American Eve (53 page)
Authors: Paula Uruburu
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Women
119.
Gertrude Käsebier
Respected and talented portrait photographer and part of the Photo-Secession movement who exhibited at the prestigious 291 along with Stieglitz and Steichen.
123.
“sugar-daddyish mix of altruism”
Michaels, 114.
123.
“selling her to the highest bidder”
Michaels, 115.
124.
“none more fully”
Michaels, 115.
129.
“little butterfly”
This is probably the most famous photographic image of Evelyn. It won Eickemeyer a prize and was the image used at the murder trial as proof of her unsavory character. It was also the best-selling of all the postcard images of Evelyn.
CHAPTER EIGHT. AT THE FEET OF DIANA
146.
“a connoisseur” . . . “an apostle of beauty”
O’Connor, 131.
148.
“architect of desire”
Title of Susannah Lessard’s engrossing and elegantly written autobiographical book detailing her family history and the legacy of her great-grandfather Stanford White.
149.
“just a fairy out of wonderland”
Atwell, 12.
159.
Svengali and Trilby
The manipulative hypnotist/impresario and his lovely model/victim in George Du Maurier’s best-selling 1894 novel
Trilby.
CHAPTER NINE. THE BARRYMORE CURSE
166.
“In the considered opinion of ”
O’Connor, 188.
169.
“By God we’ll go to a restaurant”
O’Connor, 190.
170.
“a slick, penniless, hard-drinking ne’er do well”
O’Connor, 189.
CHAPTER TEN. ENTER MAD HARRY
194.
Posing under another assumed
From the second trial transcript.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE WORST MISTAKE OF HER LIFE
213.
“I want to speak with you”
This episode, with a few additional details from
My Story
and Thaw’s
The Traitor,
is Evelyn’s recounting as described in
Prodigal Days.
216.
“Burglar-Banker-Father”
From an Emily Dickinson poem describing God.
219.
a very different way
Both White and Thaw were also, coincidentally, enraptured by a specific quality of Evelyn’s distinctive beauty—her exquisitely delicate and “boyish figure”—which may have had more unconventional implications than Evelyn realized at the time. Each man at different times had expressed to Evelyn his severe distaste for “fat” women of the more voluptuous type that was popular in the 1890s, and there are indications that their love of beauty cut both ways in terms of gender.
228.
“the shores of Avalon”
As a child, Evelyn had read Arthurian romance with her father, who praised the chivalry of knights and the virtue of the ladies whose honor they defended.
233.
Olga Nethersole’s production
A shocking drama for its day,
Sappho
tells the story of the “regrettably named Fanny Le Grand.” Several scenes after prostrating herself willingly at the feet of her would-be lover (a position normally reserved for maidens begging to protect their purity on stage), Fanny is carried up the stairs in the arms of her lover. When it became clear to the audience that the man had spent the night with Fanny, they let out a collective gasp. Some rose and angrily stormed out of the theater. The next morning, the unfortunate Nethersole was roused out of bed and taken down to the police station. Hummel took up her case and made her the advocate of artistic freedom during a very brief trial that ended with her acquittal (much to Anthony Comstock’s bilious resentment).
239.
Blank the Pimp
Harry’s name for White’s secretary, Charles Hartnett.
CHAPTER TWELVE. THE "MISTRESS OF MILLIONS”
260.
sob sisters
Before the 1880s, there were few newspaperwomen, and those female journalists who did exist were not permitted to write on important topics. Front-page assignments, politics, finance, and sports were not usually assigned to women. Over the next decade, as historian Frank Mott writes, “women flocked into newspaper work.” The Thaw case, with Evelyn as its central figure, was the impetus for an entire generation of newswomen to take their place at the table with the men in covering the “crime of the century.” The term “sob sister” was nonetheless a disparaging one.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. CURTAINS: JUNE 25, 1906
276.
“When I handed him”
From the first trial transcript.
284.
“a smirking conversation”
O’Connor, 191.
287.
“Everyone always figured it would be a father”
From the first trial transcript.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. AFTERSHOCK
289.
“scavenging for the puniest”
Most of the quotations in this chapter are taken from newspaper accounts that appeared immediately after the murder. There were twenty-eight newspapers in New York alone in 1906.
300.
“The gilding of the figure”
Collins, 99.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. DEMENTIA AMERICANA
304.
“a creature far meaner and uglier”
The majority of quotations in this chapter are taken from Thaw’s account in
The Traitor
of his ordeal after the murder.
307.
