The Girl on the Velvet Swing

by Simon Baatz

  She might have remained at Matteawan for the rest of her years—except that Norman Lees had discovered her during his stay at the asylum, and he now applied for her release on a writ of habeas corpus. “I saw this girl a number of times while I was detained,” Lees told a reporter for the New York World, “and I thought it outrageous that one of her youth, against whom there was no charge of ever having committed a crime, should be kept in such an institution under conditions that are absolutely vicious and tend to make her a criminal and immoral character.”30

  Dora Schwam remained at the asylum until February 18, 1911, when the judge at the hearing on the writ ordered her immediate release. Everyone agreed that it was a mystery why she had ever been sent to Matteawan in the first place. Schwam, now seventeen, was remarkably pretty, neat in appearance, in good health, with excellent manners and intelligence.31

  Norman Lees wasted no time in arranging an interview with the New York World to allow Schwam to describe her experiences at Matteawan. It had been a nightmare, the girl recalled, from the first day to the last. The nurses in the women’s wards had been violent and abusive, frequently hitting and beating patients for no apparent reason. “We were struck and knocked about continually,” Schwam remembered. “A woman might be standing in the way of the nurse making a tour of the ward. Instead of being asked to move, the nurse would slap the patient on the side of the face, or hit her in the back or side with closed fist.” The attendants had used a variety of restraints, often tying patients to their beds with ropes, using straitjackets, even occasionally drugging patients to render them insensible.

  The staff displayed hostility or indifference toward the patients but never kindness, and there was little attempt to cure the individuals in their care. “I never saw one of the women attendants who apparently felt a spark of pity or sympathy for any patient,” Schwam said bitterly. “The doctors were mostly just indifferent…. They were all alike, all in a league to have the easiest time possible for themselves.”32

  More revelations emerged later that year as Lees, using money provided by the Thaw family, filed applications for writs of habeas corpus on behalf of other inmates. Myrtle Lapp, twenty-eight, the daughter of a clergyman, had been sentenced in 1907 to a term of four years on a charge of bigamy and sent to Auburn Prison. Lapp, believing that conditions in a state asylum would be more tolerable, had feigned mental illness, winning a transfer to Matteawan in 1910. She had expected that she would leave the asylum the following year, at the end of her sentence, but was shocked to learn that she might now be held indefinitely, until the superintendent signed a certificate of recovery. Fortunately for Lapp, Norman Lees arranged for her to appear in court on a writ of habeas corpus, where she complained bitterly about her treatment, saying that the attendants had frequently attacked her, beating and choking her for minor infractions of the regulations.33

  Mary Mullen, twenty-five, originally from the state of Virginia, had lived a peripatetic existence, drifting from state to state, committing one misdemeanor after another. She had spent most of her life in reformatories and prisons, serving time for various offenses, including vagrancy and theft, but few places in her experience, she declared, had been as chaotic and as brutal as the Matteawan asylum. Mullen claimed that the hospital attendants had frequently been intoxicated on the wards, even occasionally drinking whiskey in front of the patients.34

  Inmates who applied for a writ of habeas corpus seemed always to succeed in winning their liberty. Norman Lees was a ubiquitous presence, counseling the petitioners, speaking to the newspapers, castigating Robert Lamb for his mismanagement of the asylum, and occasionally appearing in court as a witness. Mary Thaw, always taking care to avoid the limelight, provided financial support, giving Lees the money to continue his campaign, hiring attorneys and psychiatrists, even paying writers to insert favorable articles in the New York magazines.

