American Eve (35 page)

—New York Tribune headline

My heart is not for sale!

—Song lyric, 1905

“Gee! But This Is a Lonesome Town”

—Song title, 1905

Throughout the following year, as Harry pursued his fallen Angel-Child in earnest, miraculously maintaining his temper and tempering his obsession with White (even paying for Evelyn to take another trip to Europe to study art and music, this one scrupulously supervised by a hired chaperone for the entire time), the papers were filled with speculative headlines. One read: “$80,000 or Espoused to a Fair Young Daughter of Thespis.” The public wondered how much of a sacrifice the Pittsburgh playboy was willing to make on behalf of the Broadway beauty. But Harry had routinely exceeded his $80,000 monthly allowance since that time when his myopic mother had first threatened him with disinheritance should he pursue his broken dream girl all the way to the altar. There were also rumors at the time that Harry and Evelyn had already gotten married during their first European “holiday”; another said that Evelyn had been offered a quarter of a million dollars to leave Harry. But they were all only rumors.

Mother Thaw, along with the rest of the family, believed that nothing good could come from bringing a common “social-climbing soubrette” who had “nothing but her looks” into their gilded family. After all, in her mind, both of the Thaw daughters had married well. Mrs. George Lauder Carnegie seemed at least content with her lot and snug fortune. But things were very down and nearly out for the countess of Yarmouth, who was adrift in a sea of marital troubles. It didn’t help that some reporters had taken to calling her husband “the Countess.”

Evelyn knew well enough that Mother Thaw was filled with little sympathy for her and her vulgar bohemian baggage: “It was irritating for these strict souls to have a chorus girl in the family, [whose] beautiful mind [which had been cultivated by Stanny] was little compensation for her association with the stage.” And, as Evelyn described it, “I certainly had no great sympathy for her. I never regarded Mrs. Thaw as an archangel because she was so magnanimous as to forgive a chorus girl for taking . . . her favorite son.”

But if the matriarch Thaw were to give her curdled consent to the marriage, it would be understood that Evelyn could not under any circumstances continue to pursue her modeling or stage career; she couldn’t even, as she was explicitly told, participate in the occasional
tableau vivant.
Although popular with the affluent and aesthetically minded rich from New York to Newport, this harmless parlor entertainment was frowned upon by the pious Pittsburgh clan and their fellow disciples. Evelyn responded only with a sphinxlike smile and said nothing.

Moreover, it was also understood by all at Lyndhurst that Evelyn’s past was dead and buried. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Out of sight. Out of mind. Although her knee-jerk reaction was to roil against the first stipulation, a now nineteen-year-old Evelyn halfheartedly accepted the opportunity embedded in the latter to put her short but too painful past behind her, especially certain events needing “less closure than obliteration.” Nonetheless, Mother Thaw’s abrupt amputation of her whole identity and demand that Evelyn bury even memories of the best part of her still young life seemed terribly familiar to her. She flashed back to her father’s death and her mother’s eventual dismissal of his existence and mandate of silence. This only helped darken the former chorus girl’s “beautiful mind” and color the opinion she was forming of her mother-in-law-to-be, whose face like her general demeanor was a grim, tight fist. There were certain days when she considered that she might be merely trading Medea for Medusa.

The popular-culture myth that Evelyn was a scheming, social-climbing, gold-digging "she-wolf ” can be dispelled simply by pointing to the magnates and millionaires who had wanted her and whom she had routinely dismissed or ignored since she was sixteen. One then needs to consider the three-and-a-half-year campaign it took the “millionaire scion of steel and such” to finally win her pretty hand. The question of her judgment (or sanity) in finally agreeing to marry “Mad Harry” is another matter.

Having been forced at such a young age to abandon her fantasies to a harsher reality in order to survive, in early 1905 Evelyn considered her narrowing options. She had been the family provider since the age of fourteen; she had come to the unhappy realization that in spite of his generosity, Stanny the unrepentant rounder would never leave his wife and son. To make matters worse, because of her illicit relationship with him, if it ever got out, no respectable man, young or old, would ever take a serious interest in her. The closest thing to a real proposal Evelyn had gotten was from the smitten Bobby Collier, who had offered to send her to Europe to study sculpture a year or so earlier. And then there was Harry.

