Speakeasy Dollhouse: Murder, Dolls and Cocktails in Coffee Cups.

Back in 1935, Cynthia von Buhler's grandfather, Frank Spano, was murdered. Possibly a gangland hit. Possibly tied to Dutch Schultz. This is the kind of bloody family past that is so potent, so laden with untold secrets, it's kind of inevitable that the bodies cannot, will not remain buried.  Miss von Buhler wants to figure out what happened. This true life jazz age murder in her family has inspired her to create a multi-platform exploration of the crime, performed by dolls, actors (including the completely ubiquitous friend of The Cabinet Jennifer Harder), chorus girls and the audience.

I haven't seen the book version, save for the photos posted online, but from what I've seen, they are elaborately designed little worlds, and I hope they are exhibited at some point. Inspired in part by Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, she has meticulously designed and created tiny little sets inhabited by dolls which enact her grandfather's death, the events surrounding the murder and scenes from her own life.

A couple of Mondays ago, me and a select group of my lady actor/artist friends attended the human size portion of Miss von Buhler's project which crops up every few months in The Back Room - what used to be Lansky's Lounge, and way before that, an actual speakeasy in back of Ratner's. It's best described as a combination of interactive theater, art installation, cabaret and fancy dress party. Guided by cops (dirty, of course) into a bakery area in which cannolis are proffered, one is then led one party at a time into the speakeasy proper. Heavy on atmosphere and fun, and light on narrative, the attention to detail impresses. Howard Fishman's combo perform period perfect jazz, cocktails are served in coffee cups, everyone looks fabulous. The one criticism I had would be that I would have liked a bit more direction in terms of where one should be looking. But, that's just a quibble, it hardly matters.

We drank many cognac based cocktails out of our coffee cups, saw the lovely Veronica Varlow perform, at one point, I heard someone playing a ukulele, turned around and Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were right above me, singing Makin' Whoopie.


It's a beautiful space and we had a lovely time. No murders were solved when I was there. It's not some cheesy, interactive whodunnit murder game. It's an excavation of the past, an attempt to find at least the feeling of the truth by recreating it whole, and to simultaneously host a lovely party.

The past is a mysterious country, and as I've said so many times here before, all of my past is tied to this glorious city. Most of my New York Irish ancestors were lawyers and judges and newspaper men and real estate developers. Most of my family's contributions to this city have been definitively erased by time and rebuilding and short memories. At the time Miss von Buhler's grandfather was shot down, one of my illustrious great uncles was working at the Manhattan District Attorney's office, prosecuting high profile jazz age murders. I have to wonder if any part of this story made its way across his desk. This city is sometimes a surprisingly small place, so it's possible. The ghosts of the past never stop walking.

The next performances of Speakeasy Dollhouse are August 4th and 6th. Tickets are available here.

Photo credit: © Cynthia von Buhler, 2012

All illustrations © this blog.

James Ellroy and Red Riding 1974

Many, many years ago (before some of you were born, no doubt), I picked up a paperback copy of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential without knowing anything about it. I liked the cover. I liked hard boiled detective fiction and I liked St. Marks Bookshop - which was still actually on St. Marks Place back at the dawn of the 90s.

Ellroy's L.A. Quartet are the blackest of noir. He uses a gigantic canvas to tell his long, violent story of corruption, crime and the emptiness at the heart of the dreams of post-war Southern California. His style is baroque and deeply profane, troubling to its core.

A few weeks ago the Curtis Hanson directed film of L.A. Confidential aired. Trav and I hadn't seen it in a good long while, so we watched it and it's... fine. But it's awfully clean for a film about the ugliest perversions and the deepest corruption. The movie is a well made, intelligently plotted period piece with some nice performances. It doesn't wear its period particularly comfortably and those suits worn by all those cops look awfully new. It seems a little small compared to the book, which is a different sort of animal entirely. There are two (!) serial killer subplots (both excised in the screenplay), dozens of characters - including many clearly based on real people including Walt Disney (who commits suicide), spanning nearly eight years. When I first read it I was dying to see it as a movie, but thought it was unfilmable. I was right, in order to film it, it had to be cut so far to the bone it had to become a different species entirely.

Most telling, the movie's villain, corrupt police Captain Dudley Smith, is killed at the end. James Cromwell is perfectly cast, but in the movie he is just a villain, a bad man doing bad things. In Ellroy's books he's the devil himself. All human greed and corruption made flesh. And like evil itself, he's unkillable. He can be momentarily neutralized, but never destroyed. In the books, taking down Smith destroys Ed Exely utterly, and Smith still isn't dead.

L.A. Confidential is a perfectly respectable movie, but what it needed was HBO and the fulfilled promise of novelistic storytelling television has given us in the last decade or so.

All this brings me to last night when I watched Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974. I haven't read David Peace's quartet of books of crime, corruption and perversion in Yorkshire in the 1970s and early 80s, but I have a feeling they were given the sort of treatment that would have served Ellroy's books well. Set in Yorkshire (the West Riding, I believe, Brontë country) the landscape is bleak indeed. I don't know it for a certainty, but I wouldn't die of shock if Peace was influenced by Ellroy. Both have police so corrupt, they murder and torture, both contain serial killers who attach the wings of birds to the back of dead children. The film is violent and sometimes hard to watch, but it's awfully beautiful. Filmed in gorgeous 16mm, its period setting is perfect.

