Trials of Passion (39 page)

Imitating a Stanford White tactic, Thaw, still as Mr Munroe, through another chorine invited Evelyn to an ‘early dinner' at Rector's Restaurant. Ever happy to eat, Evelyn accepted the distraction: she was depressed over her imminent removal to the New Jersey boarding school.

31.
The Pittsburgh Millionaire

In his decidedly odd and peripatetic self-published memoir
The Traitor
, dedicated to his mother ‘who stood by me to the last', Harry K. Thaw arrives at his first meeting with Evelyn about a third of the way through the book – after
Boys Own
drinking bouts in Harvard, playboy treks across the name-dropping heights and depths of France, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, and (largely failed) adventures in scaling the social heights of New York and Newport. Of his first encounter with the woman who so dramatically altered his life, Harry writes, in his idiosyncratic manner:

It was good to see her. But I had heard of Stanford White, and I told her she should keep away from him, that he was very ugly, and not only that, he was married ... She liked my wrists and hands. I was wrong, for I said my wrists should be thicker, and she said she was sorry as she liked mine, but she agreed with me.

Evelyn's recollection of this meeting is rather different. She is all ready to leave because ‘Mr Munroe' is late, and she only stays because of the intermediary's insistence.

When Munroe does appear, he falls dramatically to his knees before her and kisses the hem of her skirts. Astonished and slightly repelled, Evelyn darts back and the man leaps to his full six foot two. At first, seeing him in his impeccable suit, she thinks he looks ‘sweet', but at second glance there is something unsettling about the combination of manly height and child's podgy, unshaped face: she focuses on his smooth hands, which evidently ‘had never labored at all in his thirty-two years'. Thaw's ‘goo-goo eyes', silly grin and snub nose give the impression of a face that is both odd and has ‘a sinister brutality
about the mouth'. He gestures extravagantly and talks non-stop, his subjects piling one on top of the other, while he blinks frenetically. Evelyn reflects that this was a man who ‘took his position in life very seriously and his world value too seriously'. When she contradicts his insulting view about a friend of hers who, he says, is ‘fat', then his insistence that women shouldn't allow themselves to put on ‘flesh', he seems utterly taken aback. Evelyn is by turn irritated and amused. In a comment as astute as that pronounced by any of Thaw's later psychiatrists, Evelyn writes in her first memoir: ‘Men who acclaim their own importance persistently and with no sign of hesitation as to their own conviction on the subject cease to be nobodies and become somebodies. And the egotism which prompted Harry's sentences and which appeared in all his dealings with the remainder of humanity at once fascinated and annoyed.'

Harry Thaw, the delinquent millionaire, was rarely challenged by young women. If Evelyn was relieved to see the back of him and, as she told her intermediary, had no interest in seeing Munroe again, Harry was hardly a man who could be described as susceptible to cues. The next day, he was pressing his attentions on Mrs Nesbit, who had no trouble in recognizing a face she had often enough seen in the Pittsburgh papers. Indeed, at the lowest moment of her life she had been to the Thaw mansion to plead for rescue funds for her family, but had been turned away unceremoniously by Mrs Thaw, who on the whole didn't dispense charity that didn't earn her recognition.

Harry K. Thaw (1871–1947) was the eldest son of the Pittsburgh railway baron William Thaw (1818–89) and his second wife Mary Sibbet Copley. Perhaps because there had been a male child before Harry who had died in early infancy (purportedly smothered by the ample Mary's breast), Mary Thaw spoiled her surviving eldest and was ever ready to pull him out of disreputable scraps. His father was distant, stern and disciplinarian in the way of Victorian fathers. If trial evidence is to be believed, Harry was definitely an odd child, ever prone to twitching and temper tantrums – during which, following the
maternal cue, he would hurl heavy objects at the servants. He suffered from sleeplessness and a kind of unstoppable erratic speech, punctuated by the baby talk he used throughout his life. There may have been some innate brain condition or an ingrained pattern of behaviour from earliest childhood, but whatever the reason, Harry Thaw was never less than peculiar. Teachers found him unteachable and he was moved from school to school: one later testified to his ‘zigzag' walk, perhaps reflecting his erratic brain patterns.

