Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic by Daniel Allen Butler Page B

now been married four months, was at least four months pregnant. The gossipmongers were having a field day with the colonel—the scandal, of course, being over why Astor would divorce his wife to marry Madeline rather than simply making her his mistress—and it seemed doubtful if he would ever regain his former social standing. Now he was returning to New York with his new bride, after spending four months in Egypt and Paris, hoping that some of his former stature could be salvaged.
    In contrast, another passenger on board the Boat Train, Benjamin Guggenheim, would never have even considered such a socially hazardous idea as divorcing his wife for another woman. Not that he was any model of conservative respectability—after all, he had just finished an extended stay in Paris with his mistress, Madame Aubert, while Mrs. Guggenheim was in New York—but he knew how the game was played. The sexual hypocrisy of the upper classes in those days was astonishing: affairs and liaisons were almost commonplace, the only condition being that no matter how widespread the knowledge of the affair might be, it must never be publicly admitted, or as Vita Sackville-West put it, “Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected.”
    One of seven sons of Meyer Guggenheim, a Swiss who had moved to America before the Civil War, Benjamin and his brothers ran one of the most closely knit family enterprises in the United States, whose interests ranged from banking and finance to mining and smelting. Benjamin had taken a close interest in smelting, as new industries were demanding more specialized and refined metals than simple iron or steel. By investing heavily, Guggenheim had transformed the American smelting industry, with the result that all the other interests of the family became secondary. Whatever the details of his private life might be, Guggenheim was a gentle, soft-spoken man, whose quiet demeanor and pleasant appearance concealed a will of iron. Though neither harsh nor vindictive, Guggenheim was not a man to be crossed twice.
    Neither was Charles Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Railway. By nature, railroadmen—and especially American railroadmen—were a ruthless lot, and to be able to hold his own with the likes of J. P Morgan, E. H. Harriman, or James J. Hill, one had to have certain jugular instinct. A Canadian by birth, Charles Hays was as determined as any of them, building the Grand Trunk into the dominant railway around the Great Lakes, in the northern Midwest states, and in the Canadian provinces. He was looking to expand into the hotel business and had been studying firsthand management methods in Europe. Now he was returning to his native Canada to launch an entire chain of Grand Trunk-owned hotels.
    Rarely do characters—in every sense of the word—like Molly Brown come along. Geoffrey Marcus’s description of this remarkable woman is impossible to improve upon—he called her “the wife of the manager of a Leadville gold mine who had ‘struck it rich’ in 1894 and had thereafter prospered exceedingly. She was a middle-aged matron of Irish extraction, Amazonian proportions, and superabundant vitality.” Her one desire in life was to be accepted by the social elite of Denver, Colorado, the descendants of the so-called “Sacred Thirty Six,” but her rough-and-ready manner reminded the Denver socialites too much of their own origins, and they cut her mercilessly. (Admittedly, Molly’s faux pas could be memorable, as in the time she referred to herself as “the Hand-Made of the Lord.”) “The newly minted gentlemen had worked with pick and shovel on arrival,” commented Richard O’Connor, “and their ladies had bent over their washboards; but all that was crammed into a forgotten attic of the past.” 5
    Molly’s husband, James Joseph Brown, didn’t share his wife’s social ambitions, preferring to hold onto his working-class roots; eventually a gulf opened between them and they