Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (17 page)

Frank Millet and Stanford White had, in fact, been part of the same Bohemian circles as young men. They had met in 1876 during the decoration of Trinity Church, the monumental Romanesque structure in Boston’s Copley Square designed by H. H. Richardson. White, who had apprenticed with Richardson, persuaded the architect to bring in young artists to help complete John LaFarge’s interior decorations. Millet and the other artists White befriended during the work on Trinity Church became the nucleus of the Tile Club, which formed in New York the following autumn. The club was established with the intention of making handcrafted decorative tiles in earnest William Morris–inspired fashion, but it quickly evolved into an artist’s social club, with the exuberant “Stanny” as its chief fun-maker. For one gathering, Millet and Saint-Gaudens assisted White in the creation of a Roman-style dining room draped in creamy white fabric and decorated with tiger skins and brass objects. As the toga-clad Tilers reclined on couches, they were entertained by “the Hellion,” an artist’s model with the kind of sex appeal that, according to Frank, “
would seduce Saint Anthony.” Millet claimed to have never before attended a greater “semi-respectable spree.”

Stanford White’s “sprees” would become more extravagant and less respectable as his fame and wealth grew. A convivial clubman and designer of some of Manhattan’s most elite clubhouses, he would also partake in the secret revels of the Sewer Club and the sexual liaisons that took place in a rented space called the Morgue. He also became the ultimate sugar daddy for a stream of young chorus girls—Evelyn Nesbit was not the only girl on the red velvet swing—and he would lavish money on gifts, clothes, and even their dental work. By the turn of the century, in the words of the architect’s great-granddaughter, Suzannah Lessard, “
his compulsions [had] acquired a cyclonic velocity.” In 1906 White’s red hair and outsized mustache had turned gray, and he looked twenty years older than a man of fifty-two. Unknown to him, he also had a degenerative liver disease and incipient tuberculosis that would likely have killed him within a year.

The notoriety that still clouded Stanford White’s name in 1912 would have discouraged Frank Millet from recounting any “Stanny” stories to White’s quietly reserved brother-in-law on the
Titanic
. John Jacob Astor, too, had known the famous architect but had fallen out with him in 1903 over the building of a sports pavilion for his Ferncliff estate near Rhinebeck. With Ava Astor’s encouragement, plans for the complex had expanded to encompass an indoor marble pool, tennis court, library, billiard room, and guest quarters. Astor had never imagined anything so large, and soon he and the architect were not on speaking terms. White said he understood why the “Jackass” label had been applied to Astor. The Trianon-style building was eventually finished in 1904, and over a century later it provided the backdrop for the wedding of presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton. The Stanford White scandal also helped fuel the disapproval that greeted Astor’s engagement to Madeleine Force in 1911. Photographs of a tall, mustached, middle-aged man squiring a teenaged girl summoned memories of the salacious stories that had filled the newspapers only a few years before.

AT NOON ON
Friday, April 12, the ship’s mileage for its first sea day was posted outside the Purser’s Office. Since leaving Queenstown, the
Titanic
had covered 484 nautical miles, besting the
Olympic
’s first-day tally of 428 miles. Interest in this was keenest among those taking part in the betting pool on the ship’s run. According to Norris Williams, “
practically the only excitement during the day’s progress on the ocean is the posting of the day’s run with the thrill that goes to the lucky winner.” The pool was organized by Purser McElroy but run by a committee of passengers who would select twenty numbers centered around the expected next day’s mileage.
An auction was held after dinner in the smoking room where the numbers could be bid on by committee members and nonmembers alike, with members receiving a rebate of 50 percent on their winning bids for any of the twenty numbers. Norris Williams claimed that on Thursday evening the pool for Friday’s tally had run up into four figures and that there were some smaller informal pools as well. The purser would keep roughly 10 percent of the pool winnings for donation to a seaman’s charity. Many passengers would check the noon mileage tally each day on their way down to luncheon since the purser’s notice board was near the grand staircase, one deck above the dining saloon.

