Lightoller was the one who allowed Michel Navatril, a.k.a. Louis Hoffman, to place his sons Lolo and Momon on collapsible D, the final lifeboat launched. Michel Jr. (Lolo was the boy’s nickname) recalled his father’s final words to him: “My child, when your mother comes for you, as she surely will, tell her that I loved her dearly and still do. Tell her I expected her to follow us, so that we might all live happily together in the peace and freedom of the New World.”
Navatril’s body was recovered; he had a revolver in his pocket.
The two boys-briefly celebrities as the unidentified “Titanic orphans”-were returned to their mother in France. Edmond Navatril (Momon had been his nickname as a child) fought with the French army in World War II, escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp; however, due to health problems suffered during his captivity, he died at age forty-three. Michel Jr., who became a professor of psychology, lives in France.
Bertha Lehmann, the Swiss girl who was the only person Navatril ever trusted to take charge of his sons out of his own sight, boarded the same lifeboat as the Navatril boys. She lived in Minnesota and Iowa and raised a number of children; she died in December 1967.
John Jacob Astor IV guided his wife Madeline into lifeboat number four, but Lightoller refused Astor’s request to accompany and protect his wife, who was after all in a “delicate condition.” Lightoller firmly refused and Astor accepted this judgment, but did ask the number of the boat, whether to locate his wife later, or to register a complaint against Lightoller, will never be known.
Astor then assumed a casual, confident manner, lighting up a cigarette, tossing his gloves to his wife and assuring her that the sea was calm; saying, “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands,” adding that he would see her in the morning. He stepped away and receded onto the boat deck.
When older boys were being turned away by Lightoller from lifeboats as “men,” Astor impulsively grabbed a girl’s large hat off a nearby head and shoved it onto a boy’s, saying, “Well now he’s a girl,” gaining ten-year-old William Carter a seat and his life. One of his last acts, apparently, was to go to the kennels and let out all of the dogs there, including the Astors’ Airedale Kitty, whom Madeline Astor claimed to have seen, from her lifeboat, running about the boat deck as the ship was sinking.
Astor was seen at the railing with Archie Butt and others, but did not drown; his crushed, soot-covered remains, recovered, indicated he’d apparently been killed by the falling forward funnel. In the pockets of his blue serge suit were $2,400 in American money and smaller amounts in French and English currency.
Madeline Astor was granted the income of a five-million-dollar trust and various mansions, as long as she did not remarry; but she married again, anyway, having two more sons by elderly stockholder William Dick, and married yet again-after a divorce-in 1933, to an Italian prizefighter, divorcing him five years later, also. Presumably her son John Jacob V, who had his own five-million-dollar trust fund, saw to it his mother didn’t starve. She died in 1940, in Palm Beach, Florida-a suicide, according to some sources-rarely speaking of the tragedy, and younger than her husband had been when he died.
Henry B. Harris, ushering his wife Rene to where Lightoller was restricting seating on the collapsible D, was told his wife could come aboard, but that he could not. He said softly, “I know-I’ll stay,” bade her farewell, and stepped back into the crowd.
Rene sued White Star for a million dollars, receiving only $50,000 (the standard payoff for a First-Class death aboard the Titanic-steerage was a thousand dollars). Plucky as always, she bucked the standard sentiment that a woman could not be a theatrical producer, and had a long and prosperous run doing just that; for years she had hit plays running in her own theaters, living a life strewn with yachts, Central Park penthouses, various homes and various husbands (though always using only “Harris” as her surname). The stock-market crash of ’29 sank her finances, but not her spirits; when she died, penniless, in a one-room apartment in a welfare hotel, at age ninety-three in 1969, she was still (in the words of Walter Lord) “radiantly blissful.”
Wallace Hartley and his orchestra-the full eight members playing together for the first time on the deck of the sinking ship-performed until the ship went down. Some say the impromptu concert ended around half an hour before the final plunge; even if this is so, their cheery on-deck ragtime is an enduring legend, and fact, of the tragedy. Despite adamant opinions to the contrary, their last number probably was “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Actress Dorothy Gibson-one of the twenty-eight persons in boat number seven, capacity sixty-five-sailed the Titanic to fifteen minutes of fame. One month after the sinking, a moving picture starring and written by Miss Gibson-Saved from the Titanic, in which the silent-film star’s costume was the very dress she’d worn that memorable night-appeared in theaters to huge crowds. It was her last success. She married film distributor Jules Brulatour, divorcing two years later (with a hefty $10,000 a year in alimony), dying in obscurity in Paris in 1946.
Official records list John Bertram Crafton and Hugh Rood as having gone down with the ship; neither body was recovered by the MacKay Bennett.
One of the enduring mysteries of the night the Titanic sank is whether Alice Cleaver behaved as a heroine, or a villain. Hudson Allison had left the family’s C-deck suite to find out what exactly was wrong; soon his wife Bess was in mild hysterics, and Alice Cleaver seized up baby Trevor into her arms, wrapped the nightgowned child in a small fur blanket, and assured the boy’s mother that she would not let the child out of her arms much less her sight.
Alice then rushed out, apparently passing Hudson in the hallway; but the stunned parent seemed not to recognize either Alice or his boy. The nanny hurried onto deck, where, with the help of steward William Stephen Faulkner, she made her way to lifeboat eleven. As she climbed into the boat, Faulkner held the child for her; rather than accept the child from the young man, Alice pulled him into the boat after her. Because he was holding a baby in his arms, this was allowed.
The Allisons-Hudson and Hugh and golden-haired Lorraine-were lost in the sinking; Lorraine was, in fact, the only First-Class child to die. Even as newspapers were praising the blunt-nosed nanny for her courage and quick thinking, the families of Hudson and Bess Allison accused her of an act tantamount to murder.
Mrs. Allison’s mother asserted that the Allisons had obviously stayed aboard the ship, searching for their baby, and missed their chance at a lifeboat. Space was the birthright of their gender for Bess and Lorraine, and Hudson Allison-with the baby in his arms-could just as easily stepped into that lifeboat as the young steward.
After all, Hudson Allison’s only crime was hastily accepting a last-minute replacement for the position of nanny, without sufficient time to check references. (His body was recovered but not his wife’s, or his daughter’s.)
Lending credibility to the theory that Alice Cleaver was more coward than heroine were the lies she told reporters, giving her name as Jane Andrews. Obviously, the nanny did not wish to see the glowing reaction of the press tainted by knowledge that the woman who saved the Allison baby off a sinking ship was a mother who’d thrown her own baby off a train.