By the time Archibald Gracie IV was born in 1859, the family was living in Mobile, Alabama, where his grandfather had established a cotton brokerage business. When the Civil War broke out, Gracie’s father, Archibald Gracie III, enlisted in an Alabama regiment, eventually becoming a Confederate brigadier general before being killed during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. Losing him at the age of five had left Archibald Gracie IV with a great curiosity regarding his father’s life and Civil War service. With him on the Titanic were copies of The Truth About Chickamauga, his 462-page account of the 1863 battle in which his father had served. Like many Civil War battles, Chickamauga was a bloodbath, second only in carnage to Gettysburg—a victory for the Confederate side though a Pyrrhic one. Researching Chickamauga had exhausted Gracie. As he would later write in The Truth About the Titanic, “It was to gain a much needed rest after seven years of work thereon, and in order to get it off my mind, that I had taken this trip across the ocean and back. As a counter-irritant, my experience was a dose which was highly efficacious.”
This richly ponderous writing style, along with Gracie’s habit of pushing his Chickamauga book on other passengers, has caused him to be characterized as the club bore amid the clublike décor of the Titanic’s smoking room. Kindly old Isidor Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York, had accepted a copy of Gracie’s book and then returned it a few days later expressing “intense interest” in having read it. Since even the most dedicated of Civil War buffs find Gracie’s detailed descriptions of troop movements at Chickamauga to be daunting, Straus was undoubtedly merely being polite.
Frank Millet and Archie Butt were both quick-witted enough to nimbly rebuff being saddled with Gracie’s book. Frank had clear memories of the Civil War; he had been seventeen when his father, Dr. Asa Millet, serving the Union cause as a surgeon, invited him to assist at an emergency field hospital in May of 1864. Exposure to the grisly realities of battle did not deter Frank from enlisting two months later as a drummer boy in the Sixtieth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. His service was uneventful except for one occasion when he was called to drum out an alarm following the escape of forty Confederate prisoners from the camp where he was stationed.
Three of Archie Butt’s uncles had been officers in the Confederate Army, and he had grown up in Augusta, Georgia, amid the hardships of postwar Reconstruction. Archie would make this era the setting for his 1899 novella Both Sides of the Shield, a story with a Chickamauga connection. The narrator of the novella is Palmer, a young newspaper reporter, as Archie had once been, who is sent south by a Boston newspaper to write accounts of postwar life in the former Confederacy. On the train, Palmer meets a courtly Southern colonel named Turpin who invites him to The Pines, a decaying plantation which the colonel’s family is struggling to maintain. Palmer meets Turpin’s strapping son, Bud, and his daughter, Miss Ellen, who is the mainstay of the household. He is invited to stay with the Turpins and eventually files a series of stories describing a diminished-but-proud Southern family’s life in a post-slavery world. Palmer falls in love with Ellen, but when she discovers that he is the author of newspaper articles that she believes have ridiculed her family, he is banished from The Pines.
Palmer quits the newspaper and becomes a wanderer, haunted by memories of Miss Ellen. When war with Spain is declared, he enlists in the army and is stationed in a camp at Chickamauga, Tennessee. There he meets Bud Turpin, now an army officer, and tells him of his continuing devotion to Ellen. When typhoid fever sweeps through the camp, Palmer is stricken and Bud writes to his sister of Palmer’s love for her. Miss Ellen comes to Chickamauga, Palmer’s fever breaks, and all is forgiven. He is released from the army and taken back to The Pines by Miss Ellen, who tells him that he must resume his life as a writer.
The story conveys Archie’s sentimental attachment to the lost world of the old South but is perhaps most interesting for something else it reveals about its author. In portraying a man with a hidden secret who finds redemption on the hallowed soil of Chickamauga through the love of a Southern woman not unlike his mother, Archie may well be describing his deepest wishes for himself. When it was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in March of 1905, Both Sides of the Shield was much admired by Theodore Roosevelt, and it is said to be one of the reasons why Archie was selected as his White House aide.
