Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by Jeffrey Hart

THE SCANDAL distracts us from the enduring truth. As the clock inched toward midnight on June 25, 1906, Stanford White sat at a table in the roof cafe of the old Madison Square Garden. He had designed the building himself It was not then the scene of hockey matches or basketball games, but an elaborate and sophisticated pleasure dome. The first bullet hit White in the left eye and killed him instantly, but Harry K. Thaw fired two more shots just to be sure.

Thaw was a millionaire Pittsburgh playboy and a mentally unstable narcotics addict. His murderous obsession with White derived from the fact that years earlier White had deflowered (raped, in effect) the beautiful actress Evelyn Nesbit. Somehow, Thaw had persuaded Miss Nesbit to marry him, and she had incautiously told him about White's deed.

At the time of the rape, Evelyn Nesbit, age 16, was a star in the popular musical Floradora, known as "the girl in the green velvet swing." Stanford White wined and dined her, swung her around Manhattan in horse carriages, and introduced her to high society. He took her to various of his "hideaways" for intimate suppers. Eventually, he struck. After plying her with champagne, he took her to a bedroom, complete with mirrors and flashing lights, and dressed her in a Japanese kimono. Then she passed out. When she awoke, she was no longer a virgin-but she was for the time being in love with White, who liked to swing her on a velvet swing in the nude.

White had a wife out in Smithtown, Long Island, whom he visited on weekends and seems to have regarded with great affection. Her attitude toward the activities reported in the gossip columns remains unknown. In any case, Smithtown was not the scene of the real action. White and his social and artistic intimates maintained various dens in Manhattan which were used for anonymous sexual parties. One was called the Sewer Club, another the Morgue. White also had a cozy apartment in the tower above Madison Square Garden. When he was murdered, a tenor on the roof cafe stage was singing "I Could Love a Thousand Girls." Among White's effects were 160 books of erotica, and he shared with Thaw an interest in sado-masochism. On the night he died, he was wearing a ring "of peculiar design," with figures of two nude women and one male. Stanford White made Hugh Hefner look like a choirboy.

But, interesting as it is, this side of White distracts us from the fact that he may be the very greatest of American architects. Stanford White was a Renaissance man in several senses of the word. He designed many great buildings of the turn-of-the-century period, and he not only designed the buildings but ransacked Europe to decorate them.

White's father was an impecunious litterateur and Shakespeare specialist whose conversation must have been White's principal education. At 16, White was apprenticed to the firm of the great Henry Hobson Richardson, who immediately recognized the boy's skill at freehand drawing. Before he was twenty, White was given extraordinary responsibilities by Richardson, supervising ongoing architectural projects. Soon came the great years with the firm of McKim, Mead, and White, without doubt the dominant architectural firm in the country. White was the firm's resident genius. He reacted against Richardson's romanesque experiments and against the Gothic Revival, deciding instead to produce a magnificent American classicism. "For White," observes Paul Baker in this riveting biography, "during the last decades of the nineteenth century the formally balanced classical tradition . . . became ever more important. . . . As the United States grew in wealth and national strength and became with the Spanish-American War a world imperial power, adaptation of the traditional modes of the grand and imperial design seemed to him particularly fitting."

You cannot stroll around Manhattan without becoming sharply aware of his creativity. The Villard Houses, on Madison Avenue, now part of the Helmsley Palace Hotel, derive from Renaissance models. White designed the magnificent facade of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue, and great private homes arose under his architectural magic wand. McKim, Mead, and White designed Columbia University's Low Library, and much else on that campus. Augustus SaintGaudens and White collaborated on a statue of Admiral Farragut, which can be seen on lower Fifth Avenue -and also on what may be the single best piece of American sculpture, the memorial to Henry Adams's wife, Clover, in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. It is a strange and brooding female figure, faceless, metaphysically disturbing.

White also designed the Newport Casino, and herewith a charming tale. James Gordon Bennett, the multimillionaire publisher of the New York Herald, had sponsored as his guest at another Newport club one Captain Henry Candy, a British polo player. When Candy rode his horse up the stairs and into the main hall, the club withdrew his privileges. Outraged, Bennett commissioned White to design a better club nearby; he produced the Casino.