The architect Stanford White has fallen to his knees. His hand trembled as he touched the hem of the kimono he had specially ordered for her from Japan. At the age of 47, he kissed the garment for which he had spent 2000 dollars then, or 53,500 today, to make his latest acquisition, 15-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, look perfect in it. He had been her benefactor for two months and it was time to shed his protective mask. He could never resist young girls and they could never resist his fame, money and energy, which erupted out of him like a volcano. Evelyn was no exception, although by the time she was in her teens she was already a true American sex symbol, famous in a way that only Marilyn Monroe was after her.
Stanford White was completely charmed by her, but he easily succumbed to the charm of the young beauties. More than the genius of America’s most famous architect of his time, whose buildings irrevocably changed the face of Manhattan, there was talk of his debauchery, of which there was no end in sight. It was everywhere, at the select parties of New York’s elite and at bohemian sleepovers in dingy basements.
The smell of hate
He was welcomed with open arms in the men’s clubs, but on the contrary, Harry K. Thaw, heir to a fortune of around 40 million dollars, found closed doors everywhere. He did not understand why. He did not think himself eccentric when he rode up on horseback not only to the club but also wanted to ride into it, or when he lit his cigar with $100 bills. The reason why the gentlemen had excluded him from their midst lay elsewhere, he thought.
He found it in the ubiquitous and popular, but genuinely joyful Stanford White. He was the one who blacklisted him from New York clubs, Thaw decided, and declared the architect, famous among other things for having the longest moustache in New York, to be Public Enemy Number 1. He became completely obsessed with him, and Anthony Comstock had him deep in his stomach.
As New York’s self-appointed moral policeman, he set out to cleanse the city of depravity, but his eye also landed on the four-metre-high statue of the goddess Diana, which then adorned the city’s tallest tower. It was part of one of White’s architectural masterpieces, the Madison Square Garden, a multi-purpose centre that hosted everything from sporting events to theatre premieres.
The complex, which cost three million dollars and was financed jointly by the nouveau riche of the day, boasted, among other things, the largest auditorium in the world. The statue of Diana on it was huge, but probably not the biggest, and it was certainly naked.
Comstock was horrified. This market used to be decent, he growled, but now the nannies have to run across it with trolleys to avoid the sight of the hideous Diana. She was so high up that they had to look up if they wanted to see her, but that was supposedly why the men were bumping into her as they all stared up.
Comstock declared war on Diana and won. Stanford White had to dress her, but in his fury he put on a scarf that had been torn off in the first wind and vengefully put headlights under it so that she was now visible even at night. He resisted the provocation with the same difficulty as the wild sex his biographers love to report, while his wife is hardly wasted for words.
Beautiful and no longer innocent
Evelyn Nesbit didn’t know much about any of this when she moved to New York from Pittsburgh with her mother in 1900, and at the age of 15 she immediately made it her own. She had to. Since she lost her father a few years ago, she, her mother and younger brother had been pounding the poverty line, although her mother soon realised that she could raise her daughter well.
At the age of 14, Evelyn started posing for painters and photographers. They loved her immediately. Her face was like a blank sheet of paper that they could turn into anything they wanted. She quickly became a star in her native Pittsburgh, but still did not earn enough to feed her family. With her brother living with relatives rather than at home, her mother decided to try their luck in New York.
In 1900, they came, they saw and they won. Evelyn was on the cover of almost every magazine, including Vanity Fair and Harper’s Magazine, almost overnight, but it wasn’t until she broke into the chorus of the famous Broadway musical Florodora in 1901 that the infamous Stanford White was hooked. He saw the show forty times before he managed to persuade one of the chorus girls to come to lunch and bring Evelyn with her.
“He’s desperately old” was the first thought of the teenager when she found herself in his home, but his playfulness and brimming energy soon made her forget that. After all, he was a man who had a swing attached to the ceiling of one of the rooms, dressed in red velvet. He immediately sat Evelyn down on it and pushed her so high that her feet broke through the parasol fixed to the ceiling, while his boyishly mischievous laughter echoed all around.
