Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  Early in 1911, Town Topics noted that “Mother Force has let no grass grow in getting her hook on the Colonel [Astor].” By August 2, the New York Times had reported that the couple were engaged and described how this had come about. Madeleine’s father, apparently concerned about “continued rumors of the attachment between Colonel Astor and his daughter,” had called Astor on the telephone to discuss the matter and it had been agreed that Father Force should announce the engagement. Force majeure, indeed.

  Over the next five weeks, the newspapers feasted on wedding details, particularly as one minister after another refused to officiate. In the end, a Congregationalist pastor presided over a rather short service held in the ballroom at Beechwood in Newport on September 9, 1911. Criticism from the pastor’s congregation would soon cause his resignation from the ministry. The newlyweds, too, received a very cool reception from Astor’s social set, which may have contributed to their decision to leave in January for a ten-week Mediterranean tour highlighted by a trip down the Nile.

  One Newport acquaintance who hadn’t snubbed Jack Astor was Margaret Tobin Brown, the estranged wife of Denver millionaire James J. Brown. She was sympathetic to marital woes and escaped her own by traveling. That winter, in fact, Mrs. Brown had joined the Astors on their excursion to North Africa and Egypt. In her pocket as she sat near the Astor party on the Nomadic was a small Egyptian tomb figure that she had bought in a Cairo market as a good luck talisman. The voyage Margaret Brown was about to take would immortalize her in books, movies, and a Broadway musical as “the unsinkable Molly Brown,” a feisty backwoods girl whose husband’s lucky strike at a Leadville, Colorado, gold mine vaults her into a mansion in Denver, where she is rebuffed by Mile High society. In the 1957 film A Night to Remember, Molly Brown is first spotted announcing loudly to her table in the Titanic’s dining saloon that her husband “Leadville Johnny” was “the best gol-durn gold miner in Colorado” who had “built me a home that had silver dollars cemented all over the floors of every room!” The rags-to-riches arc of the Molly Brown legend is essentially true, though the details are highly fanciful. The real Margaret Brown, in fact, was never known as “Molly” until after her death, when a greatly embellished biography gave her that tag—and the mansion with silver dollars in the floor was an invention of the same writer.

  Margaret Tobin Brown (photo credit 1.69)

  Feisty she was, however, and Margaret Brown’s remarkable energies had already been devoted to such causes as women’s suffrage and the establishing of the first juvenile court in the United States. Her self-betterment included learning several languages at New York’s Carnegie Institute, and by 1912 any “gol-durns” in her speech had been long banished and she was mixing with society figures at her summer “cottage” in Newport and on her European travels. With her hennaed hair, expensive clothes, and forthright manner, Mrs. Brown might seem a likely candidate to be one of Frank Millet’s “obnoxious, ostentatious American women.” But some recent news had muted her customary ebullience. While staying at the Ritz in Paris, she had received word that her first grandchild, four-month-old Lawrence Brown Jr., had fallen seriously ill, and she had immediately booked passage home on the earliest available ship. It would therefore have been a rather subdued “Molly” Brown who waited on the Nomadic for the ship that would propel her into legend.

  Margaret Brown was not the only passenger returning home because of a family emergency. The writer, interior designer, and Washington society figure Helen Churchill Candee had also received an alarming telegram, informing her that her twenty-five-year-old son, Harold, had been injured in an airplane crash. Helen had gone abroad in January to finalize research on a new book about antique tapestries. After spending time in Spain and Italy, she was returning to Paris in early April by way of the Riviera, when a cable sent by her daughter caused her to immediately make plans to sail for home. As she sat alone on one of the Nomadic’s slatted banquettes, her petite, elegantly dressed figure topped by a modish hat, Helen, too, was almost certainly preoccupied by anxious thoughts as she wondered what had possessed Harold to get into one of those dangerous new flying machines.

  The most somber group of all, however, were the Ryersons of Haverford, Pennsylvania, who were returning home for the funeral of their twenty-one-year-old son, Arthur, a Yale student who been thrown from an open car while motoring on the Easter weekend. The family had received word by telegram in Paris, and Arthur Ryerson Sr. had cabled back to arrange his son’s funeral for April 19, two days after the Titanic was to arrive. His wife, Emily, was being given comfort by two of her daughters, Suzette, aged twenty-one, and Emily, aged eighteen, while thirteen-year-old Jack Ryerson was tended by his tutor, Grace Bowen. The Ryersons were part of Philadelphia Main Line society, named for the fashionable suburban towns built along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a group that would be well represented on the Titanic’s first-class passenger list.

