Thursday, March 30, 2006
Revisiting the Stanford White - Harry K. Thaw - Evelyn Nesbitt story
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
This year, on June 26, will be the 100th anniversary of the murder of the noted neighborhood architect/ playboy by the gambler/millionaire Pittsburgh steel and railroad heir, in revenge for the seduction of the latter’s wife four years earlier, when she was 16, an artists’ model and Floradora showgirl.
This is a real neighborhood story - the seduction took place in White’s bachelor studio in the Giralda Tower of the 2nd Madison Square Garden that the architect designed in 1880 - young Evelyn may even have been the model for sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens’s (1848-1907) Diana, on top of the Garden tower, now displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The murder itself also took place on the roof of the Garden, during the premiere of Mam’zelleChampagne, a musical revue, while the chorus sang I Could Love A Million Girls (quell symbolism). The forgettable show lasted for 60 performances, due to the notoriety.
The Garden building was razed in 1925, with MSG moving to 50th & 8th Ave, subsequently to the top of Penn Station at33rd Street. The 51 Madison site at 26th Street in 1928 became the New York Life Insurance Company’s headquarters, the famous golden tower atop the six-story Cass Gilbert-designed building, a neighborhood landmark (so designated in 1975). The site has an interesting earlier history – it was the passenger railhead of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which in 1871 moved to Grand Central, and the building became P. T. Barnum’s Monster Geological and Classical Hippodrome, then Gilmore’s Garden, venue of bicycle races that would rival in popularity today’s automobile events.
More local references. White, member of the McKim, Meade and White architectural firm, was the designer of the original Pennsylvania Station, the marble Washington Square Arch (1880), as well as the Century Club on East 16th Street and the reconstruction of the Players Club on Gramercy Park (both landmarked). He and Mrs. White had their city apartment at 122 East 23rd Street.
At the 1st Thaw trial in 1907, following what was dubbed Crime of the Century by the Hearst press, Evelyn testified that she was seduced with a doctored drink while visiting White, who had a red velvet rope swing in his studio, for the entertainment of his women visitors. Thaw’s defense was insanity, and the jury was hung. The 2nd trial a year later sent Thaw to the Matawan asylum in New Jersey, from which he walked away in 1913, fled to Canada, and was acquitted, in a new trial. He returned, spent more time in funny farms, attempted suicides and wrote The Traitor in 1926, a book in which he denounced White for his many seductions. The bizarre-acting Thaw got involved in more fracases, and died of a heart attack in Miami in 1947, at the age of 76. .
Evelyn Nesbit (1885-1967), an exceptionally beauty, as an atists’ model and actress was the financial mainstay, from an early age, of a genteel family left destitute with the death of the breadwinner. She was known to many from 1903 postcards, showing her on a polar bear skin rug and as a Beauty and the Beast, and Charles Dana Gibson painted her. Her life floundered after the trial – Thaw and she divorced 1915, without a promised settlement (he disputed the parentage of her son, Russell William Thaw, 1910-84, a decorated WWII pilot), and had a long love affair with John Barrymore, whom she would not marry. Her career involved silent movies, vaudeville, café dancing and club management. Eventually she did marry her dance partner Jack Clifford (1880-1956), separated and divorced, and was the technical advisor in a 1955 film of her life, The Girl On the Red Velvet Swing, starring Joan Collins. Nesbitt was also portrayed in the 1981 film version of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, by actress Elizabeth McGovern. Nesbitt’s 1934 book Prodigal Days, The Untold Story, claims that Harry Thaw's shooting of White was premeditated, and had been planned over a period of some time. Late in life she stated that her only true love had been White, who knew her as a child, and may have paid for her education in a New Jersey private academy.
What prompted Harry Thaw to commit the irrational action? The White/Thaw/Nesbit mystery has been the subject of a score of examinations, biographies, fictional works, broadcast media productions, two movies and poems, starting with Benjamin Atwell’s The Great Harry Thaw Case, Or A Woman’s sacrifice in 1917, a perishable 297-page work of few surviving copies, reputedly commissioned by the family to influence the 2nd trial. There was also a PBS American Experience TV show, just days ago, that prompted me to revisit my resources on the neighborhood legend, a subject on which I last wrote some 10 years ago.
