Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

One of the gay news sites that my facebook algorithm feeds to me had a post about this book. It mentioned that the book highlights a possible gay couple onboard the Titanic. I wanted to know more about that. The Titanic in general is interesting to me because my family has long repeated a story that we had a relative on the boat. Coincidentally, I had been talking about that story with my father and oldest brother recently and we had all decided it couldn’t be true. There were three Hoyts on the passenger list, but it didn’t seem likely that any of them could have been related to us. In any case, that story has always made the Titanic personally interesting to me. And I’ve been interested in general in the Gilded Age lately because of the television show of that name that Jim and I have been watching and enjoying. I put the book on hold on the library. Then, for another coincidence, before I started reading, Jim and I had dinner at the home of two new friends and it turns out one of them is fascinated by shipwrecks and I spotted two models of ocean liners in their home. We didn’t talk about the Titanic that evening, but now I have something to add to the conversation the next time I see them.

Brewster’s book is an amazing piece of research that puts together the intersecting lives of dozens of passengers aboard the fated shift. The story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the taking on of passengers in Southhampton, Cherbourg, and Queenstown, then preceding across the North Atlantic. His details, taken from letters, artifacts, and testimony from survivors include dinner menus, clothing, which passenger sat with, or played cards with, or walked the deck with which other passengers, telegrams sent by passengers and warnings received from other boats about the danger from icebergs. As the events on board are chronicled, Brewster also gives the backstories of the men and women he describes. Some in particular stand out. Among those I knew were John Jacob Astor IV, traveling with his new, young wife (he died, she survived); and Margaret Brown, later called “Molly” and dubbed “unsinkable.” I hadn’t known that Peggy Guggenheim’s father Benjamin had been on board, and went down with the ship. Among those I had not previously known about, Brewster highlights a fashion designer named Lady Duff Gordon and her husband Cosmo (both survived), and the two, possibly gay friends, Archibald Butt and Frank Millet.

Their story runs through the entire book. Archie Butt was a Presidential aide and close friend to both Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. Frank Millet was an artist, designer, and cultural administrator for the federal government. Archie Butt never married. He was passionately devoted to his mother. Any evidence of his possible homosexuality is entirely circumstantial. He was, however, close friends with Frank Millet, and although Millet did marry, and had four children, the evidence for his homosexuality is explicit. As a young man he had a passionate affair with a poet and writer for the San Francisco Chronicle named Charles Warren Stoddard, they lived together for a time in Venice, and Millet wrote love letters to Stoddard that Stoddard saved. Millet is a fascinating character, an accomplished painter, involved with the 1893 Chicago Exposition, the American Academy of Art in Rome, and the design for the Lincoln Memorial. He mostly lived apart from his wife and children, who lived on an estate in England, while Millet lived in Washington D.C. with Archie Butt. I’ve ordered a copy of a biography of Frank Millet that was published several years ago and look forward to learning more about him. After the two men went down on the Titanic, President Taft erected a memorial fountain in their honor in a prominent location on the ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument.

Of the three Hoyts on the boat, two were a married couple: Frederick and Jane. Frederick is introduced playing cards with Frank Millet in the first class smoking room earlier in the evening on the night of the accident. Brewster describes him as “a New York stockbroker and yachting enthusiast… who was returning from a combined business trip and vacation in England with his wife” (p. 160). Jane Hoyt was helped into “Collapsible D” lifeboat by Frank Millet. She remembered asking him if he had any message and he responded, “Give my love to Lily [his wife] and to all my friends” (p. 199). As the boat was being lowered, three men who had been left behind noticed there was extra room in the boat so they jumped. One of them was Frederick, who landed in the water and then climbed in. Here, Brewster describes Frederick as “the Connecticut broker who had played cards with Millet only hours before” (p. 199). Brewster says Jane “threw her fur wrap over the shivering new arrival” before she knew who it was. He then started rowing to keep warm. (Frederick’s own account, published a week after he was back in New York, is that he put his wife on the lifeboat, went to have a drink with the ship captain, who he knew, and then jumped into the water as the ship went down, swam in the cold for five or ten minutes and then was picked up, coincidentally, by the boat that his wife was on.)

The other Hoyt, William F. Hoyt, Brewster describes only briefly. Apparently he stayed on the Titanic until it went down, went into the water as the boat sank and then was pulled into lifeboat 14 but died soon after. “One very large man, a first-class passenger named W. F. Hoyt, was pulled from the water bleeding from the nose and mouth and died shortly afterward” (p. 213). His body was carried on to the Carpathia, the rescue ship, from which he was then buried at sea in a weighted canvas bag, along with three other corpses that had been brought aboard.

Brewster is inconsistent about whether Frederick and Jane are from New York or Connecticut. My family is descended from a Simon Hoyt whose name appears on a “List of the names of such as are known to have been in Salem and about the north side of the Massachusetts Bay before and in the year 1629” (Drake’s History of Boston, p. 57 as quoted in a genealogical book my grandmother owned). One of Simon Hoyt’s descendents, Thaddeus, moved from Sidney, New York, to Ashtabula, Ohio in the early nineteenth century. According to research my grandmother did, his son, named Governor, had five children, including Orson, my great-grandfather. Orson, had six children: Julius, Fred, Carl, Edna, Clarence, and my grandfather, Myron. But it’s not possible that my grandfather’s brother Fred is the Frederick who survived the Titanic, because the New York Times published an obituary of Frederick Hoyt when he died in 1940 in which are listed three siblings: two brothers named Willard and Joseph and a sister named Mrs. Schuyler. So that should put that story to rest. Jane Hoyt, by the way, died in 1932.

The other Hoyt on the Titanic, William Fisher Hoyt, the one who died in lifeboat 14 and was buried at sea, was born in Ohio, but he lived and worked in New York and there is no person with that name in my direct line. According to another reference I found in the New York Times on the occasion of W. F. Hoyt’s estate being settled, he had a brother named Gordon in Cleveland, Ohio, and parents named Charles and Helen, names, again, that do not appear in my direct line, although I suppose they could be distant cousins of some sort.

Brewster’s book is quite a fun read. He includes dialogue and descriptions and inner feelings that make you feel they must be his imagination, but there are extensive notes at the back, and of course 712 people survived and all of them had ample opportunities to tell their stories. Reading the account of the last night as the clock ticked toward the hour of the sinking, I began to feel truly sad that so many of these people Brewster had come to let me know so well were not going to make it. He completes the story with accounts of the Carpathia returning to New York and the homecoming. One of the postscripts describes the later lives of many of the survivors. The last living survivor, Millvina Dean, had been a two-month old baby on the boat; she died in 2009.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.