Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  His exoneration of the White Star Line may have been influenced by a fear that assigning blame would lead to lawsuits that would cripple the line and damage the reputation of British shipping to the benefit of the French and German liners. Dozens of lawsuits were filed nevertheless, particularly in the United States, and the total sum demanded for all claims came to almost $17 million. The claims encompassed everything from $8 for a pair of Dorothy Gibson’s satin slippers and $50 for Eugene Daly’s bagpipes, to $5,000 for William Carter’s new Renault and $14,000 for Charlotte Cardeza’s Burmese ruby ring. Suits were also filed for loss of life: For being deprived of their husbands, René Harris sued for a million dollars, May Futrelle for $300,000, and Lily Millet for $100,000, though much less was actually received since the final amount distributed to all claimants came to only $664,000.

  René Harris received a $50,000 settlement for the loss of Henry B. Harris, a far cry from a million but even this sum was welcome since the Harris theatrical enterprise was on the verge of bankruptcy. René was advised to liquidate and live on her assets but she insisted that Harry wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Despite being told that “there was no such thing as a woman in the theater business” René convinced her creditors to give her a chance to make the company solvent—and she succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. For twenty years she filled the Harris theaters with hit plays and helped launch the careers of such stars as Helen Hayes, Barbara Stanwyck, Dame Judith Anderson, and the playwright Moss Hart. Similarly, René’s friend May Futrelle found herself having to repay publishers’ advances for books that Jacques would now never write. She, too, managed to pay off her husband’s debts and generate income through licenses of his existing works and by her own writing.

  One modest expense that the White Star Line was happy to cover was a transatlantic ticket for Marcelle Navratil, the mother of the two curly-haired “Titanic orphans” who were being looked after in New York by Margaret Hays. After seeing a photograph of her sons in a French newspaper, Mme. Navratil contacted the White Star Line, who arranged passage to New York from her home in Nice. Over the Easter holiday in April, Marcelle’s estranged husband, Michel Navratil, had disappeared with the boys and was taking them to America on the Titanic under the alias “Louis Hoffman.” On May 16 Marcelle was reunited with her sons and two days later they returned home together on the Oceanic.

  The Titanic “orphans,” Michel Navratil, age three, and his two-year-old brother, Edmond (photo credit 1.51)

  On the same day that Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York, a brand-new movie entitled Saved from the Titanic was announced on the marquees of the city’s nickelodeons. The ten-minute silent film had been made in three weeks at Éclair’s studios in New Jersey and starred a real-life survivor of the shipwreck, Miss Dorothy Gibson, wearing the same white silk dress and black pumps in which she had escaped from the sinking liner. Dorothy had at first been unwilling to relive her ordeal so soon after the disaster and according to one newspaper there were times during the filming when she had “practically lost her reason by virtue of the terrible strain she had been under.” The one-reeler, which was produced by Jules Brulatour, would be Dorothy’s last film since she then embarked on a career in opera. This would prove to be short-lived, as would her marriage to Brulatour in 1917. Following a generous divorce settlement in 1919, the prettiest girl retreated from public attention and was never seen on stage or screen again.

  Margaret Brown, however, was only warming up to the spotlight. A photograph of her presenting a silver loving cup to Captain Rostron on May 29 was carried in newspapers around the world. The ceremony took place on the Carpathia after its return from the Mediterranean, and gold, silver, and bronze medals were given to Rostron and his officers and crew on behalf of the Titanic survivors. Margaret also made a personal gift to the captain of the small turquoise Egyptian tomb figure she had tucked into her pocket before leaving her Titanic stateroom. A trip home to Denver in April had turned into a victory lap for the heroine of the Titanic, with a luncheon being given in her honor at the home of a once-frosty grande dame of Mile High society. To the Denver Times Margaret modestly noted that “I simply did my duty as I saw it.… That I did help some, I am thankful and my only regret is that I could not have assisted more.” Margaret continued to chair the Titanic Survivors’ Committee for the rest of her life, and in 1920 she laid floral wreaths on all the Titanic graves in Halifax when a shipboard fire during a crossing caused her to land there unexpectedly. She also raised funds for the Women’s Titanic Memorial in Washington, D.C., just one of the dozens of statues, plaques, fountains, and even buildings erected in memory of the sinking on both sides of the Atlantic.

