She later called him 'a benevolent vampire' and described him as both 'infinitely mean' and 'generously big.' Until her death in 1967, she would say White was the only man she'd ever loved.

(His obscure fetish was watching swinging girls kick at paper parasols.) When the dreamy relationship turned into rape (inevitably, to the jaded observer), Nesbit felt shocked, betrayed and yet more beholden to White than ever. A married man but a well-known womanizer (or rather, girl-izer), White introduced Nesbit to high culture and fine food, lavished financial support on her family and invited her over for rides on his red velvet swing. At 16, the virginal Nesbit fell in with White, the 46-year-old creator of wonders like the Garden and the Washington Square Arch. Her mother ostensibly tried to protect Evelyn from men but actually encouraged their attention for her own profit. She, her mother and her brother bounced from one temporary home to another before a teenage Nesbit pulled the family out of debt by modeling and then acting. In Uruburu's telling, Nesbit had a bucolic childhood in Pennsylvania until her father's sudden death, which plunged the family into penury. The Gilded Age 'It' girl, in other words, was far less Salome than Pauline (as in 'The Perils of').

Nesbit comes across as a naïve young girl manipulated by both the great architect and his millionaire assailant, both of whom happened to be sexual predators. In 'American Eve,' Paula Uruburu, making magnificent use of Nesbit's memoirs, letters and photographs (which introduce many of the chapters), places the notorious murder in a new context. She has long been held vicariously responsible for the 1906 murder of the architect Stanford White, who was shot by Nesbit's jealous husband during a performance at what was then Madison Square Garden. New York Times Review INSOFAR as the Gilded Age model Evelyn Nesbit - arguably the most famous face of the early 20th century - is remembered today, it's as a tease and a gold digger.

American Eve by Paula Uruburu