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.

Chorus Girls

This started off as a quick sketch I made for the inamorato. I then inked it, scanned it, and painted it in photoshop. I’ve been talking forever about my chorus girl project - but I think I’ve finally figured out the form it’s going to take and I’m VERY excited. As always, stay tuned.

"All there is to this Follies racket is to Be Cool and Look Hot"

Dixie Dugan: Show Girl In Hollywood

Oh, Alice White.

The only reason she's re-entered the public's consiousness is because she is the subject of seemingly dozens of utterly charming publicity stills from the late '20s and through the '30s. I have a strong suspicion that the vast majority of those who are won over by her adorableness have never seen any of her pictures.

A few weeks ago we emerged from Cabinet Headquarters and ventured over to Film Forum where we were lucky enough to catch the rarely screened 1930 flick, Show Girl in Hollywood. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I have a particular fondness for the early sound musicals. Show Girl, like all of them, is a backstage musical, this one based on J.P. McEvoy's novel of the same name, featuring his show girl creation, Dixie Dugan.

The novel was serialized in Liberty Magazine in 1929, and as in its comic strip spin-off, the chorus girl protagonist was modeled after that most problematic and interesting Ziegfeld alum, Miss Louise Brooks. See below:

A first, silent Dixie Dugan flick, titled simply "Show Girl" was made in 1928, also starring Alice White. Prints exist, but it's not available on either DVD or online, unfortunately. The real question is: why was Louise Brooks never even considered to play the part which was based on her? The ways of Hollywood were and are still inexplicable. Show Girl was made by First National and Brooks was signed to Paramount (though she had been loaned out to First National before), and the studio wanted to promote their own version of Clara Bow, Alice White. The picture didn't do that well (neither did Ziegfeld's stage version of 1929 starring Ruby Keeler with songs by Gershwin), but a sequel was made a couple of years later once sound was introduced.

Back to Alice White. She is, inarguably, adorable. But she's not much of an actor. She mugs and is stilted. Her singing voice is dubbed and she's a barely adequate dancer. But, as mentioned previously, she's super adorable, a trait which has launched the career of many a starlet past and present. But, adorable does not a career make and Miss White's floundered as she became enmeshed in a tabloid sex scandal (also not uncommon among starlets past and present) and her career never recovered. One way in which she does differ from many starlets is that she was a girl with a college education who began her career working behind the camera. She was Erich Von Stroheim's script girl, but he eventually fired her. She then worked for Charlie Chaplin, who first put her in front of the camera, a goal I have a feeling she may have achieved via the Chaplin casting couch.

White made lots of silent comedies and then segued nicely into sound, but never really hit the big time. One can't help but wonder what the Dixie Dugan series would have been like had Louise Brooks (below right) starred. Alice White's gigantic peepers and baby-doll Brooklynese are charming enough, but Brooks had a great deal more force and charisma and was sexy as hell. And she was an actual Ziegfeld star, unlike Alice White who only performed on film.

This film itself is more interesting as historical curiosity than for its own merits. It's one of the only early talkies that shows the actual movie making process. In the film, Dixie befriends a fading silent screen star, played by Blanche Sweet, aging silent film star. Though, please mind, I use the phrase "aging" advisedly. Sweet's character is written and filmed as if she's on the verge of Norma Desmond-hood, but then she cries out with anguish, "I'm thirty-two years old!". In the screening I attended, this was not greeted by the audience with understanding and pity, but with great big gales of laughter.

As with Glorifying the American Girl, the last reel of Show Girl in Hollywood was shot in color, but in this instance all copies have been lost, and only black and white versions remain. Like in the Ziegfeld movie, there is s scene in which actual stars attend the premier of Dixie's movie. We are then treated to one of the strangest musical numbers I've ever seen (which is saying a lot, as I've seen some very strange musical numbers indeed). The song is called "Haywire" and in order to demonstrate "crazy" the filmmakers have chosen to include these bizarre dancing... figures. They look like homeless people possibly, or maybe the legendary Mole People who supposedly live below the streets of New York. It is so weird. You can see the whole sequence below:

All my caveats aside, I am beyond pleased to have gotten to see this curious picture on the big screen. And though one can't help but dream of a Brooks inhabited alternate reality version, it's a fascinating and entertaining curiosity.

