American Eve by Paula Uruburu

Author:Paula Uruburu [Uruburu, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women
ISBN: 9781594483691
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Published: 2008-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Worst Mistake of Her Life

In Domrémy, France, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Harry wrote in the guestbook, “she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around.”

—Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days

Topsy, an elephant that had killed three men, was executed on the boardwalk at Luna Park by electrocution, “providing entertainment in death as in life.”

—New York World, 1903

According to Evelyn, it must have been “the whim of Fata Morgana” to snatch her away from stage then school in virtually one capricious life-threatening swoop. An impartial observer might wonder, however, what fickle celestial forces were at work with regard to the girl destined to “put one man in the grave and another in the bughouse.” Although Evelyn eventually came to learn that Thaw’s perceived rivalry and his resentment of White’s potent presence in her life (as well as the virile life of the city) predated her involvement with either man, she believed at the time that they were the exclusive and harmless products of Harry’s hyperbolic, hyperactive brain. She never considered until it was too late that Stanny was the reason Thaw had intentionally fixed his sights on her; after all, Harry Thaw almost always seemed to be going off half-cocked on one subject or another. Nor did she consider that Thaw was driven more by envy and loathing of the great White than by her siren charms, which lured so many men her way and drove so many others to distraction. She was also not conscious that her own conflicted but intense emotions on the subject of Stanford White were mirrored, if grotesquely, by Harry. Like the insanely conflicted Montresor out of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” Harry actually admired and envied the man he claimed to hate, and was plotting revenge for similar albeit darker sins that he himself had committed.

In early 1903, neither Evelyn nor Stanny had any idea of the depth or virulence of Harry’s inflamed hatred and swelling obsession, even though he had spoken zealously but in vague generalities on several occasions to his Angel-Child of White’s diabolic deeds. Evelyn refused to be provoked or speak badly of Stanny, who she said was not, as Harry’s informants claimed, “a sybaritic blight on the girlhood of Gotham.” She defended Stanny’s unwavering generosity to her and her family, of which there was ample, untainted public evidence. But the evidence Harry wanted so badly was irrefutable proof of White’s prodigious appetite for jeunes filles and what Thaw imagined were unrelenting wholesale debaucheries in the Madison Square Tower “lust nest” and elsewhere around the city.

Yet in spite of all his money and best efforts, Harry was little more than a whirling dervish, spinning his wheels in fanatical pursuit of his own truth regarding Stanford White and going nowhere. In turn, Evelyn tried to speak well of Harry to Stanny when White cautioned her about the pasty-faced playboy and his offensive proclivities, although, inexplicably, Stanny didn’t offer any cogent or specific details that might have convinced her (and perhaps thwarted Fata Morgana).

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