American Eve (39 page)

The murder scene: the Madison Square Garden rooftop theater.

that
Mamzelle Champagne
would probably be short-lived. Some of the patrons, in fact, took to booing and hooting periodically, while other critics in the audience merely drank and chatted rudely in Irish whispers, oblivious to the performance taking place.

A number of people had begun milling about among the aisles, making it difficult for the waiters in their white aprons to bring patrons their drinks. This added to the audience’s general restlessness. Suddenly, without a word, Harry also left the table and was instantly hidden from Evelyn’s line of sight by one of the large, leafy plants.

What had drawn him away was a man he had spied sitting alone at a table near the back. Harry recognized James Clinch Smith, Stanford White’s brother-in-law, from across the theater and stopped at his table. Smith, who knew Thaw only in passing, said that he was there for lack of anything better to do. Harry engaged him in some mindless small talk, then the conversation ended. Harry came back to his table and took a few sips from his glass of champagne, then left again and disappeared just as quickly as before into the crowd. Beale had also left the table, and as Evelyn sat and listened to McCaleb’s critique of the uninspiring performances and music, she watched Harry fade into the glare of the stage lights against the evening sky beyond. The next day, several witnesses said that an agitated Thaw could be seen pacing back and forth at the rear of the roof garden “like a caged tiger.”

A little before eleven o’clock, with the show nearly over, a small disruption like the one in the Café Martin drew some people’s attention to the elevator. Evelyn glanced in the direction of the noise, where to her dismay, out stepped Stanny, alone this time, who headed for his usual table. She immediately scanned the faces in the audience for Harry, but could not find him. White had originally planned to attend to some business in Philadelphia that evening, but since his son had come to visit, he stayed in town. Several people who recognized him applauded, and White acknowledged their greeting with a wave of his hand. He then took his customary seat five rows from the stage, and began to watch what was left of the performance, resting his chin in his right hand and throwing his other arm casually over the back of the chair.

As the director of the Garden, White had seen the show several times in rehearsals. In fact, he had already been at the Garden that day. About five hours earlier White had made an appearance behind the scenes, where, during a break in their final run-through, he observed the chorus girls huddled around a water cooler, some of whom were wilting from the heat. White directed the stage manager, Lionel Lawrence, to fill the cooler with ice and lemonade for the girls. He also reminded Lawrence that he wanted to be introduced to a particular girl, “a little peach” named Maude Fulton, “Evelyn-like and seventeen,” who was new to both New York and the stage. But Lawrence was unable to oblige, because of the bustle over last-minute preparations for opening night. He didn’t even notice his employer’s departure.

A preoccupied Evelyn jumped when Harry abruptly reappeared at their table. Harry, who again seemed not to have noticed White’s entrance, sat down and almost immediately began fidgeting in his chair. Neither Beale, who had also returned, nor McCaleb thought this unusual, since some part of Harry was almost perpetually in motion. Onstage, several of the featured chorus girls, dressed in fencing costumes with cartoonish red-heart appliqués on their white shirtwaists, were singing a song about dueling over a woman’s affection, “I Challenge You to Love.” It was, Beale commented, “bloody awful.” Evelyn shot a furtive glance at Harry, who suddenly stood up again, a somewhat dazed look in his eyes. Less than ten minutes had passed since White had entered.

Evelyn nervously looked up at Harry, who now perched over the table like a huge, distraught crow. She suggested in a somewhat faint and strained voice that they leave. Beale and McCaleb readily agreed. Appearing to comply, Harry, who hadn’t taken off his coat all evening, helped Evelyn with her wrap. The four began walking toward the elevator, leaving the general noise of the music, conversation, and clinking glasses behind them. The golden Diana, shimmering with the hemisphere of mirrored lights at her feet and the theater below her, serenely gazed at the city from her privileged spot, her bow arched in ceaseless readiness. At his table below, White spoke briefly to the Garden’s caterer, a man named Harry Stevens. He asked Stevens to arrange an introduction after the show to the little peach he had his eye on and who had just finished her debut song, “Could I Fascinate You?” Stevens obligingly headed backstage.