Benjamin Atwell
The Thaws’ publicist also helped the family mount a play more than just loosely based on the murder case. It opened in Brooklyn while the first trial was taking place. Its central characters are Stanford Black, a “rounder and roué” who seduces then abandons a young girl, and Emeline Hudspeth Daw, the beautiful wife of the young chivalrous hero, Harold Daw. Several scenes after a particularly lurid one in which Black seduces and abandons a young girl, who is then spurned by her family and dies of a broken heart, Daw shoots Black during a musical performance on a roof garden and awaits trial in the Tombs. In the play, Daw proclaims his own innocence, based on the idea of the “unwritten law”: “No jury on earth will send me to the chair, no matter what I have done or what I have been, for killing the man who defamed my wife. That is the unwritten law and upon its virtue I will stake my life.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. A WOMAN’S SACRIFICE
326.
“thundering from pulpits”
O’Connor, 199.
327.
“poured out by the Thaw family”
O’Connor, 201. The Thaws’ well-paid publicist, Benjamin Atwell, who helped mastermind the campaign of slander and vilification against White, also wrote
The Great Harry Thaw Case, or, A Woman’s Sacrifice,
published initially in hardcover, then quickly made available to the eager public as a pulp edition during the first trial.
328.
“Who goes to Maine in February”
O’Connor, 200.
329.
“shot and killed with premeditation”
Most of the quotations in this and the following chapter regarding testimony are taken from the original first trial transcript.
349.
Le Rat Mort
This episode is taken from the first trial transcript, with some details added from Evelyn’s account in
Prodigal Days.
EPILOGUE: THE FALLEN IDOL
368.
silent film
The titles of most of Evelyn’s films indicate the common theme of her notoriety:
Threads of Destiny, The Hidden Woman, A Fallen Idol, Thou Shalt Not, Woman, Woman!, I Want to Forget, The Woman Who Gave, Her Mistake,
and
Redemption.
370.
“Frederick Gump debacle”
Harry was arrested for whipping a young man, eighteen-year-old Frederick Gump, in a hotel bathtub. Thaw avoided jail by going to the Kirkbride Insane Asylum in Philadelphia for eight years, longer than the time spent in Mattewan for killing White.
370.
He hanged himself
Although it remained “the love that dare not speak its name” where Howard was concerned, all the signs pointed to Evelyn’s brother’s being gay. He had clearly developed a relationship with White’s secretary, Charles Hartnett, ten years his senior, which lasted through the second trial. But a closeted Howard inevitably married and lived a number of years in an apparently affectionate but sham marriage until he killed himself in despair.
371.
Joan Collins in the title role
In one of the letters she wrote in her later years, Evelyn lamented the casting of Joan Collins to portray her in
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
She felt Collins was “too bosomy” and “too British” to play her. She wrote (perhaps tongue in cheek) that she would have preferred Marilyn Monroe.
FURTHER READING
Atwell, Benjamin.
The Great Harry Thaw Case.
Laird and Lee, 1907.
Baker, Paul.
Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White.
The Free Press, 1989.
Banta, Martha.
Imaging American Women.
Columbia University Press, 1987.
Brownlow, Kevin.
Behind the Mask of Innocence.
University of California Press, 1990.
Collins, Frederick L.
Glamorous Sinners.
Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1932.
Gustaitis, Joseph. "The Statue That Offended New York.”
American History Magazine,
June 1999, pp. 44-50.
Lessard, Suzannah.
The Architect of Desire.
Dial, 1996.
Mackenzie, F. A.
The Trial of Harry Thaw.
Geoffrey Bles, 1928.
Maeder, Jay, ed.
Big Town Biography.
New York Daily News, 2000.
Michaels, Barbara.
Gertrude Käsebier.
Harry N. Abrams, 1992.
O’Connor, Richard.
Courtroom Warrior.
Little, Brown, 1963.
Petersen, James.
The Century of Sex.
Grove, 1999.
Showalter, Elaine.
Sexual Anarchy.
Penguin, 1990.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER TWO - Beautiful City of Smoke
CHAPTER FOUR - The Little Sphinx in Manhattan
CHAPTER SIX - Benevolent Vampire
CHAPTER SEVEN - Through the Looking Glass
CHAPTER EIGHT - At the Feet of Diana
CHAPTER NINE - The Barrymore Curse
CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Worst Mistake of Her Life
CHAPTER TWELVE - The “Mistress of Millions”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Curtains: June 25, 1906
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Dementia Americana
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - A Woman’s Sacrifice