  Margaret Brown described her time aboard the tender as an hour or longer of sitting in a “cold, gray atmosphere,” which may have referred to more than just the weather, given the number of anxious or grieving passengers on board. The mood on the tender certainly affected Margaret’s friend Emma Bucknell, a wealthy widow from Philadelphia, who had also been traveling in Egypt. The matronly, nervous Emma had confided to Margaret that she feared boarding the Titanic because of her “evil forebodings that something might happen.” Mrs. Brown simply smiled at her friend’s premonitions and offered reassuring words to her.

  Yet Emma Bucknell was not the only one on board with apprehensions about the voyage. Fashion writer Edith Rosenbaum had at first been looking forward to the crossing, but on reaching Cherbourg she had been gripped by fears and had sent an anxious telegram from the station to her secretary in Paris. Perhaps it was simply nerves, she thought, since this was her first trip to New York as a fashion buyer and stylist, and she was bringing trunks of valuable Paris gowns to show to American clients. Edith also hadn’t fully recovered from a car crash the summer before that had killed her German fiancé and severely injured another friend. They had been motoring to the races in Deauville, which Edith was covering for Women’s Wear Daily, when their automobile crashed into a tree. She had survived with only minor injuries, but the emotional trauma of it lingered.

  The accident, however, hadn’t diminished her love of France. On her first trip to Paris five years before, Edith had known instantly that it was the city for her. Back home in Cincinnati, marrying a young man from a suitable Jewish family was what was expected of her, but at twenty-eight the prospects for that were growing slim. Over her father’s objections, she returned to Paris in 1908, determined to find work in the fashion trade. Her first job was as a salesgirl for Maison Cheruit in the Place Vendôme. Madame Cheruit herself had been impressed by Edith’s American verve and jolie laide looks—and her claim that in Cincinnati she had always ordered her dresses from Cheruit. After a year, Edith left the fashion house to write about French style for a small periodical distributed by Wanamaker’s department stores, and this led to a job as Paris correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily. She also drew sketches for the Butterick Pattern Service and later even designed her own line of clothes for Lord & Taylor in New York. But designing, in her words, was “just a sideline.” As she would later say, “I never fooled myself that I was going to be another Lady Duff Gordon.”

  Edith had written about the opening of the Paris branch of Lucile Ltd., Lady Duff Gordon’s fashion house, the year before. The idea of an English couturiere establishing an outpost in the capital of haute couture had raised some Gallic design noses skyward, but fashionable French women had soon flocked to Lucile’s showroom on the rue de Penthièvre. It was from there that Lady Duff Gordon and her husband, Sir Cosmo, had left that morning to take the train to Cherbourg. Seeing the famous designer sitting calmly on the Nomadic in her sable coat and pearl earrings and holding a bouquet of lily of the valley likely helped to calm Edith’s fears. She had covered the fashi
on shows at Lucile’s salon but had never actually met the famous couturiere in person, though the lounge of the tender did not seem quite the right place to approach her. Introducing oneself, she had learned, was not the done thing on this side of the Atlantic.

  His Swiss-educated manners, similarly, may have inhibited Norris Williams from approaching Karl Behr on the Nomadic. The American tennis star, in any case, was no doubt preoccupied by thoughts of the girl he would soon see on the Titanic. Nineteen-year-old Helen Newsom was a friend of Karl’s younger sister, and a romance had recently blossomed between them despite some objections from Helen’s mother and stepfather, Sallie and Richard Beckwith. It wasn’t that Karl was unsuitable—he was from a prosperous New York family, after all, and was a Yale graduate and a lawyer, as well as a tennis champion, and had good looks and charm to spare. But at nineteen Helen still seemed a little young for serious courtship. In a bid to cool things down, the Beckwiths had decided to take her on an eight-week tour of Europe in February. On boarding the Cedric, however, they had discovered that Karl Behr was a passenger as well, traveling to Europe on a business trip, or so he claimed. During the crossing the Beckwiths’ attitude had softened toward Karl and he was able to spend some quiet time with Helen, something he looked forward to repeating on the crossing home.

