly supervision', he was also a ‘voluptuary' – something her other admirer, James Garland, informed her of in no uncertain terms, indicating that he couldn't carry on seeing her if she was frequenting Stanford White.

Evelyn wasn't sure what ‘voluptuary' meant and far preferred the impressive White, who bought her intriguing automata every time they met and sent flowers daily. Nor was she interested in marriage to a man like Garland. Two weeks later, after another reminder from White, and with her mother now on side, Evelyn finally had her teeth fixed.

As if this was a sign that she would play Galatea to his lubricious whims, White then moved the Nesbit family, mother, daughter and son Howard whom he also befriended, into an apartment at the Wellington Hotel, which he had designed. Evelyn had never lived in rooms so opulent and enchanting. It was like inhabiting a fairy tale: her bedroom was draped in white (!) satin. There was a matching lace- topped bed, and a canopy crowned in white ostrich feathers. The forest-green living room had a piano, and White provided a teacher. Evelyn played Beethoven to please her patron. Soon after the move,
he sent her a red cloak to wear to a party that Friday night. The big bad wolf came to pick up his Little Red Riding-Hood himself this time, instead of sending one of his emissaries – often enough mistresses on their way out. He took her to his Garden apartment. It was there that events would soon unfurl that would rivet millions when recounted in detail at Harry Thaw's trial in 1907 by an Evelyn who still looked like a schoolgirl.

Excited by the wonders of the Garden's treasure-filled tower, if bemused by the lack of party guests, Evelyn was comforted by White's promise that he would have her photographed – in her Red Riding- Hood cloak – by the time's best photographers, Gertrude Käsebier and Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr amongst them. He would keep his promise.

After one glass of champagne, the man who was now ‘Stanny' took Evelyn home. She had to behave like a good girl, he told her. The next morning, he was there with books for her to read – an education that took in Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Shelley, as well as Dickens. White thought schooling important and now began to finance Howard's, sending him to the Chester Academy in Pennsylvania. Soon after, he took Evelyn to Gertrude Käsebier's studio, where she was photographed in an Empire dress, demurely innocent, her hair coiled girlishly yet suggestively on her bare shoulders, and staring enigmatically direct at the spectator. White's seduction was the slow wooing of a man who understood his own pleasures.

Now, as the date marking the end of Evelyn's first year in Manhattan approached, White gradually convinced Mrs Nesbit to take some days to reacquaint herself with Pittsburgh and leave Evelyn in his care. Reluctant at first, the woman soon succumbed, invoking Evelyn to see no one but Mr White during her absence and to obey him. Indeed, as Evelyn writes in her memoir, ‘He dominated me by his kindness and by his authority.' He dominated her mother too, who might have known better.

A few days after Mrs Nesbit's departure, White took Evelyn to Rudolf Eickemeyer's studio. Choosing her costumes himself, White had her photographed as a Turkish maiden, a demure Quaker girl, as
Little Red Riding-Hood and Little Bo-Peep, and finally in a lavish Japanese kimono on a bear rug where, exhausted after hours of posing, Evelyn fell asleep and gave Eickemeyer one of his most famous photographs of her as Little Miss Butterfly. A day or two later, Stanny's hold over Evelyn took on a new configuration.

Invited to a party in his 24th Street rooms, not for the first time Evelyn found herself alone. Stanny entertained her with tales, and this time she was allowed a second glass of champagne. When she wanted to go home, he suggested she stay, and took her up to a mirrored room she had never visited before. Tapestry hangings gave way to a four-poster bed, it too surrounded by mirrors on three sides, and on the ceiling rows of tiny differently coloured bulbs producing lighting in rose and blue – like a nymph's palace under the sea, Evelyn later wrote. Then came more drink, tasting bitter this time, but Stanny told her to drink up. After a few moments a ‘curious sensation' overcame her. She felt ‘dizzy and sick' and the room and its objects grew ‘blurred and indistinct'. In her 1934 memoir she adds that Harry Thaw later maintained that the wine had been drugged, but she never altogether believed it.

Whatever the case, when she next woke, Stanny lay beside her exposing ‘the naked body of his naked sins' still more or less in ‘the full flush of his extraordinary physical powers'. She screamed in terror, started to cry in her confusion. A tender Stanny comforted her: ‘Don't cry Kittens ... Please don't. It's all over. Now, you belong to me.' He had good reason to try to comfort her. Under the law, since Evelyn was under eighteen, he had committed statutory rape.

Distressed as she might have been at the time, Evelyn never damned White for his ‘deflowering' of her. Since she had fallen asleep, induced into unconsciousness either by far more champagne than she had ever drunk or by a drug slipped into it, she had never given her consent. But Evelyn was not one to press rape charges. In her 1914 memoir she wrote what she had earlier stated at the trial, ‘Not even for the purpose of pleasing those who demand, according to the rules of melodrama, a more bitter and more prejudiced view, can I
represent him other than he was. His failing we know – it was his one failing.'

