Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  1. excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs;

  2. tendency to bear grudges persistently, i.e. refusal to forgive insults and injuries or slights;

  3. suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;

  4. a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation;

  5. recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding sexual fidelity of spouse or sexual partner;

  6. tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;

  7. preoccupation with unsubstantiated ‘conspiratorial’ explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large.

  American alienists of the time, like Evans and Wagner, would most likely have read Valentin Magnan’s classic descriptions of paranoia, and certainly Krafft-Ebing’s. Such descriptions, even to the present day, link paranoia to excessive narcissism – that self-aggrandizement and exaggerated sensitivity to slight that often involves the person in splitting off the unwanted, as a defence mechanism. Magnan, in his Delire Chronique (1890), had broken down ‘systematized delusion’ into ‘persecutory paranoia’, ‘ambitious paranoia’, ‘amatory paranoia’ and ‘litigious paranoia’. The amatory paranoiac is often chivalrous and idealistic, but feels persecuted by those who prevent the success of his desires, and may lose his self-control and resort to violence against his persecutors.

  The death of a juror’s wife resulted in a court recess over a long weekend. It was apparently an eventful one. At the Tombs, Thaw was frantic, fearing a mistrial. He shouted for Evelyn. Meanwhile the papers, which could not get enough of the case, talked up the possibility of a lunacy commission being called for: it looked to them as if the defence’s ‘temporary insanity’ might really be a far more permanent form of madness. In addition, there were reports that Evelyn was being cited in the divorce case of the producer of The Wild Rose: the play had been named after her, it was claimed. Delmas squashed the rumours. Evelyn as a victim who needed rescue was crucial to the Thaw case.

  When court reconvened on Monday, 18 February. Dr Evans was called back and now questioned about Thaw’s will: this allowed Delmas to have this strange document read into the court records. Evans’s view, in response to Delmas’s question, was that this was indeed not the will of a sane man.

  37. The Prosecution Counter-attacks

  Both Evelyn and Evans had been so strong in the witness stand that the district attorney was left with his case floundering. If the jury bought the defence’s ‘temporary insanity’ line, they might well release Harry altogether.

  Jerome flailed. He called Evelyn back to the stand and tried to discredit her. His questioning was brutal. He was attempting to prove to the jury that she had been lying all along. Her ‘confession’ to Thaw had either never taken place, or it was not true to the facts. Delmas rightly objected, pointing out that Eveyln had been recounting what she remembered telling Thaw. Jerome paid no heed and sneeringly tried to blacken her character and destroy the illusion of innocence her childlike looks reinforced. He questioned her about the extent of her nudity when she had modelled, the risqué cafés she had frequented in Paris, her unchaperoned status, her late nights, her continued relations with Stanford White, a man she had described as ‘kind and fatherly’ despite the fact that he had ‘wronged’ her. He asked whether her operation had been an abortion. By the end, Evelyn was in tears.

  But Jerome’s bullying had gone too far, and it turned the court against him. One of the four or so women reporters allowed to stay in the courtroom during the confession of activities so inappropriate for chaste feminine ears, Nixola Greeley-Smith, wondered how Evelyn had been able to survive what was palpably ‘torture’ inflicted in the name of the law. She recounted how all the women in the room had writhed under the sting of Jerome’s questions. His ‘vivisection of a woman’s soul’ made it a duty to give this ‘trembling, weeping woman any support that the presence of members of her own sex might afford’. Even the Reverend Madison C. Peters concluded that it was time to halt this ‘disgusting barbarity’ being inflicted on £a helpless child’, who was more sinned against than sinning.

  Jerome, however, persisted. Through Evelyn’s mother – whom the press now uniformly deplored as ‘unnatural’ – he had gained access to her teenage diary from her days at the DeMille school. This came complete with a mocking sketch of a nun. Jerome wanted to show that Evelyn was scandalously immoral, that she scoffed at her innocent schoolfriends whose ambition was to be mothers, while she herself was intent on performing on the stage.

