And then there was the matter of the proposed running mate to United States. Many of the younger men at Gibbs & Cox wanted the new America to be a complete departure from her sister ship—as they told Fortune’s Smith, something “strikingly new, not a copy.”4
Across the Atlantic, they saw competition coming. The French Line had just laid the keel of a new liner to replace Ile de France and Liberté, both approaching their thirtieth year. Estimated to weigh in at 66,000 tons, the sleek, streamlined France would stretch 1,035 feet in length, making her the longest ship in the world, and bigger than United States. Although she borrowed some design details from Yourkevich’s Normandie, France would be a completely new ship. And she would have only two classes: first and tourist. The French Line hinted that their new superliner might try to take the Blue Riband away from United States.
Designs for the proposed running mate for United States became a flashpoint of contention at 21 West Street. Gibbs was standing firm: why improve upon perfection? The new America would be basically the same as United States.
There were also problems with the structure of the firm’s ownership. It was a partnership controlled entirely by William Francis and Frederic Gibbs, who owned all of the company’s stock. They paid themselves relatively modest salaries and never declared a dividend on their shares. Some of the senior engineers wanted part of the “crock of gold” that they were convinced the Gibbs brothers had squirreled away, and they wanted the old man to distribute some of the stock and the unpaid dividends hidden within the equity to senior members of the staff.5
William Francis would have none of it. The company would remain his and his brother’s alone. When asked who was next in line when he retired, he would look down at his middle coat button and mutter, “A committee is studying it.”6
In private, he was more candid about his future. “When I retire, I’ll be dead,” he told a friend.7
When not designing or drumming up business, Gibbs took his friends to the theater, opera, and Broadway musicals. He also loved the circus, and whenever Barnum and Bailey’s came to New York, he would rent a box in Madison Square Garden and take friends to marvel at the trapeze artists, jugglers, and lion tamers. When going out on the town, Gibbs often shed his shabby suits and cracked shoes for full evening dress: white tie, tails, polished patent leather pumps, and red-lined opera cape. He especially enjoyed the musical My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. So much in fact that he saw the show eighteen times.8
Gibbs was more than an observer of the theater world. While his wife, Vera, sat on the board of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, he served as chairman of the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater. Fellow board member Wynn Handman enjoyed Gibbs’s presence at board meetings, where the naval architect spoke up with “authority, lubricated with humor.” The actor and architect became close friends.
An even earlier theater friendship was the one William Francis formed with actress Katharine Cornell. From the day they met, the two had formed an instant connection. Like the naval architect, Cornell accepted nothing less than the absolute best in her work, never forgetting, said the New York Times, “the day or the city where she had a ‘perfect performance.’”9
Cornell grew to know Gibbs as few outsiders did. In the early 1950s, they made a ritual of meeting each other for lunches where he could open up and relax. She went with him to Yankee home games, where Gibbs let loose whenever a New York player hit a home run. “He became so enthusiastic,” she laughed. “He loved it.”
The actress recognized the performer in Gibbs. In her view, he used his unpleasantness as a dramatic act to achieve the results he wanted. “His wonderful dour expression—it was just a pose on his part,” she said. “I don’t know whether it arose from shyness; but it was absolutely marvelous… people were so enchanted to see him smile.”
She also knew that William Francis was a lonely man, despite his family and influential friends. “He sought perfection, that’s why he cut himself off,” Cornell said of him. “He was very economical with his friends. He was very controversial, very concentrated, so concentrated on his work that he had very little time just to chitchat. If he liked you, he was very helpful in anything you were interested in, and he was always very generous.”10
He reveled in the praise from other leading ladies of the stage. “Dear Francis—You’re my ideal!” wrote actress Annie Jackson on a photograph that hung prominently in his New York apartment.11
Although bad at cocktail parties, the onetime Harvard recluse found that he had a knack as a public speaker. His deadpan demeanor and dry wit won over audiences at dinners all over New York City. At the 1960 Thomas Edison Foundation Mass Media Awards dinner, hundreds of guests, including Elizabeth Taylor, sat in the Waldorf-Astoria’s gleaming Sert Room. The proceedings were dreary. Ahead of them, and still to be endured, was the presentation of the awards at the end of the event.
After he was introduced, Gibbs left his table, mounted the podium, and stared out across a sea of vacant faces.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “I have had some very sad experiences. Tonight, I think, is much the worst.”
Everyone in the room began to laugh, then laugh louder, and then to applaud.
“I honor scientists,” Gibbs told the audience before presenting the awards. “I honor educators because I can never aspire to be either. My sole claim to distinction is being a jack of all trades and master of none.”12
Despite his professional success and involvement in the arts, observers could not help wonder about his private life.
“I do believe that you love the United States more than your wife,” a reporter said to William Francis Gibbs.
“You are a thousand percent correct,” he replied.13
Vera Gibbs, present during the exchange, did not show hurt. She had spent a life acknowledging with a smile her husband’s obsession with work, and she kept any personal thoughts to herself, especially around the press. But by the mid-1950s, things worked best when they were apart: he in his office, and she shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic on the “Family Rowboat.” In her diary, she noted how her husband would send her messages each day: “I had a nice telegram from William Francis.” But she did not sit around waiting. “Each day I received messages from him, either through the Captain or the Chief Engineer. I finally sent one to him, in which I said that the only flaw in the trip was social complications. I always seem to be trying to wedge in one more cocktail party.”14
By this time, their three children were grown and on their own. Known by her friends as a woman of “infinite patience” who possessed a “large reserve of humor,” Vera Gibbs built a life of striking independence, tempered with her concern for the welfare of her stubborn husband.15 Personal friends were entertained at the 945 Fifth Avenue apartment, whose living room boasted two large likenesses facing each other: an oil painting of Vera’s father, the lawyer Paul Cravath, and a bronze bust of her husband, William Francis Gibbs.
Now in his early seventies, Gibbs had long been accepted by society, and not just through Vera. Despite his seeming remoteness, numerous cultural, social, and business leaders counted him a friend. He had been a member of the University, Century, Broad Street, India House, Piping Rock, and New York Yacht clubs.16 Still, he seemed restless and decided to build a seaside retreat. In the late 1950s, during destroyer trials off Rockport, Massachusetts, he saw a beautiful rock outcropping, about an acre in size, jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1960, William Francis and Vera Gibbs purchased the outcropping as the spot for a new summer house.