American Eve (41 page)

Unsubstantiated rumors began to leak out in the press about the “Garden Tragedy,” some wildly speculative—that Harry Thaw had been obscenely intoxicated or doped up on opium, that his wife had refused to break off her friendship with the dead architect, that White had spoken disparagingly about Mrs. Thaw at the Café Martin and had boasted about their past relationship in front of her outraged husband—even that Evelyn had shot White! Almost anything was considered newsworthy. It was reported in another paper that more than a dozen women had fainted in Madison Square Garden (not counting the chorus girls), but that happily, no one had been run over by any electric motorcars or beer wagons. One paper, in an unintentional play on words, reported that one of hard-drinking Harry’s sisters, Alice, was the “Countess of Vermouth.”

Just as quickly as information spilled onto the streets, the district attorney’s office was flooded with misinformation. Some of the more inventive witnesses insisted that a beautiful, young, and slim dark-haired woman in a large white hat and a filmy white veil, which “fell about her shoulders like wings,” sat with White at his table just before the shooting. Others insisted, accurately, that he was alone from the moment he sat down until Thaw shot him, which was all of fifteen minutes. It was seriously suggested that perhaps the mistaken witnesses had seen the ghost of other young girls White had destroyed. Or that it might have been the angel of death in disguise.

The
World
quoted a Mr. Nott from the D.A.’s office: “I get a new tale every minute . . . and so far neither the police nor the force of this office has been able to substantiate one of them. . . . I never knew of a case in which there were so many rumors which were without a grain of truth.”

The glint of Thaw’s gun in the air under the hot lights of the theater caused some witnesses to swear that the millionaire murderer had used a golden gun. Upon closer inspection of Harry’s .38-caliber revolver, however, they noticed that it appeared slightly rusted, as if it had been carried in his pocket for some time without a case. When questioned about it, Harry offered that indeed he had carried it with him for more than a year. The police, who seemed always half a step behind even the greenest reporter, puzzled over a reasonable motive for the murder.

Anthony Comstock, who saw a golden opportunity to promote his own causes, issued a statement two days after the murder about how Thaw had “cherished enmity against White” for some time prior to his marriage to Evelyn. Apparently, Harry had phoned Comstock after the inquest (against the advice of his counsel). It was subsequently revealed how Harry had for the last year and a half (and previously) supplied Comstock with funds and information regarding White’s suspected practices.

“He seemed very anxious to punish White,” Comstock was quoted as saying. He then added darkly, “In more than one instance, when it seemed a clear case had been made against White, the victims of the man were spirited out of town.”

Comstock did not stop to think that his statements could be used in court to prove premeditation on Harry’s part. Neither did Harry.

Far from the almost hilarious pockets of noisy, disorganized activity ripping open around the city, a much more somber and virtually silent scene was being played out as young Lawrence White made his way by train to his parents’ home in St. James. It took him about three hours to reach the house, and after that, he sat for several more hours outside his mother’s bedroom door, waiting to break the terrible news to her. The papers the next day reported that Mrs. Bessie Smith White had taken the news calmly. But it was a different story for Stanny’s aged mother, Mrs. Richard Grant White, who like Mrs. Holman, was “prostrated” by the news of her son’s death. The family thought it best not to tell her the circumstances of his death, eventually settling on the suggestion that it had been done by an anarchist. The next day, the Gramercy Park house was besieged by sympathetic callers. Messenger boys ran themselves into a full sweat as they delivered cablegrams by the score from as far away as Japan and Russia.

The
World
’s headline told the story:

Stanford White Stretched at the Feet of Venus
Architect’s Body Lies in His Beautiful Drawing Room in City Home,
Near the Ancient Statue of the Venus Genetrix,
Taken from the River Tiber

Ultimately, White’s family decided to cancel a memorial service scheduled for St. Bartholomew’s Church, one of the architect’s most splendid designs, out of fear of an expected crush of the “morbidly curious.” The papers continued to hint at the now crumbling façade of the dead man’s life. The
World
on Thursday, June 28, 1906, read:

Men in White’s Set Shiver and Keep Silent
Twenty of Them, Some with Brains and Others with Money,
Are Keeping Close Watch for the Dreaded Subpoena-Server
Not a Word in Eulogy of Dead Intimate
From Millionaire’s Parties to the Morgue

Mother Thaw, meanwhile, arrived in Liverpool. The minute she stepped off the boat she was informed of her son’s deadly performance at the Garden’s rooftop theater. Far from being prostrated, she promptly and stoically got on the next available ship, the
Baltic,
and sailed back to New York. Her daughter Alice would follow a short time later.

