Another Random Looking Up of Stuff

Thank you, PMZ, for setting off the next random looking-stuff-up obsession. Our topic today: Evelyn Nesbit and the Stanford White Murder.

Pretty girls get attention when they’re murdered, and even when they’re only standing near a murder. In this case the victim was the pretty girl’s boyfriend…manfriend…lecherous old bastard friend, Stanford “Stanny” White, an architect, who got popped on the roof of a building he designed. The details of the murder are pretty freakin picturesque, the personalities involved likewise, and the whole story occupies a place in the annals as the first great Crime of the Century—the 20th Century, I mean. There would be many more, of course.

This Evelyn Nesbit, though, was probably the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s famous Gibson Girl, and had a number of other notable attributes, not least was that she lived some of her later years in Northfield, New Jersey, one town north of me own auld sod. So sayeth Wikipedia. (She died when I was 9, and had probably left Northfield long before that, so chances are I didn’t interview her for the paper.) In youth, she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the country, with "the slim, quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies and the size of half-dollars, and a mouth made of rumpled rose petals," according to Irvin S. Cobb. She earned lots of money as an artists’ model, fashion model, and eventually an actress. The movie "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" was written about her, and she appears as a semi-fictional character in E.L. Doctorow's novel "Ragtime," also the movie made from it.

As for the swing, god, who wouldn’t want to push a beautiful 16-year-old back and forth on a velvet swing? To reinact some arcadian fantasy. Sure, throw some grapes in there, and twining vines. Don’t you have a swing, Pat? You architects know how to have a good time.