American Eve (48 page)

In question after question, Jerome asked her about the company she kept, the dubious stage society she was surrounded by, raising more insinuating questions about when she “first became ambitious to become a great actress.” He asked Evelyn what her mother thought about her young daughter going on the stage.

Evelyn responded, “Mother said I ought not to go out without her. She said the ‘show’ was all right, but she ought to go along with me.”

Jerome tried to emphasize a moral slackness on Evelyn’s part and yet not her mother’s. The reason, which Evelyn would soon discover, was that Mrs. Holman was at first secretly then openly providing the prosecution with ammunition and evidence to help their case against Thaw. Jerome therefore didn’t want to alienate Evelyn’s mother as long as she was telling him private details and helping his cause. Although she was eventually silenced, it was not because of a guilty conscience. The Thaws and their money saw to it that Mrs. Holman retreated. And, even though Evelyn must have resented the position that her mother’s “moral slackness” or ignorance had helped put her in (in addition to her taking the D.A.’s side), she could not bring herself to condemn her mother on the stand. So in trying to defend her mother’s indefensible actions while justifying her own, Evelyn only made herself seem worse.

Jerome produced the famous Eickemeyer photos of Evelyn in the kimono on the bearskin rug.

“Are these fair types of all the pictures taken that day?” he asked her, hoping they would be risqué enough to raise eyebrows, but sensing that these and others he had might strike people as “disappointingly proper.”

Before Evelyn could answer, he followed with, “Are there none suggestive of any more impropriety than these?” Jerome seemed “aggrieved” that he could find no truly scandalous photos. Evelyn replied that there were “some taken with a low neck.”

He persisted, encouraged by her answer. “Was there any further exposure? ” he asked, waving the photos in her face.

“They were very low in neck,” she said quietly, which only fueled his exasperation.

It was clear to Evelyn that Jerome had hoped the issue of her modeling in compromising positions and costumes would throw her into a panic and upset her amazingly calm demeanor. But Evelyn had been hounded and beleaguered and raged against by the best of them in Harry Thaw for so long that any badgering Jerome could muster, however fierce, paled in comparison. Aside from Harry, to the rapt courtroom spectators it seemed that the district attorney was the only one in a visibly agitated state.

In fact, while Evelyn’s testimony was at times selective or twisted by Harry’s defense (such as the fact that Stanny must have drugged her champagne), she told enough of the truth to confound Jerome, who couldn’t find a way to entrap her. Try as he might, with countless questions asked and repeated angrily in an attempt to confuse Evelyn “into the controversion of facts,” Jerome, a man who had aspirations toward the governorship of New York and even the presidency of the United States, could not break the “little model-wife” into pieces. Even Harry declared admiringly, “None can forget what a witness she made! The simple directness of her narrative as it was drawn from her, and remaining not only unshaken, but emphasizing and renewing the facts, startled and astounded us at the time.”

Jerome moved on to a different topic, which he believed was unsavory-sounding enough to provoke a reaction from Evelyn and would simultaneously tarnish the girlish image she was presenting on the stand.

“Hadn’t Stanford White paid you on a regular basis whenever you were not engaged in a production?”

Evelyn replied that White’s generosity was well known and not confined only to herself, her mother, and her brother. In fact, it was in the capacity of benefactor and supporter of her career that she knew White “first and best.”

He tried to pressure her for details about the letter of credit White had given her before her European trip.

“When did he give it?” “What was the amount of the letter of credit?” “Was it a large or small sum?” To all these rapid-fire questions Evelyn replied, “I don’t remember.” She added that she was unconcerned with the financial details of the trip, that her life was in the hands of others—namely, her mother, who in turn had put everything in Thaw’s control in arranging the trip. As she repeated for emphasis, she was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl recuperating from an operation, barely able to tie her shoes.

An exasperated Jerome asked her if the letter of credit made any impression on her mind. “No” was her reply. Jerome then asked her when she began to doubt the wisdom of accepting such a letter since Mr. Thaw was paying for her trip abroad. She gave him a general answer: “1903.”

Jerome sneered. “When Thaw proposed to you, and you rejected him, did you believe yourself to be better than others because of what happened to you?”

