The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century - Simon Baatz

Written by Simon Baatz
Read by Christine Lakin
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Release date: January 16, 2018
Duration: 10:24:31

In 1901, Evelyn Nesbit, the pinup girl and penniless young actress, dined with Stanford White, the legendary architect whose works defined the New York landscape, at his 24th St. apartment. Evelyn drank champagne and was dazzled by a tour of White’s decadent rooms, which included a sumptuous velvet couch swing on which Evelyn played. Evelyn was given more champagne, and lost consciousness. She woke, nearly naked, in bed next to White. White was forty-seven years old. Evelyn Nesbit was just sixteen.

Four years later, tarnished by the air of impropriety that in those days surrounded a lowly career in the theater, Evelyn would marry Harry Thaw, a playboy millionaire rumored to be mentally unstable, and in whom she confided the story of her encounter with Stanford White. One night in 1906, a vengeful Thaw shot and killed White before hundreds of theatergoers during a performance at Madison Square Garden—a venue designed by none other than White himself.

The city—and the nation that looked to it—erupted with news of the murder and ensuing trial, then the most sensational scandal in history: one so sordid that President Teddy Roosevelt himself would try and stop the press from covering it. But the murder of Stanford White stood for far more than tabloid scandal. Evelyn’s shocking testimony would propel her to an uneasy stardom, an uncertain fortune, and send the case before the Supreme Court.

Publishers Weekly
“…The main narrative presents, without caveats, a chilling account of White drugging Nesbit in his townhouse and raping her while she was unconscious. Oddly, Baatz waits until the afterword to assert that “it is impossible to know if the rape, as Evelyn Nesbit described it, did take place,” revisiting some of the arguments made by the prosecutors during her cross-examination at trial and noting the major differences in Nesbit’s account of the contested encounter decades later in her memoir. Rather than incorporating this analysis into the main narrative, the book presents a thin recounting of the historical record that relies on dramatizations and ends with a hollow attempt to give Nesbit’s life lasting significance (“Evelyn Nesbit’s life, in the end, was little different from the lives of millions of others”). …. Still, readers will appreciate the parallels between Nesbit’s “It Girl” status and our own celebrity-obsessed culture.”

A better book on the scandal is Paula Uruburu’s American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White: The Birth of the “It” Girl and the Crime of the Century. Sadly, I don’t have access to it.