  He then asked Evelyn questions about Thaw’s irrational acts. She said that he had carried a revolver ever since Christmas 1903, because he believed people were following him in order to do him harm. No, the pistol didn’t frighten her, since she knew it was intended only for Stanford White. At this Jerome abruptly released her from the stand. He was getting nowhere.

  The next day brought him nothing more promising. Delmas had called Evelyn back to the stand to show she wasn’t implicated in any of her mother’s arrangements with White concerning money for her or her brother. Jerome tried once more to impugn her honesty. Hadn’t Evelyn told her brother, when she returned from Europe with Thaw, that he had treated her cruelly in order to make her confess that White had drugged her? But Evelyn stood up to him. As she said in her first memoir, she had learned how to be a confident witness by concentrating on the truth. The handwritten frontispiece of the book reads: ‘Be truthful. Even a well made lie is easily broken down under proper and persistent cross examination. A witness who deliberately and knowingly commits perjury is not only doing a wrong but is a fool.’

  Frustrated by the charming and clever Evelyn, Jerome then turned his ire on Dr Evans. Once more, he tried to discredit the expert. He wanted to make Evans admit that the conditions he had attributed to Thaw – melancholia and paranoia – were permanent, not temporary; and that ‘brain storm’ was a spurious invention of his own. But Evans held his ground, and the only effect repeating the term ‘brain storm’ had was to embed it in the language:

  My observation of him and the facts I have heard, make me positive that in his abnormal, excited condition of mind he would not be accountable for his actions when he heard the mention of Stanford White’s name ... Constant brooding over the terrible story he had heard so sunk his soul to its lowest depths that he might be liable at any time to be plunged into a brain storm, and under its influences use upon his enemy a revolver which he had been carrying for selfprotection.

  Jerome got no further with Dr Wagner when he called him back to the stand. And now the judge was astonished to hear the prosecutor stating: ‘If Thaw was insane on the date of the shooting and on the first three medical visits he sustained in the Tombs, he is now insane.’ Presumably, an exasperated Jerome had now been squeezed into the position that it was better to have Harry K. Thaw in a psychiatric facility than out and about roaming the streets. It wasn’t the electric chair, but it was certainly an alternative form of containment.

  Meanwhile Thaw himself, who wanted not only to be exonerated but hailed as a heroic saviour of innocent damsels, was briefing the press: ‘I am not crazy. I was not crazy when I shot Stanford White. I’m glad I did it. I was justified when I shot him. I was never insane and never said I was.’

  Harry Thaw adored the limelight, and litigation continued to be his route into it.

  To counter the son’s ill-effects on his own case, Delmas called the mother. On the stand, the redoubtable Mrs William Thaw proved a formidable witness, one who spoke with utter rectitude and honesty. As Evelyn, who rarely had sympathy to spare for the woman, wrote in her 1914 memoir: ‘Mrs Thaw made a good witness. She put up a fine fight for her son’s life. Every motherly instinct was aroused. She is a kindly matron, with brown eyes and a pleasant expression. She was dressed in widow’s garb with her black veil throw
n back, disclosing a mass of silver-white hair. At all times she was perfectly self-possessed.’

  Mrs Thaw told the court how, on his return to Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1903, she had picked up Harry’s terrible state from the violent manner in which he played the piano, and then from his groans and sobs. He told her he couldn’t sleep. Finally, on being pressed, he confessed that he had been thinking about ‘a wicked thing the wickedest man in New York had done’ and that this man had ruined his life by ruining the girl Harry loved. She was a girl with the ‘most beautiful mind’ of all the young girls he had ever known, and he would ‘make it his business to see that this girl was not dragged down’. As Harry grew more and more depressed, overwrought and obsessed with the young woman, whose name and profession Mrs Thaw eventually learned, the family doctor too grew worried about him.

  Jerome now leapt up. His intervention stunned the court. ‘If it is presumed that this defendant was insane at the time of these conversations and continued insane right down the line until June 25, 1906, then it must be presumed that he is still insane, that he is insane today. In that case, it is time to stop this trial.’