It wasn’t until she was nearly inside the elevator that Evelyn, her arm in McCaleb’s, noticed that Harry had once again vanished. Drawn away, perhaps even urged on by the lyrics of the song “I Could Love a Million Girls,” which the tenor Harry Short was performing onstage, Harry Thaw had doubled back:

I’ve heard them say so often they could love their wives alone, But I think that’s just foolish; men must have hearts made of stone. Now my heart is made of softer stuff; it melts at each warm glance. A pretty girl can’t look my way, without a new romance . . .

Having just spoken with one Harry while another sang onstage, White was unaware that a third was advancing upon him swiftly and silently from behind. Trying to see over McCaleb’s broad shoulder through the archway to the elevator, Evelyn stood on her toes and frantically scanned the audience. A rush of pins and needles ran up the pearl buttons on the back of her dress. Less than thirty feet away from where she stood, the darkly muffled figure moved within a few feet of the unsuspecting architect in his seat.

Seconds later, a startlingly loud gunshot pierced the torpid night air. The musicians faltered. Evelyn recoiled and stared stricken in the direction of the sound. Suddenly everything melted into slow motion and the world stopped on its wobbly axis. She opened her mouth in a silent scream. In the flash of those seconds, which seemed to last an eternity, she saw everything. She raised her trembling hand to her lips. Two more shots followed in searing rapid succession, forcing everything into spinning, pointless motion again and causing her to flinch with each blast. Evelyn looked up at McCaleb.

“He shot him!” she finally cried.

Before anyone else knew what was happening, Stanford White’s body was covered with the scarlet spray of his own blood, which began to deepen almost immediately into a sickening dark burgundy. As it edged around his toppled body on the floor, the overturned table lay next to him, having been pulled over with the force of the body; the architect’s blood began to seep into the twisted tablecloth. Those closest watched in horror as the jagged crystal shards of his wineglass disappeared in the mushrooming puddle. Part of his face was torn away, and the rest was blackened beyond recognition by powder burns. Harry had stood less than two feet from him when he held the muzzle of the pistol to White’s head at eye level and pulled the trigger. One bullet lodged in his brain behind his left eyelid. A second, penetrating his nasal cavity, broke part of his jaw and three teeth, while the third struck him in the right shoulder and then passed through his elbow. Harry stood transfixed, his right hand and starched white cuff and gold cuff link spattered with White’s blood. Some witnesses said the victim looked at his attacker in amazement at the last second; others said he never saw it coming. By all accounts, however, they had exchanged no words. The
New York Times
reported the next day that White, whose body had been jolted upright by the force of the bullets before it fell in a heap, was unquestionably beyond any earthly help instantaneously.

Immediately afterward, like some demented avenging angel of death in his black coat and broken white halo of a hat, Harry, his own face deadly white, held the barrel of the gun over his head and let the unused shells fall with a brassy clink to the floor. For a second or two there was a dreadful, penetrating silence. White’s blood, mixed indiscriminately with the wine from his shattered glass, began to spread toward Thaw’s feet. Harry K. Thaw “of Pittsburgh,” with a glazed yet triumphant look in his eyes, shouted to terrified witnesses:

“I did it because he ruined my wife! He had it coming to him. He took advantage of the girl and then deserted her!”

At that very instant, twenty-one-year-old Evelyn’s fragile fairy-tale world, which had always edged too close into nightmare, evaporated forever like a childhood dream. And at fifty-two, Stanny was dead.

At first, a majority of the nine hundred people in attendance thought the gunfire was part of the show. But as the grisly reality of White’s murder became evident to those seated closest to him, horrified screams now cut through the thick air. The refrain of “I Could Love a Million Girls” froze on the lips of the tenor as the orchestra, some of whom could see White’s toppled body, continued to play confusedly in fits and starts. Some people seated near the back of the theater, still unaware of what just happened, shouted, “Go on! What’s the matter?” thinking the gun-play was part of the show.

But among those nearest the murdered man, a panic ensued. Within moments, frightened theatergoers from all corners of the Garden scrambled to reach the elevator. As Evelyn described it, time had compressed and now unnaturally expanded; it was like riding the el seated backward and rushing at breakneck speed but going nowhere.

