Authors: Greg King
When Alfred Pope died in 1913, he left an estate valued at some $5.5 million, not including his real estate and art collection.
(
20
)
She used her inheritance to provide James Hyslop with an assistant, twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate Edwin Friend, who had studied classics and philosophy both in America and in Berlin.
(
21
)
Theodate was drawn to the young man “endowed so richly in heart and mind,” and to his wife, Marjorie, and provided them with housing on the Hill-Stead estate.
(
22
)
At her prompting, Friend became editor of the society’s journal, with an annual salary of $2,000. Soon, he began to ignore Hyslop’s articles in favor of his own, writing about séances and how his wife allegedly communicated with the dead. An infuriated Hyslop removed Friend as editor; shortly thereafter, both Friend and Theodate resigned from the society.
(
23
)
In the spring of 1915, she decided to form a new American psychical society, and sail with Friend to England to obtain the backing of Sir Oliver Lodge and other English spiritualists.
(
24
)
They booked passage on
Lusitania:
Theodate traveled with her maid, Emily Robinson, but Friend was forced to leave his pregnant wife behind.
(
25
)
Now, assured of what she hoped would be a peaceful night’s sleep, Theodate pondered the voyage. She was nervous: the crossing itself seemed fraught with potential danger and, on top of it, the German warning was too ominous to simply laugh off. She thought that many others aboard
Lusitania
shared her anxiety, noting, “We were a very quiet shipload.” Hoping to take her mind off her own worries, she asked Friend to read aloud to her from Henri Bergson’s
Matière et Mémoire
. This, she thought, “illustrated so wonderfully some of the common difficulties in communication.” As she listened, Theodate “marveled to myself that such a man as Mr. Friend had been found to carry on the investigations. I felt very deeply the quality of my respect and admiration for him.”
(
26
)
A steady rhythm of marching feet interrupted the Sunday morning quiet of
Lusitania
’s Boat Deck. Staff Captain Anderson led a contingent of officers and officials up and down, in and out, and back and forth as they inspected the liner deck by deck. Public rooms, staterooms, bathrooms, galleys, engine rooms, storage rooms, and crew quarters had to be clean, neat, and in good order, ready for any potential emergency. It was Cunard tradition.
(
27
)
Passengers and crew would have been better served had Cunard paid less attention to tidiness and more to their lifeboat drills. The
Titanic
disaster had at least ensured that a liner like
Lusitania
now carried enough lifeboats to hold everyone aboard. They stood ranged down the length of the Boat Deck, eleven to each side, capable of holding 1,322 people within their wooden hulls; twenty-six collapsible lifeboats with wooden keels and canvas sides, fitted beneath them and set in cradles on deck, could carry another 1,238 passengers.
(
28
)
At eleven every morning,
Lusitania
’s sailors conducted a boat drill. Two short whistles summoned ten members of the deck crew to muster. At a signal, they climbed into a single boat, hoisted the oars, and sat down. In a few seconds, they stood back up, replaced the oars, and climbed back down onto the deck. None of the falls—the ropes holding the boats to their individual davits—were checked or tested, none of the boats were raised or lowered, and no passengers were involved.
(
29
)
For Captain Turner and the Cunard Line, this passed for a competent boat drill. The Royal Navy had taken the best sailors for the war;
Lusitania
had to make do with a haphazard crew of seamen, picked up here and there. Training had been minimal; Turner even complained that the men weren’t proficient in handling the lifeboats.
(
30
)
As master of
Lusitania,
he was responsible for the 1,965 souls aboard his ship. A passenger liner had been torpedoed just a month earlier; he was taking
Lusitania
into a declared war zone; the German government had warned passengers with its newspaper notice. Yet Turner did nothing to rectify this lack of training. There were no extra drills, there was no additional practice for the sailors, and no attempt was made to advise passengers what to do if the ship should meet with tragedy.
These drills did nothing to calm
Lusitania
’s anxious travelers. Michael Byrne, horrified at the “pitiable exhibition,” wondered why passengers were not included; at the very least, he thought, everyone should be shown how to properly put on and adjust their lifebelts.
(
31
)
“It is not necessary to offer any of the officers advice as to the navigation of the ship,” one guidebook warned passengers. “They have been at sea longer than you have, and probably know more about it than you do.”
(
32
)
Yet to many, the risk of deadly disaster outweighed the risk of offending. After watching one of these perfunctory lifeboat drills, burly wine merchant George Kessler complained to purser James McCubbin, “It’s all right drilling your crew, but why don’t you drill your passengers?” McCubbin merely referred Kessler to Captain Turner.
(
33
)
Kessler wasn’t accustomed to being summarily dismissed. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1863 and known derisively as “the Champagne King,” the black-bearded man—who prided himself on his resemblance to King Edward VII—made a name for himself in Gilded Age New York as American agent for Moët & Chandon.
(
34
)
“A fine type of New York’s self-made man,” one journal said of Kessler; not only was he “a pleasant, courteous gentleman” but, as befitting the refined product he represented, he had “a natural affinity for beauty, and a pleasant and cultivated taste.” He liked the finer things in life: his bachelor apartment on Fifth Avenue had been decked in expensive brocades and silks sewn with pearls, Moorish lanterns, and figures of marble, jade, and ivory set with diamond eyes.
