American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  After three weeks Harry dismissed Delafield, which meant that at the inquest, Harry was represented by an interim counselor, who “the baby-faced millionaire murderer” said “looked more like a janitor.” Refusing to talk until he could have a lawyer he would be satisfied with, Harry unwittingly stopped himself from offering testimony that could have been used to prevent the case from going to trial. With stenographer at the ready, the district attorney had planned to save the state an enormous amount of time and money by declaring Harry insane. After all, there was no doubt that Harry was mentally unbalanced. He had killed White in front of nearly a thousand witnesses and was now happily taking credit for it.

  In fact, Delafield had been perfectly willing to allow the insanity defense. And as Harry suspected, he had indeed been working with the district attorney’s office for a swift end to the whole ugly mess, not only to save Harry’s life but also to protect others whose reputations might be tarnished or even ruined should the case go to trial. Perhaps Delafield also suspected that there was no other way for Harry to avoid the electric chair, especially given Evelyn’s past as a model and a chorus girl, which would make any defense based solely on Harry’s claim that he was protecting her innocence difficult at best. Even Harry’s own alienist, Dr. Allen McLane Hamilton, hired under Harry’s protest by his defense team (and who would prove embarrassingly ineffectual on the witness stand), wrote to Josiah Thaw in early August: “I am quite at sea as to what to do as in your brother’s case. By the papers I see that your mother has unreservedly committed herself to his [unsound] . . . and futile defense, which will eventually land him in the electric chair. I am in a position to know that the district attorney is in possession of facts that will flatly contradict Evelyn Thaw.”

  But no one could appease Harry, who was hopelessly obstinate throughout the months leading up to his trial. By the time Hamilton wrote his letter to Josiah, the firm of Black and Olcott had already been “turned out” by Harry and replaced by Hartridge and Gleason. Nor would these new attorneys represent Harry at trial.

  In the meantime, friends and enemies alike, as well as Comstock’s revitalized and omnipresent Greek chorus of conscientious righteousness, seemed to scurry or bluster their way out of the wainscoting to offer either assistance or character assassination of the trio involved in the Garden tragedy. Stories quickly began to make bolder accusations about Stanford White’s character. One headline read, “White Reaped the Whirlwind and Paid the Ultimate Price.”

  Lurid tales of White’s incredible proficiency at womanizing also began to surface. One reporter asked facetiously if there were some phrase he could use other than “womanizer,” since the issue wasn’t women but girls: “He attended musical plays where there was likely to be the grandest display of irresponsible beauty,” one paper reported. Another anonymous source, referring to Evelyn, stated that White had “made every attempt to thrust himself upon the child’s notice.”

  “White was a rounder,” or so said producer George Lederer (in whose second divorce Evelyn was named a co-respondent—along with ten other chorus girls). Lederer also offered opinions on the Thaws. He described his former “Wild Rose” as having a “frivolous disposition,” while he characterized Harry as “a cigarette fiend [who] always seemed half-crazed.”

  Unflattering or increasingly hostile descriptions of White accumulated at an astonishing rate; he was labeled “a sybarite of debauchery, a man who abandoned lofty enterprises for vicious revels.” He was “an engine of creation and destruction,” “a charming companion, a man of kindliness possessed of many talents . . . but not bound by scruples.” Hearst’s paper reported that he was “the most oriental and luxurious rake in his subtle and splendid equipment for the ruin of women.” According to the Thaw family’s hired publicist and apologist, Benjamin Atwell, White was “as respectful to women of the stage who demanded respect as he was to his wife’s friends. But when they were young and powerless and posed no threat . . . he was capable of revolting mistreatment.” During his life, White had dreaded public exposure of his infidelities and had worked furiously to prevent them from leaking to the press, but now as the proceedings moved forward with a frightening momentum, an avalanche of negative publicity threatened to crush his formerly sterling reputation into gravel.