Yorkshire is thousands of actual and conceptual miles from sunny L.A., but they share the same corrosive misery, a baroque inescapable violence and doom. The young reporter who ineptly tries to sort out the killings and the corruption and lies that surround him is destroyed utterly. Bam. The end.

Poor Evelyn Nesbit: The Crime of the Century, Part 3

There has been a slightly longer gap between the posting of this latest chapter of the lovely Miss Nesbit's odyssey than originally intended, so if you have missed the earlier installments click here for part one and part two.

Part 3.

Oh, Evelyn. Really, my heart breaks for her.

Just short of her eighteenth birthday, back home in New York City, the most beautiful girl in all the world. It should have been so easy. Men lined up round the block, more stage and modeling jobs than she knew what to do with, her brother in a fine school and her mother given an income and happy, and then finally married off to a kind and loving millionaire. Some chorus girls ended up those happy circumstances, but it's a fickle world and plenty ended their days in SROs in Times Square or worse.

Back in New York, an emotionally battered and physically exhausted Evelyn landed a chorus job (against doctor's recommendations) and did her best to avoid both White and Thaw, who returned to New York shortly after she did. Her mother was busy being romanced by an old family friend, a stockbroker who she would subsequently marry. She pretty much completely broke off all contact with Evelyn, as she had clearly found a new and far less troublesome meal ticket. So, Evelyn was on her own. Friends began telling her immediately upon her return that Harry Thaw is a crazy person and a morphine addict and super dangerous. To which, she responded, rightfully so, "Why are you telling me now? I mean, this could have been super useful information for me to have before I was stuck alone in Europe with him, right? " (I'm paraphrasing).

After ignoring his messages to her, White (pictured below) finally got her attention by saying he needed to talk to her about her mother. She immediately responded, asking if anything was wrong. He replied that it was a matter of life and death and he didn't want to discuss it over the telephone. So, she (of course) agreed to see him. He showed up and told her her mother was fine and proceded to berate her about Thaw. What both White and Thaw proceeded to do in the coming months almost broke Evelyn completely. They both coerced her into meetings and tried to make her sign affidavits and statements against the other. They both harangued her about the wickedness of the other. They both had evidence of the other's criminal behavior with minors (Evelyn and others). These two men were each obsessed with destroying the other and Evelyn (not yet 18) was caught in the middle, with no responsible adult to turn to or to help her out in any way. She moved from hotel to hotel but was always found by Thaw's private detectives. Understandably, she was sick and deeply depressed. In this state she agreed to start seeing Thaw again, but only in crowded public places.

Discouraged, Thaw returned to Pittsburgh and received his mother's (extremely reluctant) approval to pursue Evelyn's hand in marriage. His lawyers advised him to stay away from her until her eighteenth birthday. Somewhat surprisingly, he did so. White planned a party for the occasion, but on the day, Evelyn, thoroughly sick of him, refused to go and went out to dinner with a jubilant Thaw instead. White went berserk, waving a pistol around, threatening to kill "that son-of-a-bitch". Evelyn had already given Thaw's letters to her to White's attorney - she now gave White's letters to Thaw's hoping that if they each had equal ammunition they would cease all hostilities. She found it increasingly difficult to find work in New York as White was apparently using his considerable influence to blackball her.

For the next couple of years, Harry was on his best behavior and pursued Evelyn relentlessly. Thaw even sent her to Europe to study sculpture and art (with a proper chaperone, this time). He apologized repeatedly for his past acts, saying he had been overcome with fury at what had transpired between her and White. He said he forgave her. It's so awful to think of the series of events and the state of mind that enabled Evelyn to marry Thaw. She had been supporting her family since she was a child. Her mother never looked after her properly, she willfully put on blinders and used her own daughter to survive and abandoning her when the complications of Evelyn's life became inconvenient. Evelyn has been painted as being a gold-digger and a whore. But, it took Harry Thaw, with his 40 million dollars, almost four years to get Evelyn to marry him. When she was twenty, she finally did. The bride wore black.

Her married life was a gothic misery. She lived with Harry in her mother-in-law's mansion, constrained by their small-minded small town Presbyterian values. They looked down on Evelyn, feeling that Harry had thrown himself away on this worthless show person, while Evelyn found them mindless and anti-intellectual, with no interest in books, music or art. Just money and their narrow view of Christianity. In other words, she was bored senseless, and in one of her memoirs wrote that she prayed that she might have "the patience to bear the burden of her spiritual friends". One day a minister friend of Mrs. Thaw's was annoyed by one of Evelyn's little dogs, so he kicked him. Evelyn swore at him like a fishwife. Harry was increasingly obsessed with White, grilling Evelyn about him obsessively for hours. Years before, White has paid to have Evelyn's teeth fixed. Harry took her to a dentist and had all the work (fillings, everything) taken out - and redone identically. He also had a photographer come to the house and had him take pictures of Evelyn in which she posed as Bluebeard's dead wives (Seriously. You can't make this stuff up).