  Only the judge’s irritation and refusal to appoint a lunacy commission ensured that the trial continued. Mrs Thaw was taken through her ultimate agreement to her son’s marriage to Evelyn – on the condition that her past was never referred to and that her mother never came to visit.

  After a long weekend recess, the court reconvened on the Monday. Jerome’s tactic now seemed to be to tell the world the worst about Evelyn and about Harry K. Thaw’s sadistic tendencies. Thaw’s former long-term lawyer, whose firm had been fired before the trial commenced, was called and asked about the various claims he had settled for Thaw, including one brought by a girl alleging that she had been tied to a bedpost and whipped. Delmas’s objections that such testimony couldn’t be brought in rebuttal prompted only Jerome’s plaint that he was trying to show that Evelyn’s narrative about White couldn’t have dislodged Harry’s reason, since he was already familiar with such propensities in his own person.

  One of Evelyn’s photographers and Stanford White’s brother-in-law were up next. The latter, just back from Europe, had been at the roof garden on the night of the murder. He had talked with Thaw just before, and claimed that he was neither drunk nor mad, though Harry had offered to introduce him to young women ...

  Jerome then called Abraham Hummel, the lawyer that Stanford White had sent Evelyn to for an affidavit as to what had happened to her in Schloss Katzenstein. Despite a slew of objections from Delmas, the court heard of the sexual violence Evelyn had been subjected to within the castle walls. Once out in the public sphere, the material was so scandalous that there was no point in trying to undermine the authenticity of the affidavit or the statement of a decidedly weaselly Hummel.

  After that, Jerome called what Delmas named his ‘squadron [or army] of experts’, and the battle over Harry Thaw’s sanity began in earnest.

  Never had so many notable alienists been summoned to court at the same time, or appeared nationwide on the front pages. Never had the new psychiatry been so tested and at such length, its disparate views, diagnoses and terms trumpeted and pulled apart before so vast a newspaper-reading public. If the vagaries of the human mind had had an initial airing with Dr Evans’s definitions of ‘brain storm’, melancholia and paranoia, they were now to be stretched even further, this time on the side of a rational ability to distinguish between right and wrong that coexisted with ‘insanity’. Jerome forced the court to ask whether, given the logic of the proceedings, Harry K. Thaw was even ‘competent’ to brief his lawyers and stand trial.

  Up for the prosecution were Dr Austin Flint, Dr Carlos F. MacDonald and Dr William Mabon, who had all been on hand since Harry’s initial arrest. They were now joined by Dr William Hirsch of the Cornell University Medical School, Dr William Pritchard of the Polyclinic Hospital, Dr Allen Ross Diffendorf, superintendent of the Connecticut State Hospital, Dr Albert Warren Ferrie of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and – Jerome’s trump card – Dr Allan McLane Hamilton, who had been the first doctor on the defence team when it was still led by Thaw’s ‘Traitor’, Delafield.

  Jerome had prepared what the New York Times called a ‘12,000 word question’ for the alienists, once they were sworn in en masse after the lunchtime recess. (Only Hamilton and MacDonald, who had helped Jerome prepare his case and therefore thought it unethical to testify now, were kept back.) The people’s ‘hypothetical’ question incorporated all the events leading to the murder from the prosecution’s point of view.

  It took Jerome’s second an hour and a half to read out what was in effect a pamphlet of thirty-nine pages; halfway through it, a brief recess was called. The question covered the whole story to date, including Thaw’s sadistic acts and his demeanour in the Tombs when he refused examination. Asked at the end of the reading whether Thaw ‘knew that his acts were wrong and knew the nature and quality of those acts’, Dr Flint responded that he did. When the witness was handed over to Delmas, the defence attorney asked that the court be adjourned so that he could read the lengthy hypothetical question at least once before cross-examining the witness.

