American Eve (10 page)

Comstock, who believed his work had been commissioned by God, saw himself as the supreme guardian of virtue fighting certain “jackals of the law.” His lofty goal was to be accomplished through the assiduous enforcement of anti-obscenity laws. What’s more, he was an officially sanctioned crusader, since he was designated a special agent for the Post Office. Within two years in his position, Comstock had “weighed in” with his opinions on pornography and initiated his own “bonfire of the vanities” by seizing more than 100,000 pounds of objectionable books and close to 200,000 drawings and photos. Yet while anything remotely associated with sex was anathema as far as the upstanding Society for the Suppression of Vice and its commander were concerned, those seeking lower and even horizontal pleasures could easily find them in the Tenderloin and Bowery, where an estimated 25,000 painted women who were “neither Parisian nor theatrical” walked the streets.

The rest of the female population of course navigated their way through the sometimes treacherous labyrinth of “social necessity,” only to become part of the “sexual-marital bind.” For some more enlightened social critics, these angels in the household differed perhaps only slightly from their unfortunate sisters, the city’s “fallen women,” since they too sold themselves and their modesty—only for a higher price. Described by author and journalist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the sinister and deceptively oppressive social patterns that threatened to strangle any woman attempting to see through or escape them meant that “the same world exists for women as for men, the same human energies and human desires . . . [but] all that she may wish to do must come through a single channel and a single choice. Wealth, power, social distinction . . . not only these but home and happiness, reputation, ease and pleasure . . . all must come to her through a small gold ring.”

"THE STATUE THAT OFFENDED NEW YORK”

But it was a large gold woman who was at the pivoting center of one of the most heated sexual debates of the day in New York. Comstock’s most visible yet elusive enemies were “the infidels” Stanford White and his comrade in arms, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who seemed intent

Collier’s
cover satirizing Comstock’s attempts
to purify the Garden Diana.

upon thwarting Comstock’s prissy and bullying self-righteous attempts at censorship. Rumors of scantily clad underage showgirls bursting out of pies at men’s clubs in the city had already sent Comstock into spasms of rage, and when he learned that the maestro of such depraved entertainment had set his sights on a much more public form of “entertainment,” he was beside himself.

White’s desire for an ornamental figure to adorn the top of his radiant Garden Tower resulted in Saint-Gaudens’s offering him a fittingly resplendent eighteen-foot sculpture of Diana, the goddess of the hunt (and chastity, wink, wink), which he had displayed at the 1893 World’s Exposition. Modeled on Saint-Gaudens’s mistress and clad only in her own natural beauty, the first Diana was too heavy to stand safely on her revolving ball-bearing perch. So the sculptor produced a more petite thirteen-foot version. Once in place, the lighter Diana spun effortlessly on her revolving golden hemisphere above the city, blown by the slightest gust of wind. Some joked that it was White’s most elaborate pedestal yet for a Saint-Gaudens sculpture. But Diana proved more of a lightning rod than the weather vane she was purported to be. Almost as soon as the charmingly naked statue was placed atop White’s tower, the luminous figure, which blazed serenely in the noonday sun, scandalized onlookers and provoked a variety of comments from shocked observers who must have had excellent vision, given their relative distance from the shining goddess.

According to one of the policemen patrolling Madison Square Park at the time, “People as has kids says as how she is immoralizing.”

Several newspapers reported that there had been a “marked change in the character of the frequenters of Madison Square. Formerly this beautiful little park was the gathering place of children . . . but more generally what children come here are rushed through at breakneck speed . . . in their place the Square is thronged with clubmen armed with field glasses . . . Delmonico elegants, Casino Johnnies, and every other variety of local dude.”

After seeing for himself that this divine body, adorned only in a thin veneer of gilt, stood in glaring promiscuous relief “against the clear blue of the heavens,” which “rendered every detail of the modeling startlingly plain to the view,” Comstock seethed with rage and demanded that it be taken down.

In seeming acquiescence to the already frustrated Comstock, White directed Saint-Gaudens to construct a gilded pennantlike drapery for Diana to “cover her modesty” (another euphemism for female private parts). Much to Comstock’s vexation and White and Saint-Gaudens’s orchestrated delight, the insubstantial drapery came detached and blew away within weeks of having been put in place. After that, in sparkling defiance, White proceeded to make sure that the Garden Diana could be seen even at night. Under his direction, she was daringly and dramatically illuminated from below by mirrors that reflected a ring of powerful incandescent arc lamps at her feet.

Ultimately, Comstock’s campaign against the statue that offended decent citizens as far away as Philadelphia, like his efforts to close the saloons, failed. Nonetheless, it fueled his wrath and helped publicize his cause, however much he was preaching the converted. But it would not take long for “Saint Anthony of Comstock” to gain an ally and disciple in his crusade against White and other less visible voluptuaries: a man with money to burn (literally, since he sometimes lit his imported cigars with hundred-dollar bills to shock and amuse onlookers). Equally zealous but content initially to remain anonymous, Comstock’s patron saint and private financier was none other than Harry K. Thaw, of Pittsburgh.

