Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  When Stanford White asked Mrs Nesbit to come and see him a few days later, it seems neither she nor Evelyn suspected his motives. She was altogether taken with White’s courtesy and concern: he had once more recommended his dentist, assuring Mrs Nesbit that he had tended to the teeth of all the girls in Floradora. Only later did Evelyn take up the offer. But when White’s next invitation to her came, her mother was happy to let her go and visit the man the newspapers described as intense and masterful. Evelyn liked him too. ‘He was a compendium of information on all subjects, likely and unlikely. He was an authority and teacher ... gifted by Nature beyond the average.’ He was also very kind, as her mother had pointed out, and felt very safe. White was a ‘charming, cultured gentleman whose magnetism undid all my first impressions of him. He emerged as a splendid man, thoughtful, sweet and kind; a brilliant conversationalist and an altogether interesting companion.’

  White might have been all these things, and indeed was a more than suitable replacement father for an Evelyn who had lost her own and was eager for intellectual stimulus. However, if White was ‘clever’, and a useful patron and benefactor for a rising teenage star over whom he exercised a ‘fatherly supervision’, he was also a ‘voluptuary’ – something her other admirer, James Garland, informed her of in no uncertain terms, indicating that he couldn’t carry on seeing her if she was frequenting Stanford White.

  Evelyn wasn’t sure what ‘voluptuary’ meant and far preferred the impressive White, who bought her intriguing automata every time they met and sent flowers daily. Nor was she interested in marriage to a man like Garland. Two weeks later, after another reminder from White, and with her mother now on side, Evelyn finally had her teeth fixed.

  As if this was a sign that she would play Galatea to his lubricious whims, White then moved the Nesbit family, mother, daughter and son Howard whom he also befriended, into an apartment at the Wellington Hotel, which he had designed. Evelyn had never lived in rooms so opulent and enchanting. It was like inhabiting a fairy tale: her bedroom was draped in white (!) satin. There was a matching lace- topped bed, and a canopy crowned in white ostrich feathers. The forest-green living room had a piano, and White provided a teacher. Evelyn played Beethoven to please her patron. Soon after the move, he sent her a red cloak to wear to a party that Friday night. The big bad wolf came to pick up his Little Red Riding-Hood himself this time, instead of sending one of his emissaries – often enough mistresses on their way out. He took her to his Garden apartment. It was there that events would soon unfurl that would rivet millions when recounted in detail at Harry Thaw’s trial in 1907 by an Evelyn who still looked like a schoolgirl.

  Excited by the wonders of the Garden’s treasure-filled tower, if bemused by the lack of party guests, Evelyn was comforted by White’s promise that he would have her photographed – in her Red Riding- Hood cloak – by the time’s best photographers, Gertrude Käsebier and Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr amongst them. He would keep his promise.

  After one glass of champagne, the man who was now ‘Stanny’ took Evelyn home. She had to behave like a good girl, he told her. The next morning, he was there with books for her to read – an education that took in Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Shelley, as well as Dickens. White thought schooling important and now began to finance Howard’s, sending him to the Chester Academy in Pennsylvania. Soon after, he took Evelyn to Gertrude Käsebier’s studio, where she was photographed in an Empire dress, demurely innocent, her hair coiled girlishly yet suggestively on her bare shoulders, and staring enigmatically direct at the spectator. White’s seduction was the slow wooing of a man who understood his own pleasures.

  Now, as the date marking the end of Evelyn’s first year in Manhattan approached, White gradually convinced Mrs Nesbit to take some days to reacquaint herself with Pittsburgh and leave Evelyn in his care. Reluctant at first, the woman soon succumbed, invoking Evelyn to see no one but Mr White during her absence and to obey him. Indeed, as Evelyn writes in her memoir, ‘He dominated me by his kindness and by his authority.’ He dominated her mother too, who might have known better.

  A few days after Mrs Nesbit’s departure, White took Evelyn to Rudolf Eickemeyer’s studio. Choosing her costumes himself, White had her photographed as a Turkish maiden, a demure Quaker girl, as Little Red Riding-Hood and Little Bo-Peep, and finally in a lavish Japanese kimono on a bear rug where, exhausted after hours of posing, Evelyn fell asleep and gave Eickemeyer one of his most famous photographs of her as Little Miss Butterfly. A day or two later, Stanny’s hold over Evelyn took on a new configuration.

  Invited to a party in his 24th Street rooms, not for the first time Evelyn found herself alone. Stanny entertained her with tales, and this time she was allowed a second glass of champagne. When she wanted to go home, he suggested she stay, and took her up to a mirrored room she had never visited before. Tapestry hangings gave way to a four-poster bed, it too surrounded by mirrors on three sides, and on the ceiling rows of tiny differently coloured bulbs producing lighting in rose and blue – like a nymph’s palace under the sea, Evelyn later wrote. Then came more drink, tasting bitter this time, but Stanny told her to drink up. After a few moments a ‘curious sensation’ overcame her. She felt ‘dizzy and sick’ and the room and its objects grew ‘blurred and indistinct’. In her 1934 memoir she adds that Harry Thaw later maintained that the wine had been drugged, but she never altogether believed it.

  Whatever the case, when she next woke, Stanny lay beside her exposing ‘the naked body of his naked sins’ still more or less in ‘the full flush of his extraordinary physical powers’. She screamed in terror, started to cry in her confusion. A tender Stanny comforted her: ‘Don’t cry Kittens ... Please don’t. It’s all over. Now, you belong to me.’ He had good reason to try to comfort her. Under the law, since Evelyn was under eighteen, he had committed statutory rape.

