In this exclusive excerpt from Saving Sin City, a new history of Gilded Era New York City and the first trial of the century, we’re introduced to unstable, violent millionaire Harry Thaw as he makes his way to New York from Pittsburgh, and becomes enamored with showgirl and model Evelyn Nesbit, who he would later marry. Nesbit and Thaw rose to national prominence after Thaw was arrested for the murder of architect Stanford White, who had assaulted Evelyn Nesbit as a young actress, then become involved in a complex and coercive affair with her.
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At the height of the 1901 theater season, Florodora is the most popular show on Broadway and Evelyn Nesbit is its biggest draw.
From early evening the scintillating night world between 14th and 23rd Street, blazing now with dazzling electric light, is alive with people heading for the stylish restaurants, theaters and brothels illuminated by incandescent lamps that turn the sky into a purple haze. Like moths to a flame, top-hatted eligibles, married magnates on the prowl, and newly minted middle-class hedonists flock to the Great White Way. Their luxurious carriages fill the streets, their well-tended horses add a rhythmic clop-clop to the hum of gaiety and excitement. A visiting journalist, awed by the resplendence of the New York night, writes of “huge electric trolleys sailing in an endless stream, profusely jeweled with electricity” and elevated trains “like luminous winged serpents, skimming through the air.”
At the Casino Theater, as Evelyn dresses for her performance as a “Charming Spanish Maiden” with the “Florodora Girls,” a mostly male audience is filling the seats inside the spectacularly exotic Moorish-Revival theater. Originally intended as a concert hall, it has become the city’s most popular showcase for light opera, frothy revues and burlesque. Described half-jokingly as “a respectable seraglio” conjured with faux Moorish flourishes and props, it is a place where a millionaire in search of a beautiful paramour might easily acquire a young showgirl beguiled by money.
The show’s featured Floradora Sextette is famous for its dancing, prancing, risqué allure (and for its heartbreakers and home wreckers) but Evelyn is pleasantly aware that the flood of flowers, lovesick letters and marriage proposals arriving each day at the theater is now mostly addressed to her. Encouraged by White, bolstered by her celebrity as a model and now as a performer, she is aware that 20th-century men have wearied of the fleshy voluptuousness typical of the old music hall sex idols and prefer a more modern look, one that she embodies with her slim figure and exotic allure.
What Evelyn is not aware of is that one of her most persistent anonymous correspondents is watching her most nights from the shadows of a darkened theater box. His letters, in which she has noted an unusually refined use of language, have lately escalated to include invitations to join him for lunch and $50 bills wrapped around American Beauty roses. She has politely declined the lunch invitations, explaining that she doesn’t make a practice of meeting with strange men or accepting their money. When at last he identifies himself as Mr. Munroe, Evelyn’s curiosity is piqued, but there are scores of similarly besotted men desperate to claim her affection, and none can offer her more glamor and excitement than Stanny.
Back home, Harry’s reputation as the black sheep of the family dynasty has never been in question.In fact, Mr. Munroe, who is well aware of his rival and determined to remove Evelyn from his influence, is in reality Harry K. Thaw, the rich but reprobate heir to a multimillion-dollar Pittsburgh fortune traceable to his father’s timely acquisition of Pennsylvania Railroad bonds. Back home, Harry’s reputation as the black sheep of the family dynasty has never been in question. As a child, he was prone to bouts of insomnia, incoherent babbling, and temper tantrums that made it difficult to retain household help. Harry’s father, recognizing that his bug-eyed, baby-talking, addled son was not normal and would squander his inheritance, had written strict limits on Harry’s income into his will—limits that Harry’s doting mother, Mary Copley Thaw, had nullified as soon as her husband was safely underground, raising her son’s annual allowance from $2,400 to a more comfortable $80,000. Even that has never covered the considerable expenditures necessitated by Harry’s perverse tastes. Barely out of adolescence, he was amusing himself betting on cockfights, brawling in bars and experimenting with whips, drugs and irregular sex. When reparations were called for, Harry could always count on the family-proud matriarch to pay off his victims, silence the press, and preserve the family honor.
Iron-willed, self-righteous, and utterly devoted to her three interests in life—Harry, the family honor and the Presbyterian Church—Mother Thaw has long ruled over a certain segment of Christian society as the dowager empress of Pittsburgh. Known for her good works on behalf of the church and for her minor philanthropy, she is often approached by the needy for help. Some receive it and some do not, as a mortified Mrs. Nesbit discovered. Once, at a low point in the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death, when the family was in dire straits, Evelyn’s mother had swallowed her pride to walk the few blocks that separated the Pittsburgh boardinghouse where she and her children were living from Lyndhurst, the Thaw family mansion. A hideous pile, gloomy and menacing, the mansion would play a different role in Evelyn’s life in just a few years, but, on this occasion, she was unaware of her mother’s desperate decision to approach the magisterial Widow Thaw for a handout, and of its humiliating outcome. After steeling herself and ringing the bell, Mrs. Nesbit was shocked when she was rudely turned away by a gray-gloved servant, an experience she never forgave or forgot.
