April 10, 2007
The Titanic and Bruce Ismay Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:45 PM EST I watched the movie Titanic over the weekend. I hadn’t seen it since it first opened 10 years ago, and I was every bit as impressed with it as I had been the first time I saw it. It is a wonderful romance movie, a thrilling adventure movie, and an epic disaster movie (quite as close as I ever care to get to being shipwrecked in the North Atlantic in mid-April, thank you very much). It fully and brilliantly conveyed the horror and pathos and terror of the moment. The ending—as the ship slowly transforms from the dead wreck of the late twentieth century into the living, breathing, glittering creature she had so briefly been in the early twentieth, and as the doomed lovers are reunited forever at the top of the grand staircase—is a please-pass-the-Kleenex moment for the hardest of hearts. And, in a limited way, Titanic is not a bad documentary of what is by far the most famous (if not the most death-ridden) maritime disaster in history. That is understandable, as why would a competent moviemaker fool around with what is already a nearly perfect story? To be sure, the characters so memorably played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are pure fiction, but the world they inhabited is not. The ship was meticulously recreated, many of the minor characters are real and accurately portrayed, and the details of the sinking, as they were understood 10 years ago, are faithfully rendered. (There is new evidence that the ship broke in two from the bottom up, not the top down as shown in the movie.) There were, of course, minor slips. There is a scene involving smoking at lunch, but no one would have smoked in the first-class dining room in 1912. The astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson pointed out that the stars in the sky as DiCaprio and Winslet floated in the dark, wreckage-flecked waters after the ship went down were randomly generated, not those of the real sky. (I confess I didn’t notice that the first time around; I was thinking about how cold that water must have been.) One of the minor characters, in this and in earlier movie versions, is Bruce Ismay. Like many first-class male passengers, he survived and, like them, he would be mostly forgotten today except for one fact: He was the managing director of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic. He spent two hours helping the ship’s officers load women and children into lifeboats on the ship’s starboard side. As the last lifeboat was ready for launch and there were, according to his testimony, no other passengers in sight, he made a fateful decision. At the crossroads of his life, with a single flicker of his all-too-human heart, he sought to do what all living creatures seek, to stay alive. He stepped into the lifeboat. Thus he survived, but his reputation did not. Because he was popularly regarded as having had a duty to stay with the ship until all the passengers were safe, although he was not part of the ship’s crew, he was savaged by the press, especially in the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. He was the subject of derision by vaudeville comedians. The journalist Ben Hecht (who would later write the play The Front Page) published a doggeral verse about him: The captain stood where a captain should
When the captain’s boat goes down.
But the owner led when the women fled
For an owner must not drown. Ismay had had a long association with New York City. He had run the line’s New York operations for several years as a young man and had married Julia Florence Schieffelin, from one of the city’s most prominent families. He was a member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs. But as soon as he finished testifying before the American board of inquiry, he sailed back to Britain. He soon retired from business, resigned from his New York club, and never crossed the Atlantic again, although he lived until 1937 and died a very rich man. One can only wonder how often he relived that one fateful moment, how often he second-guessed the action he took, how often he must have wondered if the cold, cold water would have been preferable to the life his action had made possible, knowing that he had been condemned in the court of history to be scorned forever. And which of us is sure what we would have done had we been in his shoes at that moment?
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