Trials of Passion (51 page)

So Gump travelled east. Harry had asked him to come to New York, where he was staying at the McAlpin Hotel with his servant-bodyguard.
There, Harry Thaw, now a man of forty-six, held Gump against his will and proceeded to whip and abuse the boy to within an inch of his life. The next day, Gump somehow managed to escape and went to the police.

When the police finally tracked Thaw down, he was staying in a small Pittsburgh boarding house. Here he had tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists. They also arrested his bodyguard, in whose pockets were letters from other young boys to whom Thaw had offered jobs. This time Mother Thaw decided to draw the line herself. She told reporters she could no longer resist the facts that demonstrated her son's insanity. She had applied to the court to have him declared insane. And although the New York State district attorney attempted to take the criminal, rather than the asylum, route to contain Harry within walls, Mrs Thaw won out. Harry was judged insane and committed to the Pennsylvania State Hospital in Philadelphia. The Gump family's attempt to sue for damages went on for years: the case was only finally settled out of court in 1924, when Thaw had determined to petition for his freedom once more.

Evelyn, on this occasion, decided to petition against Harry, claiming that he had not yet recovered his sanity: if he were freed, he would dissipate the estate in which their son had an interest. But Harry won his suit and was once more at liberty.

For a while, he displayed a little interest in an again divorced Evelyn and their, or her, son. He even helped her buy a new house in Atlantic City, and went to hear her sing at her run-down nightclub, the one that is said to have inspired Orson Welles in the making of
Citizen Kane.
But any hopes Evelyn might have held out of a reconciliation, or even a new marriage, were not to be. Even after his mother died in 1927, leaving him and his siblings one million each, it was too late for Harry to change his ways, as Evelyn had repeatedly hoped. She long held Mrs William Thaw responsible for at least a proportion of Harry's ways. But mother dead or alive, Harry carried on in the same way as ever, even managing to get himself barred from entering England, where in 1928 he was listed as an ‘undesirable'.

It is not clear what triggered Harry's manic episodes or indeed the suicidal states that sometimes followed, but clearly, however implicated his mother might have been in his history, her death was no cure.

Poor Evelyn. Once the child star whose charismatic beauty seduced all and sundry, she grew into a despairing woman, addicted to morphine and alcohol, who several times attempted suicide. Right or wrong, as she said in her second autobiography, Stanford White was the only man she had ever loved. ‘Stanny was lucky,' she purportedly added in a 1960s interview. ‘He died. I lived.'

But the little girl who had saved her family from hunger with her modelling talents was a true independent spirit and a survivor. Stanford White had perhaps also spotted that, when he set out to educate her. She played in some ten silent films, sang and danced in a variety of clubs and cabarets around the country, even for short periods running her own. The clubs may have grown more down-at-heel over the years, but she carried on, her name appearing erratically in gossip columns – once, when her pet boa constrictor escaped into Lower Manhattan. ‘He was an expert at keeping away the bill collectors,' she quipped. She also wrote her two autobiographies, and after the First World War ran a tea room in Manhattan. She lived to see the film made of her relationship with Stanford White.
The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing
(1955) earned her a Hollywood consulting credit, as well as needed funds and a revived interest in her life.

She died in 1967 in California, a grandmother of three, at the ripe age of eighty-two, though before she could witness her re-imagining in E. L. Doctorow's novel
Ragtime.
She had begun life as the object of painters' and photographers' gaze. She had inspired films and fiction. In the last part of her life, it was she herself who became the maker – of sculpture and ceramics, those very objects she had admired in Stanford White's houses. Her trajectory echoed women's possibilities through the course of the twentieth century. It also elaborated some of the many forms misogyny could take.

Harry K. Thaw, after more of the court cases he seemed to be as
addicted to as the beatings he sadistically inflicted, died in Miami of a heart attack in 1947 at the age of seventy-six. He left Evelyn, the woman on whose behalf he had told himself he killed, a mere ten thousand dollars. It was the same amount he left a waitress he had had the briefest of contacts with in a Virginia coffee shop. But then the paranoid millionaire had never been accountable – and perhaps this waitress was now his idealized ‘Boofuls'.

As for Stanford White, doubly forgotten as both man and architect for many years, in 1996 his great-granddaughter published
The Architect of Desire.
In retrieving his memory and his considerable achievements, his penchant for very young women aside, she discovered an autopsy report showing that at the end he had been suffering from Bright's Disease and incipient tuberculosis: he would probably have died of natural causes within a year of his murder.

45.
Assessing the Experts

The Thaw case, which had preoccupied the courts for nine long years and cost the state over a hundred thousand dollars and the Thaw family ten times that, continued to cast a lurid light not only on its principal players but on the whole tricky subject of the role of the psychiatric witness in the courts. Could the contradictory opinions the experts provided ever be trusted in the hard evidential atmosphere of a forensic setting?

In January 1910, a Special Committee on the Commitment and Discharge of the Criminal Insane presented a report that damned the experts as ‘unscrupulous'. They had, ‘to the shame of the medical profession', both sworn Harry Thaw ‘out of jail on an opinion of insanity', and attempted at another time ‘to swear him out of the asylum by an opinion of sanity'. Their ‘favourable opinions' could be bought by the family ‘for cash'. The result would inevitably be that the murderer would be set free to ‘direct his homicidal inclinations against some other citizen who has already fallen or may hereafter come under his displeasure'. And everything done according to the forms of law.

