In 1911, a teenaged socialite named Madeleine Talmage Force rose from relative obscurity to land one of the greatest eligible bachelors of her era: a newly divorced Colonel John Jacob Astor IV ...

(Lightoller, for his part, believed that Astor wanted to know the lifeboat number so that he could later sue White Star Line.) Madeleine, for her part, declared that her husband was the “calmest ...