Evelyn recalls her reaction, “I could afford to smile. That was not the way to rattle me.”

After days on the stand, Evelyn had impressed both seasoned reporters and court officials with her touching and simple recounting of her story, so artless and so seemingly genuine and vivid. Her testimony, offered with restraint and characterized by unexpected moments of understated drama or a simple pathos, not only confounded Jerome but continued to move others in the room to tears. No one could refute the facts of her awful childhood after her father died. And as Harry put it, “For sheer realism there is little that can surpass her description of that night in Paris.”

As the days wore on, Evelyn was caught up in a terrible paradox, even though she was not only holding her own with the “courtroom Tiger” but seemed to be beating him at his own game. She was an unsuccessful actress when Jerome wanted to underscore her financial dependence on White, and when he insinuated that the tearful story of her seduction and ruination was made out of theatrical cheesecloth, she was suddenly a phenomenal actress. The fact that Harry’s life was at stake seemed to be forgotten in the “duel between herself and the Public Prosecutor.” The only question in some people’s minds was who would win—the lady or the tiger?

Evelyn quickly learned the kinds of tricks Jerome had at his disposal, one of which was to combine two questions as one, the one demanding a “yes” answer, the other a “no.” After several instances of putting such a question to Evelyn, with Jerome shouting, “Yes or no?!” Evelyn began to demand that the questions be separated and asked one at a time. Ordered by the court to do so, with Evelyn being instructed not to answer anything she didn’t understand, Jerome would himself become rattled “and pretty sore, which was perfectly sweet of him,” Evelyn wrote.

After her initial cross-examination, once they heard from the lawyers that she had done well, the different members of the Thaw family who met her in the witness room were all smiles and congratulations. As she described it, “At the hotel I was ‘brave little Evelyn’ and ‘dear little Evelyn’ and ‘most courageous girl.’ ” Mother Thaw blessed her and told her she was wonderful. But, as Evelyn also writes, “had the lawyers told them I made a bad witness they would all have shown unmistakable signs of desiring to shake me.” Needless to say, she was not fooled by their praise, although one comment in the press assessing her performance did please Evelyn: “From one point of view, the cross-examination’s effect tended rather to strengthen the defense’s argument as to the cumulative effect upon Thaw’s mind. There was never any faltering, and as her courage rose, more than one answer having every semblance of candor and innocence parried Mr. Jerome’s questions by producing an impasse.”

LE RAT MORT

During the next session Jerome began with a line of questioning that took Evelyn back to Paris, 1903. He asked her, “Did you continue to believe that all women were unchaste, as White told you, until you talked with Thaw in Paris in 1903?”

“Yes,” Evelyn replied meekly.

He then asked her about a café in Paris with the unappealing name of Le Rat Mort.

“Is it a reputable café?” Jerome demanded to know.

Evelyn was surprised by this question, saying that she didn’t know. “I don’t know, people were sitting about eating,” replied Evelyn, “it seemed a respectable thing to do.” Some in the packed room snickered.

“Was there somebody dancing?”

“I think so.”

“Was it two o’clock in the morning?”

“Possibly,” she answered.

“Did you see the cakewalk being danced?” he asked ominously.

“No, I think it was a Russian dance,” she answered.

Evelyn knew that it had in fact been the cakewalk, which was considered an outrageously improper ragtime dance by most, performed usually by “colored dancers.” She thought it probably best that she remember it as a Russian dance. Unfortunately for Evelyn, she had forgotten “in her exuberance” that she had written to a friend about going to the Dead Rat and watching the cakewalk. Harry had also written a letter stating that a Miss Winchester was persuaded to get up and “do the cakewalk at 2 a.m.”

“How many times were you at the Dead Rat?” he asked, emphasizing the name with relish, realizing it made more of an unsavory impact in English.

“Only once,” Evelyn replied, which irked Jerome.

However, there came the moment when Jerome finally managed to break through Evelyn’s reserves. For the first time he brought Evelyn to tears.

“Had you felt the heinousness of the wrong that had been done to you?” he asked

“I didn’t know anything about it at the time,” Evelyn said.

But Jerome persisted, asking her a series of rapid-fire questions: “Didn’t it outrage every instinct in you?” “Weren’t you very bitter against White when you told Thaw?” “When you felt you were giving up Thaw’s love, did you not feel enmity against White?”

