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SUNKEN DREAMS
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| PHOTO: Mansell Collection - Time Inc. | ||
So much for the physics. But what captured the public's attention was that night's human tragedy. Titanic set sail carrying some 2,200 people -- millionaires, immigrants, 13 honeymoon couples and an eight-man band that played to the bitter end -- and lifeboats for just over half of them. In the end 712 were rescued; the rest drowned or froze in the water. "It was the biggest ship in history, filled with celebrities of that time," says James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film Titanic, which has become the first film to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, been nominated for a record-tying 14 Oscars and propelled actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into superstardom's rarefied realm. "It would be like if you took a jumbo jet filled with half the stars in Hollywood and crashed it into the Washington Monument.
Yet Titanic's sinking was not instantaneous, and in her dying moments fateful choices were made. A look at her real-life victims includes both tales of valor and too-human frailty.
Smith (days before the disaster) was respected by his crew and admired by the passengers.
Known as "the millionaire's captain," Smith was one of the most experienced and charming ship's masters on the Atlantic run.
Captain
E.J. Smith
Titanic's enduring enigma
Four months before the sinking, Smith was
toasted by wealthy New Yorkers at a dinner in his honor. Known as "the
millionaire's captain," he was one of the most experienced and charming ship's
masters on the Atlantic run. So why did Smith steer his fully loaded ship at
high speed through a field of icebergs in the middle of night? The captain took
the answer with him to the bottom of the Atlantic, but nothing in his past
suggests a reckless streak. Edward John Smith was born in landlocked
Staffordshire, England, in 1850 and went to sea in his teens as a "boy" on a
sailing ship bound around the globe and captained by his half-brother Joseph.
As a captain he joined the White Star Line in 1880 and eventually skippered the
maiden voyages of many of the line's newest steamers, including Titanic's
sister ship Olympic. Once, while Smith was at the helm, the Olympic
mysteriously struck an object while crossing the Atlantic and had to be taken
to a Belfast shipyard for repairs to a propeller.
Smith, married with one daughter, was contemplating retirement after the Titanic crossing. But given what happened, says a distant relative, Pat Lacey, 75, "it's a jolly good job he went down with her instead."
SIR COSMO AND LADY DUFF GORDON
A lady's careless words came back to haunt her
As the Titanic slipped beneath the North Atlantic, London-born Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, a dress designer with chic shops in London and New York City, turned to her secretary aboard lifeboat No. 1 and said, "There is your beautiful nightdress gone." Lucy's ill-timed comment, uttered over the screams of 1,500 victims stranded in the water, started a fateful chain of events. "Two of the sailors said, `It's all right for you -- you can get more clothes, but we have lost everything,' " reports Sir Andrew Duff Gordon, Lucy's great-nephew. Her sympathetic husband, Sir Cosmo, who had been given the nod to get into the lifeboat with his wife, later gave each of the seamen 5 pounds ($360 today) to replace their belongings -- a gesture that inadvertently sealed the couple's fate.
Back in London, gossipy members of society accused Duff Gordon of bribing the crew to row the two-thirds-empty craft from the scene without helping victims in the water. In May 1912, a British inquest cleared Duff Gordon of the charge. But the damage to the couple's reputation was permanent. Shunned in some circles, the Duff Gordons, who were unable to have children, drifted apart, though they never divorced. Cosmo died in 1931. Lucy's business thrived for a time but went bankrupt before her death in 1935. For them at least, says Lucy's biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith, "it was almost worse to survive than to go down."
For a moment, it looked as if one of the lifeboats would follow Titanic
to the bottom. Water gushed through a hole in the bottom until, in the words of
Gibson, a 28-year-old silent-screen actress from Hoboken, N.J., who was aboard
with her mother, Pauline, "this was remedied by volunteer contributions from
the lingerie of the women and the garments of the men."
In 1914 she married Jules Brulatour, the wealthy New York film distributor with
whom she had been having a long-term affair and who had called her back from
her European vacation just days before she boarded Titanic. The unhappy
union ended in divorce two years later. Gibson, "a very vivacious sort,"
according to historian Don Lynch, died of a heart attack in Paris in 1946. Many
remembered the actress for her starring turn in Saved from the Titanic,
a silent film made one month after Gibson was rescued. Her costume: the very
dress she had worn the night of the disaster.