After finishing their second dinner on the Titanic, Archie and his table companions would once again have taken coffee at one of the small tables in the Palm Room where the orchestra continued to play. Archibald Gracie recorded that he “invariably circulated around during these delightful evenings, chatting with those I knew, and with those whose acquaintance I had made during the voyage.” In The Night Lives On Walter Lord imagines people “wincing at [Gracie’s] approach, but putting up with him anyway, for he was kind, courtly and certainly meant well.”
Gracie was also prone to name-dropping and informs us that after leaving the Palm Room, “the men of my coterie would always go to the smoking room, and … join in conversation with some of the well-known men whom we met there.” He then names Archie Butt, Clarence Moore, and Frank Millet as three of the celebrated men whom he saw regularly. Gracie claims to have discussed politics with Major Butt, though Archie had written to President Taft from the Berlin that he liked to “haul in” the onboard political discussions and likely did so again with Gracie. The topic of the day was Theodore Roosevelt’s run against Taft for the Republican nomination. Roosevelt had lost to Taft in the New York primary on March 26 but had won handily in Illinois on April 9, just two days ago, and was expected to take Pennsylvania that coming Saturday. Discussions of this may have fueled Archie’s anxiety as he prepared for his return to the fray in Washington.
Gracie also mentions Arthur Ryerson as another of the prominent men who frequented the smoking room. Ryerson was encouraged to escape the grief-laden atmosphere of his stateroom by John B. Thayer, a neighbor from Haverford, Pennsylvania. Thayer was a second vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and was returning from a European tour with his wife, Marian, and seventeen-year-old son, Jack, who had been at boarding school in England. Marian Thayer was a friend of Emily Ryerson’s and was looking in on her frequently as she kept to her room during the voyage.
John B. Thayer and Arthur Ryerson both knew George Widener, the last of the “well-known men” on Gracie’s list, though he was far from the least in terms of social standing. Widener was the son of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate P.A.B. Widener, who had built one of the very grandest of all the Main Line estates, Lynnewood Hall—a 110-room palace built in French neoclassical style and set on three hundred acres that included formal gardens, a polo field, and a lake. George Widener managed several of the family companies and lived at Lynnewood Hall with his wife, Eleanor, and two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, twenty-seven-year-old Harry Widener, was traveling with them and had a stateroom next to their C-deck suite. Since leaving Harvard five years before, Harry had devoted himself to acquiring rare books, and his collection already included an early folio of Shakespeare and a Gutenberg Bible. A recent book-buying foray in London had turned up a rare copy of Sir Francis Bacon’s Essaies that he was proudly carrying home with him on the Titanic. Before leaving for Southampton, Harry had dropped into a London book dealer to show off his prized acquisition and jokingly remarked, “If I am shipwrecked you will know that this will be on me.”
In the smoking room, Archibald Gracie and the other regulars soon settled into their club chairs, and decks of cards began to be shuffled. As cigar smoke wafted upward to create a misty glow around the cut-glass globes of the filigreed brass chandeliers, several of those at cards cast appraising glances around the room, since their purpose there was business rather than pleasure. Professional cardsharps had become enough of a problem on the transatlantic liners for White Star to post a special warning message opposite the first page of the passenger booklet. In the politest of terms, the message stated that
“certain persons, believed to be Professional Gamblers, are in the habit of traveling to and fro in Atlantic Steamships,” and warned that games of chance would afford these individuals “special opportunities for taking unfair advantage of others.”
Fleecing the unwary was clearly lucrative, since it has been estimated that roughly sixteen “sportsmen,” as the gamblers were known, had booked passage on White Star liners in early April of 1912 and that three of them had made it onto the Titanic. George Brereton of Los Angeles is listed as “George Brayton” on the passenger list, though he was most often known as George “Boy” Bradley. On the Titanic’s last night, Brereton would join up with two other cardsharps, Harry “Kid” Homer and Charles “Harry” Romaine, in an attempt to hustle two passengers in a game of bridge whist.
