American Eve (26 page)

Up close, his doughy baby face was particularly unsettling in contrast to his exceptional height. Of course, with the right lighting and sartorial embellishments, Harry could be considered handsome enough to charm most women, especially those who knew that he was heir-apparent to a $40 million coke and railroad fortune. But the Angel-Child was not most women.

Logo of George Tilyou’s Coney Island
Steeplechase Park, circa 1900.

As Elba sat self-consciously sipping her Chinese tea, she listened to the one-sided conversation between a very earnest Mr. Munroe and a silent Evelyn. It was immediately clear to Evelyn that this was a man who “took his position in life very seriously and his world value too seriously” as he gesticulated with increasing energy and blinked his eyes for emphasis as he talked. In a flurry of words, one topic snowballed inoffensively into the next. But when Harry’s ramble moved in an unflattering direction about one of Evelyn’s chorus-girl friends (he called her fat and said that women should never let themselves gain too much flesh), Evelyn jumped to the girl’s defense. He seemed taken aback by the assertiveness of her response, as if people had never challenged his views on anything before. They probably hadn’t. Then, much to Evelyn’s surprise, he suddenly introduced the subject of Stanford White.

Mr. Munroe’s animated face turned solemn as he told Evelyn that she should keep away from White, “that he was very ugly, and not only that, he was married.” Evelyn offered one of her inscrutable modeling looks and said she knew only good things about White. She shot a surreptitious glance at Elba, who simply stared into her teacup, as if trying to read the leaves. Thirty minutes had passed when Mr. Munroe rose up to his imposing full height and asked Evelyn where she was staying. Evelyn replied that she and her mother were happy in an apartment in the city but she declined to tell him where. She said she was not in the habit of giving strangers, even well-dressed ones, her address. But her answer was inconsequential. Mr. Harry “Munroe” Thaw already knew where she lived. He routinely employed a rather extensive and elaborate network of spies. He boasted to friends that his men “bested Pinkerton’s” in ferreting out information, from Manhattan to Monaco. Indeed, he had learned about Evelyn’s love of books and animals from “informants” who stretched back to his sacred smoky city.

For a brief moment, the flustered man seemed to be in suspended animation as he hovered over his diminutive dream girl, so deliciously and unbelievably close at last. He then bowed like the prep school boy he had been and said he had some pressing business matters to attend to. Evelyn countered by saying she had some urgent errands as well and pulled Elba to her feet. Harry listened intently to what he imagined to be the lisp of silk against skin as his Angel-Child and her girlfriend swept quickly through of the dining room and out the revolving glass door beneath the talons of the griffin. He automatically threw down a fifty-dollar bill and left.

For whatever reason, probably because his simpering expression and “goo-goo eyes” were so unsettling, Evelyn must have looked at his hands throughout the conversation because Harry’s peculiar recollection over twenty years later was that “she liked my wrists and hands.” Thinking back to that first encounter, Evelyn also recalled his hands, which like his face, were smooth as a baby’s, indicating that “he had never labored at all in his thirty-two years.” Had she known more about him, Evelyn would also have known that Harry never had the slightest interest in the family business. Any pressing matters he had were only in his head.

Upon immediate analysis of the encounter, Evelyn said she felt an overwhelming sense of relief when he left, and that at best this Mr. Munroe was just one of the throng of cordial-enough young men who admired her from beyond the footlights, which is where she wanted him to stay (young being relative, since he was almost twice her age, at thirty-two) . She also figured that, as with many other potential Broadway swains, Mr. Munroe’s curiosity had been satisfied, and that would be the end of things. She told a perplexed Elba that she had no desire to meet him again. Elba offered no response, nor did she disclose to Evelyn the true identity of her intensely infatuated admirer.