  Helen Newsom and Karl Behr (photo credit 1.15)

  Norris Williams was out on deck when the Titanic was finally sighted. Shortly before 7 p.m. her funnels were seen beyond the breakwater and the word quickly spread to the passengers in the lounge. Norris noted how majestically the great liner steamed toward them. To Edith Rosenbaum it looked like a six-story house; to Margaret Brown it was “the master palace of the sea.” Mrs. Brown recalled the Nomadic then putting on steam and steering out into the waves of the outer harbor. She also remembered that when the Nomadic reached the choppy seas beyond the breakwater, some of the passengers became “actively ill.”

  In Edith Rosenbaum’s highly colored recollection, however, the rocking of the tender was caused entirely by the wake of the huge Titanic, since the sea until then had been calm. As the Nomadic drew alongside, she described how “the tender [began] pounding against her sides with such force that I feared she would break in half.” According to Edith, it took ten men to hold down the gangway “as it shook and swayed in every direction.” Edith also claimed to be the last person to leave the tender since the “uncanny upheaval” of the Titanic’s wake had stirred her fears anew.

  Yet never in her most tremulous imaginings could Edith Rosenbaum have predicted that 50 of the 172 travelers who sat with her aboard the Nomadic were embarking on the final voyage of their lives.

  (photo credit 1.61)

  On stepping into the Titanic’s first-class reception room, Edith Rosenbaum instantly felt uneasy. (photo credit 1.70)

  Norris Williams would never forget his first view inside the Titanic, He remembered stepping into a white-paneled vestibule with a black-and-white-patterned floor that appeared at first to be solid marble, though he soon realized it wasn’t. Yet he found the entrance foyer to be so imposing, and so unlike anything he had ever seen on a ship, that it gave him, in his words, “a very distinct start.” Edith Rosenbaum had an even stronger reaction. On setting foot inside the Titanic she immediately decided that she wanted to go back to Cherbourg. She asked Nicholas Martin, the White Star agent who had come out on the tender with the passengers, about the possibility of locating her luggage. “All right, take another boat,” she recalled Martin saying, “but your baggage must remain.” When Edith inquired about insurance for it, he replied, “Ridiculous, this ship is unsinkable.” Edith thought of the expensive gowns she was taking to New York and concluded, “My luggage is worth more to me than I am, so I better remain with it,” and decided to stay.

  Arriving on the Titanic was also unforgettable for Ella White. A wealthy widow from New York, the short, stout, and rather pug-faced Mrs. White suffered from leg trouble and had fallen and twisted her ankle on the swaying gangway. The ship’s doctor was quickly summoned to the reception room, and Mrs. White was then helped by her chauffeur and maid to a C-deck cabin, where she would spend the rest of the voyage. From there, she would occasionally dispatch her younger, slimmer companion, Marie Young, to check on the two prized French roosters and two hens that they had purchased for the farm at her Westchester estate. The poultry were housed near the Titanic’s galleys, and several passengers would report the curious sound of roosters crowing on the ship.

  Inside the richly carpeted reception room, uniformed stewards awaited to guide the Cherbourg passengers to their rooms. “At the entrance there were like 50 butlers,” an Argentinian businessman noted in a letter sent the next day. The Titanic’s first-class reception room was actually a large, U-shaped hallway that encompassed the curved balustrades of the grand staircase landing and the entrance to the first-class dining saloon. But it was also one of the most popular public rooms on the ship, where passengers gathered before dinner and met for coffee afterward while the orchestra played. It was known as the Palm Room due to its cozy groupings of wicker chairs and tables set amid potted plants in fashionable Palm Court style. White-paneled walls with arched leaded windows and a ceiling with Jacobean-styled plasterwork helped complete the theme, as did a string and piano quintet that regularly played tunes reminiscent of a Palm Court orchestra.

  On stepping into this convivial scene, the weary Cherbourg passengers may have felt like latecomers to a party. For the grieving Ryersons it must have seemed incongruous. White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay greeted Arthur Ryerson and his family and insisted on providing them with an extra stateroom to the two they had already booked and arranging for the services of a personal steward. Ismay no doubt chose also to greet John Jacob Astor and his party upon their arrival. Astor and Ismay make an interesting pairing since they were curiously similar men. Both were tall, dark, late fortyish, and generously mustached; both were scions of prominent families and had inherited their positions in life; each is remembered as having an aloof and sometimes brusque manner, a likely cover for shyness. Did Astor pull out his gold watch to remind Ismay of the late hour of their boarding? One can imagine Ismay casually responding that the Titanic had been held up by another liner swinging into her path while leaving Southampton—all regrettable but quite unavoidable.

