David Warner as Spicer Lovejoy in Titanic (1997)
Vitals
David Warner as Spicer Lovejoy, sinister bodyguard and ex-policeman
North Atlantic Ocean, April 1912
Film: Titanic
Release Date: December 19, 1997
Director: James Cameron
Costume Designer: Deborah Lynn Scott
Tailor: Dominic Gherardi
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
112 years ago tonight on the night of Sunday, April 14, 1912, RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic Ocean. The grand ship making its maiden voyage was under the waves less than three hours later, en route the ocean floor as the disaster claimed the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew, leaving around 700 survivors scattered in small open boats awaiting rescue.
From the moment headlines broke across the world the following morning through more than a century later, the Titanic disaster has all from historians and experts to the public at large, its legacy kept alive by scores of books and film productions, including a silent film starring real-life survivor Dorothy Gibson filmed just weeks after the sinking, a handful of Hollywood melodramas, a Nazi propaganda film, and the 1958 drama A Night to Remember, still considered by many the definitive fact-based retelling of the disaster.
The first major color production depicting the Titanic sinking aired on ABC in 1979. Through the Queen Mary standing in for the Titanic bore little resemblance to the actual ship, S.O.S. Titanic is remarkable for almost exclusively featuring dramatis personae representing actual passengers and crew, rather than fictionalized characters or composites. One of these was the sharply observant English schoolteacher Lawrence Beesley, who traveled in second class and survived the sinking to pen one of the first written accounts of the disaster which remains a valuable resource among historians and enthusiasts today. Beesley was portrayed in S.O.S. Titanic by David Warner, a talented and prolific stage and screen actor who died in July 2022 at the age of 80—you can read more in my 2023 post about Warner’s tweed Norfolk suit as Mr. Beesley.
The late, great Mr. Warner didn’t restrict his Titanic screen credits to the late ’70s, as he was cast nearly 20 years later in James Cameron’s epic 1997 blockbuster Titanic, which won a record-tying 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
David Warner starred as the real-life passenger Lawrence Beesley in S.O.S. Titanic (1979) and the fictional Spicer Lovejoy in Titanic (1997).
Cameron’s crew painstakingly recreated the ship and the details of the disaster, blending actual figures like Captain Edward J. Smith, shipbuilder Thomas Andrews, and passengers like John Jacob Astor IV and Molly Brown with fictional characters like the artsy steerage drifter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and bored upper-class socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), whom find an unlikely love aboard ship despite Rose’s engagement to marry the sneering Pittsburgh steel tycoon and “unimaginable bastard” Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane).
Warner portrays Spicer Lovejoy, Cal’s “undertaker of a manservant” always lurking in the shadow of his master and whose holstered pistol suggests he’s not above carrying out the Hockley family’s dirty work as needed. The young lovers frequently steal each other’s time while dodging Lovejoy’s watchful eye. “Pretty tough for a valet, this fellow… seems more like a cop!” Jack comments to Rose, who responds “I think he was!”
Is Lovejoy’s fervor merely driven by loyalty to Cal… or an incessant rage that Jack dared ask to borrow “a smoke” and then ended up palming two of Lovejoy’s cigarettes instead?
What’d He Wear?
Accompanying the Hockley and DeWitt-Bukater parties boarding Titanic at Southampton, Spicer Lovejoy initially wears a gray flannel three-piece lounge suit, tailored consistently with latter Edwardian fashions. The single-breasted jacket has a high-fastening four-button front with Parisian (or “cran necker”) lapels, a welted breast pocket, and uniquely welted—rather than jetted or flapped—hip pockets.
Lovejoy’s white shirt and stiff collar echo the shirts he would wear throughout the voyage, and he knots his blue dotted silk tie in a characteristically tight four-in-hand. He completes his traveling garb with a black felt derby hat—known as a bowler to a Brit like Lovejoy—and soft black leather gloves.
Lovejoy instructs a porter to have their trunks loaded into “the parlor suite, rooms B-52, 54, 56.” In real life, this premium port-side suite was occupied by J. Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of the White Star Line. There was a nearly identical starboard suite (B-51, 53, 55) that was occupied by Charlotte Drake Cardeza; given Cameron’s penchant for accuracy and the fact that Ismay is portrayed on screen, I was never sure why he chose to put Cal’s party in Ismay’s suite.
Though ostensibly traveling in first class, we never see Lovejoy following his employer’s example of dressing for dinner or Sunday services, instead adhering to a daily shipboard “uniform” of a staid charcoal flannel suit and a rotation of contrasting waistcoats, all tailored by Dominic Gherardi.
Lovejoy’s dark charcoal woolen flannel suit features a different cut than the lighter gray Southampton suit. The single-breasted jacket has traditional notch lapels that roll to a three-button front, but the back is distinctively detailed with two tail-like vents split up the back to the horizontal waist-line seam, with an ornamental 4-hole button at the top of each vent—presenting a final product that blends aspects of an old-fashioned frock coat with a more contemporary lounge jacket.
The jacket otherwise follows a similar design with conventional men’s jackets with its welted breast pocket and straight flapped hip pockets. The natural shoulders are finished with roped sleeve-heads, and there are two buttons at each cuff.
“Courtesy of Mr. Caledon Hockley.”
