Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The further climb up a narrow wrought-iron spiral staircase to reach the turreted top of the Garden’s tower would have been easy for the nimble Evelyn. From here, you could have a close-up view of another nubile beauty – a shining, virginal Diana, who spun with the wind, her bow and arrow ever at the ready. She was the product of the time’s most famous artist, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The Puritan guardians of New York’s virtue, led by the redoubtable and vociferous anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock, had protested against the statue’s brazen glittering nudity. In provocative response, White and Saint-Gaudens had decked Diana in gauzy drapery. But her robes blew away within weeks, and Diana’s champions proceeded to illuminate her so that she became brilliantly visible, even at night. Back when Diana had first arrived atop the tower, a Mercury reporter had written, The Square is now thronged with clubmen armed with field glasses ... No such figure has ever before been publicly exhibited in the United States.’

  White, who was a connoisseur of the female form as well as of architectural structures, knew that this first Diana, who weighed in at 820kg of copper gilt and measured 5.5 metres in height, was too heavy to spin on the globe pedestal provided for her, and in 1893 she was replaced by a smaller, hollow version of herself – the one young Evelyn Nesbit gazed on during her visits to White. Whatever might be going on below her, Diana chastely turned with the wind here until 1925, when the building was pulled down. By that time, Stanford White was dead, murdered in the very Garden of which he was so proud by a millionaire who didn’t approve of his penchant for youthful female beauty.

  Evelyn Nesbit’s biographer, Paula Uruburu, likens Evelyn’s photogenic appeal to Marilyn Monroe’s: Evelyn’s, too, was a presence the camera loved and made iconic, though unlike Marilyn she was initially perhaps more fatal to the men around her than to herself. Born in 1884, she outlived Marilyn by some five years and would have liked Marilyn to play her in the 1955 film about her early life, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, rather than the chosen star, Joan Collins.

  Slight, fragile, with supple childlike limbs, copious hair that in the light moved from chocolate to auburn, a full mouth, glowing dark- hazel eyes and an inherent love of dressing up, this ‘American Eve’ had, in the early 1900s, an allure that met the period’s demands for naughty but nice: she was both enticingly seductive and charmingly innocent. Evelyn could be chaste shepherdess, classical nymph, ragged Gypsy or playful coquette. She could wear the clothes the newly burgeoning fashion magazines demanded, yet needed none of the day’s corsetry to advertise any of many products – soap, furs, chocolates, toothpaste.

  She was the ‘modern Helen’, a dreamy, pouting pin-up girl for the new century. Dressed, half-dressed, veiled, behatted, chaste or seductive, Evelyn graced everything from tobacco and playing cards to calendars for Prudential Life and Coca-Cola. Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator for the mass market, twisted her hair into a question mark and transformed her into ‘Woman: the Eternal Question’. Her face came to embody the very mystery the eternal feminine posed. Eventually, even hard-bitten journalists would wax lyrical over her ingenuous charms. These were accompanied by a sharp, unschooled intelligence, which Stanford White, a Pygmalion to her Galatea, helped to educate, extending her native American to Shakespeare.

  29. Murder in the Garden

  The evening of Monday, 25 June 1906 was unseasonably hot. It drove the rich to their Long Island homes and the rest to Coney Island. The day before, a hippo in the Brooklyn Zoo had expired in the heat, but on the 25th a sea wind tempered the weather just a little. Stanford White, then fifty-two, had taken his nineteen-year-old son Laurence and a friend, both students at Harvard, to dinner at the stylish Cafe Martin, a Paris look-alike establishment which even boasted a space devoted to women without escorts. Dinner over, White had dropped the younger men at the theatre they had chosen over the opening of what was advertised as ‘a sparkling musical comedy’ in the rooftop space of Madison Square Garden.

  The roof garden was a glamorous open-air cabaret-theatre. White’s tower apartment and his luminous Diana overlooked it, and provided some of its visual drama. Lights of many colours twinkled and swayed amidst luxurious potted plants. Waiters carried drinks to the tables that took up the central space, and there were rows of seats at the sides. A special table was always reserved for White, the garden’s creator. He was there for only part of that evening: he had seen bits of Mamzelle Champagne in rehearsal and it fizzed rather less than its title and advertising. But he was interested in one of the chorus girls, a seventeen-year-old new to the city, so he returned at eleven o’clock.

