Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (46 page)

LADY DUFF GORDON
(1863–1935)

The 1920s didn’t roar for
Lucy Duff Gordon
since Jazz Age flappers found her romantic gowns passé. As Cecil Beaton wrote, “
The era of elaborate ornamentation was over.… It was a far cry from Lucile’s pastel chiffons to the jerseys and short skirts with which Chanel replaced them.” Lucy didn’t understand how the postwar world had changed and fired designer Edward Molyneux from her Hanover Square salon for producing sleeker, more modern designs. By 1923 Lucile Ltd. was bankrupt. It was left to the ever-kind
Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon
to explain how her capital had disappeared—as usual, Lucy blamed her business partners. Lucy continued to write her fashion columns and sometimes created designs for private clients from her small flat, in the way that she had started her career so many years before. “
She had to learn … to get on buses, perhaps in the rain, and go to cocktail parties,” recalled her granddaughter. It didn’t help that her sister,
Elinor Glyn
(1864–1943), was enjoying great success in Hollywood as a screenwriter and even as a director. (When Clara Bow starred in the screen adaptation of Elinor’s novel
It
, she was dubbed “the ‘It’ Girl,” “It” being a coded term for sex appeal.) In 1932 Lucy published her autobiography,
Discretions and Indiscretions
, which became a bestseller. In it she describes her experiences on the
Titanic
and the scandal that followed. Lucy died of breast cancer in a Putney, London, nursing home on April 20, 1935, at the age of seventy-one, four years to the day after Cosmo’s death. They are buried together in Brookwood Cemetery near London. In recent years, exhibitions of Lucile fashions at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology have provided some recognition of Lucy’s place in the history of fashion.

ALICE FORTUNE
(1887–1961)

Alice Fortune
’s shipboard flirtation with
William Sloper
was likely intended to be little more than that, since on June 8, 1912, she married lawyer Charles Holden Allen, to whom she was already engaged. The couple had one daughter and lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and in Montreal. They retired to their summer home in Chester, Nova Scotia, and Alice died there on April 7, 1961. Her mother,
Mary Fortune
(1851–1929), did not remarry and died in Toronto in March 1929, aged seventy-seven. Older sister
Ethel Fortune
(1883–1961) was haunted by dreams of her brother
Charles Fortune
flailing about in the icy water. She married Toronto banker Crawford Gordon in 1913, and their son, Crawford Gordon II, was responsible for producing the prototype of the Avro Arrow aircraft in the 1950s. Ethel died in Toronto on March 21, 1961. The youngest sister,
Mabel Helen Fortune
(1888–1968), married a jazz musician from Minnesota and had one son, but the marriage was short-lived. Mabel soon met a woman from Ottawa and lived with her in Victoria, British Columbia, for the rest of her life.

LILY MAY FUTRELLE
(1876–1967)

May Futrelle
returned to “Stepping Stones,” the house on the harbor in Scituate, Massachusetts, and it is said that on every April 15 she would throw flowers into the Atlantic in memory of her husband,
Jacques Futrelle
. In the 1930s she taught creative writing in Boston and New York and was a national chair of the American League of Pen Women. She also hosted a radio show called
Do You Want to Be a Writer?
May died in Scituate at the age of ninety-one and is buried there.

DOROTHY GIBSON
(1889–1946)

William Sloper
wrote that he was invited to the wedding reception for
Dorothy Gibson
and
Jules Brulatour
in 1917 but was unable to attend. The prettiest girl’s affair with Brulatour had been made public in May of 1913 after Dorothy had struck and killed a pedestrian while driving Brulatour’s car. After Dorothy and Brulatour separated in 1919, she lived for a time in Manhattan and moved to France with her mother in 1928. She later became involved in Fascist politics but changed her affiliations during World War II and was arrested by the Germans in Italy as a suspected resistance supporter and imprisoned in Milan. Dorothy escaped in 1944 and died of heart failure at the Ritz in Paris on February 17, 1946, at the age of fifty-six. No print of
Saved from the Titanic
has survived; the only existing film from Dorothy’s movie career is a one-reel comedy,
The Lucky Holdup
, which premiered just before she sailed on the
Titanic
.

