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After less than a
year in "The Wild Rose" I opened on January 21, 1903, what was
destined to be the most memorable engagement in my history. Klaw &
Erlanger had recently taken up the producing of great extravaganzas,
importing the big Drury Lane pantomimes from London and giving them
an American farcical touch and a bit of additional lavishness. In
splendor of staging and costumes they fairly out-hendersoned
Henderson.
Their first production of this kind. The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, had just
run its course, and now they staged "Mr. Bluebeard."
In this memorable production, the Sister Anne of the original legend, who had been
ruthlessly eliminated from Henderson's version, now appeared as the
leading comedy character, and I was assigned to play it. Dan McAvoy
at first essayed "Bluebeard," but was soon replaced by Harry
Gilfoil. Flora Parker was Fatima; Adele Rafter was Selim; Norma Kopp
was Abdallah; Bonnie Maginn, a Chicago girl, was Imer Dasher;
William Danforth was Mustapha and Herbert Cawthorne was Irish Pasha.
I was supplied with two excellent songs Billy Jerome, "I'm a Poor,
Unhappy Maid" and "Hamlet was a Melancholy Dane"; and I had a scene
with a comic elephant which seemed to please the patrons greatly.
Newspapers exhausted their stock of adjectives in trying to describe this
colossal affair. "Stupendous!" "Magnificent!" "The limit of
pictorial stage art has been
reached." "Extravagance can go no further." "One of the most
gorgeous spectacles ever seen in a theatre." Such were a few of the
comments. There was a flying ballet which floated in the air like
thistledown. At one point the leader soared from the stage out over
the heads of the audience almost to the gallery rail, scattering
flowers as she went. That trolley wire upon which she was carried
was destined to play a tragic part in the history of the show before
the year was out.
At another moment
in the play a girl on the stage stepped towards the footlights and
held out her hands ; one of the fairies floated down as gently as a
snowflake, alighted thereon and pirouetted without causing the hand
to shake.
There were some really wonderful tableaux "The Valley of Ferns," "Egypt,
" "India," "Japan," "The Parisian Rose
Garden" and "The Triumph of the Fan."
The last-named was the most gorgeous of all; hundreds of people on
the stage, many in hand-painted costumes and waving scores of huge
fans of ostrich plumes; greater fans of lace and feathers appearing
from flies and wings, all illuminated with colored electric bulbs;
and above all, the seven aerial dancers, each poised on the points
of an illuminated glass star which revolved under the touch of her
toes. Some of those fans caught fire at Cleveland and came near
precipitating a calamity, but happily were extinguished betimes.
"Mr. Bluebeard" opened the new Iroquois Theatre in
Chicago on November 23, 1903. They made a great celebration of the
opening, had elaborate souvenir programs and no little ceremony.
The two local stockholder-managers of the theatre, the architect of
the building and one or two others made speeches, and certain of the
gallery gods called loudly for an oration from me, but the orchestra
mercifully drowned their outcries by striking up "America."
The theatre was one of the finest that had yet been built in this country, a palace
of marble and plate glass, plush and mahogany and gilding. It had a
magnificent promenade foyer, like an old-world palace hall, with a
ceiling sixty feet from the floor and grand staircases ascending on
either side. Backstage it was far and away the most commodious I had
ever seen. The space in the rear allowed for enormous expansion of
the stage setting. They must have had as much room back there as, or
more than they have in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. A
vast expanse of dressing rooms was provided under the stage and
auditorium for the chorus, and the principals dressed on the stage
level or above. The flies were reached by elevators. We were told
that the theatre was the very last word in efficiency, convenience,
and safety. Instead, it proved to be a fools paradise. There had
been no great theatre disaster in this country for many years, and
all precautions against such a thing were greatly relaxed.
Chicago having been our home for so many years, I had taken my wife and children
with me on this trip and we were stopping at the Sherman
[hotel]. We had an uproarious time with
the kids around the holiday season. My mother, then nearing eighty,
was not too old to join in the fun. Business was good at the
theatre, and life in general seemed to be moving along very
satisfactorily.
We drew big crowds all through Christmas week. On Wednesday afternoon, December 30th,
at the bargain price matinee, the house was packed and many were
standing. I tried to get passes for my wife and youngsters, but
failed. It was then decided that I should take only the eldest boy,
Bryan, aged six, to the show and stow him wherever I could. I tried
to get a seat for him down in front, but found that there were none
left, so I put him on a little stool in the first entrance at the
right of the stage, a sort of alcove near the switchboard, and he
liked that even better than being down in the seats.
