Butt was clearly a gay man who was traveling with a friend whose surviving letters make clear that he had a long-standing love affair with a dashing European man. It’s impossible to read his story and not instantly spot a closeted gay man, and much to my relief Brewster does not indulge in the easy, discreet silence that an earlier generation of historians would have used. He was a Washington power broker, a famous man-about-town covered regularly in the media and so highly regarded that after the sinking all of DC waited anxiously for news of his fate.īutt – whose name would be the subject of much glee on The Daily Show and the Colbert Report today – was also a famous bachelor. The most interesting example (for me) was Archibald Butt, a top presidential aide first to Teddy Roosevelt and then President Taft, who was sailing home from visiting his sister in England to gear up for the coming election. I’m happy to say I was wrong.īrewster’s book illustrated the story with a very intimate, frank and 21st century perspective on the people who were onboard when the Titanic went down 100 years ago. While everyone knows the classic Titanic stories – The band playing until nearly the end, Ida Strauss giving up her seat in a lifeboat to die with her husband Isador and the profound irony of the world’s most famous new ship sinking on her first ocean crossing – I wondered if I hadn’t heard these tales too many times to find anything new. So it was with mixed feelings that I recently began, Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster.
I’ve also come to loathe the garish, sloppy retellings such as the wretched excesses in the 1979 movie that even Cloris Leachman as Molly Brown couldn’t salvage. I’ve even come to cherish the lesser-known Titanic dramas, like the subplot in the television classic, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” when Lady Marjorie becomes one of the few First Class women to go down with the ship. I’ve read many other books about the Titanic over the years and seen nearly every dramatic version of the story.
I was enraptured by the book, swept up in a story filled to bursting with so much pathos and irony. I was curious about a tragedy that I knew very little about, but that was apparently so profound that was still a part of popular culture decades later. I’d seen glimpses of the black and white movie of the same name and I had enough experience as a reader to know that I would learn a lot more in a book than by watching a film.
I was 11 years old when I saw Walter Lord’s classic book about the Titanic, A Night to Remember on the library stacks.
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