John Maxtone-Graham, an Authority on Ocean Liners, Dies at 85

By SAM ROBERTS    JULY 7, 2015
From the New York Times

John Maxtone-Graham, a New Jersey-born naval historian whose books and shipboard lectures evoked the lost glamour of trans-Atlantic ocean liners, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was respiratory failure, his wife, Mary, said.

Mr. Maxtone-Graham’s nautical calling began inauspiciously. His first ocean voyage, eastbound on the liner Minnewaska when he was 6 months old, was a result of the stock market crash of 1929, which prompted his parents to move to London. Shuttling between hemispheres as a child in the 1930s, he was frequently seasick.

But as an adult, after a decade as a Broadway stage manager, he made hundreds of crossings (16 in 2005 alone), spending more time at sea than on land, and recreated the glory days of luxury liners in books like “The Only Way to Cross” and in lectures that were, he said, tinged with “nostalgic regret” for the “floating superlatives” that once plied the Atlantic.

Mr. Maxtone-Graham regaled audiences with trans-Atlantic lore — recalling that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor routinely traveled with as many as 135 pieces of luggage, that passengers from Manhattan’s East Side would claim that they ventured to the West Side only when they were embarking for Europe, that news photographers would charter tugboats to ambush arriving celebrities.

He wrote about 30 books, including “Dark Brown Is the River,” a biographical novel about his older brother; “Liners to the Sun,” about cruise ships; “Safe Return Doubtful: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration”; “Cunard: 150 Glorious Years”; “Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner”; “Queen Mary 2: The Greatest Ocean Liner of Our Time”; and “S.S. United States: Red, White and Blue Riband, Forever.”

“The Only Way to Cross” (1972), recalling the romance of swift ocean-borne travel, was perhaps his best-known book. Sarah Ferrell, writing about the book for The New York Times, lauded it as “urbane and erudite.” (If it had been an audiobook, she might have detected his self-described trans-Atlantic accent.)

John Kurtz Maxtone-Graham was born on Aug. 2, 1929, in Orange, N.J. His father, Patrick, a banker, was Scottish. His mother, the former Ellen Taylor, was American.

“I had Scottish-American parents, so perhaps it is small wonder that I became intrigued by the ocean separating the two countries,” he told The Washington Independent Review of Books in 2012.

He attended schools in Britain and the United States and graduated from Brown University in 1951. Entering the Marines, he served in Korea as an infantry platoon leader and was demobilized as a lieutenant.

Mr. Maxtone-Graham married Katrina Kanzler in 1955; they later divorced. Survivors include their daughters, Sarah Francois-Poncet and Emily Maxtone-Graham; their sons, Ian, a longtime writer and producer for “The Simpsons,” and Guy, also a television and film comedy writer who worked on “Beavis and Butt-head”; two grandchildren; and a twin brother, Michael.

He married Mary Bergeron in 1981 aboard the ocean liner Rotterdam in New York harbor. On Broadway, Mr. Maxtone-Graham was the stage manager for “What Every Woman Knows,” with Helen Hayes, in 1955; Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and a production of “King Lear” with Orson Welles in 1956; “Brigadoon” in 1957; and “The Night of the Iguana,” with Bette Davis and Margaret Leighton, in 1961-62.

By 1967, he was writing magazine articles about maritime subjects. Mr. Maxtone-Graham prided himself on his lectures aboard ships and at museums and libraries.

“I think I’ve recreated an Edwardian style of entertainment for a generation that is used to electronic amusement,” he said in a 2007 interview with cruisecritic.com.

He also claimed a more unorthodox cultural credit: an appearance as a lecturer on the fictional Royal Valhalla in Episode 505 of “The Simpsons” in 2012.

His favorite ship, he told cruisecritic.com, was the Normandie, which he described as “the quintessential ocean liner: beautiful, fast, huge interiors (the like of which have never been duplicated), stunning décor.”

In “Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner,” he dispelled the theory that the ship, renamed the U.S.S. Lafayette, was sabotaged by the Nazis when it caught fire while being transformed into a troop transport at a Manhattan pier in 1942. He affectingly described its burned-out carcass as “upended, demeaned and undignified, like a dowager who, slipping on a wintry sidewalk, falls with upraised skirt, helpless prey for voyeurs.” Mr. Maxtone-Graham and his wife typically spent seven months a year at sea, away from their brownstone on Manhattan’s West Side, which is filled with maritime mementos.

One day in 1906, eight trans-Atlantic ships arrived in New York with a total of 1,000 cabin passengers (including a couple named Maxtone-Graham) and 10,000 immigrants. Fifty years later, though, for the first time, more Americans were booking airline seats than shipboard cabins. Not long after, with petroleum prices becoming prohibitive, the liner France was consuming a ton of oil for each mile on a five-day crossing.

As a result, the industry retooled, as it had after the United States curtailed immigration in the 1920s. If, as Cunard crowed, getting there was half the fun, new so-called love boats were now advertising gluttonous cruises to nowhere.

“On ocean crossings there is a feeling that the passenger, crew and ship are going somewhere, not drifting around,” Mr. Maxtone-Graham told cruisecritic.com. “That said, cruises are interesting, because I like the arrivals in port, the fresh quality of coming into a new port, particularly in places like Norway and northern Iceland, places that are remote, charming, unspoilt, where there are inhabitants who care about the ships and care about the visitors.”

But how, he was asked, did he manage to maintain his weight during seven months of sybaritism? On the first night, he explained, he would tell the waiter, “No bread or butter.”

“And we’ll leave in the middle of the meal; we don’t eat dessert,” he added. “These are helps, but not the whole answer. It’s a battle, but I have a clever tailor.”