The luncheon bill of fare for April 12 included Melton Mowbray Pie, Boiled Chicken with Bacon, and Lamb with Mint Sauce—the kind of English fare that would have been familiar to Frank Millet from his years in Broadway. After lunching with Archie Butt and Clarence Moore, he would likely have repaired to his cabin to tackle more paperwork. Archie Butt, too, may have done some letter writing that afternoon, perhaps penning a note to his sister-in-law Clara to keep up his epistolary diary. Although he had written several letters to President Taft during his time in Europe, he had not sent any accounts of his travels to Clara, and there was much to describe, from his audience at the Vatican to the time spent in Chester with his brother and his sixteen-year-old niece Arrington, to whom he was devoted.

W. T. Stead also found the
Titanic
a good place to work and was busily correcting the proofs of an autobiographical sketch he was preparing for publication. “
The ship is as firm as a rock, and the sea is like a millpond,” he had written to his wife from Queenstown. “If it lasts, I shall be able to work better here than at home, for there are no telephones to worry me, and no callers.” Although Friday’s weather was showery, the calm seas had lasted and the ship continued on its smooth and steady course to New York. By Friday afternoon, most of the ship’s passengers had been lulled into the out-of-time tranquillity that often accompanied a calm ocean crossing amid comfortable surroundings. There were no organized shipboard activities and most passengers spent their time reading or chatting in the public rooms, taking walks on deck, being served hot bouillon while sitting well wrapped on deck chairs, or perhaps playing a game of deck quoits. Daisy Spedden, the mother of the boy whom Francis Browne had photographed spinning a top on deck the day before, recorded in her diary that she had taken young Douglas to the boat deck once again on Friday to play ball.

For those wishing more strenuous exercise, there was the gymnasium, with its enthusiastic instructor, T. W. McCawley, described by passenger Helen Churchill Candee as a “
powerful five-feet-five of white flannels” who “bounded about the place” urging passengers to try out the gym’s various exercise machines. Archie Butt had ridden the mechanical horses and camel in the gymnasium of the
Berlin
on his way over, so he may well have done the same on the
Titanic
, as he still needed to build up the stamina he had lost during his illness.

The British ritual of afternoon tea was observed on White Star liners and many of the
Titanic
’s American passengers took tea with a pastry or some biscuits at four o’clock even though this was not something they were accustomed to doing at home. The Palm Room was a popular place to do this since the orchestra played there from four to five each day. So was the Café Parisien, which had been created on the starboard side of B deck, and was a room not found on the
Olympic
. Ivy-covered trellises and café tables with wicker chairs provided a Continental atmosphere where elegant sandwiches and a selection of pastries were served from the circular, tiered buffet. “
The Parisian café is quite a novelty and looks very real,” an English passenger wrote to his wife, “it will no doubt become popular amongst rich Americans.”

Not long after teatime ended came the bugle call indicating that passengers should begin to dress for dinner. By this time the staff of the Café Parisien had cleared away the teacups and cake plates, and the tables in the A La Carte Restaurant next door were already set with artfully folded linen napkins standing upright beside gold-rimmed Crown Derby china created expressly for the room. The restaurant and the adjoining café were run as a private concession managed by Luigi Gatti, a successful London restaurateur. The restaurant was known to passengers as “the Ritz Restaurant” because it so closely resembled the dining concessions operated by the Ritz-Carlton hotels on the Hamburg-Amerika liners. White Star had even copied the Ritz’s signature rococo styling in the restaurant’s gilded boiseries and fluted walnut columns. In this elegant ambience, for an added fee, passengers could dine on more deluxe fare than that offered in the dining saloon. In the early evening, a piano, violin, and cello trio would begin playing in the restaurant’s reception room for the diners who would soon gather in the silk-cushioned chairs set around the white-paneled walls. The music drifted past the nearby aft grand staircase into the stateroom corridors, and the strains of a waltz or an operatic tune no doubt wafted into cabin B-82, where Benjamin Guggenheim was dressing for dinner with the aid of his valet.