  Soon after, a large muffled figure, with an unseasonable long black coat over his tux and a panama pulled down over his head, approached White’s table from the lift towards which he and his party had seemed to be heading just moments before. A tenor was singing the ironically appropriate ‘I Could Love a Million Girls’:

  ‘I’ve heard them say so often they could love their wives alone,

  But I think that’s just foolish; men must have hearts made of stone.

  Now my heart is made of softer stuff; it melts at each warm glance.

  A pretty girl can’t look my way, without a new romance ... ’

  A gunshot exploded in the night air, louder than both orchestra and crooner. It was quickly followed by two more. A woman screamed. Others joined in. White slid from the table, overturning it as he fell. Glass splintered everywhere. A doctor raced through the rising tumult to find him lying in a pool of blood, his face partly annihilated and blackened with powder burns. He was palpably dead and his killer stood beside him, his pistol now turned upside down, his arms held up over his head. He had been a mere two feet away from his victim and had put a first bullet through his left eye, a second through the mouth and a third through White’s left shoulder. Some reported a look of glee on his face.

  The theatre manager had ordered the orchestra to resume their playing and the chorus to be brought back on, but the performers were already leaving, joining the frightened crowd in what would at any moment turn into a stampede towards the exit. Others fainted on the spot. The mother of Mamzelle’s lyricist, having watched the audience’s hostile response to her son’s opening night, feared he had been the object of attack and screamed, They’ve shot my son!’

  But it was unmistakeably Stanford White who was dead. Now, a woman in a striking black hat piled high with a gauzy veil and wearing an embroidered white satin gown that clung to her with ‘sculptural indiscretion’ was heard, from the entrance to the roof theatre, to scream, ‘My God, Harry! What have you done?’ The woman was Evelyn Nesbit, now twenty-one years old and married for just over a year to the Harry she was exclaiming at: Harry Kendall Thaw, the thirty-four-year-old millionaire son of a Pittsburgh railroad and mining dynasty, favourite of his strait-laced and Presbyterian widowed mother, the redoubtable Mrs William Thaw, who would have far preferred her son never to have met the lovely Evelyn with her less than respectable past.

  There are varying accounts of how pasty-faced Harry, who had drunk several bottles of champagne that evening and whose hands and arms were twitching markedly, responded to Evelyn’s exclamation. Over the coming months, up to the first trial and then through the second, a rampant tabloid press as well as higher-brow one would have a field day covering the lives, the hows and the whys of all the principals, and often disagreeing not only in their points of view, but also on chapter and verse.

  Evelyn Nesbit’s own remarkably well written first memoir of 1914, The Story of My Life by Evelyn Thaw, is filled with literary and artistic allusions – to Flaubert, Shakespeare, the painter and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, for instance – and presents an endearing picture of an astute young woman, sensitive to the life around her, to Harry’s acts and to what can be revealed and what can’t.

  Evelyn’s Untold Story of 1934 (entitled Prodigal Days in the US) is more sensational and direct, whether because of changes in the author herself, or in the times – or perhaps in her ghostwriter?
– is not altogether clear. Harry Thaw’s revealingly peculiar self-published account, The Traitor (1926), both simplifies events and complicates the picture because of its palpable oddity: it reveals a man of determined views but disordered intelligence, to whom money and mummy give inordinate power. There is also the Edison Studios film, The Unwritten Law, of 1907, first of several movies. Then there are the various accounts over the years of the landmark trial itself.

  It seems that by the time Harry responded to Evelyn’s cry he had already been disarmed by the closest uniform to hand. Paul Brudi, a New York City fireman, had the presence of mind to take Thaw’s gun and walk him towards the lift. Thaw may then have hugged and kissed his wife and said, according to his memoir, ‘It’s all right, dearie. I have probably saved your life.’ When a local policeman, Officer Anthony L. Debes, then arrived to arrest him, Thaw declared that White deserved his death. ‘He ruined my wife and then deserted her,’ he said in complete calm, though the officer didn’t know whether he’d heard ‘wife’ or ‘life’. Both have a kind of accuracy.

