Playing poker with a high spirit was a masculine rite of passage in first-class Atlantic crossings. The staking of large sums was a display of status: wherever rich men gathered, there were poorer men, too, adepts at sleight of hand, subterfuge, and connivance. Notices on the Titanic warned that the first-class saloons of liners were infested by cardsharps, and unavailingly sought to discourage gambling. Harry (“Kid”) Homer, a professional gambler, originally from Indianapolis, was a first-class passenger on the Titanic, and a gaunt, hard-faced rogue he looks in his photograph, with all the facial charm of a prison guard. A former Los Angeles car salesman turned professional gambler named George Brereton was also known as “Boy” Bradley and traveled under the alias of George Brayton. Charles Romaine, originally from Georgetown, Kentucky, but now of Anderson, Indiana, was another gambler traveling under a disguised surname.
The first-class lounges were action zones for confidence tricksters, too, with their squalid dedication and vindictive traps. Alfred Nourney, calling himself Baron von Drachstedt, ostensibly a salesman of fast cars, upgraded from second class to first class, where he moved with the care of a spy who had infiltrated a hostile camp. He was a slippery youth who took his cues quickly and was ready for any chances offered. It is suggestive of Nourney’s targets that he insinuated his way into a card game with Greenfield the furrier and Henry Blank, of Glenridge, New Jersey, who had been visiting Swiss watchmakers and dealers in precious stones in Amsterdam.
“It is a stratified society,” Steiner continued, “and the lines are dollar-marked.” Stewards assessed the size of men’s bank accounts by the contents of their wardrobes and placed passengers accordingly. “Around the captain’s table are gathered the stars in the financial firmament; those whom nobody knows, who travel without retinue, are at the remote edges of the dining room, far away from the limelight.” This was different from the equality of steerage, where “everybody ‘gets his grub’ in the same way, in the same tin cans, ‘first come, first served’; and all of us are kicked in the same unceremonious way by the crew.”13 It was not as if the table manners were reliably superior in first class. Steiner saw plutocrats eating blueberry pie off their knives and frowning in confusion at the little bowls of rose water set before them. Some American success stories not only lacked table manners but did not know how to dress. “The new rich used to come secretly to me to be coached, not only in the art of dressing, but in the art of wearing beautiful clothes,” Lady Duff Gordon confided. Englishwomen paid as much as twenty guineas for a consultation, and in New York she received five times that sum from wives of “self-made men” who felt incapable of appearing in society until they had been drilled.14
In the childish belief, held by many rich people, that they could dupe their staff, newly embarked first-class passengers used to tell their stewards, “I am a friend of the President of this line.” Violet Jessop, who was seldom outsmarted by those she served, used to reflect what a lucky man Bruce Ismay was to have so many thousands of friends.15 On the Titanic, first-class accommodation was filled to 46 percent of capacity: a sure indication that there was overcapacity in the Atlantic steamship business. The liner’s 337 first-class passengers were estimated to be worth $500 million.
