Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  J. Pierpont Morgan (photo credit 1.32)

  The brilliant showcasing of American paintings and sculpture at the Chicago exposition spurred the idea of creating an academy in Rome where American artists could soak up classical inspiration. Charles F. McKim, one of the partners in the famed architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, spearheaded the academy project, and Frank Millet agreed to be the secretary of its first board. With all the funds for the American Academy having to be privately raised, McKim sought out the greatest moneyman of the age, J. Pierpont Morgan. On March 27, 1902, McKim breakfasted with the financier at his home at 219 Madison Avenue and came away with more than he had expected. Morgan had agreed to give financial support to the American Academy but had also asked McKim to draft plans for a private library to house his collection of rare books and manuscripts on land next to his Madison Avenue brownstone. “I want a gem,” Morgan declared, and McKim’s Italian Renaissance design for the Morgan Library still stands as one of New York’s architectural treasures.

  J. P. Morgan traveled and acquired for his collections constantly, but at sixty-five showed no signs of lessening his business interests. “Pierpont Morgan … is carrying loads that stagger the strongest nerves,” wrote Washington diarist Henry Adams in April of 1902. “Everyone asks what would happen if some morning he woke up dead.” Among Morgan’s many “loads” at the time was a scheme to create a huge international shipping syndicate that could stabilize trade and yield huge returns from the lucrative transatlantic routes. By June of 1902 he had purchased Britain’s prestigious White Star Line for $32 million and combined it with other shipping acquisitions to form a trust called the International Mercantile Marine. In 1904 Morgan installed White Star Line’s largest shareholder, forty-one-year-old J. Bruce Ismay, son of the line’s late founder, as president of the IMM. The second-largest shareholder was Lord William J. Pirrie, the chairman of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders responsible for the construction of White Star’s ships. Pirrie had been the chief negotiator with Morgan’s men and was placed on the board of the new trust.

  The British government had acceded to Morgan’s flexing of American financial muscle in the acquisition of White Star but had also provided loans and subsidies to the rival Cunard Line for the building of the world’s largest, fastest liners, Lusitania and Mauretania—with the proviso that they be available for wartime service. By the summer of 1907, the Lusitania had made its record-breaking maiden voyage, and Pirrie and Ismay soon hatched White Star’s response. They would use Morgan’s money to build three of the world’s biggest and most luxurious liners. Within a year Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic, had been laid. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called Titanic. A third, initially named Gigantic, was to be built later.

  (photo credit 1.67)

  Lord Pirrie (top, at left) and J. Bruce Ismay inspect the Titanic in the Harland and Wolff shipyard (middle) before her launch on May 31, 1911 (above). (photo credit 1.33)

  There is a now-famous photograph of J. Bruce Ismay walking with Lord Pirrie beside the massive hull of the Titanic shortly before its launch on May 31, 1911. The tall, mustachioed Ismay, sporting a bowler hat and a stylish walking stick, towers over the white-whiskered Pirrie, who wears a jaunty, nautical cap. Missing from the photo is J. P. Morgan, who had traveled to Belfast with Ismay and would shortly join him and other dignitaries on a crimson-and-white-draped grandstand. To the crowd of more than a thousand onlookers, Morgan would have been instantly recognizable from countless newspaper cartoons depicting him as the archetypal American moneybags—his walrus mustache and giant purple bulb of a nose, the product of a skin condition called rhinophyma, being easily caricatured.

  For the launch ceremony, there was no beribboned champagne bottle to smash against the bow and no titled dowager to pronounce “I name this ship Titanic.” That was not how White Star did things. Instead, at five minutes past noon, a rocket was fired into the air, followed by two others, and then the nearly 26,000-ton hull began to slide into the River Lagan to cheers and the blowing of tug whistles. A white film from the tons of tallow, train oil, and soap used to grease its passage spread over the water as the ship was brought to a halt by anchor chains. Soon, the Titanic’s hull gently rocked in the river while the newly completed Olympic waited nearby.

