by Simon Baatz
The concierge confirmed that Gump had indeed stayed with Harry Thaw at the hotel on Christmas Eve. But Thaw had already checked out of the McAlpin. He had not left a forwarding address, and the concierge had no idea where he had gone.
The district attorney eventually learned that Thaw had fled to Philadelphia. Swann sent his detectives to Philadelphia, where they fanned across the city, checking the hotels, watching the trains leaving Broad Street Station, and speaking to the car rental agencies. Thaw had stayed at the Hotel Belgravia on Rittenhouse Square for a few days, but he had subsequently disappeared. Had he already left Philadelphia? Could he now be back in Pittsburgh?
Every policeman in Philadelphia had joined the hunt for the fugitive, but no one thought to look for Thaw outside the city’s commercial center, an area bordered by the Delaware River on the east and the Schuylkill on the west. Few people would have considered searching for him on the outskirts of the city. But Thaw, acting on the advice of an old Philadelphia friend, had gone to ground under an assumed name in a boardinghouse at 5260 Walnut Street, far from the center of the city, and here he remained, waiting for an opportunity to avoid the dragnet.
He had never been so disconsolate, never so depressed. He had always had an optimistic outlook, even when faced with overwhelming odds, but now he had lost hope. He had read the newspaper reports that Fred Gump’s parents were eager to assist the Manhattan district attorney in prosecuting him; he had read that a grand jury in New York County had voted an indictment against him for kidnapping and assault; and Thaw realized that the State of New York would again demand his extradition. There had been public support for his assassination of Stanford White, but there would be only condemnation for his brutal attack on a defenseless nineteen-year-old.
He arose at eight o’clock on Friday, January 12, to take his bath and to dress for breakfast. He moved slowly, bowed down by his depression, every action accomplished only by great effort. His family could not help him and his friends had deserted him. He had no future, no way to escape years of imprisonment in the penitentiary.
A straight razor, with an ivory handle and a carbon steel blade, lay on the washstand. Thaw picked it up, turning it slowly in his hand, the sunlight glinting on the sharp steel edge. He cut himself first on the left wrist, a small incision near his hand, and then he made a deeper gash along his forearm, watching the blood as it spilled into a porcelain washbasin. He cut himself a third time, across the base of his jaw, and then again, across his windpipe, finally staggering backward onto the bed, blood seeping onto the bedclothes.
At that moment his landlady, Elizabeth Tacot, knocked and, hearing no answer, opened the door to see Thaw, covered in blood, softly moaning, lying sprawled across the bed. Amazingly, and despite his best efforts, Thaw had cut neither the artery in his arm nor the jugular vein in his throat; he was still alive. Tacot ran downstairs to call her doctor, and the physician, S. E. Bateman, arrived a few minutes later, quickly binding up the cuts to prevent further hemorrhaging. It seemed miraculous that Thaw should survive his wounds; but Bateman, speaking to the reporters later that day, claimed that Thaw had fallen in such a way that the bedclothes saved his life. “It is a lucky thing for him,” Bateman said, “that he tumbled upon the bed in such manner that the coverlet pressed against both his wrist and neck. Otherwise he would have been dead when found.”3
Thaw’s whipping of Fred Gump, his flight from New York, and his suicide attempt in Philadelphia persuaded even Mary Thaw that her son was mentally unbalanced. The doctors had moved Thaw from the boardinghouse to a private suite in St. Mary’s Hospital, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, and Mary Thaw visited her son every day, sitting at his bedside each afternoon, while he made a fitful recovery.
