Read Online American Eve by Paula Uruburu - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Paula Uruburu
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Unlike the painters, who preferred her without makeup, however, the photographer put some eye makeup and lipstick on Evelyn, subtle touches that nonetheless gave her a startlingly more mature appearance. Phillips was extraordinarily pleased by the pictures in which, he said, she resembled “a young Aphrodite.” He managed to have them printed in an art magazine, where they attracted a good deal of attention; they were then reproduced in the Philadelphia newspapers (and once again a year or two later in Broadway Magazine ).
By late fall, the Philadelphia newspapers had begun reporting on the “strange and fascinating creature” whose face “shows a remarkable maturity of repose, though [she is] no more than fourteen years old.” Although the issue of her correct age was already becoming a topic for debate, as Florence Evelyn’s popularity grew, so did the demand for the privilege of photographing the “rare young Pittsburgh beauty” or capturing her “dazzling allure on canvas.” As one reporter saw it, she exuded an “enchanting combination of youthful innocence and colossal self-possession.” When one of the local shopkeepers on Arch Street remarked casually to the girl that she was going to shake up the new century that was just around the corner, she almost believed it.
As New Year’s Eve 1899 approached and the final weeks of the 1800s
One of the Phillips photographs of fifteen-year-old
Evelyn posing in Philadelphia, 1900.
were peeled away, Florence Evelyn hoped that the much-heralded Century of Progress that was about to unwrap itself would live up to the hoopla and near hysteria she heard on every side. While her mother mulled over the idea of another change in the scenery behind her uniquely photogenic daughter, Florence Evelyn fantasized about how she might figure in whatever awesome changes lay ahead in the pink new tomorrow of 1900 and all tomorrows after that. But not even in her wildest dreams could she have predicted that the public’s burning desire for the perfect emblem of their imagined perfect new age would be realized in a girl from Tarentum. The setting, of course, was already obvious.
Advertising pose of sixteen-year-old Evelyn as the Sphinx.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Little Sphinx in Manhattan
By 1900, questions of identity had become a social obsession. . . . But there was something new: the favored type was one variation or other of the American female.
—Martha Banta, Imagining American Women
Vulgar tradition dictated that portliness in mature men of the dignified leisure class indicated wealth and opulence. The opposite was true for women— dictated to by the useless and expensive canons of conspicuous waste . . . under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificiality and induced pathological features attractive, so for instance the constricted waist.
—Thorsten Veblen
Mrs. Nesbit kept turning over in her head the suggestion that her coveted daughter might have a more profitable career as a photographer’s model in New York City. After a few more turns, despite Florence Evelyn’s regular income posing for a satisfied spectrum of Philadelphia painters, illustrators, and sculptors, in mid-June of 1900, Mrs. Nesbit packed up her few belongings in a ratty carpet bag and set off for New York, alone, with no plan of action whatsoever, leaving her children behind once again. What she did take with her were some letters of introduction to a few well-known metropolitan artists—but she told herself that she would use them only as a last resort. In the meantime, a confused and anxious Florence Evelyn, who, for the first time since her father’s death, had felt a pleasing sensation of security, was pulled off her pedestal and shunted back to Pittsburgh to stay with family friends, while Howard was once more planted on a family farm out in Allegheny from which he had already been uprooted twice before.
As the weeks stretched into months with
By late fall, the Philadelphia newspapers had begun reporting on the “strange and fascinating creature” whose face “shows a remarkable maturity of repose, though [she is] no more than fourteen years old.” Although the issue of her correct age was already becoming a topic for debate, as Florence Evelyn’s popularity grew, so did the demand for the privilege of photographing the “rare young Pittsburgh beauty” or capturing her “dazzling allure on canvas.” As one reporter saw it, she exuded an “enchanting combination of youthful innocence and colossal self-possession.” When one of the local shopkeepers on Arch Street remarked casually to the girl that she was going to shake up the new century that was just around the corner, she almost believed it.
As New Year’s Eve 1899 approached and the final weeks of the 1800s
One of the Phillips photographs of fifteen-year-old
Evelyn posing in Philadelphia, 1900.
were peeled away, Florence Evelyn hoped that the much-heralded Century of Progress that was about to unwrap itself would live up to the hoopla and near hysteria she heard on every side. While her mother mulled over the idea of another change in the scenery behind her uniquely photogenic daughter, Florence Evelyn fantasized about how she might figure in whatever awesome changes lay ahead in the pink new tomorrow of 1900 and all tomorrows after that. But not even in her wildest dreams could she have predicted that the public’s burning desire for the perfect emblem of their imagined perfect new age would be realized in a girl from Tarentum. The setting, of course, was already obvious.
Advertising pose of sixteen-year-old Evelyn as the Sphinx.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Little Sphinx in Manhattan
By 1900, questions of identity had become a social obsession. . . . But there was something new: the favored type was one variation or other of the American female.
—Martha Banta, Imagining American Women
Vulgar tradition dictated that portliness in mature men of the dignified leisure class indicated wealth and opulence. The opposite was true for women— dictated to by the useless and expensive canons of conspicuous waste . . . under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificiality and induced pathological features attractive, so for instance the constricted waist.
—Thorsten Veblen
Mrs. Nesbit kept turning over in her head the suggestion that her coveted daughter might have a more profitable career as a photographer’s model in New York City. After a few more turns, despite Florence Evelyn’s regular income posing for a satisfied spectrum of Philadelphia painters, illustrators, and sculptors, in mid-June of 1900, Mrs. Nesbit packed up her few belongings in a ratty carpet bag and set off for New York, alone, with no plan of action whatsoever, leaving her children behind once again. What she did take with her were some letters of introduction to a few well-known metropolitan artists—but she told herself that she would use them only as a last resort. In the meantime, a confused and anxious Florence Evelyn, who, for the first time since her father’s death, had felt a pleasing sensation of security, was pulled off her pedestal and shunted back to Pittsburgh to stay with family friends, while Howard was once more planted on a family farm out in Allegheny from which he had already been uprooted twice before.
As the weeks stretched into months with
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