Upon boarding the Titanic, newlywed Madeleine Astor was in the midst of a scandal. At 18, she had just married John Jacob ‘JJ’ Astor, who was 47 and recently divorced. On a long honeymoon abroad, Madeleine became pregnant, so the couple set sail for home. Unfortunately, JJ Astor wouldn’t survive the sinking. “She recalled, she thought, that in the confusion, as she was about to be put into one of the boats, Colonel Astor was standing by her side,” one newspaper reported at the time. “After that…she had no very clear recollection of the happenings until the boats were well clear of the sinking steamer.”
Although she gave birth to a healthy baby later that summer, the public’s interest in her after the tragedy made life difficult. Reportedly, she was greatly “inconvenienced by the curious.” She didn’t often speak about the Titanic, and a cloud seemed to hang over her life. As Astor’s widow and the mother of his son, Madeleine was entitled to a trust as long as she didn’t remarry, but she did just that in 1916, then later divorced and remarried again, this time to an abusive Italian boxer. She died in 1940 when she was just 46 years old.