Beyond Coincidence (19 page)

The novella is worth looking at in some detail, so remarkable are the similarities with the tragedy it so uncannily foretells. It begins:

She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession, and trade known to civilization. On her bridge were officers, who, besides being the pick of the Royal Navy, had passed rigid examinations in all studies that pertained to the winds, tides, currents, and geography of the sea; they were not only seamen, but scientists.

… Two brass bands, two orchestras, and a theatrical company entertained the passengers during waking hours.

… From the bridge, engine-room, and a dozen places on her deck the ninety-two doors of nineteen water-tight compartments could be closed in half a minute by turning a lever. These doors would also close automatically in the presence of water. With nine compartments flooded the ship would still float, and as no known accident of the sea could possibly fill this many, the steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.

… She was eight hundred feet long, of seventy thousand tons displacement, seventy-five thousand horse-power, and on her trial trip had steamed at a rate of twenty-five knots an hour over the bottom, in the face of unconsidered winds, tides, and currents. In short, she was a floating city—containing within her steel walls all that tends to minimize the dangers and discomforts of the Atlantic voyage—all that makes life enjoyable.

Unsinkable—indestructible, she carried as few boats as would satisfy the laws. These, twenty-four in number, were securely covered and lashed down to their chocks on the upper deck, and if launched would hold five hundred people.

The simple statistics of the comparisons between Morgan Robertson's
Titan
and the
Titanic
are remarkable. But it's Robertson's description of the
Titan
's collision with the iceberg that is so chillingly prescient of the real-life events fourteen years later.

Two bells were struck and answered; then three, and the boatswain and his men were lighting up for a final smoke, when there rang out overhead a startling cry from the crow's nest.

… “Ice,” yelled the lookout. “Ice ahead. Iceberg. Right under the bows.” The first officer ran amid-ships, and the captain, who had remained there, sprang to the engine-room telegraph, and this time the lever was turned. But in five seconds the bow of the Titan began to lift, and ahead, and on either hand, could be seen, through the fog, a field of ice, which arose in an incline to a hundred feet high in her track.

… seventy five thousand tons—dead-weight—rushing through the fog at the rate of fifty feet a second, had hurled itself at an iceberg.

… The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring, snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings, and fore-and-aft bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the sides of the ship, even where backed by solid, resisting ice; and filling the engine and boiler-rooms with scalding steam, which brought a quick, though tortured death, to each of the hundred men on duty in the engineer's department.

Amid the roar of escaping steam, and the bee-like buzzing of nearly three thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings from within the enclosing walls, and the whistling of air through hundreds of open dead-lights as the water, entering the holes of the crushed and riven starboard side, expelled it, the Titan moved slowly backward and launched herself into the sea, where she floated low on her side—a dying monster, groaning with her death-wound.

Late on the night of Sunday April 14, fourteen years after
The Wreck of the Titan
had been published, the RMS
Titanic,
heralded as “practically unsinkable” by its owners, the White Star shipping line, struck an iceberg and was holed below the waterline. Less than three hours later she had sunk beneath the waves. Of the 2,200 aboard, only 705 people, mainly women and children, were rescued.

B
REAK A
L
EG

Shortly before the opening night of the musical
42nd Street,
entertainer Jan Adele slipped and tore the ligaments in her left ankle. The plot of the show concerns a Broadway director looking for one more hit before he retires. His hopes are dashed when his leading lady twists her ankle just before opening night.

S
NAKE

A deadly poisonous viper came within inches of killing actress Trudie Styler—also the wife of Sting—in the Brazilian rainforest, but by coincidence she knew how to react because she had just finished making the film
Fair Game,
in which she plays a woman locked in a flat with a killer mamba. She believes the film saved her life.

The coincidence is all the more remarkable for the fact that Styler is phobic about snakes, and never intended to be in the film at all. “I can't look at a picture of a snake. If one comes on the television screen I leave the room; it's that kind of reaction.”

The odds were against her taking the part. When her agent suggested it, she said, “Forget it!” The Italian director Mario Orfini didn't seem interested in her either.

“He said, ‘Very nice to meet you, but I'm looking for Kim Basinger,' and I said, ‘Well you'll be looking for a long time because you haven't got the kind of money that she wants.'”

“Then he said, ‘If she won't do it the next person on our list is Rosanna Arquette.' I said, ‘She's a friend of mine, she's doing movies back to back for the next year, but I look a bit like her.' I had no intention, if he offered it to me, of accepting, but my pride wouldn't let me back down.”

Eventually an offer was made to Styler and she accepted, mainly because she realized how unusually prominent the female lead role was.

Four months later, Styler was in the middle of the tropical jungle in Brazil with Sting, while setting up their Rainforest Foundation charity. One night she woke up with a presentiment that something wasn't right. “I got out of my hammock, feeling deeply uncomfortable, put my feet on the ground (I had naked feet), got my flashlight and walked a couple of feet, then my body froze as if to say, don't go any farther. I shone my flashlight and there, reared up in front of me, was this big snake, mouth open, ready to strike. My hand was six inches from his face, and he could have got me if he wanted, but I kept very still. I only knew that because of the movie, because this was an exact reenactment of a scene in that film.

“I breathed very slowly and deeply because snakes can sense panic, and they're deaf, so I knew if I kept rigid I could shout for help. I said, ‘Sting, there's a snake!' And the wretched man said ‘Huh?' It's very irritating when someone doesn't hear you and you're just about to be killed! So I said it a bit louder and this time he did hear and also the natives must have heard because they woke up and came into the tent with a club and killed it.”

