Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  It is often written that the strain of trying to preserve his allegiances to both men pushed Archie to the brink of a nervous breakdown in early 1912. His letters, however, reveal that the reason for his low mood was a physical ailment brought on by stress and overwork. Archie had been at Taft’s side during a grueling precampaign swing through twenty-eight states in the fall of 1911. According to his own tally they were on the road for fifty-eight days and had made 220 stops, with 380 speeches by Taft, who had been seen by “3,213,600 ear-splitting citizens.” (Archie was particularly incensed by “saucy little brats” who yelled out “Hello Fatty” to the president.) As he declared to Clara, “Do you wonder that our nerves have been disintegrated and that our innards are all upside down?” Archie’s innards were actually in serious trouble from “auto-intoxication,” a stress-induced illness that left him unable to digest food properly and caused ever-increasing levels of toxins to be released into his bloodstream. It was this illness that had caused the weight loss of twenty pounds that he had mentioned to the New York Times reporter, and it prompted friends to comment on how gaunt and ill he looked.

  On February 23, 1912, Archie wrote to Clara of his decision to go to Rome for a little holiday with Frank Millet. “I hate to leave the Big White Chief just at this time, though … if I am to go through this frightful summer I must have a rest now.” Loyal soldier that he was, Archie had decided to stick with Taft through the fall election. “My devotion to the Colonel [Roosevelt] is as strong as it was the day he left, but this man [Taft] has been too fond of me for the past three years to be thrown over at this time.”

  In an oft-quoted sentence from this same letter Archie tells Clara, “Don’t forget that all my papers are in the storage warehouse and that if the old ship goes down you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.” Though this is often cited as a Titanic premonition, Archie then adds, “As I always write you in this way, whenever I go anywhere, you will not be bothered by presentiments now.” Archie’s time in Rome would prove to be restorative but his low and fatalistic moods continued to reappear. While staying with his cousin Rebie Rosenkranz in London before sailing, he had seemed to her husband to be “in a depressed and sad state of mind … nerves he called it.” On his last full day in England he had suggested a visit to Westminster Abbey, saying, “If I do not see it now I shall never see it.” Yet Archie was not fatalistic about the Titanic, which he had heard was unsinkable, and in Father Browne’s photograph of him he is caught chatting amiably on A deck. So there is every reason to believe that at dinner on April 10, 1912, his customary affable nature was on display.

  Major Butt (top, at left) was constantly at Taft’s side during official appearances. Following his illness, a thinner Archie (above, at right) accompanies the president on one of his daily walks. (photo credit 1.34)

  As an experienced transatlantic traveler, Archie knew to head for the dining saloon shortly after boarding to reserve a good table for the voyage, in this case for himself, Frank Millet, and his Washington friend, Clarence Moore. As the three men sat at table that evening, the conversation likely recapped Archie’s audiences with the pope and the king of Italy as well as his subsequent trip to England to see his older brother, Edward, a cotton trader who lived in Chester, near Liverpool. There was undoubtedly some talk of horses and dogs since Clarence Moore was a noted sportsman and former master of hounds at the exclusive Chevy Chase Hunt Club. He had just been scouring the north of England in search of a pack of good hounds and had purchased fifty pairs for the newly formed Rock Creek Hunt Club. Archie, too, was an ardent dog lover and the owner of some pointers that he kept kenneled with Moore’s dogs back in Washington.

  Clarence Moore was a Washington banker and broker whose wisest investment had been to marry Mabelle Swift, the heiress to a Chicago meat-packing fortune. This helped him to acquire a substantial Beaux Arts mansion on the most fashionable stretch of Massachusetts Avenue and a gaily awninged seaside home called “Swiftmore” near the Taft summer White House at Beverly, Massachusetts. Moore had occasionally joined Archie for rounds of golf with “the big White Chief” at the Beverly country club.

