Black & White

The orchestra was playing "Tell Me, Pretty Maiden" from Florodora when Harry K. Thaw shot Stanford White. The architect, who had started to rise when he saw Mr. Thaw coming toward him, sank back into his chair with an expression of sudden weariness while a tide of slow vermilion spread like spilled wine across the bosom of his evening shirt. That was in June, 1906. Now Harry Thaw has written a book.*

The book itself is, as a criticism, unimportant. Mr. Thaw has attempted to illuminate the lack of morals of the late Mr. White rather than his professional achievements. But through the coils and crumples of the narrative, through a catacomb of names, dates, documents arranged with the precise disorder of total recall, shapes emerge like people seen for a minute through a lifting mist, and one has a glimpse of the diversions of one of the most brilliant and perhaps the most debauched of U. S. architects.

Until the night of the shooting there were very few people who thought that Stanford White was overfond of gaieties. His friends debated, instead, whether Stanford White or Charles F. McKim was the ablest member of the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White. Stanford White was a man widely respected, for his wit and position as much as for his unusual talents: he was a member of the best clubs in Manhattan, the husband of a charming woman. If you wanted a house built, and had money, you went to Stanford White.

His work, beyond cavil, was more original than Architect McKim's. The latter, a conservative gentleman of the highest type, was in his decoration a trifle too simple, austere, for many people's taste; his design too was severely academical. But everyone agreed that Charles McKim was exactly the man the firm needed to balance the exciting gifts of Stanford White. No one, even with an unlimited fund to draw on, could decorate a house like Stanford White. There was a certain discreet voluptuousness in his patterning of rugs and hangings of sombre and yet burning tones, his use, for contrast, of tapestries stiff with gold threads, of smoldering paintings and shawls dipped in scarlet, lit with mannered passion like suspended flame. As an architect his imagination rioted into turrets and cupolas, a certain Moorish richness of proportion, avoiding the florid by a breath and a promise. He made a great deal of money. He increased his regular income by bringing over shiploads of antiques and selling them among his friends. Most of his work was done in Manhattan where, with the help of Charles McKim, he built the Metropolitan and Century Clubs, the Tiffany and Gorham buildings, the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Library of Columbia University, and finally, the old Madison Square Garden (torn down last year). This bulking sultry building, with its hippodromes and galleries, tapering to Saint-Gaudens' winged Diana on its central citadel, had a roof garden with a cabaret show and a smart orchestra. Up in the tower, Stanford White had apartments, reached by the same elevator that communicated with the cabaret's chorus dressing-room. That June night, after the theatre, Mr. White had gone to the cabaret. He sat about for a while, then ordered a table and a bottle of champagne in a corner of the room. The Floradora tune was almost over when Harry K. Thaw asked his party to excuse him for a minute. He had just seen Mr. White.

The impulse that had made Mr. Thaw bring a gun along that night must always remain a little vague. It was a regulation Colt six-shooter and he had his hand on it as he threaded his way among the tables toward the place where Stanford White was sitting. That he had a certain amount of justification for what, at that moment, he was about to do, the jury admitted when they handed in their decision, but the allegations he made against the dead architect at the trial, and which he repeats in this book, have never been conclusively proved. There is, as there was twenty years ago, an odor of truth about them; the passage of time has failed to make that odor more savory. Page 106 of Harry Thaw's book records, for instance, a boast of Mr. White's about 378 unfortunate girls, a story that most people have never cared to think about.

Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, sitting beside an empty chair, saw her husband take his hand out of his pocket and saw the dull glitter of the thing he slowly pointed at Stanford White's chest. Mr. Thaw had gotten across the room; he stood about twelve feet from the architect and pulled the trigger three times. The girl who had been singing on the stage caught her song off short but the tune ran on for a lifetime in the mind of Evelyn Nesbit Thaw. She herself, as a member of the original Floradora chorus, had sung that tune a great many times; she had been singing it when she met Harry Thaw; the orchestra in the Pre-Catalan was playing it when she confessed to Harry Thaw that Stanford White had seduced her; they played it at the wedding when Mr. Thaw, moved by his mother's advice, had married her. A minute before that tune had mingled with the tinkle of silver and glass and the gabble of a thousand conversations. Now her own labored breath was the loudest sound in the roof garden. The diners were huddled against the further wall, pressed against Stanford White's artistic battlement as if they wanted to crawl over it, to jump down into Madison avenue; Harry Thaw, the pistol lifted stiffly over his head, stood beside an overturned table, alone in the middle of the room, an erect, insane, suave and wildly improbable figure, drawn in a simple sweep of black and white.

* THE TRAITOR--Harry K. Thaw--Dorrance & Co. ($2).