  This image of Dorothy Gibson appeared on the poster for Saved from the Titanic. (photo credit 1.80)

  The largest Titanic memorial of all is the Widener Library at Harvard University, erected by Eleanor Widener in memory of her son Harry, in which his rare book collection is carefully preserved. Among the many memorials in Southampton, England, is a bronze plaque to the ship’s postal workers cast from the Titanic’s spare propeller. A proposal for a monument in memory of Archie Butt and Frank Millet was issued from the White House within days of the Titanic’s sinking. It was President Taft’s idea, and he agreed to chair the committee and make the first donation toward it. Several hundred of Frank and Archie’s friends followed suit—the list of donors reads like a Gilded Age Who’s Who, with such names as sculptor Daniel Chester French, architects Henry Bacon and Cass Gilbert, industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Charles L. Freer, urban parks creator Frederick Law Olmsted, and decorative artist Louis Comfort Tiffany.

  It was first thought that the memorial might take the form of a bronze tablet on the White House grounds but sculptor Daniel Chester French wrote to Lily Millet in early July that he and architect Thomas Hastings were at work on something that would likely take the form of a fountain. At the end of January 1913, President Taft approved the design for the Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain to be located in a leafy glade on the Ellipse just beyond the South Lawn of the White House. Daniel Chester French, who would later sculpt the large seated figure of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, created two bas reliefs for the fountain’s central shaft that rises from a basin of Tennessee marble. On its north side, facing the White House, a knight in armor representing Chivalry was carved in honor of Archie Butt; on the south side, looking toward the Lincoln Memorial, a classical maiden with a palette and brush symbolizing Art, commemorates Frank Millet. Around the rim of the basin an inscription reads:

  The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain near the White House (photo credit 1.52)

  In memory of Francis Davis Millet—1846–1912—and Archibald Willingham Butt—1865–1912, This monument has been erected by their friends with the sanction of Congress.

  The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain was completed by October of 1913, but there is no record of any dedication ceremony for it. By then Woodrow Wilson had replaced William Taft as president. During the fall election—the one that Archie Butt had been dreading—Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and allowing the Democrats to capture the White House. In his inauguration address President Wilson lauded America’s prosperity, but proclaimed that “evil has come with the good and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste.” America and the world were changing. Deference for wealth and privilege was on the wane, and Gilded Age excess was out of fashion—for the time being at least. Labor unrest, suffragette marches, waves of New World immigrants—all were harbingers of a modern world struggling to be born.

  “It takes a terrible warning,” William Alden Smith had declared at the U.S. Senate Inquiry, “to bring us back to our moorings and senses.” The Titanic disaster did no such thing, of course. The “story of the century” would soon be overshadowed by far greater horrors in the fields of Flanders. But in the twenty-first century, quite remarkably, this Edwardian shipwreck ha
s become our most-invoked metaphor for calamity, a byword for human arrogance and folly. In an age when Greek myths and biblical stories are no longer part of common understanding, the Titanic has become one of our most potent modern parables. Expressions like “rearranging the deck chairs” and “hitting the iceberg” are used daily and need no explanation. For politicians it has become a rite of passage to be perched on the liner’s plunging stern by newspaper cartoonists. The story of the giant ship that sank on its maiden voyage is so rife with symbolism that if it hadn’t actually happened, we might have had to invent it.

  Yet it did happen, on that cold, clear April night in 1912. And it happened to real people—stokers, millionaires, society ladies, parsons, parlormaids—people who displayed a full range of all-too-human reactions as the events of the night unfolded. The recollections of those who survived, conflicting and embroidered though they often are, allow us to place ourselves on that sloping deck and ask, “What would we do?”

  The unsinkable story sails on.

  Just how long did their hearts go on? Of the 712 people who avoided death in the early morning of April 15, 1912, five lived to be one hundred or more and at least a dozen lived into their nineties. Despite exceptional longevity for a few, tragedy stalked the lives of so many Titanic survivors that it has often encouraged superstitious speculation of the “hand of fate” variety.

