Helen Brown Benziger | Volunteer Resources

Catherine Ellen "Helen" Brown Benziger

A young Helen, ca. 1890s

Margaret and James Joseph Brown’s daughter Catherine Ellen Brown was born in Leadville, Colorado on July 1st, 1889 and was quickly given the nickname “Helen” after Margaret’s younger sister Helen. After the family moved to Denver and when the children were not attending school they traveled. Their first trip took them across the southern United States and concluded with a stop at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1895 they took their first trip to Europe sailing to Naples and staying several months in Italy, then continuing on to England, Scotland and Ireland. After J.J. purchased the Avoca property west of Denver along Bear Creek, both children enjoyed spending time on the farm and Helen loved to groom her pony after spending hours driving her pony cart around the hills. When she was older, Helen and her friends enjoyed the dances Margaret would host in the barn, which was outfitted with a special hardwood floor built for dancing and these became notable social occasions often mentioned in the society columns.

Helen’s schooling seemed to be dependant upon where in the world her mother was, either in New York as Margaret studied at the Carnegie Institute or France at the Convent of the Notre Dame. When at home on Pennsylvania Avenue, Helen attended Loretto heights Academy and Denver’s prestigious Wolcott School. To help her mother’s charitable causes, Helen appeared in a play at the Broadway Theater to benefit Judge Ben Lindsey’s “Juvenile Improvement” program. Helen not only impressed Denver society with her red-auburn hair and charm, she also set her heart on the stage playing parts in small theatrical productions. As author Kristen Iversen retells in Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, Polly Pry, in her gossip column Town Topics, extolled Helen’s looks. “Helen carries herself with a Vere-de-vere poise, although only the blood of Brown and Tobin courses through her veins. Her hair is the coppery color we read about, but seldom see; her skin the tint of magnolia flowers; her eyes great twilight pools of gray. When her lips turn up instead of down she will be incomparable.”

Helen continued to grace Denver society and was presented also in New York and Newport and in Europe. As part of her London debut, Margaret and Helen attended the coronation of King George V in Westminster Abbey, and in 1911, Helen was presented at the May drawing room of the English court. She continued her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, with aspirations to the stage as an actress and then as a playwright. Now in her early twenties, Helen was facing family pressure to marry. Helen had seen George Benziger, who was from a Swiss publishing family and thirteen years her senior, at social engagements, but they didn’t meet formally, according to Iversen, until both were coincidentally on board the same ship, and ironically passing over the exact area where

Helen (left) and Margaret (right) sit on a bench at Wolhurst, in Littleton, Colorado, in 1909

a year later the Titanic would meet its iceberg. Helen thought George pleasant, handsome, and certainly the caliber of man her mother would deem appropriate. George Benziger’s letters to Helen were witty, and his devotion was apparent. But Helen was in no hurry.

In early 1912 she traveled with her mother and John Jacob and Madeline Astor to Egypt, then on to Rome, and then back to Paris. Helen remained in Paris, with plans to summer in London until returning to the Sorbonne in the fall. After waiting three horrifying days to hear if her mother survived the Titanic disaster, Helen instead traveled to Denver to be with her mother. A year later and just months before her 24th birthday, Helen married George J. Benziger. They wed in Chicago, Illinois where Helen had just purchased much of her wedding trousseau. J.J. did attend the ceremony but Margaret, who was in Germany, chose not to come home, perhaps to avoid any clashes with Mr. Brown. The Benzigers honeymooned in Europe before settling in Hempstead, New York and a year later she gave birth to son James George Benziger and in 1917 her second son, George Peter Joseph Alderich Benziger. The Benzigers traveled extensively, visiting Margaret in Newport, brother Larry in Fort Collins and family and friends in between. They also went to Europe, visiting friends in England and France and staying with George’s family in Switzerland.

In November of 1921, Helen received a telegram from her father asking her to come to Los Angeles. He had spent many weeks in the hospital and Helen stayed the remaining winter with him before they began the journey east. They stopped in Denver and Leadville before Helen brought him to her home in New York. J.J. helped George and Helen purchase a house, just weeks before his death on September 22, 1922. Helen, on her way to the hospital that day, was just 20 minutes too late. With no will, it was almost four years and a lot of family turmoil and bitterness before his estate was settled, Helen and Larry received a trust of $100,000.

Margaret and Helen repaired their relationship after the death of J.J., and they continued to visit each other and correspond, especially after Margaret settled in New York City at the Barbizon Hotel. Helen received a call late in the night of Oct. 26, 1932 from Barbizon manager to inform her that her mother had passed away in her sleep. She laid her mother to rest with J.J. at the family plot at Holy Rood Cemetery. She would again place a loved one to rest at Holy Rood in January, 1948, when husband George died after a fall in their home. Helen Benziger lived on until 1970, watching her two sons grow up and have children of their own. Son James became an English professor at Southern Illinois University and had three children: Brad, Katherine, and Vincent. Peter went in to the publishing industry, like his father, and had four daughters: Lynne, Pam, Helen, and Heidi.

Before her and Lawrence’s death, as the myth of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” began flourishing, the family closed ranks and closely guarded all photos, scrapbooks and letters. In a letter written in 1953, which Iversen found in the collection of Muffet Laurie Brown, Helen wrote “You can’t seriously have believed that I would consent to, or encourage, further public annals about Mother. I will never, never place information in the hands of anyone out in Colorado, conditioned as they are so obviously by the string of myths dreamed up by the local press.”

Images from the Molly Brown House Museum and Helen Benziger