HENRY SLEEPER HARPER
(1864–1944)

“
Louis, how
do
you keep yourself looking so young?” is how
Henry Harper
reportedly greeted
Carpathia
passenger Louis Ogden shortly after he arrived on the rescue ship. It’s possible that a similar insouciance regarding disaster contributed to the Harper & Brothers publishing firm’s slide into receivership in 1899 while Henry was a director. Henry kept a desk there for a time after the company was sold but increasingly had less to do with the firm. He and his wife,
Myra Harper
, had no children and liked to spend about six months of every year traveling abroad. Henry also loved the outdoors and became involved in protecting the Adirondack forests from logging. After surviving the
Titanic
, the Harpers continued to travel and while in America divided their time between New York City and a summer home in Winter Harbor, Maine. When Myra died in 1923, Henry married again and in his sixties fathered a son, also named Henry. Henry Sleeper Harper died on March 1, 1944, in New York City, after a two-year illness. His bowler hat was photographed still sitting on a bed in his stateroom during the filming of the
Titanic
wreck for James Cameron’s 3D documentary
Ghosts of the Abyss
. Harper’s Egyptian manservant,
Hammad Hassab
, returned to Egypt and continued to work as a dragoman through Thomas Cook and Sons. His calling card read, “Hammad Hassab, Dragoman, Having the distinction of being a survivor from the wreck of the
Titanic
.”

IRENE
(
RENÉ
)
HARRIS
(1876–1969)

“
Mrs. Harris was rich, racy and of infinite good humor,” remembered playwright Moss Hart of the woman who produced his first play in 1925. The twenties roared for René (who by then had become Renée), with song-and-dance man George M. Cohan regularly filling the Hudson Theater along with other hit shows. This allowed her an apartment on Park Avenue, a home in Palm Beach, and a yacht with a crew of four. Her social circle included Irving Berlin and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and she had a string of male admirers, three of whom became husbands, though never for long. “
I have had four marriages—but really only one husband,” she claimed, referring to her first, whom she always called “Henry B.” Renée would keep her “infinite good humor” but lose everything else when the Depression hit the theater business particularly hard. In 1932 she was forced to sell the Hudson Theater, for which she had once been offered a million, for only $100,000, and even that did not cover her debts. Down to only the clothes on her back, Renée moved in with her sister and survived the Depression directing children’s plays for the WPA’s Federal Theater Project and selling the occasional magazine story. By the early 1950s she was living in a one-room apartment in a hotel in Manhattan and spending summers at a retirement home for theater people on Long Island. She became a good friend of Walter Lord’s when he was working on
A Night to Remember
but was unable to sit through a screening of the 1958 movie version as she found it too realistic. On the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking in 1962, she gave an interview to NBC radio and attended a memorial service at New York’s Seamen’s Church with her old friend
May Futrelle
and some other survivors. Walter Lord encouraged her to finish writing the story of her remarkable life, and she was hard at work on it in late August of 1969, when she collapsed and was rushed to hospital. Renée died on September 2, 1969, at the age of ninety-three. All who knew her had to agree with the final notice she received in
Variety
, which said “
The lady was something special.”

MASABUMI HOSONO
(1870–1939)

The
Titanic
’s sole Japanese survivor was assailed for having brought shame on his country in the eyes of the West. In 1913 he lost his government job, though he was eventually rehired.
Hosono
wrote a description of his
Titanic
experience in which he (incorrectly) claimed that he was the last person to get into the last boat. He died on March 14, 1939.

VIOLET JESSOP
(1887–1971)

Stewardess
Violet Jessop
had the distinction of surviving the
Olympic
’s collision with the British cruiser
Hawke
on September 20, 1911, and the sinking of both the
Titanic
and the third sister ship,
Britannic
, when it was sunk in the Aegean while serving as a hospital ship in 1916. Her memoir,
Titanic Survivor
, was edited by liner historian John Maxtone-Graham and published in 1997. Violet died in May of 1971 in Great Ashfield, Suffolk.

