Evelyn Nesbit
Evelyn Nesbit Biography
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About Evelyn Nesbit
Evelyn Nesbit was an American artists' model, chorus girl, and actress. She is best known for her career in New York City, as well as her husband, railroad scion Harry Kendall Thaw's obsessive and abusive fixation on both Nesbit and the prominent architect Stanford White, which resulted in White's murder by Thaw in 1906.
As a model, Nesbit was frequently photographed for mass circulation newspapers, magazine advertisements, souvenir items and calendars. When she was about fourteen, she had begun working as a model for various artists in Philadelphia. Nesbit continued after her family moved to New York, posing for artists including James Carroll Beckwith, Frederick S. Church and notably Charles Dana Gibson, who idealized her as a "Gibson Girl". She began modeling when both fashion photography (as an advertising medium) and the pin-up (as an art genre) were beginning to expand.
Evelyn became the focal point and the heart of what was known at the time as "The Crime of the Century". The next year, on June 25, 1906, her husband, Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw, murdered 52-year old architect and socialite Stanford White (of the firm McKim, Mead, and White), who had taken advantage of 16-year old Evelyn and subsequently become her lover a couple of years before she married Thaw. Harry Thaw's mother quickly financed propaganda, even a film, to portray her son as a protector of women's virtue; at the same time, the media reported the very-married White's many other transgressions involving young women. After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Thaw was retried in 1908 and found insane. He was sent away to a mental institution for the criminally insane in upstate New York, from which he which he escaped once; in 1915 he was released with reputation untarnished--a homicidal hero.
Nesbit visited Thaw while he was confined to mental asylums. She toured Europe with a dance troupe, and her son, Russell Thaw, was born in Germany. Later she took the boy with her to Hollywood, where she appeared as an actress in numerous silent films. Nesbit wrote two memoirs about her life, published in 1914 and 1934. She died in Santa Monica, California, in 1967.
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