Harry also had a penchant for boys. In London, after one bellhop lodged a complaint that he had been lured into Thaw’s room, bound, placed in a bathtub, had boiling water poured over him and been whiplashed into near-unconsciousness, some five thousand dollars had to be paid out. On his trips to Europe, Harry ran through valets, too, with great speed: during his trial, the one who had served him longest at home suffered a sudden and mysterious death, perhaps because there was too much that he could reveal, most of it outrageously sadistic.
Whether he performed his brutal acts in a manic fugue or in a drugged state, whether he successfully split them off from the life his mother (and he) approved, readily disavowing them while he led his ordinary existence under cover of an idealized self image and unrec- oncilable notions of good and bad – or whether he lied and deluded himself in some simpler way – is inevitably difficult to penetrate at this distance. What is certainly clear is that for Harry Thaw Stanford White stood for all the bad he couldn’t acknowledge in his own life.
Thaw’s obsession with White had come into being at the cusp of the century. It may have coincided with or been exaggerated by his use of cocaine, a substance it is almost certain he injected, given his behavioural patterns and the fact that Evelyn had found a syringe amidst his things. But there are other elements in play in Thaw’s obsession. As the constant name-dropping in his memoir underscores, he had taken on his mother’s aspiration to be accepted by the crème – the Fishes, the Vanderbilts, the Astors. Neither he nor his mother were of that class, and the fact rankled – dangerously, in Harry’s case. Nor was Harry, expelled from Harvard and known for his bullying antics, allowed into New York’s elite men-only clubs. The one club that had him as a member, the Union League Club of New York, revoked his membership when he rode a horse up its front steps and through the front doors.
Thaw became convinced that his rejection by the New York elite was all due to Stanford White, the cultivated bon viveur who was welcomed by the mighty and went unpunished for vices that the young scion of strict Pittsburgh Presbyterians shared, but couldn’t allow himself to admit. In a paranoid twist, White became Thaw’s double: he had what Thaw secretly wished for and wasn’t permitted. So he imagined White was persecuting him for those same unconscious wishes: White’s agents followed him, he said, and the architect had turned Manhattan against him.
An instance that could only have exacerbated the situation occurred when Thaw invited a showgirl with her fellow lovelies to a gala party he was throwing for his circle. Just before, lunching with a respectable friend from his social, not his sexual, world, he had refused to recognize the woman when he saw her at a restaurant. Angered by the slight, she took her party girls to a gathering at White’s tower instead, while Thaw waited in vain for the ‘girls’ he had promised his friends.
Now, a humiliated Harry knew for certain that the world had to be rid of White. It was White, he was convinced, who had set out to shame him. Who had turned both the woman and all of New York society against him. If Harry could rid the world of White, that despoiler of virgins, he, Harry, would become the city’s saviour. He sent both money and information to Anthony Comstock so that the vice-hunter’s agents would follow White and out him. He was convinced that White was having him followed in turn, and setting his own agents against him.
Historical moments and their social mores undoubtedly affect both the expression of psychological disorder and the terms in which it is understood. Harry Thaw is a figure contemporaneous with Krafft- Ebing’s expositions of criminal perversion and paranoia, as well as Freud’s first reflections on the subject. On 24 January 1895, Freud had written to Wilhelm Fliess suggesting that ‘people become paranoid over things they cannot put up with’. Paranoia in this light begins as a defence against painful experiences, particularly of embarrassment or humiliation, which could destroy the ego. When there is an internal change, the subject has to make a choice as to whether the cause is internal or external: the paranoid person, in order to preserve his narcissism whole, or prevent any experience of deficiency within the self, attributes it to the external, ‘what people know about us and ... have done to us’. Grandiosity is part of the clinical picture, as is a distinct emphasis on projection onto the other of the defects one cannot afford or bear to see in oneself. Harry projects his own envious hatred onto White, imagines himself both hated and in danger, and so needs to strike out at the vile predator first.
32. Pursuing Evelyn
How did the young, but relatively sensible, Evelyn allow herself to become prey to Harry Thaw’s designs?
