The family of Mick Jones, English rocker of Foreigner
fame, now lives in the New York City townhouse that Gilded
Age architect Stanford White is rumored to have built for
his teenage paramour Evelyn Nesbit. The well-cared for structure
sports much of its original woodwork and interior components,
possessing the same lasting quality held by the story of Stannie’s
affair with Evelyn, a story that has become woven into the
fabric of American culture.
Guests at the Jones’s townhouse will sometimes regale
each other with tales based on the tragic love affair. Someone,
for example, might mention the rumor circulating during the
White murder trial that in the master bedroom White had included
a wall-size, two-way mirror facing opposite the bed and that,
behind that mirror, Evelyn’s mother would watch the
proceedings and later instruct and advise her daughter about
the correct practice of love. This, of course, is purely scurrilous
rumor, compounded from the known facts of the Stannie-Evelyn
affair, the architect’s control over construction of
the townhouse in question, and the classic “stage mother”
persona of Evelyn’s mother.
In the early twentieth century, when Stannie, nearly fifty
years old, swung sweet Evelyn, sixteen or seventeen years
old, back and forth on a special velvet swing, either nude
or barely dressed, depending on the storyteller’s preference,
there was no such thing as rock star fame. The idea of celebrity,
however, was well-established and both Stannie White, a major
force in the world of architecture and design, and Evelyn
Nesbit, one of the first chorus girls of the time, were celebrities.
Five years after Evelyn first met Stannie, the man Evelyn
later married, Harry Thaw, dispatched Stannie with three pistol
shots in the face, catapulting all three to a fame and celebrity
that transcended anything yet known on the American continent
and perhaps anywhere else in the world as well.
New York in the Gilded Age
After the Civil War, America entered upon an era of industrialization
and modernization. Ambitious, driven industrialists and financiers
battled each other, union organizers, and the government to
build the railroads, mines, and factories that turned America
into a world power. From cultural and financial backwater,
America was transformed into international prominence. New
York City became the focus of all this new business, finance,
and society. Between the older echelon of high society, ruled
over by the Astors, and the newer, nouveau riche
component symbolized by the Vanderbilts, New York was a vibrant,
even frantic, arena of social competition and ostentation.
Bigger and more beautiful mansions went up on a yearly basis,
elaborate and sumptuous pleasure palaces that began to line
the streets and avenues of New York, announcing the wealth
and grandness of the families within, many of whom hired Stannie
White to design and build their temples to self. Comparably
grand clubhouses for the men of high society were also needed,
and Stannie had his hand in many of those. Where Stannie’s
role was on the building and design end, Evelyn fitted in
on the amusement and entertainment side, her time in show
business witnessing the birth of Broadway as the national
theatrical center.
The fin de siecle was nearly the high point of modernism,
when talented, driven individuals, starting from virtually
nothing, could rise to the top of the economic order with
hard work, sharp wits, and a flexible moral code. Individual
rights, self-expression, a secular and open tolerance, disregard
for traditional ways of doing business, all of these were
inherent in the Gilded Age. Strict materialism prevailed,
with all judged by the extent of their wealth, or the absence
of it. It was, indeed, democratic capitalism run amuck. Later,
some of the era’s excesses would be trimmed by trustbusters,
muckrakers, labor leaders, and temperance ladies, but, in
the 1890s and early 1900s, when Stannie and Evelyn reached
their pinnacles of fame, it was a no-holds barred time of
getting and spending. The distribution of wealth was hideous,
as it would take time for the new wealth at the top to trickle
down, or be taxed-and-redistributed down. The vigorous labor
movement of the 1870s and 1880s lay in ruins by the 1890s,
the victim of successful union-busting by the magnates and
of violence and excess by the workers.
Depend on the French for a cynical quote with a dig at America
– from George Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister,
after visiting Gilded Age America: “America has gone
from a state of barbarism to one of decadence without achieving
any civilization in between.”
Evelyn
Evelyn was born into middle-class circumstances outside of
Pittsburgh in 1884. The father, an attorney, died young, leaving
Evelyn, her mother, and a younger brother to fend for themselves.
With no male breadwinner, the Nesbit family’s circumstances
continually eroded over the years, descending at one point
to full-fledged begging status, only to be restored gradually
as Evelyn matured into an outstanding beauty in her early
youth and began earning modeling fees, first in Pittsburgh,
then in Philadelphia, and eventually in New York City.
Her mother’s ambitions for Evelyn drove this process
of promoting and marketing. By the time Evelyn was fifteen,
she was her family’s sole support and had established
herself as one of the top artist’s models in America.
At the turn of the century, modeling as a profession possessed
considerably less cachet than it does now and, despite resounding
success in this field, Evelyn and her mother could not have
viewed themselves as being at or near the top of society.