When Harry had set his sights on entering New York society, mother and son had been crazily confident that New Yorkers would find Harry irresistible. After all, hadn’t Town Topics spread the news that Mrs. Astor, undisputed queen of New York society, had seen fit to admit him to one of her famous balls? Buying his way into society’s top tier promised to be as easy in New York as it had been to crack international society during his recent travels abroad.
For the past five years Harry had been tearing through Europe, ostensibly pursuing the education interrupted after his expulsion from Harvard for “immoral practices.” Instead, he had taken the opportunity to insinuate himself into the world of the wandering rich – the high-living American expatriates and Old World blue bloods whose lives looked to Harry like a perpetual moveable feast. Members of the European smart set, unaware of the bizarre behavior that had people back home calling him “Mad Harry” behind his back, had seen only a rich young American who dressed impeccably and spent lavishly.
“I am Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh,” he would announce to each new acquaintance, as though Pittsburgh were the Celestial Kingdom and he the heir to the throne.“I am Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh,” he would announce to each new acquaintance, as though Pittsburgh were the Celestial Kingdom and he the heir to the throne.
With eligible bachelors always in high demand, they had included him in their endless dinners, their elaborate excursions and manor-house weekends. He had reciprocated by hosting lavish dinners for them in the best European hotels, later filling his diary with details of his pointless extravagance and the names of his social conquests—the Philadelphia Phippses, the Duc and Duchesse d’Uzes (“so cheerful,”), and the lovely Lady Mary Montague. After a tête-à-tête with Lady Randolph Churchill, who is the daughter of Jerome’s uncle Leonard and has become her father’s match in amorous conquests, he wrote that despite being in mourning, she had been “charming.”
At one dinner in Paris, his guests had included social celebrities like Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago, the uber-aristocrat Vicomte Charles de la Rochefoucauld, and the fabulously rich Lord Lonsdale, notorious for devoting his wealth to a life of ostentatious pleasure. John Philip Sousa’s band had played for the party, offering rousing renditions of “The William Tell Overture” and Liszt’s Second Rhapsody, which, wrote Thaw, “lifted the roof off, as it were.” There were also rumors of less decorous revels, perhaps the most sensational a “Beauty Dinner,” also in Paris, for a bevy of “the more exclusive demimondaines of the city.” Each guest had reportedly found a thousands dollars’ worth of jewelry wrapped in her napkin, a party favor from the host, the only man present.
At first Harry’s social aspirations in New York seem destined to triumph over the rumors from across the Atlantic. He boasts of attending dinners “with all the better people” and seems to be riding high. It is generally accepted that the rich are fair game for gossip and that much of it is nothing but vented resentment or, worse, attempted blackmail. Tales of Harry’s questionable escapades are not taken too seriously until he subverts his own cause by treating them as amusing table conversation. Guests are aghast at one gathering when he regales them with a cheery account of the day he crashed his car into a shop window to punish an imprudent salesperson. The damages were paid, so what was the problem?
Tales of even more troubling behavior begin to gain credibility. Hushed up but leaked is an incident when Harry viciously flogged a young hotel employee, then literally rubbed salt in his wounds. Another story making the rounds involves his fondness for a West Side brothel where the madam obligingly provides girls for Harry to whip. His perversities are no secret in the carnal bazaars of the Tenderloin, where the reigning madams have been quick to peg Harry as one of those “Pittsburgh Queers.”
Society’s portals soon begin to slam shut. He is turned down by the Metropolitan, Century, Knickerbocker and Players Club. His attempt to ride a horse into the Union Club after being turned down for membership is a scandal so public as to test even the resourceful Mary Copley Thaw’s abilities to erase it from history. The Whist Club is one of the only men’s clubs where Harry is allowed entrance.
Far from blaming his own behavior for his humiliations, Harry, who has taken to heart his mother’s unwavering belief in the entitlements owed to members of the Thaw clan, easily deludes himself. He is convinced that he is being blackballed and maligned by certain influential “old money” members whose transgressions are overlooked while his are exaggerated. And the one he holds most responsible is Stanford White, whose celebrity and success in living the fast life in New York he most envies and resents. White, who parties with showgirls, hobnobs with high society and refuses himself nothing he fancies, seems to have everything Harry craves and has been raised to expect as the idol of Mother Thaw’s heart.
