American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  The World quoted a Mr. Nott from the D.A.’s office: “I get a new tale every minute . . . and so far neither the police nor the force of this office has been able to substantiate one of them. . . . I never knew of a case in which there were so many rumors which were without a grain of truth.”

  The glint of Thaw’s gun in the air under the hot lights of the theater caused some witnesses to swear that the millionaire murderer had used a golden gun. Upon closer inspection of Harry’s .38-caliber revolver, however, they noticed that it appeared slightly rusted, as if it had been carried in his pocket for some time without a case. When questioned about it, Harry offered that indeed he had carried it with him for more than a year. The police, who seemed always half a step behind even the greenest reporter, puzzled over a reasonable motive for the murder.

  Anthony Comstock, who saw a golden opportunity to promote his own causes, issued a statement two days after the murder about how Thaw had “cherished enmity against White” for some time prior to his marriage to Evelyn. Apparently, Harry had phoned Comstock after the inquest (against the advice of his counsel). It was subsequently revealed how Harry had for the last year and a half (and previously) supplied Comstock with funds and information regarding White’s suspected practices.

  “He seemed very anxious to punish White,” Comstock was quoted as saying. He then added darkly, “In more than one instance, when it seemed a clear case had been made against White, the victims of the man were spirited out of town.”

  Comstock did not stop to think that his statements could be used in court to prove premeditation on Harry’s part. Neither did Harry.

  Far from the almost hilarious pockets of noisy, disorganized activity ripping open around the city, a much more somber and virtually silent scene was being played out as young Lawrence White made his way by train to his parents’ home in St. James. It took him about three hours to reach the house, and after that, he sat for several more hours outside his mother’s bedroom door, waiting to break the terrible news to her. The papers the next day reported that Mrs. Bessie Smith White had taken the news calmly. But it was a different story for Stanny’s aged mother, Mrs. Richard Grant White, who like Mrs. Holman, was “prostrated” by the news of her son’s death. The family thought it best not to tell her the circumstances of his death, eventually settling on the suggestion that it had been done by an anarchist. The next day, the Gramercy Park house was besieged by sympathetic callers. Messenger boys ran themselves into a full sweat as they delivered cablegrams by the score from as far away as Japan and Russia.

  The World’s headline told the story:

  Stanford White Stretched at the Feet of Venus

  Architect’s Body Lies in His Beautiful Drawing Room in City Home,

  Near the Ancient Statue of the Venus Genetrix,

  Taken from the River Tiber

  Ultimately, White’s family decided to cancel a memorial service scheduled for St. Bartholomew’s Church, one of the architect’s most splendid designs, out of fear of an expected crush of the “morbidly curious.” The papers continued to hint at the now crumbling façade of the dead man’s life. The World on Thursday, June 28, 1906, read:

  Men in White’s Set Shiver and Keep Silent

  Twenty of Them, Some with Brains and Others with Money,

  Are Keeping Close Watch for the Dreaded Subpoena-Server

  Not a Word in Eulogy of Dead Intimate

  From Millionaire’s Parties to the Morgue

  Mother Thaw, meanwhile, arrived in Liverpool. The minute she stepped off the boat she was informed of her son’s deadly performance at the Garden’s rooftop theater. Far from being prostrated, she promptly and stoically got on the next available ship, the Baltic, and sailed back to New York. Her daughter Alice would follow a short time later.

  The Victorian picture of mournful maternal concern, Mary Copley Thaw would be the only one consistently depicted with unqualified sentiment and sympathy throughout the trials. Few but Evelyn, however, knew that she was also a vain and obstinate woman, and that Harry’s inheritance from his mother also included a tendency to erupt into violence. As described by one writer years later, not only was she “ungovernable in her abuse” of servants, of the law and its representatives, and of Evelyn, but her “inordinate social ambition” often provoked an unholy wrath. Mother Thaw had been known on several occasions to heave the bulky Pittsburgh city directory at the head of her secretary when displeased with her tardiness in tending to church business. Evelyn had also seen evidence of Countess Alice’s familial if latent aggressive tendencies: Once, when poking into unused rooms at Lyndhurst out of boredom and curiosity, Evelyn discovered Alice Thaw’s girlhood mahogany boudoir table. It had a deep rut worn into it and several other spots that had been made by Alice with her ivory-boned hairbrush after consistent and repeated beating.