The Victorian picture of mournful maternal concern, Mary Copley Thaw would be the only one consistently depicted with unqualified sentiment and sympathy throughout the trials. Few but Evelyn, however, knew that she was also a vain and obstinate woman, and that Harry’s inheritance from his mother also included a tendency to erupt into violence. As described by one writer years later, not only was she “ungovernable in her abuse” of servants, of the law and its representatives, and of Evelyn, but her “inordinate social ambition” often provoked an unholy wrath. Mother Thaw had been known on several occasions to heave the bulky Pittsburgh city directory at the head of her secretary when displeased with her tardiness in tending to church business. Evelyn had also seen evidence of Countess Alice’s familial if latent aggressive tendencies: Once, when poking into unused rooms at Lyndhurst out of boredom and curiosity, Evelyn discovered Alice Thaw’s girlhood mahogany boudoir table. It had a deep rut worn into it and several other spots that had been made by Alice with her ivory-boned hairbrush after consistent and repeated beating.

THE "CAUSE OF IT ALL”

A horrendous and surreal night dissolved into squinting, painful early morning for Evelyn, who had not slept for even five minutes. Having had a good deal of practice avoiding Harry and his detectives over the last few years, Evelyn managed to escape detection by police and the press as she left the scene of the crime, earning her the nickname of “the girl Houdini” by one reporter. She wondered for a moment if perhaps she hadn’t just had a horrible dream. But she knew she had been awake all night, and that instead of packing her things and relaxing in a plush stateroom on a luxury liner, she was in the tiny cramped apartment of her only real friend, former Weber and Fields chorus girl May McKenzie. After having seen Stanny’s bloodied face blackened into a horrific and unrecognizable death mask before her eyes, she had gone instinctively to the only other home she had—to the heart of the theater district Stanny had once shared with her. She realized May’s apartment, run by a no-nonsense woman named Mrs. Molloy, could provide only a brief refuge. For two days, the sound of the gunshots echoed through her brain as the throbbing in her head became unbearable. Increasingly prone to migraine headaches (which doctors called neuralgia), Evelyn would not sleep for two more nights. The usual sleeping powders were useless.

With a heart like a leaden plumb line, Evelyn knew she could not stay in hiding any longer, even though she wanted to “bury herself forever beneath six feet of concrete.” The first time she appeared in public, pale and wan and dressed in a somber brown outfit, “with a thin soft veil hanging from her hat to her delicately formed chin,” she had to run the gauntlet of cameramen who had camped outside the prison steps. All the papers speculated as to whether Evelyn would be forced to offer testimony at the inquest to be taken later that morning in front of the Grand Jury. Grim and tight-lipped, she was told, much to her relief, that she was not required to answer any questions after refusing to say anything that might incriminate her husband.

After that ordeal, she ran the same gauntlet of flash powder and shouts from the army of newsmen that would surround her for the next two years. She had hardly reached her rooms at the Lorraine when she fainted. The hotel doctor had to be called to revive her with camphorous smelling salts. As the small veiled figure passed them in the lobby some of the hotel guests indulged in speculation as to the fate of the Thaws’ social standing back in their Smoky City. But if the Thaws were about to be “mash[ed] in muck,” “poor little Evelyn, faithful and alone,” was about to be “trapped in quicksand.” And even though she was in New York, her mother had not materialized to offer comfort or support. Nor would she.

Harry’s valet brought him a sober gray business suit for the morning’s events and informed his employer that he was on some list of the district attorney’s. Harry asked about the lawyers, Delafield and Longfellow, who had shown up, as opposed to those he had wanted. He questioned why he couldn’t have two of the most famous lawyers in the country, Joseph H. Choate and William B. Hornblower. He protested “politely” to a detective when handcuffed for the first time as he was taken to police head-quarters (a novelty for Harry, who was the one usually locking the cuffs). He was told by a thin-lipped, pruny inspector, “We always handcuff murderers, ” and was whisked off to have his photo taken for the rogues’ gallery before being placed with other prisoners awaiting inspection or interrogation by detectives.

