Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (6 page)

(photo credit 1.61)

On stepping into the
Titanic
’s first-class reception room, Edith Rosenbaum instantly felt uneasy.
(photo credit 1.70)

N
orris Williams would never forget his first view inside the
Titanic
, He remembered stepping into a white-paneled vestibule with a black-and-white-patterned floor that appeared at first to be solid marble, though he soon realized it wasn’t. Yet he found the entrance foyer to be so imposing, and so unlike anything he had ever seen on a ship, that it gave him, in his words, “
a very distinct start.” Edith Rosenbaum had an even stronger reaction. On setting foot inside the
Titanic
she immediately decided that she wanted to go back to Cherbourg. She asked Nicholas Martin, the White Star agent who had come out on the tender with the passengers, about the possibility of locating her luggage. “
All right, take another boat,” she recalled Martin saying, “but your baggage must remain.” When Edith inquired about insurance for it, he replied, “Ridiculous, this ship is unsinkable.” Edith thought of the expensive gowns she was taking to New York and concluded, “My luggage is worth more to me than I am, so I better remain with it,” and decided to stay.

Arriving on the
Titanic
was also unforgettable for Ella White. A wealthy widow from New York, the short, stout, and rather pug-faced Mrs. White suffered from leg trouble and had fallen and twisted her ankle on the swaying gangway. The ship’s doctor was quickly summoned to the reception room, and Mrs. White was then helped by her chauffeur and maid to a C-deck cabin, where she would spend the rest of the voyage. From there, she would occasionally dispatch her younger, slimmer companion, Marie Young, to check on the two prized French roosters and two hens that they had purchased for the farm at her Westchester estate. The poultry were housed near the
Titanic
’s galleys, and several passengers would report the curious sound of roosters crowing on the ship.

Inside the richly carpeted reception room, uniformed stewards awaited to guide the Cherbourg passengers to their rooms. “
At the entrance there were like 50 butlers,” an Argentinian businessman noted in a letter sent the next day. The
Titanic
’s first-class reception room was actually a large, U-shaped hallway that encompassed the curved balustrades of the grand staircase landing and the entrance to the first-class dining saloon. But it was also one of the most popular public rooms on the ship, where passengers gathered before dinner and met for coffee afterward while the orchestra played. It was known as the Palm Room due to its cozy groupings of wicker chairs and tables set amid potted plants in fashionable Palm Court style. White-paneled walls with arched leaded windows and a ceiling with Jacobean-styled plasterwork helped complete the theme, as did a string and piano quintet that regularly played tunes reminiscent of a Palm Court orchestra.

On stepping into this convivial scene, the weary Cherbourg passengers may have felt like latecomers to a party. For the grieving Ryersons it must have seemed incongruous. White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay greeted Arthur Ryerson and his family and insisted on providing them with an extra stateroom to the two they had already booked and arranging for the services of a personal steward. Ismay no doubt chose also to greet John Jacob Astor and his party upon their arrival. Astor and Ismay make an interesting pairing since they were curiously similar men. Both were tall, dark, late fortyish, and generously mustached; both were scions of prominent families and had inherited their positions in life; each is remembered as having an aloof and sometimes brusque manner, a likely cover for shyness. Did Astor pull out his gold watch to remind Ismay of the late hour of their boarding? One can imagine Ismay casually responding that the
Titanic
had been held up by another liner swinging into her path while leaving Southampton—all regrettable but quite unavoidable.

In reality, the incident in Southampton harbor earlier that day could have been rather more serious. Just after noon, as the tugs had begun to move the
Titanic
away from Ocean Dock and down the narrow channel, they approached two smaller steamers, the
Oceanic
and the
New York
, moored together farther down the pier. Due to water displacement caused by the passing of the huge new liner, the
New York
’s steel mooring cables had “
snapped like thread” with “cracks like pistol shots” in the words of
Titanic
passenger Francis Browne, and her stern had swung out toward the
Titanic
. Browne, a keen photographer, had leaned over the railing of the boat deck with his camera at arm’s length to capture the
New York
’s stern coming within four feet of the
Titanic
. “
A voice beside me said, ‘Now for a crash’ and I snapped my shutter,” he recalled. Browne then quickly dashed farther aft, “only to see the black hull of the
New York
slide gently past.” A sudden burst of water from the
Titanic
’s port propeller following a “Full Astern!” order from the bridge had avoided the predicted crash—though only narrowly. Tugboats attached lines to the
New York
and pulled her away to moor elsewhere, but the near collision delayed the
Titanic
’s departure by an hour or more.

At luncheon afterward there had been much discussion of the recent excitement, with some passengers wondering aloud if passenger ships had just become too big, while others noted that this was an unfortunate omen for a maiden voyage. By late afternoon, however, the talk was all about the size and splendor of the new liner as passengers trooped up and down the grand staircase exploring her decks and public rooms. “You would never imagine you were on board a ship” was a much-overheard comment. That evening Frank Millet, too, became caught up in the general enthusiasm and wrote to Alfred Parsons the next morning that being on the
Titanic
was “not a bit like going to sea. You can have no idea of the spaciousness of this ship.… She has everything but taxicabs and theatres.”

