He changed when he sat at the piano. My great-grandmother Bessie Smith White lived next door to us, in the White Cottage, so called because of its color. ), Samuels fourth volume on the subject is Stanford White in Detail (Monacelli), edited by his wife, Elizabeth White, with photos by Jonathan Wallen. The wooden lions are believed to be Venetian. Those disclosures are Ms. Lessard's allegations that her father, a music professor and composer whom she calls Frank Rousseau in the book, molested her and her five sisters throughout her childhood. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. This had been the drive, once axially straight, but by this time the bushes had invaded the roadbed to a point where there was only this path snaking through. Her parents, Daisy and Winthrop Chanler, were social lions and knew all the choicest people (Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Edith Wharton, and even Theodore Roosevelt), and Laura knew Stanford before she knew my grandfather, Larry White. One more tradition that I have is the painting of landscapes and looking to the world around me for inspiration. Uncle Willie threw his leg at Maxim's in Paris, and not, as Ms. Lessard wrote, at Delmonico's in New York, he said. The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. Similarly, my father was charged and masterful and magnificent, but he was also, in my perceptions, blanked out. Removing the paint would destroy the paper, which is very thin, Samuel says. Stanford White was born 7 November 1853 in Manhattan, New York, United States to Richard Grant White (1822-1885) and Alexina Black Mease (1830-1921) and died 25 June 1906 Manhattan, New York, United States of gunshot. The parlor was the only part of the house that had a cellar underneath. He left immediately to go to his mother at Box Hill. The piano room had a wavy wooden floor that pitched down, and the plaster walls were wavy, too. It is a family tradition still to travel with a sketchbook, whether one would identify oneself as an artist or not; and, as Stanford White's accumulated treasures are passed down, they end up in rooms in which they are comfortable, in good company. She shocked New Yorkers with her nudity, as Saint-Gaudens and Stanford had hoped. My grandfather was my first corpse, and when I left the room I saw my mother coming down the stairs into the front hall with tears streaming down her face: she didnt use a handkerchief or wipe them away with her hand; she was just letting them stream, and her black hair was loose and streaming, too. Exclusive: How HBO Almost Lost Succession, At the 'White Lotus' Premiere with Beatrice Grann. The story of Stanford Whitehis scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. Her ''Death of the Orange Trees'' (1963, Harper & Row), about an established family's fall from grace, was not warmly received in the White family. Tiffany and Company Building. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. My grandparents lived in Box Hill in the old style, but the Bobby Whites, and we in the Red Cottage, lived in a bohemian way. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He was laid out in the parlor at Box Hill, a room of angels and ornaments, red velvet and gilt. The stairwell was open from the third floor, above, to the first floor, below, and hanging from the ceiling of the third floor was an extraordinary contraption of floating objects: a pendulum chain, linking a glass-doored lantern (which lit the second-floor level), an iron curlicue, and, at the bottom, a brass lamp with a bellied base. As The Gilded Age opens, horse-drawn carriages transport European decorative treasuresfurniture, tapestries, statuaryto the still-under-scaffolding white limestone mansion architect Stanford. . Everything in the environment had meaning for me that no one there understood; no one even knew that I was connected to the place. The drive was romantic, but the Rond Point was drearyeven distraught-seeming. The tumbleweed repeated is an actual tumbleweed from the HC Cattle Company belonging to Cy's family ranch. Stanford White. (This was a view that many composersStravinsky among themshared at the time.) Stanford kept his supply of girls flowing, sending notes and gifts and flowerscourting, luring, seducing, drawing them in. I feel she chose to focus exclusively on the unhealthy elements of the family.''