Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche, his wife Juliette Marie Louise Lafargue and their daughters, Simonne, born on February 19, 1909, and Marie Louise, on July 2, 1910.
Richard Sturges: You crazy woman. You're talking about the most important thing in my life. I have plans for Norman.
Julia Sturges: What plans? That he should grow up to be you?
Richard Sturges: Possibly. I'm satisfied. Is it so extraordinary that I should want to have some hint, some portion of myself survive?
Julia Sturges: Some portion of... Oh yes, I forgot, the best dressed man of his day. That's what they're going to put on your tombstone. Well, that may be all right for you, but I won't have it for Norman. He stays with me!Julia Sturges: Before you go down and eat and drink, you'd better know how things are going to be. I've given up on Annette. Her standards will always be the chic club, the best table, the royal enclosure, and that's her decision. She's almost of age. But, Norman is still a child. I'm not taking any chances with him. He stays in America.
Richard Sturges: Now wait a minute, Julia. What is this all about?
Julia Sturges: I should think it would be perfectly clear. I'm not going to see Norman thrown away. He stays with me. And if you try to interfere, I'll be as common as you think I am! I'll fight you tooth and nail! I'll take you to the courts!
Richard Sturges: [closing the cabin door] Could you be common in a slightly lower voice.
Julia Sturges: I'll say it in any tone you want! I'll whisper it. I'll write it down, but that's the way it's going to be! He stays with me!
Richard Sturges: [after Richard and Julia have been quarreling over who will have custody of their son] My dear Julia, I've been around enough bridge tables to recognize someone who's holding a high trump - play it now if you will.
Julia Sturges: We'll discuss it later.
Richard Sturges: Now!
Julia Sturges: All right, Richard. One question first?
Richard Sturges: If it's about Norman, you know the answer. No court in the world, no power in the heavens can force me to give up my son.
Julia Sturges: He is not your son.
Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche.
A second-class stateroom.
Stanley J. May, his sister Lily Odell, their brother Richard May and nephew Jack Dudley Odell strolling on deck.
April 11, 1912: Author Jacques Futrelle smiles from the boat deck.
A Titanic dog show.
A Broadway star and movie actress, Dorothy Gibson was also a fine singer and dancer.
Father of art patron Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim, Benjamin Guggenheim, the fifth of mining operator Meyer Guggenheim 7 sons, had shrewedly married Florette Seligman, daughter of James Seligman, a senior partner in the firm J & W Seligman. The Guggenheims who had 2 daughters in addition to Peggy, were nonetheless not happy. Consequentially, he was traveling with his French mistress and not his wife. As a final beau geste, Guggenheim, accompanied by his valet, hastily changed back into the evening clothes they'd recently taken off to retire. "Tell my wife that we behaved like gentlemen", he said to a passenger who survived.
German immigrants, Isidor and Ida Straus refused to be parted, or to enter a lifeboat together. When the co-owner of the Macy's department store served as a U. S. representative, the devoted couple had written one another daily.
Sister of notorious romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff Gordon, was a leading fashion designer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, best known by her professional name "Lucile". After Charles Frederick Worth, she was Britain's first designer to achieve international renown, as the innovator of the "mannequin parade", a precursor to the modern fashion show, liberating slit skirts and alluring, pared-down lingerie.
Famous in Titanic lore for insistence that a steward retrieve her 'lucky' pig, which played a tune when the tail was wound, Miss Edith Louise Rosenbaum, 33, was better known as Edith Russell. She was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio. A journalist reporting on French fashions for Woman's Wear Daily, returning home to New York, she had booked two first-class staterooms. One was meant merely to hold all her new Paris clothes! Enroute she wrote to her secretary back in Paris.
My Dear Mr Shaw:
This is the most wonderful boat you can think of. In length it would reach from the corner of the Rue de la Paix to about the Rue de Rivoli.Everything imaginable: swimming pool, Turkish bath, gymnasium, squash courts, cafes, tea gardens, smoking rooms, a lounge bigger than the Grand Hotel Lounge; huge drawing rooms, and bed rooms larger than in the average Paris hotel. It is a monster, and I can't say I like it, as I feel as if I were in a big hotel, instead of on a cozy ship; everyone is so stiff and formal. There are hundreds of help, bell boys, stewards, stewardesses and lifts. To say that it is wonderful, is unquestionable, but not the cozy ship-board feeling of former years. We are now off Queenstown. I just hate to leave Paris and will be jolly glad to get back again. Am going to take my very much needed rest on this trip, but I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble.How I wish it were over!
Yours sincerely, Edith
With mixed results, Margaret Tobin Brown, Mrs. James Joseph Brown of Leadville and Denver, Colorado, aspired to social succces as a great hostes. Directly as a result of Titanic's sinking, she gained her greatest acclaim after it the public learned how she had exhorted the crew of Lifeboat No. 6 to return to where the ship had sunk to look for survivors. Dubbed afterward, 'the Unsinkable Molly Brown', in fact, during her lifetime, she was not ever called Molly. Devoting herself to fund-raising for causes like education and women's rights, even taking up acting, to friends she was always Maggie Brown.
Heir to a British textile fortune, widowed Charlotte Wardle Drake Cardeza, lived at Germantown, Pennsylvania with her only child. In 1912 she and her son were, returning from a safari in Africa and a visit to Thomas Drake Martinez Cardeza's hunting reserve in Hungary. The Cardezas and their servants all survived the shipwreck. Not so their possessions, which included a jewel chest, 14 trunks, 4 suitcases and 3 crates of baggage, valued at £36,567. 2s.
Thomas Drake Martinez Cardeza, who married a descendant of Jean Racine, had no children, leaving $5-million for medical research. Showing above his waistcoat, he wears a 'slip'. Could the salvaged spectacles below have been a spare pair?
