The Murder of Stanford White

By Dr. Gerald Langford

Evelyn Nesbit was a popular American chorus girl, an artists’ model, and an actress. In the early part of the Twentieth century, the figure and face of Evelyn Nesbit were everywhere, appearing in mass circulation newspaper and magazine advertisements, on souvenir items and calendars, making her a cultural celebrity.

But it was on the evening of June 25, 1906 that she gained worldwide notoriety, when her husband, multi-millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot and murdered architect and New York socialite Stanford White on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden—leading to what the press would call “The Trial of the Century”.

The Harry K. Thaw—Evelyn Nesbit—Stanford White story remains one of the great crime sensations of the Twentieth Century. Stanford White, an enormously rich man of high social position and supposedly blameless reputation, nevertheless led a private life that was at variance with his public reputation. His lavish stag dinner parties were well-known, and later played an important part in the famous murder trial.

A gripping read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787209763

Dr. Gerald Langford

Gerald Langford (October 20, 1911 - April 18, 2003) was an author and Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and O. Henry Scholar in the latter half of the 20th century. He was born in Alabama in 1911 and grew up in Georgia. He received his Bachelor of Arts, Masters, and Doctorate in English Literature from the University of Virginia. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps for three years during World War II and taught at colleges in South Carolina, North Carolina and Kentucky before joining the faculty of the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1946, where he taught courses in creative writing and contemporary English and American literature. His first book, “Alias O. Henry: A Biography of William Sidney Porter,” was published in 1957. His other published works include “The Richard Harding Davis Years” (1961), “The Murder of Stanford White” (1962), and “Ingenue Among the Lions,” (1965). In the 1960s, he developed an interest in photography with a specific interest in photographing buildings related to O. Henry’s life. Dr. Langford died April 18, 2003 in Austin, Texas.

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Muriwai Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MURDER OF STANFORD WHITE

BY

DR. GERALD LANGFORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

1—June 25, 1906 5

2—Stage Setting 20

3—The Opening of the Trial 31

4—Delmas’ Master Stroke 43

5—The Vivisection of a Woman’s Soul 70

6—Jerome’s Dilemma 107

7—Repeat Performance 132

8—Aftermath 152

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 162

DEDICATION

In Memory of S. M. L.

1—June 25, 1906

It was a Monday, but not a blue Monday. The brisk sea breeze, that over the weekend had brought a respite from New York’s summer heat, continued to threaten women’s skirts and men’s hats. Unduly exhilarated by the change in the weather, an unprecedented total of eleven motorists had been arrested for speeding on Sunday. Several of them had been driving as fast as thirty miles an hour, the police reported; one of them, trying to evade arrest, had attained the alarming speed of fifty miles an hour. No doubt it was another such apparition on Monday morning which frightened the horse of Jacob Diamond, causing a runaway accident on Manhattan Avenue. Diamond had driven his four daughters and a girl friend of one of them back from Coney Island in his surrey. He was heading for the Twenty-third Street ferry when his horse bolted out of control. All six occupants were thrown from the vehicle.

During the day a woman to whom the zestful weather meant nothing—Annie Burns by name—was caught stealing a pincushion in a dry goods store.

You might as well send me up, she told the manager. I’ve got no place to go.

When, out of pity, the manager decided not to press charges, Annie grew angry.

You’re obliged to make the complaint, she insisted. I tell you I want to be locked up. I haven’t got anywhere to sleep.

A policeman took the view that anyone confessing to theft had to be locked up. Annie found at least a temporary shelter.

Perhaps not too differently motivated were three sixteen-year-old boys who, later in the day, knocked down Mrs. Hannah Roth in front of her home at 151 Lenox Avenue, and snatched her purse. All three were caught by a swift-footed policeman who heard Mrs. Roth’s cries. The ringleader, it was learned, was out on bail pending trial for a previous burglary.

Far removed from such ironies of penury, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daring and much-publicized daughter, Princess Alice, was again in Monday’s news. Once described by her wryly benevolent father as spending most of her time in Newport and elsewhere, associating with the Four Hundred, she had been married in February to the wealthy congressman from Cincinnati, Nicholas Longworth. Still on their honeymoon tour of Europe, after one of the showiest weddings of the showy new century, the couple had continued their triumphal progress by dining that Sunday with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.

Alice’s even more dashing father was in the day’s news too. Washington announced that he would go to Panama for a personal inspection of the work on the canal—a precedent-breaking trip deplored by an editorial writer for the Times, who wrote:

There is an unbroken usage that the President shall not leave the territory of the United States during his term of office....Technically the President would not quit the territory of the United States so long as he remained on board of a National vessel. But it is of course impossible to imagine the President visiting the Isthmus without going ashore and delivering an allocation to whatever persons he might there find assembled.

