The architect of desire : beauty and danger in the Stanford White family by Lessard Suzannah

Author:Lessard, Suzannah [Lessard, Suzannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: White, Stanford, 1853-1906, Nesbit, Evelyn, 1884-1967, Thaw, Harry Kendall, 1871-1947, Murder
Publisher: New York, N.Y. : Dial Press
Published: 1996-05-25T19:00:00+00:00

their identity as a family, though how exactly this was to be done was unclear. Archie went to Columbia Law School, graduated, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1885. Instead of practicing law, however, he decided to become an opera singer. Margaret later developed this ambition as well, but Archie, who had by then abandoned singing to stalk the Apache chief Geronimo out West, discouraged her from pursuing it for reasons that are not recorded. In the summer of 1884 Archie and Wintie, the brother nearest him in age (later to become Mama's father), decided to make a grand tour of Europe, a way of life that as a gentleman of leisure Wintie w^ould adopt permanently. In Rome Archie fell in love with Daisy Terry, who was a first cousin once removed: Daisy's parents were expatriates and she had been born and raised there. But it was Wintie who got Daisy; they married in December of 1886. Archie seems not to have been put out by this, for the summer after he had met Daisy in Rome he met, at Newport, Amelie Rives.

Amelie Rives was an exquisitely beautiful, highborn novelist from Virginia: one of her later novels was called "Virginia of Virginia." She had purple eyes, wTote dramatic, perfumed letters in an extravagant script in purple ink, and exercised an irresistible charm. Archie became a frequent guest at the Rives estate at Castle Hill, in Virginia's Albemarle County, near Charlottesville. Then, in April of 1888, Amelie published a novel called "The Quick or the Dead?" The plot of "The Quick or the Dead?" revolves around a beautiful young heroine whose dead husband comes to her as a ghost, while she falls in love with his cousin, who looks exactly like him. Tension arises from the heroine's struggle to choose between the living lover or the ghost. The novel created a scandal because of the orgiastic feelings that the heroine entertains for both men. (In the end she chooses the quick.) "The Quick or the Dead?" became a best-seller and Amelie became a celebrity, as did Archie, who was widely and publicly identified as the model for the identical men. This was the beginning of newspaper publicitv about the Chanlers that was to disturb their socially august Astor relatives and also, in later vcars, perhaps to inure Mama to embarrassing exposure in the press.

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