  There are at least seven known deaths by suicide among the survivors, and Titanic researcher Philip Gowan has found evidence for as many as seven or eight more, though none of them, so far as is known, were directly Titanic-related. Dr. Washington Dodge, the San Francisco physician and civic politician who helped push Boat 13 away from the condenser exhaust, shot himself in the forehead in 1919 after a breakdown caused by business and investment problems. In March of 1927, Dr. Henry Frauenthal leapt to his death from the balcony of his New York apartment following months of depression fueled by his wife’s mental illness. Lookout Frederick Fleet hung himself from a clothesline in 1965 in despair over the death of his wife. Quartermaster Robert Hichens, the man at the ship’s wheel when Fleet spotted the berg and who later became the tyrant of Boat 6, plotted a murder-suicide in November of 1933 in Torquay, Devon. But he was so drunk on the chosen night that he only succeeded in wounding the man he believed had wronged him and failed to kill himself, though he did attempt to cut his wrists while under arrest. Hichens was released from prison in 1937 and died in 1940. On September 22, 1945, Jack Thayer, aged fifty, was found in his car with his wrists and throat slashed. The reason most often given for his suicide is that he was depressed over the loss of his son in the Pacific War. His mother, Marian Thayer, died of natural causes on April 14, 1944, the thirty-second anniversary of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg.

  It seems a particularly cruel twist of fate that Douglas Spedden, the much-beloved only child of Daisy and Frederic Spedden, should have been struck by a car and killed in August of 1915, three years after the family were all saved from the Titanic. The couple had no other children and lived on in Tuxedo Park until their deaths—Daisy died in 1950 and Frederic in 1947. (Daisy had, for a time, employed Ellen Bird, the English maid to Ida Straus.) As a Christmas gift for Douglas in 1913, Daisy wrote a story about their European travels and voyage on the Titanic, with Douglas’s toy polar bear as the narrator. The manuscript was discovered by a relative, Leighton Coleman III, and published in 1994 as the children’s picture book Polar the Titanic Bear.

  Eleven-month-old Trevor Allison, the only surviving member of his family, also did not live to see adulthood. The Allison baby was carried off the Carpathia by his English nursemaid, Alice Cleaver, who had taken him into Boat 11. The Allison family blamed Alice Cleaver for the deaths of Bess Allison and two-year-old Loraine Allison, believing that Bess must not have known that the baby had left with the nurse and thus likely searched for him until it was too late. Alice claimed that she had told Mrs. Allison she was taking the baby with her. Major Peuchen said that he saw Bess Allison get out of a lifeboat with Loraine and go in search of her husband. Trevor Allison was raised by Hudson’s brother, George Allison, and his wife Lillian but died of ptomaine poisoning at the age of eighteen in August of 1929. In 1940 a woman named Loraine Kramer appeared on a national radio program claiming to be Loraine Allison. Her story of how she had survived the Titanic proved to be far-fetched, however, and she was dismissed as an impostor by the Allison family.

  Perhaps the most heartrending of all survivor stories is that of Helen Walton Bishop, the nineteen-year-old newlywed from Dowagiac, Michigan, who left her lapdog Frou Frou behind before boarding Boat 7 with her husband. Helen was likely pregnant on the Titanic, since on December 8, 1912, she gave birth to a baby boy, who died two days later. The following November, Helen suffered a severely fractured skull in an automobile accident and was not expected to live. She recovered with a metal plate placed in her skull but her mental condition was seriously altered and this led to a divorce in January of 1916. Three months later Helen was injured from a fall while visiting friends in Danville, Illinois, and on March 15, 1916, she died and was buried in her hometown of Sturgis, Michigan. Her death at the age of twenty-three made the front page of the Dowagiac Daily News. Ironically a story about the remarriage of her former husband, Dickinson Bishop, appeared on the same page.