Lovejoy leaves Jack to a watery fate in the master-at-arms’ office on E Deck. Though James Cameron was aware that the ship’s plans would have placed this office amidships rather than against the hull, he wanted the effect of Jack observing the sinking through an external porthole.
The suit pairs with matching flat-front trousers with an appropriately long rise that keeps the waistband covered by Lovejoy’s waistcoat du jour. The trousers are cut straight through the legs, with the plain-hemmed bottoms breaking cleanly over the tops of his black leather oxford shoes.
“I put the diamond in the coat… I put the coat on her!”
Lovejoy always wears plain white cotton shirts, styled with a front placket and double (French) cuffs that he fastens with nondescript links. Consistent with fashion standards of 1912, this shirt is meant to be worn with detachable collars, with Lovejoy preferring a stiffly starched narrow white collar with a wide spread, secured with gold studs to the front and band of his shirt’s neckband.
He rotates through a selection of blue neckties and odd waistcoats during Titanic‘s voyage, beginning with a navy-blue textured tie and dark-gray vest during dinner on the evening of Friday, April 12, when he, Cal, Colonel Gracie (Bernard Fox), and the master-of-arms meet Jack on the poop deck during Rose’s aborted suicide attempt look at the uh, uh, propellers!
This narrowly self-striped dark-gray waistcoat fastens high with five buttons—all of which Lovejoy wears buttoned—and four welted pockets.
On Saturday, April 13 and Sunday, April 14 through the events of the sinking, Lovejoy wears a different waistcoat and tie. This neckwear is also a dark navy-blue, patterned with faded light-blue stripes in the traditionally English “uphill” directions and knotted in a characteristically small and tight four-in-hand.
This second waistcoat is a rust-brown with an almost iridescent satin finish, otherwise identical to the gray vest with its high-fastening five-button front and quartet of welted pockets. Lovejoy keeps his gold pocketwatch in the lower right pocket, attached to a gold chain worn “single Albert” style.
Cal Hockley: “I make my own luck.”
Spicer Lovejoy: “So do I.”
The Gun
Spicer Lovejoy carries an ornately engraved nickel-plated Colt M1911 that aligns with James Cameron’s screenplay description of a “pearl handled Colt .45 automatic,” though this weapon would have been highly unlikely—if not outright impossible—for anyone on the Titanic to possess. After Cal mag-dumped the M1911 while desperately pursuing Jack and Rose down the Grand Staircase, a deleted scene shows Lovejoy pulling a spare magazine from his left waistcoat pocket to reload it before stalking the couple through the partially submerged first class dining saloon on D Deck. He carries the pistol in a British-tan leather shoulder holster under his left arm.
As traced by its serial number (#327179), the Colt M1911 featured in Titanic was manufactured in 1918 as a stock military model. Late in the 20th century, it was refinished with nickel plating and faux pearl grips, and the stock hammer was replaced with the longer-spurred “A1” hammer that was introduced when the pistol was redesigned as the M1911A1 in the mid-1920s. The distinctive engraving was done by celebrated engraver Angelo Bee.
You can see photos of the screen-used M1911A1 in this Heritage Auctions listing, and read more about this and other firearms used in Titanic at IMFDB.
Lovejoy intimidates the manacled Jack by watching the ship’s list roll one of his .45 ACP rounds down the master-of-arms’ increasingly sloping desk, then reloading it into the magazine and snapping it into his ornately carved 1911A1.
Despite the nomenclature of the M1911 series of pistols suggesting they existed by the time Titanic sailed in April 1912, it wasn’t until just three months earlier that initial batches were delivered for usage by the U.S. military, for whom they were initially designed. Civilian sales began in August 1912, four months after Titanic sank, with a limited run of 100 blued pistols made available for select members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) before the M1911 was made widely available for the general public the following year.
For Spicer Lovejoy to have taken an M1911 aboard Titanic in 1912, he would have needed to somehow obtain one of the pistols delivered to the military in January 1912 and had it elaborately refinished in an ornately engraved nickel plating rather than the stock blued steel that was standard for all 1911 pistols this early in the run. Lovejoy then would have needed to train himself to a degree of comfortable familiarity and had a holster fashioned for it, transporting the whole rig across the Atlantic in time to be in Southampton on the morning of Wednesday, April 10.
Of course, at the end of the day, it’s just a movie (and other things I tell myself to calm myself down.)
How to Get the Look
David Warner as Spicer Lovejoy in Titanic (1997)
Unlike the first-class fashion-plates in his employer’s social set, Spicer Lovejoy dresses more for function than form, though his non-matching waistcoats provide some opportunity for color amidst his otherwise conservative charcoal flannel suit, stiff white collars, and dark ties.
- Dark-charcoal woolen flannel Edwardian suit:
- Single-breasted 3-button jacket with notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 2-button cuffs, and double-vented tail-back with two vestigial buttons
- Flat-front straight-leg trousers with plain-hemmed bottoms
- White cotton shirt with front placket and double/French cuffs
- White stiff detachable spread collar with gold stud
- Dark-navy uphill-striped tie
- Rust-brown satin-finished single-breasted 5-button waistcoat with four welted pockets
- Black leather oxford shoes
- Black socks
- British-tan leather shoulder holster
- Gold pocketwatch on “single Albert”-style gold chain
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie.
For real enthusiasts, I recommend watching Titanic: Honor and Glory‘s real-time animation of the sinking.
The Quote
You know, I do believe this ship may sink.
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