  Debes agreed to Thaw’s request not to handcuff him. He was a millionaire, after all. They went down in the same lift as Evelyn and the two friends who had accompanied them to the roof garden. When they reached the ground floor, Thaw lit a cigarette and asked the officer to phone his friend George Lauder Carnegie – his brother-in-law and nephew of the great Andrew Carnegie – to tell him that he, Harry, was in trouble. Trouble was not a rare event for Harry. Earlier that week he had already had several altercations in Pittsburgh, including one with a bank employee who couldn’t provide the cash he wanted within fifteen minutes, and another with a cafe attendant when the establishment didn’t have any of his favourite cigars, so he had proceeded to ransack the place. He had also become so abusive with a tram driver that he had had to be forcibly ejected from the vehicle. His rages were common knowledge in his hometown, but also in New York and even London and Paris.

  In New York, earlier in his career of havoc and mayhem, he had driven a car through a display window, attempted to ride a horse into an exclusive club that had failed to make him a member, and engaged in numerous fisticuffs. Some of these rows took place during gargantuan drinking sprees, which along with poker nights had comprised the larger part of his university education. His mother always came to Harry’s rescue. Before his death when Harry was eighteen, his father had cut his monthly allowance down to $2500 – until he showed himself responsible enough to be entrusted with his share of an estate valued at $40 million. But after his father’s death, Mrs Thaw restored her son’s monthly $8000, only to withdraw it again when she didn’t approve of his choice of women. All this was at a time when a good annual salary was about $500.

  Down in the street, officer and prisoner managed to avoid the crush of people and carriages, as well as most of the reporters who had quickly gathered. They walked through the Tenderloin along Thirtieth towards Sixth Avenue to the police station. Here Thaw first identified himself as John Smith, an eighteen-year-old student from Philadelphia, something his calling cards instantly contradicted. (He later said that on the walk to the station, a reporter had told him not to give his real name.) When the press caught up with him, he declined to make a statement and simply sprawled back on a bench and smoked. His eyes were fixed in a stare, but he was otherwise calm. He treated the police politely, asked for water and a cigar, thanked the guard for both, then slept, his crushed hat pulled down over his baby face, until the coroner arrived.

  The prosecution would later insist that Thaw was wholly in control: the fact that he refused to answer questions until he had seen his lawyers testified to that. Already rumours were circulating that he was a cocaine and morphine addict who had killed under the influence. He was ‘kinda spooky’, a policeman testified at the trial, with a far-away look in his ‘bulging eyes’. But the coroner’s first public statement put paid to gossip about drugs or insanity, at least for the time being. Mr Dooley arrived around one in the morning and at three was joined by witnesses, who identified Harry as the murderer. This permitted him to be officially charged. He was then walked across the so-called Bridge of Sighs, below which crowds would gather during the trial so as to look up and catch a glimpse of him, to a cell in the city prison, the Tombs.

  The coroner told a questioning reporter that Thaw seemed ‘perfectly rational’. ‘His eyes were shifty and bleared, but he talked like a sane man, and I am convinced the killing was deliberately planned.’ In his memoir, Thaw claimed that in the night, despite it being a men’s prison, he had heard young women’s voices uncannily like his wife’s: one called out ‘She’s ennercent [innocent]!’ His wife’s chastity and innocence had in his dreaming mind long stood in for his own.

  Meanwhile, Stanford White’s son Lawrence was taken to the crime scene. He had never heard of Harry Thaw. He wished his father had gone to Philadelphia on planned business rather than staying in New York to see him. In a state of shock, he stood, for the length of the night, over his father’s dead and disfigured body – which White’s own brother-in-law, who had been in the audience that evening, had failed to recognize. As for Evelyn, reporters gathered en masse at the hotel where she and Harry had been staying – the Lorraine, a plush establishment on Fifth Avenue, where they had a suite together with rooms for maid and valet. They waited for her in vain. She had had the presence of mind – in The Traitor Harry says it was on his advice – to slip away and stay with one of the few remaining friends from her life in the theatre, May McKenzie.

