Silent Wierdness: Born Today December 25: Evelyn Nesbit (Sorted Edition)

Monday, December 25, 2017

Born Today December 25: Evelyn Nesbit (Sorted Edition)

1884??-1967

Florence Evelyn Nesbit--model, chorus girl, actress, media "sensation,--controversial figure that she was--was born on Christmas day in Tarentum, Pennsylvania (very near Pittsburgh). It is thought that her actual birth year was 1886 (or after...), but this is unconfirmable at this time. She herself said much, much later in life that her mother added "several" years to her age--so it's not completely out of the question that even she didn't really remember her actual birth year. She is most famous for being infamous, but for the purposes of this blog, she did appear (later on) in silent films, many with her young son Russell. I have no desire (or time, given the time of year...) to get into all the details of her rather tragic young life (there are plenty of great places around the web to catch the salacious details!), suffice that her and her family's life changed forever when her father, a lawyer, died suddenly when she was around 8 years old. He left behind copious debts and two young children (Florence was the oldest, and there was a younger brother). The family, destitute, was put out of their home. Her mother sent her younger brother to live with relatives and tried to find work in the Pittsburgh area as a seamstress. They lived hand-to-mouth, moving constantly and surviving very often on charity. It was around this time that her mother reportedly started using her blinding, and very young, good looks to advantage. Nesbit claimed that when her mother tried to start a boarding house, she sent young Florence to collect the rent from the mostly male lodgers who were staying there in the first place because of the child's looks. Her mother eventually found work as a saleswoman at Wannamaker's Department store in Philadelphia--her two children joined her there and became store employees themselves. This is when Florence would come to the attention of local artists. Her first modeling job was innocent enough, as the artist was confirmed to be a woman, and earned the family real, much needed money. So her modelling career took off and she would pose for artists of different mediums; she has even been called the world's first super-model--though all of her modelling was done when she was seriously underage. This was bound to bring her to the attention of all types, including pedophile older men. Such was unfortunately the case for her, when her modeling took the family to New York, where she basically became a super-star (and eventually also a chorus girl). Her face graced the covers many very popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Hapers and others. She also became a popular pin-up girl via post-cards. She also became one of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girls. Evelyn found modeling for artists, especially painters, painstaking and laborious and pestered her mother to allow her to enter into theater work instead. (One of the most famous portraits of Nesbit was painted by artist James Carroll Beckwith in 1901).

Very well known illustration by Gibson entitled Woman: The Eternal Question, featuring Nesbit (while seriously underage) with her hair styled as a question mark.

This is around the time that things began to go wrong...very wrong. She succeeded in convincing her mother to allow her to appear in the crazy phenom that was the staging of the Edwardian musical play Florodora at the Casino Theater on Broadway (this was "on Broadway" in name only even during this day and age). It was around this time that she began to go by the name she is famously (or infamously) known by: Evelyn. She was very popular (inspiring more than a little titillation due to her young age) and the experience gave her the theater bug. Near as anyone can assess, she possessed little to no acting skill at all--it was all her looks...and her youth. It was at this time that she and her family crossed paths with rather infamous architect (and pedophile apparently) Stanford White. He eventually contrived and succeeded in taking her virginity (no one knows for sure how old she was, though she definitely was not older than 16--probably more like 14). After this she became one of his young mistresses. Not long after this her path crossed a young man working as an illustrator at a New York newspaper who was John Barrymore. He was seriously smitten with her and attended many performances of hers at the theater just to gaze upon her. They had a relationship that in most circumstances would have led to marriage, but her mother objected, claiming that Barrymore's job prospects were poor....(geez!). He would later state many times over that Nesbit was his first serious love. She then got entangled with the spoiled rotten and clearly insane railroad & mining heir Henry Kendall Thaw. Thaw would eventually murder White, and the whole trial caused a sensation that was splashed across newspapers worldwide. Barrymore was retained as a witness in the trial, but ultimately didn't testify. [It was ostensibly with Thaw that she had her only child Russell William Thaw, conceived she claimed during a conjugal visit, though Thaw always denied paternity and many speculated at the time that the child was Barrymore's (unlikely).] All of this, and Evelyn still had not yet made it into a film!

One of Evelyn's live model shots during a art photo session, long before her troubles began.

Well, technically, that's not quite true. She had indeed been filmed as herself in 1907 in a sensationalistic short entitled The Unwritten Law: A Thrilling Drama Based on the Thaw-White Tragedy (two copies of the film survive in archives in New York and London). The film was made by Lubin and actually released theatrically. As far as actual acting in films goes, she didn't actually make her formal debut until 1914, by then a life time away from where she started! She debuted in a role that is just plain strange for her tabloid character in actual life. She plays Miriam Gruenstein a young Jewish woman, who along with her father Isaac, are the only survivors of a group of Jewish people sent into exile in Siberian Russia in the Lubin Manufacturing produced Threads of Destiny. The film ends with Miriam becoming an older man's (and the murderer of her people to boot) mistress....this part strikes a familiar tone with Evelyn's actual life (the film is also presumed lost). She is billed as Evelyn Nesbit Thaw. She only had 10 more film credits to her name during her lifetime, with several of them featuring her along side her real-life son Russell. The last of these was an Allan Dwan film The Hidden Woman. Through all of this, two murder trials had come and gone, her connection to the wealthy Thaw family was petered out well before 1920. She was left to her own devises to make ends meet. In the 1920's, she reportedly ran a speakeasy, or two; and by the 1930's she was dancing vaudeville, she was quick to note that she never danced in a strip tease, though the thought of it didn't seem to bother her one jot, she told the New York Times: "I wish I were a strip-teaser. I wouldn't have to bother with so many clothes." During World War II, she lived in Los Angeles, teaching ceramics and sculpting for which she had more talent than acting. She gets no official credit, though she certainly should, for her role in the highly fictional account of life committed to film that was the 1955 film The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing starring Joan Collins, Ray Milland and Farley Granger. Nesbit served as a consultant on the film. She was even paid for her time, so IMDb, credit is due here! After this, she lived most of the rest of her life in Northfield, New Jersey. Toward the end of her life, she moved into a nursing home in Santa Monica, California and on the 17th of January, 1967 she passed away at the age of, or around, 82. She is buried at Holy Cross in Culver City. During her life, she was also also married to minor film actor Jack Clifford--who was actually an Italian whose real last name was Montani. Her son later became a celebrated pilot and served in World War II.