  RHODA ABBOTT (1873–1946)

  Rhoda Abbott (sometimes called “Rosa”), who was rescued from half-submerged Collapsible A, is the only woman to have survived the night in the icy water. She spent two weeks in New York Hospital after being carried off the Carpathia and lived with respiratory problems for the rest of her life. Rhoda also grieved deeply the loss of her two sons, sixteen-year-old Rossmore and fourteen-year-old Eugene. She had taken the two boys back to England in 1911 to live with her mother after separating from Stanton Abbott, a middleweight U.S. boxing champion. But the two boys became homesick for America and she was returning with them to Providence, Rhode Island, on the Titanic. In December of 1912 she married an old friend from England, George Williams, and lived with him in Jacksonville, Florida, until 1928, when the couple returned to England. There George suffered a stroke and Rhoda cared for him until his death ten years later. She died of heart failure on February 18, 1946.

  MADELEINE ASTOR (1893–1940)

  Nineteen-year-old Madeleine Astor gave birth to John Jacob Astor VI on August 14, 1912. She had inherited the income from a $5 million trust fund and the use of the Astor mansion on Fifth Avenue and “Beechwood” in Newport so long as she did not marry again. But on June 22, 1916, Madeleine relinquished any claim to the Astor fortune when she married her childhood friend, the independently wealthy William Karl Dick (1888–1953). They had two sons but divorced in 1933 after Madeleine began an affair with a twenty-six-year-old Italian prizefighter named Enzo Fiermonte, whom she had hired to teach boxing to her boys. To the horror of her family and Palm Beach society, she married Fiermonte in November of 1933 and endured five stormy years before divorcing him for “extreme cruelty” in 1938. Two years later, the always frail Madeleine died of heart disease at the age of forty-seven and was buried in New York’s Trinity Cemetery, not far from the first husband she had last seen standing on the deck of the Titanic. Madeleine’s eldest son, John Jacob Astor VI, spent many years battling his half brother, Vincent Astor, for a larger share of the family wealth and died in 1992.

  LÉONTINE PAULINE “NINETTE” AUBART (1887–1964)

  Several Guggenheim family members awaited the arrival of the Carpathia, and it is believed that they arranged accommodation for Ninette Aubart and her maid in New York and kept the news of her existence hidden from Ben Guggenheim’s widow, Florette. Ninette and her maid took the Adriatic to Liverpool on May 3 and proceeded from there to Paris. She filed a claim of $12,220 for her belongings and $25,000 for injuries against White Star, though like most claimants, she received far less. Ninette Aubart married three times and had at least one child, a son, before her death in October of 1964, in Paris. One
of her husbands was believed to have been a member of the French Cabinet, and René Harris recalled in her 1932 Liberty article that on a visit to Paris she was invited to tea by her Carpathia roommate, who was by then married to “one of the outstanding figures in the French capital.”

  LAWRENCE BEESLEY (1877–1967)

  Lawrence Beesley wrote a successful book, The Loss of the SS Titanic, that was published in late 1912. A devout Christian Scientist, he also wrote in a church journal about how his faith had sustained him during the disaster, as did another Christian Scientist on board, Second Officer Charles Lightoller. Beesley corresponded with Walter Lord while he was researching A Night to Remember and visited the set during the filming of the 1958 movie based on the book. He died on February 14, 1967, at the age of eighty-nine.

  KARL BEHR (1885–1949)

  Karl Behr and Helen Newsom were married in March of 1913 and had three sons and one daughter. Karl continued to play tennis through 1915, competing with R. Norris Williams and being ranked in the top ten of U.S. players. He later went into banking and became vice president of Dillon, Read & Co. of New York and was also on the board of several companies, among them Goodyear Tire and Rubber and the National Cash Register Company. After his death, on October 15, 1949, Helen married Dean Mathey, a tennis player and friend of Karl’s; she died in 1965.

  JOSEPH BOXHALL (1884–1967)

  After testifying at both the U.S. and British inquiries, Joseph Boxhall became the fourth officer on the Adriatic. During World War I he served on cruisers and a torpedo boat and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander. After the war, he married Marjory Beddells, the daughter of a Yorkshire industrialist and the marriage was a happy one, though they had no children. Boxhall returned to the merchant service in 1919, became a chief officer, though never a captain, and retired in 1940. He served as a technical advisor on the film A Night to Remember, to the surprise of those who knew him since, until then, he had been reluctant to talk about the Titanic. He died at the age of eighty-three, on April 25, 1967, the last of the Titanic’s surviving officers, and his ashes were scattered over the ocean near where the Titanic had gone down.