At forty-six, Ben Guggenheim had graying hair but was still handsome in a soft-faced, dreamy-eyed way. Women usually found his warm smile and wealthy air to be attractive, and he, in return, had always had a keen interest in them. Ben was not the only one of Meyer Guggenheim’s seven sons to have extramarital liaisons, but according to a nephew, “
of all the brothers, he was the most extravagant in his amorous divagations, even introducing them into his own home.” One such “divagation” involved an attractive nurse who was moved into the family’s Manhattan mansion, supposedly to give Ben massages for his neuralgia. This took place when his daughter Marguerite, known as “Peggy,” later a celebrated art collector, was around five or six. She would later write that she adored her handsome father but remembered being punished at the age of seven for blurting out, “
Papa, you must have a mistress as you stay out so many nights.”

Benjamin Guggenheim
(photo credit 1.71)

Ben’s marriage in 1894 to Florette Seligman had been described by the
New York Times
as “
one of the handsomest weddings of the season,” uniting the “Silver Prince” of the wealthy mining family with a daughter of one of the city’s most prominent banking clans. The Seligmans were an old New York Jewish family and are said to have regarded “the Googs” as arrivistes. The Guggenheim fortune was indeed quite new, with the lion’s share of it having been made during the last decade when the family moved from lace importing to acquiring mines and building smelters. In 1885, at the age of twenty, Ben had been sent out to Leadville, Colorado—the same town where Margaret Brown’s husband had made his fortune—to work as a bookkeeper in a family-owned mine. He then advanced to the job of managing a smelter at Pueblo, Colorado, which he did with some success, and the family soon began to focus on smelting as a core business. In 1901, however, a dissatisfied Ben resigned from M. Guggenheim & Sons to live on his investment income. This would prove to be a shortsighted decision since he would miss out on the family’s highly profitable expansion into mining in Africa and South America, and it would leave his three daughters far less wealthy than their cousins.

Ben, however, was now free to cultivate his own interests, which included travel, art collecting, and philandering. Florette threatened divorce but the Guggenheims prevailed on her to remain married for the sake of their girls: Benita, born in 1895; Peggy, born in 1898; and Barbara Hazel (called Hazel), born in 1903. Florette, however, was far from a doting mother and relied on servants to care for the girls; Hazel remembered that her mother never read her a book or told her a story. Peggy would recall that Florette spent endless hours playing bridge and taking tea with other “Our Crowd” ladies. (Excluded from the Four Hundred, New York’s elite Jewish families had formed their own “crowd.”) Ben, meanwhile, spent more and more time in Paris, where he had a business, the International Steam Pump Company. Despite such lucrative contracts as the building of the elevators for the Eiffel Tower, the company required constant infusions of Guggenheim’s capital.

By April of 1912, Ben had been in Paris for over eight months and was returning home for Hazel’s ninth birthday. Traveling with him on the
Titanic
was his newest mistress, a petite twenty-four-year-old blond cabaret singer known as Ninette, but whose full name was Léontine Pauline Aubart. She is listed on the passenger list as “Mrs. N. Aubert [
sic
] and maid” though she was likely unmarried. Ninette occupied stateroom B-35, a discreet distance away from Ben’s cabin though on the same deck. Her ticket was booked without a meal provision, which meant that she intended to take all her meals in the A La Carte Restaurant. Ben likely thought that this would be a less conspicuous place for them to dine than the dining saloon. There were always people one knew on board during a crossing—this time it was Isidor and Ida Straus, whose nephew, Roger, was married to Ben’s niece, Gladys. Ben had helped ensure that Ninette would be expensively gowned for each evening’s dinner, and the claim for lost luggage that she later sent to the White Star Line lists four trunks containing twenty-four dresses, twenty-four pairs of shoes, an array of lingerie, seven hats (two with plumes), long gloves, several jeweled bags, theater glasses, and a tiara.