The Value of An Artist’s Date
The point of going on an artist’s date is not to work but to play
A LOT has happened since the last dispatch. I finished a draft of Vegas Girls, the second book of The Queenpin Chronicles, and while it’s with the editor I’m fleshing out my ideas for Havana Girls. I can’t wait to share them both with you!
This is my newsletter/community space (and now a podcast), Ill-Behaved Women, to celebrate women (and those who identify) and connect. When I returned to my first love, fiction, I realized this was the thru-line connecting all my columns, articles, essays and books.
Because history is already littered with the untold stories of the well-behaved.
Onward.
Since June, I’ve had the chance to meet many of you at recent events, including the night at Water Street organized by The Women’s Creative (check out the video on Instagram!), an amazing evening with friends old and new in Winter Haven, and a spectacular signing at Barnes & Noble.
Next up: NERD NITE! It’s sold out… But, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble in Orland Park, Aug 10, and The Book Cellar in conversation with
on Aug. 22!Of, if your book club has read Florida Girls, maybe we can meet up in person?
This post is about my love for Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and to encourage you to try it out if you feel you’ve lost your creative spark. Truly, doing the work was one of the more painful exercises of my adult life. Not only because the book calls for inviting more creativity into your life, Cameron makes it plain that carving out space for your creative sprite requires some serious decluttering. In my case, that meant getting rid of people and activities that I was letting make me feel like shit, because that was my “normal.”
I’m not doing morning pages right now, but I always love a good artist’s date. That’s a time I set aside to go and do something just for the sake of play. It’s more mindset than atmosphere—I can do it at an IKEA—but in this case I actually went to the St. Pete Museum of Fine Art.
This image stayed with me, to the point that after looking into the woman in the photograph, I’m now holding space for a possible novel… Plus we have FLORIDA & PITTSBURGH connections!
This is a hand-tinted photograph of Evelyn Nesbit (American, 1884-1967), famed Gibson Girl, Coca-Cola model, and last seen on a 1998 stamp (uncredited). Some say she was the original “it” girl.
Her husband, the wealthy but unstable Henry Kendal Thaw (1871-1947), obsessed over her prior relationship with the architect and noted predator Stanford White (1853-1906), thinking he’d “ruined” his wife. Thaw murdered him in front of hundreds of witnesses at the rooftop theatre of New York City's Madison Square Garden in 1906.
During the trial, journalists wrote of Nesbit’s “liquid brown eyes” and “rosy Cupid’s bow mouth,” often commenting she looked like no other girl. But it wasn’t the first time she’d been seen.
Nesbit became a model shortly after her father died suddenly, leaving the family broke. They moved to Philadelphia, where she was spotted by an artist in a department store. Struck by her beauty, he asked her to sit for a paid portrait, kicking of a modeling career that her mother encouraged as the income supported the entire family.
She went on to pose for women’s magazines such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan, as well as calendars and ads. As a teenager she posed in various costumes, and sometimes semi-nude.
1901, Nesbit made the leap onto Broadway to join the hit production “Florodora” as a chorus dancer. During this time the 16-year-old attracted the attention of both Henry Thaw, heir to a railroad fortune; and Stanford White, 30 years her senior.
White was a celebrated architect — he designed Tiffany’s and the Washington Square Arch and helped usher in the “American Renaissance” period. He also maintained a number of exclusive social clubs for well-to-do men around New York City, while he himself was notorious for pursuing underage showgirls.
White’s strategy was to invite girls to his various “snuggeries,” then groom them using money and attention until they gave in to a sexual relationship.
Quoted 20 years later, Nesbit wrote, “I would dare not say of him that he ruined my life … He merely made a way for me … a painful way … which inevitably was mine.”
After White lost interest in Nesbit, she fell ill and needed pricey surgery. In 1903, her mother urged her to contact Thaw. When she did, he sent a top doctor, then whisked Nesbit and her mother away for a European vacation to recover.
Thaw, nicknamed “Mad Harry,” was known for excessive drinking, drug use, and erratic and violent behavior, which his mother often paid to keep quiet. In New York City, he had a reputation for antics such as lighting cigars with $100 bills. He once rode a horse up the steps of the Union Club — one of White’s exclusive places clubs where Thaw desperately wanted access.
Perhaps not suprisingly, Thaw also financed “anti-vice” efforts as a pet cause. He saw White as an enemy.
While in Europe, Mad Harry went on a rampage with Nesbit as his target. He treated her worse than White ever had, and she returned to the States worse off.
After three years of begging forgiveness, the pair wed in 1905.
Nesbit was dubbed the “Mistress of Millions,” though he forced her to wear all black (even to her wedding), and she mostly hid in their Pittsburgh mansion.
Thaw, after two trials, was not convicted but remanded to a state hospital until 1915.
After the trial the couple divorced and Nesbit, now cut off, traveled with a vaudeville troop through Europe, along with her new husband Jack Clifford. By 1918, her new husband left her, unable to cope with Nesbit’s fame. (But apparently their divorce wasn’t final until 1933?!)
She lived in NYC and Chicago, struggling with addiction throughout her life, though she did pen two memoirs, and serve as advisor on her biopic — The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing in 1955, starring Joan Collins. Eventually, she settled in Southern California.
The saddest footnote may be this—owners of one of the Thaw family summer homes, now a Pennsylvania hotel, claim that patrons have seen her ghost. Imagine staying stuck in that story.
Despite her memoirs and the film, I’d never heard of Evelyn Nesbit OR Henry Thaw, though both are native Pittsburghers.
I look forward to more research… would you be into it?
SOURCES:
Interestingly, in Encyclopedia Britannica (a perennial fave for research!), Nesbit is but a side note to entries on White AND Richard Fleischer, the filmmaker behind her biopic, underscoring how she’s been overlooked despite telling her story in memoirs…
ALERT!
YOUR TURN!
Tell me:
Have you read or done exercises from The Artist’s Way? What’s your favorite?
What did you know about this Gibson Girl?
Have you ever seen that Joan Collins film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing?
What are you reading? Watching?
Got any good vacation plans?
If enjoyed this history of Evelyn Nesbit…
Or!
I wrote this about Cameron's book and got a day job the next week
https://monkeyfire.com/mpol/dir_zine/dir_1998/828/t_gamut.html
Love that story and can't wait for you to write it! I was watching an old Disney nature short from the Everglades a few weeks ago and was dropped into a novel -- so now I have to finish the one I'm writing and get to it!