  Across the US, newspapers the next day, both broadsheet and tabloid, led on the lurid story. Reporters had been busy throughout the night gathering background material and responses to the event, interviewing possible witnesses, friends and, where they could, members of Harry’s and Evelyn’s families in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and White’s in Manhattan and Long Island. In status-conscious New York, White’s obituaries noted, amongst much else in his luminous career, that the London Spectator had called his father ‘the most accomplished and the best bred man that America has sent to England within the past generation’, though the financial difficulties the elder White had encountered had meant that Stanford couldn’t pursue his dream of being an artist. The New York Times, hinting at Stanford White’s secret life, stated that he aiid his wife ‘had not been living together recently’ and that ‘for a busy man, who worked hard and achieved notable things, he gave up a great deal of time to the pleasures of sociability and friendship’. Madison Square Garden where he kept a ‘suite of apartments’ was now described as his ‘pleasure house’.

  The full description of the kinds of pleasures Stanford White enjoyed there would not come out until the trial, but the press would soon hint and smear. If messages of condolence at first arrived at the famous architect’s house in huge number and from around the world, the very fact of murder, combined with the insinuating press coverage and the Thaws’ fortune and public relations machine, would soon taint White’s reputation. Too mighty to provide comment, his influential friends and rich clients melted away. As if they, too, could only be maintained by a belief in their architect’s virtue, many of his buildings were left to crumble and disappear.

  Press descriptions of Harry Thaw had little but the size of his fortune to counterbalance the horror of his crime. But that and the family’s reputation went some way towards shielding him from the worst. The report sent to the New York Times from his native Pittsburgh – where one of his brothers was seriously ill while the other, like his mother, was happily away – calls Harry the ‘black sheep’ of the family. One of his sisters had married a Carnegie, after all, the other the Earl of Yarmouth, avid for American millions, but nonetheless distantly in line to the throne. Harry had only a history of wildness and Evelyn Nesbit – the family, not altogether successfully, tried to massage away the less than impeccable reputation of each.

  An unnamed member of the Thaw family, according to the New York Times, stated that there could have been nothing between Mrs Har
ry Thaw and Stanford White to provoke the shooting. The reverend who had married Evelyn and Harry, W. L. McEwan of the Third Presbyterian Church – the widowed Mrs Thaw’s most enduring playing field – stated that when he had married the Thaws on 4 April 1905 their future had seemed rosy. The courtship, the reporter elaborated, had lasted three years, the couple having met when Evelyn performed in the musical Floradora. The two had been to Europe together, but Thaw’s mother thoroughly disapproved of the relationship. On this occasion, she had cut her son’s allowance herself: there would be no more coming to him from his father’s forty-million-dollar estate unless he changed his ways.

  What the paper didn’t comment on is that, whatever her threats and Puritan rectitude, Mother Thaw continually bailed her eldest out – even after he had spent fifty thousand dollars on a dinner for the showgirls of Paris at which he was the only male and dessert came wrapped in diamonds. If, like the rest of the Pittsburgh moneyed classes, Mrs Thaw at first refused to accept Harry’s ‘chorus girl’, she eventually consented to her poor besotted Harry’s marriage. The newly-weds shared the Thaws’ ample Pittsburgh mansion, where a campaign was promptly launched to make Evelyn conform to her mother-in-law’s rigid ways.

  But Evelyn had little patience for the stuffy Mrs Thaw, a woman who palpably loathed her and who was only interested in Church and status, the first being a version of the second: God was far easier to access than the snobbish New York elite who had never allowed her son entry. Effectively imprisoned by the older woman’s ways while in Pittsburgh, Evelyn had been thrilled when Harry had decided on another trip to Europe. The week in New York was merely a stopover. It turned out to be a long one.

  Harry Thaw had become increasingly obsessed with Stanford White. Thaw had White, as well as on occasion his wife, followed by agents. He referred to him as The Beast’ or The Blackguard’. He insisted that Evelyn tell him when and if she saw him: when they were in restaurants with others and she spied the ‘B’, she was to pass him a note.