American Eve

by Paula Uruburu

  Evelyn soon came to comprehend fully not only the terrible fix she was in but that the fix was in. In weighing all the facts and her options, Evelyn saw that there was little room for choice in the matter. In spite of what he had done, she didn’t want to see Harry electrocuted. She flashed on the hideous, shuddering image of the pitiful elephant Topsy, whose electrocution on the Coney Island boardwalk had been captured by Edison for the nickelodeons a few years earlier. And she needed no further evidence that Harry was indeed crazy, but an insanity plea seemed out of the question as far as he and his clan were concerned. She also knew enough about the law and a wife’s lack of rights in marriage and property matters (in those days before pre-nuptial agreements) to see that as Harry’s widow she would get as little as possible from the miserly Thaws. Perhaps even nothing. Their formidable battery of high-priced lawyers would see to that, and she had no money of her own to mount any kind of defense. And if Harry was found insane and sentenced to an asylum, at best she might have to live indefinitely with the Thaws in dismal repentant dependence on them until such time as Harry was released. Knowing Harry as she did, she knew that day might never come. Her best and only hope was that he be acquitted.

  Although she wrote years later with nostalgic bravado that she was “determined to tell all that [would] help him,” at the time Evelyn also considered “a very patent alternative.” She questioned whether any human being, no matter how momentous the issue, should be made to undergo the humiliation she would surely suffer on the witness stand. Considering all Harry had said and done in the name of her so-called honor and American girlhood prior to the murder, Evelyn wondered why the issue of preserving her honor no longer applied. Of course, she knew the answer, but still she contemplated the heroic actions she had read in books of “prisoners who have risked death rather than the honor of their wives should be questioned.” But Harry’s heroism was “not of that variety, ” nor was he the kind to be satisfied with “posthumous honors.” If his lawyers wanted to preserve the image that he was sane, Harry would have to be kept as far away as possible from the witness stand, while Evelyn would have to be, as one Broadway denizen wrote, “grilled like a sacrificial lamb chop.”

  As the day of her testifying neared, Evelyn appeared to those around her like someone in a trance, acting just as she had the night of the murder. Some started to speculate that the ethereal Evelyn Thaw was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It would also become clear enough to even casual observers that Evelyn’s only other acquaintances, theater people and Bohemian types, were powerless, not very reliable, and not likely to come to her defense—described in the World as “nauseous representatives of the common types of the Tenderloin—waiters, chorus girls, bell boys, cab drivers, private detectives, chauffeurs, doorkeepers, theatre hands, models, valets and other habitués of that part of the city.” In this Evelyn shared the fate of White, whose highbrow friends at the other end of the social scale suddenly became merely clients who found it convenient to remove themselves from the city for the duration of the Thaw debacle, “high-tailing their high-toned arses to Europe or South America while the Thaw circus was in town.”

  The fact that Harry Thaw continued to speak confidently about Evelyn, considering all he had done to her (and countless others), reveals Harry’s mad capacity for self-delusion. Of course, the same could be said about his family and attorneys as well, even if they believed Evelyn would be able to come through successfully in the face of William Travers Jerome’s ferocious tenacity, withering prosecutorial style, and years of experience. He had reduced older, much more experienced men to real tears, so what chance did little Evelyn stand? Surely no amount of coaching or prompting or prior performing as a utility girl in the chorus could prepare her for Jerome’s inevitable onslaught. And it was all to be conducted in front of the watchful eyes of hundreds in the courtroom—and by extension the rest of the nation and the world beyond.

  Throughout all the preliminary discussions about her testimony during visits to Harry in the Tombs, Harry seemed to Evelyn increasingly, ridiculously pleased with himself. In her account in 1915, Evelyn spoke of Harry’s enthusiasm, of how he looked forward to her appearance in the witness box, “where she was to introduce him as if he were one of the knights of the Round Table.” Although he remained obstinately silent in the face of alienists and medical doctors who he said, “haunted him while in the Tombs,” Harry was absolutely and girlishly chatty when reporters visited. Speaking to a Times reporter one day while Evelyn was there, Harry said proudly, “Wait till my little wife gets on the stand and you’ll hear a story such as you have never heard before.”