It struck me as I looked out over the crowd during the first act that I had never
before seen so many woman and children in an audience. Even the
gallery was full of mothers and children. There were several parties
of girls in their teens. Teachers, college and high school students
on their vacations were there in great numbers. The house seated a
few more than 1,600. The managers declared afterwards that they sold
only a few more than a hundred standing room tickets, which would
bring the total attendance to considerably over 1,700. The
testimony of others seemed to indicate that there were many more
standees than admitted by the management, and it was widely believed
that there were more than 2,000 people in the house that afternoon.
And remember that back of the curtain, counting the members of the
company, stage hands and so on, there were fully 400 more. The
quantity of scenery, costumes and properties required for such a
spectacle is prodigious, and a big force of men and women besides
the actors is necessary to take care of it.
Much of the
scenery used was of a very flimsy character. Hanging suspended by a
forest of ropes above the stage and so close together that they were
well-nigh touching each other were no less than 280 drops, several
of which were necessary to each set; all painted with oil colors,
the great majority of them cut into delicate lacery and some of them
of sheer gauze. There had been a fire in the scenery during our
engagement in Cleveland, but by a piece of luck it was quickly
squelched; and I had been playing in theatres for so long without
any trouble with fire that the incident didn't give me much of a
scare. It takes a disaster to make one cautious. After our
experience at the Iroquois, not one in ten of us actors (and I dare
say other people would have been equally heedless) could remember
whether we had ever seen any fire extinguishers, fire hose, axes or
other apparatus back of the stage.
The play went merrily through the first act. At the beginning of the second act a
double octet of eight men and eight women had a very pretty number
called "In the Pale Moonlight." The stage was flooded with bluish
light while they sang and danced. It was then that the trouble
began. In spite of some slight conflict of opinion, there can be no
doubt that one of the big lights high up at one side of the stage
blew out its fuse. That was what had caused the Cleveland blaze, and
it was well known to the electricians of the company that in order
to obtain the desired lighting effects, they were carrying much too
heavy a load of power on the wires. Anyhow, a bit of the gauzy
drapery caught fire at the right of the stage, some twelve or
fifteen feet above the floor.
I was to come on in a few minutes for my turn with the comic elephant, and I was in
my dressing room making up, as I wore a slightly different outfit in
this scene. I heard a commotion outside and my first idle thought
was, "I wonder if they are fighting down there again" for there had
been a row a few days before among the supers and stage hands. But
the noise swelled in volume, and suddenly I became frightened. I
jerked my door open, and instantly I knew that there was something
deadly wrong. It could be nothing else but fire. My first thought
was for Bryan, and I ran downstairs and around into the wings.
Probably not forty seconds had elapsed since I heard the first
commotion but already the terror was beginning.
When the blaze was first discovered, two stage hands tried to extinguish it. One of
them, it is said, strove to beat it out with a stick or a piece of
canvas or something else, but it was too far above his head. Then he
or the other man got one of those fire extinguishers consisting of a
small tin tube of powder and tried to throw; the stuff on the flame,
but it was ridiculously inadequate. If there were any of those large
fire extinguishers there which throw liquid chemicals from a hose,
nobody seemed to find them or to think of them.
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Meanwhile in the
audience, those far around on the opposite side and especially those
near the stage could see this blaze and the men fighting it, and
they began to get frightened.
The flame spread through those tinder-like fabrics with terrible rapidity. If
the drop first ignited could have been instantly separated from the
others, the calamity might have been averted; but that was
impossible.
Within a minute the flame was beyond possibility of control by anything but a fire
hose. Probably not even a big fire extinguisher could have stopped
it by that time. Why no attempt was made to use any such apparatus,
or whether, indeed, it was in working order, I don't know. If the
house force had ever had any fire drills, there was no evidence of
it in their actions.
The stage manager was absent at the moment, and several of the stage hands were in a
saloon across the street. No one had even taken the trouble to see
that a fire alarm box was located on or near the theater, and a
stage hand ran all the way to South Water Street to turn in the
alarm.
As I ran around back of the rear drop, I could hear the murmur of excitement growing
in the audience. Somebody had of course yelled "Fire!" there is
almost always a fool of that species in an audience and sometimes
several of them; and there are always hundreds of poorly balanced
people who go crazy the moment they hear the word. I ran around
into the wings, shouting for Bryan.
The lower borders on that side were all aflame, and the blaze was leaping up into the
flies. On the stage those brave boys and girls, bless them, were
still singing and doing their steps, though the girl's voices were
beginning to falter a little. I found my boy in his place, though
getting much frightened. I seized him and started towards the rear.
