When the fabled liner Titanic went to its cold, deep grave on April 15, 1912, it took with it 1,513 lives and many, many dreams.
For the most part, these may have been humble dreams that perished, given that the lower decks held a preponderance of the victims, immigrants crowded into steerage and coming to America in search of a life that might somehow include regular meals.
Unlike so many of the popular entertainments inspired by that long-ago tragedy, this year’s hit Broadway musical “Titanic” spends considerable time below the decks, dwelling as much on the lives of third-class passengers as it does those of the glittery Astors and other toffs in first class and the respectable folk in second.
The new “Titanic” movie, due on screens everywhere in December, also involves the unfortunates in steerage, with a young artist in third class (Leonardo DiCaprio) falling into a rather desperate and difficult shipboard romance with a well-off first class Philadelphia lady (Kate Winslet). But this story, which involves a mysterious large diamond, is completely fictional.
In the Broadway musical, we meet four in particular from the lower decks – all Irish, all coming to America out of the most dire economic necessity. Three are named Kate – McGowen, Murphey and Mullins. The fourth is a James Farrell, who falls in love with McGowen.
All four are based on actual people who were aboard the Titanic when it struck the iceberg and met its fate. In reality, the three women survived and the man did not. In “Titanic,” Farrell and McGowen make it, but Murphey and Mullins perish.
The actors who play these characters are all at least part Irish, and all are descended from immigrants who came across like those in steerage on the Titanic.
There’s a more chilling coincidence. A female ancestor of actress Erin Hill (Kate Mullins) actually had a ticket for the Titanic.
“They had third class tickets and they missed their train from where they were leaving to catch the Titanic,” said Hill, who is among the last to be seen on the starkly tilted deck as it slips into the sea in the musical’s great climactic scene. “They missed it by an hour. They ended up taking the Lusitania a couple of days later, but they were supposed to be on the Titanic, down there in steerage.”
The incident was incorporated in the show, with a tardy but fortunate passenger frantic at missing his passage.
Hill, who came to “Titanic” from the cast of “Rent” and plays the harp at tea time at New York’s posh St. Regis Hotel when not on stage, doesn’t know what dreams and ambitions her ancestors had for their new life in America.
But her character’s are very simple. Kate Mullins is coming to the golden land of opportunity in the hope of becoming a seamstress.
She and the other three do a very upbeat musical number about it: “Ladies Maid.” With eyes shining, Jennifer Piech (Kate McGowen) sings that she wants to become a ladies’ maid when she gets to New York. Theresa McCarthy (Kate Murphey) sings the joys of becoming a governess.
Clarke Thorell’s Farrell worked at anything and everything in Ireland, mostly as a fisherman but also as a horse groom, which he liked best of all his labors. His ambitions in the United States are limited, said Thorell, who also was in the musical “The Who’s Tommy.”
“Kate (McGowen) asks me what I’m planning to be in America, and I say, `anything that’ll keep my belly from making noise at night,’ ” he said.
Theresa McCarthy, whose last New York production was “Floyd Collins,” grew up in the Detroit suburbs and Petoskey, Mich., and lived for a time in Chicago.
Her Kate was in actuality one of several Murphey sisters from County Longford in north central Ireland who, in a pattern that continued unceasingly from the time of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s almost to the present day, emigrated to America to ease the burden on their families.
“Children were chosen from a family to go to America to earn a living, because no one was earning a good living in Ireland,” McCarthy said. “The farming just wasn’t happening and there were so many people. They’d go over and then they’d send back money at Christmas time. It is sad, because sometimes they would never see their families again, and they knew it when they left.”
The real Kate Murphey survived the Titanic sinking and settled finally in Chicago, though McCarthy could not trace her further.
Cutting across classes
One of the myths of the disaster, generated by the class prejudices of the time, was that the toffs behaved like gentlemen and ladies while the steerage class immigrants acted like crazed animals desperate to save themselves.
This is nonsense, according to Donald Hyslop, historian with the Southampton (England) Maritime Museum and co-author of a new book on the sinking, “Titanic Voices: Memories from the Fateful Voyage.”
“If you look at the testimony of people who were there (what you had is) just what you’d expect when you have a huge number of human beings going through a life-or-death crisis. All facets of human behavior came to the fore — good, bad and heroic,” he said.
“All of those things came through. Some of the people were tremendously heroic and some people lost their nerve, and that seems to have been the case throughout all the classes and crew.”
Hyslop, who gathered numerous oral histories for the book, said the steerage class people suffered so disproportionately in the casualty count because they were so numerous and because their quarters were so far from the upper decks and the ship’s comparatively few lifeboats.
Worse, the gates separating the third class level from the more prestigious decks were locked for nearly all the evacuation.
Though the official British inquiry — in typical British class system fashion — ruled that the third class had not been discriminated against in life saving, Hyslop said there was testimony from one of the two surviving third-class stewards that “the gates were locked.”
(According to Hyslop, the gates were customarily locked to prevent contact between the steerage folk below and their social betters above. They were eventually unlocked, but only when sinking appeared imminent and it was too late to save most of those in steerage.)
“Most of the people stayed down there and most of them didn’t really try to get out,” said McCarthy, who also researched the story and her part. “They trusted that they were in the right place and they were being taken care of and they shouldn’t venture out of their common room there.
“There was an account of a woman with a small child sitting at a piano playing as water was filling up around her. She knew that there was nothing that could be done so she was playing some music on the piano.”
A forbidden subject for years
According to Hyslop, the shock and shame attendant to the Titanic disaster made it a taboo subject in Southampton for nearly half a century.
In the 1950s, Walter Lord’s best-selling non-fiction book and subsequent movie, “A Night to Remember,” sparked a renewed public fascination with the legend that seems to increase with the passing years and which was fueled as well by oceanographer Robert Ballard’s more recent discovery of the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean bottom.
Some of the popular treatment of the disaster has been irreverent or light-hearted (a Titanic joke found its way into the 1976 presidential campaign). The Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet movie “Titanic” promises to be an action-disaster film with more in common with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Speed 2” than classic tragedy.
But the Broadway show, which won this year’s Tony Award for best musical despite some sharply critical reviews, remains fairly faithful to the subject. It is, after all, a musical about death.
“Terry and I crusaded to have our characters get killed,” said Hill, who grew up in southern Indiana and has acted in Chicago. “Originally, they didn’t. But they needed to die in this. Some of us in third class needed to die, because so many did. I remember the first time we performed with the ending that has the still-living characters walk back into our tableau (of the Titantic dead). Everybody was crying. It was really affecting.”
According to Piech, a New Jersey native who also comes from Polish immigrant stock, the subject matter has bonded the cast members and crew as no other production she can recall.
“It’s an amazing learning experience,” she said.
For McCarthy, there is something uniquely spiritual about this show.
“Thank goodness they treated it in such a respectful way,” she said. “There’s no tap dancing on the Titanic. There’s no frivolity. Although there certainly are moments of lightness and joy, it’s serious. You can’t forget that, when you are going out there, you’re playing an actual person. Somehow, the spirit of all those people, they come to join us sometimes.
“Another thing, when we look out at the audience and see the 1,500 people sitting out there — that’s the number of people who died on the Titanic! That’s a stunning realization.
“Every night, we’re seeing the people who didn’t make it.”