Evelyn quickly got used to him, her mother to his money. He paid for the flat she moved into with her daughter and for her younger brother’s schooling. As a man whose word could open or close the door to success for a girl, he got his young protégée better business deals.
For two months he played the benevolent patron so well that his mother did not hesitate when he suggested she visit her relatives in Pittsburgh and leave Evelyn in his care.
Two days later, Evelyn was on her way to his party. Bad luck, everyone had cancelled, he cheerfully complained to her when she arrived and there was no one there. He opened a bottle of champagne and then another. With each glass, Evelyn was less present. Suddenly she knew nothing more. When she came to again, she saw blood on her thighs.
“I was desperately afraid. I started screaming. Mr White came and tried to shut me up. I sat down and there were mirrors everywhere. I started screaming again. Mr White asked me to shut up because it was all over. He threw his kimono on and left the room. I screamed louder than ever. I don’t remember very well what happened next. He took me away and I cried all night.”
Afterwards, people could not agree whether White had drugged her or drugged her, whether he had raped her or not, but in any case, when her tears dried up and she recovered from the shock, Evelyn remained his lover without him forcing her to do so.
Prestara for White
But she never spent the night at his place. According to the rules of those days, he brought her home every night and remained, in the eyes of those around him, a benevolent, protective friend of her mother. Whether she knew that Evelyn was his mistress is not known, but since Evelyn was the only one who supported the family with her work, and White helped her financially, it is very likely that her mother was calculating and kept her mouth shut.
And so Evelyn posed during the day, performed on Broadway in the evening and partied with White at night, like the time he organised a dinner with a huge cake. In the middle of the dinner, a little girl of 15 jumped out, dressed in a sheer tunic, and the room was filled with birds that had been enclosed in the cake with her.
White certainly paid the girl well, but he didn’t pay her enough to make up for the loss of reputation. When Evelyn told him that he had ruined her, he is said to have laughed, all the more carefully to protect the reputation of a mistress whose name and face were known to almost everyone in America.
The only problem was that Evelyn was also getting older, at least in Whit’s eyes. She celebrated her 17th birthday on Christmas Day 1901. Her 48-year-old lover gave her three diamond rings, a pearl necklace and a set of white fox fur hats, but not his heart.
In fact, he hasn’t been interested in it for some time. He was giving more and more gifts to other girls and spending more and more time with them. Evelyn was jealous. It was true that she had lost her virginity in ungrateful circumstances, but then she had really fallen in love with White.
“Stanford White was a wonderful man … The fact that he wronged me and that from a certain moral point of view he was perverse and decadent does not cloud my judgement,” she wrote years later. At seventeen, she suffered only from the worm of jealousy.
Like a true teenager, she tried to return her married lover’s soap for dear life and, while he was fishing in Canada, she started flirting with 21-year-old John Barrymore. Although young, he was already a chronic alcoholic with a chequered past, but to Evelyn he was good enough to keep them entertained for a month or so before they fell asleep over wine and woke up the next day.
My mother went crazy. Evelyn’s reputation was on the line. She called White to help and together they decided that Evelyn should go to an all-girls school. Crying, she had to forget about posing, playing and White, who was relieved when she finally got out.
But Mr Monroe continued to prey on her. He had been sending her messages and gifts for some time, but she had been refusing all his invitations to lunch and returning all his gifts. He was just one of many admirers whose faces she did not know, but he was much more persistent than they were.
But after months of sieges, she relented and accepted an invitation to dine at a prestigious restaurant in New Jersey. Mr Monroe walked in, looked at her with his mad eyes and told her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. He scared her to death.
Then he dramatically added: “I am not Mr Monroe. I am Harry Kendell Thaw from Pittsburgh!” Evelyn later lamented that he had revealed his wealthy origins with such pomposity that she wasn’t sure whether she should fall unconscious or not, although she might have recoiled in horror.