In June 1906, Mr. and Mrs. Thaw traveled to New York en route to London. They planned to take in dinner and a show at Madison Square Garden (an odd choice, considering Thaw's obsessive hatred of Stanford White). They had dinner at Café Martin, where they saw White across the room, who was there with his son. Evelyn began to panic, worried about what Thaw would do. They proceeded to Madison Square Garden to see a new show called "Mamzelle Champagne". The show wasn't very good and Evelyn said she would have been bored had sh not been so apprehensive about what would happen when White inevitably arrived, and sat at the table that was permanently reserved for him. The Architect arrived at the rooftop theater, a teenaged chorus girl on his arm. As the song "I Could Love a Million Girls" was sung, Harry got up from the table. A moment later, a gunshot was heard and pandemonium broke out as people realized Stanford White was dead, shot through the skull, and Harry Thaw was the killer.

Part 4: The Trial will appear shortly.

Poor Evelyn Nesbit: Wicked Harry Thaw Part 2

To read the previous installment of this series, click here.

Part 2.

Inevitably, as Evelyn Nesbit’s fame grew, she met more people and more young men, something both Stanford White and Mrs. Nesbit, who was concerned with keeping the family’s meal ticket happy, did not approve. But White, with his bevy of teenage girlfriends, mostly laughed it off.

Then Evelyn started a romance with a young John Barrymore (Drew's grandfather - pictured below). They were young, beautiful, and in love, and the press followed their every move. They drank too much, and ran around New York running up bills neither could pay. After drinking way too much cheap wine and accidentally falling asleep in Barrymore’s apartment and not returning home until late the next morning, they came home to the Nesbit apartment to find White in an indignant fury. He warned Barrymore off, and manipulated Nesbit into ending the affair.

This was around the time Harry Thaw began stalking Evelyn. He began focusing on her through a weird obsession he had developed with Stanford White. He had somehow come to believe that White was evil incarnate, and that Evelyn needed to be rescued from this monster. A word on Thaw: he was a crazy person. Batshit, barking, mad. He was the heir to forty million dollars, was addicted to drugs, was notorious among the prostitutes of all the world's capitals for his seriously disturbing and violent sado-masochistic practices (I mean, not consensual fun, but causing real harm), was paranoid, stupid and delusional. And very, very rich.

What’s so interesting to me, is that the story is usually couched in terms of Thaw being obsessed with Nesbit, which wasn’t quite the case. He was obsessed with White at least a year before Evelyn moved to New York. Evelyn was hardly the point. White was. Make of that what you will.

Post-Barrymore, White sent Evelyn off to an exclusive girl’s school, where after a couple of months, she needed an appendectomy. Back in the first years of the 20th Century, this was a very big deal and extremely serious and dangerous. There are the inevitable rumors floating in the aether, both then and now, that this was no appendectomy, but an abortion. But there doesn't seem to be much evidence to bolster this theory, so it's likely just scandal (sneer quotes being used around the word "appendectomy" to the contrary). What's not in question is that Evelyn was very ill. This is when Thaw stepped in.

Back in New York, he had began courting Evelyn. He started off pretending he was a certain "Mr. Munroe". At first she wasn't very impressed with him, but she began to soften towards him as he seemed kind of sweet and hapless to her. He finally revealed his true identity to her: "I am Harry Kendall Thaw of Pittsburgh!", he declared with all the drama and import of, say, Batman revealing his secret identity. The fact that he was a lofty Thaw from Evelyn's home town likely had something to do with her attraction: she'd been hearing his name her entire life.

He now offered to take Evelyn and her mother on a trip to Europe so she could convalesce. While there, Thaw manages to alienate Mrs. Nesbit who goes home early, leaving Evelyn alone with Thaw. Throughout what turned out to be an exhausting and frenetic trip, Thaw moving them from hotel to hotel almost nightly, Evelyn also had to contend with Thaw's constant marriage proposals. She was alone, penniless, sick, seventeen years old, and dependent on a madman.

Now, let's look at this dispassionately. I took a pretty long look at what the world still has to say about Evelyn, and I just don't get it. She's generally painted so negatively: as a greedy, worthless, gold-digger. One can't help but wonder how the tone would change regarding the exact same circumstances if Harry had, say, flipped out and killed her. He was certainly capable of it. Would she then be seen as blighted American innocence, like Natalee Holloway? Must girls die to be spoken well of? Because those that live, and are tainted by scandal, even if it is not of their own making, rarely fare very well.

Mrs. Nesbit, stuck in London, wired Stanford White to rescue her and bring her home. Which he did. She wanted to charge Thaw with the corruption of a minor, something White didn't want her to do as it would likely open a can of worms her really didn't want opened. Evelyn was stuck n Europe with Thaw, who finally wore Evelyn down and got her to "confess" to everything that went on between she and White. At first Harry seemed sympathetic, but kept Evelyn up all night, asking question after question, pacing the floor and muttering to himself. As they continued to travel, he went berserk. Obsessed with virginity and White's wickedness, Thaw started behaving increasingly erratically.

One night, Thaw rented a Tyrollean castle and, ominously, gave the servants the night off. That evening after dinner, Evelyn went off to bed, fell asleep, and was awoken by a riding crop wielding Thaw. He beat her and he raped her. Let me repeat. She was a destitute seventeen year old in a country in which she didn't speak the language, at the mercy of a man who had access to forty million dollars (about half a billion in today's currency), who was both obsessed and insane. She said she felt like "a firefly caught in a mason jar by a cruel and wicked schoolboy". The story is something out of a gothic melodrama.