  The launch had gone off just as planned and a highly pleased Lord Pirrie hosted a luncheon for Morgan, Ismay, and a select list of guests in the shipyard’s offices, while several hundred more were entertained at Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel, where a third luncheon was held for the gentlemen of the press. During the speeches at the press luncheon, the construction of the “leviathans,” Olympic and Titanic, was hailed as a “pre-eminent example of the vitality and the progressive instincts of the Anglo-Saxon race.” That American money had paid for them was made a positive by the observation that “the mighty Republic in the West” and the United Kingdom were both Anglo-Saxon nations that had become more closely united as a result of their cooperation. While the Belfast men toasted their success and the primacy of their race, a shipyard worker named James Dobbins lay in hospital, his leg having been pinned beneath one of the wooden supports for the hull during the launch. Dobbins would die from his injuries the next day.

  Following the luncheon, J. P. Morgan and Bruce Ismay boarded the Olympic along with other guests and sailed for Liverpool. Exactly seven months later, on December 31, 1911, Morgan would walk up the Olympic’s gangway once again, this time in New York bound for Southampton. From England he went on to Egypt, where he spent the winter at a desert oasis called Khargeh supervising the excavation of Roman ruins and an early Christian cemetery. By mid-March, Morgan was in Rome, and on the morning of April 3, 1912, he stood with Frank Millet atop the Janiculum Hill, reviewing the plans and site for the new American Academy building. Like the Morgan Library, this was to be another of Charles McKim’s Italian Renaissance palaces, built from a design drawn up by the architect before his death in 1909. Millet was keen to see McKim’s dream realized and Morgan told the New York Times, “I hope that here will eventually be an American institution of art, greater than those of the other countries, which are already famous.” The next day the financier went on to Florence, where Millet soon joined him, perhaps to lend an informed opinion on Morgan’s ceaseless acquiring of art and antiquities. “Pierpont will buy anything from a pyramid to a tooth of Mary Magdalene,” his wife had once noted. Morgan was no doubt pleased that Millet was sailing on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. He had planned to be on board himself before changing his plans in favor of a stay at a spa at Aix-les-Bains with his mistress.

  WHILE MORGAN TOOK the waters in Aix on April 10, Millet waited on the Normandy coast for Morgan’s newest ship to arrive. Eschewing the loud Americans crowding the waiting room, he may have chosen to stretch his legs after the long train ride from Paris. In front of the small, Mansard-roofed Gare Maritime stood the White Star tenders, Traffic and Nomadic, on which luggage and mail sacks were being loaded. The two tenders had been built at Harland and Wolff to service the new Olympic-class liners which were too large to dock in Cherbourg, the first stop after Southampton on White Star’s transatlantic route. The quay in front of the Gare Maritime led to a long jetty with an ancient stone tower at its end. It was a mild spring day with scudding clouds allowing bursts of sunshine, so Frank might have walked out on the jetty to see if there was any sign of the liner on the horizon. The walk would have helped to clear his mind of the institutional politics that had plagued him in Rome. As he wrote to Alfred Parsons the next day: “If this sort of thing goes on I shall chuck it. I won’t lose my time and my temper too.”

  It would be a big disappointment for Lily Millet if Frank chose to “chuck” his post as head of the American Academy. She was enchanted with the Villa Aurelia, the ochre seventeenth-century cardinal’s palace that went with the job. Now that her children were gr
own, Lily was establishing a career as an interior designer and had great plans for the villa and its gardens with their sweeping views of Rome. Here she could imagine the serene evenings of their twilight years, reconciled and reunited with her wandering husband.

  Frank’s friend Archie Butt, too, had admired the villa when the two men had stayed there together before Lily arrived. Since 1910, Frank’s more-or-less permanent base had been Washington, D.C., where he had shared a house with Major Archibald Willingham Butt, the president’s military aide, known to all as “Archie.” It was Frank who had persuaded an exhausted Archie to come with him to Rome the month before and take some rest-and-recovery time before the fall presidential election. President Taft needed his closest aide to be in fighting trim for the coming campaign, and had arranged letters of introduction for Archie to the pope and the king of Italy to grant an air of officialdom to his trip. According to a March 31 social column in the New York Times, Major Butt had “had the entrée to every house worth while in Rome,” and “by doing exactly what the doctors forbade,” as Archie himself had put it, he was in splendid condition and ready to return home. Major Butt had gone on to visit embassies in Berlin and Paris before continuing to England to see his brother. At about the same time that Frank was departing from Paris on the Train Transatlantique, Archie had boarded the Boat Train at London’s Waterloo Station for the noontime departure of the Titanic from Southampton.

