Voyagers of the Titanic by Richard Davenport-Hines Page B

boycott of the reception he gave at his house on Fifth Avenue to introduce his bride to his friends, who also ignored the Astors in their box on the opening night of the new season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Faced with ostracism, they abandoned their planned charm offensive of dinners, dances, and balls, and wintered in France and Egypt. By April 1912 she was four months pregnant, and the Astors were returning to America for the confinement. They were elated at the pregnancy yet soberly set on their social rehabilitation. His retinue on the Titanic comprised his valet, Victor Robbins (altogether there were thirty-one personal maids or valets on board); his wife’s maid, Rosalie Bidois (from the Channel Islands); an American nurse, Caroline Endres, hired to care for her during the pregnancy; and his Airedale dog, Kitty.
    Apart from the Astors, there were at least six sets of honeymooners in first class. Daniel Warner Marvin, aged nineteen, son of the owner of the Biograph Cinema Company, was returning to America with his bride, Mary Farquarson, aged eighteen. Lucien P. Smith, aged twenty-four, of Huntington, West Virginia, had recently married eighteen-year-old Mary Eloise Hughes: she bore his posthumous son in December 1912. Victor de Satode Peñasco y Castellana, aged eighteen, from Madrid, was going to America with his new wife, Maria Josefa Perez de Soto y Valleja, aged seventeen. John P. Snyder, aged twenty-three, from Minneapolis, was returning from his European honeymoon with Nelle Stevenson, aged twenty-two. Dickinson Bishop, heir to the Round Oak Stove Company, had married in November 1911, and embarked at Cherbourg with his wife, Helen, after a tour of Mediterranean Europe and Egypt. One newly married couple were both verging on the age of fifty: Dr. Henry (or Hyman) Frauenthal, with a high-domed baldness and fulsome black beard, had married in France, as recently as March 26, Clara Heinsheimer from Cincinnati. They were traveling with his brother Gerry (or Isaac) Frauenthal, a New York lawyer.
    “The faster and bigger the ship, the less likely one is to speak to strangers,” Emily Post adumbrated in her Etiquette manual. “Because the Worldlys, the Oldnames, the Eminents—all those who are innately exclusive—never ‘pick up’ acquaintances on shipboard, it does not follow that no fashionable and well-born people ever drift into acquaintanceship on European-American steamers of to-day, but they are not apt to do so. Many in fact take the ocean-crossing as a rest-cure and stay in their cabins the whole voyage. The Worldlys always have their meals served in their own ‘drawing-room,’ and have their deck-chairs placed so that no one is very near them, and keep to themselves except when they invite friends to play bridge or take dinner or lunch with them.” 19 This gives an accurate picture of the Astors on the Titanic . One acquaintance to whom they were cordial was Margaret Brown. Colonel Astor had met her five years earlier in Lucerne, and they converged again in Cairo. From Egypt she traveled with them to Paris, and then, hearing that her infant grandson was lying sick in Kansas City, she determined to take an early boat home.
    Margaret Brown had been born in 1867 to Irish immigrants in a hovel in Denkler Alley, Hannibal, Missouri—a halt on the railroad to the California goldfields. Her father fired the coke furnaces in Hannibal’s gasworks. At the age of thirteen she began working with other Irishwomen in a tobacco factory—probably stripping tobacco leaves. Her brother Daniel had settled in the mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, where the Guggenheims had laid the basis of their fortune. At the age of eighteen she went west to Leadville, where she lived as Daniel’s cook-housekeeper. Next she worked in the carpet and drapery department of a Leadville store sewing carpets and draperies. In 1886 she married J. J. Brown, an Irishman from Pennsylvania who had worked as a miner in the Black