Beauty Possessed

BEAUTY POSSESSED is a historical fiction romance novel, based on the actual events of showgirl Evelyn Nesbit’s life, leading up to what was coined the “Murder of the Century” by the press, the crime reported “to the ends of the civilized globe.”  On June 25th, 1906, Stanford White, New York City’s leading architect and man about town was shot to death while attending a musical performance at Madison Square Garden’s rooftop theater, a building of his own design and construction. Harry K. Thaw, eccentric heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune, had pulled the trigger, marking the final act in a struggle between the two men over Thaw’s young wife, the model and showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. By her sixteenth birthday, in 1900, Evelyn was known by millions for her underage sexuality, sparking an entirely new industry of news and gossip and signaling the beginning of America’s growing obsession with beauty, glamour, celebrity and sex.      Pleas for clemency by wealthy supporters for Thaw touched off an extended debate over widespread acceptance of a double standard – one for rich Americans and another for everyone else. Money, power, sex, drugs, jealousy, betrayal, murder, art and Broadway are the ingredients of this true story, as relevant today as it was in 1906.