Lusitania (10 page)
Authors: Greg King
In 1915, Jolivet decided to go to Europe to see her brother before he went off to fight in the Great War. Her friend actress Ellen Terry was also traveling to Europe, and Rita was to join her, booking passage aboard an American liner, which they believed to be safe from possible submarine attack.
Lusitania,
though, was leaving the same day and would reach England first. “I wanted to see my brother before he left for the Front,” she later said. Not only was
Lusitania
faster, she was also larger and more luxurious, and carried Rita’s friend Charles Frohman. At eight that Saturday morning, she decided to take the Cunard vessel.
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With the last-minute change, Rita had to rush to reach Pier 54 before
Lusitania
sailed. Boarding the liner, she found that she had been given “a very bad room” on D Deck, an inside cabin with no portholes. She had a second surprise, this one more welcome, as she roamed over
Lusitania
’s decks awaiting departure: her brother-in-law, George Vernon Butler, also traveling aboard the liner to see his wife, Rita’s sister, Inez, in Europe.
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Inez was a talented violinist who had performed before Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Edward VII of Great Britain, but her husband was a more shadowy figure. George, who used Vernon as his surname, offered himself as a jack-of-all-trades: he had once been a banker, then acted as a concert singer, and also as an importer, though no one could quite pin down the actual source of his income. In fact, he was on his way to Russia: Nicholas II’s feckless brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich had apparently asked Vernon to broker a munitions deal for the tsar’s army to purchase some $3 million of American rifles.
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An actress was indeed an unusual and diverting attraction for many of
Lusitania
’s more aristocratic passengers. “Women of the stage,” Theodore Dreiser once mused, seemed “peculiarly suited to this realm of show, color, and make believe. The stage is fairyland and they are of it.” Most actresses, he insisted with a fair bit of misogyny, “lie like anything. They never show their true colors, or very rarely. If you want to know the truth, you must see through their pretty, petty artistry, back to the actual conditions behind them, which are conditioning and driving them. Very few, if any, have a real grasp on what I call life.”
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If an air of unreality swirled around Rita, it was one that had been carefully cultivated. Frohman, always on the lookout for a potential star, thought that the beautiful Jolivet might one day grow to rival Maude Adams in popularity. She had five films to her credit when she boarded
Lusitania,
including Cecil B. DeMille’s new picture,
The Unafraid
. Yet for all of the publicity Rita had received, it was her voyage aboard
Lusitania
that, ironically, would become her greatest claim to fame.
Quiet, her decks empty and her lights extinguished,
Lusitania
steamed east through the night. She was in the ocean now, her crisp bow slicing through the undulating Atlantic, her path marked by a silvery ribbon of foam trailing in her wake. New York City’s dismal weather had followed her: May 2 dawned cold and gray, rain pelting the liner as she rolled in uneven seas south of Nova Scotia.
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It was a Sunday. As much as he loathed the public side of his duties, Captain Turner was nothing if not a traditionalist, and that morning he conducted Protestant services in
Lusitania
’s Saloon Class Lounge—one of the few times when First and Second Class passengers were permitted to mingle; Catholic services took place in the Second Class Dining Saloon. Turner read out the lesson, and lent his gruff voice to the singing of hymns. He ended with prayers for the royal family, and for all those at sea.
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Even on the tranquil
Lusitania,
thoughts of the war—relatives fighting, friends killed, acquaintances lost—dominated. A few passengers, like rotund, thirty-six-year-old Isaac Lehmann, saw opportunity. Although officially described as an export broker from New York, Lehmann let it be known that he was actually on his way to Paris, hoping to sign a profitable deal to supply cloth to the French government for military uniforms. The prospect of wartime financial gain also led Jessie Taft Smith to book passage aboard
Lusitania
. John Smith, the Ohio native’s inventor husband, had developed a new engine for French airplanes; hearing of its success, Great Britain hoped he could develop a similar mechanism to give their planes an advantage over the Kaiser’s air corps. As Smith was already in London when the British request came, he asked his wife to carry over his mechanical plans for presentation and analysis.
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Thirty-nine-year-old Charles Jeffery was also on his way to Europe, hoping to sell his armored cars to the French army. By the turn of the century, his father, Thomas, had turned from manufacturing bicycles to automobiles, founding the Thomas B. Jeffery Company. His Rambler proved an early success, and within a decade the Wisconsin-based company was a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Charles took over the company after his father’s death and expanded the business, producing roadsters and touring cars that started at $1,000; the United States Army purchased his trucks for field use. His Jeffery Quad trucks proved valuable to the Russian and French armies, and now he had developed a new armored car with mounted machine gun, which he hoped to contract out to the Allied nations.
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Others aboard
Lusitania
were driven by wartime patriotism. It was still the age of the gentleman soldier, when young aristocrats, hoping to serve King and Country, willingly abandoned lives of privilege and took commissions that ultimately shattered such illusions and destroyed the brightest men of their generation. Twenty-one-year-old James Dunsmuir was the scion of British Columbia’s wealthiest and most socially prominent family. His father had served as lieutenant governor of the province, and he and his American wife, Laura, were accustomed to entertaining premiers and princes at Hatley Park, their $4 million baronial castle on a tranquil lagoon outside Victoria. It took an army of nearly a hundred to care for its fifty rooms, Japanese and Italian gardens, hundreds of acres of forest, and immense stables—a measure of the privilege surrounding young James Dunsmuir from birth.
