#john jacob astor

[buffshipper8490]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65040700/chapters/167240293

Intro

I'm a 90s kid. I remember when the movie came out in '97, what a cultural phenomenon it became. I remember hearing Celine Dion croon "My Heart Will Go On" over the radio everyday. I remember watching it on VHS, HBO, or on TV with my folks when I was older. I remember Kate Winslet was the first naked woman I ever saw, and when I hit puberty, she was my first crush. Since then, I've watched this film every year since I rediscovered it after a bad breakup with my first girlfriend. To this day, 15 years later and married with kids, I have a "Titanic Week" in April, where I'll watch the film and historical documentaries. I even have a Titanic themed tattoo. I love this movie. Now, there's been a few "making-of" books based on this movie but—unbelievably—never a full-on novelization. Using the script and the film, deleted scenes and all, for better or worse, this is my attempt. I hope you enjoy.

Rating Mature

Summary

An "unofficial" novelization of James Cameron's Titanic (1997). In 1996, treasure hunter Brock Lovett searches for the rare diamond "The Heart of the Ocean" inside of the wreck of RMS Titanic, the ill-fated ocean liner that sunk during her maiden voyage in 1912. Instead of finding the Heart of the Ocean in a safe salvaged from the wreck, however, Brock uncovers a drawing of a young nude woman wearing that diamond. A 101-year old woman named Rose Calvert claims to be that woman, and to Brock and his crew recalls her past as socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater and her star-crossed love affair with a poor artist named Jack Dawson on the Unsinkable Titanic...

Chapter 1 The Wreck Treasure hunter and explorer Brock Lovett searches for a rare diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean" inside RMS Titanic, the ill-fated ocean liner that sunk on her maiden voyage in 1912...

Likes ❤️ and Reblogs 🔁 are much appreciated!

[blueiscoool]

A Gold Watch That Survived the Titanic Sells for $1.5 Million

The gold watch worn by the Titanic’s richest passenger, John Jacob Astor, has set an auction record as the most expensive item of Titanic memorabilia.

A private collector in the U.S. paid $1.5 million for the 14-carat gold Waltham pocket watch engraved with the initials J.J.A. The item was part of the “Titanic, White Star and Transport Memorabilia” sale held by British auction house Aldridge & Son on April 27. The watch was one of around 250 items and easily surpassed its high estimate of $150,000.

Astor, a real estate developer and member of the New York dynastic family made rich by fur trading in the 18th and 19th centuries, died at the age of 47 when the ship sank in 1912. Astor had sparked scandal by marrying a woman nearly 30 years his junior and was returning to New York following a protracted honeymoon to Europe and Egypt designed to quell the gossip.

He was last seen smoking a cigarette with the author Jacques Futrelle after escorting his wife, Madeleine Talmadge Force, and friend Margaret Brown safely into lifeboat four. Both women survived.

Astor’s body was found on April 22 by CS MacKay-Bennett, a cable laying steamer that was repurposed as a recovery ship by the White Star Line, the Titanic’s operator. In addition to the pocket watch, his cuff links, diamond ring, golden pencil, and pocketbook, along with money in various currencies, were recovered.

The possessions were returned to Astor’s son, Vincent, who restored the pocket watch before gifting it to his father’s long-serving secretary William Dobbyn in 1935. The Dobbyn family kept the item until sending it to auction in the late 1990s.

By Richard Whiddington.

[elisabeth515]

To whoever stumbled across this post

For the sake of my cat, John Jacob Astor, not reincarnating back into human form, please boop me

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Quand le Titanic a coulé, il transportait le millionnaire John Jacob Astor IV. L'argent sur son compte bancaire a suffi à construire 30 Titanics. Cependant, face au danger mortel, il a choisi ce qu'il jugeait moralement juste et a cédé sa place dans un canot de sauvetage pour sauver deux enfants effrayés.

Le millionnaire Isidor Straus, copropriétaire de la plus grande chaîne de grands magasins américains, "Macy's", qui était aussi sur le Titanic, a déclaré :

"Je n'entrerai jamais dans un canot de sauvetage avant les autres hommes. "

Sa femme, Ida Straus, a également refusé d'embarquer sur le canot de sauvetage, donnant sa place à sa nouvelle employée, Ellen Bird. Elle a décidé de passer ses derniers moments de vie avec son mari.

Ces personnes riches préféraient se séparer de leur richesse, voire de leur vie, plutôt que de compromettre leurs principes moraux. Leur choix en faveur des valeurs morales a mis en évidence l'éclat de la civilisation et de la nature humaine.

Remake

[tarynisbunhead]

So I'm reading this book titled A Journey In Other Worlds that was released in 1894, written by Titanic victim John Jacob Astor. The story is set in the year 2000 and talks about space travel, this was released when HG Wells and Jules Verne were kings of science fiction.

