The Night Lives On (21 page)

She remained peppery to the end. By 1934 her business had fallen apart, and she was a faded old lady confined to a tiny house on Hampstead Heath. But when a New York correspondent, seeking an anniversary story, asked her if she had any regrets about the
Titanic
, she shot back: “Regrets? I have no regrets. The
Titanic
disaster made me and my fortune. Look at the tremendous amount of publicity it gave me…. When I opened my dress establishments in New York and Chicago, people mobbed the places. I made thousands and thousands of dollars.”

She did indeed make a lot of money, but it had nothing to do with the
Titanic.
World War I had closed the great couturier houses of Paris, and wartime austerity had overtaken London. The only people left with spendable money were the rich Americans, and they had no place to spend it. Lady Duff Gordon had the good sense to see this, and opened up new outlets in New York and Chicago. She prospered greatly for a while, but by the end of the war nobody had the kind of money her designs required (one of her dresses used 30 yards of silk at the hem), and the slim, boyish look of the 20’s spelled bankruptcy. Broke, but still defiant on the subject of the
Titanic
, she died in April 1935.

For Mrs. Henry B. Harris, the disaster led to a whole new life. “Henry B.,” as she always called her lost husband, had been one of Broadway’s most successful producers. But the money was current income, not the settled wealth of the Astors or Wideners. When he died, the dollars stopped. Hence her $1,000,000 claim for the loss of his “services.” When this was whittled down to $50,000, her prospects looked bleak, since it was
generally understood that women had no place in the business end of the theater.

But why not? Henry B. had often depended on her quick, intuitive mind. Moreover, she already had a theater—the choice Hudson on West 43rd Street. So she blazed a trail and became Broadway’s first woman producer.

She did very well at it too, backing good plays while developing such stars as Ina Claire and Charles Coburn. She also discovered the playwright Moss Hart and produced his first play,
The Beloved Bandit.
In his autobiography
Act One
, Hart painted a memorable picture of Renée Harris as an unquenchable optimist in the face of first-night disaster.

In World War I she turned her energies to the cause, and did yeoman service staging entertainments for the doughboys in France. General Pershing sent her a personal note of thanks, and she delightedly put it on her wall, where it hung incongruously with the more gushy tributes of other theater people.

The 20’s were all velvet. As the money rolled in, she picked up an apartment overlooking Central Park…a house in Florida…a camp in Maine… a yacht…and four more husbands. The latter were all just dalliances, she always insisted. Henry B. remained the only man who meant anything, and, in fact, she used the surname “Harris” for the rest of her life.

In 1929 she set off on a leisurely trip around the world…and then the roof fell in. The stock market crashed in October, and Renée Harris’s fortune vanished even faster than it had materialized. She hurried home, but it was too late. Everything, including the Hudson Theater, was gone. The last of her collection of antiques were auctioned off in 1931.

By 1940 she was reduced to a single room in a welfare hotel. There was nothing left except her sunny disposition. But this never failed her, and was her most striking characteristic when I interviewed her at the time of
A Night to Remember.

Seeking to find some happy reminder of the old days, I once brought her a little jar of caviar. After one taste she gently pushed it aside. I took this as a challenge and from time to time tried again. Always her response was the same: “You call
that
caviar?” she would ask with cheerful incredulity.

She liked to talk about the
Titanic
, and her shrewd theatrical eye caught all sorts of nuances. Poor as a church mouse but radiantly blissful, she died quietly in September 1969 at the age of 93.

Helen Churchill Candee was another
Titanic
survivor who managed to cope with adversity. “Our coterie,” as Colonel Gracie called her little circle of shipboard swains, was forever shattered: Colley, Kent, and Clinch Smith drowned; Gracie died from the after effects within nine months; only Hugh Woolner and Bjornstrom Steffanson survived. As far as can be determined, she was never again in touch with either of them.