Thus, much remained to be done. In that Gilded Age, they could
anticipate a possible rise to the top with not much interference
from the stuffy social gatekeepers of yesteryear.
Mother Nesbit instilled an ambition in Evelyn to be on stage.
And, once the noted artist Charles Dana Gibson had captured
Evelyn’s allure and style in the famous Question Mark
portrait, which became iconic material, creating the “Gibson
Girl” style, Broadway producers could be persuaded that
hiring Evelyn would contribute to the marketability of their
shows. The British musical Floradora was coming to
Broadway after a long, successful run in London. One of the
innovative elements of Floradora was a set of saucy
song-and-dance numbers involving six females (the “Floradora
sextette”), numbers that were acclaimed by audiences
and critics alike at the time. So popular were these routines
that the sextette idea contributed to the use of full-scale
chorus lines like the Ziegfield Girls and the dancers in Busby
Berkeley musicals of the 20s and 30s.
Evelyn, though already famous for her beauty, was not known
as a singer or dancer, and the producers of Floradora
hired her for a smallish part. Gradually, she assumed larger
roles, finally attaining full status as one of the six leading
showgirls on Broadway. The common talk of the time was that,
once a young lady became a Floradora girl and began to receive
all the associated flattery and attention, marriage to a rich
husband was only a matter of time. During the run of the play,
some seventy young women came and went from the famous sextette,
though no records exist as to the exact fate, marital or otherwise,
of any of these ladies other than Evelyn.
So-called “stage-door johnnies” crowded around
the stage entrance to the theater where Floradora
played. At the tender age of sixteen or seventeen, Evelyn
could not, under the standards of conduct existing at the
time, freely socialize with this importunate cadre of johnnies
mesmerized by her beauty and talent. To Mrs. Nesbit, this
school of fish must have seemed a very fine crowd of possible
suitors for her daughter, and she and Evelyn managed to work
out methods by which Evelyn could be pursued by various of
these prospective marks without running too publicly afoul
of Gilded Age moral niceties. One device was to restrict socializing
to small, private parties to which Evelyn was accompanied,
not by her mother, which presumably would have cast a pall
of excessive propriety, but rather by a young female “friend”
of Evelyn’s. Thus circumscribed, Evelyn ventured out
into the exciting world of men and society in the great city
of New York. Before long, it was Stannie White, older and
white-haired but sweet, accommodating, and astonishingly accomplished
and generous, who managed to recommend and ingratiate himself
above all others in the Nesbit ladies’ hearts. Plying
Evelyn with gallantry and gifts, and her mother with cash,
Stannie succeeded where others had stumbled.
Stannie
Stanford White probably gave off an aura of Old World wealth
as he navigated the theaters, restaurants, and clubs of Broadway.
This public image would have been perfectly consistent with
his times, since all the large number of nouveau riche
in post Civil War America yearned to exude Old World charm
however much this may have conflicted with their true origins.
But Stannie had actually risen from very modest circumstances.
His father had led a largely unprofitable life as a noted
Anglophile author, critic, and scholar. The White family wealth,
such as it was, sank when the grandfather’s shipping
firm went bankrupt. Instead of titan of industry, Stannie
started out professional life as a clerk.
At the age of sixteen, instead of attending college, which
Stannie’s father could not afford, Stannie began a long
though productive apprenticeship with the renowned architect
Henry H. Richardson. White’s great talents showed immediately,
and Richardson assigned increasingly important projects to
him as time wore on, Stannie’s path being not unlike
Evelyn Nesbit’s path on her way from Pittsburgh mendicant
to Broadway bombshell, with stops in between. The family history
carried a parallel as well: Stannie’s grandfather’s
shipping company had gone bust and left the family without
wealth, just as, when Evelyn’s lawyer father died, the
Nesbits lost their family resources.
When Stannie was twenty-five, in 1878, he and another Richardson
apprentice toured Europe to educate themselves directly in
Old World architecture. On returning to America in 1879, they
organized the new architectural firm of McKim, Mead &
White, a partnership destined to change the American cityscape.
Among White’s achievements: the Washington Square Arch,
St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, the uptown
campus of New York University and his masterpiece, the original
Madison Square Garden. He and his partners became prominent
and wealthy, servicing the needs of nouveau America,
dotting the urban landscape with impressive new office buildings
and designing posh showcase homes for the newly rich. But
Stannie’s successful professional life paled in comparison
to his over-the-top social career, involving acquaintanceship,
if not outright friendship, with virtually all the significant
figures of the time; his social life and business career were
tied up together since wealthy, connected friends and acquaintances
controlled all the important architectural commissions of
the time. In the end, it was a losing proposition for Stannie,
as he went into increasing debt to finance his social adventures.