This 31-year-old man scared the shit out of her, even though she didn’t know that he was advertising under the name Mr Monroe and offering acting workshops to young girls. It was only later revealed that he had whipped them and poured boiling water over them in a bathtub while publicly scolding the depravity and perversion of New York men.
Only later did it also become clear that he was really only interested in Evelyn because White had her. Hatred for him permeated every cell of Harry K. Thaw. He wanted to prove what a perverted man White was, but no girl, even a minor, would say a word against him.
It took Evelyn to corner White, but she was safely tucked away at school, at least until April 1903, when she was stricken with appendicitis. Her mother tried to find White, but he was not there, so she called Thaw.
He immediately got the best doctor for Evelyn, then dramatically rushed into her hospital room, grabbed her hand and started kissing her. The operation was not yet over when he and her mother were already plotting her recovery.
European hell
“The biggest mistake of my life,” is how Evelyn later described her decision to spend a few weeks recuperating in Europe with Harry and her mother, after which they were left alone.
They were in Paris when Harry wanted to know what happened the night two years ago when she lost her virginity. She told him. He started to shake. Then he sobbed into the void. Then he burst into tears and sat down, completely powerless. “Poor child! Poor child!” he kept repeating when he wasn’t speaking, “Oh God! Oh, God!”
Her words became his haunt, but her experience was not painful enough for him to spare her. They were in Austria when he rented a dark mansion for them. One part was occupied by servants, the other they had to themselves. Evelyn fell into bed, exhausted.
In the morning, Harry woke her up at dawn. She dressed quickly, ate breakfast with him and nodded when he said he wanted to talk to her. “I stepped into the bedroom when Thaw grabbed my neck for no reason. I could see by the look on his face that he was terribly upset. He was sobbing, his hand clutching at his whip. He grabbed me, pressed his fingers to my mouth and tried to choke me.”
Then he began to whip her “so hard that my skin broke”. She begged him to stop. She cried and screamed. “He stopped for a moment to rest, then attacked me again. He beat me with a leather whip.” She screamed, but no one heard her. He kept hitting her until she could no longer move.
The next day was similar. “He took a leather whip and whipped me without mercy. I became unconscious. I don’t know how long I was in that state.” When he stopped, her fingers were “numb. It was almost three weeks before I recovered enough to get out of bed and walk.”
In the meantime, he took $400 in cash, a gold wallet, a pearl locket, two diamond rings and one with a sapphire and diamonds. He confiscated her clothes and had previously hired people to control her.
Their European itinerary took them, among other places, to Switzerland. One morning, Evelyn made a remark and Thaw took her to her room. There he took a “cane stalk and beat me with it until I screamed. When I started to scream, he put his fingers in my mouth again.”
He tortured her, but never even tried to justify what he was doing. It was normal for him to hit her, just like in Paris, when he used a cane to beat her body for half a day, every half hour. In the end she was so weak that she lay down for two weeks.
She finally returned home towards the end of October 1903, at which point she also knew that her lover was addicted to cocaine, having found his box of cocaine paraphernalia in Paris. Nevertheless, it was still unclear to her how dangerous he really was.
No one knows whether Stanford White knew this, but he certainly asked her to leave the “addict”. He sent her a lawyer and she told him in a signed statement what had happened in Europe, only she refused to say that Thaw had kidnapped her and sailed across the ocean with her against her will, as White wanted her to do.
In the end, however, Evelyn turned out to be the teenager everyone was trying to take advantage of. Thaw’s money made her mother squint in both eyes. Stanford White, whom she had once trusted as a father figure, tried to help her, but at the same time he was using her to strike a blow against Thaw.
He needed her to sign a statement describing her first night with Whit. He pressed her to put her ex-lover behind bars and to get him there, but she kept repeating that White had neither drugged her nor raped her.
A killer who wants to be a hero
Every time he did not get what he wanted, Thaw beat her, but she married him anyway on 5 April 1905. At the age of 20, she was aware that her past would make it difficult for her to find a decent husband, but most of all, she was completely alone. Stanford White had left her and her mother was only interested in money.