  The next day all the other prosecution experts agreed with Dr Flint: Harry K. Thaw could tell right from wrong and knew what he was doing when he killed Stanford White. When Dr Hirsch came to the witness box on 15 March, he told the court that he had been a colleague of the famous Austrian neurologist Krafft-Ebing, who had been used by the defence to bolster the idea of a temporary insanity – their ‘brain storm’ theory. There was, he said, no such thing as a brain storm in any of the scientific literature. Nor did Thaw’s case match the mild versions of temporary insanity that Krafft-Ebing mentioned in his Textbook of Insanity, which had been translated into English in 1904.

  Dr Hirsch, who knew his continentals, did not know his Americans or English quite as well. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the term ‘brain storm’ to a medical dictionary of 1894, while William James, who knew how to twist and shape the language as well as his more literary brother, had used it in his 1879 essay exploring the limits of consciousness, ‘Are We Automata?’. Indeed, Evans in his evidence had used a metaphor similar to James’s. In referring to Thaw’s loss of willpower he had said: ‘the person becomes a victim of his diseased condition, operating as a ship does without a rudder in the wind’. The inimitable James, so important to the establishment of psychology in the English-speaking world, ruminated on

  the notorious fact that the strongest tendencies to automatic activity in the nerves often run most counter to the selective pressure of consciousness. Every day of our lives we struggle to escape some tedious tune or odious thought which the momentary disposition of the brain keeps forcing upon us. And, to take more extreme cases, there are murderous tendencies to nervous discharge which, so far from involving by their intensity the assent of the will, cause their subjects voluntarily to repair to asylums to escape their dreaded tyranny. In all these cases of voluntas paradoxa or invita, [contradictory wills or invited ones] the individual selects out of the two possible selves yielded by his cerebral powers one as the true Ego; the other he regards as an enemy until at last the brain-storm becomes too strong for the helmsman’s power. But even in the depths of mania or of drunkenness the conscious man can steady himself and be rational for an instant if a sufficient motive be brought to bear.

  In this version, the brain storm overwhelms Harry and he becomes murderous, unable to escape the tyranny of a ‘nervous discharge’.

  The defence wouldn’t be outdone by Flint, Hirsch or Jerome. They called Charles Pilgrim, president of the State Commission in Lunacy, and Graeme Hammond, as well as Ely Jelliffe and William A. White. While they all agreed, after a reading of both the defence and the prosecution’s hypothetical questions, that Thaw was mad and not responsible when he shot Stanford White, they had a little more trouble agreeing in what that madness consisted or how to describe it.
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br />   The difficulties of expert-witnessing, particularly in this field of the mind, have not changed all that much - despite more widely agreed classificatory systems, with numbers attached. By 1907, the great psychiatric classifier Emil Kraepelin’s terminology would have been circulating in English for at least five years, but new terms were constantly being tried out and debated.

  Hammond, on the stand, admitted that classification systems in the field were not cast in stone: he wasn’t familiar with the term ‘brain storm’, which the press and public had taken to with such rapidity that Evans became colloquially known as the ‘brain-storm doctor’. Hammond thought it was probably akin to transitory mania, or psycho- kinesia, a term the researchers into automatic action and the paranormal also used at the time. He spoke of Thaw’s ‘maniacal furor’ on the night in question and had no doubt the madness he suffered from was transient. William White concurred. Thaw’s ‘defect of reason’, as far as he was concerned, meant he didn’t have complete knowledge of right and wrong; nor did the fact that he could remember his actions discount a diagnosis of insanity. Ely Jelliffe pronounced that all of Thaw’s intellectual functions were affected by his defective judgement.

  The defence had now lined up one by one – all but the hugely respected Dr Allan McLane Hamilton, who was now subpoenaed into court. He had found Thaw to be suffering from dementia praecox – one of Kraepelin’s two great disease categories, the other being manic depressive psychosis. In Kraepelin’s view, dementia praecox – eventually reconfigured as schizophrenia – was a disorder of thinking, or cognition. Understood as a psychosis that had a paranoid subtype that Hamilton ascribed to Thaw, this was the late-nineteenth-century asylum diagnosis par excellence, and it was understood to lead to inevitable disintegration. Thaw’s was no temporary condition.