“People were running about, herding into safe corners, calling for help. The ushers and waiters tried to calm them, to get them back to their seats.”

From Harry Thaw’s perspective, as those nearest him tried to move away, stunned and frightened by this stark black apparition of death, their eyes were riveted to him and the gun he still held over his head in manic triumph. The crowd surged so close to the roof’s edge he feared for an instant “that some might be forced over the railing and plunge to the street eighty feet below.”

The scene took a decidedly surreal turn as the stage manager, Lionel Lawrence, still not sure himself what had happened, ordered his orchestra to continue playing. Three of the chorus girls, upon seeing White’s lifeless body, fell in a dead faint to the stage floor. The other girls, who hurried to the edge of the stage, their painted faces distorted into masks of horror illuminated by the footlights just below, ran hysterically into the wings in a blur of silk and feathers. The music trailed off pitifully. The mother of the lyricist, attending her son’s first opening night (and having witnessed throughout the evening the hostile or disgruntled audience’s unfavorable reaction to the show), feared he might have been the target of a particularly harsh brand of criticism, and screamed, “Oh, they’ve shot my son!”

Terrified and confused people were still stumbling and nearly trampling over one another in a frenetic attempt to reach the central elevator while Lawrence jumped up on one of the side tables and announced rather pointlessly that “a most serious accident has occurred.” The closest official to Thaw was a uniformed New York City fireman from Engine Company No. 60, Paul Brudi. The fireman gingerly approached a wide-eyed, pasty-faced Thaw and asked him to “relinquish his weapon.” Thaw seemed almost relieved, and handed the fireman the sweat-covered gun, as if giving some waiter a particularly generous tip. He was then escorted briskly in the direction of the elevator.

A dumbfounded Evelyn, her face ashen, screamed abruptly in disbelief as Harry walked toward her, “My God!” and “Oh, Harry, what have you done?”

She repeated this, crying, “You’re in a terrible fix now.” Harry smiled his idiosyncratic smile, took hold of Evelyn, kissed her on the cheek, and said, “It’s all right, dear. I have probably saved your life.” McCaleb, also pale and shaking, said, “My God! You’re crazy!” Beale stood by, mute and amazed. As Evelyn described it years later, “A complete numbness of mind and body took possession of me. . . . I moved like a person in a trance for hours afterwards.”

In contrast to the tragedy above, an absurdly comical scene was taking place one floor below. Albert Payson Terhune, a husky young newspaperman for the
New York Evening World
who was covering the opening for the paper’s honeymooning drama critic, had witnessed the murder from a mere few yards away. After running at breakneck speed down a flight of plush red-carpeted stairs to the corridor, where the sole telephone booth stood, he found it occupied by a man engaged in “a smirking conversation with one Tessie.” After the man refused Terhune’s polite request to relinquish the phone, the muscular reporter yanked him away, eager to break the unbelievable news of the murder to his editors. While pleading with an apathetic operator to connect him to the city desk in a hurry, Terhune suddenly found himself under attack by the man whose conversation with Tessie he had abruptly ended, accompanied by a friend armed with a chair. People rushing past in their attempt to escape the theater saw the agile Terhune fending off both men with one leg and his free arm, shouting his unbelievable scoop into the phone.

As some of the less squeamish or more inebriated patrons pushed forward to stare in morbid fascination at White’s corpse, someone ran back toward the dressing room to look for something to cover him with. A somewhat bemused and exhilarated Harry Thaw waited for the elevator, his hands twitching nervously. Asked by the fireman Paul Brudi, to whom he had given the gun, “Why did you do it?” Harry calmly stated, “He deserved it. He ruined my wife and left her helpless.” At that moment, Officer Anthony L. Debes, whose beat was the theater district, emerged from the elevator and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder.

“You’re under arrest,” he said.

“It’s all right,” replied Harry strangely.

They stepped into the elevator, and just as it was about to close, Evelyn, ghostly pale and trembling violently, ran into the car and threw her arms around Harry. Beale and McCaleb followed in astonished silence.

“Why did you do it, Harry?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” he repeated mechanically.