When he died, he was in debt for nearly $1 million and, instead
of being a partner in McKim, Mead, he had been reduced to
employee status in order to disentangle the firm from his
personal debts. His family was saved from ruin only because
his wife Bessie had inherited, and kept separate, her own
fortune.
Stannie had an aesthete’s love of beauty and continually
cultivated his taste for paintings and sculpture; he favored
the neoclassical and Renaissance styles and helped popularize
these tastes throughout the elite layer of society whose members
retained him to design their homes and decorate their interiors
with objets d’art that Stannie would tour Europe
to find. Perhaps foreshadowing Stannie’s louche fate
was his admiration for the nude sculptures of classical times.
As early as 1885, when he and his wife were renting a Long
Island farm, he found himself unfavorably mentioned in the
local newspaper in a letter to the editor written by the Reverend
Timothy O’Slap and reporting, in exasperated and indignant
tones, how shocked the Reverend and his party had been when
passing by the White’s rented farm and viewing, at a
site nearby the road, statues in the classical style, statues
absolutely naked and shamefully conspicuous among the surrounding
trees.
Again, in 1895, though succeeding wildly with his Boston Public
Library, scandal erupted on account of the nude statue White
had placed in the Library courtyard. The nude had to be removed,
only to be successfully relocated at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, with a smaller mold of the naked bacchante sent to
Stannie’s hideaway apartment in the tower above Madison
Square Garden, an intimate little space where, no doubt, the
classic nude felt at home and well appreciated. Even the barely
clothed classical Diana placed above the tower of Madison
Square Garden drew morally based criticism, though New York
apparently could not raise the same level of community outrage
as Boston, permitting the statue to survive.
On the one hand, Stannie led the life of a respectable Gilded
Age gentleman, well-bred wife and child nicely ensconced in
a beautiful rural home on Long Island, all well cared for
and evidently happy. Stannie’s wife, a scion of one
of the established families in New York, was well-off on her
own, inheriting millions in 1890.
On the other hand, he had his other life, as notorious Broadway
roué, often staying overnight in the city
at one or more of his hideaway apartments, entertaining himself
and his associates with the fast crowd of ladies who worked
on Broadway and its environs. One especially noteworthy banquet,
held in 1895 and hosted by Stannie, featured a Susie Johnson,
who, just barely dressed, emerged from a large pie to the
delight of the assembled revelers. Thus, the story goes, was
born the bachelor party custom of females emerging from cakes
and the like. Of course, in our own unceremonious times, bachelor
party entertainers no longer bother to conceal themselves
in cakes or pies prior to coming out.
By the time Stannie made Evelyn Nesbit’s acquaintance
in 1901, he was no stranger to showgirls and the Broadway
demimonde. The ethos of the time allowed a certain latitude
even to married men that was denied to women. As an ambitious
professional, Stannie used his night time revels to solidify
his position in society and business; when it came to entertaining
clients and general socializing, his partners at McKim, Mead
& White were of little use, leaving these functions to
Stannie.
At his peak, he belonged to over fifty clubs, some of whose
buildings he had designed himself. Over time, indulging his
love of beauty in all things, including women, and exercising
his natural sociability and love of high living, Stannie became
a notorious player in this milieu. It is said that he had
to pay the gossip sheets regularly in order to keep his name
out of the tabloids, especially after the notorious “pie
lady” affair had become public knowledge. In addition
to such payments, it is also said that he kept a rough law
firm, Howe & Hummel, on retainer against those rare cases
in which ungrateful ladies went to law against him. The firm’s
primary practice was criminal law, its offices being directly
across from the main prison in Manhattan. This law office
was open twenty-four hours a day to accommodate the odd hours
observed by felons on their way in and out of the prison.
On first becoming interested in Evelyn, it must have come
as something of a shock to Stannie, as well as serving to
enhance Evelyn’s already transcendent charms, that she
resisted his most artful advances and importunings. Evelyn
and her formidable mother played coy, the fiction being that
Evelyn, a putatively proper young lady, was under her mother’s
strictest supervision and not so freely available as the other
showgirls whom Stannie was accustomed to playing with. No
doubt, the pair, or at least Mother Nesbit, were aware that
playing the game in this way was likely to drive someone like
Stannie beside himself with desire, and they were right. He
raised the stakes and went all out to persuade the Nesbit
ladies of the advantages of allowing Evelyn to become better
acquainted with him.
