The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

"The two trials of Thaw, in which Nesbit, having been promised a million dollars, testified on her husband's behalf, were a sensation: Uruburu tells this part of the story well enough, though without the breathless, sensual panache of the earlier sections. Thaw was acquitted by reason of insanity and gained his freedom some years later, while Nesbit, needless to say, never saw her money and lived a brave, hardscrabble life of notoriety thereafter. She was a fallen idol, though her own books, different versions of her story written at various times, show her to be clever, shrewd and self-aware--a good writer, actually. 'The tragedy wasn't that Stanford White died, but that I lived,' she said in 1934; she sold her story to Hollywood for a movie starring the young Joan Collins in the 1950s. She died, in 1967, at a nursing home in Santa Monica."

Richard Rayner reviews Paula Uruburu's American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century in the Los Angeles Times.