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When socialite Harry Thaw murdered architect Stanford White in the rooftop cabaret atop Madison Square Garden early in the summer of 1906, many New Yorkers felt their deepest suspicions were confirmed about the immoral conduct of the very rich.
White's murder was the final act in a long struggle between two fabulously rich, famous and powerful men over Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nexbit, a poor, young and exceptionally beautiful artist's model and showgirl.
No murder had ever received more press attention. New York's daily papers reinforced what moralists described as an "unhealthy fascination with the degeneracy of the so-called higher classes." To the delight of the reading public, Nesbit's relationship with White would be examined in exquisite detail.
Within weeks, crowds filled Nickelodeon and Vaudeville houses to watch not one but two moving pictures that meticulously re-created the sordid affair -- one financed by the Thaw family fortune, portraying Harry as an innocent, aggrieved husband.
Thaw was an eccentric playboy who once rode a horse up the steps of the Union League Club and lit his cigars with $5 bills. But from the moment he was taken into custody, Thaw insisted he had acted "to avenge the rape of his wife." To many in the city, his behavior seemed quite appropriate. A leading minister said it would be a good thing if there was a little more shooting in cases like this.
Murder of the Century examines the opulent world of wealthy New York just after the turn of the century, conflicts over morality between the rich and middle class and the rise of a tabloid "yellow" press that encouraged and fed the public's hunger for more and more sensational stories.
"It is not merely a murder," William Randolph Hearst's Journal declared at the time. "The flash of that pistol lighted up an abyss of moral turpitude, revealing hidden features of powerful, reckless, openly flaunted wealth."
Special Thanks to
The Metropolitan Club
The International Tennis Hall of Fame at the Newport Casino
The Preservation Society of Newport County
Elaine Abelson
Paul Baker
Elizabeth Blackmar
Timothy Gilfoyle
Adolph Grude
David Nasaw
Still Photographs
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SPADEM, Paris
Bettmann Archive
Boston Public Library
Brown Brothers
Ann Buttrick
Culver Pictures
de Grummond Children's Literature Research Collection, University of Southern Mississippi
George Eastman House
Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library
Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania
Cynthia Jay
Alida Lessard
Suzannah Lessard
Library of Congress
L'Illustration/Sygma
David Lowe
McKim, Mead & White Scrapbook Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York
Moss Archives
Muse de la Mode et du Costume, Paris
Museum of the City of New York
Museum of Polo & Hall of Fame
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The New York Historical Society
The New York Public Library For the Performing Arts
Claire Nicolas
Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Science Graphics, Bend, Oregon
Sirot-Angel Collection
Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum
Underwood Photo Archives, San Francisco
Paula Uruburu
Peter White
Robert White
NARRATOR: In the decades following the Civil War, vast fortunes were being made by men who had started their lives with virtually nothing. Confident that their extraordinary financial success was a reward for virtue, they thought of themselves as a kind of American nobility. In fact, their business practices were often predatory and most certainly their personal lives were riddled with impropriety. Given their influence, this went largely unreported by the press until one night in 1906.
Stanford White, a figure at the very center of this world, was dead. New York City's leading architect and arbiter of taste had been shot in a dispute over a showgirl. Now the newspapers wrote about "lecherous, champagne-supping men and the theatrical women who were their willing consorts." Working people, who viewed them with a mixture of suspicion and envy, found the story irresistible.
BRENDAN GILL, Critic/Author: It had everything, society -- money, rage, lust, envy. And in those days we had, whatever it was, fifteen newspapers in New York City -- it wasn't limited to two or three newspapers -- and it was just -- it was the great story.
NARRATOR: Within a week of the murder, the Biograph Company had produced a motion picture dramatization. Stanford White was shot at Madison Square Garden, the entertainment complex that he himself had created. In the film, the architect is seen arriving at the rooftop cabaret. He is stalked by Harry Thaw, heir to a great Pittsburgh fortune. The murder, Thaw said, was to avenge the ruin of his beautiful young wife. Mrs. Thaw was the celebrated Evelyn Nesbit, a model and showgirl already well known to readers of the daily press.
No murder had ever received so much publicity. The attention was due, in large part, to the new and highly sensational "yellow press" dailies. The papers were written for a huge new population of working people who had moved to the city in search of factory jobs. As the case unfolded, readers were constantly reminded of the gulf that separated them from their rich employers.
