Book Review: Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster
Book Review by Bud Gundy
I was 11 years old when I saw Walter Lord’s classic book about the Titanic, A Night to Remember on the library stacks. I’d seen glimpses of the black and white movie of the same name and I had enough experience as a reader to know that I would learn a lot more in a book than by watching a film. I was curious about a tragedy that I knew very little about, but that was apparently so profound that was still a part of popular culture decades later.
I was enraptured by the book, swept up in a story filled to
bursting with so much pathos and irony.
I’ve read many other books about the Titanic over the years and seen
nearly every dramatic version of the story. I’ve even come to cherish the lesser-known Titanic dramas,
like the subplot in the television classic, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” when Lady
Marjorie becomes one of the few First Class women to go down with the ship.
I’ve also come to loathe the garish, sloppy retellings such as the wretched
excesses in the 1979 movie that even Cloris Leachman as Molly Brown couldn’t
salvage.
So it was with mixed feelings that I recently began, Gilded
Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World
by Hugh Brewster. While everyone
knows the classic Titanic stories – The band playing until nearly the end, Ida
Strauss giving up her seat in a lifeboat to die with her husband Isador and the
profound irony of the world’s most famous new ship sinking on her first ocean
crossing – I wondered if I hadn’t heard these tales too many times to find
anything new. I’m happy to
say I was wrong.
Brewster’s book illustrated the story with a very intimate,
frank and 21st century perspective on the people who were onboard
when the Titanic went down 100 years ago.
The most interesting example (for me) was Archibald Butt, a
top presidential aide first to Teddy Roosevelt and then President Taft, who was
sailing home from visiting his sister in England to gear up for the coming
election. He was a Washington
power broker, a famous man-about-town covered regularly in the media and so
highly regarded that after the sinking all of DC waited anxiously for news of
his fate.
Butt – whose name would be the subject of much glee on The
Daily Show and the Colbert Report today – was also a famous bachelor. It’s impossible to read his story and
not instantly spot a closeted gay man, and much to my relief Brewster does not
indulge in the easy, discreet silence that an earlier generation of historians
would have used. Butt was clearly
a gay man who was traveling with a friend whose surviving letters make clear
that he had a long-standing love affair with a dashing European man.
There was also a trio of men known to High Society as “The
Three Amigos,” wealthy bachelors who were well known for always traveling
together and never, oddly *cough*cough* with
female companions.
Brewster’s ease with the obvious truths about these men gave
the Titanic story a refreshingly contemporary perspective. It’s an unblinking style that gives new
insight to many of the Titanic legends.
While the lifeboat order of “women and children first” has been used even
recently to bemoan lost chivalry, a surviving woman testified just days after
the sinking that in her opinion these actions were largely misunderstood. At the time the lifeboats were being
filled, she said, the men had no idea that the ship would actually sink, and
she wondered how the story would have played out if everyone had understood what
was about to happen. As it was, it
was only after most of the lifeboats had been launched that many of those
remaining on deck realized that they would not be rescued.
The image of selfless men silently accepting their deaths to
allow weak, hysterical women to survive was also irresistible to certain
editorial writers of the day, who used the emotionally-laden heroism to rail
against the suffragette movement.
Women who wanted to vote, they argued, didn’t understand the natural
order of the universe and that men had only the protection of women uppermost
in their minds. Insights like this
give us a glimpse into the durability of the reactionary mind, but knowing that
they failed is also a source of inspiration.
Also on this topic – I knew the famous stories of how the
wealthy male survivors - Lord Cosmo Duff Gordon and the White Star Line’s
president J. Bruce Ismay chief among them – were forever stained as
cowards. But I knew nothing of the
Japanese passenger who went down with the ship but was rescued by a lifeboat
off a floating door. Given the
hatred and vitriol showered on him by his countrymen afterwards, you wonder if
he wouldn’t have done better to perish in the open ocean. Many of the male survivors suffered
similar fates.
Brewster’s account of the sinking and the hours the
survivors spent in the lifeboats was also comprehensive and wrenching, worth
the read all by themselves. He
also illustrated the actions of Molly Brown in greater detail than I’ve read
before, and I was moved by the way she raised funds for the surviving Third
Class passengers even as the Carpathia steamed for New York, and remained on
the rescue ship after it docked and the other First Class passengers had fled
to fancy hotels. She stayed
behind, sleeping on a bench, until every surviving Third Class passenger’s
information had been collected so that they could receive payments through the
Titanic Survivors Relief Fund that she organized.
Brewster ends his book with brief accounts of how many of
the survivors lived out the rest of their lives. It’s a shock to read of those who died only months later in
car accidents or from disease, and I was startled to see how many of those in
the lifeboats were still alive when I was born in 1963.
The Titanic has become an all-purpose morality tale for
anyone of any philosophical outlook.
It’s also an easy way for storytellers to instantly add intense drama to
their tales. I recently saw James
Cameron’s 3D version of “Titanic” at the theater, and while the special effects
added nothing new to the movie, I was surprised at my reaction this time. The first time around, I thought it was
an unbearably saccharine love story enlivened by a brilliant visual record of
the sinking. Fourteen years later,
the love story resonated with more force and the sinking was just as
powerful. Brewster’s book also
provoked a powerful emotional reaction, enriched by a fresh perspective glossed with contemporary sensibilities.
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