Having grown up with the specter of the imposing Thaw family mansion hulking on the outskirts of her drab little neighborhood, Evelyn found herself in the enviable position of marrying into that very same family. Unfortunately, in addition to his millions, she was all too painfully aware that Harry’s inheritance included a wealth of neuroses. But in pressing his suit (“He wanted to marry. Nothing, nothing less would satisfy him”), Harry smilingly assured Evelyn that once they were married, he would be a changed man, even declaring that he would “become a Benedictine monk.” He promised there would be no more scenes like the one in Schloss-Katzenstein, insisting that he had simply been overcome with anger at her former behavior with White. But eventually, as he said, he realized that it was not her fault. So he forgave her.

Contrary to what has been written, rumored, and ruminated on, and however unfathomable it may seem, Evelyn did also care about and even love Harry, for a time. She would write of Harry in 1915, “He was very earnest, no philanderer, no light lover, even in his infidelities he was absorbed and sincere. Such matters were serious propositions, presenting aspects which would not occur to the normal man.” There is convincing evidence of what seems genuine affection in the letters she wrote to him when she was in Mrs. deMille’s school (admittedly written with a school-girl’s immaturity and before he had revealed his true colors). Yet the same affection seems present in letters they exchanged during the trials. One could also speculate that Harry might have appeared to Evelyn, if not consciously, then on some unconscious level, as simply a much more peculiar and debased version of White. Or even Jack Barrymore.

Like Stanny, but to a lesser degree, Harry did possess a kind of charismatic intensity that undeniably affected those around him. He was at various times given to histrionically romantic, even sweet gestures à la White and Barrymore (the latter having spent money on Evie, although not his own). Like Jack, Harry had pursued Evelyn, knowing White was in her life, although what was unwitting youthful infatuation on Barrymore’s part was full-blown calculated obsession with Harry. Of course with his immense wealth, Harry could give Evelyn the financial security she craved and the ultra-comfortable lifestyle she had grown accustomed to under White’s “patronage” and considerable influence. In addition, Harry could give her a veneer of respectability she could get nowhere else. He had grown up with the advantages of money, and his cosmopolitan education and experience made him a frequently entertaining conversationalist and a minor connoisseur, albeit not in the same league as Stanny (of which Harry was keenly aware). And, after all, Harry had risked losing not only his well-publicized inheritance but also his beloved mother’s favor.

And all for “his Boofuls.”

Although virtually all descriptions of Harry the demented wastrel and Stanny the genius architect make much of their differences, the similarities between the two men are uncanny when dissected in the cold light of a hundred years. Both men had a Jekyll-and-Hyde ability to conceal the darker side of their personalities, even from their closest friends and family—and find excuses when it emerged. Each had paid chorus-girl accomplices to facilitate their introductions to Evelyn, and subsequently paid others to watch her in their absence. Knowing that Evelyn had a traumatic and foreshortened childhood as a result of the loss of her father and subsequent poverty, each at first acted the compassionate benefactor, expressing concern for her youthful innocence and welfare. And of course, fully aware of her impoverished background, each showered her with objects of wealth and luxury enough to turn anyone’s head, much less that of a teenage girl who had felt real pangs of hunger and deprivation for most of her formative years. Each took advantage of her lack of moral supervision, as both men paid off her mother or maneuvered her out of the picture so that they could have Evelyn all to themselves—and then each proceeded to act contemptibly, eventually contributing to the utter ruination of her reputation. Ultimately, each man controlled her life so effectively that Evelyn was cut off from any and all friends or outside emotional support. And Stanny and Harry had each knelt before her and trembled at the mere touch of her dress, just as each had surreptitiously lured her into a “soft prison,” but a prison, nonetheless. So, it seems, as far as Evelyn was finally concerned, if not Stanny, who had taken her first along with her only marital currency, then Harry, the man obsessed with that terrible truth and the man she had loved. And with currency to burn.

