Voyagers of the Titanic by Richard Davenport-Hines Page A

umbrella, and overcoat with velvet collar. He had the consistency that comes from never being flurried, and that makes for calm, commanding dignity. His ends were reached with a distinctive mixture of reserve and subdued determination. “He knew what he wanted and how to get it,” according to the family lawyer, who extolled Astor’s “inexhaustible energy all through his life, which he lived in his own way, not in your way or mine, but his.” 16
    Jack Astor was the unchallenged owner of much of New York and did not need to shout for attention. In 1891 he had married Ava Willing, “quite the most beautiful woman in the world,” 17 but frigid and insolent. It was for her a worldly, showy marriage, but she had neither grace nor gratitude for her situation. Her guests at Ferncliff, the Astors’ country estate at Rhinebeck, were, like her, fanatical bridge players who spent their waking hours with eyes fixed on cards. “Their host, who detested bridge and was far more at home going at top-speed in his new racing-car . . . shambled from room to room, tall, loosely built and ungraceful, rather like a great overgrown colt, in a vain search for someone to talk to.” In the evenings he would dress immaculately for dinner and go downstairs to entertain his guests, only to find everyone scurrying upstairs for a hasty, last-minute change of clothes. “They would all be late, which annoyed him intensely, for he made a god of punctuality, and the probability of a spoilt dinner did not improve his temper, for he was a notable epicure. The house would come down to find him, watch in hand, constrained and irritable.” Dinner with his wife was uncomfortable. “Never a brilliant conversationalist, he would be wanting to discuss what Willie Vanderbilt’s new car was capable of doing, or whether the chef Oliver Belmont had brought back from France was really better than his own. Instead, he had to listen to interminable post mortems —‘You should have returned my lead . . . ’ ‘You should have played your queen . . .’” 18
    At the height of the Progressive Era this great slum landlord refused to ameliorate the conditions that his tenants were forced to endure. He opposed the development of northern Manhattan to alleviate the density of the slums, for his rental income would fall if the tenements were less congested. Working at a rolltop desk behind the barred windows of the Astor Estate Office—the window of his plain room looked across a small court to a blank brick wall—Astor was nevertheless at the forefront of developing New York City into a forest of skyscrapers. He was a builder of Titanic s on terra firma. The liner as floating luxury hotel owed much to his decision to build the Astoria half of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. This delivered a new concept in hotels: instead of corridors lined by bedrooms, to which weary travelers went to sleep, he devised something akin to a clubhouse, with an elegant bar, tea room, and lounges where businessmen met and made deals, and sportsmen slapped one another’s backs and bought rounds. For some of the Titanic ’s first-class passengers, the Astor hotels were home—and the ship rather like home with four funnels added. Ella White, when she was not in Europe or at her summer apartment at Briarcliffe Lodge, a sumptuous sham-medieval hotel in Westchester County, lived in the Waldorf-Astoria.
    For years Astor shuffled dejectedly in his wife’s chill shadow. He waited until the death of his mother before trying to settle terms for a divorce—finally achieved in 1909. Two years later he married Madeleine Force, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Brooklyn businessman. Life for the young bride promised to be like a never-empty box of chocolates, but was quickly knocked awry. Astor failed to realize that his riches, capacities, handsome gloss, and hale physique, added to the unspoiled beauty of his ductile child bride, would make the pus ooze from every envious sore. There was a