  The prosecution quickly found in preparing its case that it could not maintain control over the situation. Rampant dark rumors and dim innuendo purported to be facts about White were happily offered by unsavory inhabitants of the Tenderloin, some of whom wanted to shine however briefly in the glare of publicity, while others were paid by the Thaws for their “cooperation.” Sadly, few friends came to White’s defense publicly. His closest friend, Gus Saint-Gaudens, was incapacitated, dying from cancer up in New Hampshire, and only one other man was brave enough to defend White’s memory publicly. It was Richard Harding Davis, the model for the Gibson man, a popular war correspondent, and the author of a number of adventure novels. After a devastating Vanity Fair editorial, which painted White as nothing short of diabolic, Davis wrote a response in Collier’s, August 8, 1906. He angrily accused the tactics of the yellow press of being “hideous” and “misshapen” in their attempt to denounce White and forever stain his memory:

  Since his death White has been described as a satyr. To answer this by saying that he was a great architect is not to answer at all. . . . What is more important is that he was a most kindhearted, most considerate, gentle, and manly man, who could no more have done the things attributed to him than he could have roasted a baby on a spit. Big in mind and in body, he was incapable of little meanness. He admired a beautiful woman as he admired every other beautiful thing God has given us; and his delight over one was as keen, as boyish, as grateful over any others.

  As far as the press was concerned, all they knew for sure was that their circulation figures were “leaping by the hundreds of thousands” with each new twist to the story. The D.A.’s office also tried to defend White’s character, stating to the press, “It is ridiculously easy to besmirch the character of a dead man who cannot reply or institute a suit for libel.” But these pronouncements were lost amid the hectic tumbling circus of noise and misinformation, the “orgy of misplaced sentiment” and “homicidal hysteria of yellow journalism” that the Thaws and their millions were financing.

  Even White’s professional reputation began to suffer. The Evening Post stated that he was “more of an artist than an architect,” and that at least in some of the buildings he left as his legacy, there was evidence of the moral decay and “social dissipation” that undermined his life. The Nation expressed a similar opinion regarding White’s plummet from grace: “The follies of his time and his own frailties did everything possible to undo the great artist in Stanford White. . . . Severe moralists will find the cause in his devotion to pleasure. . . . He adorned many an American mansion with irrelevant plunder.”

  White’s sins also offered a convenient platform for more radical social critics who could use the dead architect as their scapegoat and as a symbol of the not-so-starving but rather self-satisfied if thwarted artist, co-opted by decadent consumerism at its most debased by those who neither knew nor respected the splendid things their money procured. As the days pressed full speed ahead before the trial even began, critics seemed unified in their judgment: by “shutting himself up in the musky atmosphere of adoring cliques, building residences, clubs, and mausoleums for the rich,” Stanford White had frittered away his genius. And sold his soul.

  DISAPPEARING ACTS

  On the other side of the gilded gates, Mother Thaw, who had worked as strenuously as White to keep her own secrets locked away (including a family history of insanity as well as her son’s immoral escapades), was alternately apoplectic and dyspeptic as she watched the Thaw name thrust daily into a glaring and notorious public spotlight that she was, ironically, financing. Within a week of the murder, surprising or disturbing Thaw-related developments and rumors began to fly just as fast and furiously, a
s if on the express track out of Pennsylvania Station.

  The first occurred when Harry’s faithful valet of eighteen years, William Bedford, died suddenly and mysteriously. Everyone suspected that the loyal Bedford had witnessed more than his share of Harry’s aberrant behavior, and wondered if his abrupt and final departure wasn’t part of some twisted Machiavellian plot by the Thaws to protect Harry’s tinseled image as defender of the blameless and the innocent. Apparently, no one was aware of any preexisting malady—except Harry, who blamed the district attorney’s office and its tactics for hastening Bedford’s death. Although the exact nature of the valet’s illness was never disclosed (peritonitis was suspected), Harry wrote, “Knowing that my poor valet was very ill and should be in bed and receiving proper care if his life was not to be endangered, the district attorney’s staff made him sit and sit in their offices for days and days. Mortally brutal, they made him sit when deadly ill until he had to be taken to the hospital at once. He was operated on the next day. The following day he died.”

  This happened only one week after Harry’s arrest, and to an already traumatized Evelyn, Harry seemed disturbingly and incomprehensibly unemotional about the death of Bedford, the man who had been closer to him than anyone (save his mother) for half his life. The only emotion he showed was to rant at the D.A. “and his minions.”

