Hollywood created the myth of “Molly Brown”
How did the life of Margaret Tobin Brown become a Hollywood myth that obscured the real story?
The myth of “Molly” as an eccentric social outcast began with storytellers like Gene Fowler and Caroline Bancroft, who freely exaggerated what little they knew. Bancroft turned an article for a romance magazine into a bestselling tourist booklet, The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown. Gene Fowler, a wisecracking Denver reporter known for his ability to spice up a story, wrote that she was born in the eye of a cyclone, in a shack of scantlings and tin cans, and her impoverished father was a drunkard. She couldn’t read or write and grew up to become a “high-spirited, bosomy girl” who hightailed it to Leadville to marry a rich man.
The legend continued with the 1960 Broadway play starring Tammy Grimes and the 1964 MGM movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with Debbie Reynolds. Even James Cameron’s film Titanic, starring Kathy Bates as Molly Brown, relies more on stereotype than fact.
In reality, Margaret Tobin was born in a modest immigrant’s cottage in Hannibal, Mo., where her large family was part of a close-knit Irish Catholic community. Her father worked for the Hannibal Gas Works. She attended Mary O’Leary’s Grammar School. In 1886, young Margaret boarded a train for Leadville to join her brother, Daniel, who was working in the mines. She sought a better life for herself and her family.
“I longed to be rich enough to give [my parents] a home so that my father would not have to work,” she wrote. “I used to think that the zenith of happiness would be to have my father come to his home after a pleasant day and find his slippers warmed and waiting. . . father was too tired when his work was done to enjoy any comfort. His life was bounded by working and sleeping.”
Myth tells us Margaret worked as a saloon girl who could hold her liquor just as well as the “belly-up-to-the bar” boys. In fact she moved in with her brother, cooking and tending house, and took a job in the carpet and drapery department of Daniels, Fisher, & Smith. She met J.J. Brown at a church picnic and they soon married.
“I thought about how I had determined to stay single until a man presented himself who could give to [my father] the things I longed for him,” she wrote. “Jim was as poor as we were, and had no better chance in life . . . Finally, I decided that I’d be better off with a poor man whom I loved. I gave up cooking for my brother and moved to Jim’s cabin, where the work was just as hard.”
She was known as Maggie as a child, then Margaret, then Mrs. J.J. Brown—never “Molly.”
The myth may reflect Margaret’s spirit, but her real accomplishments are much more important and enduring. And she was famous for many things that went far beyond her Titanic fame.