CHARLES LIGHTOLLER
(1874–1952)

Despite his staunch defense of Captain Smith and the White Star Line, the
Titanic
’s senior surviving officer was never made a captain of any White Star ship.
Charles Lightoller
did become a full commander in the Royal Navy during World War I and on returning to White Star after the war was made chief officer of the
Celtic
. Realizing he was never going to achieve a better posting, Lightoller retired after twenty years of service, and he and his wife for a time ran a guesthouse. He purchased and refitted a steam motor launch, which was dubbed the
Sundowner
, and on June 1, 1940, the sixty-six-year-old Lightoller took the
Sundowner
across the Channel to rescue men from the beaches of Dunkirk. During World War II he would lose two of his three sons in combat. Charles Lightoller died on December 8, 1952, at the age of seventy-eight.

HAROLD LOWE
(1882–1944)

Harold Lowe
confessed to
Margaret Brown
on the
Carpathia
that he regretted the swearing in the lifeboat that had so upset
Daisy Minahan
. He also had to retract from his testimony at the U.S. Inquiry that he had fired his pistol to prevent “Italian immigrants” from jumping into Boat 14, after a complaint was filed by the Italian embassy. (He explained that he meant “
immigrants of the Latin race.”) In September of 1913, Lowe was married, and the couple had two children, a boy and a girl. During World War I he became a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, but like the other surviving officers from the
Titanic
never achieved a command in the merchant service. Lowe retired to his native Wales and died on May 12, 1944. He is buried at Llandrillo Yn Rhos, Colwyn Bay, North Wales.

BERTHE MAYNÉ
(1887–1962)

Hélène Baxter
and her daughter
’Zette
seemingly bonded in their grief with
Quigg Baxter
’s lover,
Berthe Mayné
, since she stayed in Montreal with the Baxter family for a brief time before returning to Europe and resuming her career as a singer. She never married and eventually retired to a comfortable house in a suburb of Brussels, bought for her by a wealthy admirer. As an elderly woman, she would sometimes mention that she had been on the
Titanic
with a young Canadian millionaire, but was never really believed. Only after her death did a nephew discover a shoebox filled with letters, photographs, and clippings revealing that “Tante Berthe’s” story was actually true.
Hélène Baxter
(1862–1923) died in 1923 in Montreal, and her daughter,
Mary Hélène (’Zette)
(1885–1954), left her husband Dr. Fred Douglas in 1923, remarried, and died in Redlands, California, in 1954.

DAISY MINAHAN
(1879–1919)

By April 24, 1912,
Daisy Minahan
and her sister-in-law
Lillian
were back in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and on May 2
Dr. William Minahan
’s body, recovered by the
Mackay-Bennett
, was shipped home for burial. Not long after the funeral, Daisy was admitted to a sanatorium for pneumonia. In 1918 she moved to Los Angeles, and died there on April 30, 1919, at the age of forty. Her sister-in-law,
Lillian Minahan
(1875–1962), also moved to California, where she married twice more. She died in Laguna Beach, California, in 1962, at the age of eighty-six.

JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN
(1837–1913)

On Wednesday April 17, 1912,
J. P. Morgan
received a flood of messages at the spa in Aix in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday. He wired his thanks in return but added “
Greatly upset by loss
Titanic …
my heart … very heavy.” The International Mercantile Marine had not been a financial success for years, and now it was associated with this shocking tragedy. Morgan died in his sleep on March 31, 1913, at the Grand Hotel in Rome, where a year before he had met with Frank Millet to discuss the American Academy. Flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff and the stock market closed for two hours in his honor. In November 1926, the IMM sold the Oceanic Steam Navigation Co., Ltd., of which the White Star Line was a major part, to the Royal Mail Group for £7 million. In 1932 the White Star Line once again became an independent company, but it merged with the Cunard Line in 1934 to become Cunard–White Star.