Word: thaws
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When that aged Pittsburgh viveur, Harry K. Thaw, feeling in his veins the thrill of a new spring, went to Manhattan and began to conduct himself in a manner that ill benefitted his grey hairs (TIME, Sept. 28), the New York Daily Mirror "crusaded" against him, asking, "Why is a rich lunatic a free lunatic?" Some of the Mirror's chicle-masticating readers may have thought it a breach of taste, a blatancy, to make so much of the fact that an old rake wanted to chuck a dancing girl under the chin. Little did these readers know...
Followed a description of a Manhattan night club (the Del Fey- formerly the El Fey) in which, among others, sat Michael Arlen, Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Goull Bishop. "There entered," said the Mirror, "a haggard looking and white haired man, his bloated face wreathed in smiles. It was Harry K. Thaw. . . Harry looked long and rudely at Michael Arlen. . . Then the chastiser of little rabbits . . . screeched...
...Next day Thaw left for Pittsburgh. Said the Mirror: "Harry has suddenly decided to visit his sick mother, whose illness had not hitherto caused any of the many wrinkles in his bloated face. . . The Mirror has won. If he comes back to New York the Mirror will renew its campaign to get him away." With this valedictory, the Mirror published a picture of a small brunette, "winsome little Virginia Frank," and credited her with having spurned the wealthy slayer's suit. " 'Let other girls wear his jewelry,' she said...
Whether Mr. Thaw is, after all, a slobbering degenerate or merely an old man infected with a disgusting and pathetic lust for pleasures which youth alone can make charming; whether or not the Mirror had any higher purpose in its denunciations than the enlargement of an already huge circulation-matters little. The whole episode merely furnished one more example of how a smart editor can make sensationalism the light that illumines his paper's exceeding morality...
...These rabbits, male and female, known as "Tootsie" and "Tweedledum" respectively, brightened the duller moments of Thaw's life at Matteawan. He pinched them until they squealed, bit them with his yellow teech, chased them with a pole, tossed them 40 feet in air and let them fall on the ground "to see if it would hurt them...