a century ago as a model. She revolutionised
cultural life, writes Lindsay Baker.
What makes a supermodel? A preternatural
beauty, of course, but there is more – a
certain charisma, an unerring fashion instinct,
a steely resilience, sex appeal. And a mere
model becomes a ‘super’ when she becomes
not only stratospherically famous, but also
when she somehow encapsulates her era. The
supermodel provides a snapshot of a moment
in time because she is always at the epicentre
of the fashionable cultural life of her time –
and at its vanguard. Every decade has their
supers, from impish, mini-skirted,
swinging-‘60s icons Jean Shrimpton and
Twiggy to quirky Cara Delevingne today.
But the phenomenon goes back further than
Twiggy, to the very start of the 20th Century,
when the world’s first ever supermodel rose to
fame. Evelyn Nesbit, a willowy, copper-haired
beauty from Philadelphia, was the most
sought-after artists’ and fashion model in
America’s Gilded Age. Her life was turbulent
and eventful, and her fame peaked when she
became embroiled in a murder, and what was
then dubbed ‘the trial of the century’.
Nesbit embodied her era in more ways than
one. The late 19th Century was a glamorous
period of rapid economic growth in the US but
it was also an era of considerable poverty, as
many poor European immigrants poured in.
Nesbit in her lifetime saw both sides. She
came from a modest Scots-Irish background
in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, and after her
father died leaving debts, her mother
struggled to support the family. It was also an
age with one foot still in the starchy Victorian
era and one just about to step into the
permissive Roaring ‘20s. The young Evelyn
was from a ‘respectable’ family, and modelled
– fully dressed – for artists from the age of
14, as a way out of poverty for the whole
family. When she came to New York in 1900,
her rise was meteoric. But she was also
stepping into a new, different world.
James Carroll Beckwith, whose main patron
was John Jacob Astor, took her under his
wing, introduced her to artists and illustrators,
and Nesbit was soon the most in-demand
model in New York. She was the inspiration
for numerous art works, including sculptor
George Grey Barnard’s famous piece
Innocence (now in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art) and Charles Dana Gibson’s Women:
The Eternal Question (1905). She was a
popular face too on the illustrated covers of
many journals and magazines, among them
Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, The Delineator
and Ladies’ Home Journal, and her likeness
was also to be found advertising everything
from face creams to toothpastes.
In demand
Nesbitt’s soft-featured, youthful face soon
became ubiquitous, to be seen on postcards,
tobacco cards, calendars and
chromolithographs. She often posed for
illustrators in costume – a wood nymph, a
gypsy, a Grecian goddess, a geisha girl – she
was always clothed and the resulting images
were not overtly sexual, though there was a
pin-up suggestiveness about them that no
doubt contributed to their popularity – and
Nesbit’s celebrity.
Fashion photography was just emerging, and
when Nesbit ventured into this new medium
as a ‘live model’ posing for early pioneer Joel
Federe, she was an instant hit. As
photographs gained popularity and started to
take over from print illustrations, Nesbit was
soon generating massive newspaper sales
and becoming instantly recognisable to the
public. Before long – in 1901 – she was
signed up to the chorus line at the hugely
successful Broadway play Florodora. Nesbit
was the toast of the town, and was soon
appearing regularly in the gossip columns and
theatrical periodicals of the day. It was not
long before she left the chorus line and took
on a speaking role in a Broadway play, The
Wild Rose.
Like her supermodel successors Nesbit had
become an icon of her era, and she perfectly
embodied the paradoxes of that age, too. As
Paula Uruburu, author of a biography of
Nesbit, American Eve , puts it, “For that first
heady decade of the 20th Century, Evelyn
Nesbit was the American Dream Girl whose
‘face was her fortune’ and whose life reflected
the era’s intoxicating, accelerated and daring
mood… she embodied all the contradictory
impulses [of the Gilded Age]; at times she
seemed a picture of Victorian sentimentality,
but her bewitching… smile promised
something forbidden.”
The perils of fame
During her time as a ‘Florodora Girl’ Nesbit
met the architect and New York socialite
Stanford White, whose firm’s projects included
some iconic buildings, among them the
second Madison Square Garden, Tiffany’s,
Washington Square Arch and Cornelius
Vanderbilt’s mansion. White was at first an
avuncular figure in the young Nesbit’s life, but
soon became her lover and benefactor,
providing her and her family with extravagant
gifts and an elegant apartment. It was after
their year-long relationship ended and Nesbit
was newly married to millionaire Harry K Thaw
that events began to unravel dramatically.
Demented with jealousy and – he claimed –
defending his young wife’s honour, Thaw
approached her ex-lover White one evening at
a performance at Madison Square Garden and
shot him dead at close range.
Nesbit was the star witness in a trial so full of
shocking details about her relationships with
the men (both of whom it was alleged had
been abusive to her) that a church group
attempted to ban reporting of the gory details.
Evelyn’s mother was accused of prostituting
her daughter to White. Evelyn was cast in the
press as ‘the girl in the red velvet swing’ in
reference to a swing that White had installed
in his luxurious, multi-storey apartment.
Because of the huge amount of publicity the
case attracted, the jury was sequestered – the
first time ever in American legal history that
such a restriction had been deemed
necessary. Thaw was sentenced to life
incarceration in a hospital for the criminally
insane. As Uruburu says, “Tragically, almost
as quickly as her star rose, America’s first
supermodel, sex goddess and bona-fide
celebrity fell victim to the very culture that
created and consumed her.”
Yet, like any self-respecting super, Nesbit
showed resilience and made a life for herself
after these traumatic events – as a mother, a
silent-screen actress, a vaudeville performer
and the writer of two memoirs. Along with the
art works and photographs that survive of
Nesbit, there have been poems and plays
about her, the 1955 film The Girl in the Red
Velvet Swing and the novel Ragtime by EL
Doctorow, which features a subplot about the
murder, and was adapted to a film and a
musical. Even as recently as 2010 her
influence was still being felt – in the HBO TV
series Boardwalk Empire, the character Gillian
is loosely based on Nesbit. Evelyn Nesbit’s
legacy lives on and will probably continue to
do so – who knows, maybe for even longer
than that of the supermodels who followed in
her footsteps.
Source: BBC Culture
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