The architect of desire

Suzannah Lessard grew up on Box Hill, the Long Island estate built by her great-grandfather, Stanford White, the premier architect and social impresario of the Gilded Age. In 1906, on the rooftop theatre of the original Madison Square Garden, White was shot dead by the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, whose wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, White had seduced when she was sixteen. The highly publicized scandal, and the "trial of the century" that ensued, came to be mythologized in our culture and made ever more glamorous and romantic as the century rolled on. But on Box Hill, where four generations of the Stanford White family lived side by side, a tension-filled silence surrounded the eminent, charismatic figure in the family past. Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great-granddaughters. It was only in her thirties 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 Stanford's story and, by extension, the story of her clan in order to uncover its unacknowledged truths and to recognize the unacknowledged truths of her own life. As she delved deep into her family's past, one thing became unassailably clear; that behind both the family's silence and the romantic mythology that surrounded her great-grandfather's life lay an untold narrative of sexual compulsion gone out of control.