  Given Frank Millet’s delayed arrival, Archie and Clarence Moore likely chose to dine with him later in the dining saloon, perhaps in one of the room’s alcoves where backlit leaded-glass windows added to the atmosphere. “It was hard to realize,” another passenger later wrote, “that one was not in some large and sumptuous hotel.” The menu, too, was large and sumptuous, reflecting the Edwardian fashion for elaborate multi-coursed meals—from hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, fowl, and meat to a savory, a salad, and a selection of puddings and sweets. Archie’s doctor had prescribed a very restricted diet for him but as a lover of fine food he may have been tempted into “doing exactly as the doctors forbade” in the Titanic’s dining saloon.

  Archie was an opera lover as well and no doubt recognized the tunes from Cavalleria Rusticana and Tales of Hoffmann wafting in from the musicians in the Palm Room. Millet, Moore, and Butt may have taken coffee there before repairing to the smoking room on A deck, their regular haunt throughout the voyage. The “smoke room,” as it was often called, was a popular place for masculine conversation and cards. Designed to emulate a Pall Mall men’s club, it featured mahogany paneling with mother-of-pearl inlay and hand-painted stained glass windows. Dark leather chairs were grouped around green-baized tables where card games were usually in progress. Above the glowing coal-burning fireplace, the only real one on board, was a painting by the maritime artist Norman Wilkinson of ships entering Plymouth harbor. Frank Millet likely gave it a close appraisal since a few years before he had painted a similar scene on the ceiling of Baltimore’s Customs House.

  After a smoke and a hand of cards, Butt, Millet, and Moore probably called it a night. It had been a long day, after all. As they walked to their cabins, there was barely a movement as the ship made its steady course along the Channel’s southern reaches. Up in the crow’s nest on the foremast, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee could see the lights of the French coast in the distance and the mast lights of other ships. For a closer look, binoculars would have helped, but the pair they had used in the crow’s nest on the trip from Belfast to Southampton had gone missing. This had been reported to Second Officer Charles Lightoller, but he had said there wasn’t a replacement set available. No one seemed bothered about it, so the lookouts weren’t worried either. Binoculars were not standard equipment in the crow’s nest on many ships. And these things just seemed to happen on a maiden voyage.

  The first page of Frank Millet’s letter to Alfred Parsons. (For full text, see this page.) (photo credit 1.91)

  Early the next morning, Frank Millet took out a sheet of cream White Star notepaper with the line’s red pennant and “On Board R.M.S. ‘Titanic’ ” printed at its top and began penning a letter to his old friend Alfred Parsons. After extolling the comforts of the Titanic, Millet described his own accommodations:

  I have the best room I have ever had in a ship and it isn’t one of the best either, a great long corridor in which to hang my clothes and a square window as big as the one in the [Russell House] studio alongside the large light. No end of furniture, cupboards, wardrobe, dressing table, couch, etc., etc.

  This description bears no resemblance to cabin E-38, the small, inner room listed as being Millet’s on the passenger list. It is, however, an accurate depiction of Archie Butt’s stateroom, B-38. Archie had paid the same £26 fare as Frank but the White House had pulled strings to have him upgraded to a bigger stateroom. It’s possible that Archie had managed to have his friend transferred to a larger cabin as well, although Millet would not have wanted to pay much extra for it. It’s also possible that Frank may have simply chosen to keep his small cabin for sleeping and use Archie’s larger stateroom during the day for reading and writing. The two men had reportedly shared a cabin on the Berlin on the way over in March and had also been housemates in Washington. One of their friends described their closene
ss as being like that of Damon and Pythias; another noted that “the two men had a sympathy of mind which was most unusual.” Expressions such as these have led to speculation as to whether a more intimate relationship existed between Frank and Archie.

  Of the two men, Archie Butt, the witty, dandified bachelor with an intense devotion to his mother, seems a more likely gay man than Frank Millet, the decorated war correspondent and married father of three. But it is only from Millet that we have tangible proof of same-sex affections. A cache of his love letters to a San Francisco poet and writer named Charles Warren Stoddard have, quite remarkably, survived. They date from 1874, when Millet, then twenty-eight, was enjoying the Bohemian life on the Continent after completing his art studies at the Royal Academy in Antwerp. He had come to Venice that fall to paint and study the Italian masters, particularly Titian. “Charlie” Stoddard, thirty-one, was similarly smitten with wanderlust. During his twenties he had made four voyages to Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and his published account of these journeys, South Sea Idyls, contains descriptions of encounters with native men that, to the knowing reader, are unmistakably homoerotic.

