American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  But among those nearest the murdered man, a panic ensued. Within moments, frightened theatergoers from all corners of the Garden scrambled to reach the elevator. As Evelyn described it, time had compressed and now unnaturally expanded; it was like riding the el seated backward and rushing at breakneck speed but going nowhere.

  “People were running about, herding into safe corners, calling for help. The ushers and waiters tried to calm them, to get them back to their seats.”

  From Harry Thaw’s perspective, as those nearest him tried to move away, stunned and frightened by this stark black apparition of death, their eyes were riveted to him and the gun he still held over his head in manic triumph. The crowd surged so close to the roof’s edge he feared for an instant “that some might be forced over the railing and plunge to the street eighty feet below.”

  The scene took a decidedly surreal turn as the stage manager, Lionel Lawrence, still not sure himself what had happened, ordered his orchestra to continue playing. Three of the chorus girls, upon seeing White’s lifeless body, fell in a dead faint to the stage floor. The other girls, who hurried to the edge of the stage, their painted faces distorted into masks of horror illuminated by the footlights just below, ran hysterically into the wings in a blur of silk and feathers. The music trailed off pitifully. The mother of the lyricist, attending her son’s first opening night (and having witnessed throughout the evening the hostile or disgruntled audience’s unfavorable reaction to the show), feared he might have been the target of a particularly harsh brand of criticism, and screamed, “Oh, they’ve shot my son!”

  Terrified and confused people were still stumbling and nearly trampling over one another in a frenetic attempt to reach the central elevator while Lawrence jumped up on one of the side tables and announced rather pointlessly that “a most serious accident has occurred.” The closest official to Thaw was a uniformed New York City fireman from Engine Company No. 60, Paul Brudi. The fireman gingerly approached a wide-eyed, pasty-faced Thaw and asked him to “relinquish his weapon.” Thaw seemed almost relieved, and handed the fireman the sweat-covered gun, as if giving some waiter a particularly generous tip. He was then escorted briskly in the direction of the elevator.

  A dumbfounded Evelyn, her face ashen, screamed abruptly in disbelief as Harry walked toward her, “My God!” and “Oh, Harry, what have you done?”

  She repeated this, crying, “You’re in a terrible fix now.” Harry smiled his idiosyncratic smile, took hold of Evelyn, kissed her on the cheek, and said, “It’s all right, dear. I have probably saved your life.” McCaleb, also pale and shaking, said, “My God! You’re crazy!” Beale stood by, mute and amazed. As Evelyn described it years later, “A complete numbness of mind and body took possession of me. . . . I moved like a person in a trance for hours afterwards.”

  In contrast to the tragedy above, an absurdly comical scene was taking place one floor below. Albert Payson Terhune, a husky young newspaperman for the New York Evening World who was covering the opening for the paper’s honeymooning drama critic, had witnessed the murder from a mere few yards away. After running at breakneck speed down a flight of plush red-carpeted stairs to the corridor, where the sole telephone booth stood, he found it occupied by a man engaged in “a smirking conversation with one Tessie.” After the man refused Terhune’s polite request to relinquish the phone, the muscular reporter yanked him away, eager to break the unbelievable news of the murder to his editors. While pleading with an apathetic operator to connect him to the city desk in a hurry, Terhune suddenly found himself under attack by the man whose conversation with Tessie he had abruptly ended, accompanied by a friend armed with a chair. People rushing past in their attempt to escape the theater saw the agile Terhune fending off both men with one leg and his free arm, shouting his unbelievable scoop into the phone.

  As some of the less squeamish or more inebriated patrons pushed forward to stare in morbid fascination at White’s corpse, someone ran back toward the dressing room to look for something to cover him with. A somewhat bemused and exhilarated Harry Thaw waited for the elevator, his hands twitching nervously. Asked by the fireman Paul Brudi, to whom he had given the gun, “Why did you do it?” Harry calmly stated, “He deserved it. He ruined my wife and left her helpless.” At that moment, Officer Anthony L. Debes, whose beat was the theater district, emerged from the elevator and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder.