She announced to the newspapers that she would no longer contest his commitment to a mental institution, and the next month, while Thaw convalesced in his hospital bed, she petitioned the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia to appoint a commission to determine his condition. “I am unable to resist the facts that demonstrate my son’s insanity,” she announced. “Now I know, as I never knew before, that my son is an irresponsible man whom the law must guard. Therefore to the courts of my State—of his State—I have applied to help a mother protect her son from his infirmities.” An attorney for the Thaw family, Frank Johnston, agreed. “The best thing for all parties,” Johnston argued, “would be to keep him under restraint.” Did the State of New York wish to entangle itself once again with Harry Thaw in endless legal battles? Would it not be preferable to send him to an asylum in his native state, Pennsylvania?4
The Manhattan district attorney, Edward Swann, pressed his case nevertheless, saying that New York would ask for Thaw’s extradition; but the Pennsylvania Commission on Lunacy determined on March 13 that Thaw was insane and that he was therefore a ward of the state. The governor of Pennsylvania, Martin Brumbaugh, promptly denied the extradition of Thaw back to New York, saying that it would be a travesty to prosecute an insane person. “For this state,” Brumbaugh announced, “to surrender… one of its citizens declared by one of its courts to be insane and therefore unable to make his defense… [is] contrary to sound reason and justice.”5
It was a decision that could find its justification independent of any political calculation. But it was also a predictable verdict: the Thaw family had long exerted great influence in western and central Pennsylvania, and Brumbaugh, whose support came mainly from the coal-mining districts, was mindful that a decision to send Thaw to New York would likely hurt his prospects for reelection.
The Court of Common Pleas committed Thaw indefinitely to the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, a private asylum in West Philadelphia. Thaw lived a life of ease there, enjoying a privileged existence, even traveling on occasion with an attendant to visit relatives in Pittsburgh. Mary Thaw reached a financial settlement with the Gump family—some reports said that she paid $25,000 to put an end to the matter—and nothing more was said about the whipping.6
Evelyn Nesbit had first performed in vaudeville in 1913, dancing with Jack Clifford at the Victoria Theatre, an independent vaudeville house on Forty-second Street. It was a popular act—the theater was frequently sold out—and her booking agent, Eddie Darling, could guarantee her appearances months in advance. Each year, during the spring and summer, Evelyn and Jack went on tour under contract to the B. F. Keith Circuit, crisscrossing the United States, eventually reaching San Francisco and Los Angeles before traveling back to New York. On their return in the late summer, before the start of the fall season, they would go to the Adirondacks for several weeks, relaxing at the summer home that Jack owned on Lake Chateaugay, close to the border with Canada.7
It was welcome news to learn in April 1916, during an engagement in Memphis, that Harry Thaw had divorced her. Thaw had filed suit in the Court of Common Pleas in Pittsburgh, asking for a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s infidelity. Evelyn Nesbit, according to Thaw’s attorney William Stone, had begun an affair in New York in 1909 with John (Jack) Francis, a newspaper reporter. Francis had lived with Evelyn in Germany in 1910, and he was the father of her child.8
There was little point, Evelyn realized, in contesting the suit. She had made her own way, earning her livelihood in vaudeville, settling into a relationship with Jack Clifford, and she was glad finally to be able to end her connection with Harry Thaw. Clifford also was pleased to hear the news; and the following month, on May 24, they married at the Emery Methodist Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Maryland.9
But the relationship ended the next year. Jack Clifford had been unfaithful, initiating an affair with an actress, Juanita Hansen, and then seducing a second actress, Anna Luther. Their separation had little impact on Evelyn’s career, and in October 1917 she appeared with a new dancing partner, Bobby O’Neill, at the Riverside Theatre on Ninety-sixth Street, subsequently appearing at the Palace Theatre that winter.10
But vaudeville was then in decline, fading away as the silent movies gained
an audience. Evelyn followed the trend, shifting effortlessly from the stage to the silver screen. Her first film, Threads of Destiny, appeared in 1914; three years later she was the star of Redemption. Evelyn made three films in 1918—The Woman Who Gave, Her Mistake, and I Want to Forget—and starred in five more before her movie career ended in 1922.11