At first, the young ingénue would attend Stannie’s
small, private parties with an escort (no naked ladies popping
out of pies in these soirees!) and gradually became more intimate
with Stannie. The official story, as purveyed in later court
proceedings, was that, after too much alcohol, Evelyn was
deflowered by Stannie on a weekend when her mother was away,
and Stannie was supposed to have been “babysitting”
her. There have always been imputations not only of excess
champagne but also of drugged champagne, the Gilded Age equivalent
of today’s date rape drug. With Stannie dead and unable
to answer such imputations and the demimonde acquaintances
who survived him more or less committed to sullying his memory,
there is no judging the evidence on this point.
Given Evelyn’s character, formed under the influence
of her mother, who was eager to restore the Nesbits to at
least middle-class respectability if not better, and going
through an impoverished adolescence in the disreputable subculture
of modeling and show business, credulity is strained at portraits
of her as a kind of sacrificial virgin raped and ruined by
Stannie White, evil consort of the wicked robber barons of
the time. This was the convenient tale spun by Harry Thaw’s
defense lawyers and mouthed by the ever-venal, well-paid Evelyn,
but it continues to ring hollow down the corridors of time.
Though literally besieged by men who wished to marry her,
many of whom were far more compatible and appropriate in terms
of age and background than the men she actually chose for
herself, or whom her mother chose for her, Evelyn granted
her favors only to the wealthy and never unless mother also
received a nice cut.
Another less than endearing aspect of Evelyn’s character
was her confessed habit of titillating the gentleman she happened
to be with by constantly bringing up the names of different
gentlemen with whom she used to spend time, in order to provoke
jealousy. She did this with Stannie and later with Thaw, the
latter of whom took it especially hard. In all, it seems that
mother and daughter together were a potent man-trapping machine
and that seduction and pillage was a two-way proposition when
a man entangled himself with these ladies.
Stannie and Evelyn and Harry and Barrymore
Well before becoming involved with Evelyn, Stannie had earned
a devoted enemy in the person of Harry K. Thaw, the spoiled
and worthless heir to a Pittsburgh mining fortune. At birth,
Harry was worth some $40 million. That was his money value,
and, in the course of his life, he achieved absolutely no
other value. From earliest youth, he was extremely ill-tempered
and abusive. The family’s fantastic wealth allowed Harry
to rage through life with few consequences, paying off those
he injured or the police who pursued him. He even attended
Harvard where, according to Harry himself, he studied poker.
With a generous allowance from his widowed mother, though
without ready money of his own, Harry arrived on the New York
scene in 1901 at the age of thirty. During his lengthy “stage-door
Johnny” period on Broadway, he quickly acquired a bad
reputation among even the hardened ladies of the chorus lines,
who learned that he was malevolent and frightening to be with.
His thuggish behavior caused him to be barred from parties
that Stannie hosted in his Madison Square Garden tower apartment,
where the social elite gathered for amusement. To Harry, with
no other virtue but his birth, exclusion of this kind was
infuriating. Stannie also blackballed him from one of the
New York clubs that Harry wished to join, the Knickerbocker.
Later on, and to top things off between the antagonists, a
showgirl whom Thaw had humiliated got wind of an after-theater
party Thaw was sponsoring and to which he had invited girls
from Floradora. The injured and vengeful showgirl
persuaded Stannie, who was unaware of the situation, to invite
all the same girls to come to Stannie’s tower apartment
after work that night. Stood up by his prize invitees, Thaw
blamed White for this outrage to his dignity and from then
on, Thaw was unbalanced, paranoid and obsessed where Stannie
White was concerned, never missing an opportunity to cause
him harm, and leading ultimately to Thaw’s public execution
of White atop Madison Square Garden in 1906.
Stannie’s affair with Evelyn was in full swing, so to
speak, by the fall of 1901, the courtship and seduction having
begun in summer. Despite her involvement with Stannie, however,
Evelyn, as eligible showgirl, continued to entertain offers
and proposals from stage-door johnnies and others. In December
of 1901, after a long siege of flowers and other gifts for
Evelyn from Thaw, who used a pseudonym lest his real name
and already established bad reputation scare her off, Evelyn
and Thaw met for a dinner. Thaw, filled with hatred of Stannie
White, annoyed Evelyn by criticizing her mother’s decision
to let Evelyn see White. Nothing much came of this unsatisfying
first meeting between Evelyn and “Mad Harry,”
as Thaw was referred to behind his back.
Indirect evidence exists suggesting that Stannie very much
doubted Evelyn’s fidelity as their affair played out.
Between his absences for professional and family duties and
her raucous life as a showgirl, such suspicions would have
been natural, even if unsupported by the facts. However, as
the Barrymore episode shows, evidence of Evelyn’s lack
of loyalty was abundant.
