Evelyn Nesbit (Tarentum, Pennsylvania, December 25, 1884 - Santa Monica, California, January 17, 1967) was an model and actress noted for her entanglement in the murder of her ex-lover, Stanford White, by her husband Harry K. Thaw.
1901 photograph by Rudolf Eickemeyer
As a teenager, she posed for an artist, John Storm, in Pittsburgh, and achieved some measure of financial success. In 1901, at age 16, she left Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to go to New York, where she continued modelling (posing for illustrators Frederick C. Church and Charles Dana Gibson and photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr). She became a Florodora girl on Broadway. A showgirl, she carried on simultaneous romances with her "stage-door Johnnies", and soon became seriously involved with a married architect, Stanford White. He quite possibliy drugged her, and took advantage of her when he seduced her, a fact that she repeated often to her eventual husband, though at the end of her life she claimed that White was the only man she ever loved. White arranged to have her educated at a New Jersey boarding school run by the mother of Cecil B. DeMille. She became known as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing", because White installed a swing for her to sit on at one of his hideaways.
Stanford was supplanted in her affections by Harry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947), also of Pittsburgh, son of a coal and railroad baron. Thaw's attentions led to two pregnancies, both terminated, with the hospitalizations both explained as "appendectomies" - an explanation best used only once. Thaw became increasingly jealous of Nesbit (he began carrying a pistol), and was especially sensitive about her prior relationship with Stanford White. After a trip to Europe with Thaw, Evelyn accepted his proposal and they married on April 4, 1905.
On June 25, 1906 Evelyn and Harry saw White at a restaurant (the Cafè Martin) and ran into him again in the audience of the old Madison Square Garden's roof theatre at a performance of Mamzelle Champagne. During the song, "I Could Love A Million Girls", Thaw fired three shots at close range into Stanford White's face, killing him.
There were two trials. At the first, the jury was deadlocked: at the second, Thaw pled insanity, and Evelyn testified. (Thaw's mother told Evelyn that if she would testify that Stanford White abused her and that Harry only tried to protect her, she'd receive a divorce from Harry Thaw and one million dollars in compensation. She did just that, and performed in court wonderfully: he was found not guilty. Evelyn got the divorce, in 1915, but not the money). Thaw was incarcerated at the Asylum for the Criminally Insane at Matteawan, New Jersey, enjoying nearly complete freedom. In 1913 he walked out of the asylum and was driven over the border to Sherbrooke, Quebec. He was extradicted back to the United States, and in 1915 another jury found him sane.
Thaw moved back to Pittsburgh, and his subsequent life was also filled with scandalous brawls, affairs, and lawsuits. He died of a heart attack in February 22, 1947 at his home in Miami Beach, Florida; he had another home, Villa Marie Antoinette, in Bolton, New York. His will stipulated that his former wife was to receive $10,000 of his more than $1 million estate. If she did not survive him, the money was to go to her son, Russell William Thaw (see below).
After the trial, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw's career was largely unsuccessful (vaudeville performer, actor, dancer, café manager) and her life marred by suicide attempts. She married, in Elliott City, Maryland, in 1916, as her second husband, Virgil James Montani (1880-1956, professional name Jack Clifford), her dancing partner; he abandoned her in 1918 and she eventually divorced him in 1933. In 1926, however, several months after she attempted suicide over losing her job as a dancer at the Moulin Rouge Café in Chicago, she reappeared in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she gave an interview to the New York Times, stating that she and Harry K. Thaw had become reconciled and planned to resume their former relationship; nothing came of the couple's reported plans.
Evelyn Nesbit eventually died in a nursing home in Santa Monica, California, at age 82. In her later years, she taught ceramics and served as a technical consultant to a 1955 movie about the White shooting, "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," in which she was portrayed by Joan Collins. She was also portrayed by Elizabeth McGovern in the movie "Ragtime."
Evelyn had one child, Russell William Thaw (October 25, 1910 - 2002), a noted aviator who sometimes appeared in Hollywood films; the identity of his father remains in doubt. Harry K. Thaw swore he was not the child's father.
Books
Fictional works based at least in part on the Thaw/White murder
