American Eve (24 page)

Jack, however, unaware of the exact nature of Evelyn’s relationship with her patron sinner, continued to make spontaneous and quixotic gestures, much to Evelyn’s delight. Having never been courted in any remotely traditional sense nor allowed to initiate a personal relationship on her own “with someone her own age,” Evelyn responded to Jack’s romantic advances with enthusiastic and genuine affection. Of course, one may also wonder whether she took some additional rebellious pleasure in seeing someone she knew her fiscally minded, old-fashioned mother would not approve of—if the stories and rumors about the couple were ever to blow Mrs. Nesbit’s way, since Evelyn hid her romance and Mamma Nesbit didn’t read the gossip sheets.

In fact, it was only sometime near the end of the fifth week that the ineptly watchful Mrs. Nesbit finally got wind of Evelyn’s budding love life with Barrymore and immediately demanded that it be terminated. She took hold of Evelyn one morning and asked if she “intended to marry that little pup.” She didn’t want White to think that his protégée was ungrateful and unworthy of his generosity and thus stop being generous. Nor was she about to let her obviously valuable daughter ruin her chances for fortune and lifelong security by marrying “a slick, penniless, hard-drinking ne’er do well who slept under the sun and lived beneath the moon.” One millionaire, James Garland, had already sailed into the sunset. But even though her mother had issued the ultimatum that Evelyn stop seeing Jack at once, the teenager not only chafed at the edict, she did something she had never done before—at least not to such a degree and with such openness. She defied her mother.

“If Jack wants to see me, to marry me, even,” she cried, “then I want to be with him!”

A stunned Mrs. Nesbit was thrown into a panic, yet she hesitated at first to tell White about the relationship, thinking ironically that their benefactor would be outraged by Evelyn’s behavior and derail the gravy train.

Whether it was true or not, Stanny had come to view the romance as a frivolous and, as yet, platonic affair, having been told by a number of acquaintances “in the know” that it was a giddy juvenile crush that had not progressed beyond blissful hand-holding and bad poetry—Evelyn herself would write that throughout his life, Jack liked to tell everyone he met that “she was the only girl who ever said no to him.” Perhaps by this time, Stanny was content to let the still precariously underage Kittens have her way. Or perhaps he was relieved to spend less time and energy worrying about ruinous exposure (which he had flirted with for so long, thinking back to the pie-girl incident), and more on serious private concerns, such as tremendous debts piling up and increasingly poor health. Perhaps he saw this as the perfect resolution to Evelyn’s recent bouts of petulant possessiveness. Whatever the reason, Stanny stayed in the wings, content to watch the thing play itself out. Until Mamma Nesbit acted.

Finally deciding something had to be done and risking White’s anger (so she thought) as well as the loss of her comfortable lifestyle, Mrs. Nesbit called upon Stanford White several times at his office. She asked for his assistance to break up the insolent couple, who she feared were going to elope. But White was reluctant to act in any way that might draw the wrong kind of attention to himself and arouse suspicions. Then, once again, Fortuna spun her wheel.

After a particularly happy-go-lucky night of eating “on the cheap”— cheese and breadsticks—at an Italian restaurant on lower Broadway and drinking “gallons of red wine,” an intoxicated Evelyn, on the verge of passing out, was just conscious enough to realize she was too drunk to go home. Knowing her mother’s opinion of Jack, and fearing Mrs. Nesbit’s anger, the two went back to Jack’s apartment at the Algonquin to sleep off the effects of the Mulberry Street wine. Filled with tipsy tenderness, Jack covered Evie with a cloak he told her his father, Maurice, had worn in a production of
The Count of Monte Cristo.
He promptly fell asleep on the floor next to Evie on a pile of secondhand books. If nothing else, it was a good story.

The following morning, at around eleven o’clock, Evelyn awoke with a start and a blinding headache and was now the one in a panic.

“Oh, my God!” she cried. “We’re in for it now!”

Jack rubbed his eyes and went for a glass of water, his mouth like sandpaper and his head like “day-old turkey stuffing.” Remarkably, until that evening, Evelyn had never stayed out all night (not even the night of her ruination). No matter what had gone on before, White had always managed to see that she returned home, even if it was four o’clock in the morning. The wave of nausea and pain in her stomach that rivaled the one in her head told her this all-night “frolic” could only have disastrous consequences.

Trembling and feeling queasy, Evelyn squeezed Jack’s hand and held her knotted stomach all the way home in the cab ride. When they reached her apartment and gingerly opened the door, to their astonishment, a pale and tight-lipped Stanny stood alongside her irate mother, who was “shaking like an aspen.” Mrs. Nesbit began to berate Evelyn, wringing her hands and shouting that she had ruined her reputation, that she had betrayed Mr. White, that she was lost, ungrateful, willful, and wicked. Evelyn burst into tears while Stanny stood to one side, puzzling over his next move. He decided to take Barrymore aside and ask him in a harshly paternal stage voice what his intentions were toward the girl. A gallant Jack replied without hesitation, “I want to marry Evie.” White asked him the next obvious question.

“What will you live on?”

With his natural endearing theatrical flair and totally impractical inclinations, Jack replied, “We’ll live on love.”

It was a scene worthy of Chekhov. As a flushed and red-eyed Evelyn ran back across the room to Jack’s side, on the verge of resuming her sobbing, Mrs. Nesbit broke out in crocodile tears. One can’t help but think her crying was not caused by the thought of her daughter’s moral ruination but by the idea that Evelyn had ruined any chances they might have had for continued soft and easy financial security. Stanny was sweating with apprehension, fearing that with all the bad feelings flying around the room, at any moment the curtain might finally be lifted on his own unconventional acts. If Kittens had wanted to expose his sins, this would have been as good (or bad) a moment as any. And, whether or not Jack meant what he said about marriage, he must have also suddenly wondered if Evie had heard and if he had been too hasty in his offer, given his free-spirited tendencies and severely reduced circumstances.

