20-05-2025
History: How the Titanic's richest survivor enjoyed her time in Palm Beach
Not long before the famed ocean-liner Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic after plowing into an iceberg on a cold, dark April night in 1912, the richest passenger aboard helped his frightened bride into a lifeboat.
Tall, lean and mustachioed John Jacob Astor IV wanted to accompany her in Lifeboat 4, but his social status and family fortune — born of the fur trade, then turbocharged by New York real-estate investments — ran up against the women-and-children-only dictum.
What concerned the 47-year-old Astor most when he asked the ship's quartermaster to join her was her 'delicate condition.'
Madeleine Talmage Astor was 18 and frightened. She also was five months' pregnant and had been feeling ill as the couple bunked in a double suite with a cadre of servants and Astor's Airedale named Kitty.
After Astor was denied a lifeboat berth beside his wife, her cries joined the overall hysteria on the sinking ship. Seeking to comfort her, Astor promised he would 'see you in the morning, dearie,' according to survivor accounts.
After the Titanic's final plunge into the icy North Atlantic, Astor went down with it.
Madeleine survived.
She was among hundreds rescued by the RMS Carpathia; one crew member said he'd never seen 'a sadder face or one more beautiful' than Madeleine Astor's.
Months later, she gave birth to a son, who was named after his father. In time, the boy would learn of his parents' romance, begun in 1910 after they met in the Maine summer resort of Bar Harbor.
That's where Astor owned an ornate home, one of several in the Astor portfolio, including a renowned manse on New York's Fifth Avenue.
The press had feasted on the courting couple's every move, noting the 'scandalous' age difference and Astor's ability to bestow lavish gifts on an impressionable teenage Madeleine and her parents of lesser social status (William and Katherine Force were Brooklyn society leaders).
Then there was the fact that Astor's first marriage had ended only months before in 1909, when his first wife filed for divorce.
'Like celebrities of today, they (Madeleine and Astor) were … followed incessantly by reporters and photographers,' Karen Kamuda, president of the Titanic Historical Society, said.
After their September 1911 marriage and extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt, they boarded the Titanic on April 10 in Cherbourg, France.
Before his 1912 death, Astor, who owned New York's Waldorf Astoria and St. Regis as well as rent-collecting buildings in the city, had been making winter visits to Palm Beach with his former wife.
But after Astor drowned in the Titanic disaster, it was Madeleine who claimed a spot in Palm Beach, where she leased oceanfront estates, socialized and played golf and tennis.
In 1916, Madeleine married Brooklyn-society childhood friend William K. Dick, who was wealthy in his own right, although not on the scale of the Astors.
Remarrying meant forfeiting income from her trust fund, plus use of the Astor family's Fifth Avenue manse. But she could dip into her son's trust fund, which she did, as news reports liberally outlined.
By the early 1920s, Madeleine and Dick, with whom she had two more sons, were regularly spending winters or springs in Palm Beach. Madeleine played tennis and hosted or attended parties. A noted fashionista, she preened even for a stroll along the now-gone pier off The Breakers.
She wore 'a stunning frock of heavy flat crepe in white, with a double tunic' and a wide leather green belt edged with gold,' the local press reported in 1925, noting her wide-brimmed Milan chapeau and black-velvet pumps.
But by 1932, 'one never hears, or reads, of Madeleine's joining this or that fashionable luncheon or dinner party, and her social appearances in Palm Beach are … nil,' a Palm Beach society columnist wrote. By 1933, the Dicks' marriage had ended in divorce.
But what sent shock waves through society was that Madeleine, 40, months later married a middleweight Italian boxer 15 years her junior; they'd met on a cruise ship.
She reportedly provided Enzo Fiermonte with a $1,000-a-month allowance for suits and entertaining her in a style to which she was accustomed.
Madeleine's and Fiermonte's marriage was considered 'stormy,' with periods of estrangement and reconciliation. She divorced him in 1938 — the decree was handled in West Palm Beach — on the grounds of 'extreme cruelty.'
While she alleged that Fiermonte hit her, he later told the press she was 'unstable' with mood swings and the need for attending nurses.
Two years after her divorce from Fiermonte, Madeleine died in Palm Beach at 46. Heart failure was cited, but friends were said to wonder about a possible overdose of sleeping pills.
The funeral took place in New York at the Episcopal Church of St. Bartholomew's. Some 1,500 people attended, according to the New York Times.
As during her lifetime, onlookers and the press lined the street outside, hoping to glimpse the famed rich arriving and departing the rites of the woman who once was the Titanic's richest 18-year-old pregnant bride, then widow.
M.M. Cloutier writes about history for the Palm Beach Daily News. This story originally appeared in that publication in January.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: History: The Palm Beach years of Titanic survivor Madeleine Astor