Glorifying The American Girl

Glorifying the American Girl, the 1929 film produced and supervised by Florenz Ziegfield himself, is about as close as any of us are going to get to seeing the Follies live. Which still, isn't very close.

I love the very early talkie musicals from the late twenties and very early thirties, when they were just figuring out the medium which, because of that incredible genius Busby Berkeley, got figured out pretty quickly. They're all backstage show biz tales, and that goes triple for Glorifying the American Girl. It's tells a simple story, but it's far more realistic than the ones told in Gold Diggers of 1933 or 42nd Street.

Ziegfeld star Mary Eaton plays aspiring singer and dancer Gloria Hughes who, as the film begins, works as a singer in a department store. Now, let me explain this archaic mode of employment. Gloria works behind the counter of the sheet music department, and when a customer wants to hear what a song they are interested in purchasing sounds like, she sings it, accompanied on piano by her wholesome boyfriend, Buddy. The sheet music industry at the time was huge, and deserves a post of its own for sure.

Back to Gloria. While attending a company picnic at which the management has provided variety entertainment, she meets tap dancer Miller of the vaudeville act of "Miller & Moody". After seeing her dance, he asks Gloria to become his partner. She does and goes off on tour, her avaricious harpy of a stage mother in tow. It's a grueling tour of five a day shows and one night stands - quite realistic in other words. It soon becomes clear that Miller has cycled through many, many Moodys over the years, and that he is something of a hack. A nasty, greedy piece of work, who hates other's success with a passion and expects sexual favors from his dance partners. After havong been on the road a good long while, Gloria is spotted by a Ziegfeld scout and she and Miller return to New York.

One of the things we found most exciting about this film here at Cabinet headquarters was its New York location shooting. There's a long sequence in which the streets around Grand Central are seen from driver's eye view and it's pretty amazing. I'm also pretty sure The New Amsterdam is played by The New Amsterdam. Florenz Ziegfels was at the peak of his glory when this film was shot and it shows. There's a sequence in which a crowd of luminaries are announced as the enter the theatre, including: Mayor Jimmy Walker, Noah Beery, Texas Guinan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor, and Mr. Ziegfeld himself, accompanied by his wife, Billie Burke.

We then get to watch about half an hour of a Ziegfeld spectacle. We see a long (very, very long) Eddie Cantor comedy routine, a song sung by Rudy Vallee (who I will love forever for his hilarious turn in Palm Beach Story), and Helen Morgan boozily sings a torch song from atop her piano. Make no mistake: these were the some of biggest stars alive at the time this movie was made. And there are girls. Girls and girls and more girls, wearing some of the most extraordinary costumes, and dancing and gliding across some of the most magnificent sets ever created. The Follies was both wonderful and boring. It wasn't particularly hip at the time - there were jazzier, younger, sexier and faster reviews. The Follies was an American institution, and one critic likened it to an achievement more on par with Ford's, one of automation, something to be admired, but fundamentally unsexy. In other words, it was a great deal like the sort of shows we now find in Las Vegas.

The film was written by chorus girl expert, J.P McEvoy. He was a screenwriter, short story writer and the creator of Dixie Dugan, a comic strip based on the most legendary of all chorus girls, Miss Louise Brooks. He will be featured in a post later this week. Needless to say, he knew the lay of this starry eyed though hard-bitten land well, and it shows.

And what of our heroine, Gloria? She becomes a great Ziegfeld star, of course. And in one of my favorite plot twists ever - she doesn't get the boy. Being a star is awfully time consuming, and though she weeps, no doubt everyone will be happier as things turned out. And in real life, Mary Eaton was a great Ziegfeld star, and is thus completely believable once she fufills her destiny. When Glorifying the American Girl was originally released in 1929, much of the final reel was in color, extraordinarily enough. Sadly, the versions currently available are in black and white only, and some footage was snipped post-Code because of some mild Show Girl nudity. But, all hail YouTube! Much of the color footage still exists, some of which can be seen below. Hopefully one day it will be reintegrated with the film (Martin Scorcese, are you listening, Sir?)