DOROTHY GIBSON
The silent-film star dressed for disaster
MADELEINE AND
JOHN JACOB ASTOR
An American millionaire and his wife bade farewell forever
John Jacob and Madeleine Astor's Airedale, Kitty (in this ca. 1911 photo), was lost,
but two dogs did survive.
On a vessel flush with tycoons, New Yorker John Jacob Astor IV stood out as the richest. He boarded at Cherbourg with an entourage that included his wife, Madeleine, a manservant, a maid, a nurse and his Airedale, Kitty. First-class staterooms like theirs -- richly paneled suites with working fireplaces and separate quarters for servants -- cost as much as $4,000 for the voyage, equivalent to a staggering $50,000 today.
But there was more to Astor than the $87 million fortune he made through real estate and his family's fur-trading empire. After graduating from Harvard, he patented such inventions as a turbine engine, a bicycle brake and a "vibratory disintegrator" used to produce gas from peat moss.He wrote a science-fiction novel about life on Saturn and Jupiter and financed his own Army battalion during the Spanish-American War. His first marriage, to Ava Willing of Philadelphia, lasted 10 years and produced two children.
But his second marriage, to Madeleine Force in 1911, caused a scandal. She was 18 at the time, and he was 46. To escape wagging tongues, the couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt (where they joined his friend Molly Brown). By the time they boarded Titanic, Madeleine was five months pregnant. "They wanted the baby born in America," says historian Don Lynch.
Astor mentioned his wife's "delicate condition" when asking an officer if he could take one of several empty seats in her lifeboat, but the officer refused. Astor took it like a gentleman. He lit a cigarette and tossed his gloves to his wife. Several days later his partly crushed, soot-stained body was found floating in the Atlantic with $2,500 in a pocket. Experts believe Astor may have been hit by a falling smokestack.
In the years that followed, Mrs. Astor, who was twice remarried and died in 1940, rarely spoke of the tragedy, except to recall her final memory: Kitty, on deck, pacing frantically. On Aug. 14, 1912, she named her newborn son, a future playboy, John Jacob Astor V.
MOLLY BROWN
Not even an iceberg could slow down this dynamo
On board Titanic, Brown (ca. 1900) was
shunned by some members of high society.
Mrs. J.J. Brown's 1912 tour of the Old World had been a smashing success. She bought antiquities in Egypt, hobnobbed with John Jacob Astor, one of the world's richest men, and visited her daughter, Catherine Ellen, at a Paris finishing school. Even after news of a sick relative cut short her stay, Brown was lucky enough, or so she thought, to book a ticket home on the finest ship afloat: Titanic.
The steamer went down, but not the "Unsinkable" -- as she came to be known -- Molly Brown. Loaded into lifeboat No. 6 (capacity:65) with 24 women and two men, Brown, in a black-velvet, two-piece suit, argued fiercely with Quartermaster Robert Hichens, who refused to return to the wreck site for fear survivors in the water would swamp the boat. To fight the bitter cold, Brown taught the other women to row and shared her sable coat. And when Hichens dismissed a flare fired by an approaching ship as a "shooting star," Brown threatened to throw him overboard (although not, as in the 1964 movie musical bearing her name, while waving a pistol). Once in command, she ordered the women to row to safety.
Brown had proved her mettle yet again. Born Margaret Tobin in Hannibal, Mo., in 1867, she left the poverty of her hometown behind and moved when she was 18 to the boomtown of Leadville, Colo., to find "work and a rich husband," says her great-granddaughter Muffet Brown, a Los Gatos, Calif., graphic designer. She met prospector James Brown, 13 years her senior, at a church picnic and married him in 1886 -- seven years before he struck gold at the Little Jonny Mine and began building his $5 million fortune.
Molly, though, couldn't abide being confined to their Denver mansion. She traveled, often with her son Lawrence, to Europe and mastered several languages before separating from James in 1909. After the ship sank (with 13 pairs of her shoes and a $325,000 necklace), Brown raised funds for poor survivors and fought for women's suffrage. But most of all, Brown, who died after a stroke in 1932, enjoyed her fame as the pluckiest of Edwardians. "Simple Brown luck," she said after the wreck. "We're unsinkable."
J. BRUCE ISMAY . . .
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he great ship sank
with a slight gulp, witnesses say.
It was early morning, April 15, 1912, 700 miles east of Halifax, Canada.
RMS
Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New
York
City, had sideswiped an iceberg 2 hours earlier, popping rivets and
buckling the hull's iron plates deep below the waterline.