American Eve (37 page)

One morning when they were alone at breakfast for the first time in a week, Harry abruptly told her that he had made an appointment for her at his dentist. She went, figuring any time away from his “White madness” and Lyndhurst, even a trip to the dentist, was better than her living entombment. What she had not figured on was the psychotic extent of Harry’s jealousy. Not knowing on that first visit that Harry had explicitly directed his dentist to undo all the work White’s dentist had done four years earlier, an unsuspecting Evelyn was subjected to having her teeth “fixed.” Once the work was begun, it had to be finished or she risked infection and possible disfigurement. So, at some expense to Harry and nausea-inducing pain to Evelyn over the course of a month, any suspected trace of the dental work “the Beast” had paid for was drilled, pried, extracted, filed, and spit away. And then all redone exactly the same. (This would eventually weaken Evelyn’s teeth and damage some irreparably; little of its effect, however, was initially visible in pictures.)

PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES

On his better days, Harry had one or another photographer come to Lyndhurst to take more formal portraits of his Tweetums than those Evelyn had become accustomed to with Stanny. Harry’s first choice was his friend Burr McIntosh, who was a part-time New York actor and who had begun a high-class theatrical picture magazine, although McIntosh’s schedule made it difficult to comply with Harry’s often impulsive Pittsburgh requests.

Invariably, Harry insisted that Evelyn dress in white, preferably in ermines or starched white shirtwaists and skirts that made her look more like the innocent schoolgirl she had once been rather than a twenty-one-year -old despoiled former mistress turned repentant wife. Then, one day, Harry told Evelyn at breakfast that he had a photographic surprise for her and that it didn’t matter what she wore. An apprehensive Evelyn entered the “salon” (living room) an hour later, with a cautious attitude and Harry’s soft ham hands covering her eyes.

As he pulled his hands away, Evelyn saw the local “society” photographer whom Harry frequently hired, setting up his equipment. There was a large sheet hung somewhat haphazardly at one end of the room with a slit cut about a foot and a half wide in its center and about seven feet off the floor; one of Mother Thaw’s ugly carved oak chairs was positioned behind the sheet. Puzzled, Evelyn turned to Harry.

“It’s the thing,” he said excitedly, rubbing his hands together and grinning, “the thing. I am Bluebeard!”

Instead of panicking (and thinking perhaps he might rush at her with a scimitar), Evelyn realized what Harry meant. One of the more ghoulish fads at the time, popular with college girls, was to pose as one of

Evelyn posing as Bluebeard’s wives
at Lyndhurst, 1905.

Bluebeard’s wives. Girls would stand on chairs or boxes behind a sheet or quilt and stick their heads through slits made in the material. A girl would then have her crowning glory pulled up into a ponytail and pinned over her head onto the sheet, creating the illusion of a decapitated head. Some, to enhance the effect, added fake blood dripping from where the neck was supposedly severed and dusted flour or chalk on their faces to mimic the pallor of death.

But in deference to his mother, who grudgingly indulged Harry’s recurrent desire to have his “little girl-wife” photographed within the confines of the home, there would be no gore on the sheet. Nor would he mar Boofuls’s face with makeup of any kind. That morning and into the early afternoon, Evelyn stood on the chair, her head through the slit, her abundant uncombed mane fastened loosely above her head. As directed by a keyed-up and giggling Harry, the former professional poser assumed a different practiced expression each time the photographer took her picture. Several weeks later, he produced for Harry a small portfolio of the shots he had taken and the “special effects” he had achieved in several of them. One of those photos,
Evelyn’s Moods,
shows her as the multiple wives of Bluebeard, her “severed” head reproduced five times in the same photo with different facial expressions. It was Harry’s favorite, perhaps since he could forget she even had a body. He liked it so much that he included it in his book
The Traitor
twenty years, two asylum stays, and one divorce later.

Meanwhile, much to the socially sensitive Mother Thaw’s utter dismay, Evelyn’s ugly past kept rearing its pretty and still-attached head. The first time was Evelyn’s reappearance on a polar bear rug, in an image known popularly as
Beauty and the Beast,
used for a sausage ad on a calendar sent out by a local butcher, Haudenshields’s, that Christmas. The happy butcher thought this would be a superb New Year’s present and sent them to all his customers throughout Pittsburgh. The horrified matriarch tried in vain to have them recalled, and shuddered at the thought of so many people being reminded of Evelyn’s “polluted upbringing. ” Evelyn, on the other hand, was tickled pink and red, thinking it might be one of the best Christmas/birthday presents she had ever gotten. Then, in January 1906, the more infamous Eickemeyer photo,
In My Studio
(also known on postcards as
Little Butterfly
), was displayed at the Second American Photo Salon in none other than the Carnegie Art Gallery. The catalogue description reads, “The sultry showgirl, dressed as a Jap, is stretched at full-length on a magnificent polar bear rug.”

In March 1906, much to Evelyn’s delight, Harry announced that a trip to England was in the offing. He proposed that he, Evelyn, and his mother sail together, and proceeded to make the preparations. The fact that Mother Thaw announced a week later that she would go ahead on a different ship only sweetened the deal for young Mrs. Harry. The date of departure was finally set: June 28. The week of June 19, Tommy McCaleb, a friend of Harry’s who had come for a visit to Pittsburgh, accompanied the newlyweds to New York, where they would spend the week before sailing.

