Authors: Greg King
Friendships were born and acquaintances renewed as an air of sociability took hold. A typical voyage, according to one chronicle, “should be one of ease, and after the first day or two it may be one of dignity also.” Fellow passengers should be treated “with courtesy and civility,” for one never knew if, after the voyage, the “unpretentious person” might be called upon to render assistance or exert influence in the future. Passengers should not “be too dignified or too assertive,” and should not indulge in practical jokes. A crossing, at least in Saloon Class, would likely comprise “an assemblage of people as one would expect to meet at a first-class hotel.”
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Life aboard
Lusitania
reflected British tradition and values, an atmosphere carefully cultivated to both entice and reassure her most privileged passengers that, even though they were at sea, they need not forgo the comforts or courtesies of home. Theodore Dreiser, traveling a few years earlier aboard
Mauretania,
was particularly struck by the exacting politeness of the crew. Being British, he thought, had made these stewards and stewardesses subservient in ways starkly contrasting with their American counterparts. There was, he thought, “an aloofness” about their service, yet they were unfailingly polite, deferential, and anxious to please; everywhere he went, the crew spouted, “Yes, sir,” and “Thank you, sir.”
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“It may be pretty accurately said,” wrote social advisor Emily Post, “that the faster and bigger the ship, the less likely one is to speak to strangers and yet, as always, circumstances alter cases.” The most exclusive passengers rarely sought out new acquaintances aboard ship for fear that unwelcome intimacy and unsuspected antecedents might somehow tarnish reputations. Transatlantic liners were the known hunting ground of a particular type of scoundrel, the Arriviste, armed with enough money to buy temporary membership in this exclusive club and always on the watch for opportunities to add prominent figures to his circle of acquaintances. Post warned passengers against those who attempted to force themselves on others and struck up conversations without proper introductions. When this happened, one should immediately be on guard. A “few minutes of conversation” were sufficient to assess intent and breeding; expressions of slang, lack of decorum, and pushiness would quickly reveal someone who was “grasping, calculating, and objectionable.” If such was the case, Post advised, it was best to immediately leave or to divert one’s attention to a book or to another passenger.
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After traveling for many months, Angela Papadopoulos and her husband, Michael, were looking forward to reuniting with their three children in Athens. Born in 1883, Angela was the daughter of Italian aristocrat Vincenzo Baffa Tasci Amalfitani di Crucoli. Brought up at her father’s estate, she’d married Papadopoulos, a wealthy businessman who had cornered the market on exporting Oriental carpets from Turkey, Persia, and Central Asia, and settled into a comfortable life in Athens. They’d crossed the Atlantic in
Lusitania
that February, and saw no reason not to return aboard her to Europe. Settling into their stateroom on B Deck, thirty-two-year-old Angela “discovered with delight that in the cabin next to us were Mrs. Burnside and her daughter Iris, whom we met in Toronto.”
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Josephine Eaton Burnside was probably happy to find a friendly companion to help occupy her time: she was on her way to see her estranged husband—just the latest development in her oddly contradictory life. She’d been born to Timothy Eaton, one of Toronto’s wealthiest men and the founder of Eaton’s Department Store. Sly and farsighted, Eaton had used money-back guarantees and mail-order catalogues to build his network of mercantile shops into the country’s largest commercial enterprise. In the process he’d become very rich: a 1907 estimate placed his fortune at roughly $5 million.
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Yet he was a dedicated Methodist who disdained luxury, and Josephine was brought up in a comfortable, though not lavish, house. Fashionable Toronto society deemed the Eatons dull: they neither drank nor danced, and kept to themselves, dining every Sunday on what he deemed a good Irish supper of cold mashed potatoes mixed with buttermilk.
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Timothy approved when Josephine married Irish-born Thomas Burnside, but the union was miserable. Burnside hated Canada, and wanted to continue working in England; Josephine hated England, and refused to leave her beloved Toronto. No amount of Eaton money could persuade Burnside to maintain appearances, and so the couple agreed to live apart in their respective countries. Now, their twenty-year-old daughter, Iris, insisted on going to stay with her father. Dreading a dangerous crossing and possible attack by a German submarine, Josephine tried to put the voyage off; Iris stubbornly insisted, and so her mother reluctantly booked passage on
Lusitania
.
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Timothy Eaton’s money was relatively new, and he had earned it “in trade.” It bought access but not necessarily acceptance. Still, with its “enforced intimacy,”
Lusitania
was something of a social leveler.
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In this artificial world, an otherwise peculiar blend of aristocrats and traditionalists rubbed shoulders with celebrities, industrialists, and entrepreneurs unlikely, under other circumstances, to find themselves gathered in the same social milieu. Vigorously ambitious Americans, in particular, could temporarily abandon their self-made origins and travel in all of the luxury and style their money afforded.
Even in the midst of the war, there was no absence of luxury aboard
Lusitania
. Her two Regal Suites on B Deck were the pinnacle of indulgent comfort. Author Richard Harding Davis, who had occupied one of the suites in 1914, deemed it “so darned regal that I hate to leave it. I get sleepy walking from one end of it to the other.”
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Deploying decorative motifs drawn from the Palace of Fontainebleau and the Petit Trianon at Versailles, each suite was subtly different. That on the port side featured a dining room paneled in Italian walnut and adorned with gilded reliefs; meals or private parties could be catered from a small nearby pantry. Sliding doors inset with glass opened to a sitting room hung in “beautifully painted panels of flowers.” Sofa, chairs, and a mahogany writing desk inlaid with satinwood were grouped around an ornamental marble mantelpiece above an electric fire; windows, draped in cream and green silk to match the upholstery, flooded the room with light, and a door allowed direct access to and from the deck beyond. “Designed in a sumptuous manner,” the bedrooms featured brass beds and blue silk brocade hangings: delicate little Wedgwood-style cameos hung from gilded floral swags adorning the white enameled walls. Even the private bathroom was fitted with marble fixtures.