  THE "CAUSE OF IT ALL”

  A horrendous and surreal night dissolved into squinting, painful early morning for Evelyn, who had not slept for even five minutes. Having had a good deal of practice avoiding Harry and his detectives over the last few years, Evelyn managed to escape detection by police and the press as she left the scene of the crime, earning her the nickname of “the girl Houdini” by one reporter. She wondered for a moment if perhaps she hadn’t just had a horrible dream. But she knew she had been awake all night, and that instead of packing her things and relaxing in a plush stateroom on a luxury liner, she was in the tiny cramped apartment of her only real friend, former Weber and Fields chorus girl May McKenzie. After having seen Stanny’s bloodied face blackened into a horrific and unrecognizable death mask before her eyes, she had gone instinctively to the only other home she had—to the heart of the theater district Stanny had once shared with her. She realized May’s apartment, run by a no-nonsense woman named Mrs. Molloy, could provide only a brief refuge. For two days, the sound of the gunshots echoed through her brain as the throbbing in her head became unbearable. Increasingly prone to migraine headaches (which doctors called neuralgia), Evelyn would not sleep for two more nights. The usual sleeping powders were useless.

  With a heart like a leaden plumb line, Evelyn knew she could not stay in hiding any longer, even though she wanted to “bury herself forever beneath six feet of concrete.” The first time she appeared in public, pale and wan and dressed in a somber brown outfit, “with a thin soft veil hanging from her hat to her delicately formed chin,” she had to run the gauntlet of cameramen who had camped outside the prison steps. All the papers speculated as to whether Evelyn would be forced to offer testimony at the inquest to be taken later that morning in front of the Grand Jury. Grim and tight-lipped, she was told, much to her relief, that she was not required to answer any questions after refusing to say anything that might incriminate her husband.

  After that ordeal, she ran the same gauntlet of flash powder and shouts from the army of newsmen that would surround her for the next two years. She had hardly reached her rooms at the Lorraine when she fainted. The hotel doctor had to be called to revive her with camphorous smelling salts. As the small veiled figure passed them in the lobby some of the hotel guests indulged in speculation as to the fate of the Thaws’ social standing back in their Smoky City. But if the Thaws were about to be “mash[ed] in muck,” “poor little Evelyn, faithful and alone,” was about to be “trapped in quicksand.” And even though she was in New York, her mother had not materialized to offer comfort or support. Nor would she.

  Harry’s valet brought him a sober gray business suit for the morning’s events and informed his employer that he was on some list of the district attorney’s. Harry asked about the lawyers, Delafield and Longfellow, who had shown up, as opposed to those he had wanted. He questioned why he couldn’t have two of the most famous lawyers in the country, Joseph H. Choate and William B. Hornblower. He protested “politely” to a detective when handcuffed for the first time as he was taken to police head-quarters (a novelty for Harry, who was the one usually locking the cuffs). He was told by a thin-lipped,
pruny inspector, “We always handcuff murderers, ” and was whisked off to have his photo taken for the rogues’ gallery before being placed with other prisoners awaiting inspection or interrogation by detectives.

  After a brief stop in the Jefferson Market Police Court, where he was formally charged with homicide in the first degree—willful murder—and committed to prison without bail, Harry was then taken back to the Tombs to sit on “Murderers’ Row.” Later that same day, as a team of alienists was being put together, called in from all parts of the country to test Harry’s sanity at the request of both the defense and the prosecution, the police extended their net for actual witnesses to the murder, still hoping to find a clear motive while wandering in a fog of ineptness and confusion. At almost the exact same time, the funeral train bearing White’s body and a full carload of roses, gardenias, chrysanthemums, and hyacinths left at nine o’clock from the Long Island Rail Road station, bound for eastern Suffolk County. Within the hour, Harry Thaw’s inquest would take place.

