December 25, 1884

December 25, 1884 is the commonly cited birth date for Evelyn Nesbit. Her profession is also listed variously, as chorus girl or actress. What is not debated is her exceptional physical beauty. That alone would not explain her notoriety, which derived from her role in one of the earliest celebrity scandals of the modern era. Her husband, a wealthy businessman, Harry Thaw, shot and killed her former lover, the famous architect, Stanford White. This happened in 1906, and the ensuing legal mess was labeled "The Trial of the Century."

Nesbit wrote memoirs and there we find out about her cat. She wrote them in 1914, but a published version is titled Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit (2006) and this is what I used, though, it's origins are not clear.

A story Evelyn recalls is of her teenage years, when her mother could not afford to keep her and her brother and so they were staying with distant relatives. One Christmas, she was 12 or so, and there were no presents. She and her younger brother found a stray cat in an alley, and told others that it was a Christmas present. They soon were on a train back to their mother, and Evelyn insisted on carrying the cat. Only her beauty prevented multiple conductors from putting the cat out of the train. This was before her career as a model for artists, which would bloom soon.

And of course eventually her own bloom faded. So I like to recall that before her death on January 17, 1967 she received money for her role as an adviser for the movie version of her famous youth. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing debuted in 1955.