The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by Ruth Conniff

Why, when I was your age, we had to walk sixteen miles to get to a lesbian bar. There was no such thing as lesbian chic. We were monsters and we liked it that way. We didn't have famous pregnant lesbian couples on the covers of glossy weekly magazines. We had one quarterly newsprint newsletter--so stapled together, you had to update your tetanus shot just to subscribe. There weren't lesbian bookstores; there were only two lesbian books. That's two copies of one book. And we passed them around like they were the last extant paper products in a post-nuclear winter.

But now. we've got products with the L-word right in the titles. Lesbian is not liberal. Actually liberals of the nineties are the lesbians of the seventies. And our books are now sold in your big mega-super-humungo-so-overwhelming-I'm-having -a-panic-attack-and-leaving-with-nothing-Barnes -and-Ignoble-bookstore/cafe/HMO. Which have forced the mom and mom. or pop and pop gay/lesbian bookstores we had for a minute to shut down or become rainbow tchotchke stores.

I found The History of Lesbian Hair by Mary Dugger (Doubleday), So You Want to be a Lesbian? by Liz Tracey and Sydney Pokorny (St. Martin's Griffin), and Lesbianism Made Easy by Helen Eisenbach (Crown) all by the checkout register at my local mega-store. Right by the Dell Astrology pamphlets. But I bought them at my gay bookstore. Mary Dugger's book is a graphic romp through life, liberty, and the pursuit of lesbian happiness. The cover photo of Mona Lisa in a modified greasy biker haircut is worth the price. The Tracey/Pokorny oeuvre is cheeky and informative, with enough rules to give that best-selling straight rule book a run for its money. Helen Eisenbach's satire is an ennui-laced correction of the notion that being a lesbian is difficult. If you buy them and tie them up with one purple bow you've got a perfect lesbian starter kit and stocking stuffer.

The best book I read all year was The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, by Suzannah Lessard (Dial Press).

In this mesmerizing story, which unfolds with the compelling force of a mystery novel, Lessard explores how her powerful and infamous great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White, has haunted her family through four generations.

White designed the New York Public Library, Madison Square Garden, the arch in Washington Square Park, and many other major landmarks. (He even acquired the statue attributed to Michelangelo, recently discovered at the French Embassy in New York.) In 1906, he died an infamous death--a legendary philanderer and abuser of young girls, he was shot in the head by the husband of one of his victims.

The murder trial that followed (dubbed "the trial of the century") dominated public attention much the way the O.J. Simpson trial has ninety years later.

Stanford White became a symbol of the wealth, excess, and debauch that characterized America's Gilded Age. He inspired E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, and a movie called The Girl in the Velvet Swing (named for the swing in which he pushed Evelyn Nesbitt, the showgirl whose husband eventually killed him). White is even credited with the origin of the joke about inviting a young woman up to see your etchings, because of the etchings of nudes he kept in one of his Manhattan hideaways. Over the years, Ire compulsively seduced (and very likely raped) a series of young women, some of them barely out of puberty, who were financially and emotionally dependent on him.

Even while the rest of the world was caught up in White's depraved story, his descendants remained willfully oblivious to the scandal that swirled around them. Living on "the Place," as family called it (the Long Island estate Stanford White built), they inhabited an isolated world created by this obsessive genius.

Although Lessard was protected from knowing the dark side of her family history while she was growing up, it nonetheless affected her--both directly and subconsciously--in ways it has taken her years to sort out.

This book documents her process of discovery. Lessard connects the plight of the young women White seduced to her own experience as a child, when her family failed to protect her from the sexual predation of adult relatives. She subtly and brilliantly reveals how sexual pillage was part of her family legacy, along with the legacy of plunder that produced the family fortune.

The stories of sexual abuse, which do not fully unfold until the end of the book, are riveting. It is a tribute to Lessard that she addresses this overworked topic with such depth and power. Lessard brings together not just the personal and political, but the social, moral, mythic, and architectural elements in our culture, to create one big dazzling picture.

The White saga is not just a family history, but a history of the United States.

Stanford White's architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White, built an immense playground for the wealthy at the turn of the century. White designed the spectacular mansions inhabited by America's new rich, as well as their skyscraper offices, their clubhouses, even their tombs. He traveled the world collecting artifacts to decorate his buildings, using financial leverage, deception, and sometimes outright thievery and fraud. Upon discovering a beautiful old fountain in the central plaza of a small Italian town, he paid the local police to look the other way while he had the fountain ripped out and carted off overnight.