During the afternoon of the pleasant, unexceptional-seeming day, the New York Giants scored a resounding 12-3 victory over the Philadelphia Quakers, and nightfall brought another form of summer entertainment, that was also getting off to a good start. Now that Lillian Russell—still queen of the American stage despite the Wagnerian amplitude of her figure—had completed her spectacular spring engagement in F. F. Proctor’s vaudeville circuit, the summer theaters had begun to open. Two more openings were scheduled for Monday evening. The popular farce The Governor’s Son, written by George M. Cohan and featuring The Favorite Family of Fun-Makers, the Four Cohans, was coming to the New Amsterdam Aerial Roof Garden. More notably, as things turned out, the roof theater of Madison Square Garden was premiering a musical entitled Mamzelle Champagne, with book by Edgar Allen Woolf and music by Cassius Freeborn, composer of the music for the memorable hit The Belle of New York.

Coincidentally, one of the men particularly concerned with the first night of Mamzelle Champagne—for reasons other than artistic—was also the designer of the striking new yellow and terra cotta Madison Square Garden itself, with its record-sized amphitheater featuring horse shows and prize fights, as well as a theater, roof garden, restaurant, and ground-level arcade of fashionable shops. Its three-hundred-foot central tower, modeled after the Giralda in Seville, was one of the chief attractions of the New York skyline, topped as it was with a scandalously nude figure of Diana, executed in bronze by America’s greatest sculptor of the time, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. One reporter had written shortly after the completion of the tower in 1891, The Square is now thronged with clubmen armed with field glasses. No such figure has ever before been publicly exhibited in the United States.

Stanford White, aged fifty-two, whose name had become familiar to all New Yorkers through this most striking of his works, was an architect comparable in eminence and influence to Frank Lloyd Wright in the following generation. He has been cited as the greatest single influence in beautifying the drab, brownstone New York of the nineteenth century. Of the private homes he designed throughout the country, one of the earliest was the Romanesque-style Tiffany house at Madison Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, called by the English critic Edmund Gosse in 1885 the most beautiful modern domestic building I have almost ever seen. Later, homes of special note were those of Pierre Lorillard in Tuxedo Park, Thomas Nelson Page in Washington, and in New York those of Charles Dana Gibson, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., and Payne Whitney. The creator of three new buildings supplementing Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia, White had lifted the face of New York with such familiar landmarks as the memorial arch at Washington Square, the Herald building modeled after the Doges Palace in Venice, the Hall of Fame at New York University, and many famous clubs, notably the Lambs, the Century, and the Metropolitan (founded by J. P. Morgan and several decades later called one of the most successful examples of pure Renaissance architecture in America). More recently White had designed such public buildings as Tiffany and Company, Sherry’s ultra-fashionable restaurant, and the daringly wall-less Corinthian temple which was the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Newest of all was the controversial Madison Square Presbyterian Church. With its green-tiled dome and its portico of green granite columns it was, in White’s own words, a protest against the idea so prevalent among laymen that a building, to be churchlike, must be built in the Medieval Style.

A man of many extra-curricular interests, White was an inveterate partygoer in the most exclusive circles of New York society. He had been a guest, for example, at James Hazen Hyde’s 1905 costume fete, and indeed is usually said to have been its designer. Hyde, the recent inheritor of the fortune his father had made as founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, wanted to outdo even the famous ball given by Mrs. Bradley Martin in 1897 at a cost of nearly $10,000 for food and drink alone. Hyde’s ambition was more than satisfied. For his ball—a reproduction of a court festivity of Louis XVI—Sherry’s restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street was transformed into the Grand Trianon of Versailles. The waiters wore royal livery, and the guests came in period finery. The floor of the main ballroom was thickly carpeted with rose petals, and the walls were hung with great clusters of orchids. From early evening until breakfast at seven the next morning, the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and several others performed in various rooms. Beginning with ballet dances by such Metropolitan stars as Enrichetta Varasi, the evening’s entertainment featured a specially written comedy starring the famous actress Gabrielle Réjane, imported from France for the occasion. (Incidentally, the extravagance of Hyde’s ball so shocked the public, and was followed by such widespread cynicism about the profits of insurance companies, that the legislature appointed the rising young lawyer Charles Evans Hughes to conduct an investigation of all such companies in the state.)

White also moved freely in bohemian circles. He was on terms of backstage familiarity with theatrical people, whom he frequently entertained at parties in his top-floor studio in the tower of Madison Square Garden, and his penchant for eye-catching young showgirls was well-known. In describing one of the more sedate of his famous tower parties, the wife of composer Reginald de Koven (still remembered for the hymeneal Oh, Promise Me, from the score of his light opera Robin Hood) noted that the guest list for the occasion featured women as lovely and varied in type as he ever assembled.

