American Eve (38 page)

Ordinarily (when she wanted to), Evelyn was easily ready before Harry, having learned to change costumes in a breath as a result of her stage days. Harry, mired as Evelyn described in perpetual “babyhood,” generally took longer than most women to prepare himself for an evening out. This time, however, Harry claimed to have grown impatient waiting for Evelyn to finish dressing. He left without her, telling her where she could meet up with him. Sporting a black tuxedo suit with pearl studs and a custom-made white straw boater, Harry also wore a hopelessly impractical long black overcoat. But this eccentric touch did not strike his beleaguered valet, Bedford, as particularly peculiar. Harry had of course done much worse, and Bedford had been witness to an unfair share of it all.

The couple met up at Sherry’s, situated at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, only a block from their hotel. The ultra-fashionable restaurant, like Tiffany, was another of the jewels in the crown of McKim, Mead, and White, which didn’t occur to Evelyn at the time. She found Harry at the bar, where he had already polished off three drinks. In typical fashion, Harry had paid his three-dollar tab with a hundred-dollar bill as he took another cigarette from the gold case in his pocket. Together in their black-and-white costumes, the couple made for a noticeably strange and striking contrast—baby-faced Harry, over six feet tall, was completely muffled in black, save for the white straw boater pulled almost to his eyes, which darted nervously around the room; Evelyn, barely five feet, looked both doll-like and grown up in her ankle-length snowy dress, long black kid gloves, and large hat swathed in ebony black gauze, which surrounded her head like a dark cloud.

It was there they met up with Beale, who apparently was “not dressed,” so they decided to go to another, less formal restaurant. The trio made their way to the Café Martin. The Café Martin, located in Delmonico’s former building on Twenty-sixth Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, was a popular eatery in the theater district with a decidedly French ambience, whose wedding-cake interior consisted of charming layers of white and gold. A man could take his wife (or mistress) to the café without fear of exposing her to the less savory element of the city in the nearby Tenderloin district. Unlike the men’s clubs, with their exclusionary policies, Martin’s was decidedly democratic in its clientele. Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill Cody frequented the place when his Wild West Show was in town. But on this particular night, when the Thaw party arrived, there were only the usual customers and a few of the gossipy gaggle of anonymous chorus girls.

Entering from the Twenty-sixth Street side, the trio was seated in the main dining area, where they were joined at around eight o’clock by Tommy McCaleb. Evelyn faced the elegant part of the room, whose huge windows overlooked Fifth Avenue, where the restaurant had a second entrance. Daylight still filtered in from the terrace and cast a lovely glow on Evelyn’s face, described by one columnist during her modeling days as needing a blazing light to “bring out the soul of eternal loveliness unrivaled in any other’s eyes.” Harry sat directly across from her. During the course of their dinner, according to the waiter, who gave the Thaw party his exclusive attention while they were there, Harry “ordered three cocktails and drank them himself in rapid succession, in addition to a glass of wine.” He also talked steadily and vociferously about everything from his mother’s charity work to mountain climbing. Evelyn barely said a word.

Sometime during the main course, an impressive figure in natty evening dress entered the restaurant from the Fifth Avenue side with two young men in tow. The older man maneuvered his way through the sea of tables, almost as if the room were a bit too small for him, while the younger men followed in his wake. As he headed toward the balcony tables, the man’s robust build and brush of reddish hair, “which stood up like velvet pile” flashed suddenly upon Evelyn’s consciousness from across the room. She flinched involuntarily.

“He was an unexpected vision,” she recalled.

“He” was Stanford White.

Whenever White entered a room, there was usually a flurry of activity and salutations. With him were his nineteen-year-old son, Larry, and a friend of Larry’s, Leroy King, both of whom were in town for a visit from Harvard. White’s wife, the former Bessie Smith of Smithtown, was at their country home in St. James, well out in Suffolk County, on the picturesque north shore of Long Island. Evelyn stole a look from behind her menu to see if Harry had noticed the small commotion caused by White’s entrance. Apparently, he hadn’t.

As Evelyn described it, “In spite of the heat, I went cold with fear.” She began to shiver unconsciously. “I dared not make one false move, dared not cease my smiling and exchanging repartee” with Harry and the other two men. At first she thought it best not to say anything with regard to White’s presence in the restaurant, since she knew Harry’s insatiable and obsessive jealousy of the architect would most certainly ruin their dinner. The last thing she wanted was a public scene. Nonetheless, Evelyn could not keep her eyes from inadvertently wavering once or twice in the direction of the terrace.

“I thought my nerves would crack from the tension,” she said.

With Harry’s “help” and more than three years of hindsight, the former Kittens had come to see that Stanny’s carefully designed seduction of her was perfectly suited to an architect of his ingenuity and potency, qualities that had drawn her to him, and that someone as disturbed as Harry would both admire and resent. As she sat, trying to fix her automatic sphinxlike stare at nothing, Evelyn couldn’t help but hear Harry’s words, uttered compulsively and incessantly for those same three years regarding that “depraved monster and defiler of tender girlhood,” forcing certain phrases from her late at night in her bedroom as if part of some mad pagan ceremony. Over time, Evelyn had in fact begun to wonder which number on White’s list she had been when he had plucked her ripe from the chorus. As she sat silent and (she thought) imperceptibly shivering, however, she suddenly recalled small flickers of Stanny’s tender conversations in the Garden at night and clenched her napkin tightly in her lap.