  After five o’clock that afternoon, with the luggage loaded aboard the Cherbourg tenders, passengers began making their way toward their gangways. As Frank approached the Nomadic, his weary mood may have lifted. He could look forward to dining with Archie on the Titanic that evening and hearing his droll observations of the other passengers, all delivered in Archie’s characteristic Georgia drawl. Millet had often said that he was not a fan of maiden voyages—he preferred liners where the officers and crew were more familiar with the ship. But his meetings in America wouldn’t wait. And if White Star’s new liner lived up to its billing, there would be a comfortable room and a good dinner for him at the end of this very long day.

  (photo credit 1.84)

  Among those boarding the tender Nomadic (top, at left) were John Jacob Astor, his young wife, Madeleine, and their Airedale, Kitty. (photo credit 1.12)

  As Nicholas Martin had promised, the tender Nomadic was ready for departure at 5:30. Although the Titanic had still not been sighted, Martin had decided to board the passengers and have the tender wait in the harbor. With a late-afternoon chill now in the air, most of the Nomadic’s 172 first- and second-class passengers made their way down to the lounge, where roll-backed slatted benches provided plenty of seating. The room was paneled in white and decorated with carved ribbon garlands that gave a hint of the elegance awaiting on the Titanic. By contrast, the Traffic, now loaded with mailbags and the wicker cases and satchels of steerage travelers, had clean but spartan interiors, in the style of White Star’s third-class accommodations.

  Soon the floor of the Nomadic’s lounge began to vibrate and smoke belched from its single stack as the tender started to move toward the breakwater. It wasn’t long, however, before the young American R. Norris Williams began to wonder why they had been sent out on the tender so soon. “Riding the waves in the outer harbor is interesting for a little while,” he noted, “but then you get bored; the saloon is stuffy so you wander the decks again, just waiting. Innumerable false alarms as to the sighting of the Titanic—more waiting—slight and passing interest in a fishing boat—more waiting.” Williams had spotted one of his idols, the U.S. tennis star Karl H. Behr, among the Cherbourg passengers. Behr, aged twenty-six, had been ranked as the number 3 player in the United States and had competed for the Davis Cup and at Wimbledon. Norris Williams was a talented player himself who had won championships in Switzerland and France and was planning to play on the U.S. tennis circuit that summer before entering Harvard in the fall. He was traveling with his father, Charles Williams, who was originally from Philadelphia and was, in fact, a great-great-grandson of the most famous of all Philadelphians, Benjamin Franklin. Williams Senior had practiced law in Philadelphia before moving to Geneva with his wife in the late 1880s. Norris had been born and educated there and was fluent in three languages as a result. At twenty-one, he was tall and lanky, with prominent ears and a winning smile seen above the broad collar of his fur coat. Father and son were both wearing large fur coats, which would have caught the eye of Frank Millet as he scanned the room for people he knew.

  R. Norris Williams and his father, Charles Williams (photo credit 1.25)

  The Astors with their entourage and Airedale terrier stood out as well. Even their Airedale, named Kitty, had become famous, from the many photographs of the couple with the dog that had been splashed in the newspapers the summer before. Everything the Astors did was news, but the fact that forty-seven-year-old John Jacob Astor IV, whom the gossip sheets preferred to call Jack Astor, or even Jack-Ass (tor), was engaged to a teenaged girl almost thirty years his junior had provided the year’s juiciest story. Every detail of the romance had fueled daily headlines. When they would wed and where was a subject of heated speculation. Astor had confessed to adultery in late 1909 in order to grant his first wife the divorce she so ardently desired. This had eased the case through the courts but had greatly lowered his chances for church-sanctioned second nuptials.

