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"American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the 'It' Girl and the Crime of the Century" by Paula Uruburu Riverhead Books, 400 pp., $27.95 In 1906, the murder of architect Stanford White — shot to death in front of a crowd in the same Madison Square Garden he had built — was rather prematurely dubbed "The Crime of the Century."Just a few years later, the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Leopold-Loeb "thrill killing" would logically compete for the title, but the scandal-sheet sleaziness of White's very public execution has lingered. White's one-time lover, Evelyn Nesbit, and her homicidally jealous husband, Harry Thaw, have inspired books and movies for decades. Nesbit played herself in the 1917 film "Redemption," and 19-year-old Joan Collins took the role in "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" (1955). Nesbit, who thought Collins was "too bosomy" and "too British" for the role, died in 1967, long before Elizabeth McGovern would earn an Oscar nomination for playing her in the 1981 movie of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" — which later became a popular Broadway musical. The latest Nesbit book, Paula Uruburu's "American Eve," uses the scandal to address our eternal fascination with rich and famous people behaving badly. It's also something of a bodice-ripper. Given the subject matter, perhaps that's inevitable. Nevertheless, Uruburu has a weakness for purplish passages that sound like intertitles for silent films. "Evelyn's resolve crumbled and her common sense collapsed into dust particles," she writes when Nesbit tells Thaw that she was raped by White. Uruburu gets so close to her subject that she sometimes sounds like a witness to history. When Nesbit's mother breaks out "in crocodile tears," the author claims, "it was a scene worthy of Chekhov." How would Uruburu know? Nesbit's literate and revealing memoirs, quoted at length, provide the most persuasive argument for the author's artistic license. Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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