White arrived alone for the opening of Mamzelle Champagne. His wife was at their summer home in St. James, Long Island, and his son—just down from Harvard with a classmate—had preferred going to a different show, although the three of them had dined together. White had taken the young men to the Café Martin, one of New York’s smartest and naughtiest restaurants, located in Delmonico’s former building, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway on Twenty-sixth Street. The Broadway side of the establishment had been fitted out as a French-type café with marble-topped tables and cushioned wall seats, where the patrons lingered on after dining to play chess or to scan the file of risqué Parisian illustrated papers. The main restaurant, with its imposing array of white linen beneath the paneled ceiling and elaborate chandeliers, was on the Fifth Avenue side. Upstairs were private dining rooms, awaiting the spur-of-the-moment parties that could be formed in a special foyer open to women without escorts.

After dinner White had driven his guests to their theater before coming on to Madison Square Garden. As he took his seat at his reserved table near the stage, his commanding presence attracted the attention of various people at nearby tables. Taller than most men and still powerfully built, his evening-clad figure was topped by a thatch of red hair that matched his mustache. Stanny always looked to me like Vercingetorix, one of his friends recalled in later years. I used to say that his proper clothing was a wolfskin and a battle-ax, and that he should let his hair grow.

It was pleasant in the roof garden, where arches of vines carried strings of colored light bulbs, and the breeze softly moved the fronds of the potted palms. Mamzelle Champagne proved a routine affair, though, and White stayed on only because he had arranged for the stage manager to present him to one of the chorus girls who had struck his fancy on some earlier occasion. Preoccupied with this interest, he apparently did not notice the arrival of a young couple well-known to him, the Harry Thaws.

Millionaire playboy Harry Kendall Thaw, aged thirty-four, was the eldest, wastrel son of the late William Thaw, a railroad and coke magnate of Pittsburgh. The Thaws represented not the Society of Fifth Avenue and Newport—the hierarchy of the Four Hundred long ruled over by the formidable Mrs. John Jacob Astor—but the nouveau riche who had made staggering fortunes since the Civil War and were now trying to buy their way into fashionable circles. One of the Thaw daughters had married the Earl of Yarmouth and now lived in England. The other daughter had married George Lauder Carnegie, a nephew of Andrew Carnegie. Thaw himself, after gaining notoriety for a succession of scandalous escapades in the night spots of Paris and New York, had married just over a year before, and apparently settled down. His twenty-two-year-old wife was the former Evelyn Nesbit, an artist’s model and chorus girl, earlier known around town as the particular protégée of Stanford White. Before her marriage she had taken two trips to Europe with Thaw, after the second of which the two of them had been ejected from a New York hotel—an event creating almost as many headlines as were later devoted to the similar experience of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and his mistress, Madame Andreiava, who arrived in America in April, 1906, to solicit help for the emancipation of the Russian masses. The Thaws had tried to put their premarital indiscretions behind them. Moving into the Thaw mansion in Pittsburgh, where Mrs. William Thaw had been living alone, they had begun a strenuous campaign to force the tarnished bride into the city’s neo-fashionable society. They were now in New York on their way to Europe to join Thaw’s mother, who had sailed two days earlier to visit the Countess of Yarmouth. Before coming to the play, they also had dined at the Café Martin with two guests, Truxton Beale and Thomas McCaleb, whom they brought with them to see Mamzelle Champagne.

Thaw’s arrival in the roof garden was noticed by a number of people, not only because of his notoriety but because, in spite of the resort weather, he was wearing an overcoat along with his straw hat. As always, Evelyn Thaw attracted attention too. My face, she wrote later, was a faintly olive-hued oval crowned by lustrous copper curls. My eyes were hazel and very brilliant, my nose was straight and almost Irish in its slight upward tilt, and my mouth very red—a bit full, the lips pouting. On this opening night, she was wearing an embroidered white dinner dress and a black picture hat. As the tedious performance dragged on, Thaw was observed moving about among the tables as if to speak to people he knew. More than once, he was also seen starting to approach White’s table, then taking his stand at a point where he could watch White unobtrusively. But apparently no one happened to be looking the last time he left his own table and started toward White.

On stage a singer was just beginning I Could Love a Million Girls. Suddenly a gunshot startled everyone, followed immediately by two more shots. Thaw, holding a pistol almost against White’s head, stood unmoving. As the audience watched unbelievingly, White’s elbow slid from the table, the table overturned, sending a glass clinking in the sudden silence, and his body tumbled to the floor. For a moment there was silence. Then Thaw, with the pistol held over his head as a sign that the shooting was over, started toward the exit leading to the elevators.