And what of Mary Eaton, our chorus girl heroine? From a family of show biz siblings, she is most well known today for being the sister of fellow Ziegfeld girl Doris Eaton, who became the oldest living Ziegfeld Girl prior to her death last year at the age of 106. Doris is the subject of Lauren Redniss's amazing pictorial-graphic-collage-biography, Century Girl, which is an absolutely must have for anyone with an even passing interest in Ziegfeld, chorus girls, American social history, show business, or anything at all, really. Mary was one of those complete entertainment packages that proliferated at the beginning of the last century: she could act, do light comedy, sing, tap and dance en pointe. He career wained with the fall of variety and she succumbed, like so many other talented performers both before and after, to alcoholism. She died of liver failure in 1948.

If you would like to see more of the lovely Mary Eaton, she was also featured in the early Marx Brothers film, Cocoanuts.

Gilda Gray: Shimmy!

Gilda Gray was a vaudevillian, a chorus girl, a headliner in The Follies and at the Palace, and a movie star.

Now, of course, she's pretty much forgotten. Doing all this research on these former chorus girls and silent movie stars, there's one thing I'm finding particularly telling: at least half are mentioned as being "possibly the model for Norma Desmond". I picture Hollywood in the fifties being filled with strange and lovely aging goddesses who still live on cigarettes and gin. In some ways Gilda was one of them, but at heart, she was a trouper.

Born in Poland in 1901 (or thereabouts: to paraphrase Angela Carter, the birthdate of actresses is often a movable feast), her parents were killed when she was an infant, but she was luckily adopted out of the orphanage by a couple who moved with her to Milwaukee when she was 9 or 10 (or thereabouts: see above). She began her career singing and dancing in local saloons. She married when still in her early teens, had a son, got divorced and went on the road. She danced what was called (and is still called) The Shimmy. People went wild for her.

She went by a variety of names until none other than the great Sophie Tucker suggested she use the name "Gilda" because of her golden blonde hair. This was in 1919. She did, and it stuck. Gilda Gray is a far better theatrical moniker than Marianna Winchalaska, the name she was born with. She was a success in vaudeville, which led her to be hired by Florenz Ziegfeld, and in the Follies, she truly became a star. In 1923 she headed to Hollywood where she was immediately successful. Her movies were huge hits and she made lots of money, and like most true show biz success stories of the age, she was a world class workaholic.

In 1929, she lost most of her accumulated fortune in the crash, and couldn't get much movie work as her thick Polish accent was not deemed talkie friendly. So, she went back to vaudeville, where she got a booking at The Palace in New York at $3,500 a week in depression dollars. She also made some movies in England, one of which, Piccadilly, has been recently restored. I watched it a few weeks ago, and - it's not very good. In general, the English silents are pretty deadly, and this one is no exception. It's painfully slow-moving and Gilda isn't great in it. From what I gather, she was neither a great actress or a great dancer: what people came in droves to see was a pretty young woman shaking with orgasmic delight in an otherwise fairly staid world.

She had a heart attack in 1931, largely brought on by overwork. Any sort of comeback was hindered by poor health. She shot a few scenes, playing herself in The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, but her scenes were cut from the final film. She continued to perform in nightclubs when she could, got married and divorced a few times, and did some very admirable work during the war on behalf of Poland.

She died of a second heart attack in 1958, all but forgotten. The Motion Picture Relief Fund paid for her funeral.

Ten Minutes

And she held this pose for ten freaking minutes. Anyone who has ever modeled knows that ten minutes can seem like a long, long time. Also, that isn't some comfy settee she's draped over, but a stool turned on its side with a wrap thrown over it. Art modeling is physically taxing work, and those who do it well deserve celebration and praise!

Incipient Mermaid-hood

The above is a very quickly painted portrait that is definitely headed in a mermaid sort of direction. My watercolor skills are primitive, to say the least, so I need to just paint all the freaking time. Right? I have just so many ideas in terms of larger projects I have brewing and I can't wait until I am able to unleash them

Soon, I'll be writing about my newest obsession, Rebecca West and her extraordinary novel The Fountain Overflows. Which, honestly, you all should read.