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All of this luxury came at a price: $2,250 for a Regal Suite, one way.
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Two kinds of passengers usually booked
Lusitania
’s Regal Suites: the old-moneyed, titled traveler, and the nouveau riche passenger accustomed to luxury. And so it was on this voyage: socially prominent Marguerite, Lady Allan occupied the starboard suite, while self-made American entrepreneur Albert Bilicke and his wife, Gladys, had taken the one to port. Here, in these refined surroundings, the fifty-four-year-old California businessman hoped to recuperate from recent abdominal surgery.
By 1915, Bilicke had gone far in life and seen much. Born the son of German immigrants in Oregon, he’d graduated from a San Francisco business college and followed his father, Carl, to Arizona Territory, opening and operating hotels in Globe and Florence before moving on to the bustling frontier town of Tombstone.
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The discovery of silver ore in the surrounding hills saw the settlement quickly double in size, with gambling dens, shops, saloons, and Carl’s Cosmopolitan Hotel rising along its dusty streets.
Tombstone was a wild and rough place, where frontier justice ruled: young Albert once shot the ear off a man who was attempting to rob his father.
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Town marshal Virgil Earp tried to impose some sense of order; he made the Cosmopolitan his unofficial headquarters, meeting there with his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday, as tensions between citizens and cowboys steadily rose. On the evening of October 25, 1881, Holliday got into an argument with a group of cowboys, led by brothers Frank and Tom McLaury; the cowboys were back the next day, drunkenly wandering the streets near the O.K. Corral and brandishing their guns. After the marshal wrestled a gun away from cowboy Ike Clanton, the latter’s allies loudly threatened to shoot the Earp brothers.
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Twenty-year-old Albert Bilicke followed these scenes with growing apprehension. “Every good citizen in this city,” he later explained, “was watching all those cowboys very closely.” The day after Earp took Clanton’s gun, Bilicke saw Tom McLaury walk into a shop; when he came out a few minutes later, Albert thought that he detected the unmistakable bulge of a gun in his pocket.
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McLaury joined his brother, and Ike and Billy Clanton, as they marched down Fremont Street. Ahead stood Virgil Earp, along with brothers Wyatt and Morgan, as well as Doc Holliday. Albert believed that one of the cowboys had first opened fire; in a few seconds, everyone was shooting. When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers lay dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp were seriously wounded. At the subsequent trial, Bilicke testified for the Earps and Holliday, insisting that he had seen Tom McLaury surreptitiously arm himself, presumably with the intent to kill the marshal and his brothers as well as Holliday.
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The gunfight at the O.K. Corral became the single most famous episode of Wild West justice. A few years after the incident, Albert returned to California, opening a hotel in Dunsmuir before moving to Los Angeles. In 1893, he took over operation of the city’s exclusive Hollenbeck Hotel; ten years later, he was building his own establishment, the Alexandria, which “added much to the fame and luxurious hotel life of Los Angeles.”
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Investments in real estate and building companies made Bilicke extremely rich: within two decades, he had amassed a fortune worth $2,706,000.
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Bilicke married Illinois native Gladys Huff, six years his junior, at Niagara Falls in 1900, and the couple had three children: Albert, Nancy, and Carl. The family lived in a quarter-million-dollar, Mediterranean-style house on South Pasadena’s Monterey Road, complete with terraced gardens and fruit orchards.
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Here, Gladys worked tirelessly—not on her household, gardens, or entertaining, but rather as her husband’s private secretary. She had an unusual aptitude for business, and served as Albert’s “most intimate counselor in many of his transactions.”
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In the spring of 1915, Bilicke fell ill and had to have abdominal surgery. To recover, he and Gladys took a holiday across America; when they ended up in New York, they decided to sail to Europe and booked passage on
Lusitania
. Just before the ship left New York, Bilicke jotted a postcard to a business associate in Los Angeles: “We are off and this is certainly a fine ship. Have crossed twice in her, and am acquainted with her speed and officers. Expect to get much rest this trip.”
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Bilicke was just the sort of man fellow passenger and art dealer Edgar Gorer would have wanted as a client: eager to leave a rough-and-tumble past behind, wealthy, and anxious to demonstrate his good taste. A “man of strong and aggressive personality,” the British-born Gorer sold exquisite porcelains, delicate figurines, and rare objets d’art to connoisseurs and collectors around the globe.
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The son of a silversmith and jeweler, Gorer had, said a rival, “forced himself into a leading position amongst London art dealers by sheer cleverness and courage.”
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Early on, Gorer hit on the idea of producing beautifully illustrated catalogues of his Eastern and Asian porcelains that won him much attention. The rival Duveen Brothers, while admitting Gorer’s cunning, openly questioned his expertise. They warned potential clients that Gorer might be passing off modern reproductions as antiques. Things came to a head in 1914, when Joseph Duveen learned that Gorer had arranged the sale of a rare Chinese vase to American collector Henry Clay Frick for $40,000. “That vase is not a genuine antique,” Duveen warned Frick. Duveen insisted that “Gorer knows nothing about porcelains,” adding that he meant to stop him “putting these fakes on the market.” Frick quickly backed out of the agreement.
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Insisting that Duveen had purposely set out to ruin his reputation, an infuriated Gorer filed a libel lawsuit against his rival, seeking $575,000 in damages for having “practically destroyed” his career. The suit was to be announced on May 7, while Gorer was still at sea on
Lusitania
.
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