February 10, 2007
The Normandie Posted by Ellen Feldman at 06:00 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s affection for the Normandie, to which he paid fine tribute on the AmericanHeritage.com homepage today. She was more than surpassingly beautiful and dizzyingly fast. She was racy. If, as Kipling said, the liner was a lady, then, as Ludwig Bemelmans pointed out, the Normandie was a femme fatale. Her passenger list reflected her character. Stodgy society booked passage on the dowager Queen Mary. Cole Porter, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and other aristocrats of the arts and darlings of cafe society crossed in the Normandie’s cabins, where the sinuous art deco lines promised smooth sailing, at least aesthetically. The Normandie’s death by fire and capsize was heartbreaking, but an ironic twist makes the story almost tragic. As Harvey Ardman tells the tale in his definitive book, Normandie: Her Life and Times, one of the chief architects of the ship, a Russian naval engineer named Vladimir Yourkevitch, was at his office in lower Manhattan when he got a call from an old friend telling him, in Russian, that his beloved ship was burning. Yourkevitch’s first reaction was not cavalier but confident. He knew the Normandie’s superb firefighting system. The flames, he was sure, would quickly be extinguished. He returned to work but could not concentrate. Finally he left his office, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him to Pier 88. By this time the crowds in the area of the burning ship had brought traffic to a halt. Realizing that things were more dire than he had imagined, Yourkevitch got out and began to run. As he turned the corner of 48th Street and Twelfth Avenue, he came into view of the smoking, listing ship and the scores of firefighters who were continuing to cascade water on it. The sight broke his heart, but his mind clicked into gear. He was certain that if the seacocks were opened, the ship would settle upright and safe in the shallow water. Three times he tried to get through the police lines, but his heavily Russian-accented English made him unintelligible to New York’s Finest. Finally he found a naval officer and managed to convey who he was and how he could save the ship. “The Navy is in charge,” the officer told him. “Don’t you worry about it. We know what to do.” Yourkevitch finally gave up and returned to his apartment on Riverside Drive. From his windows overlooking the Hudson, he watched his ship die.
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