Richest of all was John Jacob Astor. A photograph survives of him entraining at Waterloo Station for Southampton: a man of forty-seven, looking straight at the camera, his bearing stiffened by high confidence in himself and his purposes, Astor resembles a conventional ruling-class Englishman, with his trim moustache, erect bearing, bowler hat, rolled umbrella, and overcoat with velvet collar. He had the consistency that comes from never being flurried, and that makes for calm, commanding dignity. His ends were reached with a distinctive mixture of reserve and subdued determination. “He knew what he wanted and how to get it,” according to the family lawyer, who extolled Astor’s “inexhaustible energy all through his life, which he lived in his own way, not in your way or mine, but his.”16
Jack Astor was the unchallenged owner of much of New York and did not need to shout for attention. In 1891 he had married Ava Willing, “quite the most beautiful woman in the world,”17 but frigid and insolent. It was for her a worldly, showy marriage, but she had neither grace nor gratitude for her situation. Her guests at Ferncliff, the Astors’ country estate at Rhinebeck, were, like her, fanatical bridge players who spent their waking hours with eyes fixed on cards. “Their host, who detested bridge and was far more at home going at top-speed in his new racing-car . . . shambled from room to room, tall, loosely built and ungraceful, rather like a great overgrown colt, in a vain search for someone to talk to.” In the evenings he would dress immaculately for dinner and go downstairs to entertain his guests, only to find everyone scurrying upstairs for a hasty, last-minute change of clothes. “They would all be late, which annoyed him intensely, for he made a god of punctuality, and the probability of a spoilt dinner did not improve his temper, for he was a notable epicure. The house would come down to find him, watch in hand, constrained and irritable.” Dinner with his wife was uncomfortable. “Never a brilliant conversationalist, he would be wanting to discuss what Willie Vanderbilt’s new car was capable of doing, or whether the chef Oliver Belmont had brought back from France was really better than his own. Instead, he had to listen to interminable post mortems—‘You should have returned my lead . . . ’ ‘You should have played your queen . . .’”18
At the height of the Progressive Era this great slum landlord refused to ameliorate the conditions that his tenants were forced to endure. He opposed the development of northern Manhattan to alleviate the density of the slums, for his rental income would fall if the tenements were less congested. Working at a rolltop desk behind the barred windows of the Astor Estate Office—the window of his plain room looked across a small court to a blank brick wall—Astor was nevertheless at the forefront of developing New York City into a forest of skyscrapers. He was a builder of Titanics on terra firma. The liner as floating luxury hotel owed much to his decision to build the Astoria half of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. This delivered a new concept in hotels: instead of corridors lined by bedrooms, to which weary travelers went to sleep, he devised something akin to a clubhouse, with an elegant bar, tea room, and lounges where businessmen met and made deals, and sportsmen slapped one another’s backs and bought rounds. For some of the Titanic’s first-class passengers, the Astor hotels were home—and the ship rather like home with four funnels added. Ella White, when she was not in Europe or at her summer apartment at Briarcliffe Lodge, a sumptuous sham-medieval hotel in Westchester County, lived in the Waldorf-Astoria.
For years Astor shuffled dejectedly in his wife’s chill shadow. He waited until the death of his mother before trying to settle terms for a divorce—finally achieved in 1909. Two years later he married Madeleine Force, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Brooklyn businessman. Life for the young bride promised to be like a never-empty box of chocolates, but was quickly knocked awry. Astor failed to realize that his riches, capacities, handsome gloss, and hale physique, added to the unspoiled beauty of his ductile child bride, would make the pus ooze from every envious sore. There was a boycott of the reception he gave at his house on Fifth Avenue to introduce his bride to his friends, who also ignored the Astors in their box on the opening night of the new season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Faced with ostracism, they abandoned their planned charm offensive of dinners, dances, and balls, and wintered in France and Egypt. By April 1912 she was four months pregnant, and the Astors were returning to America for the confinement. They were elated at the pregnancy yet soberly set on their social rehabilitation. His retinue on the Titanic comprised his valet, Victor Robbins (altogether there were thirty-one personal maids or valets on board); his wife’s maid, Rosalie Bidois (from the Channel Islands); an American nurse, Caroline Endres, hired to care for her during the pregnancy; and his Airedale dog, Kitty.
Apart from the Astors, there were at least six sets of honeymooners in first class. Daniel Warner
Marvin, aged nineteen, son of the owner of the Biograph Cinema Company, was returning to America with his bride, Mary Farquarson, aged eighteen. Lucien P. Smith, aged twenty-four, of Huntington, West Virginia, had recently married eighteen-year-old Mary Eloise Hughes: she bore his posthumous son in December 1912. Victor de Satode Peñasco y Castellana, aged eighteen, from Madrid, was going to America with his new wife, Maria Josefa Perez de Soto y Valleja, aged seventeen. John P. Snyder, aged twenty-three, from Minneapolis, was returning from his European honeymoon with Nelle Stevenson, aged twenty-two. Dickinson Bishop, heir to the Round Oak Stove Company, had married in November 1911, and embarked at Cherbourg with his wife, Helen, after a tour of Mediterranean Europe and Egypt. One newly married couple were both verging on the age of fifty: Dr. Henry (or Hyman) Frauenthal, with a high-domed baldness and fulsome black beard, had married in France, as recently as March 26, Clara Heinsheimer from Cincinnati. They were traveling with his brother Gerry (or Isaac) Frauenthal, a New York lawyer.
