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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage
Hugh Brewster
The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World
Crown
April 2012
On Sale: March 27, 2012
352 pages
ISBN: 0307984702
EAN: 9780307984708
Kindle: B005BUG6NO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage takes us behind the
paneled doors of the Titanic’s elegant private suites
to present compelling, memorable portraits of her most
notable passengers. The intimate atmosphere onboard
history’s most famous ship is recreated as never before. The Titanic has often been called “an exquisite
microcosm of the Edwardian era,” but until now, her story
has not been presented as such. In Gilded Lives, Fatal
Voyage, historian Hugh Brewster seamlessly interweaves
personal narratives of the lost liner’s most fascinating
people with a haunting account of the fateful maiden
crossing. Employing scrupulous research and featuring 100
rarely-seen photographs, he accurately depicts the ship’s
brief life and tragic denouement, presenting the very latest
thinking on everything from when and how the lifeboats were
loaded to the last tune played by the orchestra. Yet here
too is a convincing evocation of the table talk at the
famous Widener dinner party held in the Ritz Restaurant on
the last night. And here we also experience the rustle of
elegant undergarments as first-class ladies proceed down the
grand staircase in their soigné evening gowns, some of them
designed by Lady Duff Gordon, the celebrated couterière, who
was also on board. Another well-known passenger was the artist Frank Millet,
who led an astonishing life that seemed to encapsulate
America’s Gilded Age—from serving as a drummer boy in the
Civil War to being the man who made Chicago’s White City
white for the 1893 World Exposition. His traveling companion
Major Archibald Butt was President Taft’s closest aide and
was returning home for a grueling fall election campaign
that his boss was expected to lose. Today, both of these
once-famous men are almost forgotten, but their ship-mate
Margaret Tobin Brown lives on as “the Unsinkable Molly
Brown,” a name that she was never called during her lifetime. Millionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim,
writer Helen Churchill Candee, movie actress Dorothy Gibson,
aristocrat Noelle, the Countess of Rothes, and a host of
other travelers on this fateful crossing are also vividly
brought to life within these pages. Through them, we gain
insight into the arts, politics, culture, and sexual mores
of a world both distant and near to our own. And with them,
we gather on the Titanic’s sloping deck on that cold,
starlit night and observe their all-too-human reactions as
the disaster unfolds. More than ever, we ask ourselves,
“What would we have done?”
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