The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family [Hardcover]

Suzannah Lessard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1996

The story of Stanford White--his 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. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century.



As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family.



Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1906, Suzannah Lessard's great-grandfather, the prominent architect, socialite, and hedonist Stanford White, was sensationally murdered by the husband of a showgirl White had seduced when she was 16. The acquittal of the killer on the grounds of insanity added to the scandalous gossip. In this beautifully written memoir, Lessard, a writer for the New Yorker, recalls growing up on the White family estate on Long Island, where the murder was a taboo subject. She evokes a sense of repressed and dark passion that infected the harmonious landscaping and architecture White had created. She writes of "coldness that may feel like warmth, or violence that presents as lust for life." In this extraordinarily literary nonfiction mystery, Lessard slowly reveals that her family history held more secrets than the murder, and reaches a startling and controversial climax.

From Publishers Weekly

When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event. While the complex character and magnificent accomplishments of Lessard's great-grandfather, celebrated Gilded Age architect and murder victim Stanford White, could indeed be the focus of a fascinating story, Whiting Award winner Lessard brings to her assiduously researched narrative a depth of understanding and a moral vision that imbue this work with a deeper significance. This is a mesmerizing narrative composed of many interlocking layers. Most simply, it is an account of the several ancestral lines from which Stanford White descended, and of how the genetic strain of genius and rampant sexual perversity affected his descendants. It's a lucidly detailed portrait of several upper-class social milieus from whose combined values White was formed: the Smiths of Smithtown, Long Island, unpretentious Yankee stock intimately tied to their land holdings over many generations; the Chanler siblings, eccentric and vastly wealthy orphans brought up on a splendid country estate in the Hudson River valley. It is an incandescent depiction of the classical monuments that White contributed to our culture, from the Washington Square Arch to a mansion at Newport. It is an evocation of Box Hill, the almost magically beautiful and serene family compound on Long Island, where Lessard was raised, and of the dark secrets that shadowed its idyllic vistas. It is a chronicle of the circumstances leading to demented millionaire Harry Thaw's revenging his wife Evelyn Nesbit's honor by murdering White in Madison Square Garden in 1906, with what we already know about the sensational event augmented by Lessard's portrait of the bizarre silence in which the family shrouded the crime. And it is a personal revelation of Lessard's own suffering, of the sexual abuse to which she and her siblings were subjected and of the reasons this perversion occurred and was tolerated. Lessard is a writer of mature talent, immense sensibility and poetic expression. Her understanding of the visceral and spiritual effects of architecture and music and landscape on the heart and the soul is both brilliantly instinctive and intelligently reasoned. As exposed by Lessard, what resulted from the family's genteel social code?which prohibited discussion of emotions and pain?is practically a textbook example of psychological dysfunction. That Lessard finally has been able?at great emotional cost?to tell her overlapping stories with simple eloquence is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers. Illustrations. BOMC and QPB selections; first serial to the New Yorker.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 334 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385314450
• ISBN-13: 978-0385314459
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,105,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars American History, Angst, Sex, Scandal, June 2, 2000

By 

Lance C. Panzer (the Great Lakes) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (Paperback)

This book defies a brief explanation. I sensed deep passion in the author as I read her words, a passion for her family's weaknesses and strengths, a passion for knowing herself, a passion for the power of architecture, and a passion for her great-grandfather, the infuriatingly complex architect, Stanford White.

Stanford was generous and careless, creative and self-destructive, maniacally disciplined and utterly irresponsible. While he selflessly gave his heart and soul to his massive stone buildings, he thoughtlessly shattered the hearts and lives of the people around him. Even while he was racked by ill health, he drove himself in his work life AND his recreational life as if he were immortal. He either believed he could never die, or knew he surely must and so didn't care.

