But Harry K. Thaw was used to getting his way, and he began to pursue Evelyn with what she initially saw as the same kind of flattering and harmless if overly zealous attention dozens of others had shown her. Eventually, they all admitted defeat. But not Mr. Munroe. As she put it, he “was persistent in pursuing me, everlastingly.” Evelyn was, of course, unaware as to why he was so determined to win her or how he intended to, if need be, shatter the fragile bell jar of her existence. Nor did she know that the day after her first encounter with him, a fervent and undaunted Thaw had in fact gone to see her mother at their apartment at the Wellington to press his case for Evelyn’s undivided attention. When Mrs. Nesbit opened the door, there stood Pittsburgh’s infamous “squandering son of untold wealth,” who in revealing his true identity to “the mamma” needn’t have bothered to add “of Pittsburgh.”
The shock of recognition nearly floored Mrs. Nesbit, who stood for a moment as if seeing a hallucination or some appalling apparition. Harry’s outlandish escapades had been published from time to time in the hometown papers along with his photo, neither of which a prepubescent Evelyn had seen. But her mother had. Of course, Harry didn’t know about the demeaning incident some years earlier at his own family’s threshold, when their butler had dismissed “the mendicant mamma” with a wave of his gloved hand.
According to Harry, the brief meeting in the anteroom of the plush apartment did not go well.
“She was not enthusiastic,” he wrote. “I knew why later. This mother should have known better.”
Later that day, when Evelyn returned home from a modeling session, she mentioned to her mother the strange and uncomfortable lunch date she had endured the previous day. Predictably, Mrs. Nesbit neglected to mention her own disconcerting encounter with the same man, whose real identity she too withheld from Evelyn. She also failed to appreciate the irony of having turned a Thaw away from her door as he begged for her daughter’s attention.
A week or so later, an unsuspecting Evelyn was invited to a pre-theater dinner by another actress friend. Among the dozen guests at the restaurant, coincidentally, was Mr. Munroe, whose seat was coincidentally right next to Evelyn’s. She greeted this social ambush with her model’s smile, which Mr. Munroe read as a coded sign of reciprocated affection. Throughout the sweetbread-and-mushroom patties, halibut, rice croquettes, currant jelly, almond cakes, and polite dinner conversation, not one of the eleven accomplices gave away Mr. Munroe’s little secret. It wasn’t until after the café noir and crème de menthe that, appropriately enough when entering the theater, the smiling man declared “with dramatic earnestness, ” his voice trembling with pride, “that he was not whomever Mr. Such and Such.”
“I am not Mr. Munroe,” he told Evelyn, with a sweep of his arm. “I am Harry Kendall Thaw, of Pittsburgh!”
As Evelyn later described it, “a disguised Napoleon revealing himself to a near-sighted veteran on Elba could not have made the revelation with greater aplomb.” She continued: “It struck me as funny at the time . . . so characteristic was it that I do not think I ever knew him much better at any subsequent time than I did at that moment.” According to her, the pie-eyed pursuer hung fire in the elegant lobby, waiting on twitchy tenterhooks for her reaction. Seventeen-year-old Evelyn gazed at him with some bewilderment, wondering from the tone of his voice what it was he expected her to do—“stagger back, turn pale?” She contented herself and Harry by exclaiming “Indeed!” There seemed little else to say.
“You’ve heard of me?” he replied, with a supercilious smirk. Evelyn said that when she was growing up as a girl in Pittsburgh, the name of Thaw carried with it the same weight that a name like Vanderbilt or Astor carried in Newport or New York. Anyone, she told him, who knew Pittsburgh knew of the Thaws. Harry went stiff with self-importance and grinned from ear to ear. And Evelyn flashed on the face of Steeplechase.
Speaking in his distinctive Gatling-gun manner, within the space of a few minutes, Thaw then disclosed to her the half-truths and irrational saga of his previous deceptions: why he had sent the flowers wrapped in bills, why he had felt it necessary to send letters under a nom de plume, and so on. He knew, he explained, that she was involved in a financially precarious career, which is why he sent money. He had meant no disrespect. Moreover, he said he knew what an impact his identity would have on her, because as Evelyn saw it through his eyes, “Harry Thaw, of Pittsburgh, was Somebody.” And he had wanted to wait for the exact right moment to unveil himself to her, to throw off the mantle of ordinariness and thus make as big an impact on her as he could. He wanted, as he told her a week or so later, to “exceed theatricality.”
