Voyagers of the Titanic (9 page)

As Irish working-class Catholic millionaires, the Browns did not become overnight darlings of Denver society, but the extent to which they were shunned has been exaggerated. It is true that a Denver socialite had recently declared: “The world is full of dowdy, ill-bred women who fancy that if only they had money enough they could take society by storm.”
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Margaret Brown, however, was not dowdy: inclined to chubby cheeks, perhaps, but with a strong, smiling, and confident face, her laughing blue eyes set under luxuriant dark hair; not finished like a debutante, certainly, but shrewd, clear-headed, inquisitive, and amusing. She made the most of her chances. The Browns first visited Europe in 1895: sailed to Naples, toured Italy for several months, dallied in Paris, tried the British Isles. She discovered an aptitude for foreign languages (acquiring fluent French) and a love of Paris. Margaret Brown was twenty-six when her husband started to make millions: too late for her to resemble Astor or Vanderbilt heiresses, who were both bullied and pampered by men, held too tight by silken lassos to wrench life into their own free pattern. Other women with self-made husbands often became snobs on the edge of good society, or scared cats, but she was neither heartless nor shallow. She proved a benefactor to all America when, after 1903, she helped a reforming judge establish the first U.S. court for juveniles. She was a founder of the Denver Women’s Club, which promoted education and advocated suffrage for women, and after 1912, when her name had national recognition as a
Titanic
survivor, she drew a large audience when she spoke at Women’s Suffrage headquarters. Her hard-drinking husband suffered a bad stroke, as a result of which his temper deteriorated, and they signed a separation agreement in 1909. She forsook Denver for New York and Newport but spent much time traveling in Europe.

Leadville, Colorado, was Margaret Brown’s common denominator with her fellow passenger Benjamin Guggenheim, the most personable of the seven brothers. He was the first of them to attend college, the first to work in mining, the first to leave the family business, the first to collect good paintings, and the first to gallivant. He renounced capital of $8 million when he left the family business in 1901 but took a share of the profits with him and four years later inherited his cut of his father’s fortune. At first Ben Guggenheim lived with his wife, Florette, and three daughters in a pretentious, tomblike house on a corner of Fifth Avenue. His wife busied herself by holding muffled, listless tea parties and stilted bridge drives. Guggenheim had never felt marriage would provide full satisfaction for his claims on life. He was the rare sort of philanderer who liked women and understood them. He kept a slim brunette nurse in the Stygian house, ostensibly because her massage warded off his neuralgia, but eventually decided that marvelous regions lay waiting to be explored in Paris, where he took an apartment. The Fifth Avenue household was designed to look immutable, but the Guggenheims cared no more for permanency than the J. J. Browns at Bear Creek, and in less than ten years it had been dismantled, and its occupants dispersed.

In Paris, Ben Guggenheim tripled his emotional capital even as he lost millions by rash investments. Unlike his brothers, Ben had pale skin, delicate rather than big bones, light eyes, and the dandyish elegance of a cosmopolitan European rather than the chunky gravity of a Jewish German-American millionaire. He was too proud and cheerful a man to play the sneak. In Paris he had an open love affair with a marquise before finding a singer, Léontine Aubart. His wife in New York thought of divorcing him, but she was a money-loving woman who was persuaded by the other Guggenheim brothers that divorce would hurt the family name, thereby harming the business and therefore reducing her income. By 1912 she lived with her daughters in a spacious suite at Jack Astor’s St. Regis Hotel, screened, as they thought, from all unforeseen contingencies until that dark day when Solomon Guggenheim, outside a theater on Broadway, was halted in his steps by a news vendor’s cry, “
Extra! Extra! The
Titanic
sinks!
”

Guggenheim traveled with an entourage of Léontine Aubart; her maid, Emma Sägesser; his valet, Victor Giglio—all aged twenty-four—together with his thirty-nine-year-old chauffeur, René Pernot. Guggenheim, returning with his mistress, was bathed in the lurid greenish light of a dubious reputation: it is doubtful whether he and Léontine Aubart had more than negligible contact with the respectably married American couples thronging the lounges and decks who recognized them. Probably he and his mistress kept apart with proud discretion. George Rosenshine, the ostrich feather dealer, was also traveling with his mistress, Maybelle Thorne; he cloaked himself under the alias of George Thorne, but was known to passengers such as Irene (Renée) Harris, wife of the theatrical producer.

