MOLLY BROWN

 The steamer went down, but not the "Unsinkable" -- as she came to be known -- Molly Brown. Loaded into lifeboat No. 6
(capacity:65) with 24 women and two men, Brown, in a black-velvet, two-piece suit, argued fiercely with Quartermaster Robert Hichens, who refused to return to the wreck  site for fear survivors in the water would swamp the boat. To fight the bitter cold, Brown  ttaught the other women to row and shared her sable coat. And when Hichens dismissed a  flare fired by an approaching ship as a "shooting star," Brown threatened to throw him overboard although not, as in the 1964 movie musical bearing her name, while waving a  pistol). Once in command, she ordered the women to row to safety.

 Brown had proved her mettle yet again. Born Margaret Tobin in Hannibal, Mo., in 1867,  she left the poverty of her hometown behind and moved when she was 18 to the   boomtown of Leadville, Colo., to find "work and a rich husband," says her great-granddaughter Muffet Brown, a Los Gatos, Calif., graphic designer. She met prospector James Brown, 13 years her senior, at a church picnic and married him in  1886 -- seven years before he struck gold at the Little Jonny Mine and began building his $5 million fortune.

 Molly, though, couldn't abide being confined to their Denver mansion. She traveled, often  with her son Lawrence, to Europe and mastered several languages before separating from James in 1909. After the ship sank  (with 13 pairs of her shoes and a $325,000 necklace), Brown raised funds for poor survivors and fought for women's suffrage.  But most of all, Brown, who died after a stroke in 1932, enjoyed her fame as the pluckiest of Edwardians. "Simple Brown  luck," she said after the wreck. "We're unsinkable."

          BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM

  After being informed that the ship would go down, Guggenheim -- industrialist, father of three and noted playboy -- calmly
  returned to his stateroom with his valet and donned his dinner suit. "We've dressed in our best and are prepared to go down
  like gentlemen," Guggenheim, then 47, told a steward after refusing a life jacket. "Tell my wife in New York I did my best in
 doing my duty."

The sixth of seven sons sired by Swiss immigrant and iron-smelting baron Meyer Guggenheim, Benjamin had boarded Titanic in Cherbourg with his latest in a long line of mistresses, French singer Léontine Aubart. Having been assured that she and her maid were safely aboard a lifeboat, Guggenheim and the valet reconvened on deck, where legend -- and Hollywood -- have them
sipping brandy and smoking cigars as the ship sank.

As the rescue ship Carpathia sailed into New York harbor, three of Guggenheim's nephews rushed to the dock with his wife,
Florette, who was fortunately out of earshot when an officer introduced a young blonde woman stepping off the ship as "Mrs.
Benjamin Guggenheim." The real Mrs. Guggenheim was used to long periods without her husband, who spent months abroad,
living lavishly and, as it turned out, squandering an estimated $8 million on bad investments. His noble death may have been a
credit to his superrich family, but Guggenheim left his three children only $450,000 each, prompting daughter Peggy to later
complain that she "felt like a poor relation."

On a vessel flush with tycoons, New Yorker John Jacob Astor IV stood out as  the richest. He boarded at Cherbourg with an entourage that included his wife, Madeleine, a manservant, a maid, a nurse and  his Airedale, Kitty. First-class staterooms like theirs -- richly paneled suites with working fireplaces and separate quarters for servants -- cost as much as $4,000 for the voyage, equivalent to a staggering $50,000 today. But there was more to Astor than the $87 million fortune he made through real estate and his family's fur-trading empire.

After graduating from Harvard, he patented such inventions as a turbine engine, a bicycle brake and a "vibratory disintegrator"
used to produce gas from peat moss.He wrote a science-fiction novel about life on Saturn and Jupiter and financed his own
Army battalion during the Spanish-American War. His first marriage, to Ava Willing of Philadelphia, lasted 10 years and
produced two children. 

But his second marriage, to Madeleine Force in 1911, caused a scandal. She was 18 at  the time, and he was 46. To escape wagging tongues, the couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt (where they joined his friend Molly Brown). By the time they boarded Titanic, Madeleine was five months pregnant. "They wanted the baby born  in America," says historian Don Lynch. Astor mentioned his wife's "delicate condition"   when asking an officer if he could take one of several empty seats in her lifeboat, but the  officer refused. Astor took it like a gentleman. He lit a cigarette and tossed his gloves to
 his wife. Several days later his partly crushed, soot-stained body was found floating in the  Atlantic with $2,500 in a pocket. Experts believe Astor may have been hit by a falling smokestack.

In the years that followed, Mrs. Astor, who was twice remarried and died in 1940, rarely spoke of the tragedy, except to recall her final memory: Kitty, on deck, pacing frantically. On Aug. 14, 1912, she named her newborn son, a future playboy, John Jacob Astor V.

     ISIDOR AND IDA STRAUS

Ida Straus refused at least two opportunities to escape the sinking Titanic, choosing instead to die with her husband of 41 years, a well-known philanthropist who owned Macy's department store. News that the couple had shared their fate came as no surprise to their six children and many friends. "When they were apart, they wrote to each other  every day," says Joan Adler, director of the Straus Historical Society. "She called him `my darling papa.' He called her `my  darling momma.' " For years they had even celebrated their different birthdays on the same day. As the Titanic went down, Ida,   63, resisted the pleas of officers to climb into a lifeboat, insisting instead that her maid take her place and handing the young   woman her fur coat ("I won't need this anymore," she said). She was finally cajoled into boarding the second-to-last lifeboat,  only to clamber out again as Isidor, 67, stepped away. Last seen clasped in an embrace, Ida and Isidor are memorialized in a  Bronx cemetery with a monument inscribed, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."
 

      DOUGLAS SPEDDEN
 

 For 7-year-old Douglas Spedden, life was one big, if sometimes lonely, adventure. His parents -- Frederick, who had inherited  a banking fortune, and Daisy, a shipping heiress -- spent much of the year traveling to exotic locales with their only child. But  nothing could have prepared Douglas for what lay ahead as he boarded Titanic with his parents, a maid, his nanny and his best friend, a stuffed white bear named Polar.

An hour after Titanic struck the iceberg, the entire party escaped the ship in lifeboat No. 3. Clutching Polar, Douglas slept as
Titanic went down. By the time he woke, the rising sun illuminated the icebergs around them. "Look at the beautiful North
Pole," the boy cried, "with no Santa Claus on it!"

Back home in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., the family tried to put the disaster behind them. "The daily incidents, which once seemed of
such importance," Daisy wrote in her diary, "dwindled into mere trivialities." Yet another tragedy awaited.

 In 1915, Douglas died in a car accident near the family's summer house in Maine. Daisy and Frederick both died in old age,
just a few years apart -- but that's not where their story ends. Several years ago a distant relative discovered a storybook Daisy had written for Douglas in 1913, recounting the Titanic voyage through the eyes of a little boy's toy. Since it was published in
1994, Polar the Titanic Bear has sold 250,000 copies, ensuring that the story of little Douglas Spedden -- like the tale of
Titanic itself -- will live on.