When, on June 25, 1906, the sound of gunfire rang out during the performance of “Mamzelle Champagne” at the Roof Garden the refrain of “I Could Love a Million Girls” froze on the singer’s lips, and there was dead silence. In that silence, Harry K. Thaw emptied the remaining bullets from his pistol and then held the pistol over his head with the barrel dangling down, seeming, even, to wish that someone would take the pistol away from him as he headed for the exit. Women at nearby tables began screaming as the manager of the show jumped up onto the stage and commanded the show to continue. “Go on playing!” he shouted. “Bring on that chorus!” The chorus girls, however, were unable to respond, though the orchestra did attempt to get the lively tune going again: it started up several times and then faltered, bringing shouts of protest from other parts of the audience. Just before the murder, there had been a dialogue onstage about a burlesque duel, so many thought the shots were merely part of the show. Meanwhile, a woman in white, who had been seated at a table next to Stanford’s, leaned over and kissed his corpse as it lay on the floor.
All this was reported in the New York Times the next morning. Also reported was how Harry Thaw finally surrendered his gun to Fireman Paul Brodin, who was on duty near the elevator, and how he was then arrested by Police Officer Debes of the Tenderloin Station, who had also been present. “He deserved it,” Thaw said to Officer Debes. “I can prove it. He ruined my wife and then deserted the girl.” Evelyn Nesbit Thaw rushed up to Harry and kissed him and said, “My God, you shot him, Harry!” and, “I didn’t know you would do it in this way,” and then embraced him and frantically kissed him some more. As for Evelyn’s relationship to Stanford, the Times displayed evenhandedness by quoting George Lederer, producer of “The Wild Rose,” a Broadway musical in which Evelyn had starred. Stanford had been a disinterested benefactor, he told the reporter, and had simply gotten Nesbit a part in the musical “Florodora,” and later the lead in “The Wild Rose.” The Times also quoted Mr. Lederer as saying that “from talking many times with Miss Nesbit’s mother I am firmly convinced that his friendship for Miss Nesbit and the help he gave her grew out of sheer goodheartedness,” and that “she is of frivolous disposition and no doubt refused to break off her friendship for him after marrying young Thaw who is a cigarette fiend and always seemed half crazed to me when I saw him.” Lederer did acknowledge that White was “a great rounder.” Stanford’s affair with Evelyn was indirectly confirmed later on in the Times article, Lederer’s disclaimers notwithstanding.
As the crowd dispersed, the Times went on to report, a great pool of blood spread on the floor. The actors and actresses came down from the stage: “Away from the footlights,” it noted, “their painted faces showed strangely in the group of employees and friends of Thaw and the dead man which formed as the last of the audience left.” The Times added that the employees of the Garden, to whom both Stanford and Thaw were well known, “did not seem greatly surprised at the tragedy.”
On the same morning that this report appeared Papa, having sat outside Grandma’s door for hours, finally heard her stirring and went in and told her what had happened. Grandma and Papa were calm, but Nina, Stanford’s mother, who was living in the house at the time, became hysterical with grief when she heard the news. As soon as possible Papa and Grandma set off for New York, leaving Nina, who was too upset to come, behind. Upon arriving at the house on Gramercy Park, Papa and Grandma found reporters still camped on the doorstep. Charley McKim joined the family and assumed the position of protector, handling the press and helping to plan the funeral. The Times reported that when a newsman had phoned Charley the night before and told him of Stanford’s murder he at first was able to say only “My God—good God,” and was then “so overcome by his feelings that he could not speak for a brief time.” On being told of Thaw’s remark about Stanford’s having ruined and deserted his wife, Charley said, “I cannot conceive of any possible ground upon which such a statement could be made.”
Stanford was laid out, amidst his possessions, at the house in Gramercy Park “almost at the foot of the Venus Genetrix, a statue found in the Tiber, which Mr. White purchased and placed in the great drawing room of his Gramercy Park home,” the New York World subsequently reported. “Living, he placed chaste Diana atop his great work—Madison Square Garden,” the story continued. “Dead, he was stretched in the shadow of Venus; she who brought him to the shadow of death.” The reporter had evidently peered in the window. There were some fifteen papers in New York at this time, and this was the big story for all of them.