Guggenheim had little contact on board with Isidor Straus, to whom he was related by marriage. Straus had been born in Bavaria in 1845; his family emigrated in 1854 to Talbotton, Georgia, where he started his working life as a clerk in his father’s dry goods business. During the Civil War, he worked in Europe as an agent obtaining supplies for the Confederate government. Afterward, he worked in a Liverpool shipping office, moved to New York City, and in 1896 became coproprietor with his brother of Macy’s. Straus was careful, systematic, equable, dignified, and industrious: he had intuitions that enabled him, without any forceful assertion of will, to sense where profits lay. Straus was traveling with his wife, Ida. “These two so openly adored one another that we used to call them ‘Darby and Joan’ on the ship,” recalled Lady Duff Gordon. “They told us laughingly that in their long years of married life they had never been separated for one day or night.”
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Also in Straus’s party was his valet, John Farthing, and Ida’s maid, Ellen Bird, a shepherd’s daughter from Norfolk, who had been hired a few days before embarkation. They were delighted with their accommodation. “What a ship!” Ida Straus exclaimed as they steamed for Cherbourg. “So huge and so magnificently appointed. Our rooms are furnished in the best of taste, and most luxuriously, and they are really rooms not cabins.”
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There was no counterpart of Europe’s
haute juiverie
in America. Neither the Guggenheims nor the Strauses had any hope of the acceptance in society enjoyed by the Sassoons and Rothschilds, or King Edward VII’s trusty Sir Ernest Cassel (who tried to stop the sale of White Star to Pierpont Morgan to please the monarch). However intelligent, inventive, generous, and charming, Jewish Americans had no chance of assimilation except—like Henry Harris—in showbiz. A respected American sociologist had written in 1906 of the population of Jewish districts: “It is a haggling, bargaining, pushing, crowding, seething mass . . . cowed by fear, unmanned by persecution; a thing to jeer at, to ridicule, to plunder and to kill.” Many Jews, he charmingly explained, conceded their “racial faults” and accepted that their “people are greedy, greasy and pushing, or doggedly humble; as might be expected of hunted human beings, who for 2,000 years have known no peace, wherever the cross overshadowed them.”
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This was the bigotry with which Guggenheim and Straus (to say nothing of Jakob Birnbaum, George Rosenshine, and Abram Lincoln Salomon) had to contend.

There were two family parties led by North American railway colossi on board the
Titanic
. John Borland Thayer, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest American railroad as measured by traffic and revenue, was returning from a visit to a diplomat friend posted in Berlin, accompanied by his wife, Marion, “one of the handsomest women in Philadelphia”;
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their teenage son, John B. Thayer Junior, known as “Jack”; and his wife’s maid, Margaret Fleming. Thayer was also a director of the Long Island Railroad and other concerns, and an expert in managing freight traffic. The other railway titan was Charles M. Hays, president of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railroad, a stocky, heavily bearded, pomaded man whose expansive ambitions and wish to make his will inexorable had left him looking careworn.

Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1856, Hays began as a railway clerk with the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad in Saint Louis, Missouri. He moved to Montreal in 1896 as general manager of Canada’s heavily indebted Grand Trunk Railway and gained a reputation for invincibility after imposing reforms that coincided with the boom years of 1896–1913. As general manager (and president from 1909), he impressed, at times captivated, the Canadian prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Hays’s workweek was filled with swift, obligatory action: he believed in big decisions and unfaltering purposes. In every predicament he chose the course that demanded the greatest energy. Risk was his stimulant. He convinced Laurier that Canada needed a second transcontinental railway, running along a less populous northern route than the existing Canadian Pacific Railway, and extracted a large government subsidy toward the cost of building one.

Construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway began in 1903. Hays determined that the Grand Trunk Pacific would be a
Titanic
of railways, built to the highest standards. However, his perfectionism slowed completion of the project, and by 1912 the company’s debts were immense. Hays’s solution—which smacks of blind obstinacy or unreasonable pride—was to spend more money by upgrading rolling stock, laying double tracks, and building luxurious hotels in the great cities. The first of these hotels, Château Laurier in Ottawa, had recently been completed, and Hays needed to attend its ceremonial opening later in the month. Ostensibly, he had visited Europe to study Ritzonian hotels, with a view to improving the projected Grand Trunk hotels, but his most pressing task was to reassure his London board and British investors. Some considered that Hays had deceived his London directors about the Grand Trunk Pacific project: his policies certainly lured the railway headlong toward insolvency. In 1919 GTP defaulted on its borrowing and went into receivership, which soon necessitated the nationalization of the whole network. Hays’s tactics ended in ignominious failure.

