Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  (photo credit 1.53)

  (photo credit 1.11)

  This Page: The Titanic’s sinking was a huge news story.

  This Page: A photograph of the near-identical sister ship, Olympic, leaving port on sailing day evokes the Titanic’s departure on April 10, 1912.

  Copyright © 2012 by Hugh Brewster

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Simultaneously published in Canada by Collins Canada, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brewster, Hugh.

  Gilded lives, fatal voyage: the Titanic’s first-class passengers and their world /

  Hugh Brewster.

  1. Titanic (Steamship). 2. Titanic (Steamship)—Biography. 3. Upper class—United States—Biography. 4. Ocean travel—Anecdotes.

  5. Shipwreck victims—Biography. 6. Shipwrecks—North Atlantic Ocean.

  I. Title. II. Title: The Titanic’s first-class passengers and their world.

  G530.T6B73 2011

  910.9163#4—dc23 2011037159

  eISBN: 978-0-307-98471-5

  Front jacket illustration: Corbis; photographs, from left: Randy Bryan Bigham Collection, American Academy of Arts and Letters Collection, Randy Bryan Bigham Collection, Library of Congress Photographic Archive

  Photograph and illustration credits appear on this page.

  v3.1

  To George Behe,

  Randy Bryan Bigham,

  and

  Don Lynch,

  with thanks

  “It was a brilliant crowd … a rare gathering of

  beautiful women and splendid men.”

  —First-cabin passenger LILY MAY FUTRELLE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue | A RARE GATHERING

  1 | AT THE CHERBOURG QUAY

  2 | A NOMADIC HIATUS

  3 | THE PALM ROOM

  4 | “QUEER LOT OF PEOPLE”

  5 | QUEENSTOWN

  6 | FELLOW TRAVELERS

  7 | PRIVATE LIVES

  8 | SHIPBOARD COTERIES

  9 | DESIGNING WOMAN

  10 | A CALM SUNDAY

  11 | THE LAST EVENING

  12 | COLLISION AND AFTER

  13 | TO THE LIFEBOATS

  14 | THE FINAL MINUTES

  15 | VOICES IN THE NIGHT

  16 | THE SHIP OF SORROW

  17 | TWO CONTINENTS STIRRED

  Postscript | TITANIC AFTERLIVES

  NOTES

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPH AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  About the Author

  (photo credit 1.90)

  Caught in the lights of the submarine was a small statue of a Greek goddess. She lay on the soft abyssal mud surrounded by lumps of coal, porcelain sinks, silver serving trays, filigreed windows, a china doll’s head, champagne bottles, and much more. No light had ever before been shone on this extraordinary underwater cabinet of curiosities.

  But with more of the Titanic’s wreck site left to explore, the submarine Alvin soon left the debris field and moved on. By early August of 1986, explorer Robert Ballard and his team were back at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts with miles of film footage and hundreds of still photographs. My job for the next year was to edit and compile Dr. Ballard’s images and data into a book about his discovery and exploration of the lost liner.

  Fortunately, to share the task there was Ken Marschall, the world’s foremost painter of the Titanic and a font of knowledge about the ship. When I asked him about the Greek goddess, he produced a photograph of the first-class lounge, one of the most elegant of the liner’s public rooms. On its marble fireplace stood a statuette that was a match for the one on the ocean floor. It proved to be a reproduction of the Artemis of Versailles, a renowned Roman sculpture, from a Greek original, that Louis XIV had once installed in his palace’s Grande Galerie. The statuette was an appropriate piece of décor for the Titanic’s lounge which was described in a 1912 shipbuilding magazine as “a noble apartment … the details being taken from the Palace of Versailles.” The Artemis of the Titanic, however, had been made of an inexpensive zinc alloy known as spelter, and then gilded. On the ocean floor, its gilding had been eaten away, leaving only the dull, gray metal underneath. For a ship that has come to represent the sunset of the Gilded Age, the spelter statuette seems an apt symbol.

  The Titanic’s story, however, has lost none of its sheen. On the eve of its centenary it remains what Walter Lord, the author of A Night to Remember, once labeled “the unsinkable subject.” It has inspired hundreds of books, movies, and websites, and one hesitates to launch another craft into such crowded sea-lanes. Yet in most accounts of the disaster, the Titanic is the protagonist and her passengers merely supporting players, identified with tags like “millionaire John Jacob Astor,” “crusading journalist W. T. Stead,” and “fashion designer Lady Duff Gordon.” Yet who were these people? And what had brought their lives to this fateful crossing?

  To Lily May Futrelle, her fellow travelers were “a rare gathering of beautiful women and splendid men.” A rare gathering it was—liner historians report that no other passenger list of the period ever featured quite as many celebrated names. For Lady Duff Gordon, the Titanic was “a small world bent on pleasure.” And it was indeed a smaller world than ours—the populations of the United States and Canada were a third of what they are today (and Great Britain’s a third less), and wealth and influence were concentrated in much tighter circles. Those who made ocean crossings regularly usually found acquaintances on the first-class passenger list.