Charley informed the press that the funeral would take place at St. Bartholomew’s, a large church at Forty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue, which had an entrance porch by Stanford and whose interior had been redone by him too. The Times reported that there would be ten pallbearers, their names to be announced. However, as extra editions continued to hit the streets, with ever more scandalous details not just about Evelyn and Stanford but about Stanford’s private life in general, it became clear that the story was exploding and that Stanford as a figure of depravity was the gunpowder. Because a crush of sensation seekers was expected, the family decided to cancel the St. Bartholomew’s funeral. Charley announced the cancellation and arranged for private services to be held in St. James. The World also reported that “the men who constituted Stanford White’s intimate friends did not rally to the defense of his memory yesterday.” Instead, they disappeared into their clubs or managed not to be found at all—except, of course, for Charley. An additional reason that the St. Bartholomew’s funeral was cancelled may well have been that not enough suitable candidates had agreed to take the highly visible position of pallbearer.
On Thursday, June 28th, the morning of the St. James funeral, a hearse was to carry Stanford’s body to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry which would take the funeral party to a special train waiting in Queens for the journey to St. James. A crowd, including reporters, gathered at Gramercy Park hoping to see celebrities, but what they saw instead was the Judge John Lawrence Smith family rallying close around Grandma in this crisis. Nearly eighty years later, sitting in the newspaper morgue of the New York Public Library, I was moved to read that the people glimpsed in carriages by reporters were Grandma’s brother James and her sister Kate, and even several family members I had known, such as Cousin Charlie Butler, who ran a dairy farm just down the road from Box Hill and poured cream on everything he ate, and Cousin Isabella, who had won the rowing race in the harbor as a girl and was in my time a twinkly old lady who always had Christmas presents for us children. I also learned from the papers that Grandma and Papa drove out to St. James together by car—probably with Charley though he was not mentioned in the press. I knew from relatives that Grandma’s sisters Ella and Nellie had stayed out in St. James to comfort Nina. Aunt Ella told Nina that Stanford had been shot by an anarchist. In the Smith family this also became a handy explanation to give the children when they asked about what had happened to Uncle Stanny.
By the time the funeral train arrived in St. James there were approximately fifty people from the village waiting, and a traffic jam of automobiles and carriages from various parts of Long Island that fell into line to make up a cortège. Nevertheless, given Stanford’s stature, the funeral was an obscure one that took place in the privacy of the Smith context. The cortège followed the coffin to the Episcopal church. The church was decked out with flowers, but the undertaker provided the pallbearers. There was no sermon, no eulogy. The absence of most of Stanford’s New York pals was conspicuous, but Willie Chanler was there, and so was Jim Breese, Stanford’s wealthy photographer friend. After the service, Stanford’s body was put in the ground in the graveyard behind the church, among many Smiths, under a Scotch-pine sapling that had been planted there for the occasion. The only other grave nearby was that of Richard Mansfield White, Stanford and Grandma’s son who had died at seven months; his pretty miniature tombstone had been designed by Charley McKim.
There was no reception. After the burial, the gathering dispersed, except for Charley and a few others who remained on the steps of the church advising Grandma on how to deal with the scandalous publicity. Grandma told my mother that the course of silence had been decided on then. And so, as my mother observed to me, what was initially a strategy for dealing with a passing storm of publicity became a course that Grandma and Papa stuck to for the rest of their lives.