Sent to Harvard, Thaw boasts in his autobiography that he spent his time boozing, womanizing, watching cockfights and playing poker, while lighting his cigars with hundred-dollar bills, and once even chasing a man who had cheated him out of 10 cents down the street with a shotgun (unloaded). He was expelled for ‘immoral practices', despite his father's millions. He studied law, which he didn't take to, at Pittsburgh, and was only saved from bringing further ignominy on his family by being sent abroad. Though news of his antics in Europe, and his gargantuan expenditure, reached home soon enough.

Thaw's ‘immoral practices' were exposed to Evelyn and the world only piecemeal. They had hitherto been successfully veiled by his millions and by the family's efficiency in finding lawyers to buy out the victims of Harry's excesses. But his sadistic orgies, which employed whips and handcuffs, were known to any number of ‘thin' young women he had brutalized and paid for, as well as to the madames who supplied them.

In Paris, he was recognized as the most ‘perversely profligate' member of the American colony. In the Tenderloin he would pose as a professor and have underage would-be actresses sent to him for ‘tutoring': this included being tied to chairs, handcuffed, whipped and simultaneously harangued. Sometimes leg-irons were involved, or bathtub scaldings, a procedure that earned him the name ‘Bathtub Harry' and might just have related back to those fraternity practices at Harvard, not unrelated to the form of torture that goes by the name ‘waterboarding'. Around the time of Thaw's second trial, a woman called Susie Merrill who ran a house of ill-repute provided an affidavit
relating to Harry's perverse practices over a period of two years and with more than two hundred girls. Merrill disappeared mysteriously before she could have her day in court, though she reappeared later.

Harry also had a penchant for boys. In London, after one bellhop lodged a complaint that he had been lured into Thaw's room, bound, placed in a bathtub, had boiling water poured over him and been whiplashed into near-unconsciousness, some five thousand dollars had to be paid out. On his trips to Europe, Harry ran through valets, too, with great speed: during his trial, the one who had served him longest at home suffered a sudden and mysterious death, perhaps because there was too much that he could reveal, most of it outrageously sadistic.

Whether he performed his brutal acts in a manic fugue or in a drugged state, whether he successfully split them off from the life his mother (and he) approved, readily disavowing them while he led his ordinary existence under cover of an idealized self image and unrec- oncilable notions of good and bad – or whether he lied and deluded himself in some simpler way – is inevitably difficult to penetrate at this distance. What is certainly clear is that for Harry Thaw Stanford White stood for all the bad he couldn't acknowledge in his own life.

Thaw's obsession with White had come into being at the cusp of the century. It may have coincided with or been exaggerated by his use of cocaine, a substance it is almost certain he injected, given his behavioural patterns and the fact that Evelyn had found a syringe amidst his things. But there are other elements in play in Thaw's obsession. As the constant name-dropping in his memoir underscores, he had taken on his mother's aspiration to be accepted by the crème – the Fishes, the Vanderbilts, the Astors. Neither he nor his mother were of that class, and the fact rankled – dangerously, in Harry's case. Nor was Harry, expelled from Harvard and known for his bullying antics, allowed into New York's elite men-only clubs. The one club that had him as a member, the Union League Club of New York, revoked his membership when he rode a horse up its front steps and through the front doors.

Thaw became convinced that his rejection by the New York elite was all due to Stanford White, the cultivated
bon viveur
who was welcomed by the mighty and went unpunished for vices that the young scion of strict Pittsburgh Presbyterians shared, but couldn't allow himself to admit. In a paranoid twist, White became Thaw's double: he had what Thaw secretly wished for and wasn't permitted. So he imagined White was persecuting him for those same unconscious wishes: White's agents followed him, he said, and the architect had turned Manhattan against him.

An instance that could only have exacerbated the situation occurred when Thaw invited a showgirl with her fellow lovelies to a gala party he was throwing for his circle. Just before, lunching with a respectable friend from his social, not his sexual, world, he had refused to recognize the woman when he saw her at a restaurant. Angered by the slight, she took her party girls to a gathering at White's tower instead, while Thaw waited in vain for the ‘girls' he had promised his friends.

