ShareThisAfter years of pointing out mistakes to publishers and getting the brush, I can now report partial vindication in my quixotic, annoying campaign to set the record straight about the lives of Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw.Corrections were made in Paula Uruburu's May release, "American Eve," after I pointed out errors to the publisher, Riverhead Books. Even more interestingly, Uruburu added a kind of apology to the final product.Here it is:"I therefore apologize if at times my relating of her recollections leads to some factual errors or seeming inconsistencies, particularly regarding her early life."OK, blame poor dead Nesbit in part, but, thank you. At least, readers of Uruburu's book will have a more accurate account of Western Pennsylvania in the 1890s.My campaign started when Riverhead sent me an advance copy in January. The subtitle is "Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White. The Birth of the 'It' Girl and the Crime of the Century," that crime being Thaw's 1906 killing of White in a jealous rage over Nesbit.The story's been told frequently before -- such as the 1955 film "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" and in the local media, from Mount Lebanon Magazine to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.As I read Uruburu's description of Nesbit's childhood in Tarentum, Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh's North Side) and Pittsburgh in the 1890s, things popped up about the people and landscape that seemed wrong. I poked around here and there and found a string of mistakes starting with the age of Nesbit's father when he died. That was corrected.Her descriptions of Tarentum, Allegheny and Pittsburgh's East End were off along with her geography, which allowed the Nesbits to wander casually between Allegheny and Shadyside, a neighborhood in the East End. Those disparities remain.I felt her depiction of the Thaws as "nouveau riche" was inaccurate because the family started making its fortune here after the Revolutionary War and made many contributions to the city.Uruburu's rewrite: "Harry Thaw, in spite of the fact that his family roots reached back to post-Revolutionary America, acted out as if 'nouveau riche'..."So, he wasn't nouveau, but acted like it, when in fact, Thaw was just plain crazy -- and acted like it.Several other fixes were made, although in the process, the town of Natrona came out as "Natoria." Other objections were not addressed, but it's a start.As for the overall book itself, Uruburu, as she said, focuses on Nesbit, a waiflike young woman with no discernible talent except her ethereal face and ability to please men. Under her widowed mother's direction, she became a teen model and then a Broadway chorine, which in those days, was a euphemism for hooker.Thaw's shooting of architect Stanford White June 25, 1906, in New York City opened up the lurid can of worms that was the private lives of Manhattan sybarites.Nesbit was Mrs. Thaw by then; earlier, as a teen-ager, she had entertained the corpulent White in his exclusive sex pad.The trials that followed revealed the famous architect as a regular despoiler of young ladies and the unbalanced mental state of Thaw, a wealthy momma's boy and pervert.After the killer was sent to the looney bin, his mother cut the young lady adrift by arranging a divorce. She was left destitute, even though she wrote not one, but two "memoirs.""American Eve" is Nesbit's story, then, refashioned by Uruburu, who takes great liberty with Nesbit's writing as well as her letters and seems to accept with little question her side of the story.Her "Eve" was a proto-feminist whose life "illuminated ... the brightest and darkest aspects of the collective American Dream she embodied."Written with a certain verve and cleverness, Uruburu's book is a lively history of the lurid New York entertainment world of the early 20th century, but as a defense of a willing participant of that scene, it's a myopic, if not fabricated, view.(Book editor Bob Hoover can be reached at bhoover(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Book about a sensational true-life murder case is corrected
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