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How old was she?
At death, she was between seventeen and twenty-two years of age — or
thirty. Nellie came to the United States for the
second time in November 1901 as a member of the
Grigolatis aerialist group, performing in Klaw &
Erlanger's The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. In an
interview for the Waterbury, CT newspaper, she said
she'd joined the Grigolatis troupe when she was
fifteen years old, making her seventeen at the time
of the fire, but her manager said she was
twenty-one.
Where was Nellie born?
Waterbury, Connecticut or Bloombury, England?
When the fire began, was she in her dressing room or
on a catwalk awaiting her next performance?
Stagehand
William Wiertz reported that he found her in her
dressing room; others reportedly said she was
stranded on a 4th- or 6th-floor catwalk.
How was she able to get out of her aerial harness?
Reportedly the aerial artists could not get out of
their harnesses without assistance, but other
descriptions of their gear reported that they could
detach by touching a button at the waist. Wiertz
said Nellie was nearly naked when he found her in her
dressing room. In the Saturday Evening Post, March
1904, Charles Bloomingdale Jr. was quoted as
relating a story he was told by one of the Mr.
Bluebeard chorus girls that Nellie was attached to
her harness and could not free herself. The
unidentified chorus girl said the elevator operator
(Robert Smith) broke the ropes connected to Nellie's
harness that had not already been broken by fire.
Smith reported he drug some performers out of their
dressing rooms on his last elevator trip, but
nothing was reported in Chicago newspapers about his
breaking harness ropes.
How did she get down to the stage floor? Was she actually afraid of elevators?
Wiertz reported that he wrapped her in his coat and
attempted to get her on an elevator car, but she
resisted because she was afraid of the elevator,
squirmed out of his reach, and fell over a railing
sixty feet to the stage below. The Marshall disaster
book reported elevator
Robert Smith's account of her begging for a
space on the car, his promising to get her on his
next trip, then doing so. Weirtz's story about her
being afraid of elevators seems unlikely. For over
two years, the woman had spent many hours a week
helplessly suspended from wires in the air,
seems like an elevator would have been meh. Weirtz
did not describe his descent to the stage floor to
see if she'd survived the fall, and his entire
Nellie story was not reported and attributed to him
until forty-six years after the fire.
Another cast member, Annabell Whitford, repeated
the elevator-fear story in 1945 at the annual
Iroquois Theater memorial service but by her own
admission, she had fled to a hotel by the time
Nellie was removed from the Iroquois thus can
only have been repeating stories she'd heard
from others. To further confuse, a
Lola Quinlan claimed to have seen Nellie on
the stairs and helped her to escape. As of
this writing I'm not at all sure Lola was
anywhere near the Iroquois theater or even
existed, but even if she did there are problems
with her story about saving Nellie because Lola
also claimed to have saved another dancer and
gone with her to a hotel.
Were there two elevators on the stage, one working on the north side, one on the south side not working?
The Marshall disaster book on page 79 reports that the elevator to the
dressing rooms did not work and that all attempts to
make it work "were futile," then on page 125
describes the "fly elevator" on the north side of
the stage, operated by Robert Smith, making many
trips to bring people to safety. This is the only
indication there were multiple stage elevators.
There was also a spiral stairway on the north side
of the stage that descended to the
basement. Nellie could have fallen into this
stairwell, making it unlikely she fell sixty feet.
The sixty-foot specification may have been
conjecture but even a thirty-foot fall down
flights of stairs would cause serious injury.
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If she fell, did Nellie survive the fall for a short while?
Mechanical engineer
Robert Murry testified that he found her
hysterical, in great pain and incoherent, scratching
a wall in the basement and that he let her to the
coal chute. Could she have fallen into the stairwell
and in an injured state, gone down to the basement
rather than up to the stage floor? Some reports
support Murry's story insofar as that they say she
was badly burned and suffered from smoke inhalation,
dying in the hospital a few days after the fire.
Was
Nellie a hero?
Her manager in the U.S., Hermann Schultze, reported
to a friend of Nellie's that she'd escaped from the
auditorium once then returned to save two children.
Given her condition as reported by Murry, unlikely.
What happened to her parents and siblings?
According to a report in the Waterbury newspaper, based on
an interview with Nellie in 1901 when she came
to the U.S. with the aerial performance team,
the Grigolatis, her family consisted of her
parents and two older sisters who had lived in
America for four years, 1878-1882, while her father,
John Reed, worked his trade as a brass fabricator.
In the 1880 census, I found a John Reed in
Waterbury, who worked in the brass industry, but he
had seven children, not two, so I do not know if the
newspaper story about the size of her family was
incorrect or, more probably, that there was more
than one John Reed living in Waterbury then. A
January 9, 1904, Wisconsin newspaper reported that
Nellie's mother died when she was an infant and her
father a few years later. That contradicts her
interview with the Waterbury newspaper.
Where was she buried?
While performing together in Sleeping Beauty, Nellie and actress Viola Gillette
(born Viola Pratt)▼1 became, according to Viola, "like sisters."
In newspaper interviews Viola reportedly said that
Nellie had only one surviving relative, an uncle in
England who would decide Nellie's final resting
place and a January 9, 1904, Wisconsin newspaper
reported her body would be shipped to England at the
cost of $200, to be paid by Violet. Elsewhere,
however, it was reported that Viola paid Nellie's funeral expenses and planned for her to be buried in Viola's lot in the famous Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Green-Wood Cemetery offers a wonderful database of
interments, albeit noting that it is not complete.
The only Nellie Reed presently listed at their
online site was buried a decade before the Iroquois
fire. Nellie is a nickname for the names Helen,
Ellen, and Eleanor. Green-Wood has no Ellen Reeds.
There are several Helen Reeds, but their death dates
disqualify them. Was Nellie buried in Brooklyn at
Greenwood Cemetery, or did her uncle have her body
shipped to London? Perhaps a London genealogist will
find information about the family and share their
findings.
Nellie's funeral
A funeral service was
held for Nellie in New York City at 2:00 Friday,
January 8, at the Stephen Merritt Embalming
Institute at 241-43 West 23rd St. between 7th and
8th streets. Reverend Homer Taylor of the Church of
the Holy Communion read the Episcopal burial service
and a double quartette of members from Sleeping
Beauty and Mother Goose stage companies sang hymns.
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