In 1906, just one percent of American families controlled nearly ninety percent of the country's wealth, and a great many of these people lived in mansions along upper Fifth Avenue. While their employees worked sixty-hour weeks and lived in some of the most crowded tenements anywhere, the rich seemed not to work at all.
DAVID LOWE, Architectural Historian: It was an era of absolute opulence. People were covering their houses with the pelts of polar bears and other rare ocelots. It was the time of real luxury. People were wearing diamonds. People were wearing sable. People were eating lobster and drinking champagne. And the great restaurants, like Rector's and Delmonico's -- you'd take your girlfriend, you'd never take your wife. There's a famous story of two chorus girls talking, and one says, "You know, I found a pearl in an oyster at Rector's." And the other said, "That's nothing. I got a diamond necklace off an old lobster at The Metropolitan Club."
NARRATOR: The elegant Metropolitan Club counted Stanford White among its members, along with some of the wealthiest men in New York. White was also the club's architect. His murder over a showgirl created a scandal that threatened to force open the doors on the private lives of the rich. The most aggressive of the papers, The Evening Journal, launched the offensive with these words: "The flash of that pistol lighted up an abyss of moral turpitude, revealing powerful, reckless, openly-flaunted wealth."
In the days following the murder, the popular press proved just how well they understood their readers. Within a week, newsboys for The New York World, were selling an extra one hundred thousand copies a day. The lion's share of the coverage went not to the victim, Stanford White, nor even to his murderer, Harry K. Thaw, but, rather, to Mrs. Thaw, the former Evelyn Nesbit. Everyone knew Evelyn's photos, and she'd been immortalized as that ideal of glamour and independence, the Gibson Girl.
BRENDAN GILL: Evelyn Nesbit, from the moment she arrived in New York, she was one of the prettiest people that had ever been in New York, and she was -- not only with perfect features, but a soft, voluptuous, smiling mouth, and everybody wanted to take her picture, and she was photographed by everybody. She could wear a middy blouse and pretend to be very virtuous, or she could be this true, voluptuous creature.
NARRATOR: Now there was an insatiable desire to know everything about the beautiful showgirl at the center of the love triangle. Readers identified with the fairy tale story of a poor working girl rescued by a rich young man. Reporters noted that both Evelyn and her husband had grown up in Pittsburgh, the gritty steel capital of America. Thaw was the son of a railroad speculator and lived in a mansion on Pittsburgh's Fifth Avenue, while Evelyn lived with her brother and her mother in poverty. Evelyn's father had died when she was eight. Her mother turned their home into a boarding house, but couldn't make ends meet and was forced to sell her furniture to pay the rent. Some nights there was nothing more for dinner than bread and mustard. Evelyn took refuge in a fantasy world of fairy tale characters. Later, she would recall these days in a memoir.
NARRATOR: In 1899, the Nesbits moved to Philadelphia, where they hoped to improve their fortune. Both mother and daughter ended up with jobs at Wanamaker's Department Store. Even on their combined salaries, they could barely get by. Evelyn and her mother knew very well how beautiful she was.
NARRATOR: An offer of money to sit for a portrait was the opening to a life of glamour, wealth and tragedy. Evelyn began modeling for Philadelphia's commercial illustrators. Soon she could be seen in books and magazines as the fairy tale characters she loved so well. After a year in Philadelphia, the Nesbits were able to move to New York.
BRENDAN GILL: The mother of Evelyn Nesbit knew that she had a very salable commodity in a pretty child. Girls in those days, unless they were from upper class circumstances, didn't even finish high school. And especially if you were pretty and ambitious, what was there for you in education? There was nothing.
NARRATOR: Evelyn was sixteen and slim as a young boy. Voluptuous women were the fashion at the time, but her lean lines appealed to the artists and photographers of New York. Newspapers had only recently begun to reproduce photographs. Evelyn became famous overnight, and landed in the hit Broadway musical, Florodora. Broadway was one of the few places where a poor girl from Pittsburgh could be introduced to the exclusive social world of Stanford White and Harry K. Thaw. Evelyn had a small but featured role as a Spanish dancer. All the girls in Florodora were showered with gifts from stage door Johnnies -- six were said to have married millionaires -- so no one was surprised when the little Spanish dancer followed a similar path and began a relationship with the flamboyant Stanford White.
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