After the consultation on the church steps, Grandma, Papa, and Charley went back to Box Hill. How strangely quiet that gay house, full of dancing objects, must have seemed to them with Stanford suddenly in the ground. The atmosphere of joy trapped in silence, with catastrophe latent, so familiar to me must have come into being on that day. The abruptness of the change comes through in the McKim, Mead & White correspondence; Stanford’s busy letters persist right up to his death. “What would your little Italian ceiling cost?” “I was not at all satisfied with the long rug that you simply repaired. Where is the small rug?” “I was disappointed that the vendor cannot guarantee more than 20 mph.” “[I have had] a heavy dose of medicine indulged in to cure sciatica.” “I can hardly keep my head above water.” “I would like you to make the nude young, sweet and alluring for what are nudes if not for that?” “Might I carry in my heart the thought that if I ever get on my feet again I might buy it [a painting] back from you?” One also reads about the difference between Blanc de Nîmes versus very pale sienna in a tile, and about the problem of a grizzly-bear skin that stank, and there are directions, over several letters, for work on the fancy pergola in the box garden at Box Hill. After Stanford’s death, the office was writing to contractors about how Mrs. White was anxious to complete the work on the pergola in the box garden according to Mr. White’s original intention. Even before the end of July, Grandma was urging the office to see that copies of the frieze and the caryatids from a Greek temple were made as Stanford had planned. But in these letters there is nothing of the same rush as in Stanford’s, and nothing either of that sense of proliferation of business and objects and relationships and transactions that his letters convey. In the letters after his death, the items under discussion are few, and one knows that when they are attended to there will be no more.
Grandma must have been in need of money immediately, because Charley took charge of selling some exotic trees in tubs from Box Hill in July: twelve orange trees, a hundred and fifty years old, imported from a château in France; some pittosporums; several large, rare bays imported from Bruges; and a Japanese pine. The office correspondence also indicates that a mounted tiger’s head was sold, and that an ancient Gothic window that had been on loan to Stanford was returned to its owner. Where once there was a swirling, inexhaustible inventory, each object has suddenly become somehow unmoving and singular. There is a polar-bear rug. A marble Greek vase. An antique altar. A large Venetian lantern consisting of three lamps standing on top of carved wooden horses. Soon the only remaining concern is Stanford’s tombstone—a stela with a scrolling shell on top, designed by Charley. Matters at issue in the correspondence about the tombstone are the type of marble to be used and, once that point is settled, various delays in the execution of the work.
After the tombstone was in place beside the stripling pine in the Episcopal graveyard, Stanford’s name disappeared from the McKim, Mead & White correspondence. Reading the correspondence in Avery Library, at Columbia, I saw the Place sinking into a kind, restoring oblivion, the waters of ongoing time closing over it in a healing way as life at the office boomed on with other people’s business under categories such as boilers, garages, and gymnasiums.
In fact, however, the noise about Stanford went on in the world in a way that deeply affected the family. For months, it was on the front page of the Times nearly every day, and the tabloids and some periodicals gave it even shriller prominence. A typical tabloid headline, over a story accompanied by a photograph of Madison Square Garden featuring the tower, was “RETREAT OF GOTHAM SYBARITES; Aphrodites and Sapphos Crowded the Caves.” “STANFORD WHITE, VOLUPTUARY AND PERVERT, DIES THE DEATH OF A DOG” was the title of an article in Vanity Fair. Another tabloid headline was “THAW FULFILLED A LAW AS OLD AS THE WORLD SAID DR. GREGORY: Writer and Clergyman Strongly Defends the Deed of Young Husband Who Took Life of Stanford White.” A follow-up story on the murder described Stanford as going up to the manager of “Mamzelle Champagne” and saying, of the lead actress, Maud Fulton, “Give me an introduction to little Fulton, she looks good to me,” and then saying, “Give all the girls a drink: you know I got a couple of babies in this bunch.” Another article stated, “Nothing in the world seemed to please him better than to catch a girl just starting into her teens in his ever working net.” According to still another, “Irate fathers and mothers of children just budding into girlhood who have fallen into his clutches have sought assistance from the Gerry Society and the Police.” (The Gerry Society was an advocacy group for victims of various kinds of abuse.) One columnist wrote, “Thaw merely gave his enemy a new sensation—something he had sought in vain, probably, for twenty years.”
