On October 25, 1925, William Warren Gibbs died, aged seventy-nine and possibly senile, at the “Kenwood Sanitorium for the Insane.”33
When William Francis and Frederic Gibbs went through his papers to settle his affairs, they discovered that their father’s estate consisted of one small life insurance policy and the proceeds of a court settlement Barlow v. McIntyre. Together they totaled $3,555.02. At his death, William Warren Gibbs did not own a single share of United Gas Improvement Company, which made so many proper Philadelphians wealthy. Nor did he own shares of his other successful venture, the Electric Storage Battery Company, known at his death as Exide.
Worse still, William Warren Gibbs left debts behind. When the estate was finally settled, his children were left nothing.34
The once famous and stupendously wealthy Philadelphia promoter was quietly buried in his hometown of Hackettstown, New Jersey.
Two years after his father’s death, Gibbs still shared a modest New York apartment with Frederic. Those who knew him well thought this shy, awkward engineer would remain a bachelor. He was terrible at small talk, did not drink or smoke, and was uncomfortable around women. William Francis sometimes even provoked them into leaving him alone.
“If there’s anything I can’t stand,” he once said, “it’s sitting between two dames and trying to make conversation out of nothing. They always say, ‘What do you do?’ I say, ‘I’m an engineer.’ They say, ‘What kind of engineering?’ I say, ‘I design garbage barges.’ As a matter of fact, I do, too. Then they—the dames I mean—drift off. It’s all so damn pointless.”35
Yet in 1927, the forty-year-old William Francis Gibbs made a sudden move that shocked New York society: he got married. Gibbs’s unexpected decision gave him a cultured wife who admired his drive and appreciated his eccentricities. The union would bring financial security and social acceptance, but had no effect on his single-minded quest to build a superliner.
9. MRS. WILLIAM FRANCIS GIBBS
Although groomed to be a New York socialite, Vera Cravath was not one to flit from one fashionable event to another. Born in 1896, Vera never went to school, but was educated at home by private tutors. Fearless in the saddle, she was famous as an equestrian all over the Northeast.1 She was also fluent in French and distinguished herself as an amateur pianist. A cloud of curly hair framed her long face, and she smiled easily. She loved music, as well as the unconventional, the exotic, and the intellectual. Many years later, music teacher Olga Samaroff Stokowski, ex-wife of the conductor, remarked that Vera “knew her Brahms themes as well as she knew the characters in Hamlet.”2
She also was daring in her personal life. While visiting Paris in 1925, Vera filed for divorce from her polo-playing husband, James Larkin. Her request was granted, and she took custody of their young son, Adrian.
Her father was New York superlawyer Paul Cravath. The broad-shouldered, hulking Cravath terrorized his staff at Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood, a firm that made its money defending the practices of Wall Street and the Morgan trusts; in fact, many in the Manhattan elite felt Paul Cravath was the J. P. Morgan of American law, one who possessed “sound knowledge of finance and a magnificent ego which swept aside inhibitory obstructions.”3 The Ohio minister’s son also was one of New York’s major social arbiters: Cravath had helped develop the upscale Long Island community of Locust Valley and its ultra-exclusive Piping Rock Club. Cravath’s “magnificent ego” and social striving had also cost him his marriage to Vera’s mother, Agnes, a former operatic soprano, in 1926.
Shortly after his separation, Cravath set sail on a friend’s yacht for the sunny Mediterranean, leaving his divorcée daughter behind in New York.
William Francis Gibbs met Vera at a party to which he most likely was dragged. In his old-fashioned wing collar and black suit, he looked like a Victorian relic among the smart set around him. He was unsociable and testy in these settings. Society women he found especially irksome.
At first, Vera was put off. “I thought him rather strange,” Vera recalled. “But I was fascinated.” And they continued talking to each other.
“François,” as Vera playfully called him, gradually opened up to her. “It may sound trite but he knew what he was going to do in life,” she said. “He wanted to build ships—if that meant being the best naval architect, all right—but building ships was the most important thing in the world to him.”
The day after the party, Vera and young Adrian were scheduled to sail for Europe. On arriving in Rome, Vera found a cable waiting for her at the hotel front desk. Gibbs said he was in London. Could he visit her?
“I was impressed, you know, that he’d come all the way down there to see me,” she said. “It set me to thinking.”
Gibbs arrived a few days later, still wearing his black suit and wing collar, and carrying a bag of dirty laundry. Vera was unperturbed. After dropping off the bag at a laundry, Gibbs ordered a carriage and trotted Vera and Adrian around the sunny streets of Rome. After the ride, Gibbs said a quick good-bye and headed back to America, most likely aboard Leviathan. Vera and Adrian followed him not long after.4
A few weeks later, a small group of Vera’s friends assembled for a dinner party at her father’s apartment. The dinner guests waited for their hostess to appear. The time dragged on. The wait grew embarrassing.
Finally a message arrived from their hostess: Vera Cravath Larkin had been secretly married the day before. After dinner, the daughter of New York’s most famous attorney invited her startled friends to the Waldorf-Astoria to meet her new husband, naval architect William Francis Gibbs.
Gradually, details of the marriage began to emerge in the society pages. William Francis Gibbs and Vera Cravath Larkin had been married at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, with one witness present on January 6, 1927, and they had been at the New York Municipal Building earlier that day to apply for a license.5
Doyennes and debutantes of two cities were wide-eyed at the news of the wedding. “The marriage is of wide interest both in New York and Philadelphia,” noted the New York Times.6
Vera had not told her father about her plans and Paul Cravath was no doubt puzzled when he returned and found his daughter remarried to a forty-one-year-old engineer. But he immediately tried to launch his new son-in-law into New York society. Cravath held a luncheon in the couple’s honor at the St. Regis hotel, and a dinner the following night at the exclusive Creek Club on the north shore of Long Island.7
Thus began a much more social life for William Francis Gibbs. He would attend the opera, go to restaurants and private dinners, and host dinners in return. He would in time join several elite clubs. Eventually the rich and famous in New York would travel on his ships. But he never truly became a member in good standing of his father-in-law’s social world. He shocked too many polite Manhattan dinner partiers with his insulting, acidic wit. But when he was in the mood, he would, in the words of one observer, sit in a chair “like an old rug” and turn out to be “the lion of the party.”8
Such moments must have pleased Vera when she was with him. The couple appreciated each other’s strengths, but aside from gatherings at Olga Samaroff’s music appreciation classes, they maintained mostly separate social calendars. The ardor with which he pursued Vera in their whirlwind monthlong courtship seems to have cooled down soon after they were married. Although he had married a rich woman, Gibbs’s ambition was unaffected; in fact, it grew more intense.