New York, 1906, the age of the robber barons. Teddy Roosevelt had not yet gotten around to busting the trusts. Tariffs and corrupt politics had made it possible for ambitious pragmatists to become millionaires. The upper crust was small and kept to itself. Society columns kept track of their activities but that's all. In 1906, one percent of the country's population controlled ninety percent of its wealth. Working people were putting in sixty hour weeks and viewed the very rich with a mixture of suspicion and envy.
Until a playboy named Harry Shaw, heir to a great Pittsburgh fortune, shot a famous architect, Stanford White, through the head in the ballroom atop Madison Square Garden, which White himself had built, in a dispute over a beautiful showgirl, Evelyn Nesbit. It was a scandal that had everything.
There were about fifty newspapers in New York at the time and many of them represented the new yellow journalism that thrived on rumors and scandals. And the affair at Madison Square Garden burst open the private lives of the beau monde like a festering pustule. Wow! Most of the journalistic attention went not to Stanford White or even his murderer, Thaw, but to Evelyn Nesbit, who had recently become Mrs. Thaw. One might wonder why. One can easily find the answer by Googling her name and clicking on "images." She'd been immortalized as "The Gibson Girl," and also immortalized, at least for the time being, as my desktop background. I know that there's an age difference but I don't care.
Both Thaw and Nesbit were from Pittsburgh, the former the son of an immensely wealthy railroad speculator, the latter born in poverty. And poverty in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century was REAL poverty -- an abject, grinding absence of sustenance and organic grace -- with no safety nets for the poor. When Nesbit's father died, her mother turned the home into a boarding house but couldn't make ends meet, even after selling the furniture. They moved to New York where Nesbit became famous for her beauty.
She modeled and appeared on Broadway, eventually to be seduced by Stanford White when she was just past the age of sixteen. The middle-aged, married, Stanford White was a powerful, handsome, skilled architect who lived life at warp speed. His firm built the Boston Public Library, Pennsylvania Station, and did the interior decorations for President Teddy Roosevelt. Atop Madison Square Garden, White placed a nude statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt.
White was seeing other girls and Nesbit began seeing other men to make White jealous. She had innumerable celebrities in her thrall but was swept up by Harry Thaw, so rich that he lighted his cigars with $100 bills, but odd too. He pulled stunts that weren't so much amusing as they were bizarre. Riding a horse into a gentleman's club, whipping some girls. Thaw, by the simple method of lavishing attention and money on her, wooed her away from the older man and they were married.
In Paris, she confessed to Thaw that she'd had a sexual affair with Stanford White and had been sixteen years old when he took her virginity. In her memoirs, Nesbit claims White made her drink drugged champagne and she passed out before he took advantage of her unconscious nubility. Of course, it's easy to make claims like that. It's good to be a victim. In any case, Thaw was enraged and when they returned to New York, he murdered Stanford White.
It was great theater. The bottomless fortune of the Thaw family was brought to bear on the public's perception. They hired a PR man. They published the story from Thaw's point of view, in a book entitled "For Sake Of Wife And Home." They funded a play in which Thaw was the hero and the villain was named "Black" instead of "White." Thaw of course was put in prison, where he dined on squab and champagne sent in from Delmonico's. (I'm choking with laughter as I write this.) A survey revealed that the public wanted Thaw's acquittal by a ratio of two to one. A great deal depended on Nesbit's testimony. The family assured her she would be well rewarded. She related her sad tale to the jury while Thaw wept.
The first jury was deadlocked. In the second trial, Thaw's lawyers used the insanity defense. It worked, and Thaw was sent to an asylum. The upper crust fought to have the trial transcript kept secret because its publication might "corrupt the morals of the less well bred." After seven years in an asylum he was pronounced sane and released. He divorced Nesbit at once. She went on to a vaudeville career and remained popular, dying in 1967.
Great theater indeed.
Until a playboy named Harry Shaw, heir to a great Pittsburgh fortune, shot a famous architect, Stanford White, through the head in the ballroom atop Madison Square Garden, which White himself had built, in a dispute over a beautiful showgirl, Evelyn Nesbit. It was a scandal that had everything.
There were about fifty newspapers in New York at the time and many of them represented the new yellow journalism that thrived on rumors and scandals. And the affair at Madison Square Garden burst open the private lives of the beau monde like a festering pustule. Wow! Most of the journalistic attention went not to Stanford White or even his murderer, Thaw, but to Evelyn Nesbit, who had recently become Mrs. Thaw. One might wonder why. One can easily find the answer by Googling her name and clicking on "images." She'd been immortalized as "The Gibson Girl," and also immortalized, at least for the time being, as my desktop background. I know that there's an age difference but I don't care.
Both Thaw and Nesbit were from Pittsburgh, the former the son of an immensely wealthy railroad speculator, the latter born in poverty. And poverty in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century was REAL poverty -- an abject, grinding absence of sustenance and organic grace -- with no safety nets for the poor. When Nesbit's father died, her mother turned the home into a boarding house but couldn't make ends meet, even after selling the furniture. They moved to New York where Nesbit became famous for her beauty.
She modeled and appeared on Broadway, eventually to be seduced by Stanford White when she was just past the age of sixteen. The middle-aged, married, Stanford White was a powerful, handsome, skilled architect who lived life at warp speed. His firm built the Boston Public Library, Pennsylvania Station, and did the interior decorations for President Teddy Roosevelt. Atop Madison Square Garden, White placed a nude statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt.
White was seeing other girls and Nesbit began seeing other men to make White jealous. She had innumerable celebrities in her thrall but was swept up by Harry Thaw, so rich that he lighted his cigars with $100 bills, but odd too. He pulled stunts that weren't so much amusing as they were bizarre. Riding a horse into a gentleman's club, whipping some girls. Thaw, by the simple method of lavishing attention and money on her, wooed her away from the older man and they were married.
In Paris, she confessed to Thaw that she'd had a sexual affair with Stanford White and had been sixteen years old when he took her virginity. In her memoirs, Nesbit claims White made her drink drugged champagne and she passed out before he took advantage of her unconscious nubility. Of course, it's easy to make claims like that. It's good to be a victim. In any case, Thaw was enraged and when they returned to New York, he murdered Stanford White.
It was great theater. The bottomless fortune of the Thaw family was brought to bear on the public's perception. They hired a PR man. They published the story from Thaw's point of view, in a book entitled "For Sake Of Wife And Home." They funded a play in which Thaw was the hero and the villain was named "Black" instead of "White." Thaw of course was put in prison, where he dined on squab and champagne sent in from Delmonico's. (I'm choking with laughter as I write this.) A survey revealed that the public wanted Thaw's acquittal by a ratio of two to one. A great deal depended on Nesbit's testimony. The family assured her she would be well rewarded. She related her sad tale to the jury while Thaw wept.
The first jury was deadlocked. In the second trial, Thaw's lawyers used the insanity defense. It worked, and Thaw was sent to an asylum. The upper crust fought to have the trial transcript kept secret because its publication might "corrupt the morals of the less well bred." After seven years in an asylum he was pronounced sane and released. He divorced Nesbit at once. She went on to a vaudeville career and remained popular, dying in 1967.
Great theater indeed.
