Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (44 page)

This image of Dorothy Gibson appeared on the poster for
Saved from the Titanic
.
(photo credit 1.80)

The largest
Titanic
memorial of all is the Widener Library at Harvard University, erected by Eleanor Widener in memory of her son Harry, in which his rare book collection is carefully preserved. Among the many memorials in Southampton, England, is a bronze plaque to the ship’s postal workers cast from the
Titanic
’s spare propeller. A proposal for a monument in memory of Archie Butt and Frank Millet was issued from the White House within days of the
Titanic
’s sinking. It was President Taft’s idea, and he agreed to chair the committee and make the first donation toward it. Several hundred of Frank and Archie’s friends followed suit—the list of donors reads like a Gilded Age Who’s Who, with such names as sculptor Daniel Chester French, architects Henry Bacon and Cass Gilbert, industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Charles L. Freer, urban parks creator Frederick Law Olmsted, and decorative artist Louis Comfort Tiffany.

It was first thought that the memorial might take the form of a bronze tablet on the White House grounds but sculptor Daniel Chester French wrote to Lily Millet in early July that he and architect Thomas Hastings were at work on something that would likely take the form of a fountain. At the end of January 1913, President Taft approved the design for the Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain to be located in a leafy glade on the Ellipse just beyond the South Lawn of the White House. Daniel Chester French, who would later sculpt the large seated figure of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, created two bas reliefs for the fountain’s central shaft that rises from a basin of Tennessee marble. On its north side, facing the White House, a knight in armor representing Chivalry was carved in honor of Archie Butt; on the south side, looking toward the Lincoln Memorial, a classical maiden with a palette and brush symbolizing Art, commemorates Frank Millet. Around the rim of the basin an inscription reads:

The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain near the White House
(photo credit 1.52)

In memory of Francis Davis Millet—1846–1912—and Archibald Willingham Butt—1865–1912, This monument has been erected by their friends with the sanction of Congress.

The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain was completed by October of 1913, but there is no record of any dedication ceremony for it. By then Woodrow Wilson had replaced William Taft as president. During the fall election—the one that Archie Butt had been dreading—Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and allowing the Democrats to capture the White House. In his inauguration address President Wilson lauded America’s prosperity, but proclaimed that “
evil has come with the good and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste.” America and the world were changing. Deference for wealth and privilege was on the wane, and Gilded Age excess was out of fashion—for the time being at least. Labor unrest, suffragette marches, waves of New World immigrants—all were harbingers of a modern world struggling to be born.

“
It takes a terrible warning,” William Alden Smith had declared at the U.S. Senate Inquiry, “to bring us back to our moorings and senses.” The
Titanic
disaster did no such thing, of course. The “story of the century” would soon be overshadowed by far greater horrors in the fields of Flanders. But in the twenty-first century, quite remarkably, this Edwardian shipwreck has become our most-invoked metaphor for calamity, a byword for human arrogance and folly. In an age when Greek myths and biblical stories are no longer part of common understanding, the
Titanic
has become one of our most potent modern parables. Expressions like “rearranging the deck chairs” and “hitting the iceberg” are used daily and need no explanation. For politicians it has become a rite of passage to be perched on the liner’s plunging stern by newspaper cartoonists. The story of the giant ship that sank on its maiden voyage is so rife with symbolism that if it hadn’t actually happened, we might have had to invent it.

Yet it did happen, on that cold, clear April night in 1912. And it happened to real people—stokers, millionaires, society ladies, parsons, parlormaids—people who displayed a full range of all-too-human reactions as the events of the night unfolded. The recollections of those who survived, conflicting and embroidered though they often are, allow us to place ourselves on that sloping deck and ask, “What would
we
do?”

The unsinkable story sails on.

J
ust how long
did
their hearts go on? Of the 712 people who avoided death in the early morning of April 15, 1912, five lived to be one hundred or more and at least a dozen lived into their nineties. Despite exceptional longevity for a few, tragedy stalked the lives of so many
Titanic
survivors that it has often encouraged superstitious speculation of the “hand of fate” variety.

There are at least seven known deaths by suicide among the survivors, and
Titanic
researcher Philip Gowan has found evidence for as many as seven or eight more, though none of them, so far as is known, were directly
Titanic-
related.
Dr. Washington Dodge
, the San Francisco physician and civic politician who helped push Boat 13 away from the condenser exhaust, shot himself in the forehead in 1919 after a breakdown caused by business and investment problems. In March of 1927,
Dr. Henry Frauenthal
leapt to his death from the balcony of his New York apartment following months of depression fueled by his wife’s mental illness. Lookout
Frederick Fleet
hung himself from a clothesline in 1965 in despair over the death of his wife. Quartermaster
Robert Hichens
, the man at the ship’s wheel when Fleet spotted the berg and who later became the tyrant of Boat 6, plotted a murder-suicide in November of 1933 in Torquay, Devon. But he was so drunk on the chosen night that he only succeeded in wounding the man he believed had wronged him and failed to kill himself, though he did attempt to cut his wrists while under arrest. Hichens was released from prison in 1937 and died in 1940. On September 22, 1945,
Jack Thayer
, aged fifty, was found in his car with his wrists and throat slashed. The reason most often given for his suicide is that he was depressed over the loss of his son in the Pacific War. His mother,
Marian Thayer
, died of natural causes on April 14, 1944, the thirty-second anniversary of the
Titanic
’s collision with the iceberg.

