American Eve (45 page)

D.A. William Travers Jerome,
circa 1900.

affair with a woman twenty years younger than himself. If he feared at all the revelation of this fact (which would certainly hurt his chances of winning the case, since any number of political enemies, as well as the press, would have loved to expose him as a hypocrite and an immoral fraud), he didn’t show it.

As Evelyn looked at the picture postcard, the store owner cautioned her: “Jerome loves lunacy experts. . . . I should not back the lunacy bugs if I were you.”

He then suggested that she hightail it out of town until the whole thing blew over. Evelyn thanked him, fearing that soon enough she might have to occupy the witness box “and face this remorseless man,” this “square-jawed lawyer, all brain and ice-cold logic.”

A pensive Evelyn bought the penny card and took it home with her, not aware that her own lovely face occupied every slot on the other side of the revolving rack. She studied the picture for hours, trying to shore herself up for what the newspapers were already predicting would have to be “the performance of Herself’s life to save Himself.” Several days later, Evelyn read what Jerome told reporters in anticipation of his cross-examination of the fair young Mrs. Thaw: “Those who find pleasure in the mental anguish of their fellows [should] prepare for a treat.” The cocky D.A. also bragged that if she took the stand, he intended to tear Evelyn Thaw “limb from limb and exhibit the interesting remains triumphantly. ” Asked by reporters in Atlanta, where he had been vacationing, if he thought this would be a difficult case to prosecute, Jerome answered that it was simply a case of one man killing another out of jealousy: “Why, it’s just an everyday police court story.” But as Jerome would quickly learn, nothing about this case was ordinary.

Day after day, as the papers kept the story on the front pages, pounding away at the popular theme of “moral lepers in high places.” The “thundering from pulpits across the land grew positively deafening,” while the outpouring of denunciation and insinuation was astonishing. Anonymous girls who had never moved from the back of the chorus suddenly emerged to tell tales about the hive of depravity inhabited by White and friends in his corrupted Garden. There is little doubt that at least some of them were paid by the Thaws. Irvin S. Cobb guessed correctly when he wrote in the
World
that money was “poured out by the Thaw family, and sucked up, like water in a bed of sand.”

As the trial date neared, the district attorney Jerome described the conditions under which his office was operating in terms of eager witnesses willing to tell all:

As you know, the witnesses so far—most of them—have not been gifted with reticence. These women love to talk. Miss Doris So-and-so, or Miss Irene Such-and-such, will come down to the office and tell Mr. Garvan or another of my assistants what she purports to know. But the matter doesn’t end there. Just outside the office there will be a newspaperman lying in wait. He takes Miss Doris or Miss Irene . . . and carries her off to some cafe. Then comes a bottle of wine. Over the wine they talk. Naturally what the young lady has to say becomes somewhat embellished. . . . It’s a great game.

A NARROW ESCAPE

In the last week of January 1907, a stunned Jack Barrymore received a summons from the Manhattan district attorney. Barrymore, who had surrendered to the genetic pull of acting, had been preparing for a role in his sister Ethel’s revival of
Captain Jinks
in Boston. But the Manhattan D.A.’s office had a juicier off-Broadway role chosen for him. Jerome and the prosecution expected him to appear as one of the “dozens of men” Evelyn had known before she married Thaw. Barrymore obeyed the summons and came to New York.

In his brief preliminary discussion with Assistant D.A. Garvan, Jack offered little in the way of essential information. He said he had not known Thaw at all, nor had he ever heard Evelyn mention the name; as far as he knew, her relationship with White was “like a daughter.” The image of their fateful all-night “frolic” and White’s stern, unwavering gaze the next morning leaped to his mind immediately. To his relief, he was told he was not yet needed as a witness, and he went back to Boston. But it soon dawned on Jack (or his family’s lawyers) that he might cast himself in a bad light if he returned to testify at the trial, since he would have to admit to their
affaire de coeur
and perhaps say under oath things he would rather leave unsaid in open court, if not for his own sake then for Evelyn’s. Jack knew well enough when to make his exit. Within a matter of days, the press reported that young Jack Barrymore had been “threatened with pneumonia” and had gone to a sanatorium. And even though the headlines identified him as the latest figure in the “Thaw, White, and Nesbit Case,” he would make no grand reappearance at the Thaw trial. Jerome was livid; as he grabbed at the slick roots of his hair, he more than suggested that Barrymore was pulling a fast one. “Who goes to Maine in February to combat pneumonia?” he yelled.

