On February 9, 1942, SS Normandie burned and sank at Pier 88 in New York while being converted to a troop ship at the start of World War II. The largest ship of its time, it is considered the grandest and most beautiful ocean liner ever built, with a distinctive clipper-ship bow. It entered service in May 1935 for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (French Line) and was the first liner to cross the Atlantic in less than four days. Offering seven accommodation classes, its technical innovations included an early form of radar. Its luxurious interiors in Art Déco and Streamline Moderne styles included a vast first-class dining salon (the largest room afloat). Split funnel intakes, diverted to the ship’s sides, allowed for huge, open public spaces. After the fall of France in 1940, Normandie was seized by U.S. authorities for war use. Sabotage was suspected, but a welder’s torch destroyed her. Pictured: poster by A.M. Cassandre (1935).
Actor James Dean was born on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana. He grew up in California, then in Fairmount, Indiana, with his aunt after his mother’s death. Though raised a Quaker, his life and career interests were influenced by a Methodist pastor, Rev. James DeWeerd, with whom he was sexually involved. In 1951 Dean moved to New York, studied at the Actors Studio and worked briefly in television. A theater role led to his starring performance in Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1955), which foreshadowed his role as Jim Stark in “Rebel Without A Cause” (1955). Both characters are angst-ridden, misunderstood outcasts who crave a father figure’s approval. Dean was twice Oscar-nominated for Best Actor, as Cal Trask in “Eden” (his only movie that he viewed in its entirety) and as Jet Rink in “Giant” (1956). He died during filming of the latter in September 1955 when he crashed his Porsche Spyder in California.
Charles Dickens, prolific and preeminent author of the Victorian era, was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. Despite early poverty and very little education, he wrote 15 novels, five novellas and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction pieces, nearly all marked by humor, complex plots, colorful characters with astounding names, and sharp observation of society. His fame began with the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836). His second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), fiercely criticized the poverty, crime and social stratification of Victorian society. After separating from his wife in 1858 and conducting lucrative reading tours, he wrote A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861). Novelist Virginia Woolf observed that Dickens’ great power lies in "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."
On February 6, 1952, Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor) became monarch, Head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven Commonwealth countries, on the death of her father, King George VI, at age 57. The King had acceded to the throne in 1936 on the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII. Elizabeth then became heir presumptive, at age 10. The stress of World War II and heavy smoking (leading to lung cancer) took their toll on George VI, forcing Princess Elizabeth to assume royal duties, including a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. At the moment the King died, Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, were near Mount Kenya in a hotel built into the tops of trees; it afforded guests a view of local wildlife in total safety. Elizabeth’s coronation on June 2, 1953, was the first to be televised. Pictured: Elizabeth in Kenya’s Treetops Hotel, and returning to England as Queen.
The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, was opened to the public for the first time on February 5, 1852. Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its collections consist of three million works of art and artifacts, including the world’s largest collection of paintings, housed in six historic buildings on an historic street, the Palace Embankment, on the Neva River. It includes the vast Winter Palace, the residence of Russian tsars that was stormed and looted in the October 1917 revolution. Catherine’s collection included works by Rembrandt, Rubens, van Dyck, Veronese, Frans Hals, Raphael, Holbein, Titian and others. In the 1930s the Soviet government secretly sold more than 2,000 valuable works to foreigners. U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon acquired 21 of the Hermitage’s works in 1931 and later donated them as a nucleus of the National Gallery of Art. Pictured: the Hermitage and works by Raphael, Matisse.
Aviator Charles Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit and grew up in Minnesota and Washington, D.C. He began flying in 1922 and had a variety of accidents as a barnstormer and a mail carrier. On May 20-21, 1927, he won the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight between New York and Paris. Numerous aviators had sought the prize, six of whom died in the process. His resulting fame as “Lucky Lindy” was unparalleled. Lindbergh was an ardent, lifelong proponent of eugenics and the superiority of white, Nordic races, often focusing on their ability to produce machines. His questionable association with the Nazi regime is well documented, and he became a close friend of Henry Ford, a vicious anti-Semite who famously admitted, “we only talk about the Jews.” In 2008 his youngest daughter confirmed that he had three secret mistresses in Germany, resulting in seven children.
Author, art collector and saloniste Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, near Pittsburgh to an upper-class family. She grew up in Oakland, Calif., and later Baltimore. In 1903 she and her brother Leo moved to the Left Bank of Paris, where she presided over a remarkable salon of artists and was referred to as “Le Stein.” By 1906, she and Leo had collected works by Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and many others. Her avant-garde writings are wildly idiosyncratic, marked by stream-of-consciousness and a use of words analogous to the Cubists’ multidimensional representation of abstract forms. Her best known work, the genre-busting The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), is actually a memoir of her Paris years reinvented as the autobiography of her lover, Alice, who later wrote an extraordinary cookbook. Pictured: Picasso’s renowned portrait of Stein (1906).
Irish novelist and poet James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, to a middle class family in Dublin. After graduating from University College Dublin with the intent to go into medicine, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara. They first rendezvoused on June 16, 1904, a date Joyce later chose for the action of his modernist novel Ulysses (1922) and now celebrated worldwide as “Bloomsday.” The novel sets the characters and events of Homer’s Odyssey in Joyce’s Dublin, where the actions of Leopold Bloom (Odysseus), his wife Molly (Penelope) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) are contrasted with those of Homer’s characters. Each of the book’s 18 chapters is devoted to one hour of the day, beginning around 8 a.m.; each employs its own literary style; each is a parody of a specific episode in the Odyssey; and each is aligned with a specific color, art or science, and bodily organ.
100 years ago: New York’s Grand Central Terminal was opened to the public at midnight on February 2, 1913, at a time when rail transport dominated America and automobiles were a novelty. Built by and named for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, it replaced two earlier buildings. It is the world’s largest train station by number of platforms (44), on two levels, with 67 tracks alongside, covering 48 acres. At the center is the vast Main Concourse, 275 feet long and 125 feet high. Its main information booth is a renowned meeting place, highlighted by the most famous icon of Grand Central, a large, four-faced clock (pictured). Its faces are made from opal (a precious mineraloid), and it’s now valued at $10M to $20M. Acorns and oak leaves, symbols adopted by the Vanderbilts, are carved in stone throughout the terminal (“from an acorn a mighty oak shall grow”). If built today, Grand Central would cost $2 billion.
Actor Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio. While working as a necktie salesman in Portland, Oregon, he met Josephine Dillon, an acting coach who paid to have his teeth fixed, guided him in building up his chronically underweight body, taught him better posture and physical control, and trained him to lower his high-pitched voice. Gable was considered for the role of “Tarzan the Ape Man” (1932) but lost the role to a more imposing Johnny Weissmuller. Gable was reluctant to play the role of Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and refused to read Margaret Mitchell’s book. Actor Gary Cooper turned down the role and was certain the movie would be a flop. Gable planned to boycott the movie’s world première in Atlanta because his close friend, Hattie McDaniel, who played the role of Mammy, was not permitted to attend. He relented after she insisted that he go.