George Dunton Widener who married his father's partner's daughter, Eleanor Elkins, was heir to the Fidelity Trust Company of Philadelphia, the bank that controlled the owners of the White Star Line. He also owned a street-car line.
Today, they are never worn, except by a few dedicated sartorial traditionalist, where once, they were an indicator of distinction. So one of the minor faults of Downton Abbey, which starts with the Titanic's sinking, is the absence of men's slips. These were a flourishing, but utterly plain, edging of white linen, attached inside the waistcoats of the most fastidious, from the 1890's up to 1939.
Initially, slips were actual under-waistcoats extending above the outer one, to provide the wearer with an added contrasting flourish.
Magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan, depicted by Sorolla, shown wearing a slip.
President William Howard Taft wearing a slip.
Col. John Jacob Astor who perished with the Titanic, wearing a slip.
A bibliophile of discernment, Harry Elkins Widener became a some-what popular businessman as well. It was as a collector that he'd gone to England, accompanied by his dotting parents, to purchase new rarities.
With the loss of her husband and their favorite child, Eleanor Elkins Widener devoted her life to charitable work. As her lifeboat was lowered she had witnessed an officer shooting himself in the head and the entire tragedy was a trial she fought hard to overcome. One of the first things she felt duty-bound to do, was to see to completion the Newport house she had planned with her husband. As her son has loved rare books, she contributed funds to help build Harvard's Harry Elkins Widener Library. Both structures were designed by Horace Trumbauer. At the library opening in 1915, Eleanor Widener met geographer Dr. Alexander Rice, whom she later married.
1916: Miramar, Newport, Rhode Island.
Harvard's Harry Elkins Widener Library.
Perhaps one of the Wideners was wearing these recovered links and studs?
By all accounts, those crossing on Titanic in first-class, whatever their circumstance or background, were having a wonderful time on the newest biggest most marvelous floating palace ever known. As day passed into night, as one day succeeded the next, the myriad pleasures planned for their expressed amusement had piled delight upon delight. And then there was the fourth day. Dinner was scrumptious, it was the best day so far, many thought. At its close, whether sipping after-dinner coffee in the lounge, drinking excellent brandy at the bridge table, strolling one last time along the deck or already settled contentedly in their warm and cosy beds, every privileged passengers aboard RMS Titanic the night of April 14, 1912 was speeding on a course for a apointment with another reality. It was a harsh rekoning of a type most had never previously experienced.
For the moment, all was calm, even the sea. So the laughter and joy had continued and the great ship hurried along. But, by and by, time and for some, luck and good living too, would run out at last. The ordeal, the agony the plight of many, for all the vast resources ordinarily at their command, now would be little different from that of a Haitian man, a man despied for being black. That trapped feeling most blacks know, that one is damned, whatever one does or doesn't do, they knew that night too. The reversal was profound, such that long afterward, nothing exactly, ever again, would seem quite the same ...To be continued!
Harry Widener was an interesting individual. He was 27, unmarried, reticent in manner, devoted to his mother, keen on dramatics, fascinated by costumes, obsessively discerning about his books and his appearance, and enjoyed the company of older men. Beneath the stark neatness of the severe centre-parting, he has a soft and dreamy face and sensitive expression. Fastidiously groomed, not a hair is out of place, his suits are immaculate, his neat neckties knotted at just the right angle and his studs and links would no doubt have been perfect. There seems little doubt from all of this that Harry Widener was gay. In those days it was probably apparent but unspoken. His doting parents must have been disappointed that at his age there was no sign of him continuing the family line. He was so wealthy by inheritance he had no real need to work but could live the life of a dilettante bibliophile. He enjoyed this life of privilege to the end, happy with the books he collected, stylish in his luxurious evening suit, enjoying a gourmet dinner, retiring to the smoking room in the male only company of some of his friends, savouring a drink and cigar and playing a round of bridge whist. Then suddenly this comfortable life was shattered. His body was not even recovered. His book collection lived on after him in the eponymous Harry Elkins Widener Library at Harvard, but was there a young man somewhere mourning a lost love or was that the role of his grieving mother?
Posted by: Specks | 07/05/2022 at 11:55 AM
It was not just older men like George Widener, Thomas Cardenas and John Jacob Astor who wore slips with their waistcoats. Also on Titanic was the wealthy 24 year old Spanish dandy Victor Peñasco who had an impressive collection of suits. A photograph of the young man in an elegant lounge suit with his cane and derby hat she’s a slip under his waistcoat.
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2022/6/18500355_7914f23e-ee01-448d-b0a2-36bc9c101ce3.jpeg?v=1641508913
Peñasco was a fashionable young man who was said to have perfected his grasp of English on visits to his London tailors. He was on an extended honeymoon when he boarded Titanic. He was immaculate in his tuxedo when he faced a watery grave. Like Harry Widener, his body was never recovered. His bespoke tuxedo-style smoking suit was kept by his family and is now a memorial to him.
https://kevinbrownhistorian.wordpress.com/2022/01/07/a-dandy-on-the-titanic/
Young Widener collected books, Peñasco collected suits. Both are remembered for their prized possessions.
Posted by: Phil | 01/01/2023 at 01:21 PM
PHIL, SPECS, Forgive me, I’m just seeing this. I did. Not know of your fastidious Fashion plate before, but I certainly in no way wished to imply that the gentlemen I noted Aline wore Slips! Why today, HM King Charles lll does. More rarely, so do his sons and a few Relations. Thank you for your adroit comments and again, forgive my tardy response..,
Michael Henry Adams
Posted by: Michael Henry Adams, Style and Taste! | 04/08/2023 at 02:58 AM