But in spite of Jerome’s frustration, a relieved Jack sequestered himself as far away from the trial as he could for the duration. After a brief stop in Rockland, Maine, on February 8, Barrymore arrived at his destination, the Mansion House Hotel, situated in the little-known town of Poland Spring.

OPENING REMARKS, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1907

The naive and seemingly desperate need by a significant percentage of the citizens to hang on to outdated stereotypes made it easy for them to accept the image of the gallant husband and innocent wife versus the suave and insistent seducer who threatened hearth and home. But more cynical spectators dissected the latest rumors that filled the daily columns regarding the so-called hero and his Angel-Child. Hadn’t a girl named Ethel Thomas brought suit against Thaw in 1902? (At that time, Thomas had recounted the day when she and Harry were walking down the street to his apartments at the Bedford Hotel. He stopped in a store and came out with a dog whip. When Ethel asked him what it was for, he replied laughingly, “That’s for you, dear.” She thought he was joking, but once they got to his room, with a wild look in his eyes, he beat her until her clothes were in tatters.) Wasn’t this the same Harry Thaw who was a suspected dope fiend? Hadn’t Evelyn, the studio model and chorus girl, been named in not one but two divorce suits before the age of eighteen? And hadn’t Evelyn been involved with the rakish and increasingly and publicly dissolute Jack Barrymore? With most indications to the contrary brushed aside, such as those published in the generally impartial
New York Times,
the reactionaries and radicals on all sides seemed intent upon viewing the story as the last grand performance of Victorian theater. And everyone wanted a front-row seat.

The most remarkable thing about the opening remarks in the trial was their brevity, on the part of both Garvan, Jerome’s assistant, and the defense. They seemed downright anticlimactic in light of all the hoopla leading up to that day. The reason, many figured, for the relative briefness of the respective openings, which finished before the noon recess, was that neither side wanted to show its hand. It took Garvan all of ten minutes to offer that the state intended to prove that the defendant “shot and killed with premeditation and intent to kill one Stanford White” and that “the purpose of punishment of crime is to set an example” for the community. Throughout this, Harry sat flushed and fairly immobile, his head downcast, as if studying something on the blank pad just beneath his nose. He began to drum nervously on the table with his fingers, a habit White had also possessed.

The first witness was called, a grim-faced Lawrence White. Harry did not look up once at the nineteen-year-old as he sat in the witness box. The next witness was Myer Cohen, musical publisher of the
Mamzelle Champagne
score, who had witnessed the murder and imitated Thaw’s stealthy approach to White’s table seconds before the shooting. Several witnesses later it was Paul Brudi’s turn. Dressed in his fireman’s uniform, Brudi related the brief conversation he had had with Thaw in the moments after the shooting. Soon after, it was Officer Anthony Debes’s turn, who repeated what Brudi had reported. He stated that Thaw had proclaimed with great gusto, “I killed him because he ruined my wife!” He then paused briefly, and said perhaps Thaw had said, “He ruined my life.” He was dismissed.

The procession of witnesses continued with the coroner’s physician who performed White’s autopsy describing the gruesome nature of his wounds and his death by cerebral hemorrhage. The bullets he had taken out of White were entered into evidence, and when they were passed to the defense table for inspection, everyone but Harry looked. His eyes wandered back and forth, but as one reporter close to his table wrote, “not even a fleeting glance was thrown in the direction” of the deadly bullets.