A woman leaped to her feet and screamed. Others followed. A doctor had to fight his way through a teeming, shouting mass of people to reach the fallen man. When the table was pulled back there was a pool of blood on the floor. The victim’s face was blackened beyond recognition by powder burns. He was clearly dead.

The manager of the show, mounting a table, yelled, Go on playing! Bring on the chorus!

The orchestra feebly took up the interrupted melody, but the girls of the chorus were paralyzed. Clearly the performance could not be resumed. Vainly calling for quiet, the manager asked that the audience move out quietly. By now a number of actors and actresses had emerged from behind the scenes to mingle with the audience, their painted faces adding a bizarre touch to the confusion.

Thaw had meanwhile reached the elevator lobby to join his wife. His whole party had left their table together, at Evelyn’s suggestion intending to walk out on the dull performance. She and the two friends had reached the lobby before she realized her husband was not with them. Then she heard the shots and stood watching in bewilderment as he walked toward her with a pistol held above his head.

Good God, Harry! she cried. What have you done?

All right, dearie, he said calmly. I have probably saved your life.

At this point, as the event was later reconstructed from slightly varying accounts, one of the firemen on duty seized Thaw and disarmed him. Shortly afterward a policeman appeared. Thaw did not resist arrest.

He deserved it, he said to the policeman. I can prove it. He ruined my wife [life, some thought he said] and then deserted the girl.

The two men went down together in the elevator. When they reached the street, Thaw said, Here’s a bill, officer. Get Carnegie on the telephone and tell him I’m in trouble. There was a moment’s hesitation while the policeman considered what to do with his prisoner. He decided the wisest thing would be simply to walk Thaw to the nearest police station. Pushing through the crowd that had formed, the two men made their way to Fifth Avenue, where they turned and walked up to Thirtieth Street. No one followed them, and there was no excitement along the way. At the corner of Thirtieth Street, cabmen in front of the Holland House—a ten-story, white-stone hotel imposingly patrician in atmosphere—recognized Thaw and tipped their hats. He returned their greeting matter-of-factly. Starting west toward Sixth Avenue, the two men walked through the heart of the notorious Tenderloin, inadvertently so-named in 1876 by Police Captain Alexander S. Williams, who had recently been transferred from the Fourth Precinct to the Twenty-ninth. (I’ve had nothing but rump steak for a long time, he told a friend, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin. The figure of speech was apt in several ways, most obviously in its suggestion of blackmail and graft.) Extending from Fourteenth to Forty-second Street, between Fifth Avenue and Ninth, it was the section of theaters, gambling resorts, and honky-tonks ranging from plush brothels to noisy dance halls where streetwalkers hung out and a shakedown awaited the unwary. Wide open in its lawlessness—from which the police averted their eyes except for periodic, conveniently timed raids—the Tenderloin was the kind of safety valve necessary in an era of repression and prudery.

Thaw, on his arrival at the precinct station, identified himself as John Smith, a student, of 18 Lafayette Square, Philadelphia. When he was searched, the calling cards found on him read: Harry Kendall Thaw, Pittsburg.{1} He made no comment on this disclosure.

Why did you do this? the sergeant in charge asked him.

I can’t say, he replied apathetically.

By now several reporters had gathered, but when they asked him to make a statement for the press he refused.

He lit a cigarette while standing in front of the sergeant’s desk. Later, in a back room where he sat on a bench awaiting assignment to a cell, he pushed his straw hat to the back of his head, stretched his legs out in front of him, and lit another. The policemen noted that his eyes were fixed in a wide stare, but otherwise his composure was unruffled.

Some time after he had been locked in a cell, an adjoining cell was assigned to a rowdy drunk, who made such a commotion that Thaw called to a guard.

Say, Mr. Officer, he asked, can’t you oblige me by having that roomer next to me moved? He’s making a frightful racket.

After the man had been moved to a cell farther down the line, Thaw sat patiently on his bench for a time, then called the guard to ask for a drink of water.

It’s awfully kind of you, he said when the water was brought. I’ll remember you.

Later, he summoned the guard a third time to ask if he could have a cigar. Presumably because he was who he was, the guard obliged him, with one of his own cigars.

That’s a fine cigar, officer, Thaw commented after lighting up. I’ve always heard that policemen smoked good cigars. Now I know it.

Finally he tried to settle down for the night. Without removing his evening clothes, he folded his overcoat for a pillow and stretched out on his bench, the only bed provided. He drifted off to sleep, but not for long. At three o’clock the coroner arrived to talk with him. He tried to induce Thaw to discuss his crime, but Thaw again refused to talk until he had seen his lawyers. As the coroner was leaving the station, a reporter asked if he had noticed anything to indicate Thaw