Rita Jolivet booked her inside cabin in the first class section of the Lusitania the day before the sailing. She was going to France to meet with her brother before he shipped off to the front. As a professional actress she knew the theater producer Charles Frohmann who was also staying in first class. On May 7 she followed Charles Frohmann to the highest point of the deck, hoping beyond all hope that the British navy was going to show up to save the passengers. She couldn’t swim all that well and took out her pearl-handled pistol to shoot herself if she landed in the waves. She was the one who heard Forhmann’s last words, “Why fear death? it is the greatest adventure life presents to us.” When a wall of water swept across the deck, knocking her into the sea, it also knocked the pistol out of her hand. She clung to a piece of wreckage until she was rescued later that evening. In 1917 she starred in Lest We Forget, a movie about the Lusitania where she fought off the Kaiser single-handedly. Posters of the movie survive, but the silent movie didn’t make it to the present.
Dora’s friend, Rita Jolivet