Really. I've been rereading it for my post and what I previously thought of as one of my favorite novels has lept in my estimation into being possibly one of the greatest novels ever written. More on that later.though.

For now I need to find time to paint.

Nice Gams: the Art of Léo Fontan

For the past few months I've been neglecting my new found fascination with all the wonderful illustrators who worked for the early 20th century French periodical, La Vie Parisienne. So, let me introduce you to the lovely work of Léo Fontan. Among some other achievements, he is most well known for a delicious series of postcards that should delight both foot fetishists and everyone else. That is to say, they are illustrations of women's legs and feet.

He moved to Paris in 1909 after art school and I was thrilled to discover that his first paying gig was illustrating the cover of Arsène Lupin novels!

:::crickets:::

Okay, Clearly, I'm the only person who was thrilled to discover this. Everyone else just wants more pictures of pretty girls. Which there will be - but first this: Arsène Lupin is a glamorous, fictional, super-thief, created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905. He is kind of similar to the English Raffles (with whom I often confuse him), and he isn't enough read by classic mystery lovers in the English speaking world.


There is a contemporary French edition which still uses Fontan's illustrations!

Okay, back to the girls, as promised.

I don't know what Fontan's fascination was with women's stockinged legs (and I'm likely happier not knowing), but the results are charming. As mentioned above, he also worked for many popular periodicals, such as the rightly celebrated La Vie Parisienne.

During World War II he began specializing in portraits, which is what he mostly continued to do throughout his life. He continued to draw and paint until his death in 1965, even though he was plagued with failing eyesight.

The Art of Stage Dancing (or, How To Be A Follies Dancer By Following These Easy Steps)

Most people know that Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and best things the internet hath wrought. Anticipating the digital book revolution, they have proved themselves ahead of the curve in every way, and their files are full of wonders indeed. All those new releases on Amazon never tempt me to fork over my hard earned cash for a Kindle, but what I am about to share with you just might.

The man who calls himself Trav S.D. alerted me of the existence of Ned Wayburn: dancer, dance school major domo and Ziegfeld Follies choreographer also penned an instructional book, The Art of Stage Dancing, first published in 1925. I haven't yet read most of it, but was so thrilled with what it does contain, I felt the need to immediately report.

It begins with the following disclaimer: "As a writer of books, I confess myself to be a good stage craftsman." But from what I've seen, it is a book full of charm and anecdotes. And pictures. Pictures from editions of the Follies he has choreographed, pictures of his classes in session, and pictures of former students (including the bother/sister dance team at left.) Apparently, she was the real talent of the two, but no film of her dancing exists. The mind reels. This is what he has to say about them:

"Two of my most famous pupils in Musical Comedy dancing are Fred and Adele Astaire, brother and sister. They came to me to study from Omaha, Nebraska, as little tots of about six and seven years of age. Adele was always fond of coming to her classes; but Fred says that he just "followed on" through brotherly association rather than from any preconceived ambition to become a professional dancer. Then, through reverses of family fortunes, the time came when they felt that they should be supporting themselves. They continued to study under me, and I was very happy to be able to place them in vaudeville in a singing and dancing act, which I had prepared for them. This started them on their career, which has led them to Europe and back again."

The caption describes them as being featured in "Lady, Be Good!". There's a short description of their routine from that show in my favorite novel, Wise Children by Angela Carter, as it's the very first show the Chance sisters are taken to see (at which they aso first see their elusive father, a matinee idol on his way to becoming a Great Shakespearean).

"Up went the curtain; there were Fred and Adèle, evicted, out on the street with all their bits and pieces. She set out the chairs, she straightened the sofa, she hung a sign on the lamppost: "Bless This House". We thought that we would die of pleasure. We clung to one another's hands like grim death, we thought we might wake up and find out we had been dreaming. Nora liked Adèle best; she liked it when she dressed up like a Mexican widow and did her Spanish dance, but it was old Fred for me, then and forever, with his funny little nutcracker face and the Eton crop that looked painted on it shone so, and not a hair ever moved...But 'Lady Be Good' showed us the way. It was the Damascus road for us. We spent hours at home afterwards, in the ground floor front, rolling back the rug, getting the numbers off pat. That finale, she in her Tyrolean costume, him like a little sailor doll. We took it in turns to be the lady."

