The box office blockbuster "Titanic" has revived interest in one of the doomed ocean liner's most famous passengers: Colorado mining queen Molly Brown, unsinkable and proudly unquenchable.
The Titanic's manifest boasted such luminaries as John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Macy's owner Isidor Straus and others. But the wildly popular three-hour movie with Kathy Bates playing Molly Brown has sparked a new curiosity in the tough-talking socialite.Visits to her old home, the Molly Brown House, have doubled since the film opened in December. It's so busy that hours may be added to accommodate the crowds at the city-owned museum.
"The tour was very educational. The movie was too long," said Justin Vigil, a ninth-grader from Bear Creek High School.
Born Margaret Tobin in 1867 in Hannibal, Mo., legend has it that Mark Twain told her to go West when she waited on him in a local diner. She landed in Leadville, Colo., where she worked as a seamstress and met and married James J. Brown, a mine superintendent.
From the beginning, the red-haired, blue-eyed Brown did things her way. She lived apart from her husband, educated herself, brought her ditch-digger father to live with her, campaigned for miners' rights and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. She showed a determination that won her distinction as an early feminist.
The Browns, who moved to Denver in 1894, amassed great wealth. When the silver crash bankrupted Leadville and left many families decimated, they survived because they also had shares in gold.
Surviving the Titanic was no different, at least to Brown. "Typical Brown luck, we're unsinkable," she said in one account of her survival.
Stories of her bravery in a Titanic lifeboat added to her growing legend: how she told raft-mates to stop whining and row and threatened laggards with a pistol. She even started raising money for Titanic victims while still aboard the ship that rescued her.
Brown died in 1932, three decades before a Broadway musical and movie glamorized her life as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." Now, fueled by "Titanic," her old house is bustling beyond its typical 40,000 annual visitors; the museum's Web site has been swamped with hits.
"We have had periodic influxes of people. In the 1980s, when they discovered the Titanic (wreckage) a lot of people came, but nothing like this," curator Elizabeth Owen Walker said.
The Victorian house was state of the art when it was built in the 1800s, including indoor plumbing and central heating. Furnishings include many items from her time, including Tiffany lamps, a gramophone and a piano with sheet music for the waltz "Pearl of the Sea."
"I could imagine living there when I saw the clothes," said Bear Creek 10th-grader Natasha Goloskewitch.
The museum gift shop has a Titanic room with newspaper clips and photos of the ship that sunk April 14, 1912, after striking an iceberg in the north Atlantic. More than 1,500 people perished.
Other museums are benefiting from the movie, including The Titanic Historical Society in Indian Orchard, Mass., and the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg, which has artifacts recovered from the ocean floor.
The Brown museum hadn't opened when Debbie Reynolds starred in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" in 1964. Walker, the curator, said Bates plays a more true-to-life character in "Titanic."
Even Brown admitted that her legend grew with each retelling. As to why she never corrected a tale in which she accidentally burned $300,000, she purportedly said, "It's a darn good story. And I don't care what the newspapers say about me, just so they say something."