  Coming hard on the polished heels of Bedford’s suspicious demise was the abrupt resignation of Evelyn’s maid, Nellie Leahy, who had been with her for more than a year. Nellie was “wrought up” over the “unintentional murder” of White. Bedford’s sudden death, coupled with feeling a chill on a warm day, stoked Nellie’s Irish superstitions. Convinced it was time to leave, she came up to Evelyn in the drawing room of the hotel, blurted out, “Someone has walked over my grave!” and promptly quit. Harry maintained that the district attorney’s office had arrested one of her relatives as a way of suppressing any favorable testimony she might offer, “in that way getting rid of her as they did of Bedford, even if it was not so drastic.”

  “I TOLD YOU SO”

  In spite of such disturbing events, for his part, Harry seemed annoyingly cheerful and buoyant to Evelyn when she came to visit him in his cell: “He had no doubt as to the righteousness of his act or . . . its wisdom. He never then or at any subsequent time expressed the slightest regret for his act.” (One of the few times in his life that Harry ever even alluded to the incident, or so it has been told in a now famous anecdote, occurred in Florida, near the end of his life. Supposedly, when confronted with a monstrosity of a building newly erected on the fringes of Miami Beach, Thaw remarked to a companion, “I shot the wrong architect.”)

  But if Harry was suffering at all in prison, and on most days it didn’t seem so to Evelyn, she was suffering a far more miserable and paradoxically public confinement, having merely been maneuvered from one gilded cage to another. Even when surrounded by the mounting number of hangers-on who battened themselves to the Thaws and their millions, Evelyn was utterly alone.

  The attitude of the Thaw family following the murder was, not surprisingly, one of unwavering united support for Harry as they offered an ivy-covered uniform brick façade to the press and the public—Mother Thaw; the countess of Yarmouth; Mr. and Mrs. George Lauder Carnegie; Josiah Copley Thaw, Harry’s financier brother; and Edward, the youngest sibling. But their attitude regarding Evelyn was a relentlessly stinging and reproachful “I told you so.” Evelyn, subject to what she described as only a handful of “isolated instances of kindness,” soon saw that any small act of nicety on the part of the Thaws was the result of their realization, after consultation with lawyers, of how much depended upon her and her testimony.

  Initially, Evelyn and Mother Thaw went together to the Tombs to visit Harry in a show of solidarity for the battalion of reporters who watched their every move. One of the days when Evelyn was still riding with Mother Thaw to the Tombs, their car was stopped in heavy traffic. A policeman strolled up to the car at the crossing, Evelyn having become a familiar figure to the police. Evelyn and the traffic cop chitchatted for a little while, although she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Mother Thaw sat with rigid face and stiff back in the corner of the automobile. When they had moved on, Mrs. Thaw turned to Evelyn with a shocked expression.

  “Evelyn,” she said reproachfully, “how can you speak with these people? Don’t you realize the social position you hold?”

  Having no illusions anymore about the social status of the Thaws, an angry Evelyn retorted, ”Mother Thaw, you have got to realize that the social position your son now holds is associated with the Tombs Prison.” She continued, telling the glaring woman that “with reporters watching our every movement and on the hunt for ‘copy,’ what kind of a story do you imagine it would make if I turned up my nose at men whose social position is, at the moment, infinitely superior to Harry’s?”

  Mother Thaw remained unmoved, and sat like an Easter Island statue carved out of ebony instead of stone and covered in imported black lace.

  Because Mother Thaw was spending the majority of her time in New York, she was unable to control the Pittsburgh press. It soon began to surface in the hometown papers that Harry K. Thaw had been for years considered more than just “a mild sort of degenerate.” The headlines read, “Pittsburgh Rent by Thaw’s Act.” To add injury to insult, the Thaws’ mansion had been burglarized the day after the murder and $60,000 worth of Mother Thaw’s jewels were stolen, the thieves having read about the family’s absence in the papers.