Putting the past behind her, Mrs. Candee turned to the galleys of her new book on tapestry. Titled simply
The Tapestry Book
, it was published in 1913, receiving a fine review in the
Times.
During the 20’s she carved out a whole new career as a travel lecturer on exotic places. China and Southeast Asia were her specialties, and her book
Angkor, the Magnificent
earned her decorations from both the French government and the King of Cambodia. Nor did she just stick to sightseeing. As early as 1927 she was warning her listeners of the rising tide of anticolonialism in the area.

Through it all, she continued to charm everyone she met. She remained active until just before her death at the age of 90 in her summer home at York Harbor, Maine.

Many of the
Titanic
widows soon married again— another sign that the Victorian Age was over, with its interminable years of mourning and dripping black veils. Besides Renée Harris, the list included prominent names like Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Widener, and (a little later) Mrs. Ryerson. Among this group Mrs. Lucien P. Smith deserves special note. Her new husband was Robert Daniel, a fellow survivor whom she met on the
Carpathia.
The tennis player Karl Behr also married a survivor, but in his case it was no chance meeting. He had pursued Helen Newsom across the Atlantic and back.

Most survivors picked up pretty much where they left off, and one was back in business even before he reached dry land. Cardsharp and confidence man George Brayton had been in the
Titanic’s
smoking room stalking a prospective victim when the ship struck. He escaped in one of the starboard boats, and by the time the
Carpathia
docked in New York, he had already met and picked out a new pigeon.

Henry C. E. Stengel was a Newark, New Jersey, leather manufacturer, one of the two other passengers who had been in Boat 1 with the Duff Gordon party. Strolling the
Carpathia’s
deck on the second day after rescue, he noticed a man looking downcast, and politely inquired what was the matter. The man, who turned out to be George Brayton, explained that he had to get to Los Angeles but had lost all his money. Stengel advised him to ask the White Star Line to advance him his fare.

Nothing more was said at the moment, but shortly
after the
Carpathia
landed, Stengel received a phone call from Brayton reporting that White Star had come through, that he would be leaving soon for Los Angeles, and that he just wanted to thank Stengel for his interest. Pleased, Stengel asked Brayton to dinner at his home in Newark that night.

During the evening Brayton mentioned a big deal pending in New York, which would come to a head as soon as his brother-in-law, an executive with Western Union, got back from a trip to Mexico. Several weeks later Stengel received another phone call from Brayton, reporting that the brother-in-law was back and in a position to make some money. He’d like to cut Stengel in on the deal.

Stengel hurried to New York, where he, Brayton, and the brother-in-law ended up in a room at the Hotel Seville. Here the brother-in-law explained that he was in charge of the “RD” Department at Western Union. This was the department responsible for flashing the results of horse races, and he was in a position to withhold the results for at least eight minutes—allowing a wonderful opportunity to bet on a sure thing. It would cost Stengel just $1,000 to get in on the scheme.

Stengel later said that at this point he sailed into the brother-in-law, and when Brayton pleaded with him not to “squeal,” Stengel began punching him too. Finally, the scuffle ended, but by the time the police were called, the con men had slipped away.

George Brayton fades from the
Titanic
story at this point. With his collection of aliases, his deft moves, and his instinct for survival, it seems safe to assume that under some other name he continued plying his trade on the North Atlantic run.

Finally, what about the
Titanic’s
surviving officers? In view of their splendid discipline that last night—and their loyalty to White Star on the witness stand—one might suppose they enjoyed steady promotion, crowned by a command as their just reward.

It didn’t work out that way. No officer from the
Titanic
ever achieved his own command, no matter how brave or loyal he may have been. The White Star Line was determined to take no step that might remind the traveling public of its darkest hour.

Fifth Officer Lowe was appointed Third Officer on the
Medic
, a minor vessel on the Australian run—obviously a dead end. He served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, then retired to his native Wales. Fourth Officer Boxhall hung on through the merger of White Star and Cunard, but advancement in the 30’s was painfully slow. He finally retired as Chief Officer of the small Cunarder
Ausonia.
Third Officer Pitman decided his eyes weren’t good enough for a deck officer, shifted to the Purser’s Section, and spent the rest of his seagoing days shuffling paper.

