Review: Hugh Eakin on “Stan and Gus”

A dual biography of Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens considers art, money, friendship, and infamy

In October 1906, one of the most arresting buildings of Gilded Age New York was completed. Curiously, it was not a palace of pleasure, but a house of worship. In an era defined by extravagant mansions, Venetian skyscrapers, opulent gentlemen’s clubs, and electric-light-strewn theaters, the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was a bold experiment in American religious architecture: rejecting the usual church Gothic, it flaunted an almost pagan, high-renaissance classicism—its broad central dome fronted by a pantheon-like portico, its surfaces punctuated by yellow terracotta detailing and exquisite Tiffany windows. Rather than compete with the newly prominent urban towers that loomed over it, the church, which housed one of the city’s most well-to-do congregations, stood in commanding contrast to them.

The architect was the late Stanford White, who probably did more than anyone else to define the style, and contradictions, of his era. For decades, he had effortlessly cultivated the rich, powerful, and pedigreed—from the Morgans and Astors to Henry Adams and General Sherman—and convinced many of them to spend lavishly on his ambitious and often brilliant buildings. Yet he was also a debauched hedonist who set up private sex clubs and preyed on perhaps dozens of adolescent women. Just four months before the church was completed, the high-flying White had been shot dead, in the audience of a musical comedy at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden—another building of his barely a stone’s throw away. The killer was an unstable multimillionaire who was avenging the predation of his wife, the actress and celebrated beauty Evelyn Nesbit, White’s consort of years earlier, when Nesbit was a teenager and the architect was in his late forties. Even amid the sensational revelations surrounding the murder—it was called the trial of the century—Madison Square Presbyterian Church was hailed as one of White’s greatest works.

For decades, White’s scandalous life and violent demise have been a subject of fascination for biographers, critics, and documentarians, as well as a family memoir, and a somewhat bowdlerized Hollywood film, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) with Joan Collins playing the young Nesbit. (As he prepared to seduce her, White infamously staged her in a frolic with a garlanded swing he kept in his Twenty-Fourth Street hideaway.) Yet amid this personal notoriety, the full measure of the architect’s influence on the art and culture of New York has often been obscured. In Stan and Gus, his elegant, compact account of the enduring friendship between White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the historian Henry Wiencek seeks to redress this imbalance, suggesting, somewhat subversively, that White’s depravity was, just like Saint-Gaudens’s bouts of debilitating depression, essential to his art