  Distressed as she might have been at the time, Evelyn never damned White for his ‘deflowering’ of her. Since she had fallen asleep, induced into unconsciousness either by far more champagne than she had ever drunk or by a drug slipped into it, she had never given her consent. But Evelyn was not one to press rape charges. In her 1914 memoir she wrote what she had earlier stated at the trial, ‘Not even for the purpose of pleasing those who demand, according to the rules of melodrama, a more bitter and more prejudiced view, can I represent him other than he was. His failing we know – it was his one failing.’

  That night, Stanny’s making much of her didn’t assuage Evelyn. She was in something like shock. Sex just wasn’t talked about, so it was difficult to make sense of. She went home distressed, feeling ‘nothing, neither repulsion nor hate’. An aspect of life had been revealed to her in a flash and changed her perspective on everything. Eventually, as she pondered Stanny’s ways, this ‘generously big man’, who was kind and tender, yet ‘preyed on the defenceless’, she decided, ‘He was a prodigious vampire.’

  When he came to plead with her the next day, Evelyn sat very still. He explained to her that all people behaved like this: she translated him to mean that everybody was bad, but she must go on as if nothing had happened, since the worst sin of all was to be found out. Appearances were all. It was a difficult lesson for a slip of a girl. She continued to sit in stony silence, a numb, hollowed presence. But she listened to Stanny’s voice of seductive authority and blocked out what was also a betrayal. Her childhood had taught her to swallow hard, say nothing, and move on. She might have lost that great female prize of virginity, but something in her prevented morbid introspection and utter defeat. White was like an ‘earthquake’, she wrote, a natural force. There was no resisting. You could only pick up the pieces and carry on.

  Evelyn carried on, and she fell in love all over again with the charming, inventive Stanny who, for a little while, was utterly taken with his heart-rending child-woman whose praises the papers crooned – that ‘fluttering fair flower of American girlhood’ who had ‘blossomed in a mud puddle’. He would tremble when he touched her, she
wrote, he wanted her so naked, he took the pins out of her hair, all the while cultivating his Galatea, sometimes arranging her in poses that mimicked the world’s great paintings or sculptures, or setting her gently, naked, on his red velvet swing. They laughed, talked and loved.

  White’s undoubted assets as a patron combined with Evelyn’s own talents saw her into her next role, in a production called The Wild Rose. Here, she played a winsome Gypsy girl. Promoted as ‘a fresh and fascinating theatrical find’, Evelyn made more headlines. They feted her birthday together in the Garden apartment, just before Christmas 1902: presented in a huge red velvet stocking were white fox furs, diamond rings and pearls. Evelyn dubbed White ‘Stanny Claus’, which he certainly was to her whole family... and the gifts and treats continued all year long.

  But she grew restless with White’s secretiveness, his constantly roving eye for new and fresh talent, even if she never complained of his marriage. Yet none of the ‘millionaires’ who wooed her had White’s artistic ways and intelligence. It took the attentions of the handsome twenty-one-year-old actor John Barrymore to make her suddenly feel the attractions of a youthful and open romance – so open indeed that the papers happily charted the progress of their relations. For a brief while they ‘did Broadway’ together, but young Jack didn’t have a penny to his name. When Mrs Nesbit found out about the romance, she upbraided her daughter, even going to White to ask for help in chastizing her! White did nothing, perhaps because he had been growing worried about the frenetic activity of the anti-vice brigades and his ongoing relations with an underage girl whom the newspapers adored. Then, too, he had severe financial worries and was overcommitted. Evelyn was distressed at his lack of any manifest jealousy, and like the teenager she was, pushed him and herself further.

  It was only after Jack and Evelyn spent an entire drunken (but apparently chaste) night together, something that she had somehow never done with White, that on Mrs Nesbit’s inducement White reacted. First he sent Evelyn straight to the doctor’s, where she spent a day refusing to be examined. It’s unclear whether White wanted to blame her missing hymen on Jack, or was worried that she might be pregnant, since she had been complaining of stomach cramps. In any event, White called the pair to the tower and reprimanded Barrymore for smearing Evelyn’s reputation. The youth surprised everyone by asking Evelyn to marry him. She stammered out an inconclusive answer, and White asked what two kids like them would live on. Barrymore promptly said, ‘Love.’ White ‘got very mad and purple’, took her aside to remind her that she wanted to be an actress – and to warn that there was insanity in Barrymore’s family. Standing up to him, Evelyn told him she would do what she pleased.

  Almost immediately after this scene, with the complicity of Mrs Nesbit who feared the youngsters might elope, Evelyn was told by White that, come October, her education needed to be seen to. She was being banished from New York to an all-girls’ boarding school in New Jersey, run by a Mrs DeMille (mother of the future director). The papers talked of an interruption in her career while she followed her mother’s strict orders.

  It was during this difficult period of her life, while Evelyn was rebelling against White, all the while wanting his attentions, that she met Harry Thaw. He appeared first under the pseudonym of Mr Munroe, one amongst the innumerable array of stage-door suitors who sought the fetching young woman’s notice. Thaw had first seen Evelyn in Floradora, probably alerted to her precisely because she had been selected out by Stanford White. Having watched her in some forty performances of the The Wild Rose, he began his suit by writing her anonymous letters. Thaw had learned of Evelyn’s tastes by sending his Pinkerton detectives to spy on her: he proclaimed a love of animals and books. But Evelyn refused to meet him: she really had no interest in these fans. Thaw congratulated her on her refusal to meet strangers. It was now that he identified himself as Mr Munroe and put twenty-dollar bills in the letters he sent her. Evelyn returned them, as well as on one occasion flowers wrapped in a $50 bill – though her mother, ever hungry for cash, kept that bill without her knowing.

  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 mater
nal 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.