Bruce Ismay would not have delayed the Astors for long given Madeleine’s weakened condition, and as they were escorted to their large and elegant suite on C deck,
Titanic
stewardess Violet Jessop managed to catch her first glimpse of Madeleine Astor. “
Instead of the radiant woman of my imagination, one who had succeeded in overcoming much opposition and marrying the man she wanted,” she later wrote, “I saw a quiet, pale, sad-faced, in fact, dull young woman arrive listlessly on the arm of her husband, apparently indifferent to everything about her.”

Clearly, Madeleine Astor was feeling the effects of her pregnancy and a long day’s journey. Violet penned an even more unflattering depiction of a wealthy American matron coming on board but discreetly used the pseudonym “Mrs. Klapton.”

My heart sank as Mrs. Cyrus Klapton, clutching her pet Pekinese, bore down towards my section followed by a downcast maid. She had invariably reduced each successive maid to submission ere she boarded the ship. Although in many ways my job was not that prestigious, I could consider myself lucky when I looked at that maid and saw what her position had done to her.

It is suspected that Violet Jessop’s moneyed dragon is based on Charlotte Drake Cardeza, a Philadelphia heiress who had booked an even grander suite than the Astors and arrived on board with even more luggage. Her fourteen steamer trunks, four suitcases, and three packing crates contained seventy dresses, ten fur coats, eighty-four pairs of gloves, and thirty-two pairs of shoes as well as feather boas, parasols, ermine muffs, and ivory hair combs. In her jewel case was a diamond and Burmese ruby ring worth $14,000 ($300,000 today) as well as a seven-carat pink diamond from Tiffany’s worth $20,000 ($450,000 today). Mrs. Cardeza had booked one of the two ultra-deluxe B-deck parlor suites, each of which had a sitting room with a marble fireplace and a private fifty-foot promenade deck decorated with greenery and Tudor-style woodwork. (The other deluxe parlor suite had been booked by J. P. Morgan but was now occupied by J. Bruce Ismay.) Charlotte Cardeza was on her way home to Montebello, her walled stone mansion in the fashionable Main Line town of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Yet she apparently did not mingle much in Philadelphia society. The short and stocky fifty-eight-year-old widow was happiest hunting big game and had, for a time, owned her own steam yacht, the
Eleanor
, which was large enough to take her to Africa for yearly safaris. Her son, thirty-six-year-old Thomas, who had been living in a hunting lodge in Hungary, was returning home with her for medical treatment. Charlotte may have thought that relaxing in seclusion on their private promenade deck would be good for her son’s health, but Thomas would instead use it as a place to host floating poker games.

Charlotte Cardeza and her son, Thomas, on board her yacht, the
Eleanor
(photo credit 1.82)

Although Charlotte Cardeza seems another likely candidate for Frank Millet’s “obnoxious, ostentatious” category, she was not one of those women he observed carrying tiny dogs, despite Violet Jessop’s portrayal of “Mrs. Klapton” toting a Pekingese. But Myra Harper, the wife of Henry Sleeper Harper of the New York publishing family, did carry a Pekingese, topically named Sun Yat-sen, for the new president of China. Another lapdog called Frou Frou was carried by newlywed Helen Bishop, aged nineteen, who was returning to Dowagiac, Michigan, after a four-month honeymoon trip with her husband, Dickinson Bishop, who was twenty-five. And a Pomeranian belonging to Elizabeth Rothschild, and her husband, Martin, a New York clothing manufacturer, could also have caught Frank Millet’s eye as he waited on the tender.

Though Millet admired the
Titanic
’s spacious staterooms, the small inner cabin that he had booked down on E deck was not one of them. Frank was a frugal Yankee who, as a rule, did not like to spend much money on shipboard accommodations. Yet with empty first-class staterooms available, a number of passengers managed to trade up to better rooms and Frank may have been among them. Norris Williams and his father were quite content with their two-berth cabin and found it to be larger than they had expected. Norris immediately began describing it in a quickly jotted letter to his mother that he sent back on the tender to Cherbourg. “
Of course there is room after room—smoking-reading-lounge-palm room,” he noted, “you can imagine that there are many other rooms but as we have only been on board about 10 minutes … we have not been able to see everything.”

Edith Rosenbaum was impressed by her luxurious stateroom on A deck and pleased that she could store some luggage in an empty cabin opposite. On her way down to dinner she couldn’t help being impressed by the size and luxury of the
Titanic
’s public rooms that to her seemed larger than those in most Parisian grand hotels. Yet in a letter sent to her secretary the next morning, she complained, “
It is a monster, and I can’t say I like it, as I feel as though I were in a big hotel, instead of on a cozy ship.” In signing off, she wrote, “I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble. How I wish it were over!”