ANYONE who enjoys a good murder will have at least a fleeting acquaintance with the name of Stanford White. He was the most celebrated architect in America, arrogant and flamboyant. To commemorate George Washington's inaugural progress down Fifth Avenue, he designed a wooden arch which was later rebuilt in stone and erected in Washington Square. And he created Madison Square Garden, an immense structure of yellow Roman brick faced with terracotta. It comprised an arena that held 15,000 people, with a theatre, a concert hall and a partly open roof garden over which loomed a tower in the Spanish-Moorish style, only taller and bigger than any in Spain. Its cupola featured a bronze statue, eighteen feet high, of the goddess Diana balancing on one foot. Stanford White did not do things by halves, including the seduction of teenaged girls.
On the evening of June 25th, 1906, he was seated at a front row table of the Roof Garden, watching a new musical, Mamzelle Champagne. A tenor was singing I Could Love a Million Girls - an appropriate epitaph for a middle-aged roue, one might think - when a young Pittsburgh millionaire named Harry K. Thaw came up, agitated and pale. As he produced a pistol, the architect looked at him without moving. At a range of three inches, Thaw fired a shot into Stanford White's face.
The murder and the subsequent trial were a sensation of the time. In later years, there was a dull and bowdlerised film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, starring a young Joan Collins, with Ray Milland as Stanford White; and there was a replay of the scandal in E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime and its film version, in which White was played by none other than Norman Mailer.
Suzannah Lessard, who wrote The Architect of Desire, lays claim to Stanford White as her great-grandfather. I am not sure that this can be strictly accurate, since her grandmother did not marry White's son until ten years after the murder - can one have posthumous consanguinities? - but she has at any rate written a dense and evocative memoir covering four generations. There is a family tree provided, a candelabra affair showing who in the family was related to whom, but for such a lavishness of begetting and begatting, the Book of Genesis isn't, as the saying goes, in it.
The lady writes most artfully. Having described the murder itself early on Ms Lessard then retreats into her family memoir, using the main event as a kind of carrot to keep us going, with various nibbles along the way. She is a latter-day Scheherezade; if we are patient and keep coming back for more, the dirt, it is implied, will eventually be dished. And so it is, although there is not much told about Stanford White himself that is new.
He made a fortune - which he spent almost as he acquired it - by diligently - denuding Europe of works of beauty and - selling them to wealthy Americans. The splendidly named Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, for whom he built a house modelled on the Doge's Palace (turn right at St Mark's Square), instructed him to include a ballroom in which a person who was not well-bred would feel uncomfortable. If architecture can aspire to the poetic, he was the laureate of glitz.
At Newport, Rhode island, he designed a house for the heiress Tessie Oelrichs, which was modelled on the Grand Trianon; the double staircase was shaped like a Valentine heart, and the chandelier - an aerosol of its day - dispensed $25,000 worth of French perfume at a time. Barnum and Bailey, perhaps thereby exemplifying the former's theory that there was one born every minute, were hired to provide the entertainment at her son's tenth birthday party. When the US navy declined to anchor the Great White Fleet offshore to provide a backdrop for her Bal Blanc, she had battleships built in full-size wooden facsimiles and set afloat. The story of the great house and the irony of its decline is in itself a chilling comedy.
White himself was a voluptuary on a grand scale. He kept an apartment in the tower of Madison Square Garden, and there indulged a hearty appetite for young showgirls. When the stunningly beautiful Evelyn Nesbit was sixteen, she was cast as a Spanish dancer in Floradora. A member of the shows "sextette" introduced her to White, who took her to a room that had a velvet swing. It is doubtful if the colloquialism swinging" derived from the occasion, but Ms Lessard says that this is where the phrase "to see one's etchings" originated.
WHITE, who had a commendable liking for perfection, paid to have one of Evelyn's teeth fixed.
He fixed her wagon while he was at it for after a few glasses of champagne the 16-year-old woke up in Stanford's bed, naked, bloodied and an ex-virgin. She thought, such is the sweetness of idiocy, that he would divorce his wife - who prudently lived out of town - and marry her. Instead, and after she had had an adventure with the young John Barrymore, he packed her off to boarding school, and it was not long before she met the appalling Harry K. Thaw.
