Real-Life Stories From 'The Titanic'

J. BRUCE ISMAY
History would hold him responsible

People want someone to blame," notes Michael Manser, whose great-uncle, chairman of the company that owned Titanic, has filled that role in most accounts of the liner's last hours. No one will ever know whether Ismay, who sketched the first plans for Titanic on a dinner-party napkin, told Captain Smith to rev up the engines to arrive in New York early for publicity's sake -- as does the movie's Ismay. What's certain is that the chairman, then 49, escaped in one of the last lifeboats, leaving behind a shipload of passengers, his butler, his secretary and his reputation. "There were no more passengers on the deck," he insisted later. Rescued by Carpathia, Ismay spent the rest of the trip in seclusion.While he was not formally found culpable, he was savaged by the papers ("J. Brute Ismay," taunted one) and, some say, ostracized in London society. In 1913, Ismay stepped down as chairman of the White Star shipping line once owned by his father and later retired with his American wife, Julia Florence, to western Ireland, where he died of a stroke in 1937. Manser maintains Ismay acted honorably on Titanic and was anything but reclusive afterward. Still, he realizes that for most people Ismay remains a scapegoat. "It's nice," he says dryly, "to have a baddie in the films."

ISIDOR AND IDA STRAUS
Inseparable in life, then in death

Ida Straus refused at least two opportunities to escape the sinking Titanic, choosing instead to die with her husband of 41 years, a well-known philanthropist who owned Macy's department store. News that the couple had shared their fate came as no surprise to their six children and many friends. "When they were apart, they wrote to each other every day," says Joan Adler, director of the Straus Historical Society. "She called him `my darling papa.' He called her `my darling momma.' " For years they had even celebrated their different birthdays on the same day.

As the Titanic went down, Ida, 63, resisted the pleas of officers to climb into a lifeboat, insisting instead that her maid take her place and handing the young woman her fur coat. ("I won't need this anymore," she said). She was finally cajoled into boarding the second-to-last lifeboat, only to clamber out again as Isidor, 67, stepped away. Last seen clasped in an embrace, Ida and Isidor are memorialized in a Bronx cemetery with a monument inscribed, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."

DOUGLAS SPEDDEN
A life cut short for a boy with a bear

For 7-year-old Douglas Spedden, life was one big, if sometimes lonely, adventure. His parents -- Frederick, who had inherited a banking fortune, and Daisy, a shipping heiress -- spent much of the year traveling to exotic locales with their only child. But nothing could have prepared Douglas for what lay ahead as he boarded Titanic with his parents, a maid, his nanny and his best friend, a stuffed white bear named Polar.

An hour after Titanic struck the iceberg, the entire party escaped the ship in lifeboat No. 3. Clutching his stuffed bear, Polar, Douglas slept as Titanic went down. By the time he woke, the rising sun illuminated the icebergs around them. "Look at the beautiful North Pole," the boy cried, "with no Santa Claus on it!"

Back home in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., the family tried to put the disaster behind them. "The daily incidents, which once seemed of such importance," Daisy wrote in her diary, "dwindled into mere trivialities." Yet another tragedy awaited. In 1915, Douglas died in a car accident near the family's summer house in Maine.

Daisy and Frederick both died in old age, just a few years apart -- but that's not where their story ends. Several years ago a distant relative discovered a storybook Daisy had written for Douglas in 1913, recounting the Titanic voyage through the eyes of a little boy's toy. Since it was published in 1994, Polar the Titanic Bear has sold 250,000 copies, ensuring that the story of little Douglas Spedden -- like the tale of Titanic itself -- will live on.

Titanic raises Leonardo and Kate to new heights ....

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