But Harry K. Thaw was used to getting his way, and he began to pursue Evelyn with what she initially saw as the same kind of flattering and harmless if overly zealous attention dozens of others had shown her. Eventually, they all admitted defeat. But not Mr. Munroe. As she put it, he “was persistent in pursuing me, everlastingly.” Evelyn was, of course, unaware as to why he was so determined to win her or how he intended to, if need be, shatter the fragile bell jar of her existence. Nor did she know that the day after her first encounter with him, a fervent and undaunted Thaw had in fact gone to see her mother at their apartment at the Wellington to press his case for Evelyn’s undivided attention. When Mrs. Nesbit opened the door, there stood Pittsburgh’s infamous “squandering son of untold wealth,” who in revealing his true identity to “the mamma” needn’t have bothered to add “of Pittsburgh.”

The shock of recognition nearly floored Mrs. Nesbit, who stood for a moment as if seeing a hallucination or some appalling apparition. Harry’s outlandish escapades had been published from time to time in the hometown papers along with his photo, neither of which a prepubescent Evelyn had seen. But her mother had. Of course, Harry didn’t know about the demeaning incident some years earlier at his own family’s threshold, when their butler had dismissed “the mendicant mamma” with a wave of his gloved hand.

According to Harry, the brief meeting in the anteroom of the plush apartment did not go well.

“She was not enthusiastic,” he wrote. “I knew why later. This mother should have known better.”

Later that day, when Evelyn returned home from a modeling session, she mentioned to her mother the strange and uncomfortable lunch date she had endured the previous day. Predictably, Mrs. Nesbit neglected to mention her own disconcerting encounter with the same man, whose real identity she too withheld from Evelyn. She also failed to appreciate the irony of having turned a Thaw away from her door as he begged for her daughter’s attention.

A week or so later, an unsuspecting Evelyn was invited to a pre-theater dinner by another actress friend. Among the dozen guests at the restaurant, coincidentally, was Mr. Munroe, whose seat was coincidentally right next to Evelyn’s. She greeted this social ambush with her model’s smile, which Mr. Munroe read as a coded sign of reciprocated affection. Throughout the sweetbread-and-mushroom patties, halibut, rice croquettes, currant jelly, almond cakes, and polite dinner conversation, not one of the eleven accomplices gave away Mr. Munroe’s little secret. It wasn’t until after the café noir and crème de menthe that, appropriately enough when entering the theater, the smiling man declared “with dramatic earnestness, ” his voice trembling with pride, “that he was not whomever Mr. Such and Such.”

“I am not Mr. Munroe,” he told Evelyn, with a sweep of his arm. “I am Harry Kendall Thaw, of Pittsburgh!”

As Evelyn later described it, “a disguised Napoleon revealing himself to a near-sighted veteran on Elba could not have made the revelation with greater aplomb.” She continued: “It struck me as funny at the time . . . so characteristic was it that I do not think I ever knew him much better at any subsequent time than I did at that moment.” According to her, the pie-eyed pursuer hung fire in the elegant lobby, waiting on twitchy tenterhooks for her reaction. Seventeen-year-old Evelyn gazed at him with some bewilderment, wondering from the tone of his voice what it was he expected her to do—“stagger back, turn pale?” She contented herself and Harry by exclaiming “Indeed!” There seemed little else to say.

“You’ve heard of me?” he replied, with a supercilious smirk. Evelyn said that when she was growing up as a girl in Pittsburgh, the name of Thaw carried with it the same weight that a name like Vanderbilt or Astor carried in Newport or New York. Anyone, she told him, who knew Pittsburgh knew of the Thaws. Harry went stiff with self-importance and grinned from ear to ear. And Evelyn flashed on the face of Steeplechase.

Speaking in his distinctive Gatling-gun manner, within the space of a few minutes, Thaw then disclosed to her the half-truths and irrational saga of his previous deceptions: why he had sent the flowers wrapped in bills, why he had felt it necessary to send letters under a nom de plume, and so on. He knew, he explained, that she was involved in a financially precarious career, which is why he sent money. He had meant no disrespect. Moreover, he said he knew what an impact his identity would have on her, because as Evelyn saw it through his eyes, “Harry Thaw, of Pittsburgh, was Somebody.” And he had wanted to wait for the exact right moment to unveil himself to her, to throw off the mantle of ordinariness and thus make as big an impact on her as he could. He wanted, as he told her a week or so later, to “exceed theatricality.”

