One of the most overused phrases in reporting is “crime of the century.” I think I’ve lived through three of them, myself. True, I’ve also lived through two centuries, technically—let’s all feel old for a minute—but only two. But for people who were alive at the turn of the last century, the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White was the Crime of the Century, and Evelyn Nesbit was in the middle of it. After all, Thaw was her husband, and allegedly he was avenging her honour. History would then spend decades shaming her for her own assault.
No one knows how old Nesbit was. Her birth certificate was destroyed in a fire, and her mother routinely lied about her age in order to circumvent child labor laws. What we do know is that her father died when she was young, leaving the family penniless. Her mother farmed her brother out but kept Evelyn with her; when Evelyn was possibly twelve, she was collecting rents at the boardinghouse her mother was running at the time because her mother didn’t have the fortitude to do it herself. This lack of backbone would come to haunt Evelyn in years to come, with Mrs. Nesbit proving a very bad manager of her daughter and unable to protect Evelyn from wealthy men.
At the age of about fourteen or fifteen, Evelyn began working as an artist’s model. Famously, she was a Gibson Girl, but she was also referred to in later years as “America’s first supermodel.” She posed for magazine covers, sheet music, postcards, tobacco cards, and on and on. She was one of the models who was able to transition to photography, a transition people don’t much think about. Her being in the public eye attracted the attention of wealthy older men, and one of them was architect Stanford White. We will grant Evelyn her privacy on this one; it’s trivially easy to find out what he did to her.
Then, Evelyn was pursued by Harry Thaw, another wealthy man albeit one much closer to her own age. Her mother and White had forced her to break up with John Barrymore, Drew’s grandfather, and that’s a thing to think about. Thaw, Evelyn, and Mrs. Nesbit toured Europe together; Evelyn confessed her assault and subsequent relationship with White because she believed it would cause Thaw to break off his pursuit. It didn’t. He, too, assaulted her, and eventually she agreed to marry him. All of this tells us a lot about things at the time, inasmuch as Evelyn thought being assaulted by two men would render her unfit to marry well and was afraid of poverty.
After Thaw was, rightly or wrongly, found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized, his family cut off all support of her. Evelyn did a few movies, which are as with any other movie of the time difficult to track down. She served as technical consultant on The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, one of the many versions of her story that blamed her and treated her as a seductress, but what else was she going to do? At least they paid, and by that point she needed the money desperately. Unfortunately, she was already forgotten except to be blamed by then.