  As for Evelyn, described in the Pittsburgh papers as the “Woman Whose Beauty Spelled Death and Ruin,” to the unsympathetic she was now Delilah, Jezebel, and Salome all rolled into one. Nor was she prepared for another blow—her family’s abandonment of her, the family she alone had supported throughout her entire adolescence.

  At first, between visits to the Tombs to see Harry and meetings with other Thaw family members, between the preliminary consultation with a multitude of lawyers and questioning by the police, a preoccupied Evelyn didn’t notice her mother’s glaring absence from her side. Neither was she fully aware of her brother’s growing bitterness toward her. But Howard had grown extremely fond of White, whom he saw not just symbolically as a kind and indulgent father figure, but as the only father he had known since the age of seven. Howard, who had also become inseparable in the last few years from White’s secretary, Charles Hartnett, wanted to repay White somehow and felt it his duty to defend the name of the man who had played such a large role in his otherwise limited, fractured, and insignificant life. For nineteen-year-old Howard (the same age as White’s son Lawrence), this meant shunning his sister, the person he too came to view as responsible for White’s tragic end. It was Harry, in a rare moment of clarity, who suggested in a letter to one of his lawyers that his lawyer “quietly call” on Evelyn’s new stepfather, Charles Holman, to intervene and take care of Evelyn. But if the lawyer ever made the overture to Holman, there was no response, either from the Mr. or the Mrs.

  On any given day, Harry was champing at the bit to go to trial; in fact he looked forward to finally having a public forum to expose the “set of perverts” who preyed on upright and chaste young girls, as Evelyn once was. He was sure that the man in the street supported him and Evelyn, as did “every policeman and detective in New York City.” “And,” he was sure, “the great tide of sentiment could not be turned back.” So the idea that there might be no trial, that he would somehow be forced into an asylum not as the conquering hero but as a lunatic murderer, sent him into paroxysms of rage and tears. He went into a purple frenzy at the thought that the public might think he was sitting in a straitjacket and drooling into a spittoon.

  The media seemed as schizophrenic as Harry in trying to describe the role of the principals in the case. While many tried to run with the Edwardian notion that Harry was Sir Galahad, others began to report how he had been involved all his life in “costly and humiliating escapades” from which his poor mother had to re
scue him, with Mother Thaw often covering exorbitant checks (and hiding his peculiar moral bankruptcy), which Harry tried to cash with insufficient funds on both counts. One story asserted that when in school, he had “taken courses in dissipation,” even though Harry believed that he had thousands of years of history on his side, going all the way back to Cicero: “When life or liberty to self, or in those we must protect, is in danger by robbers and enemies, any means is allowable to defeat their nefarious ends.”

  There was of course other front-page news. A Pennsylvania Railroad express train had rolled into the Philadelphia station with a dead engineer standing at the lever. The man had apparently had a heart attack somewhere between Philadelphia and Trenton. The heroic fireman who had noticed the unusual speed of the train as it approached the station jumped into the cab and stopped the train as it barreled into the train yard, barely avoiding disaster. But there would be no one to stop the Thaw engine as it gathered steam and threatened to crush any who might interfere with the wheels of their particular well-greased defense of heroic Harry Thaw, protector of wife and home. When two weeks became two months, the “Garden tragedy” was still dominating the headlines; little did anyone realize that it would continue this way, with only brief and intermittent periods of relative quiet, for two years.

  The murder, coming as it did in the midst of insurance scandals, Roosevelt’s trust-busting, and the like, prompted the working class to suddenly look more critically at the “filthy rich.” As the young century progressed, one by one the wealthy and powerful were being knocked off their high horses, and increasingly it seemed the greater the fall, the more pleasure it afforded the common man. Uncommon wealth may still have been synonymous with superior social position, but it no longer meant moral superiority. In fact, the rich were experiencing a backlash. Whereas the nineteenth century had upheld the belief that God rewarded the deserving, the young twentieth century, disillusioned by the extraordinary and blatant immorality of the typical millionaire, destroyed that notion forever. New York City in particular, in the words of Irvin S. Cobb, was depicted as “a bedaubed, bespangled Bacchanalia.” It was, some glibly proclaimed, doomed to collapse like the Roman Empire.