  Evelyn’s reaction was slightly understated: “I [did] not share Harry’s enthusiasm.”

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, "HUMAN SACRIFICE ON THE ALTAR OF LOVE ”

  Prior to her appearance on the stand, the general professional opinion around town was that Evelyn’s talents as an actress were unremarkable. As a result, at first there was a great deal of speculation that she would be coached and that her answers would have to be “rehearsed” by Harry’s defense team. But not even this could make her ready for every possible issue or question that would be raised (as Delmas told her without much emotion). Evelyn fretted in her chair at the hotel, her head pounding and her eyes burning with the force. She asked Delmas one more time what she could expect.

  He looked at her solemnly: “My dear child,” he said, “I cannot tell you, no one can tell you what questions Mr. Jerome will ask you. He himself does not know as yet. You must do the best you can, and I will protect you to the best of my ability. That is all.”

  On Thursday, February 7, the moment Evelyn dreaded and an entire nation had been waiting for arrived. As she described her feelings, “I went into Court that morning with all the sensations of one already condemned. . . .” Outside the building and in the corridors, a crush of people tried every possible means to force their way into the courtroom, past both the animate and inanimate barricades. In the days before Evelyn’s testimony, the security had been somewhat lax, but on the day she was to be the star witness, bars had to be installed to keep the curious crowd of thousands from streaming inside. Mounted police strained to push back near hysterical women who kept surging forward to get a glimpse of the “lethal beauty.” “Half a score” of the most aggressive females actually succeeded in getting seats in the back of the noisy courtroom, as befuddled policemen were unprepared to physically restrain ladies, many dressed in their “gayest Sunday best.”

  And then over the commotion a court official shouted: “Evelyn Nesbit Thaw!”

  As if everyone in the packed courtroom had been struck dumb simultaneously, a miraculous palpable silence fell. The only exception was the sinister “rustling of paper from the Press tables.” Evelyn emerged from the judge’s chambers, walked slowly and gracefully toward the witness stand, and took her seat. A court attendant handed her a Bible, which she held while being sworn (“which is a rather impressive business”).

  “You do solemnly swear to tell the truth,” he said earnestly.

  She bowed her head mechanically and sat down as the scrape of the chair leg echoed through the large room. Even Harry sat quartzlike and uncharacteristically immobile.

  Dressed as she would be throughout the trial in a plain dark navy blue ankle-length suit with a white linen Peter Pan collar and a stylish broad, soft-brimmed black velvet hat trimmed with artificial violets, Evelyn appeared to some like “Beauty in Distress,” and to others a “small, frightened mouse” as she sat on the edge of her seat. She removed the dark veil she had worn until then, and a murmur ran through the room as some got their first look at the still-astonishing girlish beauty. Her mass of dark hair tied in a loose knot at the back of her neck was in stark contrast to the pallor in her “daintily molded features.”

  It didn’t take long for several reporters to speculate on the theatrical effect her decidedly subdued “costume” might have on observers, particularly the twelve male jurors. The outf
it certainly made the slight and fragile-looking Evelyn seem little more than a schoolgirl of thirteen, even though she had turned twenty-two a month and a half earlier. Her appearance made a powerful impression on all spectators in the courtroom and “intensified a hundredfold the dramatic climax of the trial.” She sat perfectly still, her complexion as white as “finely sifted sugar.”

  As she surveyed the scene, it took all of Evelyn’s strength to hide the fear that had welled up inside her; panic bobbed and hovered near her throat and threatened to escape any minute in a primal scream. Her heart was beating at an abnormal pace as her hands shook. She could hear the scuffling and wrestling of those barred from entering the room just beyond the imposing doors that led to the corridor. The enormity of her task hummed through the room. There was nothing to obscure her view of Harry, who sat about forty feet away, behind a railing in the center of the court. His eyes met hers as she shifted nervously in her seat on the stand. He smiled encouragingly, but Harry’s smile frequently had an unsettling effect on her, and this was certainly one of those times. Harry was surrounded on either side by “a great deal too much counsel,” six in all. There was also a handwriting expert as well as numerous medical “experts” and “specialists . . . all charging small fortunes merely to lend their presence to the scene.”