  But “bent on pleasure”? There was certainly a contingent of the transatlantic leisured rich on board, a recently evolved class of Americans who kept homes in Paris or regularly made the crossing for the winter “season” in London or on the Continent. But many of the liner’s first-class cabins were occupied by hardworking high achievers. The artist Frank Millet, for example, was on his way to Washington to help decide on the design for the Lincoln Memorial. His friend, White House aide Archie Butt, was heading home to prepare for a grueling presidential election campaign. Railroad president Charles Hays was returning to Canada for the opening of his company’s new Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa. Lady Duff Gordon herself was a leading British couturiere who had urgent business to tend to at her New York salon. Within their lives and those of others on board can be found a remarkable convergence of the events, issues, and personalities of the age, forming what Walter Lord called “an exquisite microcosm of the Edwardian world.”

  In America, the Titanic is often described as a cross-section of the Gilded Age, an era of rapid industrialization and wealth creation in the United States that began in the 1870s and ended with the introduction of income taxes in 1913 and the outbreak of World War I the following year. Her sinking is sometimes viewed as the warning bell for a complacent society steaming toward catastrophe in the trenches of the Western Front. As the poet and actress Blanche Oelrichs observed, it was “as if some great stage manager planned that there should be a minor warning, a flash of horror” before the greater calamity to come.

  When Robert Ballard’s book The Discovery of the Titanic was nearing publication in 1987, I asked Walter Lord, the dean of Titanic historians,
to pen an introduction. In it he pondered the enduring mystique of the Titanic and concluded:

  The thought occurs that the Titanic is the perfect example of something we can all relate to: the progression of almost any tragedy in our lives from initial disbelief to growing uneasiness to final, total awareness. We are all familiar with this sequence and we watch it unfold again and again on the Titanic—always in slow motion.

  As the tragedy of the Titanic unfolds once again on these pages, the remarkable characters who people it, will, I trust, help illuminate a world both distant and near to our own, and convey anew the poignance of this epochal disaster.

  (photo credit 1.83)

  The train from Paris pulled in behind Cherbourg’s dockside station on the afternoon of April 10, 1912. On board was the well-known artist and writer Francis D. Millet. (photo credit 1.1)

  The Titanic was going to be late.

  To the first-class travelers aboard the Train Transatlantique, now chugging to a stop at Cherbourg’s quayside terminus, this would be dismaying news. The six-hour journey from Paris had been quite long enough. How many hours, they wondered, would now have to be spent in this small, smoke-grimed station before White Star’s new steamer could arrive to take them to New York?

  As the passengers descended from the train, the scene on the platform was frenetic, according to a young American named R. Norris Williams, who recalled “the porters scurrying around, the crowding and jostling … excited people with lost luggage, porters asking for a larger pourboire, Thomas Cook’s representatives trying to placate some irate would-be-important-looking person—in short—pandemonium.”

  One representative trying to placate amid the pandemonium was Nicholas Martin, the manager of White Star’s Paris office, who had taken the train to Cherbourg to be a calming presence for just this kind of circumstance. As trolleys piled high with steamer trunks and leather suitcases were pushed along the platform, he circulated among knots of passengers, offering reassurances that although the Titanic had been delayed while leaving Southampton, she was now en route across the Channel and the tenders would be ready for embarkation by half-past five.

  The most important person Martin had to appease was a tall, thin man with a large black mustache and an impatient expression. The American millionaire John Jacob Astor IV was not only the wealthiest passenger waiting to board the Titanic, he was also a friend of the White Star Line’s chairman, J. Bruce Ismay. Astor and his young wife, Madeleine, had, in fact, made the crossing from New York with Ismay on the Titanic’s sister liner, Olympic, just ten weeks before. Astor, according to one acquaintance, “made a god of punctuality” and had a habit of compulsively reaching into his waistcoat to check the time on his gold pocket watch. Fueling Astor’s impatience on this occasion was the uncertain health of his wife, now several months pregnant. Concern for her had caused him to hire a nurse to be in attendance for the voyage home. Martin no doubt made sure that the Astor party, which included the nurse, a lady’s maid, a valet, and an Airedale terrier, was quickly ushered into the station.

  Far less demanding of the White Star manager’s attentions were the more than one hundred third-class passengers, Lebanese and Syrian emigrants, mostly, along with a few Croatians and Bulgarians, who were arranging themselves docilely on wooden benches beside their wicker cases and carpetbags, occasionally calling out to their playing children to stay near. They had been traveling for days since they had left their villages, and a few hours more made little difference.

  To a seasoned traveler like the celebrated artist and writer Frank Millet, delays, likewise, were something to be taken in stride. But spending several hours in a stuffy waiting room amid the braying voices of his fellow Americans was a more daunting prospect. Like many U.S. expatriates, Millet had an acquired disdain for his less sophisticated countrymen—and women. “Obnoxious, ostentatious American women,” in fact, would be singled out for special scorn in a letter he penned the next morning from the Titanic. “[They are] the scourge of any place they infest and worse on shipboard than anywhere,” he wrote to his old friend Alfred Parsons. “Many of them carry tiny dogs and lead husbands around like pet lambs. I tell you, when she starts out, the American woman is a buster. She should be put in a harem and kept there.”