The Evening Journal ran a serial called “The Girl in the Pie,” about Susie Johnson, who had jumped out of the pie with twenty-four canaries at the infamous stag dinner. The serial claimed that after she married, her husband discovered her past and kicked her out of their home, and that she ended up in potter’s field. In other articles, young women who had come forward with testimony were quoted. Miss Katherine Pilon, for example, one of the few who agreed to be named, said that “the stories of Stanford White and the men around him only state half the truth,” that she had witnessed scenes aboard a yacht that “baffled description,” and that she could point to a hundred similar instances. Stanford was defended by a member of the “Mamzelle Champagne” chorus: she said, “Temptations? Nonsense!… Every girl knew what his attentions meant and most of us would have given a year’s salary to get those attentions.” An unnamed friend of Stanford’s was quoted as saying, “What if poor White did play around with stage-girls? They were nothing but little butterflies to him. Why make such a fuss because a few of them fell by the wayside? They were gay, brief playthings. That sort of thing is to be expected.” The preachers, of course, disagreed. John D. Rockefeller’s pastor said, “It would be a good thing if there was a little more shooting in cases like this.”
In the meantime Thaw’s defense team got organized, generating another tier of publicity. Harry K. Thaw came from a very wealthy Pittsburgh family that was known locally for its philanthropy. Harry’s father, William Thaw, was a self-made coal-and-railroad multimillionaire, and the Thaws were still social aspirants in the larger world. One of Harry’s sisters had married a Carnegie. Another had married the Earl of Yarmouth, no matter that he was in fact a penniless actor in New York; no matter that on the very morning of the wedding he had been arrested for debts and on the spot had extorted an extra million from the Thaws. The Thaws also had ambitions for Harry, their only son, although he had been a worry to them from an early age. He had difficulties in the many schools that he attended. For one thing, he would without provocation throw himself on the floor in a screaming rage. As a young man, he had embarrassed the family with shenanigans such as driving his automobile through a shopwindow in revenge for inadequate service, and, for no known reason, flogging a bellboy in his hotel room and then rubbing salt in the wounds. By 1901, when Harry became interested in Evelyn, he was thirty years old and his father was dead. He was an heir to forty million dollars, making him far, far richer than anyone in the White family circle—so much richer as to put him beyond comparison. However, because of his erratic behavior his money was controlled by his mother. At first Mrs. Thaw was appalled by his liaison with Evelyn, but as Harry’s behavior continued to be worrying (at some point in this period he was convicted in Pittsburgh for enticing a minor) eventually she went as far as encouraging him to marry Evelyn in the hope that doing so would calm him down.
Mrs. Thaw was an ardent Presbyterian, a do-gooder with austere tastes and the looks of a grand dowager. When her son shot Stanford she was on an ocean voyage, on a cattle boat, to visit one of her daughters, the Countess of Yarmouth, in Europe. As soon as she arrived, she caught a boat back and on her return mobilized her considerable resources for Harry’s defense. Since there was no doubt that Harry had pulled the trigger, only two courses were open to the defense: to plead either insanity or extreme provocation. In order to bolster the provocation defense, Mrs. Thaw hired a platoon of detectives to dig up dirt about Stanford. “Many actresses scamper to avoid subpoenas,” one paper reported. Mrs. Thaw also hired a publicist who not only planted news stories about Stanford but also arranged for three plays and a book, all depicting Harry as an avenger of virtue, to be written and produced. These efforts rode a groundswell of popular opinion that favored Harry, and they supported Harry’s publicly proclaimed belief that he had served as an instrument of Providence in killing Stanford. Mrs. Thaw also hired a former Pittsburgh police commissioner to clear up the matter of Harry’s trial and conviction in Pittsburgh for enticing a minor. Subsequently, the ledger that contained the record of this trial disappeared and then mysteriously reappeared with the page about the trial cut out.
A subsidiary theme in the newspapers was how a man of Thaw’s background fared in jail. Headlines read, “THAW DINES ON SQUAB HOT FROM DELMONICO’S OVEN,” “HARRY THAW PASSES UP TURKEY,” “THAW ORDERS FIVE NEW SUITS.” Still another theme of the Harry Thaw story concerned Evelyn, who had to be protected from adoring mobs by a cordon of policemen when she visited him. Mrs. Thaw’s relationship with Evelyn was also a topic. Mrs. Thaw had foolishly snubbed Evelyn one day when their paths crossed at the Tombs, where Harry was imprisoned. Counsel quickly pointed out to her that both Evelyn’s popularity and her potential as a witness were assets for Harry, and Mrs. Thaw changed her ways. During this time circulation was way up for all the New York papers and for others as well. The Hearst chain is said to have risen on the back of the story.