Again and again the name of White and what he had done was thrown in her face.

“White—White—always White!” she wrote later. “It made me go hard and bitter to hear the name of this man whose dead hand was laid upon me.”

“How do you regard Stanford White?” he asked, his piercing eyes fixed on hers.

The courtroom was quiet as a mausoleum. Evelyn then said something without hesitating that shocked everyone, especially the Thaws.

“White had a strong personality. Outside that one awful thing, he had been a very grand man. He was very good to me, and very kind. When I told Mr. Thaw this he said it only made White all the more dangerous. ” She then began to cry for the second time, but talked through her tears.

“Before the Twenty-fourth Street incident he had never made love to me. He always treated me with the greatest respect and kindness, yet he was also a man of sufficient authority and domination to pack me off to school at his pleasure.” Everyone sat in stunned silence.

As each day passed, Jerome’s “shameless” “foul and venomous innuendos, ” his “brutal hounding” of Evelyn began to garner him unfavorable press as well. As one paper described it, “Around the slender form of the unhappy girl-witness the battle rages. Her quivering features attest the agony she suffers.” One editorial letter said that his “fiendish persecution of Mrs. Thaw on the stand, taking what appears to be the most cowardly advantage of his position [and] her unfortunate situation . . . is sufficient to elicit the contempt of even the lowest criminal on earth. The man seems to have lost his senses in the insane desire to crush the woman into the gutter. We do not look for such conduct from a gentleman or a man with human instincts.” He came off not as “an advocate anxious only to arrive at the truth” but as a “frenzied partisan.” Another reporter wrote, “Even we, at this distance, can realize something of the depth of misery into which such a cross-examination would plunge any woman. What must it be to her?”

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26

After three days of rest and relative quiet, Evelyn was recalled. She had been to the Tombs to see Harry, who was more than cheerful; he was in full-blown heroic mode, which she found “more than mildly irritating.” Even more annoying to Evelyn was the fact that Harry seemed to be enjoying his celebrity status. She wrote that “the dreadful seriousness of the position in which he stands does not seem to impress him so much as the sudden fame which had come to him.” Harry was just crazy enough to believe the fantasy his own public relations people created and ignore the reality of his actions. More and more it seemed to Evelyn that he considered himself the hero the papers made him out to be. Basking in the false light of positive publicity, his view of himself finally coincided with that of the rest of the world.

That afternoon, Jerome began where he left off, trying to prove that Evelyn was, in her words, “something worse than the dust.” He dragged up every incident he knew about and baited her to see if there was any he did not know about, magnifying certain details to discredit her or cast doubt on her credibility. Once more she was asked about White giving her money, under what circumstances, and how frequently. Had he given her presents for her vacations? How did he help her when work was slack? How many suppers had she been to, and with whom? Here again the names of those involved had to be whispered “with a great show of secrecy,” which only served to arouse the curiosity of the spectators to a “fever pitch.” Were there chaperones? When did these supper parties end? After the theater? By this time, Evelyn’s exasperation and mental exhaustion turned into a kind of giddiness; she was possessed by the “absurd desire to make extravagant and inconsequent replies, to say that supper coming after the theater was not remarkable. Had it come before the theater it would have been something freakish.” Jerome continued along these lines until he turned his attention to Evelyn’s relationship with Harry.

After asking similar questions—about presents Thaw offered her early in their acquaintance, about the fifty dollars he sent her with flowers (“You were accustomed to receiving money from men?”)—he then switched gears completely. Jerome stood in front of Evelyn, deliberately blocking her view of Harry, and asked, “Up to February 1902, had you noticed anything irrational about Thaw, either in appearance, in his actions, or in his manner?” Evelyn’s reply was that she had not, that Harry’s attentions to her at that time were no more marked than those of other men interested in her. Jerome pounced on the phrase “other men” and proceeded to “blacken her by inference.” He ran through a list of men, some of whom Evelyn knew by name or met briefly at one of Stanford White’s parties, others whom she met through her roles in various companies, and still others who must have wanted desperately to believe they had somehow been an object of her affection. He then jumped back to Harry.