It's so funny, because when one reads novels you have no way of knowing what is real. Another character in Wise Children is Dan Leno, who I didn't know was real until I read my inamorato's book. I'm no intellectual. I've been utterly enchanted by show business and dancing and the stage since I was three. The aching post adolescent pretension came later. The work is hard and needs to be trusted. Theater is a good thing, don't you know, it doesn't need to be destroyed to be made interesting, but more on that at a later date.

Back to Mr. Wayburn's opus.

He explains in great detail the basics all sorts of dancing: Musical Comedy, Acrobatic, Tap, Specialty, Character and what he calls Ned Wayburn's Modern Americanized Ballet Technique. He has chapters on Stage Make-up and diet. I discovered that to lose weight (though I am 20 pounds underweight by 1925 standards, apparently) one must under no circumstances drink any liquid with meals! There is an equally extensive section on gaining weight. He gives sample menus. One of the weight loss lunches includes macaroni and cheese. I love Ned Wayburn. In fact here is Thursday's reducing menu in its entirety:

BREAKFAST

1 apple; 1 egg omelet; 1 bran muffin; small pat butter; coffee with hot skimmed milk.

LUNCHEON

Macaroni and cheese; lettuce with French dressing; fruit gelatine pudding (clear).

DINNER

Beef or lamb stew with vegetables; 2 thin slices whole wheat bread; small pat butter; tapioca cream pudding; black coffee.

I chose the photo of the dancer at left because her last name is "Bacon". I know, I know.

Mr. Wayburn also goes on to explain how show business works. What does a Stage Manager do? Interestingly, he sounds much more like what we would call a "director". Who is the prop man? What is he responsible for? The Chief Electrician, the Company Manager, The Press Rep? And all as it stood in 1925. This book is freaking invaluable.

In true Show Biz fashion, the book is essentially an elaborate advertisement for Wayburn's school and private coaching services. There's a lot of "These people were completely at sea until they came to me and then they shot to stardom after taking my advice". But the thing is 300+ pages long. It's full of anecdotes, advice, lovely photographs of Follies luminaries and black and white illustrations. He has advice about how to overcome stage fright, how to communicate your personality through dance, how to exercise, how to ensure a creative and magical atmosphere, what shoes to wear and on and on.

If you want to be one of Mr. Ziegfeld's specialty dancers (c.1925), this is an excellent place to start.

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.

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

Pinup Postcards in Paris!

My new found obsession with the magazine La Vie Parisienne has certainly been well documented, but as wondrous a tool as the internet is, it has its limitations. I spent a lot of time trying to find some images from the magazine by its most popular illustrator, Raphael Kirchner. It was incredibly difficult to identify the source of the many illustrations, so I pretty much left him off my posts. He's most famous for creating an untold number of pinup postcards which were extremely popular with soldiers during the Great War.

He worked along side other luminaries like Alphonse Mucha, and achieved a huge amount of popularity in his adopted home of Paris. Overall, I think his work is charming and happy, and I think I like the idea of these being the sort of pictures lonely young men look at. I guess I'm a total prude, and though I believe people should do whatever makes them happy, I find the state of the world with its constantly available internet porn, a little depressing. Kirchner used his wife as his model for all of his postcards and for most of his illustrations, and I find that sweet.

When the war broke out in 1914 he emigrated to NYC, where he worked for Flo Ziegfeld and various magazines, including Metropolitan. I've featured him earlier as he painted Olive Thomas several times, once for the cover of the Midnight Frolic program, and at least once more as a part of a series of scantily clad Ziegfeld girls called "Pierrot's Dream" which were displayed in the lobby of the New Amsterdam Theater.

Sadly, he died (fairly) young in 1917. After his demise, his beloved wife descended into madness and drug addiction.