  The drumbeat of scandal grew steadily louder, the complaints of each inmate reinforcing a sense that Robert Lamb had ceded control of the asylum to the attendants and nurses. George Cobb, a Republican state senator, expressed the shared sense of dismay among the legislators at the apparent collapse of discipline in the asylum. “That’s one of the worst places we have in the State,” Cobb complained. “It’s worse than the State’s prisons.” The state legislature, Cobb promised, would not remain passive but would soon establish a committee to investigate conditions at Matteawan.35

  Nothing more starkly exposed the chaos that apparently reigned at the asylum than the circumstances surrounding the death of John Nugent on Friday, February 3, 1911. Nugent had left his ward the previous Wednesday in an attempt to escape. A duty nurse, seeing Nugent in the assembly hall, sounded the alarm, and three attendants seized Nugent, dragging him along a corridor and up some stairs, eventually locking him in an isolation cell on the second floor. Two days later, early on Friday morning, an attendant discovered the lifeless body of Nugent lying on his cot.36

  Amos Baker, the chief medical officer, stated that Nugent had escaped from his ward by crawling through a transom window. Nugent had fallen from the transom, hitting his head on the concrete floor, and subsequently died from injuries sustained in his fall. There were no bruises on his body, Baker claimed, and no signs that anyone had mistreated Nugent.37

  But the coroner’s physician, Howell Bontecou, determined that there had been a rupture of the left renal artery, resulting in hemorrhage, a finding consistent with blows from a blunt instrument. Later that month Joseph Seery, a patient at the hospital, told an assistant district attorney, Edward Conger, that he had witnessed two attendants holding Nugent by the arms while a third had struck him about the face and body. “I was following them up the stairs,” Seery told Conger. “Nugent gave a groan when he was struck.”38

  The controversy over Nugent’s death led various state and local authorities to establish inquiries into conditions at Matteawan. The State Commission in Lunacy, an oversight body established by the legislature in 1894, began an investigation one week after Nugent’s death, sending its agents to the asylum to interview both staff and patients. The governor of New York, John Alden Dix, acting under the authority of the Moreland Act, established a committee of psychiatrists and laymen to report on the treatment of patients. The district attorney of Dutchess County, John Mack, suspecting foul play, interviewed patients on Nugent’s ward and the medical staff who had had care of Nugent.39

  Finally, the state legislature also initiated an inquiry: Louis Cuvillier, a Democrat in the New York State Assembly, brought forward legislation in April 1911 for an appropriation of $20,000 to investigate the hospital administration, while a freshman senator from Dutchess County, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proposed a companion bill in the state senate, asking also for an investigation into conditions at the Dannemora State Hospital.40

  The state superintendent of prisons, Cornelius Collins, announced that his staff would cooperate with the inquiries, saying that he would welcome the prosecution of any employee who had abused patients. “If the conditions as reported,” Collins declared, “that patients were being abused or maltreated, were true, and… if one had died from the effect of such maltreatment,” then a crime had been committed. But Collins, superintendent of prisons since 1898, was already out of favor with the governor. Earlier that year, Dix, the first Democratic governor of New York since 1894, had initiated a comprehensive investigation of the prison system, and the committee of inquiry had uncovered fraud in the management of Sing Sing Prison and Clinton Prison. The chaos within the Matteawan asylum gave Dix another reason to replace Collins, a Republican appointee, and Collins, realizing that he had no future in a Democratic administration, obligingly resigned his position on April 26.41

  The furor over conditions at Matteawan seemed likely to claim Robert Lamb as its next victim. The investigations into the asylum continued through April and May, each inquiry uncovering one scandal after another. Norman Lees, busily working at the behest of Mary Thaw, continued to file peti
tions on behalf of the inmates, claiming that as many as sixty patients at Matteawan were sane and should be released.