If those who feared murderous madmen on the streets were worried, the psychiatrists too were nonplussed by the Thaw trials. After his involvement, William A. White grew passionate about reforming the legal tests of insanity. ‘Insanity' was a purely legal and sociological term that bore no relation to medicine, he noted. He didn't think the standard of ‘responsibility' was an adequate marker for anyone. Nor did the sanity–insanity divide make any sense.

By 1916, White and Bernard Glueck's textbook,
Studies in Forensic Psychiatry
, put out by the American Institute of Criminal Law, was teaching that ‘crime is a type of abnormal conduct which expresses a
failure of proper adjustment at the psychological level'. This attitude was to prevail in professional circles until the physicalist and brain explanations – which the authors of this sentence had rejected – made a comeback in the 1970s.

In 1926 the young Karl A. Menninger, soon to become a leading player in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic field, asked White his opinion on The Credo of Psychiatrists' concerning crime which had just been pulled together by the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on the Legal Aspects of Psychiatry.

Some of the key points of the Credo read:

We believe

Part of this ambitious Credo (which came to inform aspects of the penal system in the US and was akin to eventual developments in Europe) specifically concerned the role of expert psychiatric witnesses. It is here that the malign experience of the Thaw trial is visible:

White wholly approved the Credo. Responding to the young Menninger, he underlined the psychiatrists' far-reaching designs:

The idea of responsibility as related to the criminal is a fiction ... [which] nowadays only serves to precipitate a metaphysical quarrel which is never decided every time anybody commits an anti-social act, whereas if all of them were considered psychotic they would all immediately be removed from the danger of further anti-social conduct by being properly segregated and then they would come to be let out only when there was a reasonable prospect that they had changed their method of reacting sufficiently to be a social asset instead of a social liability.

This statement has the aura of an echt Foucaldian warning: psychiatric power has a wish to control and police all behaviour; it thinks it can predict and prevent future danger, not to mention determine the boundaries of the normal.

In mitigation of the psychiatrists, it is worth underlining that where capital punishment exists, the psychiatric model at least doesn't equate deviance with an invitation to institutional murder – though the uses of psychiatry under a malign state in the old USSR were certainly both iniquitous and execrable. When Truman Capote, himself somewhat deviant according to the older psychiatric textbooks, wrote
In Cold Blood
, he was nonetheless adamantly on the side of the psychiatrists. The alternative to their assessment of the murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock was, after all, the electric chair.

To White, in the first more innocent decades of the twentieth century, the views of the Credo seem the only ‘humane' way to tackle the crime problem: lock deviants up in psychiatric institutions rather than prisons, and make psychiatric rather than legal knowledge the dominant authority. All this in the hope that the prisoner/patient can be properly rehabilitated and become a useful member of society.

The problem in American law and with the ‘not guilty by reason of insanity' verdict is that it is almost impossible, once having been deemed insane, to prove sanity and be released from a psychiatric institution. Harry K. Thaw's ultimate release owed a great deal to his persistence, his fame, and of course to his exceedingly deep pockets, not to mention his formidable mother. In the course of the last century and our own, the right to liberty of the ‘institutionalized' would become a major feature within the politics of law and psychiatry.

Coda

‘It is a well known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, if he has listened too long to lawyers' arguments, too often forgets his own mission. He then folds his wings with a clatter and conducts himself in court like a reserve angel of law.'

Robert Musil

The exemplary trials I have detailed in the preceding pages act as a prism through which the private emotions and public attitudes of High Victorian society, the
belle époque
and America's Gilded Age can be seen in the fullness of their inevitable contradictions. Like all cases, these are by their very nature unique. But the temptation to draw generalizations from them is nonetheless strong, and I would like to venture a very few.

It seems clear to me that where a ‘criminal' woman can be understood as conforming to her time's ideas or ideals of femininity, juries are kinder to her and more prepared to think in terms of mitigation. In such cases, psychiatrists, too, are more likely to present arguments that allow passion to be conceived of by public and jury as a force that overwhelms reason and impinges on sanity, even legally conceived.

Putting Marie Bière side by side with Ruth Ellis – who shot dead her lover, David Blakely, in front of a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday, 1955 – underscores the point. The fragile Bière and her defence lawyer managed to turn her shooting into a good woman's act of passionate justice against exploitative masculinity. In Ellis's
case, the elements of such a defence never took hold. True, her crime was greater, but class and her way of inhabiting her gender played into the proceedings as well. A brassily blonde, working-class nightclub hostess, who had resorted to abortion when pregnant with Blakely's child, Ellis not only committed a crime, but sinned against the status quo. Never mind Blakely's violence and boozing, he was posh – upper- class and well connected. Ellis's class, her brazen looks and distinctly unladylike past undoubtedly played into her verdict in a Tory Britain more conventional in certain respects about women and hierarchy than their Edwardian forebears, who had accepted mitigation for Kitty Byron when the waif-like Kitty killed her upper-class lover.