Mrs. Thaw was quoted as saying, “While I am prepared to spend the last dollar I have in Harry’s defense, I do not think that the whole trial will cost more than a million.” That summer she decided to sell her family home and all her Pittsburgh property, and told the press that she had decided never to return to Pittsburgh but, rather, to “live near Harry if he is in prison, to go to England if he is executed, to take him to Europe if he is acquitted.” (Other Thaws were also reported to be leaving “costly residences” in Pittsburgh because of “unpleasant notoriety.”) Mrs. Thaw’s enormous fortune contributed significantly to ruining Stanford’s reputation, and hence to Papa and Grandma’s nightmare. Mama, in whom I never detected the slightest trace of paranoia in any other connection, wondered to the end of her life whether stories about the murder and the scandal that continued to surface in the press as the decades rolled by were not financed by the Thaws.
In August, the house on Gramercy Park was rented out, and Charley McKim arranged for tickets abroad for Grandma, Papa, and himself. On the liner Charley and Papa shared a cabin next to Grandma’s. The three toured Scotland together, but then Charley fell ill and had to stay in London while Grandma and Papa went on to Paris; soon, however, he joined up with them again, and they all took a tour of Normandy and the Touraine. “McKim preaches architecture to Larry by the hour,” Grandma wrote to Saint-Gaudens, and Larry was “in heaven.” But to her sister Nellie she wrote:
As for myself—nothing could be more than what I have already been through—I fear nothing—anymore—and am laying in a good stock of strength and courage to be ready for the winter which is bound to be a hard one no matter where I am.
Where Larry goes I go.
On their return in late October, she moved to Cambridge and lived there in a rented house with Papa while he went to Harvard. Papa took great care that she never saw a newspaper, and also kept from her the gravity of the financial situation in which Stanford had left them. In New York, McKim coped with the details of tidying up Stanford’s life—details having largely to do with objects: objects mixed up with other people’s things, objects lent out, objects borrowed, and objects promised to others. And then there were collateralized objects, and the extraordinarily tangled matter of Stanford’s debts.
In October trial preparations got under way, pouring kerosene on a newspaper story that had never died. Because of the difficulty of finding an impartial jury, the trial itself didn’t start until January 23, 1907, seven months after the murder. The prosecutor was one of New York’s great district attorneys, William Travers Jerome, a stocky, forceful man, reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. Thaw had five lawyers, led by Michael Delmas, a short, fat, lion-headed celebrity attorney from California, who was said to be the illegitimate son of Napoleon III and was often dubbed “the Napoleon of the Western Bar.” Large crowds gathered daily outside the courtroom, requiring a police cordon to enable the principals to enter. (Evelyn’s entrances nearly caused riots.) A telegraph office was set up in the main hall of the Criminal Court Building for the convenience of reporters, and extra seats for reporters had also been installed in the courtroom. More than a hundred reporters covered the trial. The rest of the seats were taken up by the Thaw family and friends, including two of Harry’s sisters, Mrs. George Carnegie and the Countess of Yarmouth. One of Stanford’s secretaries, Charles Harnett, attended. Aside from Harnett, however, once Papa had opened the trial with his brief testimony and then gone home, there was no one in the courtroom associated with Stanford other than Evelyn.
In the end there were two trials, both centering on the issue of Harry’s sanity, for Harry had eventually been persuaded by his lawyers to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, a novel concept at the time. In return for this capitulation, the lawyers agreed to introduce into his defense the idea that he had done only what honor would require of a husband—that Stanford’s behavior had driven Harry insane, as it would have driven any honorable man. Delmas put it this way in his summation: “If Thaw is insane, it is with a species of insanity known from the Canadian border to the Gulf. If you expert gentlemen ask me to give it a name, I suggest that you label it Dementia Americana. It is that species of insanity that inspires every American to believe his home is sacred. It is that species of insanity that persuades an American that whoever violates the sanctity of his home or the purity of his wife or daughter has forfeited the protection of the laws of this state or any other state.” The Dementia Americana aspect of the defense turned the trial into a trial of Stanford.