Evelyn continued to travel with Thaw for a few more weeks, and it just beggars the comprehension. She insisted at one point on seeing a doctor, but she said it was clear to her that he was in Harry's pay. Luckily, they wound up staying in the same hotel in Paris as famed decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, who Evelyn had met through White in New York. She told de Wolfe what was going on and she thankfully agreed to return to New York and to take Evelyn with her. Harry did not seem able to comprehend that he had done anything wrong.

So many questions remain: the largest is how Evelyn wound up married to a walking nightmare like Harry Thaw after all this. It's not much of a mystery, really, I think, and I'll delve into it further in part three. Women far less vulnerable and more experienced than Evelyn have believed promises given by men about things never happening again. One of the most unanswerable is the one I alluded to above - why has Evelyn been more an object of scorn than pity? She never deviated from her story. She told de Wolfe what she repeated under oath several years later which agrees with what she wrote in her two autobiographies.

Still people seem to willfully repeat misinformation. Saying their lovemaking during their marriage was violent, or that Evelyn was surprised by Harry's proclivities on an ocean liner during their honeymoon, and its all sort of jokey. Like she was convinced to be with him by the promise of all those millions and whatever she got was more or less deserved and he was mad and she was a whore and that's all there is to say. Many seem to be confused about the fact that all of this happened long before she was married. I think a lot of the misinformation comes from the (greatly fictionalized) movie Ragtime, which is sort of infuriating. Most importantly, she was still only seventeen, and she had no responsible and disinterested adult looking after her well-being.

Part 3: The Murder, will debut next week.

Historical Fiction: Unfairly Maligned, Having a Renaissance

I talk a lot about gender disparity in terms of art and fiction here at The Cabinet, but today I’d like to talk about a genre in which the books of most interest to men are just as sneered at and looked down upon as those geared towards women. By that I mean, Historical Fiction.

I’m not sure why the genre gets such a bad rap. Mostly, I guess because so much of it is aimed straight at the middlingest part of the middle brow: James Michener, Colleen McCollough, stacks and piles of various bodice ripping romances, those terrible doorstop size Civil War battle novels. Not to mention the awful, embarrassing Outlander novels. So, yeah, there’s a great deal of not so terrific historicals out there. But, but… some are really good, and I’ve always had a real fondness for the genre, and it seems to be going through something of a Rennaissance.

I’ve written here before about Historical Mysteries, such as the excellent Maisie Dobbs series, but for once I’m going to leave mysteries alone and write about some Literature, the kind with a capitol “L”, that has come out (semi) recently, and I have enjoyed immensely. The protagonists of all three are also, happily, teen girls.

I first encountered the work of Irish novelist Emma Donoghue in 1997 when she published her book of intertwined and reimagined fairy tales, Kissing the Witch. It’s a lovely and haunting book, one well worth your time and not often enough spoken about. I read her 2001 novel Slammerkin a few months ago and found it utterly unputdownable. As Donoghue explains in her frontpiece, a Slammerkin is an eighteenth century noun meaning either a loose dress or a loose woman. Her book is about both. The idea for the novel came from an actual murder reported in a contemporary broadside. Mary Saunders killed her employer with a cleaver as she wanted fine clothes.

Like Ms. Donoghue, I’ve a fondness for eighteenth century crime reportage and have a stack of stories I’d like to write at some point that I’ve found in places like the invaluable Newgate Calendar, or in this wonderful book of broadsides I have sitting on my shelf. It’s a wonderful period for crime reportage, and Slammerkin fairly leaps off the page in its vividness. Mary is a wonderful creation. She slides from the home of her poor working parents into one of prostitution and instead of it being a sad lament, it’s more a cry of freedom. Life was short, hard and brutal for everyone, and if one could get some pretty things along the way, all the better. There’s a fearsome amorality about her that rings true.

As I’ve said about another true life murderess, her life is fascinating because it seems as if things might have worked out for her – gone another way. But she just couldn’t stay straight, and the world was completely unforgiving, virtue being a mostly black and white affair. There’s crime and murder and sex. And Donaghue writes beautifully. Poor Mary was a mess and a monster.

Judith Merkle Riley, I was sad to discover while writing this article, died just last September of ovarian cancer. I am very sorry to hear of her passing, as she is a delightful novelist. Like Emma Donoghue, Riley has an advanced degree in history but writes like a novelist, not like an academic. Her book The Oracle Glass is the rarest of modern achievements: an intelligent, well-written entertainment.

The protagonist is Geneviéve, a teen girl who falls in with a group of devil worshipping, abortionist, fortune telling witches, masquerades as a one hundred and fifty year old sooth-saying dwarf, and is a part of events that nearly collapse the reign of the Sun King. There is romance and murder and double-crosses and politics and espionage. And, remarkably, the central story is true. A group of poisoning witches very nearly toppled the French government. They operated like Murder Inc. for French female aristocracy. It’s one of the best stories I’ve ever heard and can’t believe no one’s made a move yet. The people in Hollywood are morons.