But Thaw has been chasing her for two years. He may have been an unbalanced and violent cocaine addict, but at least he had taken an interest in her, and his millions were not exactly wasted, even if his mother still managed them for now.
And Evelyn moved into her gloomy Pittsburgh home after her marriage. She hadn’t posed or acted since she went to girls’ school, but to Mrs Thaw she was still a cheap girl who needed to be turned into a decent lady. She threw herself into the work of changing her image when a Christmas calendar came out with old pictures of Evelyn.
Furious, she tried to buy all the copies that were printed, but of course she failed, just as Evelyn was unable to really live in her new home. There she was more or less a prisoner of her mother-in-law until, 14 months after their marriage, her husband decided that they would go on a second honeymoon.
They were due to sail from New York for London on 28 June 1906, but they had arrived in the city a few days earlier, although Harry hated it from the days when he was determined not to set foot in any building that Stanford White’s fingers had touched.
In Manhattan, this was almost impossible. In those days, Stanford White and his colleagues were working on no less than 60 projects, doing interior decoration, set design and anything else that amused him.
She and Evelyn hadn’t seen each other for a long time, but she was terrified of New York. She didn’t trust her husband. She knew that his obsession with Whit had flared up again. He had saved Evelyn from him, but what if there were other girls in the game now, it gnawed at him. Although he hadn’t wanted to go anywhere where he could be reminded of his mortal enemy, he now wanted to go to a theatre premiere at Madison Square Garden.
Stanford White never missed the premiere on the roof of the centre he had built himself, but on that day, 25 June 1906, he had crossed the Thaws’ path earlier. His former mistress had a “cold sweat of fear” when she saw him enter the restaurant during dinner. Harry saw his rival but sensed his wife’s unease.
What’s wrong? “B is here, but he’s gone,” she scribbled on the slip. Harry took the news calmly. Apparently, at least. After dinner, as he tied his hat on his head, he pushed it against his temple with such force that it broke off pieces. Nevertheless, he continued his journey with his wife and friends to Madison Square Garden and the premiere of the new musical Mamzelle Champagne.
In his wide coat, he paced around like a trapped tiger, as one of the attendees described him when he realised that Stanford White was not at his usual table in the fifth row. But shortly before 11 p.m., as the show was drawing to a close, he just walked in.
Harry’s gaze became piercing. Evelyn didn’t want to take any chances. Let’s go, she told her husband and friends. Harry didn’t mind, but when she turned at the lift, he was gone.
“He shot him!” she cried, hearing three ear-splitting sounds from the roof. She was right. Harry walked quickly up to White, pulled a gun from under his coat and shot his rival in the head from about 12 metres away. He fired a second bullet into the head and a third into the shoulder at point blank range. White’s face was so disfigured that his brother-in-law did not recognise him when he passed the body.
“I did it because he ruined my wife!”, Harry K. Thaw reportedly shouted at the time, although some eyewitnesses claim that what he really said was “I did it because he ruined my life!”. In English, the words wife and life sound similar, wife [waif] – life [laif], but in any case Thaw later claimed that he was defending his wife’s honour, even four years after she had lost her virginity.
“Look at the trouble you’ve got yourself into!” said Evelyn as the policeman passed him. “No problem, dear. I probably saved your life,” replied Harry pompously, who truly believed he had done a heroic act by murdering her in front of 900 witnesses.
The evil called Stanford White
When he was brought to Tombs Prison at 3am, he was sure that in the morning he would be hailed as a hero who had saved not only his wife’s life, but the lives of many innocent girls. In his damp cell, he was happily awaiting the new morning, while his wife was struggling with how to escape from the press.
Stanford White was the most respected American architect of his time, her husband was a millionaire and she was the one and only beauty, and now all three find themselves linked to a murder. The newspapers could not have asked for a better gift.
