American Eve (32 page)

Clearly, the minute Evelyn told him of her deflowering, confirming Harry’s worst fears, the shining angel of his fantasies died. He could never forget. And never really forgive.

What should have been a magnificent introduction for Evelyn to the cultural wonders of the Old World had turned instead into a wretched initiation into Harry’s particular brand of sadism (one that she later couldn’t help feeling was also inspired by the obvious androgynous picture she presented without wig and clothing). The enormity of another appalling and perverse betrayal by someone she trusted, and her own absurd isolation and powerlessness, broke upon Evelyn one day like a sudden July storm as her tears fell fast and heavy. No matter where they went, Evelyn wondered if or when Harry’s outrage would erupt, since he was skilled at veiled threats. With invisible bars surrounding her wherever she went, she was a bird of paradise trapped with a cuckoo. To make matters worse, she was dependent upon Harry for the “smallest female necessity.” And, adding injury to injury, her insides burned periodically in spite of the doctor’s assurance that she was healed.

Evelyn finally found the opportunity in a less shrouded and mobile moment to ask Harry if Miss Simonton, the woman he had engaged as her chaperone after her mother’s initial departure, could meet them back in Paris. He agreed. Evelyn and Harry arrived there on September 3, and met up with Bedford, who had finally left the peeved Mrs. Nesbit after Stanny’s funds arrived. Evelyn and Harry then visited Elizabeth Marbury’s estate in Versailles, where, mercifully out of Harry’s earshot, an acquaintance from New York, Gordon Fellows, asked Evelyn, “How is Stanford?” Another person staying there was Elsie De Wolfe, the celebrated interior decorator whom Evelyn had met back in New York at one of Stanny’s parties.

The next day, Marbury and De Wolfe returned with Evelyn to an apartment in Paris, where she broke down and told them her mortifying story of Harry’s sadism. It was decided that Evelyn would return with them to New York (while Annie Crane replaced Miss Simonton as chaperone) . A sullen Harry provided the money for her ticket and accommodations, only dimly and intermittently aware that he might have done something to injure her.

THE SHORES OF AVALON

Evelyn sought refuge back in New York, which she had hoped might prove to be “the shores of Avalon.” But her only luck continued to be bad. She arrived on October 24 on the
New Yorker.
Thaw had asked that his attorney, Mr. Longfellow, meet Evelyn at the dock to help her through customs. But they missed each other, and, according to Harry, Evelyn was “swindled” by the officials out of more than half the money he had given her to settle back in. At first she simply tried to recover from her so-called holiday, which had done nothing to help her improve her nerves or heal her damaged psyche. She realized that she needed to go back to work, but remembered that the doctor who had performed her operation at the deMille School said she should not dance for a year. Stanny was still paying for her mother’s and brother’s “expenses” (both of whom were now effectively estranged from her), and the teenager now looked at Manhattan forlornly as little more than a house of cards, whose chief architect she assumed would offer solace upon her return, but more than likely accompanied with a regular dose of sin.

Little by little, Evelyn began to learn disturbing things about Harry that she had not known before, although by then she certainly had evidence to support the rumors of his perverted propensities. She wondered why, as with Stanny, Harry’s “peculiarities,” which had been public property, had been kept from her or were so easily hidden or dismissed. The reason, of course, lay with both White and Thaw themselves, as the bizarre triangle they formed with their American Eve closed in upon her.

Before she left for Europe, Evelyn of course had heard of Harry’s reputation as eccentric and knew firsthand of his extravagance, as did a lot of showgirls. But as she had told White before she left, Harry had shown her nothing but kindness and almost womanly consideration for her welfare for nearly a year. Nor did any of her so-called friends warn her about his monstrous side. White, who was aware of Harry’s attempts to expose his own alter ego, never really spoke seriously about Thaw to Evelyn, since he considered him such a buffoon (another thing Evelyn grew to resent after having been subjected to Thaw’s vicious buffoonery). Stanny had warned her to stay away from Thaw, but Evelyn considered that as coming more from her mother than Stanny at the time. She might have even interpreted Stanny’s concern as evidence of a kind of knee-jerk jealousy on his part, harking back to the Barrymore incident, which was still a sore spot for her. Perhaps, since he didn’t consider the craven and usually ineffectual Thaw much of a threat to himself, Stanny never considered the real threat he posed to the petite and vulnerable Evelyn. Then again, she had been warned by James Garland about Stanny the voluptuary and ignored the warning with unfortunate results.