  Lamb fought back valiantly, defending his management of the asylum, telling anyone who would listen that Harry Thaw was behind Lees’s campaign, but his position had become increasingly untenable. In June yet another inmate, Severn De Angelis, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, his attorneys claiming that Lamb had tampered with court documents in an attempt to deny De Angelis his liberty. The judge, Arthur Tompkins, had been initially skeptical, but both Lamb and Amos Baker eventually admitted the truth of the accusation.42

  The new superintendent of prisons, Joseph Scott, eager to start his tenure with a clean slate, demanded Lamb’s resignation. Lamb, in an interview with the New York newspapers, attributed his departure in July 1911 to the recent death of his father—“I am called upon to take charge of my father’s estate”—and a concern with his own health. “I wanted a vacation,” Lamb said. “I needed a rest badly, and this had much to do with my action. The alleged charges against me and the administration of the hospital had nothing whatever to do with my action.”43

  A few weeks later the chief medical officer, Amos Baker, also resigned. Baker had always opposed Harry Thaw’s release, testifying twice that Thaw was insane, and Mary Thaw was jubilant that Baker had now resigned his position. “It was with thanksgiving,” she told a reporter from the New York Sun, “I learned… how Dr. Lamb’s resignation had been followed by that of his assistant.” Lamb had always behaved in a vindictive manner, punishing Harry for trivial infractions of the rules and restricting his access to his attorneys, and she was thankful that Lamb would no longer be able to torment her son. Harry was sane, she declared, held in the asylum against his will as a prisoner, and she was hopeful that there would soon be a new superintendent at the asylum who would be more responsive to her requests.44

  But what had happened to Evelyn Nesbit? There had been no news of her for almost three years, nothing since 1909, when she was in White Plains for the second hearing on habeas corpus. There was gossip among her New York friends that she had moved to Europe. Edward Thomas, a wealthy American banker living in Paris, had frequently dined with an attractive woman in the French capital, and the newspapers speculated that his companion was Evelyn Nesbit. But it was only a rumor, and nobody seemed to know with any certainty Evelyn’s whereabouts.45

  Evelyn Nesbit gave birth to a son, Russell, in October 1910 when she was living in Berlin. It was fashionable at the time to wear a hat with a bird motif, and here Evelyn is wearing a casque, a close-fitting hat without a brim, with feathers covering a cloth body and glass eyes serving as real eyes. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, passed by Congress in 1918, ended the millinery trade in bird feathers, and the fashion died away soon afterward. (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-10584)

  The New York Herald broke the news first, reporting on May 13, 1912, that Evelyn was the proud mother of a boy, Russell, now almost two years old. Evelyn had become pregnant in February 1910. Wanting to avoid publicity, she had secretly traveled to Germany with a friend, the actress Lillian Spencer, to live in Bad Harzburg, a spa town sixty miles southeast of Hanover. Later that year, Evelyn moved to Berlin to give birth in a private clinic near Unter den Linden.46

  She returned to New York with her baby several months later, to live uptown, moving into a house at 220 West 112th Street. Evelyn had no desire to attract attention, and only a few of her acquaintances even knew that she had returned to the United States. But inevitably someone gossiped, and the Herald was the first newspaper to print the story, splashing the sensational news across its front page.47

  She insisted that Harry Thaw was the father. She had often spent time alone with Harry during her visits to the asylum, Evelyn said. “One only has to look at the little darling,” she cooed, “to know who its father is…. Harry is my husband and the father of my child. I love my baby and am going to see that it is justly treated by relatives of my husband.”48

  But Harry Thaw ridiculed Evelyn’s claim as preposterous. He had separated from his wife in 1908, shortly after his arrival at the asylum, and Evelyn filed for an annulment of the marriage later that year. She subsequently withdrew the suit, but their marriage had effectively ended. She had stated that the birth occurred in October 1910, but she had last visited him in the asylum nearly a year before that, on the Thanksgiving holiday in 1909. “This is a trumped up deal,” Harry said. “A hundred persons can deny the possibility of such a thing being true.” Some other man, a companion living in Europe, was the father, Harry speculated, and Evelyn was cynically hoping to lay claim to the Thaw estate by falsely naming him as the father. There was not a shred of evidence for her assertion, and the Thaw attorneys would, if necessary, go to court to protect the family’s interests.49

  That summer, in June 1912, Evelyn and Harry again crossed paths when she testified at a third hearing on habeas corpus. Evelyn had previously been reluctant to bear witness against her husband, but now she had no inhibitions in speaking about her marriage. She had given up so much for Harry’s sake—her dignity and her reputation—and she had received nothing in return. Harry’s attorneys at the first trial had persuaded her to testify that Stanford White had raped her, and she had been too young to understand the consequences for herself. Only now, at twenty-six, did she realize how wickedly those attorneys had manipulated her, and she was now resolute to chart her own course.

