Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (43 page)

It would be another hymn that would cause tears at the service for James Clinch Smith, held in the same small white church in St. James, Long Island, that had seen Stanford White’s funeral six years before. After “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” was sung, Archibald Gracie mentioned to one of Smith’s sisters that it was the last hymn played at the Sunday service on the
Titanic
. She was very affected by this and told Gracie it was Jim’s favorite hymn and the first tune he had learned to play on the piano as a child. Gracie included this anecdote in
The Truth About the Titanic
, a book that he did not live to see published. On December 4, 1912, Archibald Gracie died from health conditions degraded by the hypothermia and shock he had experienced when the
Titanic
sank. From “our coterie” only Helen Candee, Hugh Woolner, and Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson remained alive by the end of 1912. Helen Candee wrote romantically of “the Two” in her article for the May issue of
Collier’s
magazine, but the affair with Woolner did not continue on land, and in August of 1912 he married the young widow of an American.

Edith Rosenbaum also wrote about her
Titanic
experiences and described for readers of
Women’s Wear Daily
how her new friend Lady Duff Gordon “
made her escape in a charming lavender bath robe, very beautifully embroidered, together with a pretty blue veil.” The questionable taste of this description was barely noticed amid the furor surrounding Cosmo Duff Gordon’s supposed bribery of the crewmen in Boat 1. In England the story had blown up into a huge scandal and Lucy described the scene that greeted them when they stepped off the
Lusitania
in mid-May:

All over the [train] station were newspaper placards—“Duff Gordon Scandal” … “Baronet and Wife Row Away from the Drowning” … “Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon Safe and Sound While Women Go Down on
Titanic
.” Newsboys ran by us shouting, “Read about the
Titanic
coward!”

Making matters worse was the testimony given the week before at the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry by Charles Hendrickson, one of the firemen in Boat 1. He claimed that he had suggested they row back to pick up survivors, but Lady Duff Gordon had protested, saying they would be swamped, and Sir Cosmo had backed her up. The British Inquiry had begun on May 2 and was being presided over by John Bigham, First Viscount Mersey. In a bid to clear their names, the Duff Gordons offered to appear before the inquiry—the only passengers to do so. Cosmo was scheduled to testify first on Friday May 17, and Lucy noted the day before in a letter to Margot Asquith that he “shuts himself in the library for hours on end, dear man, worrying and looking a fright when he emerges, he is so downcast.” Margot Asquith and many other society friends packed the gallery at the Scottish Hall on Monday, May 20, for “Lucy’s day in court.” The women were dressed in their new spring frocks and hats—to the
New York Times
correspondent, the scene resembled “a fashionable matinee in aid of a popular charity.” Lucile wore a black ensemble with a white lace collar, and a hint of mourning was suggested by her large black hat and veil. When called, she spoke clearly, emphatically denying Hendrickson’s testimony and what the “clever reporter” had put into the
New York American
story. She denied hearing any cries of the drowning after the
Titanic
sank, though years later in her autobiography she would recall that “
the air was rent with awful shrieks.”

Lucy’s time before the inquiry was brief since she followed Cosmo who had already been grilled for several hours that morning and on the preceding Friday. Cosmo’s aristocratic reticence did not make him a particularly forceful witness in his own defense. When asked if it occurred to him that more people could have been saved in Boat 1, he replied, “
There were many things to think about, but of course it quite well occurred to one that people in the water could be saved by a boat, yes.” His harshest questioner was W. D. Harbinson, the counsel for the seafarers’ union, who took direct aim at class privilege. At one point he had to be cautioned by Lord Mersey “
not to try to make out a case for this class or that class or another class, but to assist me in arriving at the truth.” When Harbinson asked Cosmo if a fair summation of his position was “that you considered when you were safe yourselves that all the others might perish,” Lord Mersey interrupted again to object to the unfairness of the question and to point out, “The witness’s position is bad enough.”