I have no doubt that in many people’s hands this material would be preposterous, but Merkle was a savvy writer who understood that melodrama isn’t necessarily a dirty word, had a smart sense of humor and always stays in control of her story. She also knows her politics, and is excellent at conveying the nuances of court life and those whose livelihoods are dependent on it. There is also an interesting ambiguity in the the way some of the women's crimes are portrayed. Some are no doubt wicked and greedy to the core - but women were truly powerless in seventeenth century France, and it's fascinating to see the peculiar byways they wound up taking to control their destinies and fortunes.

Patrick McGrath is up there with Emily Brönte in the competition for who is the Gothic Novelist with the most Gothic upbringing. His father was Superintendant of Broadmoor, the hospital in Britain that treats the criminally insane, and MacGrath was raised on its grounds. I’ve read lots of his books, and particularly like his short stories. Ghost Town, his book of three connected Gothic tales which all take place in Manhattan, one in Revolutionary times, one in the 19th Century, the last right after 9/11, is wonderful. I most recently read Martha Peake: A Novel of the American Revolution, and I think it’s my favorite of his.

It’s told as a story within a story, and McGrath manages to write naturally in the atmosphere of the 19th century Gothic without it feeling anything like pastiche. Young Ambrose Tree listens to his old and sick Uncle William, a formerly eminent scientist, tell the story of Harry Peake, the “Cripplegate Monster” and his lovely daughter Martha. The two narrators, William and Ambrose are utterly unreliable, and though this is clear, one forgets. The depiction of decaying, Gothic England, in contrast with the New World the American Colonists are creating for themselves is wonderful. McGrath manages to convey how the rebelling colonists may have felt in a way I never really considered before. The whole thing feels both heart-breaking and complete in a way a normally associate with 19th century novels rather than modern ones. It's pretty extraordinary stuff.

The stories of all three of these books are carried by remarkable young women. They’re all wonderful creations, all interesting, all flawed. The plot is driven in all three by a rape. The vulnerability of women in the pre-nineteenth century world depicted in these three book is the stuff of horror, truly. But nothing is simple, ever, in life or in good fiction. I think sometimes stories set in modern middle class America or Western Europe often feel trite, the stakes feel so low. Romance really meant something in centuries past as the booby prize wasn't meet with ice cream and cocktails, but could be poverty and misery and death.

Poor Evelyn Nesbit: American Eve Part 1

A few months ago I read Paula Uruburu's excellent book, American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century, and I've been sitting on my inevitable Evelyn Nesbit post for a while. As its fairly endless subtitle would indicate, Nesbit's life story encompasses many features and touches on many different things, all of which I find interesting: show business, the aesthetics and fashion of female beauty, the problems inherent in being professionally pretty, teen girls, art and crime. This post will not be short. Bear with me.

Part 1.

For a few years at the very dawn of the 20th Century, Evelyn Nesbit was considered the Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Now, as my Darling Inamorato sometimes says, when you hear about a supposedly great beauty from pre-movie days, you oftentimes look at a picture of her and she winds up looking something like Ruth Buzzi. Before Miss Nesbit hit it big, the ne plus ultra in terms of beauty and glamour was singer Lillian Russell. Looking at pictures of her, or some of the earliest Ziegfeld stars, one has to make adjustments and allowances for the aesthetics of the time: the women are far heavier than current taste dictates, the corseting is madness, they have crazy hair dos. It’s clearly a totally different world.

Although she did work as a chorus girl, like Olive Thomas ten years later, Evelyn Nesbit achieved her first and greatest fame as an artist’s and photographer’s model, and looking at her pictures no mental gymnastics of any sort are required: she is unspeakably lovely according to modern sensibilities. What I find so interesting, is with her, the modern aesthetic of female beauty is born. Next to her, the rest of her contemporaries look old fashioned. She’s uncorseted, slender, natural and very, very young. Looking at some of Evelyn Nesbit’s photos, I was reminded of those early pictures Corinne Day took of Kate Moss for The Face, when Moss was 15 or 16. They too signaled a similar sea change in terms of aesthetics, from the very bosomy, made-up, grown-up women of the 80s (or 1890s), to the skinnier, natural looking teen girls of the 90s (or 20th century).

I was struck by certain similarities between Olive Thomas and Evelyn Nesbit. Both hailed from small town Pennsylvania, both were Irish Catholic, both were poor, both began their careers as extremely successful models, segueing into the most popular stage show of the day (Thomas to the Follies, Nesbit to Floradora), both were assisted by older, powerful lovers (Thomas by Flo Ziegfeld – and likely others, Nesbit by Stanford White), both were romanced by the young scions of show business royal families (Thomas by Jack Pickford, Nesbit by John Barrymore). The similarities are striking, but the differences are far more interesting.

Thomas clawed her way out of brutal, coal town poverty using her moxie, beauty and smarts. She died young, but I can’t imagine anyone saying they feel sorry for her. As a small child, Nesbit’s family had been part of the seemingly secure middle class. Her father died when Evelyn was eleven, leaving her mother nothing but a boatload of debt. Mrs. Nesbit seems like she was a deeply stupid woman who was incapable of adjusting to changed circumstances. While trying to cling to Victorian middle class respectability, she seemingly willfully shut her eyes to the reality of what was going on with her daughter, and bestowed her with resentment, guilt and financial responsibility, all the while shamefully mismanaging her daughter’s career. She’s someone who wasn’t capable of being an effective ordinary or stage parent. And Evelyn suffered grievously for it.