As the highly charged emotional scene unwound itself in the very apartment Stanny had decorated and maintained for Evelyn and her mother, Evelyn must have wondered what her next move should be. There is little doubt that she still had a strong emotional attachment to Stanny “in spite of that one thing” he had done and his subsequent behaviors. There is also the possibility that after spending the night on the floor of a sparsely furnished hotel room that Jack could not pay for, in the hungover, sobering light of day, Evie felt the familiar frightening specter of poverty rising in the back of her mind. Or, perhaps, she wanted to marry Jack but saw clearly that the combined force of her mother and Stanny, each of whom had controlled her life until this point, were not going to allow that to happen. She was, after all, still a minor.

Then, an unpleasant scene turned even uglier as Evelyn was whisked off to a doctor’s office in the West Thirties to be examined at White’s insistence. The next thing she knew, Evelyn found herself under lock and key in the office of Dr. Nathan Bowditch Potter, physician to the wealthy. A stern Potter questioned Evelyn for five or six hours as to the exact nature of her overnight tryst with Barrymore. Even though she was denied any food or drink until she talked, Evelyn remained stubbornly silent and refused to be examined. She folded her arms in defiance and chose instead to go hungry, flashing a scornful smile at one point, having gone without food many times before without any choice. And for a longer time.

It was clear that White’s concern was whether or not Evelyn and Jack had been physically intimate. If this could somehow be determined, on the one hand, White might be off the hook should she turn out to be pregnant anytime in the near future—a disastrous possibility he had flirted with for nearly a year, relying presumably on whatever methods of prevention were then available. On the other hand, it might at least give him an excuse to remove her from the heady influence of the irresponsibly adoring Jack and thus get Mamma Nesbit off his back. Although the physician continued to grill Evelyn throughout the long day, she refused to say whether or not Barrymore had seduced her, and she was mystified by the peculiar treatment.

Late in the day, a weary Stanny entered the room and told the stubborn Evelyn, her arms still folded defiantly across her chest, the unbelievably shameless lie that she was “the only girl in the world who could point a finger at him.” In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, even young habits die hard. Seventeen-year-old Evelyn, who wanted desperately to feel wanted and also be out of the room, accepted what Stanny told her and asked that he “square things with her mother.” Then she asked for some roast beef.

The next morning, the star-crossed pair was summoned to White’s Tower. As they stood before a now red-faced Stanny (Evelyn wondered whether it was bile or jealousy she saw reflected in his florid expression), the architect began to browbeat Barrymore in the same manner that the doctor had interrogated Evelyn. Knowing Jack’s cavalier attitude, White expected to put a period to the whole episode. But, to his disbelief, Jack spun around on his worn heels to face Evelyn and asked, “Evie, will you marry me?” A startled Evelyn shot a glance at Stanny and stammered back, “I don’t know.” It was, of course, what she did know (which Jack didn’t) that prevented her from giving any other answer.

White then took Evelyn aside and told her she should stay on the stage and become a great actress. Hadn’t she just started rehearsing for a part in a new show,
Tommy Rot,
being produced by Mrs. Osborne’s Playhouse? He added that he thought Barrymore was a little bit crazy, “that his father was in an insane asylum and that the whole family was a little bit queer,” and that within a few days or perhaps years the younger Barrymore would be in an insane asylum, “lots of people thought so.”

A day or so later, an incredulous Evelyn was informed by White that plans had been made for her to be sent by mid-October to an all-girl private school in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. After the initial shock and a bolt of searing pain that shot through her abdomen, Evelyn described her feelings as “dismal” at the prospect of being “lifted out of the light and glitter of Broadway,” only to be dumped into the quiet and peaceful dullness of what she perceived as “a convent school.” But both White and Mrs. Nesbit insisted that she be penitent and obey, once again.

Whether or not White wanted to placate Mrs. Nesbit and avoid a scandal, or he truly wanted to end Evelyn’s now doomed relationship with the good-for-nothing Jack, he acted as if he wanted her as far away from Barrymore as possible. Additionally, her banishment to the wilds of the Ramapos would provide Stanny much-needed relief from Evelyn’s moodiness and the possibility of anyone finding out about his own libidinous indiscretions. Like Nell King and other mothers before her, Mrs. Nesbit no doubt wanted to stay in White’s good graces and told Evelyn that she considered it only proper to do what Mr. White said.

The papers picked up the story almost immediately and reported that the “adored and adorable Miss Nesbit” would be leaving the stage “sometime in the coming months to pursue her studies and mind her mamma.” Then fate played yet another nasty trick on Evie. As if the scenario weren’t melodramatic enough, what with two men half in and half out of her life, neither of whom could give her wholly what she wanted or needed, a third emerged from out of the shadows. He had simmered there for nearly a year, plotting and pining, sending notes and keeping tabs, then materializing, like some haunted doppelgänger in a bad Gothic thriller, in the form of Harry K. Thaw. The unseen watcher.

A cracked Harry Thaw in the asylum, 1914.

CHAPTER TEN

Enter Mad Harry

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Home early [from Europe] and stopped in Newport. The first day I roamed among friends, tranquil, Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Mills, Mrs. Townsend Burden, the Nat Thayers, the Cornelius Vanderbilts (they out, they sent an invitation for a musical the day McKinley was shot; stopped it of course), and the Gerrys. Next day the Stuyvesant Fishes, the Belmonts and more, not so tranquil . . . Then home and then New York and first saw Evelyn.

—Harry Thaw, The Traitor