Another arrival was George Kessler, a wealthy wine importer known the world over as the “Champagne King.” Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst, he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as “freak dinners”—perhaps most notably the “Gondola Party” he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.
By far the most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius, whose death in 1899 had left Alfred a rich man. Something of a rake, Alfred was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair, and a taste for expensive suits. He was a welcome presence on board, especially among the women, despite the fact that he was married and carried with him a history of scandal. His first wife, Ellen French, had divorced him in 1908, charging him, as the New York Times put it, with “misconducting himself with an unknown woman” in his private railcar. The woman turned out to be Mary Ruiz, wife of a Cuban diplomat. The scandal drove Ruiz to commit suicide. Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune. She was not on board. Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the Titanic but for one reason or another had changed their minds. Needless to say, Vanderbilt traveled in style, booking one of the Lusitania’s “Parlor Suites.” He lodged his valet two doors down the corridor, in an interior room with neither porthole nor bath. Vanderbilt paid for both tickets in cash, $1,001.50, equivalent to over $22,000 in today’s dollars.
Reporters came aboard, as usual, looking to interview famous or notorious passengers, only today their interest was more focused than usual. It was a mark of the importance of shipping and the frequency with which transatlantic liners called at New York that every newspaper had a “ship news” reporter. Each paper devoted a page to the arrivals and departures of the great liners and to advertisements and schedules for the many shipping lines with piers in the city. It was on these pages that the German warning had appeared in a number of Saturday morning editions.
The ship-news reporters worked out of a shedlike structure near Battery Park, in Lower Manhattan, adjacent to the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry, where a battered green door gave way to a room full of worn desks and telephones used by reporters for a dozen newspapers and one wire service. The reporters tended to favor certain ships, often for intangible reasons. “Ships do have personalities,” wrote Jack Lawrence, the shipping writer for the New York Evening Mail. Some ships “have character and a warm, friendly atmosphere while others are only steel plates riveted around throbbing turbines.” One of the favorites was always the Lusitania. The ship invariably provided news, because as the fastest and most luxurious ocean liner still in service it tended to draw the richest, most prominent passengers. Part of the ship’s appeal was also due to the fact that its longtime chief purser, James McCubbin, sixty-two, welcomed the reporters’ attention and directed them to passengers likely to be of interest. As purser, McCubbin had the responsibility to make sure all passengers were tucked into their cabins and berths as quickly as possible, to store their valuables, and—no small thing—to compile their bar bills at the end of the voyage. In the words of the Cunard officers’ manual, he was “to give satisfaction to all classes of passengers.”
The reporters met the Lusitania just before its departures, but also upon arrival, when they would sail out to the quarantine station in New York Harbor. A ritual followed. They gathered in McCubbin’s cabin. He would order a cabin boy to bring some ice, club soda, and a couple of bottles of Cunard Line Scotch. He shut the door and handed out passenger lists. The last such session had taken place the previous week, when the Lusitania arrived from Liverpool, and had brought the reporters some unwelcome news. McCubbin announced that his next voyage, the return to Liverpool departing Saturday, May 1, would be his last crossing. Company rules required that he retire. “I’m about to become the most useless mortal on earth,” he told the reporters—“the sailor home from the sea.” He called it a joke. “Sailors don’t have homes,” he said, and added, “When a sailor gets so old he can’t work any more they ought to sew him up in a staysail rag and heave him over the side.”