But all those women and children out in front haunted me, the
hundreds of little ones who would be helpless, trodden under foot in
a panic. I must do what I could to save them I tossed Bryan into the
arms of a stage hand, crying "Take my boy out!" I paused a moment
to watch him running towards the rear doors; then I turned and ran
out on the stage, right through the ranks of the octet, still
tremblingly doing their part, though the scenery was blazing over
them; but as I reached the footlights, one of the girls fainted and
one of the men picked her up and carried her off. I was a grotesque
figure to come before an audience at so serious an occasion, in
tights and comic shoes, a short smock, a sort of abbreviated Mother
Hubbard, and a wig with a ridiculous little pigtail curving upward
from the back of my head. The crowd was beginning to surge towards
the doors and already showing signs of a stampede with those on the
lower floor not so badly frightened as those in the more dangerous
balcony and gallery. Up there they were falling into panic.
Oh, God, if only I possessed an overmastering personality and eloquence that could
quiet them! If only I could do fifty things at once! "Why didn't the
asbestos curtain come down?" I began shouting at the top of my
voice, "Don't get excited. There's no danger. Take it easy!" and to Dillea, the orchestra leader, "Play! Start an overture, anything!
But play!" some of his musicians were fleeing, but a few, and
especially a fat German violinist, stuck nobly . "Take your time,
folks!" (Wonder if that man got out with Bryan?) "No danger!" And
sidewise into the wings, the asbestos curtain! For God's sake,
doesn't anybody know how to lower this curtain? "Go slow, people! You'll get out!"
I stood perfectly still, and when addressing the audience spoke slowly, knowing that
these signs of self-possession have a calming effect on a crowd.
Those on the lower floor heard me and seemed to be reassured a
little, but up above and especially in the gallery, self possession
had fled; they had gone mad.
Down came the curtain slowly, two-thirds of the way and stopped, one end higher
than the other, caught on the wire on which the girl made her flight
over the audience, [Inaccurate. No
aerialist wire was involved. The curtain caught on a lamp hinged
to the north side of the proscenium arch. Eddie was not on stage when
the fire broke out and apparently didn't read newspaper coverage of the
subsequent trials in which a dozen stage workers testified about the
curtain becoming caught on a side lighting fixture.] and which had
just been raised into position
for the coming feat. Then the strong draught coming through the back
doors by which the company were fleeing, bellied the slack of it in
a wide arc out into the auditorium, letting the draft and flame
through at its sides. "Lower it! Cut the wire!" I yelled. "Don't be
frightened, folks! Go slow!" (Oh, God, maybe that man didn't take
Bryan out!) "No danger! Play, Dillea!"
Below me, Dillea was still swinging his baton and that brave, fat little German was
still fiddling alone and furiously, but no man could hear him now,
for the roar of the flames was added to the roar of the mob. In the
upper tiers they were in a mad, animal-like stampede, their screams,
groans and snarls, the scuffle of thousands of feet and of bodies
grinding against bodies merging into a crescendo half-wail, half
roar, the most dreadful sound that ever assailed human ears.
Then came a cyclonic blast of fire from the stage out into the auditorium,
probably a great mass of scenery suddenly ignited and fanned by a
stronger gust, a flash and a roar as when a heap of loose powder is
fired all at once. A huge billow of flame leaped out past me and
over me and seemed to reach even to the balconies. Some of the
audience described it as an "explosion" and "a great ball of fire."
A shower of blazing fragments fell over me and set, my wig
smoldering. A fringe on the edge of the curtain just above my head
was burning, and as I glanced up, the curtain itself was
disintegrating. It was thin and not wire-reinforced; another cheat!
Now the last of the musicians had fled. I could do nothing more, and I might as well
go, too. But by this time
the inferno behind me was so terrible that I wondered whether I
could escape that way; perhaps it were better through the
auditorium. But Bryan had gone out by the rear, if he had gone at
all, and I was irresistibly drawn to follow, that I might learn his
fate more quickly. I think I was the last man on the stage; I fairly
had to grope my way through flame and smoke to reach the Dearborn
Street stage door, which was still jammed with our people getting
out. The actors and stage employees nearly all escaped, saved
by the failure of the asbestos curtain to come down, which let the
bulk of the flame roll out into the auditorium and brought death to
many in the audience. The flying ballet went out as I did, rescued'
by the heroism of the elevator boy, who ran his car up through tips
of flame into the flies where they stood awaiting their turn, and
brought them down. But one of them, Nellie Reed, the premiere, was
so badly burned that she died in a hospital a day or two later.
Some of the people dressing
under the stage had to break down doors or escape through coal
chutes.