As Evelyn found out too late, although Harry was no artist, he had taken great pains to surround her whenever possible with people who painted him only in the best of lights. There was also the Thaw family’s art of doing damage control for most of Harry’s life, so that any misdeeds were minimized—or erased altogether, like the infant brother who died in his mother’s bed. And, like all successful sociopaths, at times Harry was capable of fooling even his closest acquaintances. It had not been that difficult to hide his nasty side from Evelyn initially, especially since, from the time he met her, he lulled her into the warming sense of security she desperately craved. He took extraordinary measures to put his best-polished shoe forward, and as was his habit, reasonably explained away indications to the contrary.

Now no longer within Harry’s labyrinth of deception and manipulation, Evelyn heard from “one man and another that he took morphine, [that] he was crazy.” Since no one had bothered to tell her these details before she became involved with him, a beleaguered and frazzled Evelyn took in everything, but had no one to ask for help or guidance. As in Europe, she had no family or close friends of any kind she could trust or who could offer her advice, save other chorus girls, whose words, she knew, were “substitutes for real thought.” With any sense of well-being torn to shreds once again, it felt to Evelyn as if Stanny and his city were waiting to swallow her whole. And on certain days she welcomed the idea. In yet another awful twist of the screws, upon her return, Mamma Nesbit joined forces with White.

Harry had received a number of anxious telegrams from his lawyer, who had met him when he returned from England several weeks after Evelyn. As soon as he set foot on the dock, Harry had asked about her, but Longfellow could talk only about her mother. According to Harry, “though now she knew, she still pretended to trust White” not to save him but to save herself, “to disguise her own unwisdom, like an ostrich puts its head in the sand.” Harry tried to laugh it off as he had in Paris, but Longfellow insisted that White’s lawyers, with the help of Mrs. Nesbit, were out to make serious trouble. Harry said he wanted to see Evelyn, but his panicked legal counsel tried to dissuade him. He immediately began to rant and fix as much blame on Evelyn’s mother as on White, remembering, selectively, things Evelyn had told him in Paris: “She had broken with her own and her husband’s families who wished to keep [Evelyn] and Howard for the ten days she was going to visit back in Pittsburgh. But instead, she told Evelyn to do anything Stanford White said and left.”

As the days passed, a besieged Evelyn didn’t really consider that she was now back in White’s equally calculating sphere of influence and spin control; that she was living in hotels still paid for with money that had been given to her by Thaw or White. On certain dreary days, Evelyn felt as if she were covered with a blanket of heavy stones, hearing now and again the wearing strain of her mother’s constant praise of White’s character (while continually pressing him for support and getting on average about sixty dollars a week from him, more than twice what he gave Evelyn). And yet, even in her confusion, Evelyn continued to resist running back into Stanny’s waiting arms.

But within a week or so of her return, while riding down Fifth Avenue in a hansom cab, the architect passed Evelyn. Soon after that chance passing, he phoned her.

“It’s good to hear your voice again,” he said.

He went on to say that he had to see her and at first she refused, feeling the pull of the same tangled strings she had felt when she left. But White told her it was very important that she see him, because her family (i.e., mother) had caused him much trouble. Evelyn, having had her relationship with her mother effectively severed, asked if she was ill. White replied that it was a matter of life and death, but that he could not discuss it over the phone. Evelyn agreed to meet him at her hotel, the Savoy. He drummed on her door in his too-familiar way, and as soon as he entered the room, Evelyn asked him if her mother was ill. In reply, Stanny grabbed her face and tried to kiss her. She rebuffed him and he blinked in disbelief, seeming surprised at her brusque coldness to him, and asked her what was the matter. Evelyn told him to sit down, then asked again if her mother was ill. White shrugged his shoulders and said, “Your mother isn’t ill. I’ve come to talk to you about Harry Thaw.”

Evelyn threw her hands up, then sighed. Several actress friends of White’s had told him some rumors about Evelyn’s trip abroad with Thaw.

