The Titanic Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,80

against Lightoller, will never be known.

Astor then assumed a casual, confident manner, lighting up a cigarette, tossing his gloves to his wife and assuring her that the sea was calm; saying, “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands,” adding that he would see her in the morning. He stepped away and receded onto the boat deck.

When older boys were being turned away by Lightoller from lifeboats as “men,” Astor impulsively grabbed a girl’s large hat off a nearby head and shoved it onto a boy’s, saying, “Well now he’s a girl,” gaining ten-year-old William Carter a seat and his life. One of his last acts, apparently, was to go to the kennels and let out all of the dogs there, including the Astors’ Airedale Kitty, whom Madeline Astor claimed to have seen, from her lifeboat, running about the boat deck as the ship was sinking.

Astor was seen at the railing with Archie Butt and others, but did not drown; his crushed, soot-covered remains, recovered, indicated he’d apparently been killed by the falling forward funnel. In the pockets of his blue serge suit were $2,400 in American money and smaller amounts in French and English currency.

Madeline Astor was granted the income of a five-million-dollar trust and various mansions, as long as she did not remarry; but she married again, anyway, having two more sons by elderly stockholder William Dick, and married yet again—after a divorce—in 1933, to an Italian prizefighter, divorcing him five years later, also. Presumably her son John Jacob V, who had his own five-million-dollar trust fund, saw to it his mother didn’t starve. She died in 1940, in Palm Beach, Florida—a suicide, according to some sources—rarely speaking of the tragedy, and younger than her husband had been when he died.

Henry B. Harris, ushering his wife René to where Lightoller was restricting seating on the collapsible D, was told his wife could come aboard, but that he could not. He said softly, “I know—I’ll stay,” bade her farewell, and stepped back into the crowd.

René sued White Star for a million dollars, receiving only $50,000 (the standard payoff for a First-Class death aboard the Titanic—steerage was a thousand dollars). Plucky as always, she bucked the standard sentiment that a woman could not be a theatrical producer, and had a long and prosperous run doing just that; for years she had hit plays running in her own theaters, living a life strewn with yachts, Central Park penthouses, various homes and various husbands (though always using only “Harris” as her surname). The stock-market crash of ’29 sank her finances, but not her spirits; when she died, penniless, in a one-room apartment in a welfare hotel, at age ninety-three in 1969, she was still (in the words of Walter Lord) “radiantly blissful.”

Wallace Hartley and his orchestra—the full eight members playing together for the first time on the deck of the sinking ship—performed until the ship went down. Some say the impromptu concert ended around half an hour before the final plunge; even if this is so, their cheery on-deck ragtime is an enduring legend, and fact, of the tragedy. Despite adamant opinions to the contrary, their last number probably was “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Actress Dorothy Gibson—one of the twenty-eight persons in boat number seven, capacity sixty-five—sailed the Titanic to fifteen minutes of fame. One month after the sinking, a moving picture starring and written by Miss Gibson—Saved from the Titanic, in which the silent-film star’s costume was the very dress she’d worn that memorable night—appeared in theaters to huge crowds. It was her last success. She married film distributor Jules Brulatour, divorcing two years later (with a hefty $10,000 a year in alimony), dying in obscurity in Paris in 1946.

Official records list John Bertram Crafton and Hugh Rood as having gone down with the ship; neither body was recovered by the MacKay Bennett.

One of the enduring mysteries of the night the Titanic sank is whether Alice Cleaver behaved as a heroine, or a villain. Hudson Allison had left the family’s C-deck suite to find out what exactly was wrong; soon his wife Bess was in mild hysterics, and Alice Cleaver seized up baby Trevor into her arms, wrapped the nightgowned child in a small fur blanket, and assured the boy’s mother that she would not let the child out of her arms much less her sight.

Alice then rushed out, apparently passing Hudson in the hallway; but the stunned parent seemed not to recognize either Alice or his boy. The nanny hurried