Thaw Perennial

Evelyn Nesbit was born 49 years ago in Tarentum, Pa. She got a chorus job in Floradora, became the mistress of Architect Stanford White. In 1905 she married rich, lecherous Harry Kendall Thaw, who already had a grudge against White. On June 25, 1906 Thaw and his wife attended a show on the roof of Madison Square Garden. There without warning Thaw shot White dead. At the trial the Thaw defense was temporary insanity ("a brain storm''). Acquitted of murder, Thaw was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. He enjoyed enough freedom to begat a child one visiting day. Later he escaped, gained legal release. After her husband divorced her in 1915, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw led a precarious existence, in vaudeville and second-rate night clubs. For several years she worked in Chicago, lately in Atlantic City.

That story is known to nearly every newspaper reader in the U. S. For nearly a generation it has made countless Sunday features from coast to coast. In 1913 Hearst's American Weekly serialized The Story of My Life, by Evelyn Thaw. In 1914 it appeared as a paper-covered book. In 1926 Hearst's King Features syndicated Evelyn Nesbit's Own Story. A year later Bernarr Macfadden's defunct New York Evening Graphic ran a series about her. Last year King Features thought it was about time again to tell People Who Think the whole story.

Presumably the reader market for the Thaw story had been fairly well exhausted. Yet last week the New York Daily News, with the biggest circulation in the U. S., popped out with a new serial--Evelyn Nesbit's Untold Story. Printed in daily installments, it was the text of a lurid book called Prodigal Days, by Evelyn Nesbit, published last month by Julian Messner. Inc.

Publisher Messner had been sold the idea by an energetic literary agent named Sanford Greenburger, whose other clients included the late Author Jakob Wassermann and Edouard Herriot. Greenburger, in turn, had been sold by the book's ghostwriter, a onetime lawyer who married a night-club singer friend of Miss Nesbit. Editor Joseph Medill Patterson of the News, who bought the serial to bolster the usual summer circulation slump, proudly announced last week that the feature had upped sales by 50.000.

Agent Greenburger exulted that Evelyn Nesbit had made him more money in four months than Wassermann had in four years. Exclaimed Evelyn Nesbit, as she took a vacation from night-club work, "I represent an era!" Grumped Harry K. Thaw: "I don't even know the woman."

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