The sexual portrait of Stanford can be rather harrowing: The countless love nests he set up around New York; his systematic debauchery of young women (many of whom fell in love with him); the attorneys he hired to hush things up; the endless supply of cronies he found to join him in his nocturnal plundering--his appetites--and his ability to feed his appetites--knew no limits. As for Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated beauty who arguably played a role in Stanford's murder, I'll just say she wasn't the first girl to ride in his red velvet swing.

Finally, two notes. This author presents architecture, and its impact on the human psyche, in a beautiful, moving way; she breathes life into the bricks of Stanford's buildings. And her depiction of the Gilded Age is superb. It's the stuff of a great trashy Summer novel. Except it's real. And probably still goes on today.

I should also warn future readers that there's a fair amount of incest in this book.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book, and an unmixed pleasure to read, July 16, 1998

By 

David A. Irwin "David A. Irwin" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (Paperback)

Before I start to review the book, I must say that I have been fascinated by the story of the death of Stanford White since the first time I heard it when I was in my teens. Of course, I was fascinated in a very `young' way. Something on the order of `You mean they did those things back then, too.' And the book satisfied (and broadened) my by now adult fascination. What a pleasure to read.

Ms. Lessard (White's great-granddaughter) has written a brilliant family history, showing how White's death affected the family through 4 generations.

But the book is far from merely a family history. The author discusses througouht the book her own love-hate relationship with her great grandfather and the beautiful and (for her) frightening architecture he left behind. From the New York Public Library to her own college and New York's Washington Square arch, White's architecture is everywhere.

The author is unsparing in her judgements of White, and perceptive in her conclusi! ! ons about him. And what's more, I learned the facts of the story from the inside, which constituted a fascinating and satisfying quest.

I would fail in my efforts to review this book if I didn't mention the pleasure and excitement that I felt while immersed in Ms. Lessard's description of the Gilded Age. Is it because we are at the end of the century now as well that the Gilded Age retains its fascination? I can't say. But she does a masterful job of evoking the era.

And the almost legendary people who make appearances: Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, John Barrymore, Harry Thaw. What a fascinating book. I would say it's the best book of it's type I've ever read, but I'm not sure what type it is. However, it is deeply satisfying and interesting in the most intimate of ways.

And what conclusions is one to draw about Evelyn Nesbit, the woman (girl) in this legendary menage a trois. One of her lovers murdered by another of her lovers when she was 21 in 1906. And she ! ! lives until at least 1955. No wonder the story still has a! hold on our collective imagination.

And I only have time to mention one of the real (and unexpected) `stars' of the book. Box Hill, the White family home on Long Island. The book is too multi-layered to discuss the home here, but it is the backdrop for much of the `action' of the book, and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

The book is dedicated to William Shawn of the New Yorker, and all I can say is that I'm sure he would be pleased with Lessard's effort.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling story of a mixed legacy, August 23, 2003

By 

chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (Paperback)

What would it be like to be descended from one of America's most celebrated architects? For that matter, what would it be like to be descended from a man whose lurid, predatory sexual practices were once front-page news?

Members of the Stanford White family have had to deal with those issues for almost 100 years now, since White was gunned down at Madison Square Garden in 1906. For the most part, the White family did not discuss their illustrious pater familias, but Stanford White is ever-present, in all respects, in their collective lives. How the family did (or did not) deal with this mixed legacy would manifest itself over the next four generations.

Suzannah Lessard, a great-granddaughter of Stanford White, addresses this legacy squarely. She does not attempt to suger-coat White's personality, which combines breath-taking artistic genius with a self-indulgent predatory streak that ultimately led to his destruction. Through the book, she weaves multiple tales about her family, which includes stories of mental illness, sexual abuse, and emotional repression. She does this with remarkable candor.

This is a Social Register family. They are related to the Astors, the Winthrops, the Chanlers, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers, etc. They own a magnificent property, designed by Stanford White, on Long Island. On the surface, it would appear that this family has the world as its oyster. Suzannah Lessard shows that no amount of social prominence and privelage can protect a family from the problems that can face us all.