As I left the stage the last of the ropes holding up the drops burned through, and
with them the whole loft collapsed with a terrifying crash, bringing
down tons of burning material, and with that, all the lights in the
house went out and another great balloon of flame leaped out into
the auditorium, licking even the ceiling and killing scores who had
not yet succeeded in escaping from the gallery.
The horror in the auditorium was beyond all description. There were thirty exits, but
few of them were marked by lights, some even had heavy portieres
over the doors, and some of the doors were locked or fastened with
levers which no one knew how to work. There was no great panic on
the parquet floor save at the outskirts, and I am humbly thankful in
the belief that my pleading quieted those within the sound of my
voice and prevented those nearest the stage (although in greater
danger) from throwing their weight against those massed near the
doors. There was a bit of a stampede at the rear of the ground
floor, among those less in danger than any others in the house, and
some were trampled underfoot, but most of them were rescued by the
determined efforts of the door-keepers and policemen at the
entrances.
It was said that some of the exit doors leading from the upper tiers on to the fire
escapes on the alley between Randolph and Lake Streets seemed to be
cither rusted or frozen (for the weather was bitterly cold) and were
very hard to open. They were finally burst open, but meanwhile
precious moments had been lost which meant the death of many behind
those doors. The fire escape ladders could not accommodate the
crowd, and many fell or jumped to death on the pavement below. Some
of those following were not killed because they alighted on the
cushion of bodies of those who had gone before. When one balcony
exit was opened, those who surged out on the platform found that
they could not descend the steps because flames were leaping from
the exit below them.
Some painters in a building across a narrow court threw a ladder over to the platform;
a man started crawling over it, one end of it slipped off the icy
landing and he fell, crushed, on the stones below. The painters then
succeeded in bridging the gap with plank, and just twelve people
crossed that narrow footpath to safety.
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The twelfth was
pursued by a tongue of flame which dashed against the wall of the
opposite building, and no more escaped.
The iron platform
was crowded with women and children. Some died right there; others
crawled over the railing and fell to the pavement. The iron railings
were actually torn off some of the platforms.
[Torn-away railings is information not
published elsewhere.]
But it was inside the house that the greatest loss of life occurred, especially on the
stairways leading down from the second balcony. Here most of the
dead were trampled or smothered, though many jumped or fell over the
balustrade to the floor of the foyer.
In places on the stairways, particularly where a turn caused a jam, the bodies were
piled seven or eight feet deep. Firemen and police confronted a
sickening task in disentangling them.
An occasional living person was found in the heaps, but most of these were
terribly injured. The heel prints on the dead faces mutely testified
to the cruel fact that human animals stricken by terror are as mad
and ruthless as stampeding cattle. Many bodies had the clothes torn
from them, and some had the flesh trodden from their bones.
Never elsewhere did a great fire disaster occur so quickly. It is said that from the
start of the fire until all the audience were either escaped or
killed or lying maimed in the halls and alleys the time was just
eight minutes. In that eight minutes more than five hundred lives
went out. The fire department arrived quickly after the alarm and
extinguished the fire in the auditorium so promptly that no more
than the plush upholstery was burned off the seats, the wooden parts
remaining intact But when a fire chief thrust his head through a
side exit and shouted, "Is anybody alive in here?" Not a sound was
heard in reply. The few who were not dead were insensible or dying.
Within ten minutes from the beginning of the fire, bodies were being
laid in rows on the sidewalks, and all the ambulances and
dead-wagons in the city could not keep up with the ghastly harvest.
Within twenty-four hours Chicago knew that at least 587 were dead,
and that many more injured. Subsequent deaths among the injured
brought the list up to 602.
As I rushed out of the theatre, I could think of nothing but my boy. I became more and
more frightened; as I neared the street I was certain he hadn't
gotten out. But when I reached the sidewalk, God be praised, there
he was with his faithful friend just outside the door. I seized him
in my arms and turned toward the hotel.
It was a thinly clad mob which poured out of the stage doors into the snow. The
temperature was around zero, and an icy gale was howling through the
streets. Many of the actors and actresses had had no opportunity to
save street clothes or wraps, and some of the chorus girls who were
dressing at the time of the fire were compelled to run out almost
nude. Kindly people furnished wraps for these whenever they could
and took them into business houses nearby for refuge. My own outfit
of tights and thin smock felt like nothing at all, and my teeth were
chattering so from the cold and the horror of what I had just been
through that I could not speak. A well-dressed man, a stranger to
me, stopped me and said, "My friend, you'd better borrow my overcoat, "
throwing off his heavy coat as he did so and helping me
to put it on. He then picked up Bryan and walked with me across the
street, and there, at the corner of a drug store, hurrying towards
the theatre, I saw my wife with the two youngest children.