(
35
)
Eventually he opened his own import company in New York City, George A. Kessler & Company, married Cora Parsons, and grew wealthy thanks to the orchestrations of Harry Lehr, a flamboyantly bizarre man who acted as the indispensable advisor to Gilded Age hostesses. Lehr liked nothing better than planning parties, or helping hostesses select elaborate evening gowns. “Oh, if only I could wear ladies’ clothes,” Lehr once sighed, “all silks and dainty petticoats and laces!”
(
36
)
He had married heiress Elizabeth Drexel, as he coldly told her on their wedding night, only for her money, and delighted in making her life miserable. “What a perfect fright you look!” Lehr hissed at her during prayers at Mass. “Why on earth did you put on those shoes?”
(
37
)
Lehr was an opportunist, but then, so, too, was Kessler. One day, he called on Lehr and forthrightly declared, “You and I can be useful to one another. I will give you six thousand dollars a year to sell my champagne.” The gamble worked, and soon enough the cellars of the Astors and Vanderbilts were filled with champagne they “did not particularly want” merely to please the powerful Lehr.
(
38
)
A born self-promoter, Kessler relentlessly pushed both Moët & Chandon and his own label, White Star Extra Brut, which Moët & Chandon sponsored. When dining out, he would look around, spot tables with the wealthiest and most important guests, and order complimentary bottles of his champagne promptly dispatched. He even bribed waiters at Sherry’s and Delmonico’s: they received 50 cents for each bottle sold, with a dollar lavished on those who cajoled patrons into purchasing a magnum—though Kessler demanded to see the corks as evidence.
(
39
)
Kessler was no stranger to scandal. In 1902, he’d caused an international incident when he substituted his own White Star Extra Brut in place of a bottle of Söhnlein Rhine champagne sent from Germany to christen Kaiser Wilhelm II’s new racing yacht in New Jersey. The shipyard manager pocketed a $5,000 bribe, but the outcry was so great that the German ambassador, who had missed Kessler’s trick, was briefly recalled.
(
40
)
Four years later, Kessler happened to be in San Francisco when the great earthquake struck. Rushing from his hotel as it collapsed around him, he watched in horror as the city crumbled and burst into flames. It was, Kessler decided, the perfect opportunity for yet another publicity stunt: within days, crates of his champagne arrived aboard a railroad car, to be given free of charge to the shattered city’s suffering victims.
(
41
)
In time, Kessler also made a name for himself as a lavish host. Dividing his time between a house at Bourne End on the River Thames in England and New York City, he “used to lie awake at nights,” a newspaper declared, “thinking of novel ways of spending some of his vast income, and he decided that freak dinners best suited his purpose.”
(
42
)
There was a summer banquet in his English garden, where fifty thousand miniature electric lights sparkled on the trees to magical effect; another time, he re-created the North Pole in the Savoy Hotel’s winter garden. Crossing a floor covered in artificial snow, guests walked past towering icebergs crafted from mounds of silver tissue to tables resembling snowdrifts, as an army of dwarves, dressed as snowmen, served dinner.
(
43
)
Then there was his infamous Gondola Party in 1905. Kessler returned to London’s Savoy Hotel for this bit of phantasmagoria. At first, he wanted to hire a dirigible to perch atop the roof; when his guests had climbed into the gondola, the lines would be let out and they could then dine several hundred feet above the city. After objections, Kessler exchanged an airborne gondola for one in the water.
(
44
)
A small fortune went to transform the Savoy’s ballroom and courtyard into a vision of Venice. The courtyard was flooded to create a lagoon, the water tinted blue, and strewn with live goldfish, swans, and ducks; 120 electricians wired tiny electric lights into the ceiling to provide a twinkling nighttime sky. Eighty guests dined aboard an enormous, gilded gondola, served by waiters dressed as gondoliers while strolling musicians sang and famed tenor Enrico Caruso serenaded them with operatic selections. At the end of the evening, a baby elephant called Jumbo Junior was led before the startled guests, carrying on his back an enormous cake. Compared with many Gilded Age entertainments, Kessler got off cheaply, spending only $15,000.
(
45
)
As Kessler hoped, the spectacle got people talking, though not exactly in the ways he had expected. Writer H. G. Wells marveled that the guests “were important, grown-up people,” deriding the evening as an example of how “people of sluggish and uneducated imagination, who find themselves profusely wealthy, are too stupid to understand the huge moral burden.”
(
46
)
Kessler wasn’t as worried about a torpedo hitting
Lusitania
as some of his fellow passengers. He was, though, worried about his money—especially if something should happen to the ship. He carried a case with some $2 million in stocks and bonds when he boarded. Passengers generally entrusted such valuables to the purser. Not Kessler: should there really be an emergency aboard the liner, he decided that his cabin was “much safer” than the purser’s safe.
(
47
)
“What would happen if all the boats had to be lowered?” mused passenger Oliver Bernard after watching that Sunday’s drill.
(
48
)
Bernard knew something about seamanship: half a lifetime ago, after a miserable childhood, he’d run away, signing on as a deckhand and working his way across the Atlantic. One way or another, it seemed, he’d been running for most of his life. His parents had wanted nothing to do with him; on his father’s death in 1894, his vain actress mother had shipped thirteen-year-old Oliver off from London to live with relatives in Manchester. After a stint as a stagehand, Bernard had gone to sea, working his way to New York, where he took jobs at several Broadway theaters. “Scenery, properties, and the operations of stage mechanics and lighting” fascinated him, and soon he was putting his artistic talents to use designing sets.
(
49
)