Scandal Of The Century.(Evelyn Nesbit)(Biography)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

Evelyn Nesbit was the most recognizable woman of the Gilded Age--and that was before her husband killed her former lover, Stanford White.

When millionaire Harry K. Thaw shot architect Stanford White on the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden in 1906, the final stay burst on the straining corset strings of Victorian America. The woman who unwittingly provoked the murder--and became the centerpiece of the media frenzy that ensued--was Evelyn Nesbit, Thaw's bride and White's former lover. The 21-year-old's singularly beautiful face launched a thousand tabloid cover stories, and her resulting popular mythology would inspire everyone from Orson Welles to E. L. Doctorow, but Nesbit's own side of the story has been largely overlooked--till now. Paula Uruburu's American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl, and the Crime of the Century (Riverhead Books) revisits the chorus girl whose rise to fame and fall from grace exposed the Gilded Age's tarnished underbelly.

Born in 1884 in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, Florence Evelyn Nesbit was eleven years old when her father died, leaving her and her mother and brother to fend for themselves in a series of gritty lodgings "even mice rejected," as she recalled. Discovered by a Philadelphia painter at fourteen, she immediately demonstrated a flair for modeling and was soon posing regularly to put food on the table. "The artist's model is either an auto-hypnotist or a mental gymnast," she later wrote. "I think I was the latter." To further her career, in 1900 the family moved from the City of Brotherly Love to "Gotham and Gomorrah," as one vigilance-society leader called Manhattan.

Nesbit was an immediate sensation. By the end of 1901, her likeness could be found everywhere from the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to penny-arcade postcards. She quickly became the era's most recognizable pinup, selling everything from Coca-Cola to ocelot furs; as the most iconic of Charles Dana Gibson's "girls," she embodied the spirit of American possibility with her "profusion of burnished copper curls" styled in the dramatic swooping shape of a question mark. "A human camellia" with "something of the dying beauty of the Narcissus in her delicately featured face," as one newspaper article described her fragile, ennui-filled sensuality--perhaps best captured in a famous photograph by Gertrude Kasebier, in which she holds a small pitcher suggestively tilted in her lap--Evelyn was sixteen when she drew the attention of New York's celebrated architect and roue 46-year-old Stanford White.

The most prominent partner in McKim, Mead & White, the firm responsible for the Washington Square Arch as well as Fifth Avenue mansions for Vanderbilts and Astors, White became known for another address during the trial: a plush Twenty-fourth Street hideaway, built for seduction with mirrors and exotic draperies. It was here that the married bon vivant invited the waiflike ingenue, who had caught his eye in the Broadway production of Florodora, for a lunch of oysters and lobster Newburg. And it was here that Evelyn became acquainted with White's notorious red velvet swing, on which she sat giggling while he sent her soaring toward the ceiling. In an impressive show of paternal benevolence, White sent his "Kittens" to the dentist and oversaw her education and career. One champagne-fueled evening when her mother was conveniently out of town, he dropped the act and relieved Evelyn of her virginity--while she was unconscious.

White eventually discarded her for other protegees, and it was the unlikeliest of saviors who came to Evelyn's rescue: Harry K. Thaw, the "banjo-eyed" scion of a millionaire Pittsburgh coal-and-rail family. Coincidentally, Thaw had already designated White a "sybaritic blight on the girlhood of Gotham" when he embarked on wooing the pretty chorine. He induced Evelyn, who was recovering from a near-fatal bout of appendicitis (and a broken heart), to join him on a restorative trip to Europe. Once again separated from her mother, ...