Astor actually went into what felt like an angry rant, one of the characters explained their reason for doing this mission and started talking about life before and after the Civil War. I have a feeling that whole rant was extremely personal to Astor for one reason or another, after all he was a military man. What writer hasn't done this? I want to say he's taking too long explaining this mission, but I'm fascinated by the outdated ideas of space travel. Again, we have Jules Verne and HG Wells, here's someone who must have been inspired by those authors and decided to write their own story. Especially when everyone was excited at the idea of how the future would be in the year 2000. I also love some of the statements made such as "Electricity is the new form of heating" That would not be said in the year 2000, his glorification of Electricity was a very 1890s mindset.

I'm only on the 6th chapter, originally I just wanted to read it because John Jacob Astor is just known as the richest man on Titanic who didn't survive. As a fan of Jules Verne and HG Wells, this is such a delightful read - I love that the distance from Jupiter to the Sun is measured in miles.

[bargainsleuthbooks]

Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune by Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe #BookReview #AudiobookReview #September2023Books #AmericanHistory #Biography

The bestselling authors of #Vanderbilt return with the history of the #Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune. #AndersonCooper #KatherineHowe #Bookreview #newbooks #biography #americanhistory #harpercollins #blackstoneaudio #bargainsleuth

The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt return with another riveting history of a legendary American family, the Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune. The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story–of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until…

[samantha-and-nellie]

someone might've already made this comparison, but i feel like this photo of ava alice muriel astor from 1912 must've been one of the inspos for sam's beforever travel coat and hat

[marciavalance]

guys have you heard about that rumor going around about a mansion on the Sound???

[tiny-librarian]

Apart from the Astors, there were at least 6 sets of honeymooners in first class. Daniel Warner Marvin, aged nineteen, son of the owner of the Biograph Cinema Company, was returning to America with his bride, Mary Farquarson, aged eighteen. Lucien P. Smith, aged twenty-four, of Huntington, West Virginia, had recently married eighteen-year-old Mary Eloise Hughes: she bore his posthumous son in December 1912. Victor de Satode Penasco y Castellana, aged eighteen, from Madrid, was going to America with his new wife Maria Josefa Perez de Soto y Valleja, aged seventeen. John P. Snyder, aged twenty-three from Minneapolis, was returning from his European honeymoon with Nelle Stevenson, aged twenty-two. Dickinson Bishop, heir to the Rounf Oak Stove Company, had married in November 1911, and embarked at Cherbourg with his wife Helen after a tour of Mediterranean Europe and Egypt. One newly married couple were both verging on the age of fifty: Dr Henry (or Hyman) Frauenthal, with a high-domed baldness and fulsome black beard, had married in France, as recently as 26 March, Clara Heinsheimer from Cincinnati.

Titanic Lives - Richard Davenport-Hines

[thepastisalreadywritten]

[dontcallittimetravel]

Happy birthday to John Jacob Astor 4th, a lifelong avid boatsman

[your-resident-boat-person]

Once again, in honor of the anniversary, some of these stories are truly soul wrenching, and I couldn't stop sobbing watching this. I'm not one of those "you're not allowed to make jokes about tragedies" people, but I often find that 99% of the people that do will only have an extremely surface level understanding of these tragedies with only a very vague and abstract idea of the human suffering they are making light of. I make plenty of jokes about Titanic and 9/11, but it's important to understand the subject you are making light of, and that it will absolutely run the risk of upsetting certain people. Even 100 years later. It's very easy to coldly assert that someone who is upset by such jokes needs to simply get over it and stop taking themselves so seriously, because this tragedy was 100+ years ago, but once you've seen the faces of the human suffering resulting from the tragedy, it's hard to feel any other way. Seeing the brave men and women who had to go out for weeks salvaging hundreds of bodies, some of whom were children and infants, and the toll this work took on these men who did it because it was the right thing to do, it's hard to tolerate some of these jokes sometimes. I'll conclude with an abridged story from the video.

The men aboard the ship sent to salvage the bodies had only just arrived, and one of the first bodies they salvaged was a child no older than 2 years old. He had clearly been lovingly and warmly dressed by his parent, tenderly prepared to face the cold of the Atlantic as the ship slowly sank from under their feet. He was the only body recovered to not be wearing a life jacket, as all the jackets on board were too large for such a small child. These men, these rough and tumble sailors who had lived their entire lives on the harsh and unforgiving seas, felt their hearts break. As they hauled the lifeless body of the boy aboard, they felt almost as if he were their own son.

Once on land, the boy was transferred to a makeshift morgue made in an ice rink, the cold temperatures helping to preseve the bodies. The Crew of the Mackay Bennett went to check on the boy numerous times over the coming weeks, hoping his body would be claimed or identified. It never was. The boy had no family to claim him, and no one who would take him home. So much time had passed that bodies had simply stopped being identified and claimed. Anyone who was going to be, already had been.