And then a shocked courtroom heard from the coroner that, based on his postmortem findings, Stanford White hadn’t had long to live. Had White not been murdered, the doctor stated, he would have succumbed very soon to Bright’s disease, incipient tuberculosis, or a “serious degeneration of the liver.” After a few more witnesses, the prosecution rested. His head down, Harry stared, as if boring a hole into the table.

When Thaw’s hopelessly outmoded lawyer, Gleason, took the floor, his old-fashioned thunderous orator’s voice, compared to the easy conversational tone of Garvan, provoked snickers and nudging smiles from a number of the reporters. The crowd was once again astounded when Gleason stated that Harry Thaw believed he had acted upon the command of divine Providence. As a hush fell over the three hundred spectators, Gleason said that Thaw was insane at the time of the killing, because of both stress and heredity. As reporters wrote furiously, Gleason further stated that Thaw had acted in self-defense and without malice, believing that White had made threats against his life. He finished by claiming that Thaw did not know the wrongful nature or quality of his act at the time he committed the offense. Harry Thaw cringed in his seat at the confusing and contradictory remarks, delivered like a dotty old maid schoolmarm’s recitation. This was not what the Pittsburgh tribe had agreed upon in weeks of pretrial powwows. The defense was supposed to be a temporary brainstorm, but Gleason offered at least four defenses— and all of them horribly wrong, as far as Harry was concerned.

Then the elderly Dr. C. C. Wiley, the Thaws’ family physician since Harry was a child, was called to the stand by Gleason to firm up the case for Harry’s insanity. Dr. Wiley would prove to be anything but what his name suggested under the pitiless cross-examination of Jerome. He was but one of several physicians and alienists who would be called to describe Harry’s various ailments as a child. Harry, pale and nervous, twitched at the slightest unusual noise in the courtroom, and the frequent scrape of a chair was like fingernails on a blackboard to him. It didn’t take long before Wiley was stuttering and faltering under Jerome’s hail of questions, aimed at discrediting him as an expert in matters of insanity since he was a general physician and not an authority on the brain. By the end of the day, the only thing clear to those in the courtroom was that an exhausted and shriveled Dr. Wiley needed a vacation. Harry’s sanity remained open to question.

The next day, Gleason wandered off the topic so much that even Jerome quietly but firmly tried to get him back on track. The need for a specialist in criminal law was obvious. But a perverse Harry, feeling bad for Gleason, and having already fired the “Traitor” as well as Black and Olcott, wouldn’t dismiss the rattled man unless he asked to be fired. After the fiasco with the physician-not-alienist Dr. Wiley, Harry, Evelyn, Mother Thaw, and half a dozen other members of the legal team gathered in the anteroom next to the court, where Gleason, in tears, asked officially to be discharged as chief counsel.

NAPOLEON COMES EAST

Sitting in his cell as precious moments ticked by, Harry Thaw foamed over his own lawyers’ attempts to paint him as a madman. His whole self-image was tied up in the belief that he had killed White to protect the young girls of New York. To claim he didn’t know what he was doing when he shot White threw him once again into almost spastic convulsions, much to the amusement of those inmates of the state in the adjoining cells who didn’t have their food sent in from Delmonico’s.

Tearing at his soiled shirt collar and denouncing his legal team for attempting to proceed with the insanity defense against his specific directives, Harry saw to it that within a matter of hours after Gleason’s resignation, through his mother, a new head counsel was hired, one whose old-fashioned but far more cunning sensibilities fit snugly with the Thaws’ paradoxically outmoded yet nouveau riche ideas as to what was acceptable and what was not—and how to bend the media to their advantage. He was Mr. Delphin Delmas from San Francisco. Once he was at the helm, he assured Mother Thaw over the phone, there would be no more talk of madness.

Although there were times when Evelyn was barred from hearing certain pretrial testimony in the courtroom, what she couldn’t hear in the actual courtroom, she was nonetheless able to read, verbatim, in transcripts of the daily proceedings in the papers. So could the rest of the