Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit
In 1906, Evelyn Thaw, a beautiful chorus girl from Pittsburgh, found herself at the center of a scandal and the most publicized murder since Lizzie Borden.  The murder of New York’s most famous architect Stanford White by Pittsburgh playboy Harry K. Thaw had the nation reeling with shock.  Harry shot Stanford White during the musical premiere of "Mlle. Champagne" on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden during the evening of June 25, 1906, proclaiming to the world that White had seduced and "ruined" his wife, the former Evelyn Nesbit.Even before that fateful night in June 1906, everyone knew Evelyn’s face; her picture adored every newspaper and magazine in America as "America’s prettiest girl model," and she was immortalized as Charles Dana Gibson’s favorite "Gibson Girl."  If the American public did not know Evelyn’s name before that tragic night in 1906, they were certainly made aware of it the following morning.Known as "the girl on the red velvet swing," Evelyn earned this moniker when she described swinging naked on a red velvet swing in Stanford White’s New York studio apartment.  Stanford White had supposedly drugged and raped the sixteen-year-old Evelyn in the autumn of 1901.  Newspapers and tabloids jumped on the story.  The sensational White-Thaw murder case was the perfect story to increase circulation.  It had everything:  glamour, money, romance, drugs, sex, and insanity.In 1914, after two murder trials and Harry K. Thaw’s ongoing insanity hearings, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw fled from notoriety to Europe.  She penned and published her first memoirs "The Story of My Life," while appearing at London’s Hippodrome Theatre.  As the world moved through the 20th century, copies of "The Story of My Life" became rare, until only portions of her 1914 memoirs were available to the public.  This edition is a close approximation to the same manuscript that Evelyn sent to her London publishers on a late summer day long ago in 1914.