  “You’re under arrest,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” replied Harry strangely.

  They stepped into the elevator, and just as it was about to close, Evelyn, ghostly pale and trembling violently, ran into the car and threw her arms around Harry. Beale and McCaleb followed in astonished silence.

  “Why did you do it, Harry?” she asked.

  “It’s all right,” he repeated mechanically.

  Harry then turned to the policeman and said, “Here’s a bill, officer. Get Carnegie on the phone. Mr. Andrew Carnegie. And tell him I’m in trouble.”

  The policeman ignored him.

  When the elevator reached the ground floor, Evelyn, appearing stunned and shrunken, was swallowed up by a large touring car that Beale had hailed at the curb. Meanwhile, as Harry Thaw emerged from the Garden, he calmly lit a cigarette. For some reason, Debes had agreed to Harry’s request not to be handcuffed, and the two walked in the direction of Fifth Avenue through the disoriented and distressed crowd, virtually unnoticed. Finally, Harry and his escort arrived without any fanfare at the nearest police station. It was the Tenderloin precinct. The millionaire turned murderer was handed over to another policeman. When asked by the desk sergeant to present himself, Harry, still looking oddly dazed but dapper in his tuxedo and bent skimmer, approached the sergeant nonchalantly.

  “Did you know the man you shot?” the sergeant asked.

  Harry looked at the floor as if in profound deliberation. After some thirty seconds’ reflection, he replied, “Yes.”

  Back at Madison Square, the lights of the Garden were dimmed as the last of the patrons were escorted to the crowded street, many of whom, insensible to their surroundings, stood in shock and disbelief in the path of oncoming traffic. A discordant noise from the motorists and carriages could be heard up on the roof, where White’s body lay in thick and awful silence. Due to the gunpowder burns and gruesome nature of the architect’s wounds, when James Clinch Smith had walked past the body, he was unaware that the murder victim was his own brother-in-law. Six years later, Smith would be one of the doomed passengers on the Titanic.

  Summoned by the police from his father’s Gramercy Park house at 121 East Twenty-first Street, a stunned Lawrence White, who had just returned from another theater, arrived at the Garden. When asked, he said he had never seen Harry Thaw in his life, nor had he ever heard his father speak of him. After that, the traumatized nineteen-year-old simply stood throughout the mercilessly humid night as silent sentinel over his father’s unbearably still body, now covered with a dressing gown soaked and stiffening with clotted gore. With the street below evacuated and the sky above the deserted rooftop a stagnant vacuum, it was as if the world had stopped again. Even Diana seemed paralyzed.

  “If only he had gone!” White’s son later cried, feeling pangs of guilt for inadvertently postponing his father’s business in Philadelphia by his arrival in New York. Once the news of White’s brutal murder hit the newsstands the next morning, some reporters already were beginning to speculate that the architect had “reaped the whirlwind.” But it was the former model and chorus girl who would stand at the eye of a gathering storm unlike anything anyone had ever experienced.

  Mamzelle Champagne, which by most accounts would have closed that opening night or soon after, had an astounding surge of ticket buyers throughout the rest of the year, with eager patrons requesting to sit at Stanford White’s table to see for themselves “the scene of the blood-spattered tragedy.” No one, however, could have predicted the “journalistic circus,” the “orgy of misplaced sentimentality,” and
unparalleled theatrics that were to follow in the wake of White’s murder.

  Seven months later, when questioned on the witness stand, both the Madison Square Garden doorman and a Tenderloin cabdriver said essentially the same thing. They weren’t surprised White had been shot. They were just surprised that it had been a husband.

  “Everyone always figured it would be a father.”

  Mrs. Harry Thaw on the cover of the Police Gazette

  two weeks after the murder.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Aftershock

  A rich man has been killed, a rich man did the killing, and so a world sits up to hear the tale in every red and dripping particular.

  —Alfred Henry Lewis, Newspaper clipping

  According to the righteous Reverend Charles A. Eaton, John D. Rockefeller’s pastor, “It would be a good thing if there was a little more shooting in cases like this.”