Postcard advertisement for
Mamzelle Champagne
, 1906.
Handwritten on the card,
"Scene of White murder by Harry Thaw. ”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Curtains: June 25, 1906

“I Could Love a Million Girls”

—Song title from Mamzelle Champagne, 1906

It was so unseasonably hot that day that the hippopotamus in the Central Park Zoo (who over time had become acclimated to New York’s weather) collapsed and later died from heat prostration. The abnormal temperatures drove hordes of people out of the oppressive city to the more inviting shores of Coney Island and the tent city of the Rockaways. There, at the poor man’s Newport, they could forget their jobs for a few hours and distract themselves in any number of gaudy, conspicuous, cheap ways, enjoying two-cent root beers off Surf Avenue, holding the towlines at Rockaway Beach, or riding the Tickler at Luna Park. Meanwhile, down at the pier in Manhattan, John D. Rockefeller’s new imported French wig, ordered for a costume ball, was held up by customs officials until a $75 duty fee was paid (which was ten times the average working man’s weekly salary). Gradually, the inhospitably muggy afternoon melted into a sultry June evening. Although not the longest day of the year, to some that night it would seem interminable.

A little before six o’clock, Evelyn, looking forward to a rare night out, prepared herself in her hotel suite, the most expensive one at the eminently respectable Lorraine on Forty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Nellie Leahy, Evelyn’s Irish maid for the last year, drew a second bath only a few hours after the first in the hopes that it would counteract the effects of the heat. The large windows in the suite were wide open, but all they let in was late-afternoon humidity. The burgundy moiré drapes hung limply. It seemed there wasn’t a breath of air left in New York City. Evelyn immersed herself in the cool water and smiled at the bar of Fairy soap that Nellie handed her; she had modeled for one of their ads. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Or two, even though it had only been three, perhaps four years.

Afterward, Nellie helped Evelyn slip on a new white satin summer gown covered from its high neck to the long trailing Directoire skirt with hand-embroidered English eyelets and trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon. The dress was of the type denounced only recently by the
New York Tribune
as “little short of revolutionary in its application of such searching sculptural indiscretion to the female figure.” As Nellie finished fastening the last of thirty pearl buttons in back, which ran from the waist to the neck, Evelyn swept her auburn-flecked hair into appropriate Gibson-girl stylishness. The slender Evelyn struck a familiar pose before a full-length mahogany cheval mirror as Nellie added the perfect finishing touches—a fashionably oversized ebony picture hat, a sterling silver hatpin from Tiffany, and sable gloves. The effect, as always, was stunning. As she studied herself in the mirror, she was reminded of Harry’s insistence on their honeymoon that they stay at a particular hotel in Chicago simply because it was named the Virginia. At least Evelyn was sure Harry would approve of her costume, as long as he didn’t realize that the hatpin was from Tiffany (whose building had been done by McKim, Mead, and “the Beast”).

As they had numerous times before, the Thaws were to go to dinner and a show, one of Harry’s choosing. Since coming to New York City a few days earlier for a brief stop before their European holiday, Harry had invariably controlled every detail of their daily routine—and with more vigilance than usual. Therefore, it was still a mystery to Evelyn which show they were going to see. She was sure, however, that it would be some musical comedy or comic operetta, since Harry maintained a single-minded soft spot for chorus girls and preferred
Higgledy-Piggledy
to
Hamlet.
Since her banishment from “theater-land” the year before and hibernation in the ivy-covered cave with her socially insecure mother-in-law, Evelyn attended the shows Harry selected with an air of wistfulness mixed with a whiff of regret and more than a little resentment.

Harry had gone early in the morning to the steamship office down on lower Broadway to get their tickets for the trip. He met a friend there, Jimmie Gerard, who was also booking passage for himself and his wife. They briefly chatted about the unusual weather, then Harry went back uptown, had lunch with Evelyn in their hotel suite, and spent the rest of the day at the Whist Club, or so he said. It was one of the few men’s clubs in New York City where he was still allowed entrance, in spite of his outlandish antics in the past—and his imagined blackballing by “the Beast.” Today, however, he seemed quietly engaged in making last-minute arrangements for their
bon voyage.

The primary object of Mother Thaw’s trip abroad was to attend, as had been announced in the Pittsburgh papers, the “fourteen-hundredth anniversary of the Hertford family, where she would join her daughter, the countess of Yarmouth.” Evelyn suspected that the matriarch and moral juggernaut was going to assess the state of the troubled marriage between Harry’s unfortunate sister, Alice, and “Count de Money.” Happily for Evelyn, Mother Thaw, who had replaced Evelyn’s mother as a cheerless hovering entity in her life, was already on her way to Liverpool “by cattle boat, which she preferred,” Evelyn recalled, because it was cheaper and thus in keeping with her professed Presbyterian sensibilities (although Evelyn saw a certain aptness to that mode of transportation for other, less Christian reasons). Mother Thaw’s pleasure-seeking son, however, would have none of that. He made sure he and his wife would follow in grand style on the German luxury liner the
Kaiserin Augusta.
Harry preferred the Teutonic ships to all others.

As they also had for several nights, the Thaws were to be accompanied that evening by Truxton Beale, a journalist, and Tommy McCaleb, the old family friend who had come to New York with them. Harry had of late developed a particular fascination with Beale, who several years earlier was rumored to have killed a man in California and was apparently acquitted under the “unwritten law” that a husband, following a “higher law,” has the right to punish, even kill, another man with impunity who has dishonored a wife or sister. Evidently, as Harry had related with great enthusiasm to Evelyn a number of times, “public opinion had been with [Beale] from the start.” Evelyn considered it a rather spurious basis for a friendship, but she had given up trying to figure out Harry’s particular whims when it came to his erratic social relationships.