WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

– a vacation they never got to take. On the evening of June 25, 1906, Evelyn looked as spectacular as ever as her maid fastened the pearl buttons on her white satin, black-trimmed gown. Evelyn completed her fashion statement with matching black accessories, long gloves and an oversized hat with a bow. As usual, Harry had done all the planning.

      Later that night Evelyn’s heart sank when she realized her husband had arranged for dinner and a show at two of Stanford White’s known haunts. Evelyn knew how obsessed Thaw was with “the beast” as he insisted they both call White. Ever since Thaw learned that White had deflowered Evelyn at sixteen, Thaw became preoccupied with the subject, making Evelyn repeat the details ad nauseam. He started having White followed by private detectives and made Evelyn report to him whenever she saw “the beast” passing on the street. Though she still had a soft spot in her heart for White, Evelyn always complied, realizing Thaw had spies tracking her, too.

      Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most celebrated beauty of her day. Hers was a Cinderella story with a twist. In Evelyn’s case, she exchanged a life of poverty for one with a dangerous loon in a gilded cage. She started out a small-town Pennsylvania girl, the daughter of a doting lawyer. Winfield Nesbit paid for music and dance lessons and encouraged Evelyn’s interest in literature. Then in 1895, shortly after the family moved to Pittsburgh, Winfield Nesbit died suddenly, leaving his wife and two children nearly destitute. When the sheriff put them out on the street, Mrs. Nesbit sent her children to stay with relatives and friends, but eventually scraped by with money she borrowed to run a boarding house. Evelyn, her mother, and her younger brother Howard shared one bedroom while the rest were rented out.

      A professional photographer first spotted the twelve-year-old naïf sweating in the August sun on the boarding house stoop, wearing a fetching homemade blue dress. Not long afterward the family was again evicted from their home. Evelyn and Howard stayed once more with relatives while Mrs. Nesbit found work in Philadelphia as a seamstress. After the family reunited, Evelyn obtained steady work as an artist and photographers’ model. In the summer of 1900, Mrs. Nesbit again sent her children to live with friends and relatives while she spent months looking for work as a dress designer in New York. In December of 1900, both teenagers rejoined their still unemployed mother in Manhattan. Letters of introduction from Philadelphia artists led to Evelyn being hired to pose for a prominent portrait painter. Word spread to others of the “perfectly formed nymph.” The sixteen-year-old’s modeling work quickly became the small family’s principal source of income.³ The days of making do with sometimes only bread to eat were now behind them.

      Several months later, a newspaper interview with alluring photographs of “The Little Sphinx” prompted a theatrical agent to contact Mrs. Nesbit. He arranged for Evelyn to join Broadway’s most popular show, “Florodora.” The new five-foot-tall, childlike beauty in the chorus quickly caught the eye of one of its regular patrons, Stanford White. White had become the most sought-after architect of an era when America’s superrich favored ostentatious displays of their wealth. White asked an older chorine to introduce him to Evelyn, whose first impression was of an ugly old man. The architect was a contemporary of her deceased father. But unlike the quiet and unassuming Win Nesbit, White was large and gregarious with close-cropped red hair, an untamed moustache, and a huge appetite for delicacies from gourmet food to new sexual conquests. White was willing to bide his time. He ingratiated himself with Mrs. Nesbit and became Evelyn’s benefactor. He sent her flowers, paid for an upscale apartment with the luxury of its own private bathroom, and sent her to the dentist at his expense. He suggested books for Evelyn to read to expand her cultural awareness as her father had done. White also indulged Evelyn’s sweet tooth, and invited her to taste exotic foods at private lunch and dinner parties with other guests.

      During the first several weeks of their acquaintance, White never let Evelyn drink more than one glass of champagne or stay up too late. After two months, White had completely won their trust and convinced Mrs. Nesbit that it was safe for her to take a trip back to Pittsburgh and leave Evelyn in his charge. In November of 1901, White lured Evelyn to his love nest on 24th Street on the pretense of another dinner party, plied her with champagne and led her to his bedroom. Over the next several months the two became lovers, which they kept secret from her mother.

      Source of photos: Wikipedia.https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit.

       America’s first sex symbol, Evelyn Nesbit. (Photographer: Otto Sarony, 1901.)

      Source of photos:Wikipedia.https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit.

       Gertrude Käsebier’s famous 1903 photo of “Miss N.”

      Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Eickemeyer_Jr.#/media/File:IN_MY_STUDIO,_EVELYN_NESBIT,_TIRED_BUTTERFLY,_1909.jpg

       Rudolf Eickemeyer’s prize-winning 1909 photo of Evelyn Nesbit in his studio asleep on a bearskin rug, dressed in a loose kimono, and captioned the “Tired Butterfly.”

      Though White considered his adorable “Kittens” quite extraordinary, she was only one of many under-aged chorines the married lecher turned into temporary concubines. Rumors of his debauchery thoroughly scandalized old-fashioned guardians of female purity. The President of the Society for the Suppression of Vice fumed even more when White placed a large, spot-lit statue of a nude Goddess Diana atop Madison Square Garden, higher than any other feature of the cityscape. It was a slap in the face of traditional morality, a tension that underscored life in the newly emerged metropolis, rapidly on its way to becoming a center of world trade.

      Harry Thaw’s enmity toward White had a different source, dating back at least a year before Evelyn Nesbit first arrived in New York. Thaw envied White as a charter member of the elite New York social circle to which Thaw had been denied entry. White hobnobbed with the Vanderbilts and the Astors, whose Fifth Avenue mansions he designed, and socialized with other millionaires in exclusive clubs which White also designed. Thaw was convinced White had badmouthed him to prevent Thaw’s acceptance by the New York “Four Hundred.” What fueled Thaw’s fury even more was White’s interference when Thaw tried to pick up chorus girls at Broadway shows. For their own protection, White persuaded a number of dancers to steer clear of the baby-faced younger Lothario with the glazed expression and weird giggle. Thaw had developed a reputation as a dope fiend with a violent temper.

      Thaw’s mother had used hush money to quash stories about his prior bouts of scandal, but some negative publicity had still emerged. One college peccadillo that hit the newspapers was a striking example of Thaw’s often erratic behavior. It occurred during the brief time the family’s influence got the below-average prep school student enrolled at Harvard. At a bar, Thaw might ostentatiously leave a hundred-dollar bill for a three-dollar tab. Yet he had run after a Cambridge cab driver, waving an empty shotgun because he thought the man had stiffed him out of ten cents’ change. Soon afterward, Thaw got expelled for unspecified “immoral practices” and threats to fellow students and staff.⁴ Thaw later bragged that, while at Harvard, he had spent more time playing poker than attending class; he divided his remaining time among women, cockfights and benders.

      Since his expulsion, Thaw had been publicly charged with whipping a woman he dated in New York. Thaw made frequent use of laudanum and carried a special silver case filled with syringes for injecting his own drug cocktails, which reportedly included the original “speedball” mixing cocaine, morphine and heroin. In courting Nesbit, Thaw kept his inner demons well hidden. He even disguised his identity at first, sending her flowers and other gifts under an assumed name.

      In 1902, Stanford White still took a strong paternalistic interest in seventeen-year-old Evelyn. White maintained close ties with her mother and paid for her brother’s schooling, while he added other young chorines