Evelyn was simultaneously aggravated and amused, fascinated and annoyed by Harry’s unbridled egotism. He also exuded a haughtiness that was irritating yet strangely compelling and symptomatic, she thought, of the obscenely nouveau riche. And, as she confessed years later, “even a pose, so long as it is consistently upheld, is impressive.” That Harry seemed sincere about his patrimony she had no doubt. Little did she know, however, that there was another side of him, one which was beyond terrible. The newly polished and prosperous Thaws indeed had a family history, but Harry’s own past was anything but brilliant. Known from New York to Monte Carlo for more than his money, Harry and his odd-ball, often juvenile, and sometimes hazardous antics, preferably played out among the less scrupulous denizens of the local theater districts (whose silence he routinely bought), were of singular interest to the saffron press. Worst of all, Evelyn had no idea of the depth of his veritable monomania regarding the great White.
SAINT VITUS’S DANCE
At the time Evelyn began her acquaintance with “Mr. Munroe Somebody Thaw,” she was apprised of the fact that he was heir to an estimated $40 million. But he was not the first adoring millionaire whose mono-poly money might be hers for the asking. Well aware of his eldest son’s profligate propensities, the elder Thaw had stipulated in his will that the ne’er-do-well Harry receive a monthly allowance of only $2,500, a princely sum nonetheless in an age when a glass of Madeira and a steak dinner with all the trimmings at Delmonico’s cost a dollar-fifty. But, when his father died, just after Harry’s eighteenth birthday, the doting Mother Thaw upped the ante to a staggering $80,000 a month (and maintained that for eighteen more shameful years, virtually all of which was also tax-free).
As early as 1894, Harry had made the local papers for chasing a driver down North Avenue in Cambridge with an unloaded shotgun, believing the man had cheated him out of ten cents’ change. As the years progressed, “Mad Harry” carried on with his juvenile behavior. But if Mother Thaw was ridiculously free with the family fortune when it came to Harry, she kept a tight rein on bad press most of the time. So between Harry’s own hush money and his mother’s vigilant attempts at containment, Evelyn, like a lot of people, had been kept in the dark about Thaw’s sinister side. When she met him, Harry told her about his last extended European holiday during which he had visited the Paris World’s Fair, had gone ballooning, and had hired John Philip Sousa’s band to entertain guests at a private party, where, according to Thaw, they “lifted the roof off.” Someone quipped that Harry should be right at home in a balloon, since he was so “full of hot air.” He had also gone mountain climbing in the Bavarian highlands and hobnobbed with royalty at the horse races in France. Evelyn was suitably impressed.
By 1898, without his hometown advantage, however, Harry had managed to bluster or bumble his way into the New York gossip columns— although not the club world he was determined to successfully infiltrate. It was reported that in spite of his above-average height, the younger Thaw had below-average intelligence and “appeared more like the perpetual undergraduate than the scion of a wealthy family.” His inappropriate giggle when someone else’s misfortunes struck him as funny was downright creepy, and even though he had been around the world several times (Rio, Barcelona, London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Lucerne, Budapest, Constantinople, Cairo, Tangiers, Yalta), Harry only dabbled in adult
hood; he wore his pseudo-worldliness like a mask at Carnival.
He believed the center of the world was wherever he was at the moment, and there was no one who could (or would) say differently. In a well-publicized incident in Paris three years earlier, Harry had thrown an extravagant dinner for himself and twenty-five of the most beautiful showgirls he could find. The price tag was estimated at $50,000. Among his guests was the well-known stage beauty Cléo de Mérode, a woman who had been courted by the king of Belgium. John Philip Sousa’s band had provided the musical entertainment for that evening as well. The capper was that during dessert, each woman found a thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry on her plate, surrounding the stem of her aperitif glass.
