Trials of Passion (41 page)

Evelyn continued to be pulled apart by the two men, each fearing that the other might trump him in her favours and in revelations about illicit acts.

After she had refused to see him for some time, Harry came to her in his kind and gentle guise. He offered her a weekly allowance if she gave up the play she was in. In response to his pleading, she eventually handed him some of Stanford White's letters to her. Thaw was on his best behaviour. At home in Pittsburgh without Evelyn during the time that she wouldn't see him, he had fallen into so marked a depression that his mother feared suicide. She hardly wanted a rank chorus girl, or, in her words, ‘a social-climbing soubrette', in the family and had thus far refused to give her son permission to marry the woman she saw as a fortune-hunting strumpet. Now recognizing the scale of her son's obsession, the ever snobbish Mrs Thaw melted a little. As for Harry, once Evelyn allowed him access, he sought to prove that he was no longer the man who had whipped her and locked her inside a cold castle room. All that was only because Stanford White had driven him to madness. He even paid for Evelyn to take a European study trip without him, accompanied by a chaperone: to gain the tight-laced
Mrs Thaw's favour, not to mention her purity-loving son's, Evelyn had to give up the stage.

Finally, like some of the other attractive chorus girls of the time, Evelyn made her decision to become a ‘mistress of millions' and move into the financial security that she had lost with her father's death when she was ten. Sanctioned by his mother, Harry K. Thaw was prepared to have her, despite the stain ‘the Beast' had cast over ‘Boofuls's' past. On 4 April 1905, they were married. Harry had decreed his bride wear black – an ‘opera coat trimmed in rare lace with Persian floral designs and a velvet hat with a silk entwined brim and a gorgeous feather of three shades of brown'. Evelyn might well explain to reporters that the absence of white was due to the couple's haste to depart on their honeymoon, but Harry's taste had a distinct shade of punishment about it, certainly of mourning for some lost hymen.

They took up residence in a wing of what was according to Evelyn the charmless, damp, gloomy, ivy-clad Thaw mansion in Pittsburgh. This was the very same ‘Lyndhurst' that Mrs Nesbit had come to some ten years back to beg for charity. That fact brought Evelyn no sense of triumph.

For the first months of their marriage, played out under the constraining maternal wing, Harry was a pious, virtuous son – and a largely patient, tactful husband, expending his energies on charity work for the Presbyterian church that figured so large in his mother's eyes. Evelyn found the life there one of mindless tedium, and rank with hypocrisies. There was a regular procession of ministers whose wives ‘said things with a monotony and a sameness which leads me to suppose that there existed somewhere in America a school for ministers' wives where they were taught to say the same things in identical terms'. The Thaws themselves were utter materialists, hardly ‘intellectually and socially among the gods'. It's clear that Evelyn missed Stanford White's cultivated intelligence and taste, let alone the excitements of New York life. As any young woman might, she had hoped in marrying Thaw that there would be not only stability, but also the chance of trips to Europe, balls and shopping sprees. Now there was
only boredom, and towards the end of 1905 the reawakening of Harry's crusade to do away with his very own fiery dragon, Stanford White.

Thaw now started a correspondence with the vice-hunting Anthony Comstock and paid for a campaign to expose White. The very process of surveillance increased his own anxieties: he grew convinced that the older man was out to kill him and had hired members of the infamous Monk Eastman gang to carry out the murder. A paranoid Harry began to tote a gun. He did target practice at the back of the house.

In conjunction with the gun toting came renewed and assiduous questioning of Evelyn whenever they were alone. Harry would wake her in the middle of the night and demand the narrative of her life with Stanny. He wanted details of every aspect of her modelling and her meetings with White, and in particular of the fatal night, repeated over and over again. The repetition aroused him and terrified Evelyn, not on behalf of the man she was now only allowed to call ‘the Beast', but on her own behalf. Harry was patently jealous and obsessed with White: Evelyn's ravishment was ‘never absent from his mind'. Imitating the more powerful man, he had Evelyn photographed by various professionals. Usually, he wanted his Angel Child dressed as an innocent girl in frilly white. But in the set of photographs that most excited him, Evelyn appears bodiless, only her ‘decapitated' head visible through the hole in a sheet, her hair pinned up above. ‘I am Bluebeard,' an excited Harry had declared as he rushed her into this particular photo session. On another day, he forced her to the dentist's: he had directed the man to undo all the work Stanford White had first had carried out on her. It took over a month.

