ÉMILE ZOLA, IN HIS 1880 NOVEL NANA, IMAGINED THE FICTIONAL life of Anna (Nana) Coupeau, a courtesan living in Paris. Nana first appears in the story as an actress in an operetta at the Théâtre des Variétés who, despite her obvious lack of talent, mesmerizes the audience with her physical beauty. Nana has a series of lovers, abandoning each one as soon as he proves unable to provide her with the luxuries that she has come to expect. She is never satisfied, and her demands become increasingly outrageous, eventually leaving each of her lovers destitute. Nana leaves a trail of devastation behind her, destroying the careers and marriages of those men—representatives of the Parisian bourgeoisie—who pursue her. Zola provided his novel with a grim ending: Nana contracts smallpox and dies alone, her beauty hideously destroyed by the disease.
It was no longer necessary, after the murder of Stanford White, according to one New York writer, to read literature to experience the passions unleashed by the beauty of a superbly attractive woman. Evelyn Nesbit, who had first appeared on the Broadway stage at sixteen, supposedly conquered Stanford White and then a second man, Harry Thaw, and she provoked the jealousy between her suitors that exploded in violence, Thaw killing his rival in a crowded theater in Madison Square Garden. Evelyn Nesbit, the writer concluded, was a latter-day version of Nana Coupeau, a woman who enslaved her lovers, coveting wealth and luxury and paying no heed to conventional morality.1
But the anonymous writer knew nothing of Evelyn Nesbit, and the remarks on her character could not have been further from the truth. Both Stanford White and Harry Thaw were too sophisticated and Evelyn Nesbit was too naïve for such a scenario to be plausible. White was immensely influential, one of the most prominent New Yorkers of his day; Thaw, wealthy beyond all measure, mingled easily with the social elite of two continents; so it was absurd to claim that a sixteen-year-old chorus girl with no experience of the world could have lured such men into the catastrophe that engulfed all three in 1906.
Stanford White revealed his true character when, shortly after meeting Evelyn Nesbit, he persuaded his friend Rudolf Eickemeyer to take a series of photographs of Evelyn, then sixteen years old. White, forty-seven, and Eickemeyer, thirty-nine, made all the arrangements, choosing the clothes that she wore for the session, and Evelyn Nesbit, unaware that the two men were deliberately manipulating her, posed for the camera in a way that suggested that she was sexually available. These photographs, taken sometime in the fall of 1901, have survived and now exist prominently on the Internet, reinforcing the impression that Evelyn’s supposed promiscuity somehow contributed to the drama that played out between White and Harry Thaw.2
It is not easy to investigate the intimate life of an individual living a century ago, but the available evidence indicates that Evelyn Nesbit was never promiscuous, as legend would have it. She undoubtedly had opportunities for casual encounters—during the 1910s she made movies in Hollywood, and during the 1920s she sang in Atlantic City nightclubs—but she always sought security and permanence, marrying her second husband, Jack Clifford, shortly after her divorce from Harry Thaw in April 1916.
Thaw, like White, shamelessly manipulated Evelyn Nesbit for his own purposes. His attorneys in the first trial asserted that White had raped Evelyn as a young girl, and that Thaw therefore had reason to kill White. There was, however, only one person who could testify that the rape had occurred, and Evelyn was the principal witness at the trial, telling the court that White had lured her to his town house, subsequently drugging her and raping her while she lay unconscious. But on cross-examination Evelyn was required to provide details about her relationship with White, and during the interrogation by the district attorney, she revealed aspects of her life as an actress that were unacceptable in polite society. Evelyn, to save her husband, had humiliated herself, sacrificing her dignity and her reputation.
The tragedy of Evelyn Nesbit’s life is that there had never been any necessity for her to testify. The district attorney, Travers Jerome, realizing that she did not understand the consequences that would follow from his cross-examination, offered at the outset to accept a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Harry Thaw, by accepting Jerome’s offer, would have avoided the death penalty and would also have spared his wife her public humiliation; but Thaw’s attorneys chose instead to put Evelyn on the witness stand in a futile attempt to prove his justification for the murder of White. Jerome’s cross-examination of Evelyn Nesbit, moreover, raised doubts about the truthfulness of her testimony and questioned whether the rape had even occurred.