Heaven, contrary to the Victorian ditty, does not protect the working girl. Young Thaw was a sadist who, for bad measure, already detested Stanford White. He had attempted and failed to imitate the older man's debauched life style, so it was part of his copy-cat obsession that he should pursue Evelyn.
She was afraid of him, but he persisted. They married, and Thaw beat her savagely, sometimes with a dog-whip, on other occasions with a cane. Her story about how White had ravished her heaped coals upon Thaw's hatred. He took to carrying a gun; he made threats; he hired Pinkerton detectives to jeer at White in public. When the murder happened, White, at fifty-three, was ill, probably with Bright's disease, and would not have lived for much longer. At the police station, Evelyn kissed her husband and - kept repeating: "My God, Harry, you - killed him!" and "Kiss me!"
After two trials, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and went for a time to an all-mod-cons mental institution. His doting mother saw to it that Evelyn was dumped by the Thaw family; she became a morphine addict and, at forty-five, was performing in a cabaret at a Panama City bordello. By the time the film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, was made, she was seventy-four, bright-eyed, rehabilitated and teaching sculpture. Stanford White continued to be more than a villain; he was held up to symbolise the rottenness of the age.
White dominates the book, but mainly as an unseen presence. At the centre of the story is "the Place", a family estate designed by him on the north shore of Long Island, sixty miles from New York. Ms Lessard has an extraordinary gift for creating ghosts - He was latent. The silence about him was something dark right there in the light." It is, to be sure, written in spare, Updike-ish, crisply autumnal New Yorker-ese - the book is dedicated to William Shawn, one-time editor of that periodical, where the best jokes are the unintentionals - and the prose is as evocative as the description of the "old-fashioned sputtering lawn mower".
Who were the author's parents? The author calls them Frank and Mary Rousseau, which, since they are still living, is probably an evasion. They seem to have been well-known as musicians; and "my mother was famous for her beauty on the Place and in her house and in the world". "Dad" was an enthusiastic spanker; he even fashioned a "spanking stick": a piece of board half an inch thick. "After a beating he would hug me and kiss me in a false, lizardy way, telling me how much he loved me." One's scalp crawls at my daddy comes around from the furnace with a change in his eyes that makes him strange ... then my daddy reaches up and pokes me between the legs".
Ms Lessard's story is almost cold bloodedly schematic as she keeps the most potent liquor for the end of the binge. Incest, with small children as its victims, is horrible, and yet there is something blackly risible when the author and four of her five sisters come together as adults and, with the exception of one sibling who remembers almost nothing of her childhood, discover for the first time that Dad had molested all of them as children. His villainy was never found out, never denounced, never talked about. It is as if the seven dwarfs had discovered the truth about Snow White.
ONE does not look to a publisher's blurb for truth, and yet one blinks reading the dust jacket's "scratching the surface of her genteel family's murky past, she [Ms Lessard] discovered that her great-grandfather had a habit of lacing the champagne of pubescent girls in order to seduce them. Digging deeper, she found out the devastating effect his rampant sexual perversity - which, astonishingly, was tolerated - had on subsequent generations of her family." Two sentences, two quarter-truths
First, Lessard can have unearthed nothing new about Stanford White, whose depravities were dissected, described in lurid detail and gloated over in the yellow press of the day. Come to think of it, with what does one lace a pubescent girl's champagne? More champagne? Second, there can be no proof that White's sexual life can have affected a generation twice removed from his own; and, in any case, it was the author's mother, not her father who was a blood descendant of White. Would those two splendid chaps, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, argue for the existence of a pervert-in-law?
After so many pages in the company of Ms Lessard's family, one almost comes away with a sneaking liking for poor,. long-dead Stanford White. This is an engaging memoir, elegantly written and flawed only by its desire to be more substantial, more significant, than it is. Lamb dressed up as mutton, perhaps.