According to Harry Houdini in female disguise, as the journalists called her, she managed to go unnoticed to a friend’s house and spend two days there without being found. Then she waited to see what would happen. She was far less confident than her husband, who, convinced of his heroism, called his personal butler and ordered breakfast from the finest restaurant in his cell, then called photographers to take his picture for the press, a glass of champagne in his hand.
He was looking forward to the trial, which was immediately hailed as the trial of the century. At last he would be able to expose the “group of perverts” who preyed on young girls and deserved to die, he explained, until his mother silenced him, saying he was only doing himself harm.
The public prosecutor wanted to fast-track him to the loony bin because only a mad man can shoot a man in front of 900 witnesses and expect to be acquitted, and his lawyer agreed. Thaw’s mother immediately forgave him because no one in their family is unbalanced.
Now, a new group of lawyers has put their heads together to prepare the defence. They have come up with a different strategy. What if they smeared the victim in such a way that people thought it was only natural that Harry K. Thaw temporarily lost his mind and shot her, because that’s what any human being would do? On the fourth of February 1907, when the trial began, they struck with full force.
Defence manager Delphin Delmas tried to find anyone who might have bad things to say about White, from waiters to taxi drivers. One of them testified that he was not surprised by the murder, but was surprised that White was killed by a man and not by his father.
More and more stories of debauched nights in the dark corners of Manhattan came to light, and White’s reputation sank with every word he uttered, yet Delmas could not find a single woman willing to testify against the deceased, nor a single father who would accuse White of having sex with a minor.
He has only one trump card left: Evelyn. He persuaded her to tell her story publicly, but she resisted. It was too painful, she insisted, until Harry’s mother assured her, among other things, that the family money would continue to be available to her.
Fear of poverty has always been behind Evelyn’s decisions, but now she has revealed to the jurors what happened when she described her first night of love to Thaw, and then was forced to repeat it to the jurors. Soon all that was coming out of her was, “I can’t take it anymore! I can’t do it anymore!” The confession broke her, but they had to open the windows to let fresh air in and she recovered.
So she talked a little and cried a little. The jurors gulped down her carnal words and eagerly awaited a new day, in which they were promised a new dose of awfulness. And they got it, except this time Evelyn had to describe her European experience with Harry, and she had to explain whether or not she thought sexual relations with an older married man, that is, White, were wrong.
At first, she said, she found them “callous and vulgar”, but only in Paris did she fully realise their “misguidedness”. But even though she witnessed the defence, she did not want to denigrate White. She insisted that she thought he had a “strong personality” and was “a very great man. He was very good to me and very kind. When I told this to Mr Thaw, he told me that this only made him more dangerous.”
Thaw reportedly told his psychiatrist that White was “destroying all the mothers and daughters in America”, but that he wanted to bring him before a judge, not put him in a grave. Why did he shoot then? Out of “divine providence”, he explained, and his psychiatrist went on to explain why he had come to the show with a gun. He had it on him for fear of being threatened by the hawkish “hired agents of Stanford White”.
Her son’s mother has confirmed that the notorious architect was a thorn in her side. She said he was “the worst man in New York”, and that he had ruined her son’s life. Poor Harry reportedly spent countless nights crying in bed because of White.
American dementia
For the defence, the blackening of White’s name went like clockwork. The prosecution had little material to turn the tide, but presented the jury with the affidavit Evelyn had sworn when she returned from Europe. It was time for closing arguments.
Harry’s lawyer, who still insisted that he was “as sane as any man in the world”, compared his client’s story to one that William Shakespeare himself would have been proud to write, sad and tragic as it is. He slandered Stanford White and portrayed Harry Thaw as a man sent by God himself to avenge the wrongs of the earth.
Then he continued, “If Thaw is unresponsive, let’s call it American dementia. It’s the kind of incivility that makes every American man believe his home is sacred; it’s the kind of incivility that makes him believe his daughter’s honour is sacred…” He continued with the comparisons so successfully that the prosecutor found it difficult to prove how Thaw was motivated by pure jealousy and nothing more.