This year, on June 26, will be the 100th anniversary of the murder of the noted neighborhood architect/ playboy by the gambler/millionaire Pittsburgh steel and railroad heir, in revenge for the seduction of the latter’s wife four years earlier, when she was 16, an artists’ model and Floradora showgirl.
This is a real neighborhood story - the seduction took place in White’s bachelor studio in the Giralda Tower of the 2nd Madison Square Garden that the architect designed in 1880 - young Evelyn may even have been the model for sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens’s (1848-1907) Diana, on top of the Garden tower, now displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The murder itself also took place on the roof of the Garden, during the premiere of Mam’zelleChampagne, a musical revue, while the chorus sang I Could Love A Million Girls (quell symbolism). The forgettable show lasted for 60 performances, due to the notoriety.
The Garden building was razed in 1925, with MSG moving to 50th & 8th Ave, subsequently to the top of Penn Station at33rd Street. The 51 Madison site at 26th Street in 1928 became the New York Life Insurance Company’s headquarters, the famous golden tower atop the six-story Cass Gilbert-designed building, a neighborhood landmark (so designated in 1975). The site has an interesting earlier history – it was the passenger railhead of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which in 1871 moved to Grand Central, and the building became P. T. Barnum’s Monster Geological and Classical Hippodrome, then Gilmore’s Garden, venue of bicycle races that would rival in popularity today’s automobile events.
More local references. White, member of the McKim, Meade and White architectural firm, was the designer of the original Pennsylvania Station, the marble Washington Square Arch (1880), as well as the Century Club on East 16th Street and the reconstruction of the Players Club on Gramercy Park (both landmarked). He and Mrs. White had their city apartment at 122 East 23rd Street.
At the 1st Thaw trial in 1907, following what was dubbed Crime of the Century by the Hearst press, Evelyn testified that she was seduced with a doctored drink while visiting White, who had a red velvet rope swing in his studio, for the entertainment of his women visitors. Thaw’s defense was insanity, and the jury was hung. The 2nd trial a year later sent Thaw to the Matawan asylum in New Jersey, from which he walked away in 1913, fled to Canada, and was acquitted, in a new trial. He returned, spent more time in funny farms, attempted suicides and wrote The Traitor in 1926, a book in which he denounced White for his many seductions. The bizarre-acting Thaw got involved in more fracases, and died of a heart attack in Miami in 1947, at the age of 76. .
Evelyn Nesbit (1885-1967), an exceptionally beauty, as an atists’ model and actress was the financial mainstay, from an early age, of a genteel family left destitute with the death of the breadwinner. She was known to many from 1903 postcards, showing her on a polar bear skin rug and as a Beauty and the Beast, and Charles Dana Gibson painted her. Her life floundered after the trial – Thaw and she divorced 1915, without a promised settlement (he disputed the parentage of her son, Russell William Thaw, 1910-84, a decorated WWII pilot), and had a long love affair with John Barrymore, whom she would not marry. Her career involved silent movies, vaudeville, café dancing and club management. Eventually she did marry her dance partner Jack Clifford (1880-1956), separated and divorced, and was the technical advisor in a 1955 film of her life, The Girl On the Red Velvet Swing, starring Joan Collins. Nesbitt was also portrayed in the 1981 film version of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, by actress Elizabeth McGovern. Nesbitt’s 1934 book Prodigal Days, The Untold Story, claims that Harry Thaw's shooting of White was premeditated, and had been planned over a period of some time. Late in life she stated that her only true love had been White, who knew her as a child, and may have paid for her education in a New Jersey private academy.
What prompted Harry Thaw to commit the irrational action? The White/Thaw/Nesbit mystery has been the subject of a score of examinations, biographies, fictional works, broadcast media productions, two movies and poems, starting with Benjamin Atwell’s The Great Harry Thaw Case, Or A Woman’s sacrifice in 1917, a perishable 297-page work of few surviving copies, reputedly commissioned by the family to influence the 2nd trial. There was also a PBS American Experience TV show, just days ago, that prompted me to revisit my resources on the neighborhood legend, a subject on which I last wrote some 10 years ago.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:42 PM 