William Travers Jerome pressed the case that Harry was sane and that the murder had been premeditated. Since Harry had for weeks walked around New York with a gun declaring that he wanted to kill Stanford, this case was not hard to press. Then Evelyn took the stand. She made her appearance dressed in schoolgirl clothes, with a demure hat that had been carefully chosen by Delmas. According to newspaper reports, her voice was high, like a child’s, and though she was twenty-two by this time, she looked sixteen. She looked helpless and small. Irvin Cobb, a reporter for the Evening World, wrote that she was “the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at” and described her as having “the slim quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her faultless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies and the size of half-dollars, a mouth made of rumpled rose petals.”
As it happened, the prosecutor, Jerome, was himself having an illicit affair with a very young woman at the time, a fact that could have ruined his career had it been known. Evelyn, who in effect was telling on her lover at the trial, infuriated him. He lost his temper at her several times, and so appeared to be bullying a frail creature; he missed important chances to press his case when others were on the stand; and at times he even undermined his case because he was so intent on trying to elicit testimony that would blacken Evelyn.
He won a victory, however, when Stanford’s behavior outside his relationship to Evelyn was ruled out of order. This was a mercy for the family, because Mrs. Thaw’s detectives had amassed a formidable arsenal of tales. Jerome would probably have been able to get Evelyn’s relationship with Stanford ruled out as well, but Delmas circumvented this by having Evelyn testify not about her relationship with Stanford directly but about what she had told Harry about the relationship.
That Evelyn had consistently stoked Harry’s jealous rage at Stanford had been widely reported. Wherever they might be, if Stanford turned up Evelyn had made sure that Harry noticed him. In fact, on the night of the murder Stanford had arrived at a restaurant where Evelyn and Harry were dining, whereupon Evelyn passed Harry a note (later produced in court) that said “That B—— is here.” (“B——,” she testified, stood for “Blackguard.”) What had not been reported was Evelyn’s story of her affair with Stanford, six years earlier, when she was sixteen. Before this part of her testimony, Evelyn insisted that court stenographers be male, because what she had to say was too shocking for a young woman to hear. This got the court, and then the nation—including the President and Congress—into an uproar. If it had not already been made clear that Stanford was the real defendant in the trial, there was no question about it from this point on.
Evelyn told of being befriended by Stanford, of being invited to parties with other chorus girls, and of being given gifts. Then one evening when her mother was out of town, she went to what she had expected would be an after-theatre supper for four but had turned out to be a supper for two. Stanford, who up to that time had limited her to one drink, gave her many drinks that night. As Delmas summarized her testimony, she then said that
he finally took her to a room where there was a small table upon which stood a single glass and a small bottle of champagne; that while her attention was attracted by a picture, Stanford White filled the glass with champagne and insisted upon her drinking; that she did drink and in a minute or two a pounding began in her ears, a thumping and a pounding and then the whole room seemed to go round and everything got very black and she lost consciousness; that when she regained consciousness she was in bed with nothing on but a little shirt and Stanford White was in bed with her nude, and that there were mirrors all around the bed; that she was alarmed and screamed and Stanford White tried to quiet her; that when she got out of bed to reclothe herself she saw large blotches of blood all over everything and thereupon she began to scream more than ever, and Stanford White came back into the room and tried to quiet her; that after she was dressed Stanford White took her home to her hotel and left her and that she sat up all night and continued to sit up until the afternoon of the next day when Stanford White appeared at the hotel; that Stanford White then kneeled beside her and picked up and kissed the edge of her dress and that she would not look at him, and that he said to her that she should not be worried or upset; that she had the most beautiful head he had ever seen, and he would do a great many things for her, and that everybody did these things and that that was all people were born for and lived for and that she was so nice-looking and slim that he couldn’t help it, and that only very young girls were nice, and the thinner they were the prettier they were; that nothing was so loathsome as a stout or fat woman; that everybody was doing these things and that she must be very clever and not be found out and made her swear not to tell her mother about it.