“The faster and bigger the ship, the less likely one is to speak to strangers,” Emily Post adumbrated in her Etiquette manual. “Because the Worldlys, the Oldnames, the Eminents—all those who are innately exclusive—never ‘pick up’ acquaintances on shipboard, it does not follow that no fashionable and well-born people ever drift into acquaintanceship on European-American steamers of to-day, but they are not apt to do so. Many in fact take the ocean-crossing as a rest-cure and stay in their cabins the whole voyage. The Worldlys always have their meals served in their own ‘drawing-room,’ and have their deck-chairs placed so that no one is very near them, and keep to themselves except when they invite friends to play bridge or take dinner or lunch with them.”19 This gives an accurate picture of the Astors on the Titanic. One acquaintance to whom they were cordial was Margaret Brown. Colonel Astor had met her five years earlier in Lucerne, and they converged again in Cairo. From Egypt she traveled with them to Paris, and then, hearing that her infant grandson was lying sick in Kansas City, she determined to take an early boat home.
Margaret Brown had been born in 1867 to Irish immigrants in a hovel in Denkler Alley, Hannibal, Missouri—a halt on the railroad to the California goldfields. Her father fired the coke furnaces in Hannibal’s gasworks. At the age of thirteen she began working with other Irishwomen in a tobacco factory—probably stripping tobacco leaves. Her brother Daniel had settled in the mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, where the Guggenheims had laid the basis of their fortune. At the age of eighteen she went west to Leadville, where she lived as Daniel’s cook-housekeeper. Next she worked in the carpet and drapery department of a Leadville store sewing carpets and draperies. In 1886 she married J. J. Brown, an Irishman from Pennsylvania who had worked as a miner in the Black Hills of South Dakota before trying his luck at Leadville. His best man was his barber; her bridesmaid was a maid of all work in a miners’ boardinghouse. They went to live in a two-room cabin on Iron Hill, also known as Stumpftown, hard by the mines: other nearby settlements were called Finntown, Ibex City, Chicken Hill, and Strayhorse Gulch and were served, it seems, by one water pump each. In 1893 J. J. struck gold in Little Jonny Mine, which soon produced 135 tons of gold ore daily. The millionaire J. J. bought more mining properties in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and an imposing house in Denver.
As Irish working-class Catholic millionaires, the Browns did not become overnight darlings of Denver society, but the extent to which they were shunned has been exaggerated. It is true that a Denver socialite had recently declared: “The world is full of dowdy, ill-bred women who fancy that if only they had money enough they could take society by storm.”20 Margaret Brown, however, was not dowdy: inclined to chubby cheeks, perhaps, but with a strong, smiling, and confident face, her laughing blue eyes set under luxuriant dark hair; not finished like a debutante, certainly, but shrewd, clear-headed, inquisitive, and amusing. She made the most of her chances. The Browns first visited Europe in 1895: sailed to Naples, toured Italy for several months, dallied in Paris, tried the British Isles. She discovered an aptitude for foreign languages (acquiring fluent French) and a love of Paris. Margaret Brown was twenty-six when her husband started to make millions: too late for her to resemble Astor or Vanderbilt heiresses, who were both bullied and pampered by men, held too tight by silken lassos to wrench life into their own free pattern. Other women with self-made husbands often became snobs on the edge of good society, or scared cats, but she was neither heartless nor shallow. She proved a benefactor to all America when, after 1903, she helped a reforming judge establish the first U.S. court for juveniles. She was a founder of the Denver Women’s Club, which promoted education and advocated suffrage for women, and after 1912, when her name had national recognition as a Titanic survivor, she drew a large audience when she spoke at Women’s Suffrage headquarters. Her hard-drinking husband suffered a bad stroke, as a result of which his temper deteriorated, and they signed a separation agreement in 1909. She forsook Denver for New York and Newport but spent much time traveling in Europe.