. Eight years later, Laura and Larry married, and they were together for forty yearsuntil my grandfathers death, in 1956. ''I didn't really understand the point of the Chanler story in a book supposedly about Stanford White,'' one relative said. He was the pastor of a fashionable Brooklyn churchand a ladies man. According to Peter White, despite Ms. Lessard's research, she had failed to include certain information, including the autopsy report, which asserted that when White was killed at 53 he had Graves' disease, a goiter problem. The axis of this design was the driveway to Box Hill, which we called the Rhododendron Drive. Almost every reminiscence of Stanford in the office of McKim, Mead & White mentions a loud, reverberating voice, doors slamming, instantaneous aesthetic decisions, crumpled drafting paper, a gargantuan capacity for work, and a contagious obsession with beauty. There was also a cluster of barns designed by Stanford, along with some barns and farmhouses from earlier times. Stanford was really cheap, says his great-grandson, using the walls of Box Hills dining room to prove the point. At Box Hill, the density of decorative arts was much greater when he was alive, says Samuel. He worked as an apprentice to Henry Hobson Richardson, and toured Europe, before joined two young architects, Charles Follen McKim and William Rutherford Mead, to form the firm McKim, Mead and White. Nordiska Kompaniet dining chairs, 1950, offered by MY MODERN. . H. Van Buren Magonigle, a draftsman in the office in those early years, wrote: He had a field, as an electrician would say, and his radiated energy was terrific. . I stood right next to his head, so his face was at my eye level, and I noticed the warmth of him in his brown tweed jacket. To put it simply, my grandfather's grandfather on my father's side. Stanford White was one of New York's great architects. It was a large room, about twenty by twentyan addition to the eighteenth-century corewith a pine floor and two bay windows that looked south across Johnnys field. She never responded. The drive proceeded under the Propylon and then rose through the woods in a perfectly graded and straight line, densely hedged by rhododendrons until it broke out dramatically into a field. There was going to be a terrible crash, but I felt no dread. The pall of these accusations will fall over all of us.''. Once, when I was seven, Dad played a boogie-woogie on the piano and I thought I would pass out with joy. However, if they are, they should be dealt with inside the family forum, not in the public eye like so much dirty laundry.''. A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction. After befriending her and her mother as a supposed benefactor, White paid for the mother to visit relatives out of town and then insisted Evelyn, 16, drink a great deal of champagne, which may have been drugged as well. Her parents had tossed her a challengea challenge that she roundly deserved for having such grandiose ideas. I felt privileged in my outrage. Pamela flew toward this pretty palace, her hands spread flat, her strawberry-blond hair bouncing. The gilded and coffered ceiling inside the bank had a skylight at its center, with panes of deep-yellow glass. Up until the very minute he was shot on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Stanford White might have considered June 25th, 1906, to be a good day. That was shortly after his death, when my grandfather said to her that he supposed that because of the scandals my grandmother would not consider marrying him, and my grandmother said, Dont be silly., In the fifties and sixties, Stanford became a glamorous, sexy figure, whose murder was an iconic event at the juncture of centuries. Filmmaker, writer, creative. Suzannah interpreted the White family as she thinks she saw it. My grandfather was elegant, even in his overalls and an old, crumpled hata tall man, a robust man, yet one girded in an armor of privilege and cultivation, through which little evidence of a life of feeling escaped. Yet she also admitted that, left on her own, she had been terrified and humiliated. The architect/designer/artist genes are very strong in the White Family as well as the attraction to others in the arts. Brendan Gill, another quondam biographer of Stanford, later wrote of the difficulty of reconciling the big, bluff, open, lovable man of superb talent and the predatory . Even after the lobotomy Johnny could be frightening. Its not true that Stanford was never mentioned. This is my favorite part of what we do. Ms. Lessard wrote at length about Archie Chanler's stay in an asylum and Willie Chanler's habit of throwing his wood leg at waiters to get their attention. The Madison Square Company quickly set about demolishing the old rail depot and called on Stanford White to design their new building. He loved houses, and he kept doing houses all his life, says Samuel White, Stanfords great-grandson and an author and architect in his own right. During my childhood, my father composed in a neoclassical style that was lyrical yet disjunctive, melodic yet modernist. Roslyn Church in Roslyn was his last architectural effort before his death in 1906. Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, tells Town & Country, The artistry, size, ornament and structures of [Whites] buildings embody the energy and optimism that many felt the Gilded Age held for the United States. In other words, he was the perfect man for his era. Then he comes around from the furnace with a change in his eyes that made him strange and that I noted with the dispassionate objectivity of children. Stanford White in MyHeritage family trees (Martin Web Site) view all Immediate Family Evelyn Nesbit ex-partner Elizabeth Springs Smith wife Lawrence Grant White son Alexina Black White mother Richard Grant White father Richard Mansfield White brother Russell William Thaw ex-partner's son Gene Barrymore ex-partner's son About Stanford White As soon as I acknowledged this, my aversion left me, and I found myself working strenuously to bring that set-apart reality out of darkness and into the golden light of the bank. Another tradition that I continue is inheriting items that do not quite work for a project and living with them. A biography by Charles Baldwin that focussed principally on Stanfords professional life was published in 1936, and thereafter, though there were many attempts, no biography was completed for half a century. In adulthood, a kind of vision came to me of a small violent scene that seemed to be less the recollection of something real than a kind of waking dream, which led into a subterranean past that existed primarily inside me. Dial Press, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978--385-31445-9. The murder trial of Thaw, husband to gorgeous young showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, was the first to take on the description Trial of the Century. The courtroom revelations of Whites brutal seduction of Nesbit when she was 16 shocked and horrified America. Mr. Vanderbilt wrote the firm placing the sum of $50,000 at the disposal of Stanford White to purchase articles of furniture and architectural salvage obtained in Europe. The emotion scared me. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. In this way, what happened at night was put out of consciousnessnot only his but ours. Several years after the house was completed, my grandmother died, at the age of ninety-six. "The work was fairly . She identified with aboriginal peoplesour local Indians, the Setaukets, for example, who had led a woebegone life of subsistence on clams. Saint-Gaudens was the rough-hewn Irish-born artist who created some of the most stirring, monumental American sculpture of the late 19th century. As Bach says, His extravagant lifestyle, and lack of discretion or concern for those who were impacted by his actions, despite producing outstanding work, has much in common with some of the high profile, publicity-seeking business and artistic innovators who exploit media attention today.. We joke that we are constantly on the "This land is your land, this land is my land" tour and would love to work in any and all of the states. Random acts of kindness, senseless acts of beauty. Other family members saw to it that the taxes on it were paid and that the land was to some degree maintained: of all the parts of the subdivided Place, Johnnys field was thus the most communal. liked to sit down at a draftsmans table, usually in his hat and immaculate shirt sleeves, and design out loud. My house was not completed until two years after we had started. A quality in Stanfords interiors which had caused me to avoid them in the past enveloped me, like a perfume triggering an allergic reaction: a swelling in the chest near the throat, a pressure of tears behind the eyesand, above all, dread. To end the lecture, it was only fitting that Samuel White showed a photograph of all the descendants of White pictured outside his ancestral home. My grandmothers brownstone was the only one left on our stretch of Fifth Avenuea majestic specimen with a sweeping stoop and a deeply inset door flanked by three French windows and delicate ironwork balconies. They had 7 children: Angeline White, John White and 5 other children. Her son, Paul Jay is an artist working in many mediums-music, performance, writing, design, photography and sculptor-whose assemblage of beach flotsam is in this exhibit. Not much is available, first hand, regarding Stanford from his personal point of view. Yet architecture pervades the family. The firms Boston buildings included the Algonquin Club, the Boston Public Library, Harvard Stadium, and the Symphony Hall. ''When the other men in St. James heard this, they, too, refused to dismount and step inside for the mail,'' Mr. Havrisko said. On Monday, Laura and Larry returned to New York, as did Stanford, who wanted to take them to dinner and a show, but Laura had to catch the Lackawanna night train to her parents home upstate. White was indefatigable, socializing whenever possible not just because he richly enjoyed the citys entertainments, but he made contacts for McKim, Mead & White. It was unspeakable treachery that she had taken a part in the film.
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