It’s often written that Jay Yates, a notorious American cardsharp and con man who used the pseudonym “J. H. Rogers,” was also on the Titanic. A haunting note that he reportedly thrust into the hands of a woman in a lifeboat reads, “If saved, inform my sister, Mrs. J. F. Adams of Findlay, Ohio. Lost, J. H. Rogers.” But Yates was never on board and the note was a hoax—written to make the police think he was dead, since he was wanted for postal theft. Yates had hired a woman to pose as a survivor and drop the letter off at a newspaper office. The newspaper ran it, but the ruse failed and the police remained on Yates’s trail.
The small tables used for cards in the smoking room had a raised lip around the edges to prevent glasses from sliding off in choppy seas. But on this night the glasses barely quivered as the liner moved smoothly forward through a remarkably calm north Atlantic. The ship was making excellent time and it looked as if the miles it was covering might exceed that posted by the Olympic on the first day of its maiden voyage. As J. Bruce Ismay retired to his suite for the night, he had every reason to be pleased with the performance of White Star’s newest liner.
(photo credit 1.62)
The first-class lounge was a regular haunt for Archibald Gracie and his friend James Clinch Smith (above). (photo credit 1.18)
The designers of the Olympic and the Titanic were fully aware of what décor appealed to the tastes of their wealthiest clientele. In America’s Gilded Age palaces the opulence of France’s ancien régime was the style most often simulated. As a result, the first-class lounge on A deck, the showiest of the Titanic’s public rooms, had been designed to emulate Versailles—though with some English coziness added in the patterned carpeting and comfortably upholstered sofas with large green pillows. The walls were paneled in oak with carved rococo detailing, although the use of gilding was restrained, reserved for some details on the plastered ceiling, a gilt ormolu wall clock, and the statuette of the Artemis of Versailles on the marble mantelpiece. At the far end of the room stood a mahogany, glass-fronted bookcase that held the ship’s library, and from its shelves Archibald Gracie had already selected The Old Dominion, a novel set in colonial Virginia, for some relaxing shipboard reading. On Friday, April 12, and the calm sea days that followed, Gracie, like many of his shipmates, was often to be found in the lounge, reading, taking tea, and chatting with acquaintances.
Joining him there on occasion was his oldest friend on board, James Clinch Smith, a man of “quiet modesty” in the words of another acquaintance, though he was also known to possess a dry wit. Like Gracie, Jim Smith, as he was known, came from an old American family and was a direct descendant of the founder of Smithtown in northeastern Long Island. He had grown up there as one of the seven children of Judge J. Lawrence Smith and his wife, the former Sarah Clinch. An aunt of his mother’s was the widow of department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart, and at thirty-four, Jim had come into $3 million from “Aunt Cornelia’s” estate. He also inherited the Smith homestead, a white colonial farmhouse to which many additions had been made over the years. In 1897 Jim had commissioned his brother-in-law, the celebrated architect Stanford White, to enhance and harmonize the look of it. White had married Jim’s youngest sister, Bessie, in 1884 and with her share of Aunt Cornelia’s money had acquired a farm at nearby St. James which he soon transformed into a country estate he named Box Hill.
Smith himself would not marry until he was thirty-nine. His bride was the outgoing Bertha Barnes of Chicago, and for a time they were a popular couple in New York and Newport society. Bertha was an accomplished amateur musician and composer, and in 1904 she persuaded her husband that they should move to Paris. Once there, Bertha soon became well known in musical circles—particularly after she launched a popular all-female orchestra. Her husband was less at home in Paris and regularly boarded the liners to return to New York and the world he knew. This took a toll on the marriage and after a few years they were essentially living apart. In January of 1912, however, Bertha asked Jim to come to Paris and during that visit the couple were reconciled and Bertha agreed to come back to America and the Smithtown homestead. In April a family friend received a letter from Paris with the message “Jim sails today on the great Titanic for New York to get ready the old home for Bertha, who follows in October.”
