Bangoreans were riveted by ‘Crime of Century’

Newspapers were as full of celebrity gossip a century ago as they are today. Celebrity murders were particularly popular. The trial of psychotic millionaire Harry K. Thaw for the murder of Stanford White, the famous architect who had designed Madison Square Garden, was one such affair. Called “The Crime of the Century” when the century was still young, it dominated the top of the front pages of Bangor’s two daily papers for weeks. As it progressed, Bangor readers would receive additional titillation when one of the characters in this sordid drama headed for the Pine Tree State.

Thaw’s wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been White’s teenage mistress, the notorious “girl in the red velvet swing.” In June 1906, Thaw and the beautiful Evelyn were seated at a table on the roof of Madison Square Garden waiting for a play to begin. Thaw got up and walked over to the table where White was seated and shot the architect dead. “He ruined my wife,” Thaw informed the police as they took him away.

Turn the clock ahead a few months. Ethel Barrymore and her younger brother, John, were performing in the play “Captain Jinks and the Horse Marines” in Boston. This was the play that had made Ethel famous a few years before. People in Lewiston, Bangor and Portland were looking forward to seeing her in the coming weeks. It would be her third performance at the Bangor Opera House, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Alas, they would not see her brother. John received a subpoena late in January 1907 to appear in the Thaw trial. At that time, he was better known for his flamboyant behavior than his acting. He had dated Nesbit while she was White’s mistress. He had asked her to marry him, and there were rumors of an abortion.

Thaw’s prosecutors wanted to show that Stanford White was not the only man who had debauched poor Evelyn. John’s name was mentioned during the cross-examination of a doctor who may have performed an abortion. But how would Evelyn know? She had been heavily sedated at the time, her lawyer argued. And the doctor could not testify because he would be violating a professional confidence.

John obeyed the summons and headed for New York, only to be excused because his services were not needed yet. So he returned to Boston to finish performing in “Captain Jinks” with his sister. Then apparently he panicked and fled to Maine. Claiming illness, he arrived in Rockland by train on Friday, Feb. 8. After discovering the Samoset was closed for the season, he headed for Poland Spring the next day. He secluded himself in a hotel where his loyal sister visited him on Sunday.

The papers said variously that he had pneumonia or the grippe or he was having a nervous breakdown. He looked like he was on the verge of “complete physical collapse,” wrote a resourceful reporter who tracked him down and wrote a story that appeared in the Portland Evening Express on Monday, Feb. 11, the same day “Captain Jinks” was scheduled to open in Lewiston.

“So badly does he feel physically that he will be unable to take his place in the cast of Captain Jinks, the play in which his sister, Ethel Barrymore, opens at the Empire Theater in Lewiston tonight, and, in fact, he is in such serious physical and mental distress that he cannot even witness the play,” the reporter wrote.

The day the story appeared, Ethel issued a lengthy statement of her own denouncing the “malicious lies” told about her brother, and wondering why the prosecution had singled out poor John when there were a dozen other men who had been quite as friendly with Evelyn.

The next night, Tuesday, Feb. 12, a century ago today, “Captain Jinks” played to a packed house in Bangor. The Bangor Daily News reviewer commented that if the booking agent had seen the crowd he would have been sure to make the Queen City a two-night stand, instead of the one-night stand it was currently.

Before the show, reporters tried to wheedle an interview out of Ethel about her brother. She was staying at the Bangor House. At 5 p.m. the Bangor Daily News reporter sent up his card. “It was returned shortly afterward; Miss Barrymore was out. But as all that Miss Barrymore had to say on the subject was printed in the News Tuesday morning … it really didn’t matter in the least,” he sniffed triumphantly, his pride stung nonetheless.

Harry K. Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He served a few years in a state asylum for the criminally insane. John Barrymore never had to testify at the trial. He went on to become a noted dramatic actor, his penchant for outrageous behavior following him all of his life. He also became the grandfather of Drew Barrymore, who appeared in Bangor in 1984 in connection with her part in the movie “Firestarter,” based on Stephen King’s best-selling novel.

Evelyn Nesbit’s reputation and career were ruined. The story goes that one night in a smoky New York club many years later John recognized the time-hardened face of his youthful passion singing in the spotlight. “And she saw that the damaged man nursing a drink in his shaking hand was her beautiful lover,” according to Margot Peters, a Barrymore biographer. “They both wept at what time and life had done to them, and Jack stood up and declared to the whole nightclub that she was the first girl he had ever loved.”

What an ending! Had they known about it, it might have mollified certain older Bangoreans who remembered missing one of the bit players in The Crime of the Century when that show played in the Bangor newspapers a century ago.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.