The Duff Gordons’ friends were supportive, as was some of the press coverage. One journalist wrote that “
Torquemada never placed his victims more unfairly on the rack of the Inquisition than have Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon been placed on the rack of cross-examination.” In his report, Lord Mersey found that “
the very gross charge” against Sir Cosmo was unfounded, but this was not enough to vindicate the Duff Gordons in the court of public opinion. As Lucy later noted, “
A great deal of the mud that was flung stuck to us both. For myself, I did not mind … but I minded very much for Cosmo’s sake. To the end of his life, he grieved at the slur which had been cast on his honor.” The whole affair, in her words, “well-nigh broke his heart and ruined his life.” With her customary insouciance, Lucy claimed that the notoriety actually helped her business. (“Now all the women of London seem to want a nightdress like the one that could compel Lady Duff Gordon’s admiration in such an hour of peril,”
Women’s Wear Daily
noted on June 4, 1912.) Certainly, the next few years were good ones for Lucile Ltd., and when the Great War diminished the European appetite for fashion she focused her activities on New York, and in 1915 opened a Chicago salon as well. Cosmo stayed with Lucy for a time in America but when a Russian gigolo she dubbed “Bobbie” became a permanent part of the household, he stormed off to England in the spring of 1915 and lived apart from her until his death in 1931.

Lord Mersey’s report found that J. Bruce Ismay had also been unjustly vilified and noted that if the White Star chairman had not jumped into Collapsible C, “
he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost.” But Ismay, too, suffered keenly from the social ostracism directed toward him and after resigning as president of the International Mercantile Marine and chairman of the White Star Line in June of 1913, spent most of the remainder of his life out of the public eye. In private, his wife, like Lucy, would remark that the
Titanic
had ruined her husband’s life.

The only real blame assigned by Lord Mersey’s report was toward Captain Lord and the officers of the
Californian
, concluding that their ship was only between five and ten miles away from the
Titanic
and that if they had come to the rescue on first seeing the distress rockets “[they]
might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.” Stanley Lord lost his job with the Leyland Line, and until his death in 1962 tried to clear his name. In recent decades his case has been championed by a legion of defenders known as “Lordites,” who argue that the
Californian
was either not “the mystery ship” seen by the
Titanic
or was too far away to have reached the
Titanic
in time. But it is undeniable that if the
Californian
’s wireless set had been turned on, the
Titanic
’s distress call would have been heard and the ship could have taken action. The report of the U.S. Senate inquiry recommended that wireless on ships should be in operation twenty-four hours a day. It also proposed that ships carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board, that regular lifeboat drills be conducted, and that crewmembers should be skilled in the lowering and operation of lifeboats.

Lord Mersey’s report, by contrast, had to step gingerly around the issue of lifeboats since the inquiry was conducted by the British Board of Trade, whose outdated regulations had allowed a ship the size of the
Titanic
to carry only sixteen regular lifeboats. But Mersey did recommend that lifeboat capacity be based on the maximum number of people a ship could carry rather than its gross tonnage. His report also found no evidence that third-class passengers had been treated unfairly, despite that fact that 532 of the 710 aboard were lost. Lord Mersey is often accused of wielding the whitewash brush for finding neither Captain Smith nor the White Star Line responsible for the disaster. Lightoller’s insistence that Smith was simply following standard nautical procedure in maintaining full speed and trusting the lookouts to spot the ice in time clearly swayed the inquiry, though Mersey noted that this practice would “
without doubt be negligence in any similar case in the future.”

His exoneration of the White Star Line may have been influenced by a fear that assigning blame would lead to lawsuits that would cripple the line and damage the reputation of British shipping to the benefit of the French and German liners. Dozens of lawsuits were filed nevertheless, particularly in the United States, and the total sum demanded for all claims came to almost $17 million. The claims encompassed everything from $8 for a pair of Dorothy Gibson’s satin slippers and $50 for Eugene Daly’s bagpipes, to $5,000 for William Carter’s new Renault and $14,000 for Charlotte Cardeza’s Burmese ruby ring. Suits were also filed for loss of life: For being deprived of their husbands, René Harris sued for a million dollars, May Futrelle for $300,000, and Lily Millet for $100,000, though much less was actually received since the final amount distributed to all claimants came to only $664,000.