  Evelyn had spent just a few nights in May McKenzie’s tiny apartment before reluctantly going back to the Lorraine to be with the rest of the Thaws, by which point Harry had been placed in an eight-by-nine-by-twelve -foot cell that would be his home for the next seven months. Incarcerated in 220 on the second tier on the Centre Street side of the Tombs (as duly reported in the papers), Harry found himself, much to his dismay and displeasure, with a murderer on one side of him and a man arrested for criminal assault on the other. He did not like being in such proximity to common criminals, especially since he still believed that White had paid off vicious gang members to do him harm if they ever got near enough—and both of these men were far too close for comfort.

  The police were informed by the Pittsburgh authorities that Harry had been unusually agitated for at least a fortnight before the murder. It came to light that he had “run afoul” of two different people in Pittsburgh, a tobacconist and a streetcar conductor, both of whom got into fistfights with Harry. Not surprisingly, in each instance Harry got the worst of it, even though he had provoked the attacks. He was not good with his fists.

  Harry had gone to the district attorney’s office two days after the murder, surrounded by alienists hired by his attorneys and the prosecution. The names, when run together, sounded like yet another law firm— McDonald, Mabon, Flint, and Hamilton, the first three being the D.A.’s team of “bug doctors.” The novelty of alienists struck many as a “sham” pseudo-science, “voodoo hoodoo.” It was the same day the newlyweds had planned to set sail for Europe, but instead Harry sat in his cell and steadfastly refused to submit to an examination by any “bug doctors.” As he nervously awaited his mother’s arrival in New York, he sent out a barrage of hastily scribbled notes to friends and associates, against the advice of his counsel. And even though it had been only two days since the murder, Harry had already received mail, “consisting of seventeen letters, most of them addressed in the handwriting of women.” These were well-wishers who applauded Harry’s heroism, based on what they had read in the papers. Guards reported that Harry smiled quite happily as he read the letters and lay back on his cot, although he was still upset that the prison had not allowed Bedford to bring him another change of clothes. Burr McIntosh, his friend who had featured Evelyn’s photo a number of times in his magazine, asked the police if he could bring Harry some food, which Harry had requested in one of the notes. McIntosh’s request was refused.

  It was not long after, however, that Harry’s photo appeared on the front pages of every newspaper, sitting in his cell, fork in hand, dining happily on squab and steak brought in from Delmonico’s. He had apparently also convinced the prison physician that he required a bottle of wine or champagne a day “for medicinal purposes.” The public’s response was mixed. Some were outraged by the obvious privileged treatment, others were amused, and his lawyers were beside themselves, trying to keep their bubbly, babbling client and publicity-mad crusader from ruining his case before it ever went to trial. Nor would the transformation of Harry from demented playboy to shining hero happen without a price. As one writer described it, “The gilding of the figure was not effected without gold.”

  As for the more detached audience across the Atlantic, they were nonetheless drawn into the Garden tragedy at Madison Square, in part because of the connection the Thaws had to British royalty, however slight. And geographical distance seemed to provide some critical distance as well. The London Telegraph said that the murder merely created a “mawkish desire to make a virtuous hero out of a degenerate criminal.” The London Times extended its criticism to an entire class (while commenting on the lack thereof): the murder in Madison Square Garden offered a “glimpse, and not a pleasant one, of wealth without elegance or refinement; luxury without culture . . . much costly eating and drinking and fine clothes with coarse manners.” Nonetheless, in spite of feigned indifference and a superior attitude, during the first week and a half of the trial, the London papers published more than seventy-two portraits of the captivating Evelyn Thaw. And the stage was now set on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Back in Manhattan, Thomas Edison’s studio rushed to put a film version of the Rooftop Murder into nickelodeons only a week after the actual crime (with wild rumors that Evelyn played herself in the film). With curious audiences eager for an up-close view of the reenactment of the Garden tragedy, the film pushed The Story of Jesus out of its spot as the top box-office attraction. Meanwhile, confronted with what was already being called the “crime of the century,” no one paid attention to the mention in the papers near the back pages that the hippo who had died a day earlier in the zoo was buried quickly in a quiet nonsectarian ceremony in Brooklyn.

