The following story ran in the March 25, 1998 PAW:
Walter Lord '39 enjoys continued success with his Titanic book
A small toy pig, well worn and with a raggedy limp tail, stands
in a glass box on a side chest in the cluttered, sunken living room
of Walter Lord '39's New York City apartment. The toy pig conceals
a music-box, now broken, that sustained the spirits of the children
in lifeboat #11 as it floated upon the frigid waters of the North
Atlantic in the early morning of April 14, 1912, when the Titanic
went down with 1,502 aboard. Four steps up from the living room,
in what would be the apartment's dining room, is Lord's office,
its walls covered with paintings and drawings of the Titanic. Framed
and hanging on the wall behind Lord's desk, which is piled with
papers, are strips of ticker-tape paper with fading typescript announcing
the news of the ship's sinking. On another wall hangs a needlework
memorial, whose eggshell-white threads shimmer under glass; it depicts
a mourning angel, kneeling on a monument, the ship goes down behind
it.
Lord, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and gets about in a wheelchair,
is the author of 13 books, the most famous of which is A Night To
Remember. A minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the ship
and the later rescue of 705 people, it was published 43 years ago
and has never been out of print. "My book had an enormous success
in 1955," says Lord. "It gradually dropped off bestseller
lists, but then suddenly it came back up again in 1985, when Bob
Ballard found where the Titanic was located."
And now with a Broadway musical and a box-office megahit movie based
on the tragedy, Lord's book is again a bestseller, #2 on the paperback
list at the beginning of March. "I don't know what to make
of the infatuation people have with this story," admits Lord,
but he says his own fascination with the Titanic began when he was
nine years old, when he sailed with his family and governess on
the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.
The son of a lawyer, Lord grew up in Baltimore and came to Princeton
from the Gilman School. A history major, he wrote his thesis on
the 19th century Collins steamship line. Lord earned a law degree
from Yale and was in the OSS during World War II. He then worked
as a copywriter for an advertising firm in New York before turning
to writing full-time in 1956.
Lord devised his writing style -- a meticulous, minute-by-minute
reconstruction of events in spare prose -- for A Night To Remember,
his second book, and used it again in such books as A Day of Infamy,
about the Pearl Harbor attack, and The Past Would Not Die, about
the civil rights movement. His research involves numerous interviews
with eyewitnesses and participants. For A Night To Remember, Lord
interviewed 63 survivors. After a movie based on his book came out
in 1958, he interviewed another 60. Those interviews and other papers
related to the Titanic will eventually go to a maritime museum in
England.
Has Lord seen the Broadway musical or the new movie? "Yes,
I've seen each one three times," he says. "Both are good,
and the movie is a marvelous piece. It gets so many things right."
While admitting he did not cry at the movie, as so many people have,
he is moved still by the heroism on board the ship. "There
were a lot of heroics," he says, referring to, among many examples,
the musicians who played until the final moments. "I was especially
touched by the bell boys, running messages back and forth. And the
men who kept the lights on until the end. They weren't seamen, people
who loved the sea. They were just electrical engineers, doing a
job. All were lost."
