American Eve (29 page)

In early 1903, neither Evelyn nor Stanny had any idea of the depth or virulence of Harry’s inflamed hatred and swelling obsession, even though he had spoken zealously but in vague generalities on several occasions to his Angel-Child of White’s diabolic deeds. Evelyn refused to be provoked or speak badly of Stanny, who she said was not, as Harry’s informants claimed, “a sybaritic blight on the girlhood of Gotham.” She defended Stanny’s unwavering generosity to her and her family, of which there was ample, untainted public evidence. But the evidence Harry wanted so badly was irrefutable proof of White’s prodigious appetite for
jeunes filles
and what Thaw imagined were unrelenting wholesale debaucheries in the Madison Square Tower “lust nest” and elsewhere around the city.

Yet in spite of all his money and best efforts, Harry was little more than a whirling dervish, spinning his wheels in fanatical pursuit of his own truth regarding Stanford White and going nowhere. In turn, Evelyn tried to speak well of Harry to Stanny when White cautioned her about the pasty-faced playboy and his offensive proclivities, although, inexplicably, Stanny didn’t offer any cogent or specific details that might have convinced her (and perhaps thwarted Fata Morgana). A gullible Evelyn insisted that Harry had been nothing but a gentleman since she met him and was also very generous in offering to pay for her recuperative journey.

Evelyn’s appendectomy, performed hurriedly under what today would be considered atrocious and primitive conditions, left her highly susceptible to infection and so enervated that she “couldn’t lift a hairbrush.” At least, however, unlike the late president’s medical team a year and a half earlier, Evelyn’s doctor and his assistants wore gloves and masks. Harry rewarded an astonished nurse with a diamond Tiffany brooch. But even though the surgery was declared successful, there was a traumatic and peculiar side effect within days of the operation. Evelyn’s crowning glory, her luxurious hair, had begun to fall out in wisps, then patches. The doctor assured Mrs. Nesbit that this was a temporary condition, the result of her daughter’s weakened system and inability to tolerate the opiates for pain and morphine-laced sedatives given to her in excessive doses under such irregular conditions. In the meantime, it was decided that she needed to be moved to a sanatorium, where she would be instructed to drink only lithia water, take milk baths—and have her head shaved. This, Mrs. Nesbit was told, would facilitate a quicker, even growth of new hair and “revive her follicles.” But once she was told, the very idea of cutting off her profusion of curls sent Evelyn into a convulsive panic as she pushed against the blurry edges of semiconsciousness for several days.

A remarkably understanding Harry assured her that he would provide the best wigs money could buy until her hair grew back. Evelyn, at times almost cataleptic, was too listless to put up a fight. A week after the operation, her mother sat her up in bed and gave her some laudanum (against the doctor’s advice, since similar drugs that had been given to her were at the root, so to speak, of her dilemma). Mamma Nesbit also held her still while Harry’s valet did the shearing. Unable to watch as her hair fell to the bedclothes and floor, a woozy Evelyn turned her head away from the mirror and then dropped off into a fitful sleep, her hair now in a schoolboy’s crew cut. Bedford shook the sheets clean, swept away the locks, which coiled like grosgrain ribbon at his feet, and threw them into the dustbin.

Although annoyed and unhappy that Harry Thaw was the figure behind the European trip, according to Evelyn, Stanny seemed reconciled to her departure if only for the sake of her recovery. He probably was relieved to see Mrs. Nesbit safely out of the country, out of the range of her unrelenting requests for favors (or so he thought), and out of his slightly graying hair. Perhaps wanting to show Evelyn that he could be the bigger man, Stanny gave her a Thomas Cook’s letter of credit for $500 just before she and her mother were to leave. Mrs. Nesbit kept the letter with her, and suggested that Evelyn “not mention it to Mr. Thaw.” Knowing the bad blood between them, Evelyn also considered it sensible not to mention it. Her mother assured Evelyn that having the letter was a good thing, since they didn’t want to have to be beholden to Mr. Thaw while abroad. White’s letter of credit gave them, she said, “a sense of independence.”

