American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  The next day in the new Third Presbyterian Church at Thanksgiving morning services, an odd little scene took place between Harry and his mother as they sat in the back under the gallery. They were the only two from the family at the service, as his sisters were coming for the holiday from England and New York but hadn’t yet arrived. Despairing and desolate that Evelyn was effectively avoiding him, having chosen to go back to the theater and the sphere of White’s influence, and unhappy with his mother’s lack of sympathy, Harry stood next to Mother Thaw throughout the service. Toward the close, the choir began to sing Kipling’s Recessional Hymn. Without warning, Harry began to sob, swallowing intermittently and emitting his wounded-animal noises. Mother Thaw gave him a little shake as his tears fell on the hymnal in his trembling hands.

  After church, she tried to discuss the matter with the gloomy Harry. Near tears again, Harry told his mother that he had tried to discourage the girl from life on the stage and offered to send her to school and so forth but that “he had very little help or encouragement from her mother in his efforts to protect or befriend the child,” as he constantly referred to her. A week or so later, Dr. Bingman, a family friend who knew Harry’s medical and “emotional” history, came to talk to him. He was utterly depressed, even more than when he had tried, halfheartedly, to commit suicide by cutting his own throat in his days at Wooster Academy. Finally, fearing a potentially more effective suicide attempt, Mother Thaw relented. She gave Harry her reluctant approval to pursue his fallen angel.

  A thoroughly elated and invigorated Harry returned to New York in December. He kept up a steady campaign of penitent courtship; he sent gifts and the contents of an entire florist’s shop with notes indicating that he had changed and that he still wanted to marry her. When Evelyn sent some clothes of his that had been in her trunk, one of the pockets had an ivory nail file of hers in it. Harry took this as a sign “that everything was all right.”

  What developed in the days leading up to Evelyn’s eighteenth birthday was a Mexican standoff in the middle of Manhattan. White’s lawyers were armed with the affidavit and other evidence of Thaw’s concealed criminal behavior, a large portion of it provided by Mrs. Nesbit (including shirtwaists she said Thaw in fits of anger had ripped from her daughter, which she had kept as evidence). Thaw and his lawyers were armed with Evelyn’s story, combined with mounting evidence from other young “victims” of White whom Harry, with the help of his detectives and the prehensile grasp of Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, had ferreted out. Thaw was also paying part of his army of detectives to watch White’s every movement, while White paid out close to six thousand dollars in several months to his own detectives to find out who was paying to have him watched. But with White’s potentially devastating threat hanging over Harry’s head, his lawyers advised him not to do anything rash until Evelyn turned eighteen. So, the overwrought Harry waited like an excitable child for Christmas Eve.

  In the meantime, what with costume fittings, pre-show parties, and some modeling assignments, Evelyn tried to throw herself into her new role with enthusiasm. But nothing had changed. Even though Stanny was still willing to make himself and his money available to Kittens, his unwavering interest in other girls was too blatant and insulting. Meanwhile, he had effectively diminished her reputation for any potential legitimate suitors within his considerable sphere of influence. Which left her in limbo.

  The morning of December 24, Harry sent all sorts of gifts to Evelyn’s hotel—Japanese trees, bonsai miniatures—and, according to his own recollection in his memoir, “she cared little.” For his part, Stanny was planning a “bully party” in honor of Evelyn’s eighteenth birthday at the Tower.

  That evening, Harry—along with two friends, Charlie Sands and Lorimer Warden, and an unnamed girl—drove to the Madison Square Garden Theater, where Evelyn’s show had opened. According to Harry, they had expected to find Kennedy, the detective from the Grand Hotel (and one of Harry’s informants as to Evelyn’s comings and goings) waiting outside. Instead, there was a Detective Heitman, who told Harry that White was not there. Moreover, he told Harry that he had overheard four members of the Monk Eastman gang talking and pointing to Harry as he stepped out of the carriage. An anxious Harry, full of false bravado, went into the theater to watch the play. After the performance, Harry went to Evelyn’s dressing room, where “a colored maid was helping her.” It would be at least twenty minutes before she was ready, so he again went outside.