In the past, Harry had instructed Evelyn to inform him whenever she saw White, and demanded that she refer to White as “the Beast” or “the B” for short. Those few times (before moving to Pittsburgh) when she had passed White on the street or in a car since their final parting on Christmas Eve, 1903, Evelyn made sure to tell Harry. Even though she considered it ridiculous, she suspected, correctly, that she was under surveillance. In her memoirs Evelyn describes the incident, which confirmed her suspicions:

One day, I awoke with a sore throat and went to a specialist to have my throat swabbed. Coming out of the building, I ran into Stanford White. [They exchanged tentative looks.] That evening, dressing for dinner, I said to Harry:

“According to my promise, I must tell you that I passed Stanford White on the street to-day.” His face darkened.

“Did he speak to you?”

“No,” I replied, “he just looked at me for a moment, and then I ran into the building. That was all.”

“You’re sure that was all?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes.”

“Your word of honor?” he asked, remaining oddly unruffled.

“Yes” was my reply.

“That’s right,” he said approvingly. “All I ask is that you tell me any time you see him. If you don’t tell me, I’ll find out anyway. There are plenty of people who will tell me.”

Harry, in fact, had mobilized his veritable web of professional spies and amateur informants throughout the city in anticipation of their arrival in June 1906. The actual purpose was threefold. The first was to keep a watchful eye over Evelyn’s every move when he wasn’t with her. (He had little to fear, since the combination of Harry’s paranoia, possessiveness, and controlling behavior had managed to cut Evelyn off from virtually all family, friends, and acquaintances.) The second reason was to protect himself from the real or imagined enemies he believed were plotting to do him bodily harm. The third reason was to try and gain proof of White’s debaucheries in order to discredit him publicly. Evelyn was unaware that earlier that very day, four of Thaw’s detectives had followed White home and had tailed him for several hours.

A small ripple of relief passed over Evelyn once Stanny was clearly out of sight on the terrace. Harry asked her if she was ill, having noticed her involuntary tremors. Not wanting him to do anything rash should he suddenly become aware of White’s proximity or think that this convergence was no coincidence, Evelyn asked one of her dinner companions for a piece of paper and pencil. On a small slip she wrote something like “The B was here but has left,” hoping that would settle the matter. She passed the note surreptitiously to Harry. He read it and asked her if she was all right, noticing, he would later tell reporters, “that she was shaking like a reed.” She replied that she was fine. He then smiled an inscrutable smile, pocketed the note, and ordered another “quart of champagne” even though he would recall in his own memoirs that he was “wild at missing him” and wondered to himself how the “blaggard had entered while he was unaware of his presence?”

“He had got out, how did he get out?”

The meal ended with only a minor incident. According to the cloakroom attendant who had checked Harry’s coat and straw hat, “When I handed him the hat he literally jerked it out of my hand and in putting it on he crushed it down over his forehead and his eyes with a crashing sound which indicated that it had been broken by the violence of his treatment.” As they emerged from the café, Evelyn eyed Harry with his cracked brim and winter coat and casually asked him if he felt hot.

“No,” he replied coolly.

She then asked where they were going. Harry said he had procured tickets for the opening night of a new musical,
Mamzelle Champagne.
The color drained from Evelyn’s cheeks. She knew that this particular show was opening at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, just as she knew that, until that night, Harry had petulantly and defiantly refused to set foot in any building connected with White, which was next to impossible in the city Stanny had almost single-handedly redesigned. Evelyn was suddenly more than just dimly aware that the evening’s itinerary had an uncanny pattern; first Sherry’s, then this near close encounter at Martin’s, and now the Garden.

The foursome strolled the single block to the Garden, and Evelyn felt light-headed from the combination of heat, wine, and general nerves. As they took the elevator to the rooftop, Evelyn asked Harry if he wanted to check his overcoat. He said no, and smiled in the same disconcerting way he had the day they first met. Evelyn closed her eyes, and Beale commented that it was already a little past nine o’clock. Harry, apparently oblivious to everything, chatted away about trifles with his two friends, his hands deep within his coat pockets.

Evelyn, who had memorized every click and grind of the elevator gears, knew without seeing that they had arrived at the roof. The party was shown to a table about three-quarters of the way back from the stage. Harry muttered something under his breath about the rotten seats. Evelyn said absolutely nothing. As the show began, while everyone else turned their attention to the noise and lights of the stage, Harry stared up at the illuminated Tower, which dominated the theater and rose in the gathering shadows on Twenty-sixth Street. Like some unconscious symbol of White’s potency, it “loomed,” and it seemed to Harry that “its big-ness increased in the darkness.” Harry followed it high up to the “little windows where she suffered,” and imagined as he had a thousand times how horrible those memories must be for her, that sacrifice of her whole life which he never let her forget.

Even though she had looked out over the enchanted Garden from White’s Tower countless times before, Evelyn was always struck by the magic and splendor of the place, as if seeing it for the first time. In an age when spectacle was the rule of the day, the open-air theater, like everything Stanny ever did, was electrifying, glamorous, and almost overdone. She sighed as she stared at the familiar scene before her, as if temporarily mesmerized by the twinkling lights of various colors; she remembered how they would sway rhythmically at times when a breeze lifted them, the undulating strands resembling fireflies noiselessly hovering in the air. Large and luxurious potted plants were strategically placed throughout the tables that faced the stage to create a feeling of intimacy under the canopy of the vast night sky.

Of course, one special table several rows from the stage was always reserved for the creator of the Garden, but when Evelyn and Harry sat down, to her relief, that table sat empty.

As Viola de Costa, a plumpish and pretty chorus girl whom Evelyn had known, popped out of a giant papier-mâché bottle of Pommery Sec, Harry and his companions ordered champagne. He held his glass up to Evelyn, who turned and feigned interest in the show to hide a swelling sense of uneasiness. As she later put it, “We were there just long enough to be bored.” It was apparently clear to even novice theatergoers and first-nighters