  In reality, the incident in Southampton harbor earlier that day could have been rather more serious. Just after noon, as the tugs had begun to move the Titanic away from Ocean Dock and down the narrow channel, they approached two smaller steamers, the Oceanic and the New York, moored together farther down the pier. Due to water displacement caused by the passing of the huge new liner, the New York’s steel mooring cables had “snapped like thread” with “cracks like pistol shots” in the words of Titanic passenger Francis Browne, and her stern had swung out toward the Titanic. Browne, a keen photographer, had leaned over the railing of the boat deck with his camera at arm’s length to capture the New York’s stern coming within four feet of the Titanic. “A voice beside me said, ‘Now for a crash’ and I snapped my shutter,” he recalled. Browne then quickly dashed farther aft, “only to see the black hull of the New York slide gently past.” A sudden burst of water from the Titanic’s port propeller following a “Full Astern!” order from the bridge had avoided the predicted crash—though only narrowly. Tugboats attached lines to the New York and pulled her away to moor elsewhere, but the near collision delayed the Titanic’s departure by an hour or more.

  At luncheon afterward there had been much discussion of the recent excitement, with some passengers wondering aloud if passenger ships had just become too big, while others noted that this was an unfortunate omen for a maiden voyage. By late afternoon, however, the talk was all about the size and splendor of the new liner as passengers trooped up and down the grand staircase exploring her decks and public rooms. “You would never imagine you were on board a ship” was a much-overheard comment. That evening Frank Millet, too, became caught
up in the general enthusiasm and wrote to Alfred Parsons the next morning that being on the Titanic was “not a bit like going to sea. You can have no idea of the spaciousness of this ship.… She has everything but taxicabs and theatres.”

  Bruce Ismay would not have delayed the Astors for long given Madeleine’s weakened condition, and as they were escorted to their large and elegant suite on C deck, Titanic stewardess Violet Jessop managed to catch her first glimpse of Madeleine Astor. “Instead of the radiant woman of my imagination, one who had succeeded in overcoming much opposition and marrying the man she wanted,” she later wrote, “I saw a quiet, pale, sad-faced, in fact, dull young woman arrive listlessly on the arm of her husband, apparently indifferent to everything about her.”

  Clearly, Madeleine Astor was feeling the effects of her pregnancy and a long day’s journey. Violet penned an even more unflattering depiction of a wealthy American matron coming on board but discreetly used the pseudonym “Mrs. Klapton.”

  My heart sank as Mrs. Cyrus Klapton, clutching her pet Pekinese, bore down towards my section followed by a downcast maid. She had invariably reduced each successive maid to submission ere she boarded the ship. Although in many ways my job was not that prestigious, I could consider myself lucky when I looked at that maid and saw what her position had done to her.

  It is suspected that Violet Jessop’s moneyed dragon is based on Charlotte Drake Cardeza, a Philadelphia heiress who had booked an even grander suite than the Astors and arrived on board with even more luggage. Her fourteen steamer trunks, four suitcases, and three packing crates contained seventy dresses, ten fur coats, eighty-four pairs of gloves, and thirty-two pairs of shoes as well as feather boas, parasols, ermine muffs, and ivory hair combs. In her jewel case was a diamond and Burmese ruby ring worth $14,000 ($300,000 today) as well as a seven-carat pink diamond from Tiffany’s worth $20,000 ($450,000 today). Mrs. Cardeza had booked one of the two ultra-deluxe B-deck parlor suites, each of which had a sitting room with a marble fireplace and a private fifty-foot promenade deck decorated with greenery and Tudor-style woodwork. (The other deluxe parlor suite had been booked by J. P. Morgan but was now occupied by J. Bruce Ismay.) Charlotte Cardeza was on her way home to Montebello, her walled stone mansion in the fashionable Main Line town of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Yet she apparently did not mingle much in Philadelphia society. The short and stocky fifty-eight-year-old widow was happiest hunting big game and had, for a time, owned her own steam yacht, the Eleanor, which was large enough to take her to Africa for yearly safaris. Her son, thirty-six-year-old Thomas, who had been living in a hunting lodge in Hungary, was returning home with her for medical treatment. Charlotte may have thought that relaxing in seclusion on their private promenade deck would be good for her son’s health, but Thomas would instead use it as a place to host floating poker games.