Nesbit, White, Thaw, Ragtime

I almost hate to admit there was a second rabbit hole after my David-Crosby-family-tree rabbit hole. But while I was reading the Wikipedia page about the history of one of the exclusive member clubs in New York City, which one of his relatives' wives belonged to, I saw this:

[The founders]...raised $500,000, and commissioned Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White to build the original clubhouse... Stanford White was slain by Harry K. Thaw months before construction...was completed.

Of course many of the names within those brief words have their own Wikipedia pages, so another rabbit hole was opened before my feet.

Stanford White was a well-known architect connected to New York high society, apprenticed in the field to H.H. Richardson (as in Richardsonian Romanesque). His best-known public structure still in existence is the Washington Square Arch in lower Manhattan, later saved by Jane Jacobs from Robert Moses and one of his planned highways. But White also designed several elite private clubs and a lot of fancy houses, as well as the second iteration of Madison Square Garden.

Harry K. Thaw was the sadistic, sociopathic son of a Pittsburgh coal baron who couldn't behave himself even as well as badly behaved New York society men managed to, from the looks of it. Or at least he wasn't able to hide it, as the others did. He hated Stanford White, possibly because he thought White kept him from being accepted in New York's clubs; possibly because Thaw was obsessed with a young woman named Evelyn Nesbit and thought White had "done her wrong"... even though Thaw proceeded to do her much more wrong.

Evelyn Nesbit was a very young woman, or a teenager, depending on which year we're talking about, who was one of the first real celebrities of New York and mass media. You probably know her image from the Gibson Girl illustrations, or at least I did. Or maybe from this 1903 photograph by Gertrude Käsebier. Her Wikipedia page is a saga.

Anyway, the upshot (literally) is that Nesbit was modeling for artists at a very young age, entered the stage by her mid-teens, probably was groomed and raped (date-raped, as the euphemism goes) by White at 16, then at 18 was taken to Europe by Thaw where he confined her in a castle to beat and sexually assault her for months. Despite that, she married him two years later, perhaps because he promised to reform.

About a year after that, Thaw shot and killed White in front a crowd of people at an outdoor theater on top of Madison Square Garden... yes, the building he had designed. Thaw's trial was of huge public interest, and he was found not guilty by mental defect.

That's just a quick summary; I'm leaving a lot out. As I read through things, I finally came to a place on Evelyn's Wikipedia page where it said,

E. L. Doctorow's historical novel Ragtime (1975) features Nesbit as a main character.

And I almost fell over in my chair. I've had a copy of Ragtime sitting on a shelf in my house since 1994, along with several other books of his. I bought them after reading and liking The Waterworks, which came out that year, but I never got around to reading any of them.

So almost immediately, I tore through Ragtime and enjoyed it very much. (After this, this post contains spoilers about the novel.)

Doctorow uses the setting of early 20th century New York and New Rochelle to portray genteel and gentile society. Around the edges, he introduces Jewish and Black characters. He enlists the anarchist Emma Goldman on a number of occasions, using her almost like a Greek chorus to explain what is wrong with everything the novel's third-person narrator accepts as normal. He explores racism and white supremacy particularly, through the tragic story of Coalhouse Walker, but he also makes fun of the absurd self-importance of billionaires and touches on the unhappiness of upper middle class white women.

It is a decentered novel. There is a broad cast of characters moving through a decade, 1906 to about 1912, not counting the epilogue-like ending, which extends past the end of World War I.

When I finished the novel, I knew I had to watch the movie, which came out in 1981. It was directed by Milos Forman and has pretty good reviews. 

Overall, I liked the film and if I hadn't just read the book I probably wouldn't write anything negative about it. It's beautiful. But there were a number of significant differences between Ragtime the book and the movie, most of which give it a less radical meaning and feel untrue to the source material. 

This is not surprising for a Hollywood film, and I assume I'm not the first person to note it. But here's what I noticed:

• Emma Goldman is not in the movie, so it immediately has a less radical perspective because it lacks her commentary. I missed her contributions greatly.
  
• Younger Brother is more of a jerk to Evelyn than in the book. He's not perfect to her in the book, either, but he's less problematic.
• Tateh's wife is portrayed as unfaithful, rather than as sexually exploited, which was clear in the book, even though he may not have understand it that way or forgiven her for it. Because the action in the movie is in Yiddish, it's not completely clear how the situation is portrayed, but she's definitely not given much of a chance to be portrayed sympathetically.
  
• The entire subplot about J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford believing in reincarnation is omitted. Obviously, this was extraneous and saved time in the film, but it also kept the studio from disparaging two famous billionaires as fools.
• Father is portrayed heroically as the mediator in the standoff at the Morgan Library. His actions are approximately the same the book, but his inner thoughts about why he's doing it make it clear it's not heroic.
• Booker T. Washington's argument to Coalhouse is more forceful (or maybe it was just because the acting was really good). In the book, Coalhouse's perspective comes across as more compelling. (Since this is essentially a recreation of the argument between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, it seems unfair to have Booker T. come out ahead in the film.)
  
• After the standoff, the movie's Coalhouse is shot by a single cop, who is ordered to shoot by the police commissioner, rather than by all of the cops firing at will, as described in the book. Doctorow's description is in perfect keeping with how Black men are shot by cops, who later claim the man was trying to flee or was "reaching for his waistband." 
• In the movie, Coalhouse crumples to the ground from that single shot. While it's sad, it's relatively humane. In the book, the "body jerked about the street in a sequence of attitudes as if it were trying to mop up its own blood" (page 316).
• Younger Brother, after leaving Coalhouse's "army" at the end of the standoff, does not join the Mexican resistance or die fighting with it, as he does in the book. No mention is made of what happens to him after he drives away. White solidarity only goes so far in Hollywood's version.
• No mention is made of Younger Brother's inventions of weapons that will fuel World War II and the military industrial complex. And that means Father does not go on to sell those weapons to the U.S. military, and he does not die aboard the Lusitania. The Lusitania is not said to be compromised with weapons aboard.
• Overall, it is a less decentered story. It focuses much more on Evelyn than the book does, and especially on Coalhouse. That's not surprising, given the requirements of movie lengths. Despite that, the movie is still 155 minutes long.
  

I understand there's a musical version of Ragtime, dated to 1996, which I have a hard time imagining. 

So that's it for that rabbit hole. I think! I hope.