With the punishment of removal to Mrs DeMille’s school awaiting her, the romance with Barrymore over and the sense that White was tiring of her, Evelyn was more susceptible than she might otherwise have been to Thaw’s pursuit of her. About a week after their first meeting, they met again at a pre-theatre supper party when Mr Munroe sat next to her. On the way to the theatre, he unveiled himself as Harry Kendall Thaw of Pittsburgh. According to Evelyn, the revelation was full of theatrical panache and pride. He clearly assumed, as if he were like some Superman emerging from his disguise as Clark Kent, not only that Evelyn would now instantly recognize him, but that she would also instantly acquiesce to his suit.
Evelyn was only very hazily aware of Harry’s dark side. Her own mother’s adamant objection to his attentions, perhaps in part fuelled by Stanford White’s disapproval and a greater knowledge of the millionaire’s background, only elicited rebellion in the young woman. It allowed her to see the more gentlemanly aspects of Thaw, what she eventually called his ‘kind, sweet, generous, and gentle side’. She often thought of him as something of a large child; his propensity towards idees fixes and explosions had not yet become visible, though, of course, he had told her to beware of Stanford White. In this, Thaw, as she put it, ‘played at the reformer with all the enthusiasm of a Savonarola’. Harry also encouraged her return to school and seemed to be genuinely interested in her well-being.
Just before she left for New Jersey, in October 1903, Harry proposed marriage. Evelyn refused. Her life was already too complicated.
She got on well at school, where the other girls loved the fact that she was an actress. Thaw wrote moralizing letters and Stanny, when she didn’t see him in New York, came to visit – though after one racy excursion with classmates in a fast car with Stanny at the wheel, parents complained vehemently and demanded that Evelyn be sent home. While Mrs DeMille was trying to decide how to handle the situation, Evelyn fell seriously ill with stomach pains and vomiting. The school nurse rang her mother and told her it might well be appendicitis. When Mrs Nesbit, who always contacted White when any problem arose, tried to reach him, he was out of town. No one knows if she hesitated before ringing Harry Thaw, recently back in New York after some months on the French Riviera.
Thaw was at his best in an emergency that demanded money be thrown at it. A leading doctor and two nurses were instantly found, a makeshift operating theatre was set up in a classroom; then chloroform was administered and Evelyn was operated on, apparently for a burst appendix. There were rumours that the operation was in fact an abortion, but Evelyn denied this under oath at the trial, as did Barrymore. Whatever the exact nature of the ordeal, it soon robbed Evelyn of her wondrous hair, which fell out in clumps and had to be shaved off. Thaw promised expensive wigs. We might wonder whether Harry perhaps preferred her as a brush-haired boy, something she herself intuited: seeing herself in her short hair, Evelyn thought she looked exactly like her little brother. Incongruously, Harry then chose a blond wig for Evelyn, perhaps in an attempt to baffle White and an ever inquisitive press, who loved nothing more than stories of their favourite pin-up.
Evelyn’s operation, and the morphine and laudanum given to her afterwards, left her gravely weakened and as a consequence indebted to an attentive Thaw. He now made a concerted play for her, offering her and her mother a recuperative cruise on an ocean liner, topped by a trip to the European capitals Evelyn had long wante
d to visit. White had sung their cultivating charms and Evelyn was keen at the prospect. Her mother, reluctant at first, accepted, not realizing that Thaw planned to accompany them, if initially on a different liner. Despite Thaw’s millions, Mrs Nesbit remained loyal to the charming Stanford White, who never proposed to her daughter, but supported her son. She would fall out with Thaw even more severely during their stay in Europe, accusing him of exhausting her daughter with his manic form of travel.
She returned home without Evelyn, despite voicing her worries about her daughter’s reputation, to complain bitterly to White, who had given her and Evelyn a letter of credit in case they needed it during their travels. Mrs Nesbit’s dislike of Thaw was returned by him; when he heard from an embarrassed Evelyn about White’s long arm, he promptly tore up the letter of credit.