  Frank Millet, circa 1874 (photo credit 1.81)

  In the autumn of 1874, Stoddard was supporting himself in Europe by writing travel pieces for the San Francisco Chronicle. One night at the opera in Venice, a young man quietly joined him in his box at intermission. “We looked at each other,” Stoddard wrote, “and were acquainted in a minute.” The young man was Frank Millet. He soon asked Stoddard what he was doing for the winter and then suggested they share living quarters. Stoddard accepted the offer and remembered that they became “almost immediately very much better acquainted.”

  Charles Warren Stoddard (photo credit 1.10)

  It’s possible that Millet had already met Stoddard a few months earlier in Rome through Mark Twain, for whom Stoddard had been a kind of secretary and drinking companion. Frank also needed someone to share the rent for “Casa Bunce,” an eight-room house overlooking the Grand Canal that he had inherited when another artist had decamped for Rome. But Charlie Stoddard would be more than just a roommate to Frank—he became the first, and perhaps greatest, love of Millet’s life, and their Venetian idyll would be fixed forever in his memory. During the daytime hours, Frank labored diligently on his art, sometimes making copies of works in churches or galleries, or sketching in Piazza San Marco. Charlie smoked, napped, and worked in a dilatory way on his articles for the Chronicle. In the evening they might take a gondola ride with Giovanni, their gondolier, cook, and errand boy. In his Chronicle pieces, Stoddard would switch genders when writing of “spoons” with “my fair” in a gondola, “… but that is between us two.”

  In late January of 1875, the pair left Venice for a three-week tour of northern Italy. In Padua, Frank was entranced by the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, and Stoddard, a Catholic convert, was equally awed by the Basilica of St. Anthony and gave Frank a medallion of the patron saint of lost things. They then moved on to Florence, where they paid an after-hours visit to Michelangelo’s David. After bribing the custodian to open a wooden shed behind the Accademia where the statue was being kept, the two men climbed some wooden scaffolding to a platform surrounding the figure’s waist. Frank ran his fingers down the swollen veins of the right arm and encouraged Charlie to do the same. He later described wanting to hug the marble image because it seemed as warm as flesh. Frank had seen the David in Florence the year before and had fantasized about touching it with Charlie, perhaps imagining the two of them communing with an artist from an earlier time who shared their affinity for the beauty of men.

  They then moved on to Siena, where, according to Stoddard, the two lovers slept in “a great double bed … so white and plump it looked quite like a gigantic frosted cake—and we were happy.” Not long after their return to Venice, however, the happiness began to pale, at least for Charlie. Money was scarce, and Casa Bunce was drafty and hard to heat, causing Frank to come down with rheumatism. Into this scene out of La Bohème there suddenly floated a tall, handsome figure in a long, black cloak of “Byronic mold” wearing a large hat with tassels. Charlie dubbed him “Monte Cristo,” but he was, in reality, an American artist named A. A. Anderson, who had independent means and a taste for the high life abroad. An entranced Charlie spent days in Anderson’s gondola “reading chatting, writing, dreaming or merely drifting.…” In his suite at the Hotel Danieli Anderson hosted a dinner that to Charlie was “the realization of a sybarite’s dream.” The exotic American would soon leave abruptly for Egypt, and a disappointed Charlie would find life at Casa Bunce to be rather drab in the aftermath. By May, Millet’s “butterfly,” as he dubbed Stoddard, had flown, leaving for Chester, England, and a man he had trysted with a year before.

  Millet was utterly bereft and poured out his love and longing for Charlie in letters that only caused his “butterfly” to flutter farther away. “Miss you? Bet your life,” he wrote. “Put yourself in my place. It isn’t the one who goes away who misses, it is he who stays. Empty chair, empty bed, empty house.” Over the door of Casa Bunce he erected a sign, UBI BOHEMIA FUIT? (WHERE HAS BOHEMIA GONE?) and in his letters to Charlie continually proposed scenarios where they could re-create “our little Bohemia.” It is rare to find such unabashed male passion freely expressed in nineteenth-century correspondence, and it’s clear from Millet’s letters that in the world of European Bohemia that he had embraced so completely, the strictures of his Massachusetts Puritan heritage held little sway.