If Harry was notable for anything among his barroom acquaintances, it was a “touchy bluster that stemmed from frustrated snobbery.” He was also easily bored. Of London he wrote, “The dances are tiresome. If Royalty comes, worse. You see rows and rows of girls, most tied to each chair.” This, in fact, was a sight he was all too familiar with, though in a distinctly less staid way. He had done more than just dabble in bondage and flagellation in the bordellos from Pigalle to Budapest, and Harry’s desire to handcuff or truss up women was but one variation on a sadistic theme that frequently ran through his one-note head.
No matter what the circumstances, Harry always walked quickly, with a long-legged, nervous gait, although to certain observers, “never seemed able to walk in a straight line.” This inclination had been noted by an instructor at Wooster Prep School, which Harry attended at age sixteen. The teacher described his walk as an erratic kind of “zig-zag which seemed to involuntarily mimic his brain patterns.” From there Harry went on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he barely tried his hand at law. After that, he enrolled in a special course at Harvard, where, by his own account, he “studied poker” and became a “cigarette fiend.” During his brief tenure at Harvard, where he continued to be put off by the study of law, Harry’s cigarette habit, combined with unspecified “immoral practices” and threats to fellow students and staff, got him hastily but quietly expelled.
Not only was he the product of a stern, distant father and a shamelessly suffocating mother, Harry Thaw, as it would subsequently be revealed at his murder trials, came from “tainted stock.” Since infancy Harry was a problem child, his résumé studded with the bizarre. Given to long bouts of chronic insomnia, temper tantrums, and baby talk or wild incoherent babbling, all of which lasted well into his late adolescence, Harry duly impressed specialists, family physicians, nurses, and tutors with his tenacious and abnormal refusal to leave his infancy behind him. Among the list of childhood diseases (including whooping cough, scarlatina, strep throat, and mumps), perhaps Harry’s most exotic illness was a bout of Saint Vitus’s dance, although some later suspected it might have been a mild form of epilepsy. Saint Vitus’s dance, a disorder associated with rheumatic fever, which Harry also had as a child, is characterized by jerky, uncontrollable twitching and movement of either the face or arms and legs. In the Middle Ages it was considered a sign of demonic possession, and usually lasted about a month or two (unless the afflicted died accidentally because of the fervor of an exorcist or cleric). In Harry’s case, no exorcist had ever been called, and so it seemed to linger for thirty-plus years. But Harry Kendall Thaw knew the source of his torment—the devil White.
When Harry was growing up, no one could discipline the truculent troubled child. Only his exasperated father had tried, and only infrequently. Once the elder Thaw was dead and Harry was eighteen, there was no one willing or able to strap him down. His siblings held him at arm’s length and mostly kept to themselves, watching with contrived indifference as their mother fed Harry’s insatiable narcissism. But because he was a child of wealth and privilege, his bizarre actions were tolerated as eccentric by his family and as spoiled by the staff, so that by the time Harry reached his late teens, a repertoire of puerile behavioral aberrations was firmly established as part of his inventory of adult quirks. He continued to speak baby talk (in his letters to Evelyn from prison, Harry wrote to his “Boofuls,” his “Tweetums,” and to “Herself”). At other times, he was given to “outbursts of uncurbed animal passion.” He often amused himself by throwing crockery or sharp, heavy objects at the heads of servants. He was reported to have pulled off the tablecloth and kicked his pheasant and foie gras into the fireplace on several occasions when they were not prepared as he had directed. Easily distracted, he could just as easily become fixated on an idea to the exclusion of all else. It was also reported that after a halfhearted suicide attempt while on a European tour in his early youth, having attempted to cut his own throat, Harry had been temporarily committed to a private sanatorium in England. Yet all of this he managed to keep under wraps. Or rather, Mother Thaw did.
Perhaps his mother’s consistent myopia regarding Harry’s aberrant propensities was sheer denial, knowing that several members on her side of the family had been institutionalized for insanity. Then again, perhaps there was a more tragic and harrowing psychological explanation for Mrs. Thaw’s attitude toward her son. In a letter to a friend years later, Evelyn relates a horrendous event that she learned about soon after marrying Harry—a story that would give Freud nightmares. Apparently, Mother Thaw had given birth to a baby boy a year before Harry. But one night, while sleeping in the bed with his mother, the colicky newborn was accidentally smothered to death under one of Mary Copley Thaw’s pendulous breasts. The child’s name was obliterated from family records, and Harry was produced a year later.