It does not frequently happen that an author is unsure that an event occurred; yet, surprisingly, it is impossible to know if the rape, as Evelyn Nesbit described it, did take place. One hesitates to throw doubt on her account, told with apparent sincerity, and recounted, moreover, two times without any contradiction between the first occasion and the second, but it would be foolish to ignore the questions that Jerome posed to his witness.
How is it possible, for example, to explain the interaction between Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit after the rape if it had been as traumatic an event as Evelyn claimed? She admitted, on cross-examination, that she had seen White several times alone in his apartment after he had raped her, and she confessed also that she had subsequently written letters to White during her travels in Europe with Harry Thaw in 1903. Her testimony at the first trial was detailed and precise on some points but surprisingly vague on others. She could neither describe the weather on the day when she claimed the rape had occurred nor say, even to the month, when White had attacked her. The district attorney maintained, in conversations with reporters outside the courtroom, that Evelyn Nesbit had accidentally revealed the day of the rape as Tuesday, November 5, 1901, and Jerome stated that he could have established an alibi for Stanford White if the rules of the courtroom had permitted him to do so.3
Did the rape happen? It will never be possible now to know the answer; but it is certainly the case that Thaw’s lawyers, eager to justify their exorbitant fees, were determined to win an acquittal. It is at least feasible that they invented the entire episode and then successfully manipulated Evelyn Nesbit into testifying falsely in court that Stanford White had raped her. Thirty years later, writing in her autobiography, Prodigal Days, Evelyn recalled that evening very differently. White did not drug her, she wrote in Prodigal Days; she lost consciousness only because she had drunk too much champagne. She lost her virginity to White, she acknowledged, but in contrast to her courtroom testimony in 1907, the event here seems almost benign, not so much a rape as a sexual initiation. She was embarrassed and started to cry, but White, in her later account, behaved almost like a gentleman, speaking tenderly to her and soothing her so that she remained calm.4
Many historians have discussed the relationship between White and Evelyn Nesbit, usually as an aside in writing about White’s architectural work, and some writers have repeated the claim that Nesbit had an abortion in January 1903 when she was a pupil at the DeMille school. But there is no evidence to support this assertion, and it appears likely that, as she wrote in her autobiography, she suffered an attack of appendicitis. It seems improbable that Nathaniel Bowditch Potter, the physician who attended Evelyn Nesbit at Pompton and subsequently cared for her in New York, would have associated himself with the felony crime of abortion. The New Jersey legislature had outlawed abortion in 1849 and New York State followed suit in 1869. Potter, professor of surgery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the medical school at Columbia University, was a leading member of the medical profession, and there is little reason to think that he would have jeopardized his career by performing an abortion.5
Several years later, in October 1910, Evelyn Nesbit did give birth to a boy. A newspaper reporter, Jack Francis, and not Harry Thaw, as Evelyn claimed, was the father. Francis had been close to Evelyn Nesbit in New York; they had lived together in Germany; and Evelyn, on returning to Manhattan, stayed in a house uptown that Francis rented. Several witnesses, including Jack Francis’s brother Peter, testified in 1916, during Harry Thaw’s divorce suit, that Jack Francis had admitted paternity of the child.6
The arc of Evelyn Nesbit’s life bears testimony to her courage and fortitude. She had few resources as a young girl—her formal education at the DeMille school lasted only a few months—and her marriage to Harry Thaw became a heavy burden, a millstone that dragged her down even many years after their separation. She had done nothing to provoke Thaw’s murder of Stanford White, yet she became tainted in the public eye through her association with the affair; and even now, more than a century later, some authors treat Evelyn Nesbit disparagingly, denying her dignity and respect. She eventually achieved a measure of independence and made her own way, earning her livelihood in the silent movies and then as a cabaret singer. It had been her misfortune to be caught, as a young girl, between two men, each of whom thought only of his own desires, but she eventually triumphed over her circumstances. Every life is a daily series of advances and retreats, intimate victories and private defeats, all measured not by grand events but by an awareness of the obstacles that have been overcome along the way. Evelyn Nesbit’s life, in the end, was little different from the lives of millions of others, a story of perseverance and determination, of achievement and independence, that nothing could finally diminish.