American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the It Girl, and the Crime of the Century Book

Some years ago, long before I started receiving student loan bills, I took a college course called "The History of American Architecture." Having been assured that this was a humanities course, and that no engineering or mathematics would be involved, I settled in to learn about gables, cornices, and dentils.

My professor was intensely passionate about the subject. He took us on a walking tour of Omaha, Nebraska, in a vain attempt to convince us that Omaha had interesting architecture. Once, he sang "America the Beautiful", just so he could talk about "thine alabaster cities" gleaming "undimmed by human tears". At the time, I thought he was a nut, but that's to be expected from a college kid. Youth always mistakes passion for madness, because when we are young, the only thing we can be passionate about is ourselves. It takes time for us to look outward, and appreciate life beyond the tips of our noses.

I first learned about Evelyn Nesbit from this professor. He took great joy in telling us the story of Stanford White's red velet swing, and little Evelyn kicking at paper parsols with her little feet. He told us to check out the movie, The Red Velvet Swing, which featured a young Joan Crawford. We didn't, of course.

Years later, though, when I came across the title of this book, something clicked. I recalled my professor's fractured tale with renewed interest.

Evelyn Nesbit was an otherwordly beautiful girl (the book has plenty of pictures to back this up) who lifted herself out of poverty by modeling. Though her career was initially modest, she eventually became ubiquitous. Her angelic mug was on advertisements and postcards and even served as the model for an angel on a stained glass window in church. She was like the Olsen Twins of her day, if the Olsen Twins were attractive.

Admirers reached deep into pulpy romance novels to come up with words to describe her (think "smokey eyes", skin like a "gossamer veil," and a mouth like "crumpled rose petals"). She may have been the most photographed woman of her day. Except she wasn't a woman. She was a girl.

(This is where I tried to find a workable Chris Hanson/To Catch A Predator joke but failed).

Evelyn eventually fell into the clutches of Stanford White, the famous architect, who also happened to be a rapacious pedophile. White raped Evelyn one night after she passed out at his house. For whatever reason, Evelyn didn't immediately tell anyone, and actually became White's lover. Later, she drifted into the orbit of crazy Harry Thaw, heir to a vast fortune. Harry also raped Evelyn, and in a case of heightened Stockholm syndrome, ended up marrying him. She also made the mistake of telling Harry what Stanford White had done to her.

Harry took his revenge on White at the Madison Square Garden Rooftop Theater. The killing took place in 1906 and was the first in a long line of crimes of the century.

The story is gripping in and of itself. It gives truth to the old saying that the "difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to make sense." Here, you have a tug-of-war between two pedophiles over the most famous female in America, which starts with a velvet swing and ends with three gunshots and a circus of a trial.

Somehow, though, this book was a disappointment. It scores as high as it does simply because the story is so entertainingly cracked (I suppose we could debate the ethics of murder as entertainment, but it's been over a hundred years, and seriously, there's a red velvet swing involved).

The problems I had with the book are numerous. It's clear that the author is well-versed in Evelyn's life. However, most of the details seem to come from Evelyn's own memoirs. This means that the account is necesarily one-sided and biased. Yes, there are a few points where the author compares her differing accounts, but mostly Evelyn's version is accepted as truth, without a lot of critical analysis. And while we're talking sources and citation, I found the endnotes section to be quite lacking. For instance, author Paula Uruburu writes that State of New York v. Thaw was the first trial in American history where the jury was sequestered. That's an interesting factoid, and as a lawyer, I intended to walk into the office the next morning and wow all my lawyer friends. But when I looked for some sort of citation to back up this pronouncement, I didn't find anything.

Then there is the writing style. American Eve is overwritten and stuffed with purple prose, grandiloquence, and exaggerated metaphors (Harry Thaw as Jekyll and Hyde? Really?). I suppose this style might be a subtle nod to New York's famous penny press, which paved the way for today's National Enquirer, but that doesn't make it any more readable.

The subtitle of the book is "Evelyn Nesbit, Standford White...and the Crime of the Century." However, this is totally Evelyn's story (which goes back to the reliance on her memoirs). You don't learn anything about Stanford White. Oh, there are bits and pieces, but these tidbits about his life - that he was an architect, that he was married, that he liked little girls - are all given indirectly. I never got a sense of the man; the author told me he was rich and famous without ever telling why.

There is a long, portentous build-up to the murder, and when it finally happened, I was suitably impressed with the gruesome depiction.

Then, however, Uruburu skims through the two trials in what seemed a race to the finish. The author claimed this was the crime - and by extension - trial of the century, but the book's description of the proceedings lacks detail, clarity, and drama. Harry changes lawyers so many times in so few pages it's hard to keep up. I got no real understanding of the proceedings, the strategy, or the participants. I would have welcomed a real discussion on Harry's trials, including court excerpts, since it presented myriad legal issues that are relvant today but were in their infancy in 1906. For instance, the author mentions alienists without ever detailing what an alienst did (good thing I read The Alienist by Caleb Carr).

I also have to ask publishers: please, please stop calling every crime the "crime of the century." Stanford White's murder was not the crime of the century. Heck, it came five years after William McKinley was murdered. And he was the president! And what about Leopold & Loeb, Sacco & Vanzetti, Bruno Hauptman & the Lindbergh Baby, JFK & Oswald, OJ & Nicole, or Shakespeare in Love stealing the Oscar from Saving Private Ryan? All these crimes were also the "crime of the century." So just stop this shameless ploy.

Oh, who am I kidding. I will buy any book with that tag line.

In a brief epilogue, the reader learns that Evelyn was cut of from the Thaw fortune, had a child, divorced Harry, got remarried, and lived to a ripe old age. On the final page, there is a picture of Evelyn in the full bloom of her youthful beauty.

When I reached that point, I was strangely moved. I noticed there wasn't a picture of Evelyn in her later years, but for once my insatiable curiosity did not compel me to go searching. She exists almost as a legend, an eternal beauty, and I didn't want to disrupt that image. I wondered about what it must have been like for her, to have lived such an extraordinary life in 21 years, and then to spend 60 years in what must have amounted to an extended anticlimax. Weighing this response against my criticisms, I would have to conclude I liked the book almost in spite of it.