  There he met with Kennedy and the other detective. When they agreed that there had been Monk Eastman gang members in the vicinity, Harry asked one of the men for his revolver. He took the gun and walked with Lorimer across the street into the saloon, where the four gang members were supposedly in a back room. Harry wondered whether or not the detectives might be lying, and went outside just in time to see a large black electric hansom drive up to the theater. An elegant, darkly dressed man got out and ran across the street in a hurry toward the stage entrance. It was Stanford White.

  Within ten minutes or so, an apparently “wild and excited” White came out “looking like everything was wrong.”

  What had happened was that Evelyn had decided she did not want to go to White’s party and continue with tiresome and disheartening patterns that held no promise of anything better in her personal future. White had urged her to come to the Tower, and she hotly refused. He then told her that he would give her time to cool off. Soon after White left, Harry picked up Evelyn, and she, along with his two friends and the girl, went instead to dinner at Rector’s, the place she and Harry had first met. Harry was flushed with excitement at frustrating White on the very day his lawyer, Longfellow, said he could start his reconciliation with Evelyn without fear of the law. One has to wonder how soon after her fateful decision Evelyn began to regret it, since Harry’s description of the evening of her eighteenth birthday seems anything but happy: “The little party at Rector’s was one of repentance, not of the food nor of the wine nor Evelyn, but her rape by White.”

  Another thing that ate away at Harry was the idea that White continued to provide funds for Evelyn’s brother even while he, Harry Thaw, was fully capable and willing to do so. Harry had assumed or had been told (it’s not clear which) that Mr. Holman, her new stepfather, had taken over the financial care for Howard. But when Harry discovered that it was not the case, that Howard actually worked for White in some minor capacity, perhaps as an assistant to his secretary, he became more disturbed and angry at Evelyn’s mother, who had let both her children be “bamboozled” by White. He also took this as a sign that White still wanted to have some leverage over Evelyn, whom he could twist to his will.

  Harry knew that the great architect gave her a weekly allowance when she was not working, and “he paid the same sum for that brother—very generous, you see, when he hoped to ‘get her back.’ ” Harry also began to think, as did others, that perhaps White’s well-known princely generosity was a way of offsetting deeds “committed out of unscrupulous passion”— that White was “a bookkeeper with the Fates” who tried out of remorse or guilt to salve his conscience and unpleasant memories by doing good deeds.

  According to Evelyn, a few days later, Sam Shubert, the theatrical manager and co-producer of her show (who died tragically in a train wreck in May), had told her with innocent amusement that White was in a great state of excitement that night, both at the theater and at the Tower party, where he kept jumping up from the table and checking for Evelyn, “running out and then coming back in again.” Finally, he said, White went back to the theater, where, apparently, he had just missed her. When White questioned the stage doorman, Benjamin Bowman, he was told she had left with Thaw. First, calling Bowman “a goddamned liar,” an agitated White ran into the theater, and finding no Evelyn, came back out. He then allegedly pulled out a revolver of his own and waved it in front of Bowman, vowing he would find and “kill the son of bitch before daylight.” Four days later, Bowman stopped Harry Thaw on the st
reet and told him of the remarks White had muttered about “that miserable puny Pittsburgher.”

  As the weeks went by, the antagonism between White and Thaw grew like a nasty swollen carbuncle. It was a situation the best alienist— practitioner of the new science of “psychiatrism”—might have struggled with, especially in trying to answer the eternal question: What does a woman want?

  Specifically, what did the still captivating and barely legal Evelyn want, assuming she had any legitimate options? And how was she to think clearly while being pulled across one line and then another in the tenacious tug-of-war between White and Thaw? More than anything, Evelyn wanted peace of mind and some chance at financial security, since it appeared romantic happiness was a delusion. This meant she needed to believe that Harry was sincere in his apologies for his violent and offensive behavior—and that he in turn had forgiven her sinful “transgressions. ” Knowing she was back in White’s city, Harry wanted desperately to win her away, permanently, apparently willing to endure the fact that she was more Magdalene than Madonna. And if he thought Stanny wanted her back, Harry wanted her all the more. If Harry wanted her, Stanny wanted her away from him—and wanted Harry out of his playground. Each man suspected the other of some more aggressive movement toward his discredit. And pinned and wriggling in the middle was Evelyn, the key to both men’s potential ruin should she decide to go public with her knowledge of either one’s “sexual crimes.”