She gave a scream at sight of me, and crying, "Oh, thank God!
Thank God!" she threw herself into my arms, then seized Bryan
and kissed him, then me again, transferring quantities of grease
paint from my face to her own and then to her son's. She had
had a vague premonition of disaster from the time that Bryan and
I had left the hotel that afternoon. Her ears unconsciously alert
for significant sounds, she had heard the first clang of a fire truck
gong in the street and rushed to the window, saw the direction the firemen were taking, and
felt certain that the trouble was at the theatre. Quickly she put
wraps on the children and started towards the Iroquois on foot.
We turned back towards the hotel, thankful yet horrified, for I knew that the
calamity must have been a terrible one. I returned the overcoat to
my good-Samaritan friend, but was so agitated that I forgot to ask
his name or even to thank him adequately, I fear. If he still lives
and chances to read this, I hope he will understand and accept this
belated expression of my gratitude.
I had no sleep at all that night. Newspaper reporters were begging me for interviews,
friends were calling me by telephone and wiring me, and I had to
reassure my mother and sisters, and my wife's two sisters, who were
taking care of our Eastern home. I was too excited to sleep, anyhow,
even if I had had opportunity. My nerves did not subside to normal
pitch for weeks afterward.
I was greatly touched by the many kindly things spoken by the press regarding my
behavior in the disaster. What I did was little enough. Heaven
knows, and at the critical moment I was enraged almost to the point
of madness because of my inability to do more.
The Iroquois disaster brought about a serious reaction upon the theatrical
profession in general. On the day after the fire every theatre in
Chicago was closed, and they remained so for some time, while the
city authorities were investigating the question of their safety.
Numerous road shows were thus thrown out of weeks of business in
Chicago, and to make it worse, New York and other cities also began
closing theatres suspected of being unsafe. Theatre managers the
country over of course began rushing into print with declarations
that a disaster like that of the Iroquois could not possibly happen
in their house; but city governments generally refused to accept
such statements until they had been put to the test.
A New York newspaper a few days later listed over fifty companies which had
actually closed their season's run; and it was said that counting
vaudeville and burlesque players there were 15,000 people idle. In
Chicago alone during the first two weeks in January 6,000 who
depended upon the mimic world for their living, actors, actresses,
chorus singers, stage hands, mechanics, etc. were out of work.
But the terrible lesson was sadly needed. In New York at that very moment there were
Broadway theatres which had wooden stairways; there were aisles so
narrow that not more than one person could pass through them at a
time; the matter of exits had been given little study or even
attention; there was a theatre located upstairs in that city with
only one not too wide stairway, and a winding one at that, down
which the entire audience must go to reach the ground; there were
basement dressing rooms reached by stairways little better than
ladders, where actors would be caught like rats in a trap in case of
a sudden fire. The fine for violation of the fire laws in New York
was nominal. The retiring fire commissioner of that city had
recently asserted that there were theatres on Broadway which were
far worse traps than the
Iroquois. During the discussion which prevailed, Oscar Hammerstein declared that no
children would ever be admitted to a theatre controlled by him; and
he angered some of the ladies by adding that a woman with a child
constituted one of the most dangerous elements that could be found
inside a theatre. [Yep, we silly goose
mothers get right excited when our child's hair is afire and he will
die in our arms.]
The Chicago horror was a blessing in one respect, namely, in that it brought about a
country-wide investigation and house-cleaning. Theatres in some
cities were declared hopeless fire-traps and were permanently
closed. Others were compelled to make costly repairs. The top
gallery of a theatre in Philadelphia was eliminated. Stringent
ordinances regarding exits were passed and enforced. A Boston
theatre manager, anxious to prove the safety of his house, threw it
open during the day and invited the public to call and inspect the
aisles and exit arrangements and to test the asbestos curtain with a
plumber's blowtorch. Since then theatres have been far safer than
ever before. There are occasional hazards and violations of the laws
of safety still, but I hope and believe that another disaster such
as that of the Iroquois is at least improbable.
The Mr. Bluebeard production was totally ruined, and Klaw & Erlanger soon decided that
they would not attempt to reproduce it; so about three hundred
people were for the time being thrown out of jobs. I went back East
with my family and for a few weeks did an act in vaudevillian
adaptation of my scene between Sister Anne and the elephant. I had
the same two young men who had played the fore and hind legs of the
animal in the Bluebeard company, but I had to get a new
elephant, as the old one had been cremated in the fire.
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