“Don’t you know he takes morphine?” White asked her. “Why would you go around with such a man who is not even a gentleman? You must have nothing more to do with him.”

An emotionally battered Evelyn sank back into her chair, wondering why Stanny hadn’t been this forthcoming and edifying before. She felt herself beginning to tumble back immediately into old behavior patterns as well—including taking the path of least resistance, which for her also meant shutting down like a Ford engine ready to seize.

Once again, she was being forced to take sides. Stanny said he would set her up for some auditions. Within a week, she was offered a minor but featured part in a new Shubert production,
The Girl from Dixie,
and was about to begin the grind of rehearsals in spite of her physical condition and the doctor’s warning. Not knowing whether White’s rekindled interest in her affairs, which seemed to have been sparked by the chance encounter on the street, was the result of legitimate feelings for her, an act of simple kindness, a way of placating her mother, or set off by his extreme distaste for Thaw, Evelyn, by then almost eighteen years old, was in an alternately listless and frantic quandary. White proceeded to send people to her hotel who told her more stories about Harry. Stanny himself constantly came to see her, and while Evelyn later offered no evidence that they had renewed their sexual relationship, he must have been hoping for a move in that direction before she turned the corner out of girlhood forever. After all, Evelyn was approaching the age when her girlish—or boyish—charms, might be less appealing to the discriminating voluptuary and therefore less of an irresistible force.

In the meantime, the teenager was so nervous and worried over her new work schedule, her mother’s estrangement, and the Thaw stories that she began to suffer from headaches and insomnia and began taking “sleeping powders,” eventually even succumbing to having a “nerve burnt” by a doctor to allay the neuralgic pain she had been suffering from for weeks.

During the time they were ostensibly together again, White also told her the saga of her mother’s return to America, how her mother had tried to cause trouble for Thaw at the American embassy in London, and how a huge incident had been averted by his bringing her mother home. Back in his saddle as sinful savior, White took every opportunity to support the tales about Thaw that Evelyn heard at every turn, waving them at her like a big stick. According to her, “He was very vehement in his indictment of Harry’s iniquities. He was a little frightened, too, I think, and went to great pains to remove any influence which Harry may have had upon me.”

White told her in no uncertain terms that she needed to hide from Thaw and cut all ties, and seemed saddened over the apparent loss of that part of her girlish innocence even he hadn’t eclipsed.

Since Evelyn could not ignore the evidence piling up around her, making Thaw out to be a monster and a dope fiend with no redeeming qualities, following White’s counsel, she avoided Harry, who had been back for about five weeks. In what must have seemed at times an absurd and exhausting exercise, Evelyn hid from Thaw and his detectives, finding ways to elude the men Harry always boasted as having bested Pinkerton’s. Her mother, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found. Having washed her hands of her willful, troublesome daughter, she became more deeply involved with Charles Holman, the old family friend and stockbroker, who made frequent visits to New York on business. Before the end of the next year, Mrs. Winfield Nesbit would become Mrs. Charles Holman, where, relocated to a comfy Pittsburgh suburb and snug in her new husband’s money, she could sit back and watch her daughter’s predicament from afar, like a spectator at a Madison Square Garden boxing match.

THE AFFIDAVIT

In early November, a month before Evelyn’s eighteenth birthday, Stanny telephoned to tell her that he was sending a carriage for her. When it arrived, she got in and quickly found herself at Broadway and Nineteenth Street, at the offices of Abe Hummel, a lawyer Thaw described as a “slimy shyster.” As was invariably the case whenever Stanny was orchestrating things, Evelyn was hurried through a side entrance. Stanny, who met her at the office a few minutes later, urged a puzzled Evelyn to swear to Thaw’s cruelty in an affidavit. He then left just as abruptly, telling Evelyn not to be afraid of Hummel (whom even his client White described as “looking like an abortion”). Although technically he was not a dwarf, with his large balding hydrocephalic head, wormy mustache, and “a face like a rotten apple,” Hummel’s appearance was indeed disconcerting. To avoid looking at him, Evelyn stared around at the office walls, which were covered with autographed photos of actresses she recognized, most of whom were Hummel’s clients in divorce or breach-of-promise cases. Until that moment, his most celebrated case had involved Olga Nethersole’s production of
Sappho,
which had caused a stir a few seasons earlier.