Now, this is where we talk about Stanford White. Before I read Uruburu’s book, and subsequently did some other research, all I really knew about Nesbit was from the movie Ragtime, based on the E.L. Doctorow novel. From it, I had a kind of vague perception that the affair between White and Nesbit was the typical chorus girl/rich guy exchange. He got to squire around and sleep with a very pretty girl, and he bought her nice things and they had a decent time together and it was consensual and vaguely glamorous.

There is a lot of ambiguity and confusion about what went on between the two of them, but certain things are clear. First, White saw Nesbit when she was appearing in a musical review with the Floradora Girls, and was instantly smitten with the pretty fifteen year old. White was forty-six. The first time she met him at a luncheon (essentially using another of his teenage girlfriends as a procurer) she was dressed in short skirts and pigtails. This is pretty much where I lost any respect for Mr. White as a person (rather than as an architect, which is a whole other ball of wax). Now think. Let’s take this out of history, out of legend and into the real. A middle aged man, any middle aged man, asks a pretty girl out to lunch. He’s seen her in a circumstance where it might be easy to confuse her age. But when she shows up for the lunch date, she is clearly a child. And he proceeded with a long seduction. Unambiguously appalling, right?

History is rarely fair, and like many women before her, Evelyn Nesbit has been painted as a gold-digger and a whore. What’s ignored, mostly, is that she was a child, and a fairly innocent one. When she moved to New York, Evelyn and her mother had a few letters of introduction from artists she had modeled for in Pennsylvania. Upon meeting an eminent New York illustrator, after seeing how pretty and innocent Evelyn was, and how incapable her mother was of managing her daughter’s life and career, he gave them a warning. Saying that not all artists were as nice as he was, he gave them a list of people he thought would be okay for her to work with: lady artists and men he knew wouldn’t take advantage of her. The way White insinuated himself into the Nesbit household is really distressing. He set the whole family up in an apartment, paid for her brother’s education and gave them an allowance.

The seduction itself has become the stuff of legend. White coerced Mrs. Nesbit into taking a trip to Pennsylvania during which he offered to be responsible for looking after Evelyn, who was sixteen at the time. Up until this point, their relationship consisted of dinners and culture and art. White also arranged for series of photographs to be taken of Evelyn, the one above of her asleep on the white bear skin rug was taken a day or two before Mrs. Nesbit left town. No one knows exactly what happened between them the night of what Evelyn referred to as her “unvirgining”..

Evelyn wrote two autobiographies, one in 1914 and one in 1934, and her accounts differ slightly. Whether he drugged her and raped her, or if she just drank too much champagne, no one knows. What is clear is that from whatever cause, she at some point lost consciousness, and White raped her. She woke up and was terrified. Nesbit never used the word rape, as she lived in a place and time where being alone and drunk in White’s 24th Street studio would have put the onus of blame pretty much entirely on her. But this story isn’t new, and it isn’t over as all the press surrounding the allegations against Terry Richardson attest. White told Evelyn that her life would be ruined if she told anyone. She later referred to him as a “benevolent vampire”. She stayed quiet, and as she said later, numb.

White remained and continued to be the most important person in her life for the next couple of years. Her feelings for him were complicated, to say the least. She said herself that in some ways he destroyed her, but he also educated her and opened up the world for her in ways for which she remained grateful. I think it's also extremely important to point out that Nesbit lived in a time when there were hardly even words for what was going on with her, and that she pretty much had zero recourse or options.

In the days before Ziegfeld glorified the American Girl, the lovely young women of the chorus remained largely anonymous. Which makes Evelyn’s rise to fame even more remarkable. After being cast in her second show, The Wild Rose, in 1901 she received boatloads of unprecedented publicity in the papers and in pages long spreads in prestigious magazines like The Theater. She was seemingly poised for major stardom.

Next up: Part 2: Harry Thaw & Part 3: The Murder

The Demise of Law & Order and the Reading of Helter Skelter

I really think more notice should have been taken of the latest Great American Institution to be consigned to dust and ashes. By that, I mean of course, what I’ve been referring in recent years as Law & Order: Classic. For twenty years it mined the Post’s headlines for stories, filmed in NYC, and gave untold numbers of actors lots of work between theater gigs. But – alas – it is no more.

Truly, though, in its final seasons it was but a shell of its former gritty, glorious self. It was a little sillier, a little less realistic; both the court buildings and the police station looked a little too shiny, too spacious, a little too clean, almost like – gasp!– sets. If that’s what you want, you may as well film in Los Angeles.

Recently, they aired a block of episodes from back in the 90s, when Clair Kinkaid (Jill Hennessey) was Jack McCoy’s ADA. Sigh. They were truly wonderful. So smartly written, so believably filmed. I think it’s pretty unanimously agreed upon that out of all the lovely young women who have played second fiddle to Assistant District Attorney McCoy (and before that, Stone. I have no truck with that Englishman who filled in the last season or two), Claire Kinkaid was the best, by far. Jill Hennessey is an attractive woman, but she looked like an attractive woman who works in the Manhattan DA’s office. Angie Harmon and Elizabeth Rohm did not. They were too made up and their clothes were both over-styled and expensive looking. Junior ADAs earn a pittance and usually have crippling Law School debt. Claire Kinkaid wore an office uniform and looked like she worked crazy long hours. She looked like the young women on the subway you see riding to work every day.