That night, Stanny's making much of her didn't assuage Evelyn. She was in something like shock. Sex just wasn't talked about, so it was difficult to make sense of. She went home distressed, feeling ‘nothing, neither repulsion nor hate'. An aspect of life had been revealed to her in a flash and changed her perspective on everything. Eventually, as she pondered Stanny's ways, this ‘generously big man', who was kind and tender, yet ‘preyed on the defenceless', she decided, ‘He was a prodigious vampire.'

When he came to plead with her the next day, Evelyn sat very still. He explained to her that all people behaved like this: she translated him to mean that everybody was bad, but she must go on as if nothing had happened, since the worst sin of all was to be found out. Appearances were all. It was a difficult lesson for a slip of a girl. She continued to sit in stony silence, a numb, hollowed presence. But she listened to Stanny's voice of seductive authority and blocked out what was also a betrayal. Her childhood had taught her to swallow hard, say nothing, and move on. She might have lost that great female prize of virginity, but something in her prevented morbid introspection and utter defeat. White was like an ‘earthquake', she wrote, a natural force. There was no resisting. You could only pick up the pieces and carry on.

Evelyn carried on, and she fell in love all over again with the charming, inventive Stanny who, for a little while, was utterly taken with his heart-rending child-woman whose praises the papers crooned – that ‘fluttering fair flower of American girlhood' who had ‘blossomed in a mud puddle'. He would tremble when he touched her, she wrote, he wanted her so naked, he took the pins out of her hair, all the while cultivating his Galatea, sometimes arranging her in poses that mimicked the world's great paintings or sculptures, or setting her gently, naked, on his red velvet swing. They laughed, talked and loved.

White's undoubted assets as a patron combined with Evelyn's own talents saw her into her next role, in a production called
The Wild Rose.
Here, she played a winsome Gypsy girl. Promoted as ‘a fresh and fascinating theatrical find', Evelyn made more headlines. They feted her birthday together in the Garden apartment, just before Christmas 1902: presented in a huge red velvet stocking were white fox furs, diamond rings and pearls. Evelyn dubbed White ‘Stanny Claus', which he certainly was to her whole family... and the gifts and treats continued all year long.

But she grew restless with White's secretiveness, his constantly roving eye for new and fresh talent, even if she never complained of his marriage. Yet none of the ‘millionaires' who wooed her had White's artistic ways and intelligence. It took the attentions of the handsome twenty-one-year-old actor John Barrymore to make her suddenly feel the attractions of a youthful and open romance – so open indeed that the papers happily charted the progress of their relations. For a brief while they ‘did Broadway' together, but young Jack didn't have a penny to his name. When Mrs Nesbit found out about the romance, she upbraided her daughter, even going to White to ask for help in chastizing her! White did nothing, perhaps because he had been growing worried about the frenetic activity of the anti-vice brigades and his ongoing relations with an underage girl whom the newspapers adored. Then, too, he had severe financial worries and was overcommitted. Evelyn was distressed at his lack of any manifest jealousy, and like the teenager she was, pushed him and herself further.

It was only after Jack and Evelyn spent an entire drunken (but apparently chaste) night together, something that she had somehow never done with White, that on Mrs Nesbit's inducement White reacted. First he sent Evelyn straight to the doctor's, where she spent a day refusing to be examined. It's unclear whether White wanted to blame her missing hymen on Jack, or was worried that she might be pregnant, since she had been complaining of stomach cramps. In any event, White called the pair to the tower and reprimanded Barrymore for smearing Evelyn's reputation. The youth surprised everyone by asking Evelyn to marry him. She stammered out an inconclusive answer, and White asked what two kids like them would live on.
Barrymore promptly said, ‘Love.' White ‘got very mad and purple', took her aside to remind her that she wanted to be an actress – and to warn that there was insanity in Barrymore's family. Standing up to him, Evelyn told him she would do what she pleased.

Almost immediately after this scene, with the complicity of Mrs Nesbit who feared the youngsters might elope, Evelyn was told by White that, come October, her education needed to be seen to. She was being banished from New York to an all-girls' boarding school in New Jersey, run by a Mrs DeMille (mother of the future director). The papers talked of an interruption in her career while she followed her mother's strict orders.

It was during this difficult period of her life, while Evelyn was rebelling against White, all the while wanting his attentions, that she met Harry Thaw. He appeared first under the pseudonym of Mr Munroe, one amongst the innumerable array of stage-door suitors who sought the fetching young woman's notice. Thaw had first seen Evelyn in
Floradora
, probably alerted to her precisely because she had been selected out by Stanford White. Having watched her in some forty performances of the
The Wild Rose,
he began his suit by writing her anonymous letters. Thaw had learned of Evelyn's tastes by sending his Pinkerton detectives to spy on her: he proclaimed a love of animals and books. But Evelyn refused to meet him: she really had no interest in these fans. Thaw congratulated her on her refusal to meet strangers. It was now that he identified himself as Mr Munroe and put twenty-dollar bills in the letters he sent her. Evelyn returned them, as well as on one occasion flowers wrapped in a $50 bill – though her mother, ever hungry for cash, kept that bill without her knowing.