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Known as “Boy,” young James was his father’s second son: the eldest, Robert, was a thorough wastrel and his disappointed father carefully groomed Boy to be his principal heir. Quiet and shy owing to his persistent acne, he’d been educated at Loretto in Scotland, winning a reputation as a boxer of some ability. Boy worked hard to please his father, taking a job at the Bank of Montreal for a modest salary to prove his worth. His only passion was horses: he loved to play polo, and kept two thoroughbred jumpers with which he won numerous prizes. The most remarkable thing about Boy, said a cousin, was that he “never complained” about anything. “He did not talk big and act small, nor had he the coarseness of the elder son.”
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Full of patriotic fervor, Dunsmuir had rushed to enlist when war erupted in Europe, training as a lieutenant with the British Columbia Horse Regiment and then the Canadian Mounted Rifles. At the end of April 1915, disappointed that his regiment was still in Canada, he resigned his commission: he hoped to go to London, enter the Royal Scots Greys Regiment, and join the fight against Germany.
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Boy had met the Kaiser on several occasions, when Wilhelm II visited the family at Kiel aboard their 218-foot steam yacht
Dolaura
and boldly signed its guest book as “Admiral of the Fleet.”
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Before leaving, Boy returned to Hatley to see his family. Strolling around the lagoon one afternoon, he spotted a heron, aimed his rifle, and killed the bird. “No good will come of that shot,” a servant gravely warned. “To shoot a heron spells bad luck.”
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Within a few days, Dunsmuir was on his way to New York to board
Lusitania
.
Wartime patriotism also drove twenty-two-year-old British Denis Duncan Harold Owen Boulton, who one day would become 3rd Baronet Boulton. After attending elite Stonyhurst and graduating from Oxford, Boulton followed the usual aristocratic path, briefly joining the British Army until he was medically discharged in 1912. He’d then gone to America to represent a creosote company, but sitting out the Great War ate away at his pride. When a friend suggested he might join the French Red Cross, Boulton decided to return to Europe.
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Boulton “paid very little attention” to the notice in Saturday’s newspapers—“we’d heard so many rumors of what the Germans were to do,” he said. “Being young, I felt more adventurous.” He thought to himself, “The hell with it!” and boarded
Lusitania,
“thinking I’d be safer in the long run than on some other ship.”
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He was surprised and delighted to find that Lieutenant Frederic Lassetter, an old friend from Oxford, was also traveling on
Lusitania
with his mother, Elisabeth. Originally from Australia, Lassetter had been on leave from the King’s Own Light Scottish Infantry Regiment after being wounded, and with his mother had visited relatives in Los Angeles.
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Boulton settled in for the voyage, but found it difficult to ignore the “undercurrent of anticipation” as
Lusitania
steamed toward the war zone.
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Anxiety and grief punctuated the tension aboard
Lusitania
. Only a week had passed since a lovely spring day in Montreal when Dorothy Braithwaite had received a devastating cable from her sisters in London. Both had husbands fighting in the war and, almost unbelievably, both received the tragic news that the men had been killed in action on the same day. Dorothy quickly packed a few things and rushed off to New York: she would celebrate a rather grim twenty-fifth birthday aboard
Lusitania,
on her way to comfort her grieving sisters.
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Another lady from Montreal, Frances Ramsay McIntosh Stephens, faced an equally worrisome situation: she was off to see her son Francis, who had fallen seriously ill while fighting in France. A veneer of marble concealed inner turmoil, but then, Frances Stephens had always known how to play to appearances. She had risen from relatively humble beginnings to become a formidable member of Montreal society. Frances owed her good fortune to the tragic 1876 death of her sister Elizabeth. Left a widower with a young son, Elizabeth’s husband, George Washington Stephens, waited a mere two years before marrying his much younger sister-in-law. Originally from Vermont, Stephens was a prominent Montreal lawyer and politician who could provide Frances with a large and fashionable house, couture dresses, exquisite jewelry, and a place in society; Frances, in turn, provided her husband with two daughters and a second son, Francis, born in 1887. After George Washington Stephens’s death in 1904, his widow—having inherited an estate worth over $1 million—set about playing the
grande dame,
funding Montreal’s Unitarian Church, endowing charities, and blessing social events with her regal appearance, invariably adorned with a brilliant, lengthy rope of pearls. On the outbreak of the Great War, her stockbroker son Francis patriotically went off to fight with the British Expeditionary Force in France.
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His wife, Hazel, followed him as far as England, bringing their young daughter, but she left their two-year-old son, John, with his grandmother in Montreal. Then, in spring 1915, the Canadian soldier developed a serious heart condition and had to be evacuated to England. His condition was so grave that his mother, with young John, a nanny, and a personal maid in tow, booked passage aboard
Lusitania
.
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Fellow Canadian travelers Mary Ryerson and her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Laura, also knew firsthand the terrible price that many had paid in the war. A fifty-six-year-old mother of five, Mary Amelia Ryerson enjoyed a prominent place in Toronto, where her physician husband, George—after serving in the Provincial Legislature—had helped establish the St. John Ambulance Association and the Canadian Red Cross. Mary and George traveled frequently: in 1909, they’d been presented to the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Word of his assassination in Sarajevo had shocked the couple—“it seemed such an objectless, political murder,” George recalled. “Little did we dream that it would be seized upon as an excuse for a world war.”
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