Dear Etiquetteer:
With the 25th anniversary of James Cameron’s Titanic in 2023, I have re-watched it and have so many questions! Loved your 2012 article covering some of Titanic and I want to know more!
Would Rose have met Jack on deck to thank him in public?
Would she have been OK seeing his nude drawings or is that more akin to watching [Insert Improper Euphemism Here] on your laptop with the sound up on a bus?
What would third class think of seeing her at their Irish jig dance party? I assume it is the modern-day equivalent of Princess Kate hanging out with a bunch of football hooligans in a pub and injecting meth with them?
[Insert Highly Improper Queries about the actual likelihood of ahem intimacy between Rose and Jack Here.] Or could a 19-year-old have rebelled so much like a teenager nowadays?
Dear Film Buff:
This is why we really can’t rely on the movies to teach us history. Etiquetteer had the great privilege in 1992 of meeting Eva Hart and four other survivors of the Titanic when hosting a screening of A Night to Remember. Miss Hart introduced the film by saying that “This is the most factually accurate film about the sinking, and the others are just rrrrrrrrrrrrubbish!” She was, of course, correct. Although Etiquetteer dearly loves the 1953 Titanic, the James Cameron Titanic of which you write, and has seen more than once the laughably inaccurate 1943 German propaganda film* and the 1929 Atlantic, A Night to Remember remains the gold standard of Titanic films. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really owe it to yourself to do so.
To accommodate the plot, James Cameron threw most period ocean liner etiquette overboard. On the Titanic, each class had its own outdoor deck space. While first class passengers could pretty much go where they wished, steerage passengers could not. Rose would have had to go to the steerage decks to find Jack, which would have been in the poop deck and the forward and aft well decks; she would not have found him where she did on the Boat Deck. (Cameron also ignored that April in the mid-Atlantic was exceedingly cold and people didn’t spend time on deck without blankets and fur coats.) But it is theoretically possible that she could have done so.
One of the great fictions sustained by Titanic-based entertainments is that there was dancing on board on Sunday. At the time dancing on the Sabbath was considered next door to Original Sin by all classes. (Yes, the dance party in the movie was not on Sunday night. Nevertheless, there was no dancing.) And in steerage the public room lights were turned off at 10:00 PM to reduce the risk of hijinks. On the Fatal Night, “. . . an informal party followed dinner, with music provided by fellow passengers” in steerage, but without dancing.*** It was also noted that “Several couples sought quiet spots for romantic interludes.” Ahem. Please note that the White Star Line assigned accommodations to women traveling along in steerage at one end of the steerage decks, and men traveling alone at the exact opposite end, with family groups in between, to discourage impropriety as much as they were able.
In first class the ship’s orchestra gave a small concert at which Dorothy Gibson, an Actual Movie Star, requested dance music. She “clicked her heels and swayed her adolescent arms to the rhythm” according to Much More Ladylike Helen Churchill Candee.** But bandmaster Wallace Hartley, a good Methodist, steered away from that level of gaiety and concluded at 9:15 PM with the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann.
Would Rose have gone to steerage to hang out? Etiquetteer thinks not. Slumming, the practice of upper class people “seeing how the other half lived,” wasn’t much of a shipboard practice, not least because of hygiene concerns. On land, slumming really came into its own in the Roaring Twenties, famously at Harlem nightclubs, but also in most urban centers.
Now . . . ahem ahem . . . you ask about the likelihood of Rose . . . ahem . . . how to express it? . . . succumbing to temptation and yielding her virtue. Remember that James Cameron’s Titanic is essentially an action film overlaid by a 20th-century teenage girl’s fantasy for both romance and emancipation on her own terms. This makes everything about Rose and Jack’s interactions Highly Improbable — not to mention that the idea of trysting in a limousine on the cargo deck was taken directly from Now, Voyager. Conventional wisdom at the time was very much that “Nice Girls Don’t.” Henry James created the character Daisy Miller in his eponymous novella about a careless American girl in Europe who is eager to meet gentlemen. Spoiler alert: she meets an early death.
Ladies waited until after marriage to rebel. Etiquetteer would direct you to three ladies of roughly this period: Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Marchesa Luisa Casati, and Nancy Cunard. Consuelo, forced into marriage with the Duke of Marlborough by her domineering mother Alva, eventually took a few lovers and ended up divorcing the Duke — but not before providing the traditional “heir and spare” in the form of two sons. The Marchesa Casati, who rarely lived with her husband in the first place, eventually became one of Europe’s most dazzling exhibitionist hostesses in Venice and Paris until she spent herself broke. Nancy, daughter of Not at All Perfectly Proper Lady Emerald Cunard****, was already restive in Society before her 1916 marriage to Sydney Fairbairn. After her 1919 divorce, she essentially slept with every white writer and black musician on the Continent — but by then it was the Roaring Twenties, and Things Had Changed.
Etiquetteer cannot find the reference now, but the Titanic included at least one couple traveling as man and wife who were not actually married. This would not have been possible for a girl in Main Line Society like Rose, who would have been too well known to get away with that ruse.
Etiquetteer wants to thank you for an absorbing set of queries on a favorite topic — the Titanic, that is, not Libidinous Indiscretion.
*Aside from the plot (the sinking was caused by a fight between Ismay and John Jacob Astor for control of the White Star Line), the 22-piece brass band could have blasted the ship all the way to Halifax with their rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee,” played while the telegraph operator frees his pet parakeet and the one German officer on board rescues a small child before swimming five miles to a lifeboat. Ridiculous.
** Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World, by Hugh Brewster, page 153.
*** Titanic: An Illustrated History, by Don Lynch, page 77.
****Emerald Cunard is also worth your study, but of an earlier period. Born Maud Burke of San Francisco and doubtful parentage, she was very much an American Buccaneer when she snagged Sir Bache Cunard. Her country house parties were known for their Lush Atmosphere. After her divorce, she was well known as the mistress of Sir Thomas Beecham.