In his memoir, Thaw underscores how Mrs Nesbit continually let her daughter down, first of all in closing her eyes to her relations with Stanford White, then in abandoning her without a chaperone in Europe. Whatever his proclivities and state of mind, Thaw was ever alert to reputation, and would have been happy to blame the hapless Mrs Nesbit for a good portion of Evelyn’s downfall. But since Evelyn defended her ‘naive’ mother, and remained loyal at least until the trial, he couldn’t condemn Mrs Nesbit outright.
Thaw had proposed to Evelyn before the voyage. Evelyn had refused, as she was to refuse again in London and again in Paris, whatever pressure a peristent Harry applied. She couldn’t marry a man unless he knew everything there was to know about her, she wrote. This was a matter of common honesty, and I take no credit for desiring to be frank and above board with my future husband.’ Perhaps, too, she was instinctively fearful of Thaw’s obsession with virginity, which manifested itself early in their relations – though she didn’t then realize that he already surmised the nature of her relations with White in his ‘lust nest’, having had the architect watched even before he had formally met Evelyn. On top of that, something in Harry’s manner when the bellboy incident came to light, whatever gloss he put on it, may have frightened Evelyn. Tempting as it might be to succumb to a millionaire who would provide that ever-elusive sense of security she so needed, particularly now that Stanny was less attentive, Evelyn resisted.
Whether her resistance had anything to do with spurring on the bellhop incident is unclear. The perverse Thaw had set a brutal trap for the boy. He called him to his hotel room, left money lying in a tempting heap on a table, and hid. Thinking himself alone, the duped boy dipped into the cash. Harry leapt out, heaved him into the bathtub, stripped and flogged him, perhaps more. The legal claim afterwards had Thaw settling for damages. Plaintively, he told Evelyn this was ever the fate of the millionaire: people exaggerated stories and made claims for injury.
Harry continued to hound his ‘Angel-Child’, demanding to know why she wouldn’t have him. Torn apart by the battling between Harry and her mother, further debilitated by Harry’s frenetic partying pace and constant changing of hotels even in the same city, as well as frightened of the explosive violence he could exude in his bullying and his agitated pacing up and down, ever accompanied by wayward babble – Evelyn, primed by drink, finally gave in one night to his direct question: ‘Is it because of Stanford White?’
She then told him the story of the girl on the red velvet swing, the drink, the possible drugging, the deflowering. This was the very narrative that was later allowed into court because, despite its licentious content, it laid the ground for what purportedly had provoked Thaw to murder the older man and to avenge his by then wife’s honour. For Thaw, Evelyn’s story provided confirmation of everything he had imagined about White and the vicious prodigality of the ‘Beast’ he both loathed and desired to be, the ‘ravisher’ who ‘boasted of having taken advantage of three hundred and seventy-eight girls’.
In the course of the long, stammering, tearful narrative of her ‘filthy ruin’, Evelyn revealed how she had been innocently seduced; how, when her mother had left her in White’s care, he had fed her champagne; how he had ‘had his way with her’ while she was unconscious; how she had then stayed with Stanhope White despite all of that. As she described it in her first memoir, Harry’s response was to gape open-mouthed, to shudder, to go limp – and when she had reached the climax of her story, to rise, then plunge into a chair and sob loudly, muttering ‘Poor child!’ repeatedly. Then he began to shake uncontrollably, his face ‘ghastly’ as he walked up and down the room, gesticulating and muttering. He made wounded-animal noises while she wept. He wrung his hands and gnashed his teeth. He questioned her about her mother, accusing Mrs Nesbit of terrible negligence, assuring Evelyn that no decent person hearing her story would say it was her own doing. She was not at fault. His respect for her had not lessened, he would always be her friend.
As the dark night dragged on and then turned into morning, an exhausted Evelyn clutched at her scars while Thaw cursed Stanford White, whom he had of course suspected all along of foul deeds. The more he pressed Evelyn to confess, the more he rambled on incoherently. When she had finished, he knelt at her side and took her hand. Evelyn states that she was utterly swayed by him then, ‘all that was best in Harry Thaw ... all the womanliness in him, all the Quixote that was in his composition’ was then evident. In The Traitor, Thaw wrote that his Angel-Child’s ‘hideously awful tale’ was one in which she had never acted of ‘her own volition unless she had refused point blank her mother’s order to obey a beast’.