In the summer of 1902, Stannie, who was well-acquainted not
only with the lions of capitalist society but also with leading
lights of the art and theater worlds, introduced Evelyn to
John Barrymore, then a young newspaperman but later a legendary
actor and alcoholic. Evelyn and John struck sparks, and, as
soon as White went off on a lengthy fishing trip with clients,
they began spending time together. At twenty-two, handsome
and dashing, he was by far a more natural match for Evelyn
than any of the rich, older men countenanced by her mother.
The entire affair came to a crashing end, however, when Evelyn
got drunk and slept in Barrymore’s rooms. A huge contretemps
among Barrymore, who wished to marry Evelyn and had already
proposed to her like countless other men, Mrs. Nesbit, White,
and Evelyn followed, concluding in a visit to Stannie’s
doctor for Evelyn, who was to be examined for something the
historical record does not reveal. It is within reason to
think that Evelyn was asked whether the obvious sexual connection
with Barrymore involved unprotected relations, and that she
may have admitted that to be true or at least denied it unconvincingly
enough to call for a doctor’s visit.
Her subsequent six-month banishment to a girls’ school
in New Jersey and the mysterious operation performed on her
there about five months after her arrival, with everything
financed by Stannie, strongly suggest that she had become
pregnant, probably by Barrymore, and withdrew from the social
and theatrical scene to avoid scandal. No participant in this
aspect of the affair ever confessed to such a sordid state
of affairs, but it is hard to come to any other conclusion
under the facts that are undisputed. The ostensible reason
given out to the public at the time for Evelyn’s sudden
disappearance from the stage was that Mrs. Nesbit had decided
she was “too young” for Broadway. Ever so true
as this was, it was by then a bit late in the Nesbit ladies’
career to make such a determination. It was also offered as
a possible reason that Stannie wished to separate Evelyn from
young Barrymore, of whom he was jealous, but the traditional
separation strategy of the time for people in Stannie’s
set was a sudden trip to Europe for the protectee rather than
to coup her up in a dreary girls’ school out in the
country.
Another episode in Evelyn’s life suggests she was chronically
unfaithful during this period. She got a role in one of George
Lederer’s musicals. Lederer was a notable producer of
the time, and, when divorce proceedings between him and his
wife commenced, his wife alleged that after he hired Evelyn
to star in his Broadway show, more than professional relations
were afoot between the two.
This view is very possibly true since Evelyn was now going
through her most confusing romantic period, bouncing back
and forth among Stannie White, Harry Thaw, and John Barrymore.
What difference would it have made to throw a powerful Broadway
producer into the mix? In fact, anything that might have helped
Evelyn secure her career, such as making whoopee with a producer
like Lederer, might also make it possible for her to get off
her dependency on rich men’s largesse.
It would only have been natural for a woman of nineteen, as
Evelyn was, to prefer the attentions of young, albeit relatively
poor, suitors, especially when her life circumstances were
corralling her into meretricious relations with rich, old
capitalists. Left to their own devices, women of such ambitious
make-up might not, in fact, have spent much time at all in
romance. However, locked into relations with older men, the
simple prospect or fantasy of relationships with same-age
males would have been appealing. The classic, often irresistible,
ploy used by older men in these circumstances was career assistance.
Reduced to essentials, in exchange for the woman’s companionship,
the rich man agrees to sponsor, support, and advance the young
lady’s career. For many ambitious young women, willing
to sacrifice relations with young men that in any event would
have been complicated or even made impossible by their personal
ambitions, these deals were appealing.
Evelyn and Harry
During the winter and spring of 1903, as Evelyn recuperated
from her Barrymore adventure, Harry Thaw resumed his attentions,
lavishing flowers, gifts, and notes upon her and visiting
when Stannie was not there. Barrymore also tried to continue
their relationship, but he had become persona non grata,
especially since Mrs. Nesbit despised him. His lack of funds
no doubt played a large part in the mother’s judgment,
as she herself was then living off Stannie, and possibly off
Thaw as well, neither of whom would have continued such funding
with Barrymore in the picture.
Thaw, ever eager to score against White, played his trump
card with the Nesbits: his enormous wealth. At the time, Stannie
was beginning to go deeply into debt and was being pestered
by creditors of all stripes. Thaw offered to send Evelyn and
her mother on a grand tour of Europe, all expenses paid. From
his point of view, this would get them away from the baleful
influence of “that Beast,” as he called Stannie,
as well as give Thaw the chance to complete his seduction
of Evelyn, totally away from all the other schemers and johnnies
besieging her on Broadway. By this time, after the debacle
with Barrymore, for which she blamed Stannie, Evelyn’s
affections were wavering, and she agreed to Thaw’s plan.
Mother and daughter departed for Europe in May of 1903, with
Stannie’s blessing, given in ignorance of who was financing
the trip, and accompanied by an employee of Thaw who was their
“chaperone.” Thaw followed in a separate ship
and the three met up in Paris, where Thaw rented an apartment.