René Harris received a $50,000 settlement for the loss of Henry B. Harris, a far cry from a million but even this sum was welcome since the Harris theatrical enterprise was on the verge of bankruptcy. René was advised to liquidate and live on her assets but she insisted that Harry wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Despite being told that “
there was no such thing as a woman in the theater business” René convinced her creditors to give her a chance to make the company solvent—and she succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. For twenty years she filled the Harris theaters with hit plays and helped launch the careers of such stars as Helen Hayes, Barbara Stanwyck, Dame Judith Anderson, and the playwright Moss Hart. Similarly, René’s friend May Futrelle found herself having to repay publishers’ advances for books that Jacques would now never write. She, too, managed to pay off her husband’s debts and generate income through licenses of his existing works and by her own writing.

One modest expense that the White Star Line was happy to cover was a transatlantic ticket for Marcelle Navratil, the mother of the two curly-haired “
Titanic
orphans” who were being looked after in New York by Margaret Hays. After seeing a photograph of her sons in a French newspaper, Mme. Navratil contacted the White Star Line, who arranged passage to New York from her home in Nice. Over the Easter holiday in April, Marcelle’s estranged husband, Michel Navratil, had disappeared with the boys and was taking them to America on the
Titanic
under the alias “Louis Hoffman.” On May 16 Marcelle was reunited with her sons and two days later they returned home together on the
Oceanic
.

The
Titanic
“orphans,” Michel Navratil, age three, and his two-year-old brother, Edmond
(photo credit 1.51)

On the same day that Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York, a brand-new movie entitled
Saved from the Titanic
was announced on the marquees of the city’s nickelodeons. The ten-minute silent film had been made in three weeks at Éclair’s studios in New Jersey and starred a real-life survivor of the shipwreck, Miss Dorothy Gibson, wearing the same white silk dress and black pumps in which she had escaped from the sinking liner. Dorothy had at first been unwilling to relive her ordeal so soon after the disaster and according to one newspaper there were times during the filming when she had “
practically lost her reason by virtue of the terrible strain she had been under.” The one-reeler, which was produced by Jules Brulatour, would be Dorothy’s last film since she then embarked on a career in opera. This would prove to be short-lived, as would her marriage to Brulatour in 1917. Following a generous divorce settlement in 1919, the prettiest girl retreated from public attention and was never seen on stage or screen again.

Margaret Brown, however, was only warming up to the spotlight. A photograph of her presenting a silver loving cup to Captain Rostron on May 29 was carried in newspapers around the world. The ceremony took place on the
Carpathia
after its return from the Mediterranean, and gold, silver, and bronze medals were given to Rostron and his officers and crew on behalf of the
Titanic
survivors. Margaret also made a personal gift to the captain of the small turquoise Egyptian tomb figure she had tucked into her pocket before leaving her
Titanic
stateroom. A trip home to Denver in April had turned into a victory lap for the heroine of the
Titanic
, with a luncheon being given in her honor at the home of a once-frosty grande dame of Mile High society. To the
Denver Times
Margaret modestly noted that “
I simply did my duty as I saw it.… That I did help some, I am thankful and my only regret is that I could not have assisted more.” Margaret continued to chair the
Titanic
Survivors’ Committee for the rest of her life, and in 1920 she laid floral wreaths on all the
Titanic
graves in Halifax when a shipboard fire during a crossing caused her to land there unexpectedly. She also raised funds for the Women’s
Titanic
Memorial in Washington, D.C., just one of the dozens of statues, plaques, fountains, and even buildings erected in memory of the sinking on both sides of the Atlantic.