After a brief stop in the Jefferson Market Police Court, where he was formally charged with homicide in the first degree—willful murder—and committed to prison without bail, Harry was then taken back to the Tombs to sit on “Murderers’ Row.” Later that same day, as a team of alienists was being put together, called in from all parts of the country to test Harry’s sanity at the request of both the defense and the prosecution, the police extended their net for actual witnesses to the murder, still hoping to find a clear motive while wandering in a fog of ineptness and confusion. At almost the exact same time, the funeral train bearing White’s body and a full carload of roses, gardenias, chrysanthemums, and hyacinths left at nine o’clock from the Long Island Rail Road station, bound for eastern Suffolk County. Within the hour, Harry Thaw’s inquest would take place.

Evelyn had spent just a few nights in May McKenzie’s tiny apartment before reluctantly going back to the Lorraine to be with the rest of the Thaws, by which point Harry had been placed in an eight-by-nine-by-twelve -foot cell that would be his home for the next seven months. Incarcerated in 220 on the second tier on the Centre Street side of the Tombs (as duly reported in the papers), Harry found himself, much to his dismay and displeasure, with a murderer on one side of him and a man arrested for criminal assault on the other. He did not like being in such proximity to common criminals, especially since he still believed that White had paid off vicious gang members to do him harm if they ever got near enough—and both of these men were far too close for comfort.

The police were informed by the Pittsburgh authorities that Harry had been unusually agitated for at least a fortnight before the murder. It came to light that he had “run afoul” of two different people in Pittsburgh, a tobacconist and a streetcar conductor, both of whom got into fistfights with Harry. Not surprisingly, in each instance Harry got the worst of it, even though he had provoked the attacks. He was not good with his fists.

Harry had gone to the district attorney’s office two days after the murder, surrounded by alienists hired by his attorneys and the prosecution. The names, when run together, sounded like yet another law firm— McDonald, Mabon, Flint, and Hamilton, the first three being the D.A.’s team of “bug doctors.” The novelty of alienists struck many as a “sham” pseudo-science, “voodoo hoodoo.” It was the same day the newlyweds had planned to set sail for Europe, but instead Harry sat in his cell and steadfastly refused to submit to an examination by any “bug doctors.” As he nervously awaited his mother’s arrival in New York, he sent out a barrage of hastily scribbled notes to friends and associates, against the advice of his counsel. And even though it had been only two days since the murder, Harry had already received mail, “consisting of seventeen letters, most of them addressed in the handwriting of women.” These were well-wishers who applauded Harry’s heroism, based on what they had read in the papers. Guards reported that Harry smiled quite happily as he read the letters and lay back on his cot, although he was still upset that the prison had not allowed Bedford to bring him another change of clothes. Burr McIntosh, his friend who had featured Evelyn’s photo a number of times in his magazine, asked the police if he could bring Harry some food, which Harry had requested in one of the notes. McIntosh’s request was refused.

It was not long after, however, that Harry’s photo appeared on the front pages of every newspaper, sitting in his cell, fork in hand, dining happily on squab and steak brought in from Delmonico’s. He had apparently also convinced the prison physician that he required a bottle of wine or champagne a day “for medicinal purposes.” The public’s response was mixed. Some were outraged by the obvious privileged treatment, others were amused, and his lawyers were beside themselves, trying to keep their bubbly, babbling client and publicity-mad crusader from ruining his case before it ever went to trial. Nor would the transformation of Harry from demented playboy to shining hero happen without a price. As one writer described it, “The gilding of the figure was not effected without gold.”

As for the more detached audience across the Atlantic, they were nonetheless drawn into the Garden tragedy at Madison Square, in part because of the connection the Thaws had to British royalty, however slight. And geographical distance seemed to provide some critical distance as well. The London
Telegraph
said that the murder merely created a “mawkish desire to make a virtuous hero out of a degenerate criminal.” The London
Times
extended its criticism to an entire class (while commenting on the lack thereof): the murder in Madison Square Garden offered a “glimpse, and not a pleasant one, of wealth without elegance or refinement; luxury without culture . . . much costly eating and drinking and fine clothes with coarse manners.” Nonetheless, in spite of feigned indifference and a superior attitude, during the first week and a half of the trial, the London papers published more than seventy-two portraits of the captivating Evelyn Thaw. And the stage was now set on both sides of the Atlantic.