Imagine the following scenario: a beautiful young girl rises from humble beginnings to become the most recognizable model in New York City. She has an affair with a married man 30 years her senior. She then weds the heir to a railroad fortune, who murders her previous lover in front of 900 people at Madison Square Garden. 

Sounds like the plot of a film, or a tabloid exposé, doesn’t it? 

Surprisingly enough, it is neither, but rather the true-life story of Evelyn Nesbit, a Gilded Age supermodel who became infamous in 1906 when her husband, Harry Thaw, shot and killed the celebrated architect Stanford White. At the time of the murder, Nesbit was only 21 years old. She received little sympathy from her contemporaries or the press, who generally looked down on her with scorn. 

In American Eve (Riverhead, $27.95), a new biography of Nesbit, Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu seeks to rehabilitate her image. The result is an absorbing portrait, not of a siren who lured one man to his death and another into madness, but of a vulnerable teenager whose life and career were ruined by a pair of unscrupulous narcissists. 

Uruburu tries “to let Evelyn speak for herself as much as possible, since her voice is the one that has been the most muffled and misinterpreted over the last hundred years.” She relies heavily on Nesbit’s two memoirs, The Story of My Life (1914) and Prodigal Days (1934), and also mines an archive of personal papers, letters, and photographs provided by the Nesbit family. 

American Eve is an absorbing portrait, not of a siren who lured one man to his death and another into madness, but of a vulnerable teenager whose life and career were ruined by a pair of unscrupulous narcissists.

Evelyn Nesbit was born in a suburb of Pittsburgh in the mid-1880s. Her father died when she was 11, leaving her and her brother in the care of their derelict mother. As a child, she was discovered by the Philadelphia fine arts scene and began modeling. In 1900, 15-year-old Evelyn moved with her mother and brother to New York City, where she was instantly successful and became the family’s sole breadwinner. She would later reflect, “I do not know that to be brought into the public eye so young is the happiest of experiences.” 

Nesbit appeared in advertisements for everything from chocolates to sewing machines. She was “dubbed the ‘modern Helen’ by one columnist,” Uruburu writes, “and her evocative and soon familiar face launched any number of advertising campaigns.” For manufacturers who were trying to “sell an American look,” Nesbit epitomized the “American dream girl.” 

Standing only five feet tall, Nesbit projected an innocent yet seductive persona that appealed to men and women alike. Uruburu repeatedly compares Nesbit to mythic beauties such as “Venus, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra.” Although her face appeared regularly in the print media, it was as an actress in a Broadway show that she attracted the attention of Stanford White and Harry Thaw. 

White was a famous architect and a darling of New York high society. He was also a middle-aged adulterer who regularly invited teenage chorus girls to his various Manhattan residences, where he dazzled them with lavish entertainments. In public, White served as Nesbit’s benefactor, showering her and her family with comforts and luxuries. In private, she became White’s mistress, thinking of him as a “benevolent vampire.” In her memoirs, Nesbit claims that White raped her one evening after she passed out from drinking too much champagne. At the time, she was 16 and he was 46. 

A serial philander, White soon grew bored with Nesbit. This provided an opening for railroad heir Harry Thaw, an ill-tempered mama’s boy who began courting the “modern Helen” when she was 17. Thaw took Nesbit and her mother on an ill-fated holiday to Europe, during which Evelyn made the grave mistake of telling him about her relationship with White. Thaw flew into a violent rage. 

Despite this glimpse into Thaw’s dark side, Nesbit married him in April 1905. The following summer, at a concert on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Thaw approached the now 52-year-old White and shot him in the face before a crowd of stunned theatergoers. 

At Thaw’s subsequent trial, Nesbit was compelled to recount the lurid details of her affair with White. It ended with a hung jury, which meant she had to recite her harrowing testimony again at a second trial. This time, Harry was spared the death penalty and sentenced to a mental hospital. Nesbit had helped to save her husband’s life, but her career and reputation were lost. 

Uruburu depicts White and Thaw as volatile, intensely controlling men who had a “Jekyll-and-Hyde ability to conceal the darker side of their personalities.” White fantasized that he was Pygmalion, a mythological sculptor, and that Nesbit was a nymph he had created, while Thaw considered himself a champion of “American girlhood” for killing Nesbit’s seducer. Each man used his knowledge of Nesbit’s tenuous finances to manipulate her.

As Uruburu points out, Thaw harbored a grudge against White long before either of them had ever heard of Evelyn Nesbit. Thaw blamed White for his rejection from a handful of exclusive New York men’s clubs that White had designed and built. So the murder may have had less to do with Nesbit and more to do with Thaw’s longstanding envy and hatred of White.

The book ends abruptly after Thaw’s second trial, with one short chapter devoted to Nesbit’s later life. She divorced Thaw, worked sporadically in show business, and suffered from depression, morphine addiction, and alcoholism. She died at the age of 82 in Southern California, having spent her final years as a sculptor. 

A gripping read with a tragic denouement, American Eve ultimately highlights the importance of being a discriminating judge of character. 

Elise Passamani is a contributing editor to THE AMERICAN.

Image by Darren Wamboldt/The Bergman Group.