  —Newspaper clipping, 1906

  Less than an hour after the crime, rogue reporters alerted to the murder and hungry for immediate gratification grew to a fearsome pack. They began prowling throughout the city, “scavenging for the puniest morsel of information,” “purveyors of salacious and demoralizing minutiae of vice.” A large number waited outside the Hotel Lorraine along with an almost equal number of photographers, hoping to get an exclusive shot of the “lethal beauty.” Others waited impatiently outside the Tombs for some word about the “playboy killer” who had yet to appear. Frantic efforts were under way to find every photo ever printed of the lovely younger Mrs. Thaw, while editors were equally anxious to secure the best sketch artists available to capture the effect of such “harrowing circumstances on her fragile beauty”—once she could be found. Because the child bride had vanished, as if into thin air.

  Some editors were in a quandary, not knowing whether to refer to her as Evelyn Nesbit or Evelyn Thaw. Several journalists questioned individuals loitering in the vicinity of the Garden, where people who had not seen a thing cheerfully offered their version of the events. Some of the more resourceful reporters began to ferret out the haunts of anyone who might have had contact with the three principals in what was already being referred to as “The Madison Square” or “Garden Tragedy.” Maneuvering their way up and down Broadway, through the Tenderloin district and the surrounding areas, newspapermen invaded saloons, restaurants, and hotel lobbies in search of anyone who had a story to tell, some for the price of a cigar or a Rheingold.

  Back at the Tenderloin station house on West Thirtieth Street, the police who had confiscated Harry’s valuables looked them over: a fine-grain leather wallet containing $166 in bills, $2.49 in change; a gold watch; a solid-gold cigarette case; several blank checks; and an empty leather holster hanging like a lifeless black tongue. They also found in his coat pocket several letters and calling cards, all of which identified him as “Harry Kendall Thaw, Pittsburgh.” To everyone’s surprise and amusement, when asked to identify himself for the desk sergeant, thirty-five-year -old Harry, perhaps hoping to take advantage of the public opinion that he had the babyish unwrinkled look of the perpetual sophomore, replied “My name is John Smith. I’m an eighteen-year-old student from Philadelphia.” (Harry claimed in his memoirs that a reporter from the Herald who spoke with him briefly on the way into the police station had advised him not to use his real name.)

  He was then taken to a back room in the station house while the desk sergeant wrote his age down as twenty-eight. Harry was told by those in possession of his calling cards, checks, and letters, “Look, it’s useless to try and hide your identity. Is there anything you’d like to say about the shooting?”

  Thaw gazed at the floor again, as if trying to make something out of the pattern in the well-worn planks, and then said he would wait for his lawyers. The police shrugged their shoulders and took him back to his seat. Since he was obviously a gentleman, they still didn’t feel the need to handcuff him.

  Harry sat in a stifling back room on a long bench between two hefty policemen who regarded him with only passing interest, neither caring about the tuxedoed, blood-spattered celebrity they had in their midst (he had lost his topcoat at some point). After a few minutes, Thaw pushed his partially cracked hat back on his head at a comically rakish angle, stretched out his long legs, and coolly lit another cigarette. He never asked about the fate of the “fat scoundrel,” having seen for himself the gruesome results of his arm’s-length shots. At the trial one of the policemen would recall that he had “a far-away look” in his “bulging eyes,” and looked “kinda spooky,” a black shapeless mass shrouded in the haze of his own smoke.

  True to form, Harry had sent the policeman at the front door to buy some cigars for him with ten dollars and instructions to find a bar that sold his special brand. He asked almost as an afterthought for either Mr. Longfellow or Mr. Choate, his lawyers of choice at that moment. He was wise enough to continue to refuse to make any statements without the presence of his lawyers (a fact that would be offered at the trial as evidence of his sanity). At one-thirty a.m. the coroner, a Mr. Dooley, reached the police station and asked to see the prisoner. After some witnesses were brought in to make statements at three a.m. and identify Harry as the shooter, Thaw was officially charged with murder and escorted across the Bridge of Sighs two stories up from the street into the Tombs, where he was locked up. The reporters who had waited on the street below had been effectively and deliberately ducked and thus deprived of an exclusive first shot at him, much to their disappointment.