For someone who simply wanted the quiet life of a Long Island squire, fate had a way of finding Smith in the wrong place at the wrong time. Six years before boarding the Titanic, he had been a witness to the very public murder of his brother-in-law, Stanford White, and had been required to give testimony at the most sensational murder trial of the new century. On the night of June 25, 1906, he was sitting alone at a table in the roof garden restaurant atop Madison Square Garden, a massive Moorish-style complex designed by his brother-in-law. Below him was the giant amphitheater he knew well from attending the annual New York Horse Show; it could hold fourteen thousand people, and Stanford White had once had it flooded to create a Venetian spectacle. Looming above Smith’s table, illuminated against the night sky, stood the building’s thirty-two-storey tower, topped by Saint-Gaudens’s golden statue of a naked Diana drawing her bow. For the roof garden, White had created a partly outdoor restaurant decorated with trellises, potted palms, and Japanese lanterns that were laid out around a stage where light cabaret was performed on summer evenings.
(photo credit 1.63)
The roof garden restaurant (top) at Madison Square Garden (middle) was designed by Stanford White (above) as a venue for musical shows. (photo credit 1.4) (photo credit 1.37)
For lack of anything better to do on this hot June night, Jim was attending the premiere performance of a musical revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne. Not long after the show began, a man in evening dress and a long overcoat appeared at his table and asked if he could join him. His face was familiar and after he sat down Jim realized that he was Harry Thaw, the eccentric young millionaire from Pittsburgh whom people said was a cocaine addict or mad or both. Thaw offered Jim a cigar and began chatting about Wall Street and investments. The talk soon turned to travel and Jim mentioned that he was going abroad next week on the Deutschland. Thaw replied that he thought the Deutschland broke down too much and said he preferred the Amerika. Jim responded that he knew the captain of the Deutschland and that he was always very nice to Jim’s wife.
“Where’s your wife?” Thaw asked.
“She’s in Paris.”
“Are you very much married?”
Jim asked what he meant by that.
Thaw pressed on, asking if he was “above meeting a very nice girl” and offered to fix him up with a “buxom brunette.”
Jim answered icily and turned away to watch the stage. So far Mamzelle Champagne didn’t have much fizz and there was distracted chatter at nearby tables. Thaw tried to restart the conversation but Smith was unresponsive so he eventually stood up and left. As the show limped onward, the pretty actress in the title role popped out of a giant champagne bottle, but even that generated only meager applause. Later, there was a mild stir as Stanford White passed through the crowd to take his usual table—he was a large, imposing figure and a famous one in New York. Everyone knew the man who had designed the Washington Square Arch, the Colony Club, t
he Villard Houses, and many other city landmarks. Onstage the lead tenor was singing “If I Could Love a Thousand Girls” while twenty girls from the chorus pranced about him. The architect beamed up at the chorus girls, his teeth flashing from beneath his outsized mustache.
Suddenly there was a gunshot, followed by another and another. Someone laughed, thinking it was part of the show, but then came a crash followed by a loud scream. Stanford White’s body lay on the floor beside his toppled table, a pool of blood spreading across the white tablecloth twisted underneath him. Harry Thaw stood over him holding his revolver in the air. “I did it because he ruined my wife!” he turned and shouted. “He had it coming to him. He took advantage of the girl and then deserted her!”
A New York City fireman had the presence of mind to relieve Thaw of his weapon which he meekly handed over. As the eerily placid gunman was escorted to the elevator, his young wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, rushed forward and called out in disbelief, “Oh Harry, what have you done?”
Panicked Roof Garden patrons began streaming toward the exits and Jim Smith joined them. When he walked past the body he was unaware that the murder victim was his brother-in-law since White’s face was partially blown away and blackened by powder burns. Smith would soon learn the truth and by morning the murder was front-page news. With each edition came new revelations about White’s hidden life, accompanied by alluring photographs of the kittenish Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, whom White had reportedly known as a teenaged chorus girl before her marriage to Thaw. Newspaper circulations skyrocketed—never before had wealth, sex, and celebrity come together in quite such a perfect storm. To avoid curious crowds, White’s funeral was moved from Manhattan to Smithtown, and Jim Smith was one of the mourners who accompanied the body on the funeral train from New York to Long Island and then to the small clapboard Episcopal church in St. James.
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage Page 9