  Immediately in front of Evelyn sat the district attorney, Jerome; his assistant, Garvan; three more alienists; and some friends of Jerome. To her left sat the sober-looking jury; to the right, the equally sedate and heavyset Justice Fitzgerald. Then there were the long tables of reporters, a number of whom she knew; others were merely part of the sea of anonymous faces that stared up at her as if she were “in the monkey house at the zoo.” In the extreme right corner of the room sat “the sob squad” and as the hundred newspapermen and -women leaned forward eagerly in their section, all held their collective breath so that “not even the random jingling of a coin or the buzzing of a fly could be heard.” Even though she thought she had become used to people gawking at her (and had posed for Stanny numerous times “in absolute shameless nakedness”), nothing could have prepared Evelyn for this “spectacle of over-exposure” as the tyrannical gaze of the press and the public watched like vultures as her brief and too colorful life unraveled in front of them.

  True to form, the Napoleonic Delmas, hand in vest, wasted no time. He stood up, approached Evelyn, and said: “Please state exactly what you confessed to Harry Thaw that night in Paris with regard to your prior relationship with Stanford White.”

  Evelyn took a deep breath as Harry let out an involuntary smothered yelp. She would later write that in many ways she found the first day the worst of all, worse than the cross-examination that followed. Her ordeal would last two uninterrupted hours that first day during direct examination alone. No one thought to offer her a glass of water during those times when her mouth was “turned to sawdust,” and as she put it, “I was too afraid to stop, sure that I would never be able to start again.”

  She thought, having sat through a number of days in court as a spectator, that she had adjusted to the whole scene—the predatory crowd, the staid judge on the bench, the keen and impatient reporters packed into every corner of the large room, the flash-happy photographers, even the various Thaws sitting rigid in their row of reserved seats behind Harry like a cold convergence of deceptively treacherous icebergs, their threatening heft hidden well beneath the surface. But, she recalls, “as I sat on the bench in the witness chair it was all the difference between watching the sea from the beach and viewing the beach from the sea.”

  HALF-TRUTHS AND JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY

  With a new cotton handkerchief in hand, her head sometimes downcast, and her trembling voice at times barely audible, Evelyn began to tell her terrible tale. Delmas slowly unfolded the story from her lips, moving backward from the events on the night of the murder to her meeting with White “and all that followed.” With only one exception, she spoke in a clear, soft voice, occasionally brushing wisps of her hair from her eyes. While relating the story of her first meeting with White, in the course of her narrative Evelyn mentioned the name of Edna Goodrich, the other chorus girl who had facilitated and attended the lunch. Suddenly there was a burst of shouting and a furious conference on both sides. A brief discussion at the bench ended with a directive to Evelyn: “From this point on, you are instructed not to speak out loud the names of any people not directly involved in the murder. Any names you include in your narrative will be whispered to the attorneys. . . . This is to spare them from public embarrassment.”

  It must be a dreadful thing to be associated with this case, Evelyn thought to herself ironically.

  Delmas asked her to relate the events that preceded their marriage, culminating in the night she confessed to Harry about her seduction by and subsequent affair with White. Almost as soon as Evelyn began to describe the mirrored room, the champagne, and so on, Jerome leaped to his feet and objected violently. But Delmas only smiled and waited for the judge to put the district attorney in his place, secure in the knowledge that his defense strategy was brilliant. Yet amazingly simple. By asking Evelyn to state what she had told Harry during that long night, Delmas could introduce into evidence a great deal of information that would not have otherwise been allowed. And, while circumventing any possible objections Jerome might make as to inflammatory or prejudicial remarks introduced about the murdered victim, Delmas’s strategy also stymied the irate D.A., who could not object on the grounds that something Evelyn said was inaccurate and untrue. What mattered was that she had said it to Harry. And that Harry had believed it.

