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Forty-seven-year-old Eddie Foy (1856-1928) played the role of Sister Anne in
Mr. Bluebeard, with a contract for $800 a week
(approx $20K today). Born as Edward Fitzgerald in
NYC, he moved to Chicago with his mother and
siblings when his father died. With the family
barely getting by, Foy began performing on the
street to help out, eventually making it to the
stage and headliner status. He was a much-loved
Chicago success story.
In the Iroquois Theater fire disaster, Eddie gained
fame that would last throughout his life. He took
his son, seven-year-old Bryan Foy (1896-1977), with
him to the performance on December 30, 1903. His
other sons and third wife, Madeleine Morande Foy,
remained at the
Sherman House Hotel. He gave Bryan a prestige
seat in front of the electrical control panel at the
south side of the stage. It was directly below the
flybridge on which William McMullen operated the arc
lamp that started the fire.
Either Eddie gave contradictory accounts or was
misquoted regarding his location at the start of the
fire. According to some reports, he saw the fire
start; in other reports, he was in his dressing room
and ran out to investigate when he heard a
commotion. He hurried to find his son and handed
Bryan to either a stagehand or to a Harry / Henry
Schroeder, an unconfirmed member of the Mr.
Bluebeard company, and told him to take the boy
outside. Eddie then ran to the stage and tried to
calm the audience. He advised people to remain in
their seats to await the fire department. As the
fire worsened, he urged them to leave the theater,
calmly and quietly. As flaming shards of curtains
and scenery began falling from the loft, he finally
fled.* He and Bryan headed back to the Sherman
House, running into his panicked wife and sons on
route to find Eddie and Bryan. Word of the fire had
spread quickly in downtown Chicago. Before long,
there would be seriously injured victims from the
audience at the Sherman House, intermingled with
newspaper reporters and performers.
Eddie Foy's story, universally described as an act
of bravery, appeared in newspapers around the
country, and his name and the Iroquois Theater fire
have remained linked forever since.
Hero or unintentional villain?
I've vacillated on the question of whether Eddie's
directives saved lives. He meant well, for sure, but
what was the result? Did people die because they had not attempted to
escape before the fireball hurled into the
balconies? If more people had ignored Foy's
cautions, would it have resulted in more people
dying from trampling at exits? Or would more people
have evacuated and escaped the fireball?
In court later, audience survivors, mostly people
who had been seated on the first floor, described
having followed his recommendation initially. They
remained in their seats to wait for the fire
department. At the last minute, they changed their
minds and fled from the auditorium. People in the
balconies, however, didn't have time to change their
minds. Large crowds at exits prevented escape before
the fireball swept upwards into the balconies.
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Eddie was one of three who urged the audience to remain calm.
An additional consideration is that Foy was not the
only one to take to the stage to urge the audience
to remain seated and calm. Two stage workers and one
octet performer did the same. If the recommendation
was followed, four messengers shared in whatever
fame or blame was due. As the celebrity in the
group, wearing a distinctive costume, Foy was the
one best remembered and spoken of by witnesses.
Warnings maybe unheard
In an era without microphones or amplifiers, it is questionable how
many people in the balconies heard Eddie Foy or the
others who urged calm from the stage, or the
continuing musical performance. Several balcony
survivors testified that they could not hear what
Foy and stage workers were saying. They inferred by
hand gestures and body language that they were
urging them to remain calm. Eddie said he shouted as
loudly as possible, but his was one voice in nearly
two thousand. People were shouting in anger at
ushers and those nearer to exits, and at people
blocking aisles. Sisters and friends were calling to
one another, trying to remain together and find an
exit. Children were crying and wailing for their
mothers. The volume of a single mother's desperate
screams to find her child would have drowned out Foy
— and there were a hundred mothers at the Iroquois.
And rumbling below all the voices was the thundering
sound over a thousand pairs of feet struggled to
reach an exit.
Fake news
A grim account in an out-of-Chicago newspaper first drew my attention to
the possible negative of the audience remaining
seated. It suggested first responders came upon the
ghastly sight of balconies filled with rows of
charcoaled victims, looking obediently at the stage
— a scene worthy of a modern horror film. Many
months later, I realized none of the few newspapers
painting that scene were published in Chicago. And
no first responder court testimony described such a
scene. There were two reports in Chicago newspapers
of a few bodies found in seats, but only one of
those reports included details with which to guess
about the last seconds of the victim's lives. That
came from the court testimony of a first responder
who was one of the first to enter the third-floor
balcony, site of the largest proportion of victims.
Fireman Michael Roche testified that they found
fifteen to twenty people who had tried to jump or
climb to a different row. Their feet became trapped
in the folding seats. Easy to understand when you
consider that many wore ankle-length dresses and
petticoats. Of those caught in their seats, some may
have suffered from injured ankles and legs.
Presumably, most were in postures indicating a
frantic struggle to free themselves or to leave
their row and enter the crowded aisle. What Roche
did not describe was rows of corpses watching the
stage.†
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Discrepancies and addendum
A retired choreographer named Jack Haskell gave an interview
in 1957, putting himself in the role of hero
regarding Bryan Foy.
The story contains many seeming untruths, but I'll keep an eye out for evidence to support it.
* There are contradictions in stories of Foy's
escape from the Iroquois. In his 1928 biography,
Clowning Through Life, co-authored by Alvin F.
Harlow, Eddie stated that he left the theater
directly through the Dearborn street exit
(
door # 5). He repeated that in his testimony before
the coroner's inquest in January 1904. In Eddie
Foy: A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian by
Armond Fields, however, Eddie is described as having
jumped into the orchestra pit and run from there
into the basement beneath the stage. A stage worker
then led him to a sewer pipe and out to the street.
Referring again to his inquest testimony, Eddie
twice said his only visit to the Iroquois basement
was when the Mr. Bluebeard company first arrived in
Chicago. Author Fields cites sources only by chapter
so I don't know from which source he pulled the Foy
escape info. Of the nine sources cited by author
Fields, I do not have access to one of the
newspapers that may have interviewed Foy at the
scene. The Chronicle may have reported something
different than did the Tribune and Inter Ocean, both
of which reported Foy saying he escaped out the
Dearborn St. exit. Foy was an entertainer. I suspect
that if he escaped through a manhole cover, he would
have exploited it. Since he did not do so, and in
court testimony said he fled through the Dearborn
street exit, that is most probable.
† I came across a distant descendant of a family of
Iroquois victims who prefers to believe her
ancestors died sitting in their seats, their
blackened corpses found staring at the stage,
whether or not it happened. Contrary to reports in non-Chicago newspapers
of hundreds of seated corpses, within Chicago only one
on-site body identification was reported and it
occurred after the woman was removed from the
theater. I suspect sitting corpses wasn't
as titillating in Chicago where Iroquois Theater
corpses were the bodies of their relatives and
friends.
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