  Such crankiness was not typical of Frank Millet, a man known for his geniality and disarming smile. His friend Mark Twain used “a Millet” as a label for a warm and likeable fellow. “Millet,” he once wrote, “makes all men fall in love with him” and is “the cause of lovable qualities in people.” Millet’s less than lovable mood on this April day in Cherbourg can be put down to exhaustion. He had just completed a month in Rome where, as he described to Parsons, he had had “the Devil of a time.” As the head of the new American Academy of Art in the Eternal City, Millet had found himself mediating a stream of administrative squabbles. And his final week there had been monopolized by paying court to J. Pierpont Morgan, the American financier who was to help fund the Academy’s new building.

  Now Millet was required back in America where more meetings awaited. In Washington, the Commission of Fine Arts, for which he was vice chair, was eager to finalize agreement on a Doric temple design for the Lincoln Memorial. Next came the American Academy’s annual board meeting in New York followed by a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where he had won a commission to paint murals for the state capitol building. It was a punishing schedule for a man who would be sixty-six in November but Frank Millet had never been content doing just one thing. As one of his oldest friends observed, “Millet was an artist but constantly subject to a great temptation, that of making excursions into other fields. Thus he led more or less the life of a wanderer.”

  During his wandering life Millet had shown an almost uncanny knack for being present at many of the landmark occurrences of his day. Where things were happening, Millet was invariably to be found—from the U.S. Civil War, where he had served as a drummer boy, to the building of the White City for the 1893 Chicago Exposition, to the conflict in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, to the boarding of the Titanic on its maiden voyage. As an English art critic wryly noted in 1894, “Inertia is not one of Millet’s faults; he is ever in movement, a comrade in the world of art. Are the heavens to be decorated? See Millet. Is there to be a banquet for the gods? See Millet. Has the army moved? Yes, and Millet with it. He breathes the air of two hemispheres … he is contagious in art and manly enthusiasm.”

  The name by which Millet’s era is known was coined by his friend Mark Twain in his first novel, The Gilded Age, a satire he cowrote with a friend in 1873, on the greed and corruption underlying Americas’s post–Civil War boom. On March 11, 1879, Twain had stood beside Millet at his wedding in the Montmartre mairie [town hall]. The other witness was sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the bride was Elizabeth “Lily” Merrill, the younger sister of one of Frank’s Harvard classmates. Lily was a beautiful, if strong-minded, young American woman—drawn from the very ranks of those whom her husband would later claim “should be put in a harem and kept there.”

  In 1885 Lily and Frank became the center of an artists’ colony in the village of Broadway in Worcestershire. This unspoiled Cotswold village had beguiled Frank on a visit from London in the spring of that year and he had rented an old stone house on the village green. His artist friends came to visit and some chose to stay. Henry James put Broadway on the map by extolling it in Harper’s Monthly as “this perfection of a village.” The novelist, then forty-two, had been drawn there by the presence of one of his protegés, a twenty-nine-year-old artist with soulful eyes and a cropped black beard named John Singer Sargent. In 1886 Sargent painted a portrait of Lily Millet looking ravishing in a white dress and mauve shawl with her black hair swept high. Twenty-six years later she still wore her hair that way, though it had by then turned an elegant white.

  In April of 1912, Frank, too, showed signs of his years and his once-handsome face had assumed the mien of a genial owl. As he walked through the t
iled concourse of Cherbourg’s dockside station, his features likely also reflected the fatigue he felt after his challenging month in Rome. Lily had joined him toward the end of his time there, and they had left together for Paris two days ago and stayed at the Grand Hotel before departing on separate trains. By now Lily would be across the Channel and on her way back to Broadway, to Russell House, the large stone manse where, years before, his circle of artistic friends—Sargent, James, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edwin Austin Abbey, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Parsons, and others—had enjoyed rollicking evenings of what Frank called “high Broadway cockalorum.”

  In recent years, however, Russell House had been more home base than home for Millet. It had really been Lily’s home, where she had raised his daughter and two sons, decorated the house, and designed the large gardens. Millet’s absences most often took him to the United States, where his murals of mythical and historical figures were well suited to the rotundas of the domed and pillared public buildings going up in the burgeoning capitals of his homeland.

  America’s fondness for grandiose neoclassicism would reach its apotheosis at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Around a large boat basin where Venetian gondolas would glide was erected the White City, a staggering display of domes, porticos, colonnades, and loggias all covered in a white finish and lit at night by white electric bulbs. Frank Millet was the man who made the White City white. As the exposition’s director of decorations he had come up with the right mix of paint to cover the rough, temporary finishes of the pavilions. To help his “Whitewash Gang” apply it within a very tight schedule, he had even invented an early form of spray painting, using a compressor and a hose with a nozzle fashioned from a gas pipe. Millet also created murals for the New York State pavilion and painted some large winged figures on the ceiling of the Palace of Fine Arts, which housed the largest exhibition of American art ever seen in the United States.