  As he sat in a cell choked with humidity and “beleaguered by the shouting of drunken prisoners,” Harry believed that night he heard the voices of young women, sounding uncannily like his little wife, from adjoining prison cells. “A girl cried and her voice seemed young and another shouted to someone ‘She’s enercent!’ ” (It is unlikely that he heard anything sounding remotely female, unless it was echoes from the other side of the Bridge of Sighs, since there were few women prisoners and they were in a separate section of the prison.)

  Harry interpreted these voices as a heavenly sign that his deadly act had divine approval, and folded his tuxedo jacket neatly under his head for a pillow. In spite of his situation, a confident Harry believed that a carefree, immaculate life like a clean slate was now going to open before him and his Angel-Child. He considered that Evelyn was safe at last from the “tentacles of the Beast.” In his euphoria he even thought that they might consider having children. At the same time, detectives had finally been dispatched to the Hotel Lorraine with instructions to “pick up the accused’s wife.” But as the mob of reporters already there infesting the lobby and the sidewalk informed them, “the lady had vanished.”

  By two a.m., reporters in Pennsylvania had wasted no time in seeking out Evelyn’s mother, Mrs. Charles Holman. A handful were so bold as to knock at her “pretty cottage door.” Described the next day in the papers as “prostrated,” Evelyn’s mother at first refused to believe the story that reporters were telling her, then she broke down and wept bitterly. After she had been quieted with some mild sedatives, the paper reported, “She said she did not know White, had never seen him, and that so far as she knew, her daughter did not know him.” Soon after, it was reported that she left for New York and most people assumed it was to join her devastated daughter. In fact, Mrs. Holman went to meet her husband, Evelyn’s stepfather, who happened to be in New York on business. He had been there for several days, unaware that Evelyn was also in town. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, however, there would be no family reunion.

  HEADLINES

  In spite of the fact that the murder had occurred so late the evening before, an astonishing assortment of facts and half-truths were already printed in the morning newspapers and delivered along with the milk to an unsuspecting public. Some reporters described in thrilling detail the panic that had ensued on the rooftop, while one of the most sober of the more than twenty-eight daily papers, the New York Times, reported that there had been no panic whatsoever among th
e theatergoers. The Times was wrong. Its headline read simply:

  A crowd gathered beneath the Bridge of Sighs,

  connecting the Tombs prison to the courthouse,

  the day after the murder, 1906.

  THAW MURDERS STANFORD WHITE

  Shoots Him on the Madison Square Garden Roof

  ABOUT EVELYN NESBIT

  Unsubstantiated rumors began to leak out in the press about the “Garden Tragedy,” some wildly speculative—that Harry Thaw had been obscenely intoxicated or doped up on opium, that his wife had refused to break off her friendship with the dead architect, that White had spoken disparagingly about Mrs. Thaw at the Café Martin and had boasted about their past relationship in front of her outraged husband—even that Evelyn had shot White! Almost anything was considered newsworthy. It was reported in another paper that more than a dozen women had fainted in Madison Square Garden (not counting the chorus girls), but that happily, no one had been run over by any electric motorcars or beer wagons. One paper, in an unintentional play on words, reported that one of hard-drinking Harry’s sisters, Alice, was the “Countess of Vermouth.”

  Just as quickly as information spilled onto the streets, the district attorney’s office was flooded with misinformation. Some of the more inventive witnesses insisted that a beautiful, young, and slim dark-haired woman in a large white hat and a filmy white veil, which “fell about her shoulders like wings,” sat with White at his table just before the shooting. Others insisted, accurately, that he was alone from the moment he sat down until Thaw shot him, which was all of fifteen minutes. It was seriously suggested that perhaps the mistaken witnesses had seen the ghost of other young girls White had destroyed. Or that it might have been the angel of death in disguise.