Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s battle for the heart of model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in 1906:
One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.
The movie version of his half of the conversation would go something like this: “Right, yes, that Stanford White. It’s about Evelyn Nesbit!”
“The Architect, The ‘It’ Girl And The Toy Pistol That Wasn’t.” — Evan Hughes, The Awl
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