Within a matter of days, a frail and overwrought Evelyn was on her way to Europe, with her mamma in tow as chaperone and Harry Thaw scheduled to follow on another ship two days later. When she boarded the ship, Evelyn wore, of all things, a blond wig that Harry had picked out for her. With the yellow press always near and always angling for a story, this little morsel became tantalizing grist for their rumor mill (most of which never made it into print). Subsequent speculation was that the reason Evelyn was being whisked away to Europe in disguise was due to the fact that she “was due,” although her still slight figure, which she did not try to hide, said otherwise. Others speculated in private that she might be recuperating from an “unsanctioned operation” that had been performed in secret and in haste at Pamlico, also hinting that Mrs. deMille had accepted bribe money for keeping it quiet. Some conjectured much later that while at the girls’ school, Evelyn had given birth, which accounted for the hair loss she had suffered (since this can be a side effect of pregnancy); speculation was that the infant had been quickly given up for adoption. Still others simply suggested that Evelyn was wearing a wig to conceal the fact that she was going to Europe with Thaw as his lover, although the fact that her mother was chaperoning spoiled that notion and threw the other scenarios into doubt as well. All the legitimate papers said that the budding chorus girl was “minding her mamma” and going off to continue her education in Europe. They were half right. Evelyn would certainly get an education while abroad, but not the kind they assumed or she expected.

In 1915, Evelyn wrote, “Some women have a conscience; some have a sense of self-preservation; they frequently exist together, but most often one does duty for the other.” Having been forced at such an early age to choose self-preservation, not to mention the preservation of her precarious family unit, Evelyn the child-woman saw precious few examples of conscience in action from the so-called adults or guardians in her life. Her mother was perfectly content to let one objectionable but wealthy man pay for their trip while holding a letter of credit from another man in her purse. The latter, her ersatz pater-protector, had taken her both literally and figuratively and showed no remorse, only a fear of being found out. So seventeen-year-old Evelyn did not question the morality of the progress of events, especially since she was still in a haze of post-operative pain and distressed over her lost tresses.

The first night alone in her stateroom, a brooding Evelyn took off her wig, stripped herself bare, and approached the full-length mirror on the back of the door. As she stared at the naked, small-boned, slim-hipped, and startlingly boyish reflection, it struck her that with her hair so severely shorn, she looked uncannily and disturbingly like her fourteen-and-a-half -year-old brother, Howard.

Initially, Harry Thaw reached into himself and pulled out his best behavior as he would another new Brooks Brothers suit from his closet, hoping to make a good impression on Mrs. Nesbit as much as to woo Evelyn successfully. He seemed content to be “the best of friends” with her in London. But, within a few weeks he again began to press his old suit for Evelyn’s hand. He was like a man possessed, and “nothing else, nothing less, would satisfy him.” It was also in London that Evelyn got her first glimpse into what lurked behind Harry’s façade of easy liberality and facile sophistication—a cruelty and malevolence to which she would be subjected all too soon.

Whether for propriety’s or publicity’s sake, Harry had arranged for Evelyn and her mother to stay at one hotel while he stayed at a different one several blocks away with his manservant, Bedford. But the constant pressure of having to be on his best behavior for such an extended period was too much for the easily ignited Thaw to contain. He craved gratification of his uglier impulses and needed release.

A few weeks into their stay, while Evelyn and her mother were at high tea at Harrods, Harry put a pile of coins upon a side table in his suite and waited behind a Japanese screen as the bellboy was summoned. The boy stepped into the room and looked around, eyeing the money left in plain sight. The temptation was irresistible, and the boy picked up two coins. As he stared at the heavy gold pieces in his palm, Harry pounced on him from his hiding place. He dragged the boy by the collar of his uniform to the bathroom, put him in the tub, “told him to remove his clothes, and brutally beat him with a riding crop.” Since neither Evelyn nor her mother witnessed the attack, it was the tearful boy’s word versus that of the richest guest at the hotel.

In a routine Thaw was all too familiar with, a doctor was called in, then a lawyer, and finally he had to pay $5,000 “to square the matter.” In hindsight Evelyn wrote: “There can be no doubt that Harry’s object in laying a trap for the boy who had shown no disposition to steal was to administer a flogging,” a malicious act that “in some way seemed to gratify him.” Unfortunately, both distracted and delighted by London, for the time being Evelyn remained blissfully unaware of the details and implications of the bizarre and unprovoked assault, coming to believe, as Harry told her, that the beating was greatly exaggerated, that this was his lot in life as a millionaire. No matter where he was, Harry claimed, people came out of the wallpaper to provoke him in the hopes of claiming bodily injury and therefore remuneration. He would eventually relay the specifics of the London incident “with much too much relish”—on their honeymoon.