For Harry, mother’s milk and money were indistinguishable; Mary Copley Thaw paid for his best clothes and worst habits well into adulthood. And eventually, in spite of her best efforts, the entire world would see how far Mother Thaw would go to compensate for that horrible loss of her firstborn infant son, and try to deny the genetics of insanity when the family’s numerous skeletons were dragged out of the closet and “put on exhibit in grinning succession in open court” after Harry’s crime of passion.
JEKYLL AND HYDE
He was a zigzagging contradiction, part gentleman, part boor, part prude, part playboy (it is alleged that he was the person for whom the term as we know it was coined). He could be charming and tyrannical, sincere and pretentious, solicitous and sadistic. Unlike Evelyn, who possessed a marvelous “sensayuma” (her word, which appears in letters she wrote late in life), Harry took himself too seriously to detect even a whiff of humor in everyday things, except when it was inappropriate. Evelyn admits, however, that he did have “a kind, sweet, generous, and gentle side.” As she stated years later for those who often wondered about her own sanity in marrying him, “I could not have loved a man who didn’t have some of the finer qualities of humanity.” It was this and only this “finer” part of Harry that he was careful to show to Evelyn during the early phase of their “friendship.” Ironically, like the man on whom he was fixated, Harry Thaw also led a double life, although his closet debauchery and depravity far outdid White’s concealed life as a “notorious seeker of pleasure in strange ways.”
Posing under another assumed name, Mr. Reid, Harry played at being a theatrical coach of some sort and scoured the Tenderloin district for gullible, unsuspecting prey. Once he had paid for a room as far as possible from any others in a less than respectable hotel, Harry would then pay an additional fee to various proprietresses for the privilege of having underage, stagestruck girls come to his rooms for “tutoring.” But the unorthodox lessons Harry taught them were not what they expected. As Mr. Reid he would beat them with dog whips, handcuff them, tie them to chairs and headboards, put them in leg irons, scream in their faces and berate them, reportedly scalding at least one in a bathtub to punish her for her Mary Copley Thaw and her son Harry, circa 1906-1907.
immoral disposition (thus earning him the nickname “Bathtub Harry”). Before his second trial, a woman named Susie Merrill, who ran a house “all of whose guests were of questionable morals,” swore in an affidavit
to these and other facts about Thaw’s “queer” proclivities, which he had whetted in the most depraved corners of the Continent (in Paris, for example, he was considered “the most perversely profligate of all the American colony there”).
Merrill described his modus operandi in her affidavit: “He advertised for girls from ages fifteen to seventeen. He had two whips, one like a riding crop, the other like a dog whip. On one occasion, I heard a young girl’s screams. Then I saw her partly undressed, neck and limbs covered with welts. I found others writhing from punishment.” Merrill estimated that Thaw had paid out about $40,000 over the course of two years to more than two hundred girls he had lured to her establishment. (Most of these facts would not come out until after the second trial, when, within weeks of offering to testify, Merrill died suddenly and mysteriously, unable to confirm her allegations under oath.)
After the evening of his unveiling, Harry would not leave Evelyn alone. He phoned her, pestered her with fervently written “mush” notes (his term), sent tokens of his esteem, did anything he could think of to earn her favor. At first all he managed to do was whip up the interest of the press, where it was reported that little Miss Nesbit “sent back two dozen pairs of the finest silk stockings and a Steinway piano delivered to her apartment, which already had one, thank you very much.” According to one stage manager, “You have no idea how that child is annoyed by the attentions of men, especially of a man named Thaw.”
Once she became fully cognizant of Thaw’s determination to purloin her precious daughter, Mrs. Nesbit not only expressed her extreme distaste for him, she took every opportunity to try to curb any interaction between Evelyn and Harry. He was an all too gross and fleshy reminder of the part of her former life in Pittsburgh she wanted to stay buried. Nor did she want to anger White. It is also possible Stanny had gotten an ill wind of this new development and told Mrs. Nesbit that Evelyn should stay away from the devious and intractable Thaw. Why else would she have discouraged a multimillionaire’s son (and an unmarried one at that) from pursuing Evelyn, not-so-past insults aside?
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