  To Evelyn, having to tell the humiliating story of her deflowering and subsequent corruption on the witness stand was “rather worse” than either the night she confessed it in lurid detail to Harry or having lived the event itself. And, to many spectators in the court, including Evelyn, it seemed that the repetition of the sordid facts was worse the second (or hundredth) time around for Harry. He strained forward in his chair and periodically gripped the table convulsively, his large knuckles alternately beet red then blanched. Halfway through her story, tears began to well up in Evelyn’s eyes, something she had promised herself she wouldn’t allow. She knew enough about the press to know that some would construe her crying as theatrical. But as she repeated the story of “the modern Nero” (so said the papers) and how “he had ravished her sixteen-year-old flesh” while she was unconscious, Harry’s terrible anguish exploded with choking unexpected force. Unable to stop herself, Evelyn also broke down crying, and restoratives had to be administered before she could go on. Tense, nervous, overwrought, and “thrilled with emotions of pity,” the spectators also made incomprehensible exclamations as they hung on every word that Evelyn uttered. With each revelation or disclosure, a gasp could be heard from the jurors. Some of them had tears in their eyes. And the sob sisters sobbed. Vociferously.

  Finally, as Evelyn finished recounting her “wrenching tale of betrayal and debauched innocence,” Harry broke down again and bawled, making the same wounded-animal noises he had made that night in Paris. Adjournment for lunch was called, and as a shaken and exhausted Evelyn got up from the witness stand and walked along the narrow passageway a court official had made for her behind the jury box, her face turned from crimson to ghostly white. She felt for the walls with her gloved fingertips as if she were about to fall into an anemic swoon. Luckily she didn’t, since all the physicians at the defense table were tending to Harry as he heaved to and fro in his seat, blubbering. Evelyn, however, hadn’t noticed the reactions of anyone else in the room. She was too consumed with her own terrible emotions, which the papers the next day gleefully printed in explicit black and white.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  On the second day of Evelyn’s testimony, the crowds outside the courthouse swelled by several thousand more than the previous day. The corridors of the building itself were completely congested with bodies hoping to catch a glimpse of the “Child-Bride.” In the
cobbled street under the Bridge of Sighs that connected the Tombs to the courthouse building, an equally large crowd had gathered, hoping to see “the defender of American womanhood.”

  Inside the courtroom, only Edward Thaw, Harry’s brother, was present to represent the family that morning. A more pallid, haggard-looking Harry was brought in. Instead of walking briskly to his place as he had the previous day, “he seemed to move in a hesitating way, looking about to right and left in the crowded courtroom.” He smiled as he recognized his brother, but as Evelyn later learned, Harry had slept little that night, agonizing once again over the story she had told the day before, a story he had made her repeat to him countless times. But on this day, Harry was “heavily medicated and not by his own hand.”

  Evelyn was also feeling much worse than the day before, trying to combat a tight, drawn feeling that seemed to want to “wring her insides out.” As she gripped the sides of her chair in the witness room, waiting for her name to be called, razorlike pains shot through her slim wrists. Her nervousness increased, and she felt a weakness along her spinal column that threatened collapse. She was grateful to be sitting, feeling for the first time that she might faint if she had to stand at that moment. If anyone spoke to her suddenly, her heart “began palpitating in a frightful manner.” And then, the court clerk’s voice rang out, “Evelyn Nesbit Thaw.”

  Delmas approached her again with a benevolent smile on his face, one hand in his vest pocket. Letters that Harry had written to Evelyn during the period she had avoided him were read out loud. One was signed, “From one about to die,” which was so like Harry in a certain mood that Evelyn almost smiled. Other letters were read, revealing not only how troubled Harry was about White, but how his troubled mind had worked in trying to make Evelyn accept his honorable advances more than five years earlier.