But Thaw’s gentleness, once he had Evelyn to himself and totally in his sway, metamorphosed in grotesque ways. His references to virginity escalated. At Joan of Arc’s birthplace he wrote in the guestbook, ‘she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around’. He showed Evelyn all the statues of saints and martyrs who had chosen to die rather than give in to sin. His idée fixe and his wild murmuring made her increasingly nervous. They didn’t share rooms, either in Holland or on their restless travels along the Rhine to Munich and Innsbruck, a journey that did Evelyn’s health no good.
Then Harry rented a lonely castle in the Tyrol, Schloss Katzenstein, for three weeks. At first Evelyn, her youthful imagination steeped in romance and musical comedy, had fantasized a romantic retreat in which her exhaustion would dissipate and she would finally be able to convalesce. Instead, the castle was up a steep mountain and remote from everywhere, made of cold stone, dimly lit, and with long drafty corridors. It came with a staff of two who lived at one end, while Harry and Evelyn had separate rooms at the other. Evelyn had entered a Gothic horror in which the all but orphaned damsel was at the mercy of a monstrous Bluebeard.
On the second night of their stay, after a long day of sightseeing in the forest nearby, Harry dismissed the servants with ‘high-handed Teutonic severity’. Tired, Evelyn ate quickly, and having accepted the usual chaste goodnight kiss on the forehead, she went to bed. Wig off, nightie on, she fell asleep instantly, only to be abruptly woken a very short time after by an apparition. A stark-naked Harry was looming above her, a leather riding crop in his hand. Its slash across her legs was what had woken her, and now she leapt up with a scream as a raging, ‘bug-eyed’ Harry tore off her clothes, all the while landing violent blows on her body with his crop.
Later, Evelyn thought that the sight of her thin naked body, so like a boy’s with its shorn hair, excited him all the more. In any event, no protest or pleading could persuade him to lessen the blows. Quite the reverse. Her pleas spurred him on. His pupils were vast and he was sweating profusely. All the while, a diatribe against sin and indecency poured from his lips. Evelyn had the impression he couldn’t hear her, nor always recognize her. She stood in for all nether and immoral beings, perhaps for himself too. At the end, he threw her, bleeding, back onto the bed and, pinning her down with his riding crop, raped her. His railing never stopped. Punishment, penance, retribution, Stanford White, virginity – Thaw’s preoccupations were ever on his lips.
Evelyn wrote that as she faded in and out of consciousness, and
wondered whether her life was about to end in Schloss Katzenstein, she also thought that this must be her punishment for what she had revealed about White and herself; and for allowing herself to accept Thaw’s generosity.
Inquisition followed rape, as if she weren’t sufficiently battered. ‘Did you really believe White when he told you everybody did the things you had done? Did you? Is it possible?’ Evelyn, barely sixteen when she first met White, stammered a ‘Yes’. Thaw rose to his full height and, towering above her, looked as if he were about to land more blows. Instead he raged: That was a lie, a dirty lie. There were many pure and decent women in the world – ‘his mother and his two lovely, decent sisters’ prime amongst them.
The splitting of women into two – the chaste and the sullied – so pervasive at the time, is hardly altogether gone today. There are those pure women who are untouchable and to be respected and who are beyond desire; and those who are desired, desiring and thus dirty, but who alone can provide sexual satisfaction for the male. Evelyn suffered from this split at the hands of Harry Thaw. Nor would his obsession with the purity he himself so lacked cease with his punishment of her.
After Evelyn’s trial by flogging and brutal rape, Harry Thaw locked her into her castle room and left her, bruised, bloodied and helpless. Without her mother, without friends or funds, she was effectively a hostage. Like so many abused women, she both felt that the punishment was somehow deserved and was terrified that the avenging Thaw would return to her room. For some three weeks, she didn’t leave it. The only medication for her welts, cuts and scabs was a stinging ointment that an utterly unrepentant Harry applied. He acted as if nothing was amiss. But he did not attack her again.
Trials of Passion Page 30