T
HE
C
AROLINE
'
S
D
OUBLE
D
ISASTER

Playwright Arthur Law was astonished to find that a play he wrote appeared to predict an actual event. His play,
Caroline,
written in 1885, was about Robert Golding, sole survivor of a wrecked ship called the
Caroline.
Just days after the play opened, a ship, the
Caroline,
went down. Its one survivor was a man named Golding.

T
HE
M
AN
W
HO
I
NVENTED
H
IS
W
IFE

An idealized girl created for a novel came intoxicatingly to life in a Berlin café in 1929, when German playwright and novelist Leonhard Frank believed himself to be looking at the very girl who had haunted his book and imagination. Frozen by careering emotions and conscious of his age (he was forty-eight; she must have been no more than twenty), Frank watched her for too long without addressing her. A youth came into the café, apologized to her for being late, and swept her out of his life.

Frank haunted the Romanisches Café for weeks afterward, hoping she would reappear, but she never did. He had to wait another nineteen years for the chance to talk to her.

Three years passed and Frank was forced to leave Germany to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

He had written the book,
The Singers,
in 1927. In it he had invented a character, Hanna, who stood for all the best qualities of young womanhood as he saw them. She was graceful, slender, hot blooded, with an olive and rose-colored complexion, and she projected emotional strength, humor, high spirits, and an irresistible curiosity about life. His sighting of the living Hanna in the Romanisches Café occurred two years later, while recovering from the effort of writing a further novel. He couldn't stop looking at her. She was everything he had dreamed she would be. But she didn't see him.

In the summer heat wave of 1948 Frank was in America, where he had found work as a Hollywood scriptwriter. He was living in New York but had escaped the heat and fled to a farm in the countryside that took paying guests. It was there he saw “Hanna” again, sitting just as he remembered her. He spent a day collecting his senses and then approached her. He told her about first seeing her in Berlin, about how she resembled the idealized girl in his book (“Hanna,” she said, encouragingly) and then tried to kiss her. She rejected him. She was married to the young man he had seen at the café, she said. Her name was Charlotte.

She avoided him for three weeks, but they met again and this time his feelings for her were reciprocated. The next morning she rang her husband to ask for a divorce. At the end of a long chain of extraordinary events, Frank married his Hanna.

For Frank the story “confirmed once again my belief that accident in human life may be synonymous with destiny.”

A C
ASE OF
A
RT
I
MITATING
L
IFE

A wardrobe department buyer visited a Los Angeles second-hand clothing shop to find worn yet elegant clothing for Frank Morgan's character, Professor Marvel, in the MGM screen adaptation of L. Frank Baum's
The Wizard of Oz
(1939). They returned with a pile of suitable coats. After trying several on, a well-worn Prince Albert coat of black broadcloth, with a splendid velvet collar was chosen. It fitted Morgan perfectly. Later, after filming had begun, Morgan was inspecting the coat in detail and was astonished to find the name “L. Frank Baum” stitched inside.

S
PY
C
ENTRAL

Norman Mailer wrote
Barbary Shore,
his novel about a writer and a group of spies, while living at 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, New York. At first he had no intention of writing about spies, but as he got going on the book he introduced a Russian spy and gradually the character started to dominate. After the book was published in 1951, the U.S. Immigration Service arrested a man who lived on the next floor to Mailer. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel, the most wanted Russian spy in the States at that time. Playwright Arthur Miller lived in the same building, too, though Mailer didn't write a book about playwrights.

T
HE
T
WIN
T
OWERS
C
OVER
V
ERSION

In what appears to be an extraordinary example of prescience, the image of the devastating attack on New York's Twin Towers was anticipated on the planned cover of a hip-hop album due to be released just weeks after the September 11 event.

The cover of the
Party Music
album by the hip-hop group The Coup depicted the band with an exploding World Trade Center in the background. A group member waves two sticks held between thumbs and forefingers as if “conducting” the proceedings.

Band member “Boots” Riley explained the symbolism behind the cover, “I came up with the idea with the photographer. We took the pictures on May 15, and we were done with it by the beginning of June. Any similarities are totally coincidental, and it was originally supposed to be more of a metaphor for destroying capitalism—where the music is making capitalist towers blow up.”

The album was due for release in November 2001. The cover artwork was rapidly redesigned.

D
EADLY
W
ORDS

Columbian drug baron Pablo Escobar read of his own death. Tom Clancy, the author of
Clear and Present Danger
—which later became a Hollywood box-office success—based his fictitious drug baron on Escobar. Clancy describes how his drug baron is shot dead by the Columbian national police as a result of an intercepted cell phone call he makes to his family. In real life the police used a computer that identified Escobar's voice on the phone and within minutes located him and moved in for the kill. A heavily annotated copy of Clancy's novel was later found in Escobar's apartment, with the scene relating to the phone call underlined. On the day Escobar was killed, the same scene was being filmed.

T
HE
C
ABIN
B
OY
—R
ICHARD
P
ARKER

In 1884, seventeen-year-old Richard Parker ran away to sea and became a cabin boy aboard the ship the
Mignonette.
The rest of the crew consisted of the captain Thomas Dudley, mate Edwin Stephens, and hand Edmund Brooks. They left Southampton bound for Australia.

They were 1,600 miles from land when a South Atlantic hurricane broke. The
Mignonette
was hit by huge waves and sank. In the panic to board the lifeboats, the crew were unable to salvage any provisions or water except two small tins of turnips.