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, Evelyn provided Harry with letters White had sent her, hoping that once each side was equally armed, they would cease fighting, sensing the battle a draw. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Mr. and Mrs. Harry Thaw, the "happy couple,” in a composite photo, 1905.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The “Mistress of Millions”

  “What Is the Fetish of the Fair Young Woman of the Footlights That Makes Western Croesus Lay His Heart and Gold at Her Feet?”

  —New York Tribune headline

  My heart is not for sale!

  —Song lyric, 1905

  “Gee! But This Is a Lonesome Town”

  —Song title, 1905

  Throughout the following year, as Harry pursued his fallen Angel-Child in earnest, miraculously maintaining his temper and tempering his obsession with White (even paying for Evelyn to take another trip to Europe to study art and music, this one scrupulously supervised by a hired chaperone for the entire time), the papers were filled with speculative headlines. One read: “$80,000 or Espoused to a Fair Young Daughter of Thespis.” The public wondered how much of a sacrifice the Pittsburgh playboy was willing to make on behalf of the Broadway beauty. But Harry had routinely exceeded his $80,000 monthly allowance since that time when his myopic mother had first threatened him with disinheritance should he pursue his broken dream girl all the way to the altar. There were also rumors at the time that Harry and Evelyn had already gotten married during their first European “holiday”; another said that Evelyn had been offered a quarter of a million dollars to leave Harry. But they were all only rumors.

  Mother Thaw, along with the rest of the family, believed that nothing good could come from bringing a common “social-climbing soubrette” who had “nothing but her looks” into their gilded family. After all, in her mind, both of the Thaw daughters had married well. Mrs. George Lauder Carnegie seemed at least content with her lot and snug fortune. But things were very down and nearly out for the countess of Yarmouth, who was adrift in a sea of marital troubles. It didn’t help that some reporters had taken to calling her husband “the Countess.”

  Evelyn knew well enough that Mother Thaw was filled with little sympathy for her and her vulgar bohemian baggage: “It was irritating for these strict souls to have a chorus girl in the family, [whose] beautiful mind [which had been cultivated by Stanny] was little compensation for her association with the stage.” And, as Evelyn described it, “I certainly had no great sympathy for her. I never regarded Mrs. Thaw as an archangel because she was so magnanimous as to forgive a chorus girl for taking . . . her favorite son.”

  But if the matriarch Thaw were to give her curdled consent to the marriage, it would be understood that Evelyn could not under any circumstances continue to pursue her modeling or stage career; she couldn’t even, as she was explicitly told, participate in the occasional tableau vivant. Although popular with the affluent and aesthetically minded rich from New York to Newport, this harmless parlor entertainment was frowned upon by the pious Pittsburgh clan and their fellow disciples. Evelyn responded only with a sphinxlike smile and said nothing.

  Moreover, it was also understood by all at Lyndhurst that Evelyn’s past was dead and buried. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Out of sight. Out of mind. Although her knee-jerk reaction was to roil against the first stipulation, a now nineteen-year-old Evelyn halfheartedly accepted the opportunity embedded in the latter to put her short but too painful past behind her, especially certain events needing “less closure than obliteration.” Nonetheless, Mother Thaw’s abrupt amputation of her whole identity and demand that Evelyn bury even memories of the best part of her still young life seemed terribly familiar to her. She flashed back to her father’s death and her mother’s eventual dismissal of his existence and mandate of silence. This only helped darken the former chorus girl’s “beautiful mind” and color the opinion she was forming of her mother-in-law-to-be, whose face like her general demeanor was a grim, tight fist. There were certain days when she considered that she might be merely trading Medea for Medusa.

  The popular-culture myth that Evelyn was a scheming, social-climbing, gold-digging "she-wolf ” can be dispelled simply by pointing to the magnates and millionaires who had wanted her and whom she had routinely dismissed or ignored since she was sixteen. One then needs to consider the three-and-a-half-year campaign it took the “millionaire scion of steel and such” to finally win her pretty hand. The question of her judgment (or sanity) in finally agreeing to marry “Mad Harry” is another matter.

