Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (5 page)

One Newport acquaintance who hadn’t snubbed Jack Astor was Margaret Tobin Brown, the estranged wife of Denver millionaire James J. Brown. She was sympathetic to marital woes and escaped her own by traveling. That winter, in fact, Mrs. Brown had joined the Astors on their excursion to North Africa and Egypt. In her pocket as she sat near the Astor party on the
Nomadic
was a small Egyptian tomb figure that she had bought in a Cairo market as a good luck talisman. The voyage Margaret Brown was about to take would immortalize her in books, movies, and a Broadway musical as “the unsinkable Molly Brown,” a feisty backwoods girl whose husband’s lucky strike at a Leadville, Colorado, gold mine vaults her into a mansion in Denver, where she is rebuffed by Mile High society. In the 1957 film
A Night to Remember
, Molly Brown is first spotted announcing loudly to her table in the
Titanic
’s dining saloon that her husband “Leadville Johnny” was “the
best gol-durn gold miner in Colorado” who had “built me a home that had silver dollars cemented all over the floors of every room!” The rags-to-riches arc of the Molly Brown legend is essentially true, though the details are highly fanciful. The real Margaret Brown, in fact, was never known as “Molly” until after her death, when a greatly embellished biography gave her that tag—and the mansion with silver dollars in the floor was an invention of the same writer.

Margaret Tobin Brown
(photo credit 1.69)

Feisty she was, however, and Margaret Brown’s remarkable energies had already been devoted to such causes as women’s suffrage and the establishing of the first juvenile court in the United States. Her self-betterment included learning several languages at New York’s Carnegie Institute, and by 1912 any “gol-durns” in her speech had been long banished and she was mixing with society figures at her summer “cottage” in Newport and on her European travels. With her hennaed hair, expensive clothes, and forthright manner, Mrs. Brown might seem a likely candidate to be one of Frank Millet’s “obnoxious, ostentatious American women.” But some recent news had muted her customary ebullience. While staying at the Ritz in Paris, she had received word that her first grandchild, four-month-old Lawrence Brown Jr., had fallen seriously ill, and she had immediately booked passage home on the earliest available ship. It would therefore have been a rather subdued “Molly” Brown who waited on the
Nomadic
for the ship that would propel her into legend.

Margaret Brown was not the only passenger returning home because of a family emergency. The writer, interior designer, and Washington society figure Helen Churchill Candee had also received an alarming telegram, informing her that her twenty-five-year-old son, Harold, had been injured in an airplane crash. Helen had gone abroad in January to finalize research on a new book about antique tapestries. After spending time in Spain and Italy, she was returning to Paris in early April by way of the Riviera, when a cable sent by her daughter caused her to immediately make plans to sail for home. As she sat alone on one of the
Nomadic
’s slatted banquettes, her petite, elegantly dressed figure topped by a modish hat, Helen, too, was almost certainly preoccupied by anxious thoughts as she wondered what had possessed Harold to get into one of those dangerous new flying machines.

The most somber group of all, however, were the Ryersons of Haverford, Pennsylvania, who were returning home for the funeral of their twenty-one-year-old son, Arthur, a Yale student who been thrown from an open car while motoring on the Easter weekend. The family had received word by telegram in Paris, and Arthur Ryerson Sr. had cabled back to arrange his son’s funeral for April 19, two days after the
Titanic
was to arrive. His wife, Emily, was being given comfort by two of her daughters, Suzette, aged twenty-one, and Emily, aged eighteen, while thirteen-year-old Jack Ryerson was tended by his tutor, Grace Bowen. The Ryersons were part of Philadelphia Main Line society, named for the fashionable suburban towns built along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a group that would be well represented on the
Titanic
’s first-class passenger list.

Margaret Brown described her time aboard the tender as an hour or longer of sitting in a “
cold, gray atmosphere,” which may have referred to more than just the weather, given the number of anxious or grieving passengers on board. The mood on the tender certainly affected Margaret’s friend Emma Bucknell, a wealthy widow from Philadelphia, who had also been traveling in Egypt. The matronly, nervous Emma had confided to Margaret that she feared boarding the
Titanic
because of her “evil forebodings that something might happen.” Mrs. Brown simply smiled at her friend’s premonitions and offered reassuring words to her.