The germ of Harry’s obsessive hatred of White had predated his obsession with Evelyn, planted one evening not long after his arrival in New York when he made the mistake of snubbing someone he shouldn’t have. He had persuaded Frances Belmont, a member of the Floradora Sextette, to round up some of her female theater friends for a party, promising to invite some well-heeled men. Then, on the night before the planned festivities, Thaw had failed to return Frances’s greeting at Sherry’s restaurant, not wishing to acknowledge his acquaintance with a demimondaine while in the company of society friends. Furious at the snub, Frances had organized her revenge. Instead of attending Thaw’s party, she had shepherded her friends to White’s Tower Studio for an evening of spiteful merriment, leaving Thaw in the lurch. An item in Town Topics—“Florodora beauties sing for their supper in White’s Studio while Thaw orchestra fiddles to an empty room at Sherry’s”—had broadcast his humiliation, enraging Thaw, who blamed White for sabotaging his party. After that, Thaw would hold the man he referred to as “the beast” responsible for just about everything that would go wrong in his life. It would become a lifelong fixation.
Meanwhile, his plan to steal Evelyn from White is entering a new phase. On a day in late December 1901, when the city is sparkling in full holiday regalia, Evelyn agrees to accompany a friend who has been after her to have tea at Rector’s. Since the restaurant, a favorite haunt of the theatrical crowd and the so-called midnight supper society, is apt to be empty at teatime, Evelyn has been reluctant and, indeed, the place is almost deserted when the two women arrive. No sooner are they seated than, to Evelyn’s surprise, a tall, well-dressed man with an odd, mirthless grin approaches their table and asks to join them. She is even more surprised to learn that he is the man who has been bombarding her with letters and flowers for almost a year, the phantom Mr. Munroe who is, in fact, the notorious playboy from Pittsburgh, Harry K. Thaw.
This first encounter is not pleasant. Thaw’s eccentric manner, rapid speech and oyster eyes unnerve Evelyn. Annoyed at her friend’s subterfuge in arranging the meeting, she rises to leave but Thaw refuses to take her offered hand. He demands to know why her mother permits her to see Stanford White, “the beast” who blackballed him at the Knickerbocker Club. Repelled, she leaves the meeting convinced that the backstage gossip of Thaw’s unsavory habits is probably true. Years later, describing her unease when confronted for the first time by Thaw, she will remember sensing “some indefinable quality about his whole personality that frightened and repulsed me.”
This first encounter is not pleasant. Thaw’s eccentric manner, rapid speech and oyster eyes unnerve Evelyn.When she tells Stanny about her encounter with Mr. Munroe, alias Harry K. Thaw, he reacts with alarm. Harry Thaw is well known along both Fifth Avenue and Broadway, he warns, and she should keep away from him. “He’s a bounder, and worse!”
Evelyn is happy to comply and Thaw recedes, temporarily, back into the shadows, though the notes and the gifts never cease. Other men, too, continue to shower her with flowers and jewelry, but all are turned down. “I loved Stanford White,” she later recalled. “I wanted only to be with him.” In the first flush of their affair, they are seldom apart, thrilled with each other and with the sparkling city festooned for the holidays.
Stanny will naturally be spending Christmas day with his family but on Christmas Eve, which also happens to be Evelyn’s birthday, the lovers celebrate together in his Tower Studio, a fairyland made even more festive by a profusion of hothouse flowers. Filling the rose-tinted room with their heady scent are American Beauty roses, long-stemmed calla lilies, gardenias, orchids, hydrangeas and, saluting the season, potted holly bushes. On each blossom White has sprinkled a dusting of confectioner’s sugar to simulate snow, creating the surreal impression of a winter wonderland in a perfumed tropical paradise. Seating Evelyn on one of the “gorgeous divans” that had caught her eye on her first visit to the Tower, he tells her to close her eyes, then draws from behind his back an oversized red velvet stocking. Too excited to play the adult, she grabs it and empties its contents: a large pearl on a platinum chain, a set of white fox furs, a ruby and diamond ring, and two diamond solitaire rings. A week later on New Year’s Eve, Evelyn is delighted to be among the dazzling guests at White’s annual year-end party at the Tower and to know that the host, so universally adored, adores her.
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Excerpted from Saving Sin City: William Travers Jerome, Stanford White, and the Original Crime of the Century by Mary Cummings. Published by Pegasus Books. © Mary Cummings. Reprinted with permission.
