Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 7, 1955

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It was, of course, only the beginning. Evelyn "forgave him," and ran happily down the primrose path with her "Stanny," who pushed his "Kittens" on a red velvet swing in the "play" room, hung her in costly deshabille, and had the little beauty snapped while lying odaliciously on a polar-bear rug. "He was a brilliant, kind and fascinating man," Evelyn said later. "He showed me a new world of art and beauty."

The world came to an end when Evelyn wanted White to marry her. He sent her to finishing school instead, but before the term was out, Evelyn flounced off to Europe with a young Pittsburgh millionaire named Harry Kendall Thaw. It was a rough trip. Thaw was a mother's darling who had been turned loose on cafe society with too many marbles ($80,000 a year) in his pocket and not enough in his head. He was given to euphoric grandeurs—he once threw a $50,000 party for some French theater people—and sadistic glooms. With Evelyn he combined them: he rented an entire castle in Austria to please her, and then burst into her chambers one night to beat her insensible with a horsewhip. In public he was apt to fall on his knees before her, while fashionable company stared, and blubber: "Her boofuls. What does her want?" Nevertheless, Harry had $40 million, and Evelyn married him.

What made Harry crazier than anything was the thought of Stanford White, and what he had done to "Boofuls." He spoke of nothing but revenge, and one night in the cabaret on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden, he walked up to Stanford White's table, whipped out a little gold .22 and fired three bullets into the seducer's face and chest. "I did it," he said in a loud voice as White slumped in death, "because he ruined my wife and then deserted the girl."

The trial was perhaps the most sensational of its kind that the century has produced. The prosecution was conducted by District Attorney William Travers Jerome, relative of Winston Churchill's. "He struck," cried Thaw's lawyer (who based his defense on "the unwritten law"), "for the purity of the home ... of American womanhood." When Evelyn came to court, dressed like an innocent schoolgirl in Fauntleroy collar and demure chapeau, crowds almost killed her with kindness, and the riot squad was rushed to the scene. The first trial ended in a hung jury, but in the second, Thaw was acquitted on grounds of insanity.

He was sent to Matteawan asylum, and for the next 16 years was in and out of confinement, once after a sexual assault on a 19-year-old boy. He died of a heart attack in 1947. Evelyn (who got very little of Thaw's money until his death, when he left her $10,000) drifted from big vaudeville circuits into the little "speaks," and from there into a series of petty failures—a tea room, a cosmetic business—that were interspersed with two attempts at suicide. Now 70, she has recently been teaching ceramics in Los Angeles.