It’s a funny thing. If there was some distant planet where people received all their knowledge of American life from watching television and movies, their view would be a warped one indeed. So many criminals, so many actors, so many policemen, so many spies. Most people in this country work in service oriented jobs or in offices. By and large, the entertainment industry has done an abysmal job at showing what most people do every day and what their lives are like. In the recent Jason Reitman film, Up in the Air, I was so impressed with how Anna Kendrick's character was played. The thing is, in most movies that show someone’s work place, they have to usually care about what they’re doing. Most people in real life kind of don’t. Which I guess is undramatic, but it also can be very funny. In the first decade of Law & Order, the right balance was struck between the workaday and the dramatic. The last decade or so, the scales tipped wildly in the direction of the dramatic, which I find a little tiresome.

The early seasons of L&O did a brilliant job of dramatizing notorious real life cases such as the Joel Steinberg and Tawana Brawley ones. But one of the most famous crimes of all belongs to California, and feels so deeply embedded in the culture of that state, that the thought of transposing in to NYC seems unthinkable. That’s of course the Tate/LaBianca killings by the Manson Family. I’ve read stacks of true crime books over the years, but I am embarrassed to admit I had never read one of the most important: Helter Skelter by Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Honestly, without it, I don’t know if Law and Order would be able to exist. It’s particularly awful that I’ve never read it as my Darling Inamorato wrote a Manson inspired musical called Willy Nilly a few years back.

Of course, the most important (and likely the best) true crime book of the modern age is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But the modern non-fiction procedural was born with Helter Skelter. It’s a fascinating case in so many ways, and touches on so many aspects of society and how it was changing in the late sixties. I was surprised how much I didn’t know. Mostly about how the police and District Attorney’s office finally cracked it and tried the perpetrators. It was a mess. Most of what I know about the LAPD and LA County Sherriff’s office is from reading all of James Ellroy’s novels, and from reading Bugliosi’s account, he was pretty accurate. Basically, there was gross negligence on the part of the LAPD and the case should have been broken far earlier.

Reading about Manson’s Family, living out there in the desert forging their own crazy Heaven and Earth, reminds me mostly of things I’d read about towns in pre-modern times that were stricken by madness. Too much drinking or drugs, too much fear, one lunatic with a strong personality, a frightening world filled with threat and dread, powelessness: all these ingredients were in play with the Manson Family, and likely with some witchcraft trials and some of the weirdness surrounding some of the stranger dissenters. And maybe some real evil. Who knows.

The human race is forever fascinated with chaos and order, which is the real payoff of crime (both true and fictional) drama. The chaos of death and murder and wickedness, then made sense of by the cops or the detectives or DA’s office. Solved is such a comforting word. And the word that I think best describes Law & Order is satisfying. The same way that crime books –most of them anyway – end with an arrest, or a trial or a hanging. They are finished. Manson outlived the final episode of Law & Order, still in jail, still mad.

Happy Snowpocalypse Movie Watching Festival!

I really don't have much in the way of exciting snow news. Snowed in! My street was plowed! Darling Inamorato made it up to Ithaca to see the kiddies! I'm going back to my old job, part time! That's pretty much it. Things are quiet at The Cabinet Headquarters this delightful New Year. Did I mention that Inamorato is in Ithaca?

Oh. And I saw a bunch of movies.

Including, The Duchess and Guy Ritchie's (as opposed to Arthur Conan Doyle's) Sherlock Holmes. If you think there's no connection between this elaborately costumed bio pic and the Steampunk flavored action movie, you would be completely and totally wrong. But more on that later.

Let's begin with The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley and directed by Saul Dibb. Knightly plays the titular role, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, a legendary and fascinating person who I think deserves better than this film. But I'm likely being too harsh. Knightly is, of course, lovely, and Georgiana was a legendary beauty. But, is it just me, but does the lovely Keira, in spite of the significant portion of her career that she's spent in crinolines and corsets, look mostly like a modern beauty? She has that awful, elegant post-corsetry slouch, and the complete lack of bosom that wasn't really popular in the 18th century (for Knightly's Chanel ad, they painted one on her, digitally, which is just silly). Shame on me, I suppose, for going on about this, but I've been thinking an awful lot about the aesthetics and fashion of female beauty recently, and something about the look of the film seemed off. When I see Knightley in modern dress, I think she's an utter knockout. But she's still terribly young and as she was only 22 or so when she played the legendary Duchess, she lacked heft. I kept thinking a better film would have gone with someone a little older, a little more charismatic. Casting is always so difficult in films that span a considerable number of years in a person's life.