Fancying himself Sir Harry Trueheart, Thaw, like Comstock, was a puritanical vigilante who envisioned himself doing God’s work—except that when no one was looking, “Mad Harry” used the devil’s playground as his own (and, far from demonstrating Spartan discipline, was more likely to come home under his shield than on it). But like Comstock and his Society members, Thaw wanted to wipe out the “nest of vipers” he believed was preying on young girls in the city—particularly those vultures who thought they were above the law (eight stories, to be exact) in the obscene tower at Madison Square, where the “red-headed devil” who toyed with the most tender affections had yet to be caught red-handed in his love nest (the term coined supposedly in connection with White and his tower trysts).

A rare image of Evelyn smiling in a
postcard photograph, circa 1902.

AMERICAN DREAM GIRL

However much the tightly wound, tumescent life of Manhattan Island (and the rest of the nation that stretched beyond the Brooklyn Bridge and Diana’s muted gaze) was under bully testosterone-fueled control, it was the flesh-and-blood goddess of innocent sexuality, Miss Florence Evelyn, whose image began to dominate the imagination of the public as the embodiment of fresh-faced youth and the always enticing American Dream.

A “slight striking almost fragile waif with a marvelous halo of hair,” she was the living tabula rasa—pure, uninitiated, and ingenuous—and poised on the exhilarating threshold of fame. In the new century of teeming masses and mass marketing, with a population obsessed with iconographic images that symbolized the “one” (Uncle Sam, the Yellow Kid, Lady Liberty, Columbia, etc.), the “little girl from the outskirts of sooty city” was already on her way to becoming the icon of her age. It would not be long before she would be etched into the collective consciousness of America as its supreme symbol of irresistible and undeniable (if at times fickle) possibility, Charles Dana Gibson’s “Eternal Question.”

In early 1901, Violet Oakley, the stained-glass artist and muralist whom Florence Evelyn had posed for in Philadelphia, was in New York, commissioned by the All Angels Church on the Upper West Side to do a series of celestial scenes. Not surprisingly, she engaged her favorite model, and word quickly spread to the most remote bohemian borders of the metropolitan art world of the unassuming and supple studio girl who could “embody the essence of the shepherdess, coquette, or naiad” (although the issue of her costuming—or lack thereof—would continue both to titillate and offend, much like the Garden’s Diana). As more painters and illustrators began to press for Florence Evelyn’s services as a model, she found her admiring employers now included the most talented and recognizable artists of their kind, including those masters of “high indigo and mauve fantasies,” Harrison Fisher, Howard Chandler Christy, Henry Hutt, and Archie Gunn.

Benefiting from a serendipitous convergence of timing and technology, photographs as well as other renderings of Florence Evelyn’s image (such as chromolithographs, hand-tinted bas-relief photos, real-photo postcards, celluloid reproductions, and tipped-in gravures) were easily duplicated and soon widely in demand. Certain newspapers such as the
Sunday World
and the
Sunday American
had also just started to publish fashion pages featuring “living models” rather than the previously drawn and sometimes ridiculously disproportionate female figures. The photographer most responsible for this new trend in what was the beginning of modern fashion photography was Joel Feder, who had a studio on West

Evelyn as Gibson’s
“Eternal Question,” 1903.

Twenty-third Street. Immediately upon meeting “the most beautiful specimen of the skylight world,” who had been featured in another issue of
Broadway Magazine
in an article on “The New York Studios,” Feder attempted to engage Evelyn exclusively, offering her five dollars for a morning sitting or an afternoon and twice that for a whole day’s posing. This was more than she made in a week posing for the typical fine artist. But Florence Evelyn was not yet ready to give herself to just one man or his eager albeit flattering attention. Nor did her mother want to cut off any avenues of potential revenue by choosing just one, no matter how tempting.

Modeling in costumes as she had in Philadelphia and once again acting out the fantasies she had read as a child only a handful of years earlier, Florence Evelyn was at times in thrall to her own image. Overcome now and then with adolescent self-absorption, she enjoyed suddenly seeing her face everywhere. And yet, as in Philadelphia, however much the idea of being the most sought-after model in the studios appealed to her teenage vanity, the posing she continued to do for painters and sculptors was increasingly dull, tiring, unglamorous, and time consuming. Inevitably, she preferred spending her time in front of a camera. Being a photographer’s model for either commercial purposes or higher art was easier. And, as her mother had hoped, the rewards were more immediate and relatively lucrative, reaching as much as eighteen dollars a week.

As a photographer’s model, Florence Evelyn routinely found herself dressed in a variety of beautiful outfits, a number of which were as unquestionably revealing as those she wore for the fine artists. But her mother did not object, and the money her daughter brought in every week paid for everything they had. One has to wonder what career choices or money the much-in-demand “little Pittsburgh peach” could have made with a professional manager or agent, since, like a leaf in a storm drain, Florence Evelyn’s meteoric modeling career floated on the swells and eddies of the generosity, honesty, or whims of those who sought to engage her services, many knowing full well that her mother knew nothing about “the business of business.” The fact that Florence Evelyn was able to rise so quickly and make a steady salary was at least a small wonder, since the unparalleled publicity she generated was virtually unplanned, and uncontrolled; very little of her success was the result of her mother’s efforts. As her daughter-in-law described the situation many years later, “a very young Evelyn put her faith in her mother, the adult, to manage things and make the right career choices, and I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.”