Evelyn Nesbit had finally achieved the success that had always eluded her. She was a celebrity, a star whose name was invariably at the top of the bill, and her fame had little connection with a scandal that was already fading from memory. There were no longer any articles about Harry Thaw in the newspapers, and her success did not depend on the notoriety that had previously attached to her name because of Thaw. There were admittedly some stars who had more talent—Dorothy Gish, Mabel Normand, Marguerite Clark, and Anita Stewart were more accomplished actors—but in 1919, when she made four films for Fox Studios, Evelyn Nesbit had few rivals.12
But drug use was ubiquitous on Broadway, and few performers could resist the temptation. A dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies at the New Amsterdam Theatre introduced Evelyn to morphine in 1919, giving her an injection one evening at her apartment and subsequently arranging for Evelyn to receive a supply of morphine each week. Later that year, while making the film My Little Sister at the Fox Studios in Hollywood, Evelyn took cocaine for the first time.13
Her addictions effectively destroyed her career and wreaked havoc with her personal life. She had made a fortune on the stage and in the movies, often earning more than $3,000 each week, but her money quickly disappeared, consumed by her drug habit. She was in her mid-thirties, regularly taking four grains of morphine each day, and the film studios no longer had any interest in hiring an actress whose addiction had so obviously diminished her sex appeal.14
In 1922, in an interview with the Washington Times, Evelyn stated that she had finally beaten the drug habit; but almost all her money had disappeared. “I remember one party at Hollywood,” Evelyn reminisced, “where cocaine was served in a big sugar bowl…. ‘Pass the sugar, somebody,’ would be the remark every few minutes, and all laughed at the joke…. It cost me $100,000 to be a drug fiend, just in cash alone. And it cost me my friends, my self-respect, everything.” Her mother, Florence, had threatened to take custody of her child, Russell, and Evelyn had eventually agreed to enter a sanatorium under a physician’s care to cure her addiction.15
Evelyn Nesbit (right) opened a tearoom in 1921 in Manhattan on West Fifty-second Street, a few steps from Broadway. It was not a success, and the following year she began her career as a cabaret singer in nightclubs in Atlantic City. (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-78404)
She moved back to New York and opened a tearoom at 235 West Fifty-second Street, close to Broadway, but it was not a success. Too many of Evelyn’s former acquaintances, men and women who had fallen on hard times, came calling, asking for a loan, looking for a favor, and she was too kindhearted to turn them away. She had no experience in running a business; her kitchen staff stole whatever they could find—bottles of wine, tableware, even pots and pans—and her waiters cheated her, routinely submitting fraudulent receipts. She had put all her savings into the tearoom, even going into debt, and its failure left her penniless. There was only one way that she could make a living, and Evelyn moved to Atlantic City to perform in the resort’s many nightclubs and cabarets.16
She first worked for Harry Katz as a singer at his nightclub, the Moulin Rouge; Henri Martin then engaged Evelyn for several weeks at Café Martin, a restaurant on the Boardwalk; and Max Williams, the owner of the Palais Royal, later employed her as a hostess. Her celebrity was still sufficiently potent to attract the crowds who flocked to Atlantic City every summer; but she was a single woman, alone and vulnerable, and the nightclub owners took advantage, cheating her at every opportunity, billing her for expenses, never paying her the money that they had promised.17
Evelyn continued to work in Atlantic City every summer, singing in the cabarets—Café Paris, El Prinkipo, Palais d’Or, and the Paradise Club—then going on tour in the fall and spring. She had long affected a brassy devil-may-care attitude, a flippant, happy-go-lucky exterior, but Evelyn lived a sad, lonely existence, and she was frequently depressed, often scared for her future, and in 1926, during an engagement in Chicago, she attempted suicide by drinking disinfectant.18
She recovered; but her moods often returned, frequently dragging her down. She could see no way out, no escape from her penury, condemned, night after night, to entertain the partygoers in the nightclubs, knowing all the while that the owners would soon find some other singer, someone younger, someone more attractive, to take her place. They would then pay her off, discard her, and think nothing of it, as they had discarded so many women before her.