Within a week or so of the flogging incident, the Thaw party moved on to Paris in June, where Evelyn had her pick of the best human-hair wigs as promised and Harry arranged for an apartment for Evelyn and her mother on the avenue Matignon. Having convinced himself by some wild pricking of his imagination that Evelyn was in love with him, Harry asked the overwhelmed Angel-Child to marry him, again. She reacted this time with tears, born of frustration and fatigue, which Harry mistook as a reciprocation of his feelings but sensed some obstacle. He believed that he could see in her face how much she was affected by his words and that he was “near victory.” But, as before, her answer was “as sable as death,” even though, he believed he could read “consent and more” in her doelike eyes.

Undaunted, Harry took Evelyn and her mother to the races at Longchamps. There were festive parties and elegant suppers where the head-turning adolescent model-turned-actress was nicknamed “Le Bébé” by Harry’s society friends. No one knew, in fact, that she was wearing a wig and that her own celebrated locks were still in the earliest peach-fuzzy stages of downy growth. Yet as a week or so passed, in spite of the shopping trips on the rue de la Paix, visits to the Louvre, and drives through the Bois de Boulogne, tensions mushroomed between mother and daughter. Finally, Harry had to hire a chaperone from a tourist agency, since Mrs. Nesbit began to refuse to accompany them on any excursions. He had to, for the time being, keep up the image of decorum.

One afternoon Evelyn squirmed when Harry asked about how the day’s shopping went with her mother. Sensing her discomfort, he pressed her and she told him that before leaving New York, White had given them a Cook’s letter of credit. Although Evelyn assured Harry that she had no need for it and hadn’t used it, her mother had finally used it, spending $200 on clothes for herself that morning. A livid and jealous Harry, who felt the superior stretch of White’s arm even across an ocean, exploded with anger and promptly confiscated the letter of credit. He knew what effect that would have on Mrs. Nesbit, and although she never said anything about it in Thaw’s presence, Evelyn’s mother privately railed against the phony aristocrat and his colossal nerve. Mamma Nesbit also complained of the pace of Harry’s eccentric itinerary, which was deliberately intended to whittle away at “the Mamma’s last nerves” (not taking into consideration, it seems, the potential injurious effect it could have on the post-operative Evelyn).

A decision was made, ostensibly to please Mrs. Nesbit, to return to England, where, she said, “the natives could be understood and the citizens [were] civil.” Back in England, according to Evelyn, she and her mother were put up, temporarily, at the Claridge Hotel while Harry stayed at the Carlton and tried to keep the intentionally irksome movable feast moving.

Once back in London, Evelyn and her mother were obliged to call on Harry’s younger sister, the twenty-eight-year-old Countess Alice, at Berkeley. To hear Harry tell it, Evelyn and the countess “found no antipathy towards each other,” even if they were “not especially friendly.” From Evelyn’s point of view, the disaffected countess, with her bovine stare, made her feel incredibly uncomfortable, especially since she looked like Harry in drag, but with none of his gift for unpatronizing gab. As far as Evelyn’s mother was concerned, the countess of Yarmouth was simply a paler if less pudgy version of the humorless, humiliating Mother Thaw. Luckily for Alice’s titled husband (whom the press back home jokingly referred to as “Count de Money”), he and Harry were not there at the same time, so Harry could not follow through with the threat he made on Alice’s wedding day to kick him down any one of their aristocratic staircases.

At a time when traveling between countries (even civilized ones) and taking day trips to remote natural wonders, ancient cathedrals, and historic ruins was time-consuming and uncomfortable at best (depending on the weather and the number of steps one had to climb in voluminous skirts and torturous, high-buttoned shoes two sizes too small), the accoutrements of travel required nothing short of sherpas; everywhere the Thaw party went, there were people and problems to contend with— chaperones and interpreters, porters, personal maids, and foreign hotel personnel, packing, repacking, lugging trunks, claiming baggage, and muddling through customs. It was wearing enough on a convalescing Evelyn, but at seventeen, she could rise above the jumbling and crowding, the snarling bureaucracy, and language barriers with the purchase of a new hat. But her aggravated mamma, feeling Harry’s unspoken enmity always burning at her back, found the constant upheaval of switching into different hotels, often in the same city, maddening and pointless. As tensions rose, a vexed and cranky Evelyn, pulled between the two, also began to bristle. From the Claridge, Harry moved mother and daughter to yet another hotel, the Grand, with no explanation. If his plan was to bring Mrs. Nesbit one straw away from her breaking point, it was working. What he didn’t plan on was that Mamma Nesbit had her own campaign in the works.