Second Officer Lightoller also served in the Royal Navy during the first war. He returned to White Star after the Armistice and was made Chief Officer of the lumbering
Celtic.
For a while he had hopes of a transfer to the crack
Olympic,
but was passed over. He retired from the sea in the early 20’s and tried his hand (not too successfully) at everything from writing columns to raising chickens.

But the sea still ran in his blood. He designed and sailed his own yacht
Sundowner
and had a final taste of peril in 1940. He took
Sundowner
over to Dunkirk with the great fleet of “little ships,” and rescued 131 British
soldiers. At his best in the midst of disaster, he cheerfully wrote his brother-in-law several days later, “We’ve got our tails well up and are going to win no matter when or how.”

“S
HE’S GONE; THAT’S THE
last of her,” someone sighed in Boat 13 as the sea closed over the flagstaff on the
Titanic’s
stern. Actually, it was anything but the last of her. Figuratively, she would always be afloat, gripping the world’s imagination for years to come. Literally, she would be seen again 73 years later, thanks to the miracle of modern technology.

Men began dreaming up ways to find and raise the
Titanic
right from the start. In March 1914—less than two years after the disaster—a Denver architect named Charles Smith published a plan based on the use of electromagnets. These would be attached to a specially designed submarine, which would dive down from the
Titanic’s
radioed position, 41°46’N, 50°14’W. The steel hull of the liner would immediately attract the magnets, drawing the sub to the sunken vessel’s side. With the exact location of the ship now fixed, more electromagnets would be sent down and attached directly to her hull. Cables would run from these magnets to winches on a fleet of barges stationed above the wreck. At a given signal, the winches would all be wound up, pulling the
Titanic
to the surface.

Mr. Smith’s plan had a precise quality that was quite enticing. Surely, any inventor must have done his homework who said he would need exactly 162 men—no more, no less. But Smith also said he would need $1.5 million, and it was here that his scheme met a fate that would become all too familiar: nobody would put up the money.

Electromagnetism had much popular appeal in these primitive days before “high tech.” Another plan, which apparently never got farther than the Sunday-supplement pages, called for magnets to be fastened to the sunken
Titanic
and attached by cable to empty pontoons, rising above the hulk like a cluster of circus balloons. When enough pontoons had been added, presumably the ship would come popping up.

Two world wars, the carefree 20’s, and the depression 30’s put a temporary end to such schemes. No one had the time or inclination to dive on the
Titanic.
Not enough years had passed for legends to sprout about the supposed great treasure aboard the ship (some said diamonds, others gold), and perhaps most important, the “fascination factor” was low. Finding the
Titanic
would ultimately become a challenge like scaling Mount Everest—because it is there—but not yet.

The 50’s saw the first flicker of renewed interest. In July 1953 the British salvage vessel
Help
, on charter from the Admiralty to the salvage firm Risdon Beazley Ltd., slipped quietly out of Southampton Harbor and headed for the
Titanic’s
position. Here the
Help
began underwater blasting with heavy explosives. No one would say what she was up to, but she was equipped with deep-set telephoto cameras and remotely controlled retrieval gear. It seems likely that the operators hoped to
blow open the
Titanic’s
hull and search for some of the treasure rumored to be inside.

Nothing was found—not even a trace of the ship— but the
Help
was back next summer for another try. Again, nothing turned up, and this time Risdon Beazley Ltd. had enough. They vanish from the story.

The 60’s brought a dramatic surge of activity. It was a time of great technological advances. Men conquered space—even went to the moon—and there was a parallel, if less spectacular, leap forward in oceanography and our ability to explore the world beneath the sea. At the same time, the triumph of the jet plane as the norm in trans-Atlantic travel focused attention on that suddenly “endangered species,” the ocean liner…and this of course included the
Titanic.
Even the political and social climates seemed to contribute. It was a time of questioning values, and what could be more fascinating than peering closely at the symbols of a period when everyone seemed to know their place? The
Titanic
became an intriguing artifact of the smug little Edwardian world.