  When his strained finances forced a return home to East Bridgewater in the fall of 1875, Frank’s letters to Charlie took on a near-obsessive tone as he longed for Europe and Charlie and despaired at the provincialism surrounding him. But it would not be until January of 1877 that his finances permitted him to return to the Old World. Traveling with him to France were the two sisters of his Harvard friend Royal Merrill, along with their mother and a younger brother. While a student, Frank had lived with the Merrill family for a year in Cambridge. In Paris, he would share living quarters with them in Montmartre, though even there his longing for Stoddard continued unabated.

  “Come Charlie, come!” he wrote in the spring of ’77. “My bed is very narrow but you can manage to occupy it, I hope.” This invitation was made despite the two Merrill sisters living only one floor below. Stoddard would finally visit at the end of April just as Millet was departing for Bucharest to cover the Russo-Turkish conflict for the New York Herald. From Bulgaria, Frank would attempt to stir some jealousy in Stoddard by writing that he was “spooning frightfully with a young Greek here.”

  Millet would not return to Paris until mid-April of the following year, arriving sunburned, war-weary, and bearing two crimson military decorations from the Russian czar. The Merrills had eagerly awaited the arrival of “our hero,” and by the end of 1878, Frank proclaimed himself to be in love with Elizabeth “Lily” Merrill, the elder of the two sisters. His affection for Lily seems to have been heartfelt, but he would prove to be an often-absent husband and an indifferent father. There would never be other women, however, and there are clues in Millet’s short stories and letters to indicate that his sexual attraction to men was more than just a youthful, Bohemian phase.

  “Misogynist” was a name often applied to gay men a century ago, and there was certainly a strong streak of misogyny in Millet. He opposed female artists exhibiting at the Chicago Exposition, and even his last letter to Parsons from the Titanic is heavily larded with female disparagement. In addition to railing about “obnoxious, ostentatious American women” and proclaiming the young American woman to be “a buster,” he notes that the ship has “smoking rooms for Ladies and Gents, intended I fancy, to keep the women out of the men’s smoking room which they infest in the German and French steamers” [italics mine]. He concludes by calling Olga Mead, the Hungarian wife of architect William Mead, “a B—” [Bitch]. All in all, this reveals more misogyny than can be ascribed to the garden-variety male chauvinis
m of the period.

  Earlier in this rather revealing letter, Millet begins his commentary on the other passengers with a few lines that have always intrigued Titanic researchers:

  Queer lot of people on this ship. Looking over the [paasenger] list, I only find three or four people I know but there are good many of “our people” I think.…

  Although “queer” was already a pejorative term for homosexuality by 1912, Millet was most likely not using it in that context. But who are the “our people” he so enigmatically sets off in inverted commas? If he simply means “our kind of people,” why did he not say so? And from his condescending references to the American passengers, it seems clear that Millet thinks most of those on board are not his kind of people, nor would they be for a refined Englishman like Alfred Parsons.

  Parsons was a key member of the “little Bohemia” that had first formed around the Millet household in Broadway during the summer of 1885. In 1900 Millet had sold to Parsons five acres of his Russell House property, on which he built his own house and garden. First known as an illustrator and painter of English pastoral scenes, Parsons later gained a reputation as a garden designer. He assisted Lawrence Johnston in the creation of Hidcote, today one of England’s most-visited gardens, and designed the grounds for Henry James’s Lamb House in Rye. Like James, Parsons never married and was considered to be a “confirmed bachelor.”

  Could Millet therefore mean “our people” to be gay people? Parsons was a very close friend of Millet’s, and it is not impossible that he could be alluding to their shared affinities. It would be decades before anything like a gay identity would emerge in England or America, but from the writings of E. M. Forster, Edward Carpenter, Hugh Walpole, and others, we know that Edwardian gay men did manage to find one another. Can it be merely coincidence that a good number of the artists and writers drawn to Millet’s Broadway Bohemian “colony”—Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Parsons, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Edmund Gosse—are believed to have had same-sex affections?