Delmas’s brilliant and persuasive summation lasted eight hours, and at the heart of it was a description of what was, at the very least, a statutory rape, as the age of consent at the time was eighteen. Jerome, in his summation for the prosecution, said, “Will you acquit a cold-blooded, deliberate, cowardly murderer because his lying wife has a pretty girl’s face?”
After two days of deliberation the jury remained deadlocked, seven finding Harry guilty and five finding him insane. The judge dismissed them and ordered another trial. That one began a year after the first and was comparatively swift. Harry K. Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to Matteawan, a mental institution in Fishkill, New York. A large approving crowd attended his passage—in his own car, accompanied only by two of his lawyers—from the Criminal Court Building to Grand Central Station, where he boarded a train for Fishkill. He had hired a private railroad car, well stocked with whiskey for the trip, and had invited a large group of friends to celebrate with him.
During the second trial Grandma and Papa were in Paris, where Papa, having graduated from Harvard, was studying architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Charley stayed in close touch, taking an intense interest in the details of Larry’s schooling at the Ecole, and daydreaming about his future. To Larry he wrote:
When you get through with your work on the other side and come home ready to build, you will find opportunities awaiting you that no other country has offered in modern times. The call is Roman, and it will have to be sustained.… There is no danger of falling back into the degenerate order of things which has heretofore always existed. [The way is now being paved for the next generation] who are to come home and design the really great works.
Charley was at the height of his influence as an architect, and his letters to Paris were full of encouragement; but his health had been fragile for years, and Stanford’s death, the trials, and the publicity precipitated an irreversible nervous decline. He lost his ability to concentrate, became melancholy and fearful, and began to take extended leaves from the office. As the years passed, his distress only worsened. Eventually he had to have an attendant with him at all times.
In this period of mourning and decline, Charley’s long attachment to Smithtown and to the Judge John Lawrence Smith family’s vision of life came to the fore again. Before sailing for Paris, Grandma had sent him a painting of St. James and Charley had written back:
Thank you for the picture; I love to have it as your gift—and for all the memories it calls up. For nearly twenty-five years I have associated it with so much in my life that has smoothed the way and helped to make existence more worth living that I should be helpless now if I were to try to tell you my affection for the soil of the Smiths.
In sickness and in health, through many years which seem such a little way back, they have endeared it to me by everlasting kindness. Is it any wonder that Crane Neck and the Sound rejoice my soul as well as theirs?
Ella was not over fifteen years old, nor you very long out of short frocks when we landed, Prescott and I, one very hot summer morning after an eventful night on the Sound and arrived twelve hours late at his new cottage by the harbour.
I can see Cornelia [Nellie] now, meeting us at the door, young and handsome, full of concern—ministering to our wants and sending us to bed immediately after breakfast! Those were halcyon days of pioneering, when the old “cord-wood” path was good enough, and the sky blue enough, and [Bessie’s brother] James’ axe cleared the way. Your grandmother used to drive over then to see the “improvements” and I was called in to explain to the Judge the beauties of one of my first efforts in Architecture.
As I look back, from then till now seems only yesterday. Nothing is changed. Winter has taken the place of summer, the country is as beautiful as ever.
In another letter to Grandma he wrote, “You alone have made life worth living.”
When Grandma and Papa came back from Paris in 1909, Charley could no longer tolerate the stresses of the city at all. So Grandma fixed up the Red Cottage for him. She put in gateposts adorned with beskirted bronze horses that had been figureheads for gondolas in Venice. She put in little gravel paths, held in by strips of iron that also kept out the weeds. And she furnished the house with, among other things, a five-foot-high Tyrolean chest with a big iron key in the lock; a Swiss gaming table, with a slate top for keeping score; and a corner cabinet that Stanford had improvised out of some ornamentally painted wooden panels from a Bavarian church. These were still fixtures of the Red Cottage in my time. Charley lived there for only a few months, however. In September of 1909, just as Pennsylvania Station was nearing completion, he died in the Red Cottage. Stanford had died wearing a heavy gold ring depicting the nude figures of a man and two women. Charley died wearing a ring on which two hearts were entwined.