  Ad for a film based on the murder, funded by the Thaws, 1907.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dementia Americana

  Everyone’s record is a secret more or less, A trifle chequered, although people never guess. Cut up your capers— But don’t get them in the papers— For you’re done for if you once get in the press.

  —Newspaper clipping, 1906

  And whoso counts me but a fool for leaving a tender maid untouched when I have her in my house, to him I say he measures purity by the vicious standards of his own base soul.

  —Euripides, Electra, translation included in Harry Thaw’s The Traitor

  In one of those cosmic quirks of timing, Mother Thaw arrived in New York on Bastille Day, Saturday, July 14, determined to liberate her son from the dungeonlike Tombs. But even the indomitable Mother Thaw could not fight the entire Empire State so easily or quickly. She was met at the dock by Harry’s brother Josiah, whom Harry believed had been fooled by his incompetent lawyer, Lewis Delafield. Josiah told his mother that he would not give Harry any more money to pursue a course of action with new attorneys, which Harry had demanded. He also informed her that Gleason, Delafield’s partner, had declined to see the “ill-starred Evelyn,” who Harry believed could simply declare what White had done to her, whereupon he would be released, with apologies and applause all around.

  Harry was immediately disenchanted with his first attorney, Delafield, the man after whom he named his memoir, The Traitor, and whom he described as “a creature far meaner and uglier than Stanford White, aside from White’s one vice”: “White was a type by himself. He was a character that does not appear once in a hundred years. . . .There was a bold audacity about White’s vices; there was a slinking putridness about the contemptible tactics of the Traitor.”

  At the time of his arrest, Harry was worried about Delafield’s effectiveness, since none of his own family or friends had ever used him in any of their legal dealings. But Delafield had been put in place by default, since the family’s other attorneys, Longfellow and Hartridge, were experts in business and financial law (and at that time the “mourning matriarch” was still somewhere in the mid-Atlantic). In fact, none of the Thaw lawyers was well versed in criminal procedures, which only helped complicate the case right from the start.
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br />   At Delafield’s request, Harry gave him an initial fee of $10,000 by check and sent for $15,000 more from Pittsburgh. Then it was suggested by someone that he hire a different lawyer, a Mr. Black, who was a family friend. In Harry’s eyes, the case should be fought on its own merits. The stunned and shaken Evelyn stuck by her husband, merits aside. But with Harry in prison, Evelyn was at the mercy of the Thaws.

  Surprisingly, Harry hadn’t wanted his mother to come back from England; he had cabled her not to come, but by that time she was already on the ship headed for New York. Whether or not he wanted to spare his mother the heartbreak of seeing her son in such a dire place or he considered her a liability at this point (since he believed her emotions might cloud her judgment), Harry thought he had everything under control. He didn’t. He knew his mother would find a way of spending vast amounts of money wrongheadedly. She did. He also dreaded the inevitable confrontation between his mother and Evelyn, who was being touted in virtually all the newspapers as “the cause of it all.”

  But after three or four days had passed, it seemed to Harry that his nominal counsel was only pretending to represent him and was in reality working for “the head of that nest of degenerates in 22nd and 24th Streets.” Harry believed that Delafield’s intention was to “railroad [him] to Matteawan as the half-crazy tool of a dissolute woman.” When Lewis Delafield suggested halfheartedly that Harry hire Delancy Nicholl, a man more familiar with criminal law, to replace him, Evelyn reminded Harry that Nicholl was one of White’s many lawyers. Reports began to surface in the papers that perhaps Thaw would not fight the charges against him and would plead insanity. Harry was convinced that the source of this speculation was his own counselor, and decided that Delafield was in cahoots with the dead man’s guilty partners in perversion.