Hays was traveling with his wife, Clara; her maid, Mary Anne “Annie” Perrault; his daughter Orian (aged twenty-seven); her stockbroker husband, Thornton Davidson; and Vivian Payne, a fatherless boy of twenty-two who, after a shining career at Montreal High School, had become Hays’s protégé and personal secretary. Thornton Davidson was the son of Sir Charles Davidson, chief justice of Quebec: the family were staunch Protestants, and the elder son, Shirley Davidson, one of Canada’s best racing yachtsmen, drowned himself in a suicide pact on the Saint Lawrence River in 1907 with his Catholic fiancée, whom the judge forbade the boy to marry. Thornton Davidson had a square face with a tenacious, emphatic, and uncompromising look. He ran his own brokerage firm in Montreal and was one of those stockbrokers whose success was compounded of force and ease: he was a sporty clubman who pressed palms, exchanged confidences, and made deals as a member of the Racquet Club, the Montreal Hunt Club, the Montreal Jockey Club, the Montreal Polo Club, the Montreal Amateur Athletics Association, and the Royal Saint Lawrence Yacht Club.

This was an exciting era to be a Canadian stockbroker, especially if one was not restrained by obtrusive scruples. Canada’s first burst of industrialization occurred in textiles, brewing, flour milling, iron, rolling stock, and farm implements. Its second wave of industrialization, during the Laurier boom era of 1896–1913, derived from steel, precision machinery, cement, chemicals, and electric power generation. It was during this boom that the embezzling banker “Diamond Jim” Baxter amassed the fortune that allowed his widow, Hélène, to travel so royally with her children on the
Titanic
. After 1909, Canada was in the throes of a merger boom, with promoters floating new businesses and creating paper millionaires. There was a lot of sudden, showy, precarious opulence in the sphere of Hays and Davidson. Bernard Berenson visited Montreal in 1914: “the one thing these provincial millionaires think of,” reported his wife, “is to build ultra hideous brown-stone houses (here the stone is a gloomy slate-colour) and hang in their multifarious and over-heated rooms a vast collection of gilt-framed mediocre pictures, often spurious and almost always, even if authentic, poor. The usual acres of Barbizon output greet us here, some of your beloved Rembrandts, a few real Goyas and fake Velásquezes, endless ‘English School’ and ‘French XVIII Century’ pictures, Japanese knickknacks enough to bury you—and all dreary and horrible, and affording endless satisfaction to their owners.”
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The collecting bug was well represented on the
Titanic
by the Wideners. Old Peter Widener, the Philadelphia tramway millionaire and associate of Pierpont Morgan in IMM’s takeover of White Star, amassed a collection of paintings in his Lynnewood Hall mansion. His son Joseph collected promiscuously, too, while his other son, George, cheerfully paid for his wife’s collection of silver and porcelain, and his young grandson Harry was in 1912 shaping up to become America’s finest bibliophile.

Young Americans reared at empyrean social heights, like Harry Widener, began crossing the Atlantic on the fastest steamers of the most expensive lines when they were small children. Edith Wharton described a youth called Troy Belknap who from the age of six had embarked in New York for Europe every June. His family would alight at the New York docks from a large silent car, he would kiss his father good-bye and shake hands with the chauffeur who was his special friend, and mount the gangplank in file behind his mother’s maid. On board, one steward would carry off his mother’s bag while another led away her French bulldog. Then for “six golden days Troy . . . ranged the decks, splashed in the blue salt water brimming his huge porcelain tub, lunched and dined with the grown-ups in the Ritz restaurant, and swaggered about in front of the children who had never crossed before and didn’t know the stewards, or the purser, or the captain’s cat, or on which deck you might exercise your dog, or how to induce the officer on the watch to let you scramble up a minute to the bridge.” On the seventh morning they would reach Cherbourg, and Troy Belknap would traipse down the gangplank with his mother, her maid, and the French bulldog toward a smiling, saluting French chauffeur (to whom he was as devoted as to the New York driver). “Then—in a few minutes, so swiftly and smilingly was the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed—the noiseless motor was off, and they were rushing eastwards through the orchards of Normandy . . . beautiful things flew past them; thatched villages with square-towered churches in hollows of the deep green country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed to be moored like ships.”
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Troy Belknap almost seems modeled on Harry Widener, who embarked at Cherbourg on the
Titanic
with his parents: they had been staying at the Ritz in Paris and were traveling with their servants Edwin Keeping and Emily Geiger.