  Having been forced at such a young age to abandon her fantasies to a harsher reality in order to survive, in early 1905 Evelyn considered her narrowing options. She had been the family provider since the age of fourteen; she had come to the unhappy realization that in spite of his generosity, Stanny the unrepentant rounder would never leave his wife and son. To make matters worse, because of her illicit relationship with him, if it ever got out, no respectable man, young or old, would ever take a serious interest in her. The closest thing to a real proposal Evelyn had gotten was from the smitten Bobby Collier, who had offered to send her to Europe to study sculpture a year or so earlier. And then there was Harry.

  Having grown up with the specter of the imposing Thaw family mansion hulking on the outskirts of her drab little neighborhood, Evelyn found herself in the enviable position of marrying into that very same family. Unfortunately, in addition to his millions, she was all too painfully aware that Harry’s inheritance included a wealth of neuroses. But in pressing his suit (“He wanted to marry. Nothing, nothing less would satisfy him”), Harry smilingly assured Evelyn that once they were married, he would be a changed man, even declaring that he would “become a Benedictine monk.” He promised there would be no more scenes like the one in Schloss-Katzenstein, insisting that he had simply been overcome with anger at her former behavior with White. But eventually, as he said, he realized that it was not her fault. So he forgave her.

  Contrary to what has been written, rumored, and ruminated on, and however unfathomable it may seem, Evelyn did also care about and even love Harry, for a time. She would write of Harry in 1915, “He was very earnest, no philanderer, no light lover, even in his infidelities he was absorbed and sincere. Such matters were serious propositions, presenting aspects which would not occur to the normal man.” There is convincing evidence of what seems genuine affection in the letters she wrote to him when she was in Mrs. deMille’s school (admittedly written with a school-girl’s immaturity and before he had revealed his
true colors). Yet the same affection seems present in letters they exchanged during the trials. One could also speculate that Harry might have appeared to Evelyn, if not consciously, then on some unconscious level, as simply a much more peculiar and debased version of White. Or even Jack Barrymore.

  Like Stanny, but to a lesser degree, Harry did possess a kind of charismatic intensity that undeniably affected those around him. He was at various times given to histrionically romantic, even sweet gestures à la White and Barrymore (the latter having spent money on Evie, although not his own). Like Jack, Harry had pursued Evelyn, knowing White was in her life, although what was unwitting youthful infatuation on Barrymore’s part was full-blown calculated obsession with Harry. Of course with his immense wealth, Harry could give Evelyn the financial security she craved and the ultra-comfortable lifestyle she had grown accustomed to under White’s “patronage” and considerable influence. In addition, Harry could give her a veneer of respectability she could get nowhere else. He had grown up with the advantages of money, and his cosmopolitan education and experience made him a frequently entertaining conversationalist and a minor connoisseur, albeit not in the same league as Stanny (of which Harry was keenly aware). And, after all, Harry had risked losing not only his well-publicized inheritance but also his beloved mother’s favor.

  And all for “his Boofuls.”

  Although virtually all descriptions of Harry the demented wastrel and Stanny the genius architect make much of their differences, the similarities between the two men are uncanny when dissected in the cold light of a hundred years. Both men had a Jekyll-and-Hyde ability to conceal the darker side of their personalities, even from their closest friends and family—and find excuses when it emerged. Each had paid chorus-girl accomplices to facilitate their introductions to Evelyn, and subsequently paid others to watch her in their absence. Knowing that Evelyn had a traumatic and foreshortened childhood as a result of the loss of her father and subsequent poverty, each at first acted the compassionate benefactor, expressing concern for her youthful innocence and welfare. And of course, fully aware of her impoverished background, each showered her with objects of wealth and luxury enough to turn anyone’s head, much less that of a teenage girl who had felt real pangs of hunger and deprivation for most of her formative years. Each took advantage of her lack of moral supervision, as both men paid off her mother or maneuvered her out of the picture so that they could have Evelyn all to themselves—and then each proceeded to act contemptibly, eventually contributing to the utter ruination of her reputation. Ultimately, each man controlled her life so effectively that Evelyn was cut off from any and all friends or outside emotional support. And Stanny and Harry had each knelt before her and trembled at the mere touch of her dress, just as each had surreptitiously lured her into a “soft prison,” but a prison, nonetheless. So, it seems, as far as Evelyn was finally concerned, if not Stanny, who had taken her first along with her only marital currency, then Harry, the man obsessed with that terrible truth and the man she had loved. And with currency to burn.