In the end, both sides lost. The jury could not agree on guilt, and in mid-April 1907, the judge quashed the trial. On 6 January 1908, Thaw was once again tried by a jury, only this time his lawyers, on whom his mother had spent millions of dollars, decided to send him to the insane asylum anyway and deal with how to get him out later.
Now they were together with witnesses to prove how Harry was “absolutely untrustworthy”. Mum Thaw told of “small-minded” uncles who had ended up in lunatic asylums. Harry’s nanny recalled how he was always moody and nervous. He would have seizures during which he would be sick and his lip would quiver, he would throw himself on his back and roar.
His primary school teachers testified to his low intelligence, and the doctors he hired claimed that Thaw suffered from mania, paranoia and other mental disorders.
Evelyn had to take the witness stand again, only this time to explain how Harry tried to kill her a few weeks after she told him how she lost her virginity. He drank an opium tincture. During her first testimony, she allegedly withheld the information because her lawyer feared that the suicide attempt would make her husband seem “too crazy”.
This time, the jury was sworn in and the American people finally learned the outcome of the “trial of the century”: that Thaw was not guilty of murder because he was inattentive during the act. Harry was in shock. For him, being sent to Matteawan State Hospital, where criminals who were untrustworthy were cared for, rather than to the electric chair, was not a success.
“I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!” he screamed in shock, convinced that he should be forgiven, even though fate had miraculously favoured him only in The Unwritten Law, a film financed by his mother.
The blissful solitude of anonymity
Harry was committed to a psychiatric hospital and Evelyn realised that the financial support she had been promised would come to nothing. The money was firmly in her mother-in-law’s hands. If it hadn’t been for her, Harry wouldn’t be in trouble, her mother-in-law scolded Evelyn and turned her back on her.
Her own mother had given it to her before. When the trouble started, she simply fled to Pittsburgh and left her daughter in the lurch. When reporters found her and asked her about her relationship with White, she calmly claimed that she did not know him at all, even though she was not only living off him, but also collecting all the money her teenage daughter was earning those days.
She moved to Waterville and tried to move on with her son. For the rest of her life, she claimed that Russell William was Harry’s child and that they had conceived him during one of her visits to the prison hospital, but no one believed her.
Seven years passed, and in June 1915, the court again ruled on whether Harry K. Thaw was sane or not. Evelyn refused to testify this time. Just in case, she had temporarily moved near the Canadian border so that she could cross in time to be served with a subpoena.
Harry testified. He spoke calmly for more than five hours. Why did he kill White? “There is no answer to that question. I cannot give it to you. There was no reason.” The jury found him competent and two days after his testimony he was a free man.
He divorced a few months later, and in 1917 he was again admitted to a psychiatric ward. This time, he was found guilty of kidnapping a boy and whipping him in a hotel room. Eight years later, he was found to be well again, and he went to Florida.
There, he reportedly stayed in one of the inferior hotels and wittily declared, “I think I shot the wrong architect.” His ex-wife, meanwhile, had remarried the wrong man. Her marriage to Jack Clifford was short-lived, and her entrepreneurial attempt to own a tearoom was also unsuccessful.
During the filming of The girl in the red velvet swing, she was an assistant. The film told her story, but she was not happy with the lead actress, Joan Collins. Apparently, she had too much bust.
When she died of natural causes in 1967 at the age of 92, her death did not shock the masses. She lived a withdrawn life in Los Angeles, and her grandchildren wanted to live the same way after her death. No one wanted to be connected to the murder, neither her descendants nor the descendants of Thaw and White.
It has suffered the worst blow. Thaw not only took his life, he also took his reputation and his inheritance. Stories of girls, sex and wild parties also brought his work into disrepute. Although he had designed, for example, New York’s Pann Station or the home of jeweller Louis Comfort Tiffany, no one talked about him again. It was only a few years ago that the memory of the genius architect who shaped New York was revived.