Of course, Thaw being Thaw, he behaved abominably and brutishly
the whole time in Europe, deeply offending and frightening
Mrs. Nesbit, for whom not even Thaw’s great wealth could
compensate for his character flaws. The mother left Europe
in the middle of the trip, unable to tolerate Thaw any longer,
but Evelyn stayed behind and toured with Thaw, virtually as
man and wife, until October of 1903, when, completely unnerved
by Thaw’s psychotic behavior, she fled France with some
friends and returned home. Thaw had beaten her and revealed
his drug addictions, to add to his list of repulsive personal
characteristics.
It seems that Thaw had begun going into rages, threatening
and committing violence against Evelyn, after learning from
her in Paris that Stannie had supposedly deflowered her under
shameful circumstances. Thaw, already morbidly hating White
due to their run-ins on the New York social scene, could now
add this alleged dishonoring of the woman he loved to the
list of his grievances. Thaw admitted to Evelyn that he knew
much of her affair with Stannie already, since he had hired
a private detective firm to follow them around in New York.
When Evelyn refused to sign legal documents attesting to the
alleged rape by White, Thaw went into his final European tantrum.
Given Thaw’s outrageous behavior, Evelyn was glad to
get home and did not disclose to him where she was living.
Once Thaw returned to New York by himself, it took some time
to track her down, but Thaw and his detectives did so; he
recommenced his siege of flowers, gifts, notes, and begging.
By Christmas of 1903, he had succeeded in getting Evelyn’s
attentions. Shortly after that, she broke off relations with
Stannie White, quit her engagement in the Broadway show she
had been newly hired for, and became Thaw’s full-time
companion and mistress.
Stannie and Thaw
Eventually, after much persuading and enormous financial investment
and incentives, Thaw was able to win Evelyn’s hand in
marriage. Her mother, who by this time had bagged her own
husband, never fully approved of the match. At the same time,
partly due to Evelyn’s ingrained habit of teasing Thaw
by bringing Stannie’s name up, enraging, and further
destabilizing him, and partly due, of course, to Thaw’s
own mental disease and obsession with White, he continued
to hire detectives to follow Stannie’s every move. Expense
was no object in Thaw’s quest to destroy Stanford White.
The record suggests that from 1903 at least, up until Stannie’s
death in June 1906, numerous detectives followed White twenty-four
hours a day. Anthony Comstock, leader of the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice, an organization principally directed
against the huge prostitution trade existent at that time,
recounted that Thaw had come to him several times with complaints
against White to the effect that he and his colleagues were
regularly engaged in the debasement of young virgins and other
related acts of vice. The Society investigated these complaints
but could never substantiate any of Thaw’s charges.
Thaw, at virtually the same time, however, was fighting off
charges, with the help of the family fortune, that he regularly
whipped prostitutes at a brothel he patronized. One Broadway
girl he spent time with sued him for a beating he allegedly
gave her, but she died before the suit could be tried.
A mysterious warehouse fire destroyed virtually all of Stannie’s
collected art objects, which had just been assembled for auction
in order to relieve his debts. The day after the fire, February
14, 1905, a private investigator named Bergoff showed up at
Stannie’s office and advised him that he was being followed
around New York, the news of which came as a complete surprise
to White. The two went downstairs and tested out Bergoff’s
disclosure, and indeed, as Stannie could now see, there were
a number of unknown persons shadowing him. He immediately
retained Bergoff to follow the spies and find out who was
behind this outrage.
Historians have not ventured to speculate on the connection
between these events. Thaw almost surely realized that Stannie
was collecting items to auction off for repayment of his debts
– with all the detective manpower he employed, this
would have been information routinely appearing in their reports.
Causing a fire to destroy most of his remaining assets would
have been very desirable from Thaw’s perverted point
of view, and perhaps this is one of the jobs his detectives
or their associates did for him. That a man unknown to and
unbidden by White would the next day show up with information
about the detectives following him is too much coincidence
to ignore. Bergoff evidently could only have come by his information
from someone working for Thaw’s detective agency; acting
on this tip from inside Thaw’s camp, Bergoff correctly
assumed that he could be commissioned by White to counterspy
on Stannie’s followers. And the fact that Bergoff showed
up exactly the next day after the fire tends to suggest that
the two events were connected. There is an inference to be
made that Bergoff was advised by his informant to wait until
the day after the fire to show up at Stannie’s office,
which would have avoided the complication of Bergoff’s
men following Thaw’s and perhaps stumbling across the
arson.
