Reading Luxury Cruise is a bit like thumbing through issues of Holiday magazine, the glossy travel magazine of the 1950s. The look, the ads, the content — they all spell “M,000,000,000Ney.” The passengers aboard the Olympic have paid at least $14,000 each for their berths on this round-the-world cruise. That’s over $120,000 in today’s dollars, so this is a ship of very rich fools.
Some of them are spending new and plentiful Texas oil money. Some of them are more carefully doling out the remains of very old money. Others seem to be riding along on a supply of cash seemingly capable of endless replenishment. These are the boys “perpetually arrested at the sportcoat stage”: “They were genial, restless children, careful never to get too drunk, and their toys were sailing yachts and expensive motorcars and airplanes, and stocks and bonds and oil wells and gold mines, and whole ocean-going liners.”
Of the new money men, some are desperately trying to make their way into the old money circles the only way they know how: with cash. So the Seth Carsons of Dallas open up the pipelines and let the champagne and caviar flow. The Aldriches, Van Gouverneurs, and Ashcrofts drink and eat it all up and, as you can predict, leave tipsy, full, and disdainful of the Carson’s lack of subtlety.
Emlen Boyne and his wife — also of Dallas — are along for the ride simply because it seems like the sort of thing you do when you’re rich. So Em drinks a little too much on the first night out, talks a little too loud, enjoys himself more than he should. And earns the same sort of dismissal as Seth Carson — or so it seems. Coarse and boorish, the old money murmurs to each other. “They were generous, impulsive, simple people — peasants grown rich in the vast lottery of America, and they must be tolerated.” But behind the comments there is a lingering sense of having encountered something that had been bred out of them generations back: “a directness, a vigor, a cunning and yet an understanding and sincerity which was rare enough in their circles — Porcellian, for instance, at Harvard, or Brooks in New York.”
Joseph Bennett, the author, scion of the Pittsburgh steel Bennetts, Princeton ’43, Lieutenant (j.g.) (US Navy) in World War Two, partner of Wellington and Co., was familiar with both sides in this drama: the old money he grew up among and the new money he invested their remaining cash in. But he was also familiar with both sides of his own creation. He could undoubtedly have afforded a cabin on the Olympic, and he aspired to be the playwright, too. His senior thesis on Baudelaire was published by the Princeton University Press the year after his graduation and his seed money had helped establish the Hudson Review after the war.
Though Bennett knew his characters well, however, he apparently didn’t know what to do with them. There is much drinking, much talking, much commenting by some on the faults of others, many details noted that one can only assume are both accurate and precisely placed. There is a drunk stumbling by accident into a woman’s cabin and possibly committing a rape (but almost certainly not). There is the loss of a million-dollar necklace that could possibly be a theft (and most certainly is). There is an Italian count who plasters himself in make up and old Ike Shawley of Osage, Oklahoma, one of the original oil barons, spending his final days withering away on the sun deck. There are brassy broads who relish their booze and their boys and Main Line heiresses who would be happy if sex stayed next to sewing machine the way it does in the dictionary.
What there isn’t is, well, a point. Why bring these people together and why roll out their antics for us to observe? The plot lines of the probably-wasn’t rape and the definitely-was theft play themselves out three-fourths of the way through the book. What follows is a bit like watching the actors shuffle around on stage, still in character, for another twenty minutes after the play is over. Faultless scenery, costumes, and mannerisms can never compensate for the lack of any compelling drama or comedy. Bennett most certainly knew his material. He just didn’t know what to do with it.
Bennett died of leukemia at the age of 50 in 1973. From the records of his papers, held in the Princeton University Library, he appears to have written, or at least started, a half dozen other novels besides Luxury Cruise. With titles such as “Sons of Rich Men” and “Trevor and Townshend Fortunes,” they suggest Bennett might have produced something quite striking on the subject of American wealth if he’d lived longer.
Luxury Cruise is available in electronic format from the Open Library (link).