Leadville, Colorado, was Margaret Brown’s common denominator with her fellow passenger Benjamin Guggenheim, the most personable of the seven brothers. He was the first of them to attend college, the first to work in mining, the first to leave the family business, the first to collect good paintings, and the first to gallivant. He renounced capital of $8 million when he left the family business in 1901 but took a share of the profits with him and four years later inherited his cut of his father’s fortune. At first Ben Guggenheim lived with his wife, Florette, and three daughters in a pretentious, tomblike house on a corner of Fifth Avenue. His wife busied herself by holding muffled, listless tea parties and stilted bridge drives. Guggenheim had never felt marriage would provide full satisfaction for his claims on life. He was the rare sort of philanderer who liked women and understood them. He kept a slim brunette nurse in the Stygian house, ostensibly because her massage warded off his neuralgia, but eventually decided that marvelous regions lay waiting to be explored in Paris, where he took an apartment. The Fifth Avenue household was designed to look immutable, but the Guggenheims cared no more for permanency than the J. J. Browns at Bear Creek, and in less than ten years it had been dismantled, and its occupants dispersed.
In Paris, Ben Guggenheim tripled his emotional capital even as he lost millions by rash investments. Unlike his brothers, Ben had pale skin, delicate rather than big bones, light eyes, and the dandyish elegance of a cosmopolitan European rather than the chunky gravity of a Jewish German-American millionaire. He was too proud and cheerful a man to play the sneak. In Paris he had an open love affair with a marquise before finding a singer, Léontine Aubart. His wife in New York thought of divorcing him, but she was a money-loving woman who was persuaded by the other Guggenheim brothers that divorce would hurt the family name, thereby harming the business and therefore reducing her income. By 1912 she lived with her daughters in a spacious suite at Jack Astor’s St. Regis Hotel, screened, as they thought, from all unforeseen contingencies until that dark day when Solomon Guggenheim, outside a theater on Broadway, was halted in his steps by a news vendor’s cry, “Extra! Extra! The Titanic sinks!”
Guggenheim traveled with an entourage of Léontine Aubart; her maid, Emma Sägesser; his valet, Victor Giglio—all aged twenty-four—together with his thirty-nine-year-old chauffeur, René Pernot. Guggenheim, returning with his mistress, was bathed in the lurid greenish light of a dubious reputation: it is doubtful whether he and Léontine Aubart had more than negligible contact with the respectably married American couples thronging the lounges and decks who recognized them. Probably he and his mistress kept apart with proud discretion. George Rosenshine, the ostrich feather dealer, was also traveling with his mistress, Maybelle Thorne; he cloaked himself under the alias of George Thorne, but was known to passengers such as Irene (Renée) Harris, wife of the theatrical producer.
Guggenheim had little contact on board with Isidor Straus, to whom he was related by marriage. Straus had been born in Bavari
a in 1845; his family emigrated in 1854 to Talbotton, Georgia, where he started his working life as a clerk in his father’s dry goods business. During the Civil War, he worked in Europe as an agent obtaining supplies for the Confederate government. Afterward, he worked in a Liverpool shipping office, moved to New York City, and in 1896 became coproprietor with his brother of Macy’s. Straus was careful, systematic, equable, dignified, and industrious: he had intuitions that enabled him, without any forceful assertion of will, to sense where profits lay. Straus was traveling with his wife, Ida. “These two so openly adored one another that we used to call them ‘Darby and Joan’ on the ship,” recalled Lady Duff Gordon. “They told us laughingly that in their long years of married life they had never been separated for one day or night.”21 Also in Straus’s party was his valet, John Farthing, and Ida’s maid, Ellen Bird, a shepherd’s daughter from Norfolk, who had been hired a few days before embarkation. They were delighted with their accommodation. “What a ship!” Ida Straus exclaimed as they steamed for Cherbourg. “So huge and so magnificently appointed. Our rooms are furnished in the best of taste, and most luxuriously, and they are really rooms not cabins.”22
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 8