After White had spent a large sum, more than he could afford,
on Bergoff’s detective services, they were able to confirm
that Harry Thaw was behind the shadowing, not only of White,
but also of actresses whom Stannie knew. Rather than risk
an embarrassing public confrontation with Thaw over the issue
of private detectives and harassment, Stannie elected for
the time being to do nothing; he believed that Thaw’s
intent was to embarrass him, even though he was also warned
by people who knew Thaw that he carried a pistol and occasionally
brandished it, vowing to kill Stanford White.
On June 25, 1906, the parties’ paths crossed for the
last, fateful time. Evelyn and Harry seldom came to New York,
Harry presumably not wishing to share her with the social
scene where he had so miserably failed and where he was held
in general contempt. But they were on their way to Europe
again and staying in New York before sailing. By coincidence,
the Thaws and Stannie ended up late that evening at the rooftop
café of Madison Square Garden, where a show was winding
down. Stannie, as usual, was trying to send notes to the girls
in the chorus when Evelyn noticed him and passed a note to
Thaw to the effect that “the beast is here.” Thaw
left Evelyn, strode over to White’s table and shot Stannie
dead on the spot, three shots to the face, execution style,
with no possibility of self-defense or escape on White’s
part. Thaw was captured immediately and taken to jail. Following
his heinous act, there erupted in New York perhaps the first
modern media frenzy of the type we are now accustomed to.
Trial in the Press and in the Courtroom
The principal feature of the aftermath of Stannie’s
murder was the all-out propaganda campaign, with virtually
unlimited funding, conducted by the Thaw family to besmirch
Stanford White, gain sympathy for Thaw, and retain Evelyn’s
services as family supporter. Huge sums were spent to these
ends so that Thaw could avoid the fate he had earned with
a lifetime of violence and, now, murder. The family financed
several plays and a film, exhibited to the public, all thinly
disguised attacks on Stanford White and his associates. A
publicist was hired to continually salt libelous reports in
the papers and periodicals and who ultimately wrote a book
advocating the Thaw family views. On the most extreme side
of this reporting, the periodical Vanity Fair ran
a headline that read, “Stanford White, Voluptuary and
Pervert, Dies the Death of a Dog.” The truth was somewhat
the opposite: if there was any vile dog in this affair, it
was surely Thaw, a wealthy beast but nonetheless a beast.
Many of these initial reports in the press described, in exaggerated
terms, lurid details of the private lives that Stannie and
some of his well-placed associates led in the Broadway milieu.
Naturally, disclosures of this kind, sensational and titillating,
drove newspaper and magazine circulation to huge heights.
People who had known White well and socialized with him disappeared
from view, not wanting to be further tarred by the journalistic
brush in full swing in the days after the murder. It was some
time before any public defense of Stannie was forthcoming,
but eventually a few brave souls did come forward publicly
to praise his work and his contributions to art and architecture.
The well-regarded journalist Richard Harding Davis, a friend
of White, contributed an article to Collier’s
in August that reminded readers of Stannie’s enormous
achievements and of his many friendships and good works. Davis
stated that White was “as incapable of little meannesses
as of great crimes.” Other similar accounts of Stannie
were forthcoming as his friends and colleagues gathered their
courage against the initial public fury fed by the Thaws’
mud-slinging and the tabloids’ frenzy.
The first trial for murder began in January 1907. Thaw resisted
his attorneys’ advice that an insanity defense was his
best hope, Harry insisting at first that the “unwritten
law,” whereby a husband was in some circumstances empowered
to defend his wife’s honor with lethal force, should
be his defense. In the end, the defense played both these
cards, introducing evidence both of Thaw’s extreme mental
instability and of White’s allegedly dishonorable behavior
towards Evelyn.
The key testimony was Evelyn’s. She was still a financial
dependent of the Thaws and behaved accordingly. Dressed in
virtual schoolgirl attire, and thus completely at odds with
her actual persona of femme fatale chorus girl, she
recounted the “drugged” and “raped”
tale, portraying herself as embodied innocence put to the
sword, so to speak, by Stanford White that night in 1901.
An interesting legal point, and one which hindered the State’s
case against Thaw, was that Evelyn’s testimony was not
admitted to prove whether or not such a rape actually occurred
as she described it, but rather was admitted solely to establish
what she had told Thaw about her affair with White. The distinction
proved significant, since the truth or falsity of the rape
story was irrelevant, the only relevant point being whether
this is what she told Thaw and hence whether Thaw’s
alleged temporary insanity resulted from hearing the story.
Since truth or falsity of the tale itself was not relevant,
Evelyn could not be cross-examined regarding its truth or
falsity, and no evidence that it was false could be admitted.