The family of John Jacob Astor had put up $100,000 as a reward for the recovery of his body, and the men had in fact found his body. The men received $25,000 each. That is approximately $82,000 in today's money. Even though the White Star Line was paying personally for every funeral and burial, each member of the crew dedicated a significant amount of their reward money to the boys funeral and burial, including a large magnificent headstone. He was buried with a red note that read "God Bless Our Son". The funeral of the boy was attended by nearly everyone in Halifax, and he came to represent all of the unrecoverable and unidentifiable victims of the disaster. The Crew of the Mackay Bennett all acted as Pall Bearers, and laid their symbolic son to rest. Still unidentified.

I'm not asking you to cease making Titanic jokes. All I'm asking is that you understand the human suffering you are making light of before you do. That is not an unreasonable thing to ask.

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Butt (left) and Millet (right) in 1910

Francis Millet was born into a well-to-do family in Massachusetts in 1848. As a teen during the Civil War, he served as an assistant to his surgeon father. He studied art at Harvard, then worked as a reporter as he traveled the world. He won acclaim for his murals at an art school in Belgium and for his writing as a war correspondent in the Russo-Turkish War. He and the travel journalist Charles Warren Stoddard exchanged love letters after a romantic affair in Italy.

Archibald Butt was born in Augusta, Ga., in 1865. His father died when he was a teenager, and as the eldest child, he was soon supporting his siblings and became very close with his mother. She moved with him to Tennessee when he left for college, and again when he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a reporter for several newspapers and made a name for himself on the social scene.

In 1908, he was recalled to Washington to serve as an aide to President Theodore Roosevelt. He was brilliant at the job, organizing the president’s schedule and state dinners and even going with Roosevelt on his frequent hunting, climbing and riding excursions. When Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, took office, Butt stayed on.

His social cachet extended outside his work. He lived with Millet in a Foggy Bottom mansion (now housing a George Washington University law clinic), where other bachelors occasionally rented rooms, and where Butt and Millet threw legendary parties.

It is not known how Millet and Butt met, but the two were sharing the mansion and playfully arguing over its decor by 1910, according to the historian Richard Davenport-Hines. Butt was a prolific letter writer — a fact particularly important to Roosevelt and Taft biographers — but he rarely wrote of his personal life and referred to Millet as “my artist friend who lives with me.”

The last months of Butt’s life were stressful. His old boss, Roosevelt, and his current boss, Taft, had a public falling out, leading Roosevelt to run for president to unseat his former vice president. Butt felt torn between the two men, both of whom he greatly respected, and he had grown thin and pale and appeared run-down, a friend recounted later to The Washington Post. Millet urged Butt to take a vacation with him and rest, and when Butt demurred, Millet convinced Taft to order his aide to deliver a letter to the pope in Rome. Butt and Millet left for Europe in March 1912, sharing a stateroom on the ship Berlin.

They had separate rooms on the return voyage aboard the Titanic. At a brief stop in Ireland, Millet sent a letter to a friend praising the luxurious ship and complaining of “a number of obnoxious, ostentatious American women.”

It was the last anyone would ever hear from them. The ship hit an iceberg and began to sink. One survivor saw Butt standing near John Jacob Astor. Rumors of Butt escorting women onto rescue boats were later proved false.

When Taft learned of the Titanic disaster, his first thought was of his aide; early coverage in The Post focused on Butt and another prominent Washingtonian: “NO NEWS OF MAJ. BUTT OR CLARENCE MOORE,” an April 17 headline read.

The Washington Times quoted a friend who said “the two men had a sympathy of mind which was most unusual.” The Post said they were the “closest of friends,” comparing them to ancient Greek figures Damon and Pythias, who were willing to die for one another. “The enduring partnership of Butt and Millet was an early case of 'Don’t ask, don’t tell,'” Davenport-Hines wrote, referring to the policy that once required gay members of the military to keep their sexuality secret.

Millet’s body was later found; Butt’s was not. At a memorial service for Butt, Taft was meant to speak but became so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t continue.

Within weeks of their deaths, plans were underway to honor them with a White House fountain. The official reason was to honor the two Titanic dead who had been part of the federal government — Millet had a mostly symbolic role as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. The National Park Service page for it says the men were “widely believed to have been romantically involved with one another.”

Located on the southwest side of the White House near the E Street entrance, the fountain has a central pillar. On one side, facing south, is a male figure in bas-relief, with a helmet and shield, representing military valor (and presumably Butt). On the other side, facing north, is a beautiful woman with a paintbrush and palette, representing art (and presumably Millet).

A simple inscription reads: “In memory of Francis Davis Millet — 1846-1912 — and Archibald Willingham Butt — 1865-1912. This monument has been erected by their friends with the sanction of Congress.”

(Full article)

[play-now-my-lord]

"Millionaire" is a fun word because a million dollars is not actually that much money anymore but there's centuries of mixed scorn and admiration baked into how people talk about millionaires. A low-energy lawyer or an ambitious plumber could be worth a million dollars in 2023. There are neighborhoods in 2023 where John Jacob Astor could not, with his net wealth in nominal dollars, afford to buy a house. Millionaires are the ones who always talk about "the top one per cent" because they're the top 25% and the world revolves around them but not quite hard enough