And what, after all, did Evelyn know about moral boundaries? Or the opposite sex? About true love? Or honesty? Or normalcy in any kind of relationship, familial or romantic? She had never dated any boys in Tarentum, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. With a truncated childhood and maternal negligence as her only experience, Evelyn was ill equipped to cope with repeated betrayal, disappointment, and loss at the hands of fate and her so-called guardians. Thrust into a world of grown-up men and responsibility while still a child, she was invariably surrounded by adults alone, first in the studios and then on the stage, where the emphasis was on her looks rather than her character. Her harried, self-centered mother offered little if any ethical guidance, and exerted just as little control over her daughter after repeatedly placing her in harm’s way, then conveniently disappearing.

For better (or much worse), Evelyn’s unfortunate choice to marry Harry probably gave her some little satisfaction by “putting it over” on the mother who had repeatedly put her in so many precarious positions— with strange families, strange boarders, strange “artistic” types, strange married men, and finally the strangest one of all, Harry Kendall Thaw.

FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO A CAULDRON

Weakened by Thaw’s relentless pursuit of her, compounded by the fact that her options were severely limited, that the theater world under Stanny’s considerable shadow had lost its patina, and that Harry professed to be madly in love with her (and only her), even though he knew “the horrible Truth,” Evelyn finally relented—and went from the frying pan into a cauldron. In February 1905, she had a sudden attack of searing pain where her appendix used to be and had to go back to Dr. Bull’s sanatorium for treatment of internal adhesions and a month’s rest. One month later, much to their chagrin, instead of a corporation or another coronet, the Thaws of Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue and Smoky City society, who “might have added further luster to their brand-new escutcheon,” got a common little chorus girl. And, as always, Harry got his way.

On April 5, 1905, twenty-year-old Evelyn Nesbit married Harry K. Thaw in a private ceremony at the house of the Reverend Dr. McEwan. The only people in attendance were Mother Thaw; Josiah Copley Thaw, one of Harry’s brothers; and Frederick Perkins, the man who could claim to be perhaps Harry’s one and only genuine friend from the days of his youth at Wooster Academy. Attempting to initiate her own familial reconciliation, Evelyn also asked that her mother be invited. So, against Harry’s and his mother’s wishes, Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Holman came to the wedding. In a startling flaunting of tradition, the young bride wore black (with touches of deep brown), the bridal outfit having been hand-picked by Harry himself; it consisted of “a three-quarter-length opera coat trimmed in rare lace with Persian floral designs and a velvet hat with a silk entwined brim and a gorgeous feather of three shades of brown.” The reason for the choice of costume, Evelyn explained to reporters later on, was that she and Harry had to leave immediately for their honeymoon, so it was more sensible for her to wear the traveling outfit. But perhaps she was already in mourning for the life she had to deny ever existed. Or perhaps Harry had instructed her to wear black as a rueful reminder that he was willing to take her as his bride even though Stanny had taken her first. Whatever the reason, if one were superstitious, it seemed more an unhappy omen than a practicality.

Throughout the brief ceremony, Evelyn never even took off her coat or hat. Harry had thrown his coat over the banister near the front door, only blocks from the door Evelyn’s mother had been turned away from in disgrace. And now, in another ironic twist of fate, Evelyn would spend the next year living in that same mansion on fashionable Beechwood Boulevard where, as the newspapers saw it, like a number of
Florodora
girls before her, Evelyn had become “the Mistress of Millions.”

From Evelyn’s perspective, after having done everything she could to prevent the marriage, “after much discussion, after many heartaches, after great searchings of conscience and of soul”—all on the part of Mother Thaw—she had been allowed to marry Harry “in a Presbyterian church, within a larger Presbyterian circle, and sentenced in the terms of my marriage vow to live forthwith in the charmed circle of a Presbyterian home.” Like the mirror image of Dante’s Beatrice, in her own circle of Thaw hell instead of the brief paradise she had known with Stanny, Evelyn fully understood the Thaws’ dilemma, even if they didn’t. As she saw it, they were the ones at a disadvantage with regard to her presence. Among the things Evelyn did not fully recognize, however, was that she had traded one kind of monstrous mother for another. And that Harry’s monomania regarding the great White was fired up again and threatening to blow.