Free American Eve by Paula Uruburu Page A

in from the Continent and circulated throughout the city’s thriving pornographic underground, mignon photos were in some ways more disturbing and subversive, disguising pedophilia as sentiment and pandering to the closeted connoisseur of “young filets.”
    When Florence Evelyn told Beckwith one afternoon soon after she had begun posing for him that she planned to seek out additional modeling work on her own (since her mother seemed incapable of finding work but moaned incessantly about their not having enough money), the artist raised his hands in dismay.
    “You are not the sort of girl,” he cautioned, wagging his finger, “that should go knocking at studio doors.”
    He offered to give her some new letters of introduction to respectable artists in New York, men whom he described as “eminently safe.” As he went to a dilapidated desk to search for pencil and paper, the girl’s thoughts reached back to the Pittsburgh boardinghouse and the unsavory prospect of asking for the rent from boarders at her mother’s urging. Thanks to Beckwith’s intervention, however, the teen soon found herself posing for a number of legitimate artists, including Frederick S. Church, Herbert Morgan, and Carl Blenner, without having to knock on any strange men’s doors.
    At first her workload was fairly light, and the poses Florence Evelyn was asked to hold were not particularly difficult. With her “liquid brown eyes,” “rosy Cupid’s bow mouth,” “softly rounded translucent shoulders,” “wildly abundant tresses,” and “the most perfectly modeled foot since Venus,” Evelyn’s Pre-Raphaelite looks were indeed an artist’s dream in the flesh. As she eased back into life in the studios, within a scant few months, the “girl from the provinces” began to attract enough attention to become a particular favorite of the New York artists (just as she had in Philadelphia). She was soon in demand by a significant number of painters, sculptors, and illustrators.
    One day a reporter came down to the boardinghouse to interview Miss Florence Evelyn, notable as the first of what would soon become a regular routine in her life. Her mother showed him the Philadelphia photographs, one of which was promptly printed in one of the New York evening papers. When the Sunday American published two big pages of photographs, the short fuse of modern celebrity was ignited. Even so, at such a young age and with so little knowledge of how the world worked, the adult Evelyn would come to believe after some reflection, “I do not know that to be brought into the public eye so young is the happiest of experiences.” Nor was it something her mother was equipped to deal with, any more than she had been regarding her husband’s hopeless finances.
    Being interviewed by a bona-fide New York reporter was “a novel experience that first time,” the adult Evelyn wrote in 1934, and slightly less satisfying each time after that, especially when she realized that her mother concealed from her how much money they had and how much she was paid for such frequent “exposure.” As for Mamma Nesbit, she gradually adapted to her role as “manager” of her daughter’s career, despite a complete and consistent lack of business sense and only intermittent concerns about the possible impropriety of life “in the studios” for a girl barely sixteen years old.
    According to Evelyn thirty years later, when she began her career in New York City, “in the main they wanted me for my head. I never posed for the figure in the sense that I posed in the nude.” As her mother would tell reporters, “I never allowed Evelyn to pose in the altogether as did Trilby”—although there is suggestive evidence to suggest otherwise. Evelyn herself describes a painting of her, done by Frederick Church in July 1900, that was hung in the Lotos Club in New York: “[I was] an Undine with water lilies in [my] hair, running down my bare limbs, [with] two striped tigers at [my]