No surprise that Evelyn had begun ‘to fear for his reason', and increasingly for herself. But on 25 June 1906, when Harry K. Thaw used his gun for more than target practice, it was ‘the Beast' he aimed at and not his ‘Boofuls'.

33.
The Trial of the Century

Six months passed before Harry K. Thaw came to court, on 23 January 1907. What unfolded over the following months came to be dubbed in the far-flung newspaper coverage, ‘the Trial of the Century': America's entire value system was in the dock. Beliefs, morals, hypocrisies were openly and widely debated. What constituted masculine and feminine virtue? What did wealth permit? What was bad and what mad? What depraved and what deranged?

The Europeans, too, were interested. The criminologist Cesare Lombroso weighed in with a long-distance diagnosis of Harry Thaw. In an article in the
New York World
that month he analysed photographs of Thaw and, true to his own preferred diagnoses, named him ‘a true epileptic moral maniac' whose ‘revenge and hatred are excited by the smallest causes or even without any apparent cause'. Lombroso had deduced all this from the sparseness of his beard, the lobeless ear close to the head, ‘the species of forehead that bulges on the right temple ... the great projection of the jaw ... The nose ... is somewhat displaced to one side.'

At the pre-trial hearing before the Grand Jury, just after the coroner's inquest, Evelyn had adamantly protested that they could send her to jail but she would not testify against her husband. ‘I will never do anything to harm Harry,' the loyal wife measuring five foot nothing stated. She was as good as her word, but in telling the truth of her story so cogently she rocked the strongholds of the rich and their armour of moral rectitude, as well as introducing America to a new kind of woman. Little wonder that in giving Evelyn fictional life, the novelist E. L. Doctorow counterpoints her with the free-thinking anarchist Emma Goldman. If Evelyn was a bad girl, then ‘bad' had to take on new meanings. Meanwhile, Harry
Thaw's murderous rectitude brought into the public sphere a psycho- sexual dynamic that only the mind doctors would want to label ‘mad' – rather than, as many papers initially thought, heroically virtuous.

Some thousand people thronged outside the Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court of New York, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star players as they drove up and made their way into the courtroom; or indeed, as a clean-shirted Harry, whose waiting time in prison had been eased by meals sent in from Delmonico's, by whiskey and by workouts with barbells, made his way across the Bridge of Sighs. The court was packed with extra chairs for the huge numbers of witnesses, family members, possible jurors and reporters. The media frenzy hadn't let up and it continued during the many months and more of this Trial of the Century'. As had happened with the earlier trial of Dreyfus in France, a special telegraph room was set up in the main hall of the court: proceedings were ‘being reported to the ends of the civilized globe', the
New York Times
commented.

So heated and sensationalist was the media build-up, so intent was America on thinking about itself afresh and debating its vices and virtues through the trial's key players, that for the first time in history an American judge, Justice James Fitzgerald, sequestered the jury, once it was finally selected after two weeks of careful consideration. If free to leave the court precincts, the jury's views would inevitably be influenced by what they might read. So instead, they were housed under guard at the Broadway Central Hotel, and could not see their families except under supervision.

Once Evelyn's clear and moving account of her relations with Stanford White and the fatal night of her undoing was allowed in as evidence for the defence, as well as eventually her ordeal with Harry Thaw at the Schloss Katzenstein, it seemed there was little other news left in America for the papers and magazines to headline. This was explosively sexual material of a kind never before made quite so public in newspapers available to women, and in certain instances through articles that had been written by women. The religious lobby from as
far away as Tennessee grew heated. President Theodore Roosevelt was asked to censor the coverage. Roosevelt was indeed worried about the printing of the Tull disgusting particulars' of Evelyn's testimony, and could have controlled the mailing of obscene material under Comstock's law, but the threatened censorship never materialized.

The press – which carried not only reports, but also in some cases, like the French did for major trials, full verbatim accounts of proceedings – noted certain oddities at the very start of the trial. Evelyn's mother, now Mrs Holman, was absent. She remained loyal to White, and refused to give evidence that might prejudice either side, or so she said. The press were hard on her, branding her ‘an inhuman monster and a wretch' who had bartered her child to satisfy her greed.