It seems a particularly cruel twist of fate that
Douglas Spedden
, the much-beloved only child of
Daisy and Frederic Spedden
, should have been struck by a car and killed in August of 1915, three years after the family were all saved from the
Titanic
. The couple had no other children and lived on in Tuxedo Park until their deaths—Daisy died in 1950 and Frederic in 1947. (Daisy had, for a time, employed
Ellen Bird
, the English maid to
Ida Straus
.) As a Christmas gift for Douglas in 1913, Daisy wrote a story about their European travels and voyage on the
Titanic
, with Douglas’s toy polar bear as the narrator. The manuscript was discovered by a relative, Leighton Coleman III, and published in 1994 as the children’s picture book
Polar the Titanic Bear
.

Eleven-month-old
Trevor Allison
, the only surviving member of his family, also did not live to see adulthood. The Allison baby was carried off the
Carpathia
by his English nursemaid,
Alice Cleaver
, who had taken him into Boat 11. The Allison family blamed Alice Cleaver for the deaths of
Bess Allison
and two-year-old
Loraine Allison
, believing that Bess must not have known that the baby had left with the nurse and thus likely searched for him until it was too late. Alice claimed that she had told Mrs. Allison she was taking the baby with her. Major Peuchen said that he saw Bess Allison get out of a lifeboat with Loraine and go in search of her husband.
Trevor Allison
was raised by Hudson’s brother, George Allison, and his wife Lillian but died of ptomaine poisoning at the age of eighteen in August of 1929. In 1940 a woman named Loraine Kramer appeared on a national radio program claiming to be
Loraine Allison
. Her story of how she had survived the
Titanic
proved to be far-fetched, however, and she was dismissed as an impostor by the Allison family.

Perhaps the most heartrending of all survivor stories is that of
Helen Walton Bishop
, the nineteen-year-old newlywed from Dowagiac, Michigan, who left her lapdog Frou Frou behind before boarding Boat 7 with her husband. Helen was likely pregnant on the
Titanic
, since on December 8, 1912, she gave birth to a baby boy, who died two days later. The following November, Helen suffered a severely fractured skull in an automobile accident and was not expected to live. She recovered with a metal plate placed in her skull but her mental condition was seriously altered and this led to a divorce in January of 1916. Three months later Helen was injured from a fall while visiting friends in Danville, Illinois, and on March 15, 1916, she died and was buried in her hometown of Sturgis, Michigan. Her death at the age of twenty-three made the front page of the
Dowagiac Daily News
. Ironically a story about the remarriage of her former husband,
Dickinson Bishop
, appeared on the same page.

RHODA ABBOTT
(1873–1946)

Rhoda Abbott
(sometimes called “Rosa”), who was rescued from half-submerged Collapsible A, is the only woman to have survived the night in the icy water. She spent two weeks in New York Hospital after being carried off the
Carpathia
and lived with respiratory problems for the rest of her life. Rhoda also grieved deeply the loss of her two sons, sixteen-year-old
Rossmore
and fourteen-year-old
Eugene
. She had taken the two boys back to England in 1911 to live with her mother after separating from Stanton Abbott, a middleweight U.S. boxing champion. But the two boys became homesick for America and she was returning with them to Providence, Rhode Island, on the
Titanic
. In December of 1912 she married an old friend from England, George Williams, and lived with him in Jacksonville, Florida, until 1928, when the couple returned to England. There George suffered a stroke and Rhoda cared for him until his death ten years later. She died of heart failure on February 18, 1946.

MADELEINE ASTOR
(1893–1940)

Nineteen-year-old
Madeleine Astor
gave birth to
John Jacob Astor VI
on August 14, 1912. She had inherited the income from a $5 million trust fund and the use of the Astor mansion on Fifth Avenue and “Beechwood” in Newport so long as she did not marry again. But on June 22, 1916, Madeleine relinquished any claim to the Astor fortune when she married her childhood friend, the independently wealthy William Karl Dick (1888–1953). They had two sons but divorced in 1933 after Madeleine began an affair with a twenty-six-year-old Italian prizefighter named Enzo Fiermonte, whom she had hired to teach boxing to her boys. To the horror of her family and Palm Beach society, she married Fiermonte in November of 1933 and endured five stormy years before divorcing him for “extreme cruelty” in 1938. Two years later, the always frail Madeleine died of heart disease at the age of forty-seven and was buried in New York’s Trinity Cemetery, not far from the first husband she had last seen standing on the deck of the
Titanic
. Madeleine’s eldest son,
John Jacob Astor VI
, spent many years battling his half brother, Vincent Astor, for a larger share of the family wealth and died in 1992.