The story starts when William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire (wonderfully played by Ralph Feinnes) proposes to the lovely, 16 year old Lady Georgiana Spencer with all the romance one expects from a telecom merger. As in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (Georgiana and Antoinette were good friends), this film amply demonstrates that being a Princess is a tough gig. One's most important job is to produce an heir, something completely and utterly out of one's control. The film paints a vivid picture of the Cavendish's mostly disastrous marriage, plagued with mutual dislike and mutual infidelities - including a decades long ménage à troi in which the Cavendishes lived with Georgiana's best friend, the Duke carrying on a sexual relationship (and fathering children with) both. She herself had a child by the 2nd Earl Grey (of tea fame and subsequent Whig Prime Minister). Most of the recent interest in Georgiana (particularly in the UK) is because of the marked similarities between Georgiana and her great-great-great (etc.) niece, Princess Diana. Which really doesn't mean that much as the British nobility are more inbred than any backwoods enclave in Kentucky (viva la revolution - a sentiment with which, incidentally, Georgiana agreed).

What seemed somewhat lacking was (unsurprisingly) the politics. The Cavendishes belong to the long, odd tradition of fabulously wealthy Liberals. Georgiana spent much of her time campaigning for Whig politicians and causes - Prime Ministers Fox and Grey, American Independence, emancipation of slaves and fair work laws. None of this is particularly delved into - or even explained in the film. The fabulously wealthy part of this equation cannot be over-emphasized - the Cavendishes owned endless property: estates, mines, factories. Or, rather, the Duke owned all this. The Duchess was essentially a pauper, as married women were not permitted to own property. Neither did they have any parental rights to their children. Nor did they have any rights to their own bodies, as their husbands were permitted to beat or use their wives in any way they chose. The Duke is painted as an intellectually dull man, intimidated by his wife's brilliance, who responds to displeasure with brutality. Feinnes is truly wonderful. So often terrible people are portrayed in films as completely one note, which is rarely the case.

But the film itself is decidedly mediocre, and the problem lies with the director. It mostly has the feel of a staid BBC production, and considering the Cavendishes's lifestyle rivaled the Kings of France in scope and expense, it looked a little cheap. Georgiana was a fashion icon in her day, and lived a profligate life of glamorous clothes (some of which she designed herself), ill considered affairs, scandal, gambling and drinking to excess , all of which were leavened by as active a political career as a woman of her time was allowed. I couldn't but help to think of Sofia Coppola's previously mentioned Marie Antoinette, and though Coppola's budget was nearly double that of Dibb's: her creativity trumped his by a factor of ten. The Duchess lacked any sort of visual panache, or sense of decadence. It's such a fascinating story, and Georgiana Cavendish who was anything but dull, deserves a far more memorable movie.

What is it about modern big budget studio fare that makes them evaporate from one's memory almost immediately? The Sherlock Holmes of Guy Ritchie's (the ex-Mr. Madonna) movie is nothing at all like Conan Doyle's creation, or like the Basil Rathbone films of the 30s and 40s. Robert Downey Jr. plays him mostly as a chatty action hero, which is fine, but sort of disappointing and a little dull. Characters lose their interest if they are made lots more like other movie characters. I mean, how boring. The movie was entertaining enough (I guess). Downey is one of the best actors we have and is always a pleasure to watch, but he didn't have as much to play here as one would wish. I was gratified to find at the denouement, that what appeared throughout the film to be an adventure story was, in fact, a mystery. But there were far too many fights and explosions and Rachel McAdams (who I adore) felt a little under utilized.

The visuals were fairly impressive and well thought out. The film looked not unlike a Steampunk-y graphic novel. They only suffered from having recently seen From Hell in which The Hughes Brother's palette was far more to my liking. It's beginning to become a little bit of a pet peeve of mine (though it's nowhere near as dire as the plague of teal and orange which really must stop) when everything from the Victorian era is desaturated and made slightly sepia toned, with everyone dressed in various shades of brown. We have this image of Victoriana mostly being in this very narrow palette because of the lack of color photography, but that is completely incorrect. Before the advent of electricity, lighting was low so people favored brighter colors. No one was Amish, and only widows wore black (there is lots of interesting literature on the Victorian era's Mourning Industrial Complex, which is in many was similar to our current day Wedding one). It's so easy to keep one's finger on the desaturate button and just call it a day.

The film ends with the set up for a sequel, and the name Professor Moriarty is dropped. Fiction is filled with brilliant Master Criminals, but the sad (or happy, depending how one looks at it) fact is, in real life most criminals are idiots. George Clooney has that great little speech in Out of Sight about how most bank robbers are fucking morons, and he's right. Being a criminal is mostly a last resort sort of career, and rarely works out for the best, so Conan Doyle's remarkable creation, the brilliant Professor Moriarty couldn't possible be based on a real person, could he? In fact, he is. According to some, he is based (at least partly) on Adam Worth, a 19th century American master criminal.

Worth is a fascinating character and really deserves his own blog post - scratch that, he deserves his own series of movies. Hello, Hollywood: what is wrong with you? I first read about him in Ben Macintyre's terrific biography, The Napoleon of Crime. One of his most celebrated capers was his theft of Thomas Gainsborough's famous portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (above). The painting, missing for decades, had recently been found, and was being displayed and aggressively marketed by the gallery that owned it under (supposedly) great security. Worth waltzed in one dark night and took it. But he never sold it. His confederates were furious and wanted their cut. But Worth kept the painting and traveled all over the world with it (from London to South Africa to New York) for nearly 20 years. The real life Moriarty had a post mortem soft spot for the glamorous Duchess that lasted decades. The world is a curious place. We deserve movies that are far less dull than the ones being offered to us.