Evelyn Nesbit

Evelyn Nesbit, photographed by Rudolf Eickemeyer, 1901

Evelyn Nesbit (born December 25, 1884 in Tarentum , Pennsylvania , USA - † January 17, 1967 in Santa Monica , California , USA) was an American model and actress . She was best known for her involvement in the murder of her ex-lover, the architect Stanford White .

Life

Evelyn Nesbit in 1903, photographed by Gertrude Käsebier .

Childhood and youth

Nesbit was born as Florence Evelyn Nesbit. In 1893 Evelyn, her mother and her brother were impoverished by the death of their father, until the adolescent's beauty attracted the attention of local artists. Model sitting became the family's sole source of income. In 1901 Evelyn and her mother traveled to New York , where the girl sat as a model for the painter Frederick Church , the photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer and the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson .

Stanford White

Evelyn Nesbit made it into the dancers of the Broadway show Florodora , where the 16-year-old caught the eye of the successful architect Stanford White, who was 47 years old at the time. White was married and liked to be around very young girls. In White's apartment in Madison Square Garden, which he designed, there were a multitude of mirrors for every conceivable angle, as well as a red velvet swing that White's playmates had to sit in. White deflowered Nesbit and took erotic photos of her after making her (according to Evelyn Nesbit) compliant with champagne.

John Barrymore

White soon left Nesbit for other young girls, and she found a new suitor in the then 22-year-old actor John Barrymore , from whom she became pregnant. However, she declined a marriage proposal from him because she still felt emotionally attached to Stanford White and her mother Barrymore did not see financially attractive enough for her daughter. White stepped in and placed Nesbit in boarding school in New Jersey (run by director's mother Cecil B. DeMille ). There Evelyn Nesbit had an abortion disguised as an appendix operation.

Harry Kendall Thaw

Harry Kendall Thaw (1905)

The next man in Nesbit's life was Harry Kendall Thaw , the son of a coal and road tycoon . The choleric Thaw was extremely jealous of Nesbit's previous admirers and always carried a pistol with him to “defend his property”. He had Nesbit tell him all the details of her relationship with Stanford White, whom he called just "the beast". Addicted to cocaine, Thaw was a sexual sadist who whipped women, including Nesbit. Nevertheless, the two married in 1905. In 1910, Nesbit gave birth to a son, Russell William Thaw († 1984), who achieved fame as a pilot during World War II and starred in a few films as a child alongside his mother. The identity of his father is unknown, Harry Thaw was in custody at the time of conception and birth of Russell. Nesbit insisted all his life that Thaw was the boy's father, Thaw himself denied it.

The Stanford White murder and the trial

On June 25, 1906, both Nesbit and Thaw and White were in the audience at the Rooftop Theater in Madison Square Garden. In the middle of Edgar Allan Woolf's Mamzelle Champagne , during the song I Could Love A Million Girls , Thaw fired three shots straight into White's face with the words "You will never see this woman again." He was dead instantly.

There were two court cases. In the first trial, the jury did not come to a unanimous conclusion, in the second trial (in which Nesbit appeared as a witness for her husband) Thaw pleaded for temporary insanity. Thaw's mother had promised Nesbit a discreet divorce and a million dollars if she testified that White raped her and Harry Thaw was only trying to restore her honor. Nesbit got the divorce, but she never saw the money. In addition, Thaw's mother blocked all cash flows to her.

Thaw served his sentence at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, New York , but enjoyed the greatest possible freedom. In 1913 he literally walked out of the asylum and fled to Quebec . He was extradited to the USA, but released as completely cured in 1913. He enjoyed the reputation of a folk hero who avenged the dishonor of an innocent girl. His first act in freedom was to divorce Nesbit.

Nesbit's later years

In the years after the second trial, Nesbit's career as a vaudeville actress and silent film actress was only moderately successful. She played women of dubious reputations several times. In 1916 she married her dance partner Jack Clifford , in 1918 the two separated again (the divorce did not follow until 1933).

Evelyn Nesbit became addicted to alcohol and morphine and made several suicide attempts. In 1926, the unemployed Nesbit gave the New York Times an interview in which she said she had made up with Thaw. However, their relationship never resumed. Harry Thaw died of a heart attack in Miami on February 22, 1947, leaving Evelyn only $ 10,000 of his million dollar fortune.

Nesbit later worked temporarily as a ceramic teacher. In the filming of her life in The girl on the Samtschaukel ( The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing , 1955), she was a consultant with and was in this film by Joan Collins presented. Evelyn Nesbit died in 1967 at the age of 82. She was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City , California .

Leaning literary figures

In 1906, the author Lucy Maud Montgomery used a photo of Evelyn Nesbit as an optical template for the description of her heroine Anne in the "Anne of Green Gables" novels.

EL Doctorow used Evelyn Nesbit's story in his novel Ragtime , which was filmed in 1981 by Miloš Forman . In the film of the same name , Nesbit is played by Elizabeth McGovern .

Filmography

• 1914: Threads of Destiny
• 1916: A Lucky Leap
• 1917: Redemption
• 1918: Her Mistake
• 1918: The Woman Who Gave
• 1918: I Want To Forget
• 1919: Woman, Woman!
• 1919: Thou Shalt Not
• 1919: A Falling Idol
• 1919: My Little Sister
• 1922: Hidden Woman

literature

• Deborah Paul: Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit , Lulu.com, 2006.
• Evelyn Nesbit: Prodigal Days - The Untold Story of Evelyn Nesbit , Lulu.com, 2005.
• Charles Samuels: The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing: The Story of Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White and Harry K. Thaw , Amereon Ltd., 1976.

Web links

Commons : Evelyn Nesbit  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Evelyn Nesbit in the Internet Broadway Database (English)
• Evelyn Nesbit in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Evelyn Nesbit in the Crime Library: The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing
• Story of Evelyn Nesbit (English)