Yet Emma Bucknell was not the only one on board with apprehensions about the voyage. Fashion writer Edith Rosenbaum had at first been looking forward to the crossing, but on reaching Cherbourg she had been gripped by fears and had sent an anxious telegram from the station to her secretary in Paris. Perhaps it was simply nerves, she thought, since this was her first trip to New York as a fashion buyer and stylist, and she was bringing trunks of valuable Paris gowns to show to American clients. Edith also hadn’t fully recovered from a car crash the summer before that had killed her German fiancé and severely injured another friend. They had been motoring to the races in Deauville, which Edith was covering for
Women’s Wear Daily
, when their automobile crashed into a tree. She had survived with only minor injuries, but the emotional trauma of it lingered.

The accident, however, hadn’t diminished her love of France. On her first trip to Paris five years before, Edith had known instantly that it was the city for her. Back home in Cincinnati, marrying a young man from a suitable Jewish family was what was expected of her, but at twenty-eight the prospects for that were growing slim. Over her father’s objections, she returned to Paris in 1908, determined to find work in the fashion trade. Her first job was as a salesgirl for Maison Cheruit in the Place Vendôme. Madame Cheruit herself had been impressed by Edith’s American verve and
jolie laide
looks—and her claim that in Cincinnati she had always ordered her dresses from Cheruit. After a year, Edith left the fashion house to write about French style for a small periodical distributed by Wanamaker’s department stores, and this led to a job as Paris correspondent for
Women’s Wear Daily
. She also drew sketches for the Butterick Pattern Service and later even designed her own line of clothes for Lord & Taylor in New York. But designing, in her words, was “
just a sideline.” As she would later say, “I never fooled myself that I was going to be another Lady Duff Gordon.”

Edith had written about the opening of the Paris branch of Lucile Ltd., Lady Duff Gordon’s fashion house, the year before. The idea of an English couturiere establishing an outpost in the capital of haute couture had raised some Gallic design noses skyward, but fashionable French women had soon flocked to Lucile’s showroom on the rue de Penthièvre. It was from there that Lady Duff Gordon and her husband, Sir Cosmo, had left that morning to take the train to Cherbourg. Seeing the famous designer sitting calmly on the
Nomadic
in her sable coat and pearl earrings and holding a bouquet of lily of the valley likely helped to calm Edith’s fears. She had covered the fashion shows at Lucile’s salon but had never actually met the famous couturiere in person, though the lounge of the tender did not seem quite the right place to approach her. Introducing oneself, she had learned, was not the done thing on this side of the Atlantic.

His Swiss-educated manners, similarly, may have inhibited Norris Williams from approaching Karl Behr on the
Nomadic
. The American tennis star, in any case, was no doubt preoccupied by thoughts of the girl he would soon see on the
Titanic
. Nineteen-year-old Helen Newsom was a friend of Karl’s younger sister, and a romance had recently blossomed between them despite some objections from Helen’s mother and stepfather, Sallie and Richard Beckwith. It wasn’t that Karl was unsuitable—he was from a prosperous New York family, after all, and was a Yale graduate and a lawyer, as well as a tennis champion, and had good looks and charm to spare. But at nineteen Helen still seemed a little young for serious courtship. In a bid to cool things down, the Beckwiths had decided to take her on an eight-week tour of Europe in February. On boarding the
Cedric
, however, they had discovered that Karl Behr was a passenger as well, traveling to Europe on a business trip, or so he claimed. During the crossing the Beckwiths’ attitude had softened toward Karl and he was able to spend some quiet time with Helen, something he looked forward to repeating on the crossing home.

Helen Newsom and Karl Behr
(photo credit 1.15)

Norris Williams was out on deck when the
Titanic
was finally sighted.
Shortly before 7 p.m. her funnels were seen beyond the breakwater and the word quickly spread to the passengers in the lounge. Norris noted how majestically the great liner steamed toward them. To Edith Rosenbaum it looked like a six-story house; to Margaret Brown it was “
the master palace of the sea.” Mrs. Brown recalled the
Nomadic
then putting on steam and steering out into the waves of the outer harbor. She also remembered that when the
Nomadic
reached the choppy seas beyond the breakwater, some of the passengers became “actively ill.”

In Edith Rosenbaum’s highly colored recollection, however, the rocking of the tender was caused entirely by the wake of the huge
Titanic
, since the sea until then had been calm. As the
Nomadic
drew alongside, she described how “the tender [began] pounding against her sides with such force that I feared she would break in half.” According to Edith, it took ten men to hold down the gangway “as it shook and swayed in every direction.” Edith also claimed to be the last person to leave the tender since the “uncanny upheaval” of the
Titanic
’s wake had stirred her fears anew.

Yet never in her most tremulous imaginings could Edith Rosenbaum have predicted that 50 of the 172 travelers who sat with her aboard the
Nomadic
were embarking on the final voyage of their lives.