American Eve (42 page)

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.

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.

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, as if on the express track out of Pennsylvania Station.