It embittered Evelyn to know that Harry Thaw, after his release from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in 1924, continued to receive revenue generated by the family trust. The value of the Thaw estate had multiplied many times during the decade and, according to one estimate, was now worth more than $100 million. Harry received an annual income approaching $60,000, and the trustees frequently made special payments, often amounting to more than $100,000, to the heirs. Evelyn’s son, Russell, was also Harry’s child, Evelyn claimed, and Russell, she believed, was entitled to a share of the estate. But she had no ability to assert her son’s claim, no means to challenge the Thaw lawyers in court, and she knew that the family would always deny the connection. Any lawsuit would be futile.19
Harry Thaw died of a coronary thrombosis on February 22, 1947, aged seventy-six, at his home in Miami Beach. He had inherited almost $3 million on the death of his mother in 1929, and he had spent the last two decades of his life in relative tranquility. In addition to his home in Florida, Thaw owned houses in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Manhattan, Saratoga Springs, California, and Virginia, and he traveled frequently, spending several weeks during the year in each location and occasionally sailing to Europe. He had many acquaintances but few friends, and his funeral in Pittsburgh was a lonely affair. His only surviving sibling, Alice, was too ill to attend, and only one relative, a nephew, Lawrence Thaw, attended the burial.20
He left an inheritance of $1,211,000, along with his various properties, but Evelyn received only $10,000 in the will. Her testimony in 1907, and again in 1908, had saved Harry from the electric chair, but there had never been any acknowledgment that she had sacrificed her reputation for his sake, never any gratitude for the courage and fortitude that she had displayed on the witness stand.21
She continued to work in New York, but she rarely appeared now in the glamorous nightclubs in the entertainment district around Times Square. She performed in out-of-the-way places, in saloons and dives in the working-class neighborhoods, scratching out a living in the rough-and-tumble districts of the city. Her final performance was in March 1938 at Ye Old Tap Room, a saloon on the corner of Eighty-third Street and Columbus Avenue. She was fifty-three years old.22
Many movie stars of the silent era had met an early death, through either ill health or drug use, yet Evelyn Nesbit had somehow survived. Her son, Russell, earned his living as a commercial pilot, and he supported his mother, paying the rent on a small studio apartment in New York. After the war, Russell moved with his second wife to Los Angeles to work as a test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Company, and Evelyn followed her son to California in 1952, renting an apartment on Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. She passed her days quietly, doting on her young grandchildren, Teresa, Michael, and Russell, teaching sculpture classes at a nearby ceramics studio, fussing over her cats, attending mass at the Catholic church in her neighborhood.23
She had seemingly been forgotten; not even the gossip columnists could recall the details of the sensational murder that had gripped the nation so many decades before. But in 1955 she was again a celebrity, albeit briefly, when Twentieth Century–Fox produced The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, with Joan Collins in the title role. Evelyn worked as a consultant on the film, receiv
ing $30,000 for her trouble. She died, aged eighty-two, of natural causes in a nursing home in Santa Monica on January 17, 1967. A requiem mass was held in her memory three days later at St. Martin of Tours, a Roman Catholic church on Sunset Boulevard, and thirty acquaintances, many connected with the film industry, attended the burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.24
AFTERWORD
ÉMILE ZOLA, IN HIS 1880 NOVEL NANA, IMAGINED THE FICTIONAL life of Anna (Nana) Coupeau, a courtesan living in Paris. Nana first appears in the story as an actress in an operetta at the Théâtre des Variétés who, despite her obvious lack of talent, mesmerizes the audience with her physical beauty. Nana has a series of lovers, abandoning each one as soon as he proves unable to provide her with the luxuries that she has come to expect. She is never satisfied, and her demands become increasingly outrageous, eventually leaving each of her lovers destitute. Nana leaves a trail of devastation behind her, destroying the careers and marriages of those men—representatives of the Parisian bourgeoisie—who pursue her. Zola provided his novel with a grim ending: Nana contracts smallpox and dies alone, her beauty hideously destroyed by the disease.
It was no longer necessary, after the murder of Stanford White, according to one New York writer, to read literature to experience the passions unleashed by the beauty of a superbly attractive woman. Evelyn Nesbit, who had first appeared on the Broadway stage at sixteen, supposedly conquered Stanford White and then a second man, Harry Thaw, and she provoked the jealousy between her suitors that exploded in violence, Thaw killing his rival in a crowded theater in Madison Square Garden. Evelyn Nesbit, the writer concluded, was a latter-day version of Nana Coupeau, a woman who enslaved her lovers, coveting wealth and luxury and paying no heed to conventional morality.1
But the anonymous writer knew nothing of Evelyn Nesbit, and the remarks on her character could not have been further from the truth. Both Stanford White and Harry Thaw were too sophisticated and Evelyn Nesbit was too naïve for such a scenario to be plausible. White was immensely influential, one of the most prominent New Yorkers of his day; Thaw, wealthy beyond all measure, mingled easily with the social elite of two continents; so it was absurd to claim that a sixteen-year-old chorus girl with no experience of the world could have lured such men into the catastrophe that engulfed all three in 1906.
