She was eventually portrayed as 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown' on Broadway and in the movie starring Debbie Reynolds.īut perhaps the biggest female celebrity on the Titanic was Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, the most fashionable English couturière. Her husband called her 'too mean to sink,' but she acted heroically in her lifeboat and later raised thousands of dollars to help 'the poor foreigners' from third class. Margaret Brown was a backwoods socialite from Leadville, Colo.

He just couldn't tear himself away from his mistress at a French spa.Īs for the women in first class, they were generally a more feisty, admirable crowd (although one American artist onboard did call them 'obnoxious and ostentatious'). One notorious rake who took a pass on the maiden voyage was legendary financier John Pierpont Morgan (who owned the Titanic's company, the White Star Line). Stead called the Titanic 'a splendid, monstrous floating Babylon.' Indeed. Then there was William Thomas Stead, known as 'the Napoleon of newsmen.' He had been a crusader against child prostitution in England and published the famous exposé, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885.īut Stead actually spent two months in prison on charges of abduction and procurement involving a 13-year-old girl, the jury not entirely believing his claims of journalistic research. Jack-Ass(tor) – as the New York press delighted in calling him – had a reputation for 'pawing every girl in sight' and was honeymooning with his pregnant teenage bride, almost 30 years his junior, partly to escape the scandal his marriage had caused.Īnother serial philanderer aboard the luxury liner was mining magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, who was travelling discreetly with his latest mistress, a blond Paris cabaret singer almost half his age. There was John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the world's largest fortune (and New York's biggest slumlord).

Gilded lives fatal voyage