An entertaining recital of a notorious scandal.
The history of a crime of passion that revealed the sordid underside of the Gilded Age.
In 1906, millionaire Harry Thaw strode up to Stanford White (b. 1853), who was seated at a theater production in Madison Square Garden, and shot and killed him. Thaw claimed he was avenging the rape of his wife, actress Evelyn Nesbit, which had occurred in 1901, when Nesbit was a 16-year-old chorus girl. The shocking murder and the titillating details disclosed by Thaw’s two trials have been chronicled many times by historians as well as by the two protagonists in their gossipy memoirs. Baatz (History/John Jay Coll., CUNY; For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago, 2008, etc.) takes a fresh—though groundbreaking—look at the scandal, drawing mostly on newspaper reports to create a fast-paced narrative. At the time of his murder, White was one of the most esteemed architects in New York, the designer, in fact, of Madison Square Garden. Although married, he was known for his liaisons with pretty young actresses and models, upon whom he bestowed pricey gifts. Anthony Comstock, in his campaign to suppress vice, claimed that White, along with other wealthy men, participated in orgies with young, vulnerable girls. Baatz questions just how vulnerable Nesbit was: even after the alleged rape, she benefited from White’s largesse. Thaw was astonishingly wealthy, too, and Nesbit overlooked his often strange behavior to marry him. During a European trip, Nesbit apparently—the author questions the veracity of some testimony—confided details of the rape, which incensed Thaw. Apparently, his anger fomented for years before the killing. Baatz recounts Thaw’s trials and testimony, including evidence of Thaw’s violent treatment of women. Finally, Thaw was deemed insane and incarcerated in a mental asylum. By the time he escaped, he “had achieved an almost mythic status as the heroic individual who had succeeded against the odds and had emerged victorious.” Nesbit, who continued to perform on stage and film, overcame drug addiction to live a quiet life.
An entertaining recital of a notorious scandal.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39665-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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