  Jack Astor’s first marriage, to the Philadelphia society beauty Ava Lowle Willing, had been a disaster from the start. The night before the lavish wedding in February of 1891, the tearful bride-to-be had purportedly begged her parents to call it off. Marrying into America’s richest family was clearly not enough to overcome the fact that at twenty-six, Jack Astor was already earning his jackass sobriquet. Within his circle he had a reputation for “pawing every girl in sight,” and in 1888 a gossip column had gleefully described him brawling with another young preppy—using both fists and walking sticks—in the cloakroom of Sherry’s Restaurant. The fight, unsurprisingly, had been over a girl.

  Tall and awkward, with a large head atop a skinny frame, Astor had grown up being cosseted by a domineering mother and four older sisters and ignored by a distant and dissipated father. Boarding school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire was followed by three years of studying science at Harvard, where he left without finishing his degree. “It is very questionable, whether, were he put to it, he could ever earn his bread by his brains,” was the observation of the Manhattan gossip sheet Town Topics. But Jack was clever with machines and spent many hours tinkering in his home laboratory dreaming up new inventions. Many of these were highly impractical, but a “pneumatic road improver” that could suck up dirt and horse droppings from city streets had won him a prize at the 1893 Chicago Exposition. The next year, he had published a Jules Verne–ish novel, A Journey in Other Worlds, which envisioned electric cars and space travel in the year 2000.

  Within a year of their wedding, the beautiful Ava (pronounced Ah-vah) had dutifully produced a son, William Vincent Astor, but from then on she ignored her husband as much as she could, devoting herself to parties, bridge, and flirtations. (A daughter, Alice, born in 1902, was rumored not to be Astor’s child.) Divorce was out of the question as long as Jack’s mother, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, was alive. The Schermerhorns had been early Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley, and it was this lineage, coupled with her husband’s vast fortune, that allowed Caroline Astor to appoint herself queen of New York society. Her annual ball was the city’s most exclusive affair, and a divorce could cause exclusion from its gilded guest list. The name “the Four Hundred,” for the city’s social elite, was believed to refer to the capacity of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, but it was, in fact, Mrs. Astor’s chief courtier, a drawling socialite named Ward McAllister, who had coined the term when asked by a reporter how many people he thought comprised New York society. McAllister had realized that greater status than his means allowed could come from organizing the society of a city awash in new money. And he soon saw tha
t Caroline Astor, whom he dubbed the “Mystic Rose” after the heavenly being in Dante’s Paradiso, around whom all others revolve, was in need of a court chamberlain.

  When the Mystic Rose gave a ball, her Fifth Avenue mansion was decorated with hundreds of American Beauty roses and she appeared festooned in so many diamonds that her court jester, the outrageous Harry Lehr, called her “a walking chandelier.” Yet by the early years of the new century the New York/Newport social set was growing tired of Mrs. Astor’s stiffly elegant gatherings. When a stroke diminished her faculties in 1905, Caroline Astor became a recluse, inspiring a depiction in the Edith Wharton story “After Holbein” in which “the poor old lady who was gently dying of softening of the brain … still came down every evening to her great shrouded drawing-rooms with her tiara askew on her purple wig, to receive a stream of imaginary guests.”

  The death of the Mrs. Astor in 1908 marked the end of an era in New York society, but it also provided an opportunity for her son and his wife to end their moribund union. The next year, after the most discreet divorce that money could buy became final, Ava boarded the Lusitania for England, where she was well known in society. She eventually married an English baron, Lord Ribblesdale, and although the marriage did not last, Ava remained Lady Ribblesdale for life.

  Freed from the shadow of two overbearing women, Jack soon demonstrated an uncharacteristic bonhomie. Formerly glum and awkward at social gatherings, he now accepted invitations readily and hosted parties at Beechwood, the thirty-nine-room family “cottage” in Newport, and at the Fifth Avenue Astor mansion. While visiting Bar Harbor in the summer of 1910, he met a seventeen-year-old girl named Madeleine Talmage Force and became instantly smitten. Madeleine and her formidable mother (known in society as “La Force Majeure”) were soon regular guests on Astor’s yacht Noma, in his box at the opera, at Beechwood in Newport, at Ferncliff, his Hudson Valley estate, as well as at the Manhattan mansion. All of which must have dazzled a teenager just out of Miss Spence’s School for Girls.