  Harry Thaw, according to Evelyn’s testimony in 1912, was obsessed with young girls, often talking over newspaper reports of assaults and rapes. On several occasions she discovered, among his papers, pen-and-ink sketches depicting a man whipping a girl. In 1907, on a visit to the Tombs, as she handed her husband a volume from his library, a sketch of a naked girl fell from the book onto the floor of the prison cell.

  “Describe it,” Travers Jerome suddenly interrupted.

  “It was a picture of a nude woman…. Thaw had drawn himself as standing over the woman with a whip in his hand. There were marks on the woman’s back to show where she had been whipped.”

  “Did Thaw frequently talk to you,” Jerome continued, “about little girls being drugged and attacked?”

  “Yes, very often,” Evelyn replied. “He would talk about the youth and virginity of girls.”50

  It was another peculiar obsession of her husband that he could not bear the thought that someone might disregard his wishes. He was mercurial, unpredictable in his moods, frequently throwing a tantrum if, say, a servant did not comply exactly with his commands.

  “Did Thaw ever talk to you about obedience?” Jerome asked.

  “I should think he did,” Evelyn replied. “He had a mania on that subject.”

  “Did Thaw ever talk to you about beating you?”

  “Yes; he said that was the trouble with me—that I needed a good beating.”

  “Did he offer to give you one?”

  “Yes, he did.”51

  Evelyn had testified unapologetically about her marriage, providing damning information about her husband; but she refused to speak again about the rape in Stanford White’s town house. She had already testified twice about that night when White drugged and assaulted her; but only to save Harry from the electric chair, and she would not tell the story a third time. Evelyn bitterly regretted that she had so naïvely allowed Thaw’s attorneys to deceive her, and there was no reason for her now to repeat her testimony.

  Clarence Shearn, an attorney hired by Thaw a few weeks before, hoped to discredit Evelyn’s testimony by asking her about the rape; but she refused to respond.

  “I will not go over this again,” she snapped. “I don’t propose to answer your questions any further.”

  “I shall try,” Shearn continued, “to avoid unpleasantness—”

  “You had better,” Evelyn interrupted, “for if you go into those things I won’t answer you. It was bad enough for Thaw to hide behind my skirts in his two dirty trials without permitting you to go over this now. Don’
t you ask me a single question about it for I won’t answer.”52

  The judge, Martin Keogh, saying nothing, looked first at the witness, then at the attorney, and again at the witness. Evelyn Nesbit had taken an oath and she was obliged to answer the lawyer’s questions; but her expression—defiant, angry, hostile—told Shearn that it would be futile to continue his interrogation. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge his defeat, and turning to Keogh, he said that he would read her previous statements, those given at the first trial, into the record.

  “You’d better,” Evelyn exclaimed angrily. “You won’t read them while I am in the room.”53

  It was a moment of triumph for Evelyn, an episode that told the world that she had achieved her independence. She was no longer the chorus girl who had sought sanctuary in a marriage with Harry Thaw, and she now neither expected nor desired to depend on the charity of her husband’s family. Her future was uncertain—she had no income; she now had a child to support—but Evelyn was steadfast in her determination never again to allow anyone to manipulate her. She would make her own way in the world; she would determine her life on her own terms; and her success would shield her from the vengeance of her husband and his mother.

  Harry Thaw lost his third attempt to win his freedom through a writ of habeas corpus. The judge, Martin Keogh, stated in his decision that Thaw was likely to commit a violent assault again similar to the murder of Stanford White. “Harry K. Thaw,” Keogh declared on July 27, “is still insane and… his discharge would be dangerous to the public peace and safety.”54