A world traveler who sailed around the globe again and again and again.
Clara L. Macbeth (1871-1970)
For 14 straight years, beginning in 1956, when she was nearly 80, Clara Macbeth lived aboard the Cunard liner Caronia. Known as “the millionaire’s yacht,” it had 600 passengers and 600 crew members and was essentially a floating country club. She stayed in the same stateroom (A32) the entire time, attended to by the same stewards. The room was decorated with her personal items, and for meals she would sit at the same two-person table near the elevator.
Other women lived on the Caronia as well, though none as long as Clara, and they played bridge together. William H. Miller, an expert on the heyday of ocean liners, referred to Clara and her group as “the kind of women who wore diamond bracelets up to their elbows at 9 o’clock in the morning.”
Clara was born in 1871, the only child of James Macbeth and his wife, Elizabeth. Clara was raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and attended P.S. 3, the borough’s first public school.
In 1888, James established a company in Jamaica, Queens County, to make electric fuses for detonating dynamite. He helped invent a dynamite detonator that was integral to the construction of the Panama Canal between 1903 and 1914. He also owned real estate in Brooklyn and Queens, and was a founder, chairman, and major stockholder in the Long Island Bond and Mortgage Guarantee Company. He died in 1929, leaving half of his estate to Clara. And when her mother passed away four years later, Clara inherited the other half.
Early in her life, James instilled in Clara a love of world travel. When she was in her late 20s, she got the travel bug while they were on a world tour. For more than seven decades, she would circle the globe on ships, eventually referred to by the Daily News as the world’s Number One Globetrotter. “I enjoyed the tour so much, I decided then and there to spend my life traveling,” she told a Daily News reporter in 1969, the year before she died.
Clara sailed to almost every country. Onboard, she went to the movies and cocktail parties, though she didn’t smoke or drink. She had friends in ports around the world and loved to catch up with them on her trips.
By 1969, at age 96, she was spending $396 a day to keep herself and her traveling companion, Madoline E. Frank, in luxury aboard ships. Clara also had an apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue but rarely stayed there. When the Daily News reporter asked her how long she would keep going she said, “Till I drop.” Her doctor called her “disgustingly healthy.”
“I’ve got no relatives to leave my money to,” she told the Daily News reporter, “and can think of no better way to spend my time. I just live on ships, traveling from port to port, sightseeing and enjoying myself. Hardly anything excites me anymore, but I keep on looking.”
Clara died on February 10, 1970, at age 99. In addition to two unrestricted funds at The Trust, she left a few bequests, including one to her longtime waiter aboard the Caronia.
Coincidentally, in 1974, after the Caronia had been sold and dismantled, a restaurant named One Fifth Avenue opened in Manhattan, and the proprietor decorated it with furniture and fittings from the ship. The restaurant was directly below Clara’s Manhattan apartment.