Evelyn was simultaneously aggravated and amused, fascinated and annoyed by Harry’s unbridled egotism. He also exuded a haughtiness that was irritating yet strangely compelling and symptomatic, she thought, of the obscenely nouveau riche. And, as she confessed years later, “even a pose, so long as it is consistently upheld, is impressive.” That Harry seemed sincere about his patrimony she had no doubt. Little did she know, however, that there was another side of him, one which was beyond terrible. The newly polished and prosperous Thaws indeed had a family history, but Harry’s own past was anything but brilliant. Known from New York to Monte Carlo for more than his money, Harry and his odd-ball, often juvenile, and sometimes hazardous antics, preferably played out among the less scrupulous denizens of the local theater districts (whose silence he routinely bought), were of singular interest to the saffron press. Worst of all, Evelyn had no idea of the depth of his veritable monomania regarding the great White.

SAINT VITUS’S DANCE

At the time Evelyn began her acquaintance with “Mr. Munroe Somebody Thaw,” she was apprised of the fact that he was heir to an estimated $40 million. But he was not the first adoring millionaire whose mono-poly money might be hers for the asking. Well aware of his eldest son’s profligate propensities, the elder Thaw had stipulated in his will that the ne’er-do-well Harry receive a monthly allowance of only $2,500, a princely sum nonetheless in an age when a glass of Madeira and a steak dinner with all the trimmings at Delmonico’s cost a dollar-fifty. But, when his father died, just after Harry’s eighteenth birthday, the doting Mother Thaw upped the ante to a staggering $80,000 a month (and maintained that for eighteen more shameful years, virtually all of which was also tax-free).

As early as 1894, Harry had made the local papers for chasing a driver down North Avenue in Cambridge with an unloaded shotgun, believing the man had cheated him out of ten cents’ change. As the years progressed, “Mad Harry” carried on with his juvenile behavior. But if Mother Thaw was ridiculously free with the family fortune when it came to Harry, she kept a tight rein on bad press most of the time. So between Harry’s own hush money and his mother’s vigilant attempts at containment, Evelyn, like a lot of people, had been kept in the dark about Thaw’s sinister side. When she met him, Harry told her about his last extended European holiday during which he had visited the Paris World’s Fair, had gone ballooning, and had hired John Philip Sousa’s band to entertain guests at a private party, where, according to Thaw, they “lifted the roof off.” Someone quipped that Harry should be right at home in a balloon, since he was so “full of hot air.” He had also gone mountain climbing in the Bavarian highlands and hobnobbed with royalty at the horse races in France. Evelyn was suitably impressed.

By 1898, without his hometown advantage, however, Harry had managed to bluster or bumble his way into the New York gossip columns— although not the club world he was determined to successfully infiltrate. It was reported that in spite of his above-average height, the younger Thaw had below-average intelligence and “appeared more like the perpetual undergraduate than the scion of a wealthy family.” His inappropriate giggle when someone else’s misfortunes struck him as funny was downright creepy, and even though he had been around the world several times (Rio, Barcelona, London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Lucerne, Budapest, Constantinople, Cairo, Tangiers, Yalta), Harry only dabbled in adulthood; he wore his pseudo-worldliness like a mask at Carnival.

He believed the center of the world was wherever he was at the moment, and there was no one who could (or would) say differently. In a well-publicized incident in Paris three years earlier, Harry had thrown an extravagant dinner for himself and twenty-five of the most beautiful showgirls he could find. The price tag was estimated at $50,000. Among his guests was the well-known stage beauty Cléo de Mérode, a woman who had been courted by the king of Belgium. John Philip Sousa’s band had provided the musical entertainment for that evening as well. The capper was that during dessert, each woman found a thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry on her plate, surrounding the stem of her aperitif glass.