Now, a humiliated Harry knew for certain that the world had to be rid of White. It was White, he was convinced, who had set out to shame him. Who had turned both the woman and all of New York society against him. If Harry could rid the world of White, that despoiler of virgins, he, Harry, would become the city's saviour. He sent both money and information to Anthony Comstock so that the vice-hunter's agents would follow White and out him. He was convinced that White was having him followed in turn, and setting his own agents against him.

Historical moments and their social mores undoubtedly affect both the expression of psychological disorder and the terms in which it is understood. Harry Thaw is a figure contemporaneous with Krafft- Ebing's expositions of criminal perversion and paranoia, as well as Freud's first reflections on the subject. On 24 January 1895, Freud had written to Wilhelm Fliess suggesting that ‘people become paranoid over things they cannot put up with'. Paranoia in this light begins as a defence against painful experiences, particularly of embarrassment
or humiliation, which could destroy the ego. When there is an internal change, the subject has to make a choice as to whether the cause is internal or external: the paranoid person, in order to preserve his narcissism whole, or prevent any experience of deficiency within the self, attributes it to the external, ‘what people know about us and ... have done to us'. Grandiosity is part of the clinical picture, as is a distinct emphasis on projection onto the other of the defects one cannot afford or bear to see in oneself. Harry projects his own envious hatred onto White, imagines himself both hated and in danger, and so needs to strike out at the vile predator first.

32.
Pursuing Evelyn

How did the young, but relatively sensible, Evelyn allow herself to become prey to Harry Thaw's designs?

With the punishment of removal to Mrs DeMille's school awaiting her, the romance with Barrymore over and the sense that White was tiring of her, Evelyn was more susceptible than she might otherwise have been to Thaw's pursuit of her. About a week after their first meeting, they met again at a pre-theatre supper party when Mr Munroe sat next to her. On the way to the theatre, he unveiled himself as Harry Kendall Thaw of Pittsburgh. According to Evelyn, the revelation was full of theatrical panache and pride. He clearly assumed, as if he were like some Superman emerging from his disguise as Clark Kent, not only that Evelyn would now instantly recognize him, but that she would also instantly acquiesce to his suit.

Evelyn was only very hazily aware of Harry's dark side. Her own mother's adamant objection to his attentions, perhaps in part fuelled by Stanford White's disapproval and a greater knowledge of the millionaire's background, only elicited rebellion in the young woman. It allowed her to see the more gentlemanly aspects of Thaw, what she eventually called his ‘kind, sweet, generous, and gentle side'. She often thought of him as something of a large child; his propensity towards idees fixes and explosions had not yet become visible, though, of course, he had told her to beware of Stanford White. In this, Thaw, as she put it, ‘played at the reformer with all the enthusiasm of a Savonarola'. Harry also encouraged her return to school and seemed to be genuinely interested in her well-being.

Just before she left for New Jersey, in October 1903, Harry proposed marriage. Evelyn refused. Her life was already too complicated.

She got on well at school, where the other girls loved the fact that
she was an actress. Thaw wrote moralizing letters and Stanny, when she didn't see him in New York, came to visit – though after one racy excursion with classmates in a fast car with Stanny at the wheel, parents complained vehemently and demanded that Evelyn be sent home. While Mrs DeMille was trying to decide how to handle the situation, Evelyn fell seriously ill with stomach pains and vomiting. The school nurse rang her mother and told her it might well be appendicitis. When Mrs Nesbit, who always contacted White when any problem arose, tried to reach him, he was out of town. No one knows if she hesitated before ringing Harry Thaw, recently back in New York after some months on the French Riviera.

Thaw was at his best in an emergency that demanded money be thrown at it. A leading doctor and two nurses were instantly found, a makeshift operating theatre was set up in a classroom; then chloroform was administered and Evelyn was operated on, apparently for a burst appendix. There were rumours that the operation was in fact an abortion, but Evelyn denied this under oath at the trial, as did Barrymore. Whatever the exact nature of the ordeal, it soon robbed Evelyn of her wondrous hair, which fell out in clumps and had to be shaved off. Thaw promised expensive wigs. We might wonder whether Harry perhaps preferred her as a brush-haired boy, something she herself intuited: seeing herself in her short hair, Evelyn thought she looked exactly like her little brother. Incongruously, Harry then chose a blond wig for Evelyn, perhaps in an attempt to baffle White and an ever inquisitive press, who loved nothing more than stories of their favourite pin-up.