Evelyn and Thaw’s lawyers were free to invent the most
outrageous and lurid description of Stannie’s conduct
possible without fear of being contradicted by any other evidence
or testimony. Within the courtroom, there was no way to defend
White’s conduct by demonstrating the improbable nature
of Evelyn’s testimony. An interesting sidebar of the
first trial was that the prosecuting attorney himself was
then engaged in a love affair with a teenager; in prosecuting
Thaw, and implicity defending the victim White, the prosecutor
must have appreciated the irony of his situation.
Even with the huge defense advantages going in, the first
jury hung on the question of Thaw’s guilt, seven of
the twelve original jurors holding out for a murder conviction,
making another trial necessary. At the second trial, the “unwritten
law” defense was abandoned in favor of a full-blown
insanity defense offering much more corroboration of Thaw’s
incapacity, including inherited insanity in the Thaw family.
Evelyn came out and performed as in the first trial. This
time, Thaw achieved his insanity acquittal and was ordered
confined to Mattewean Asylum for the Criminally Insane. He
and his family made repeated attempts for his release, but
only succeeded in 1915, some nine years later. One of the
damning factors that kept him confined was testimony at his
sanity hearings by the madam of the brothel that Thaw had
patronized and whose girls he had whipped.
While Thaw was confined, Evelyn gave birth in 1910 to a son
who she claimed was Thaw’s, conceived, she said, on
one of his supervised releases. Thaw’s mother had received
proof that Evelyn had involved herself in a love affair with
one of Thaw’s defense attorneys. On release, Thaw refused
to recognize the child and divorced Evelyn.
Fall-Out
The testimony, especially Evelyn’s lurid account of
her affair with Stannie, stunned the nation. A hue and cry
went up concerning publication of the trial testimony in newspapers,
and both President Roosevelt and Congress took actions to
squelch reports of the trial, unsuccessfully, although in
Kentucky a Louisville newspaper was indicted by a grand jury
for publishing the testimony of Evelyn Nesbit. According to
a resolution passed by the Union League Club of New York,
publication of the “disgusting testimony” of the
Thaw trial constituted a “national calamity.”
The nature of the testimony concerning Evelyn’s stay
at the girls’ school in New Jersey, conveying the strong
implication that it was a haven for unwed, pregnant teenage
girls, caused such an exodus of students from the school,
hurriedly withdrawn by their families, that the school went
bankrupt and closed permanently.
By 1909, because of her conduct with the defense team, Evelyn
was cut off financially by the Thaws. Thaw himself was remitted
to an insane asylum for a second stay, 1917 to 1924, this
time on account of a kidnapping and beating he administered
to a young boy. Even later, similar incidents of violence
and litigation marred his life until old age seems to have
defused him. He died of a heart attack in Florida in 1947
at the age of seventy-six. Though Thaw lived to be twenty-two
years older than Stannie when the latter died, fourteen of
those extra years were spent in insane asylums, and all of
them were lived under the cloud that followed him around for
killing the well-liked, accomplished, and successful Stanford
White. The girl for whom he had allegedly done all this damage
was never his, making the entire effort a futility and tragic
waste of both his life and Stanford White’s. Thaw never
achieved anything but infamy and was nothing if not good proof
that a very steep inheritance tax is desirable.
From an historical point of view, Thaw’s crime and the
revelations that came in its wake were further proof in the
public mind that the Gilded Age plutocrats were badly in need
of being reined in and disciplined, that, left free to continue
their pillaging and plundering, their indecent way of life
would ruin America. When the Union League, a plutocratic haven,
cried “calamity,” this is what they meant: that
the general public would vent their displeasure with Thaw
and White by favoring legislation and action directed against
the wealthy, the privileged, and their indecent lives.
Living to be eighty-two, Evelyn Nesbit proved to be a survivor,
as any true femme fatale should be. She did a turn
on the vaudeville circuit, put on display by impresarios who
hired notable personalities of the time to appear on stage.
Hellen Keller and Carrie Nation were two other ladies of the
time who had vaudeville appearances. Evelyn said little during
her vaudeville shows, the audiences being happy to view at
first hand the beautiful and notorious woman at the center
of a sex scandal. She struggled through as a dancer in show
business, married and divorced a fellow performer, earned
a large fee from the filming of The Girl in The Red Velvet
Swing in 1955. In an interview given in the 1950s, she
expressed her regrets: “The world didn’t see what
I remember best, myself on the stand trying to save a husband
I didn’t love from going to the chair for killing the
man I did love.”
Stannie himself, exemplar of modernist man, self-made, irreverent,
secular, free-thinking, and achievement-oriented, lived this
modern life to the maximum limit, only to run up against traditional
constraints in the end: the “traditional” moral
sensibility, though admittedly wielded by an idiotic and mentally
diseased human being, was offended by Stannie’s naïve,
exuberant ways and exacted its revenge.
July 2005
From guest contributor Joe Leibowitz
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