Nor was Mrs Stanford White in the courtroom: she had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, closer to her son and to escape any more anguish. Evelyn's nineteen-year-old brother was, however, present. He told the press he had come from Pittsburgh to ‘do what I can to vindicate the memory of Mr White', who had done so much for him and his family. ‘Why is it that people always put the worst construction on a man's motives in a case like this? Aren't there any honest, decent men?' Howard Nesbit, who was the spitting image of his sister, sat next to Charles Harnett, the man who had been White's secretary and was now Howard's intimate friend.

Evelyn herself on the trial's opening day was waifishly pale and without make-up. Beneath her dark coat she was wearing a navy- blue schoolgirl shirtwaist topped with a starched white Buster Brown collar. Wedged in between Mrs William Thaw and her more flamboyantly attired theatrical friend, May McKenzie, in lavender suit and lavish ostrich-feathered hat, she looked like a demure innocent, ‘a fragile white-faced child', but she paid attention to the proceedings with her usual intelligence. She was also constantly alert to Harry, prompting him in the selection of jury members and soothing his nervousness with glances.

The Thaw legal team was substantial: Harry had already fired his first lawyer, Lewis Delafield – the man he later designated ‘the Traitor',
the very name he gave his memoir. Delafield's ‘betrayal' had to do with the fact that he had agreed with the prosecution's initial stance: to forgo a trial by declaring Thaw legally insane, thereby preventing a death sentence in one of America's major families. As for District Attorney Jerome, despite his reforming hopes, the prosecutor was worried the evidence that would come out at the trial would not only provide acres of smut for the press, but would also blacken the reputation of some of New York's elite. White had hardly been alone in his extracurricular activities, and his parties were attended by any number of Manhattan's crème.

Thaw adamantly refused the insanity plea, though his family might at first have preferred a swift ruling without a public trial and the mass exposure that would so damage their reputation. Harry was convinced that the ‘Traitor' was briefing the press against him, calling him ‘a lunatic murderer' and Evelyn ‘an abandoned woman who led to my downfall'. On top of that, Delafield was costing him the princely fee of $10,000 dollars and a promise of $15,000 – though it's not clear that any of it was actually paid. Delafield wanted, Thaw claimed, nothing more than ‘to railroad me to Matteawan [State Hospital for the criminally insane] as the half crazy tool of a dissolute woman'. With Stanford White dead and no longer dangerous, Thaw could focus on White's good points, the ones that had initially singled the man out to him. He was now transferring his persecutory delusions to the attorney he had himself chosen. In his memoir he writes that Delafield ‘was a creature far meaner and uglier than Stanford White'; for, ‘aside from White's one vice ... his slaughter of virgins ... White was a man of many attractions ... You could not say of White that he was utterly rotten in character, because he had his good points. The Traitor had no excuse whatever.'

Even without Delafield, Thaw's defence team when the trial opened was six-strong, though almost none had any real experience of the appropriate kind. The exception was ‘the Napoleon of the Western Bar', Delphin Michael Delmas, a small man with a big voice and a fine rhetorical style who had a record of nineteen acquittals in nineteen
murder cases. Delmas's fee was purportedly a hundred thousand dollars, but then Mrs Thaw had already financed a play at the Amphion in Brooklyn, and much else, to promote her son. The play ended with the line, spoken by its hero, one Harold Daw: ‘No jury on earth will send me to the chair, no matter what I have done or what I have been, for killing the man who defamed my wife. That is the unwritten law made by men themselves, and upon its virtue, I will stake my life.'

Mother Thaw had also spent money buying from their recipients any incriminating letters, buying out harmful witnesses, and generally buying her son off an indictment, while having White slandered. Only Evelyn was kept on a tight financial leash. Yet Matron Thaw was forced to be at least polite to her daughter-in-law, or her testimony might go amiss. Evelyn, rumours had it, was promised some twenty thousand dollars if she behaved well in court, and the figure would sky-rocket if she promised eventually to divorce Thaw. For the time being, it seemed Evelyn was genuinely determined to abet her husband's case, even while she loathed being under Mrs Thaw's thumb. Sitting at a table in gestural proximity to Harry in the dock, she calmed her ever fidgety husband with her glances. To be fair to Harry, he recognized how badly his mother treated Evelyn, and tried to allay the worst.