(Harry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947) is best known for the murd...)
Harry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947) is best known for the murder of architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden in 1906 and the sensational trial that followed.
Thaw was born on February 1, 1871, to Pittsburgh coal and railroad baron William Thaw, Sr. , and his second wife, Mary Sibbet (Copley) Thaw. William Thaw, whose father was of Scots-Irish and English Quaker stock and had settled in Pittsburgh in 1804, was a high official in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, having amassed a fortune in canals, railroading, and related enterprises. The Thaw family, including ten children (five of them by William Thaw's first wife, who died in 1863), was among Pittsburgh's most prominent. After 1888 they lived at Lyndhurst, a mansion built that year at a reputed cost of $2. 5 million. William Thaw's death in 1889 left his eighteen-year-old son Harry with a fortune of $3 million plus an interest in valuable coke-producing properties.
Education
Young Thaw entered Western University of Pennsylvania (later the University of Pittsburgh) as a member of the class of 1893 but in 1892 transferred to Harvard University, where he enrolled as a special student in the arts and sciences; he never received a college degree.
Career
On frequent European jaunts he gave elaborate and expensive dinner parties, including one in Paris at which the invited guests included 100 actresses. In New York City in 1901 Harry Thaw became infatuated with Evelyn Nesbit, a chorus girl then appearing in Floradora, a popular musical review of the day. The strikingly beautiful Nesbit had been brought to Manhattan from Pittsburgh two years earlier, when only fifteen, by a mother eager to launch her upon a stage career. Quickly winning a place for herself, she posed for Charles Dana Gibson, the magazine illustrator and creator of the "Gibson Girl, " and was the model for one of his most famous sketches, The Eternal Question, in which the long tresses of a lovely young woman curl to form a question mark. She had also formed an attachment with the prominent architect Stanford White, then in his fifties and at the pinnacle of his career as a partner in the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. He had designed numerous public buildings and private mansions in New York and elsewhere. Thaw and Nesbit were married in Pittsburgh on April 4, 1905.
On the evening of June 25, 1906, while on a trip to New York, Thaw and his wife encountered Stanford White sitting alone at a table on the roof garden of the Madison Square Garden – which he had designed – watching a performance of Ma'mzelle Champagne. With neither warning nor direct provocation, Thaw drew a pistol and shot the architect dead.
In two murder trials (the first ended in a hung jury) conducted in the full glare of publicity, Thaw described his rage at his wife's stories of her earlier relationship with White; District Attorney William T. Jerome crossed swords with the prominent defense lawyers; and several psychiatrists offered conflicting testimony as to Thaw's mental state. Although Nesbit – and her mother – had apparently originally welcomed the liaison with White, at the trials she offered lurid testimony describing how he had seduced and ruined her, testimony shrewdly aimed at exploiting the "white slave" issue then much in the public mind. Thaw's mother, a strong-willed woman active in church and philanthropic causes in Pittsburgh, dedicated herself and her checkbook to her son's defense. In the second trial, concluded in 1908, Thaw was found innocent by reason of temporary insanity and was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill-on-Hudson, N. Y. Mrs.
Thaw's continuing legal efforts included an impassioned, rambling pamphlet written in 1909 (The Secret Unveiled), in which she described her son as "an average young man with a chivalrous nature" who was being persecuted by a cabal of Stanford White's influential friends. Thaw received preferential treatment at Matteawan, including several vacations, and in August 1913, under suspicious circumstances, he "escaped" to Canada.
In July 1915, having been extradited to New York and placed on trial on the escape charge, he was declared sane by a jury and released. Thaw's days in the limelight were far from over, however. In 1916 he divorced Evelyn Nesbit, charging her with infidelity and denying the paternity of her son, Russell (born in 1909). In that same year a warrant for his arrest was issued in New York, on a charge of horsewhipping a youth whom he had allegedly coerced into accompanying him east from California. A suicide attempt early in 1917 led to an additional seven years in institutions for the insane in Pennsylvania. Freed again in 1926, Thaw described the vicissitudes of his life in a privately published work, The Traitor. A venture into the field of movie production early in the 1930's produced nothing but legal entanglements with several actresses and showgirls. Although he acquired the Philadelphia estate of the publisher J. Bertram Lippincott in 1939, he was constantly on the move between New York, California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. He died in 1947 in Miami Beach, Fla. , following a coronary thrombosis; after Presbyterian services, he was buried in the Thaw family plot in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh.
Achievements
In 1955 a Hollywood film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, told again the story of the act of passion that almost half a century before had first propelled Thaw into the glare of publicity.
(Harry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947) is best known for the murd...)
Personality
Although short, bespectacled, and unprepossessing in appearance, he soon attracted attention as a playboy.
Quotes from others about the person
In an unsparing obituary judgment, the New York Times characterized him as a man whose "colossal vanity" and appetite for sensation had ultimately "become monotonous to the point of nausea. "
Connections
Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit were married in Pittsburgh on April 4, 1905.
