“For God’s sake, don’t trample on me.”
CHARLOTTE PLAMONDON SAT rooted in horror to her box seat, watching the fire spread. It began as a “wreath of flames,” she said. “It crept slowly along the red velvet curtain. We … all noticed it. So did the audience and I could see little girls and boys in the orchestra chairs point upward at the slowly moving line of flame.”
Some people had risen to their feet, others were running, tripping and climbing over seats to get to the back of the house and side exits. Many standees were blocking the aisles and, because the theatre was new and unfamiliar to them, most of the audience had no idea where to turn. They did know which aisle they had come down and, without the navigational aid of exit signs, most of what was rapidly becoming a mob was trying to get out the same way they had come in. It was surreal: the shrieks muffled by the music and the chorus boys and girls continuing to sing and dance while pieces of burning scenery cascaded down like crimson snowflakes and terrified families were quickly being torn apart.
Eddie Foy had grabbed his son and was rushing to the stage exit when he suddenly felt he had to stop and go back. “Something told me that I was selfish … all those women and children out there … would be helpless, trodden under foot in a panic. Something told me I ought to go down and see what I ought to do, so I threw my boy in the arms of a [stagehand] and said, ‘Take my boy out of the theatre,’ and when I went back my object was to get the curtain down and calm them; my whole thought was, If they get into a panic they are all killed. I paused a moment to watch [Bryan] running toward the rear doors. Then I turned and ran on the stage, through the ranks of the octet … still doing their part though the scenery was blazing over them.”
On the stage, chorine Madeline Dupont thought that the octet had completed only one chorus of the “Moonlight” song when the half-dressed comedian burst in. As Foy reached the footlights, Daisy Williams, who had at first “braced up,” according to her partner, “did a few more steps and collapsed.” Jack Strause and a second chorus boy quickly carried her off. Others in the octet began to faint, overcome by fear or the black smoke swirling about them. Near hysteria, Charlotte Plamondon saw some of the girls fall and be bundled off the stage. “I saw the men in the cast and some stagehands lift them to their feet and carry them to the rear,” she said. “By this time the [flower garden] scenery was a mass of flames.”
Panic-stricken, Frank Holland, one of the chorus boys, bolted from the footlights, squeezed through the stage exit and, his Hussar tassels and gold braid flying, sprinted through crowded downtown streets to the safety of his hotel.
From the second-tier balcony outside her dressing room, actress Annabelle Whitford could see clearly what was happening. When the first pieces of burning scenery began to fall, she knew she was in great danger. Her costume included an eight-foot train of lacy fabric that “would burn like cinder.” She threw the train over her shoulder, and hurried down the iron stairs.
Alone on the empty stage, a blazing backdrop behind him, scenery flats in the loft above crackling and glowing red, black smoke beginning to billow around the top of the proscenium arch and bits of canvas raining down like burning confetti, Eddie Foy behaved in a way that many thought was heroic. Dodging some burning brands, he stepped to the edge of the footlights, partially clothed in his ludicrous costume, and begged what was left of the audience to remain calm. “Don’t get excited,” he shouted, “sit down, it will be all right, there is no danger, take it easy.”
Remarkably, some of those in the parquet down front took their seats once again. Some even sat down momentarily in the gallery. Josephine Petry, farthest away from the stage in the top row with standees four deep behind her, got up to leave but, she said, when Foy spoke out, “Some people said, ‘Keep your seats.’ I got up and someone beside me said: ‘Sit down, there’s nothing the matter.’”
From the stage, Annabelle Whitford saw it differently. “The audience was shrinking back in fascinated horror,” she said. Others were running for their lives, leaving behind a trail of coats, scarves, boas, purses, hats, opera glasses and other belongings in a mad dash for safety. Some tried to push past others, forcing their way up the aisles. Others remained sitting or standing, rooted to the spot, transfixed.
Eleven-year-old Lester Linvonston of Hyde Park, seated down front, was awe-struck. He saw Foy “dashing on stage and catching a piece of burning paper which had sailed down from above.” “See, I’m a good catcher,” the comedian lamely joked to anyone within earshot. “I was so interested in watching Foy,” Lester said, “that I didn’t realize what was happening.”
Heavy black smoke continued to pour from beneath the arch over the stage.
When the double octet’s performance suddenly stopped, the music stopped too. Many in the pit were scrambling to get out, stumbling over chairs, instruments, stands and piles of sheet music. But Herbert Dillea and a handful of his musicians bravely remained.
From the edge of the stage Foy glanced down and urged the musical director to play: “An overture, Herbert, an overture. Play, start an overture, play anything. Keep your orchestra up, keep your music going.” The six musicians struck up the overture to an earlier Klaw-Erlanger fairy tale production, Sleeping Beauty and the Beast.
Alone on the burning stage, larger pieces of flaming scenery dropping around him, his wig now singed and smoking, Foy’s mind whirled with fragments of unanswerable questions. “I thought of my boy again,” he said. “Maybe this man didn’t take him out. Why hadn’t the curtain come down? What would happen to the women and children? Could [I] stop a stampede? Where in God’s name was the stage manager? Did anyone know how to bring that damned iron curtain down? Why couldn’t someone just cut the wire?”
Once again he tried to address the auditorium, but this time he did not tell people to keep their seats. “Take your time, folks,” he pleaded. “Don’t be frightened, go slow, walk out calmly. Take your time.” But he dropped his voice to say to some stagehands on the brink of fleeing, “Lower that iron curtain, drop the fire curtain! For God’s sake, does anyone know how this iron curtain is worked?”
“The crackling of the timbers above increased,” Foy said later, “and I repeated [for the last time], ‘Get out—get out slowly.’” But now no one was listening. His eyes swept the semilit auditorium. In the parquet, frightened people were moving quickly up the aisles in a somewhat orderly fashion. But what he could make out in the balcony and gallery terrified him. In the upper tiers, people were in “a mad, animal-like stampede.” Under the screaming and yelling a sickening rumble reverberated throughout the house.
Lester Linvonston hadn’t budged. In childish wonderment, he could not stop staring at Eddie Foy. Oblivious to the flames and the terrible noise that now reached every corner of the auditorium, Lester stood in an aisle, completely fascinated by the man in the funny costume and smoldering wig, standing on the edge of a burning stage. And then, for a fleeting moment or two, something else caught the youngster’s attention.
“Almost alone and in the center of the house,” he said later, he watched “a ballet dancer in a gauzy dress suspended by a steel belt from a wire. Her dress caught fire and it burned like paper.” It was Nellie Reed, the British prima donna of the aerial ballet.
Somehow Lester managed to escape from the theatre. A cousin, sitting a few feet away, never made it out.
Ruthie Thompson’s family had also, she said later, “joined the yelling crowd. I turned back once to grab my aunt’s hand, and saw the black shapes of people’s heads silhouetted against the solid wall of flame that now reached above the proscenium arch into the ceiling. Those flames were like waterfalls, and they came faster than people could move along in the crowd.” Ruthie was swept along by the adults in her group, her feet only occasionally touching the floor, “seeing little, hearing only screams and shouts,” as men, women and children, most of them now separated from one another, made a wild dash for any exit they could find.
August Klimek and his cousins, who had arrived late with his mother, were so enthralled with the first act that they were still wearing their overcoats when the fire broke out. “All of a sudden sparks began to fall above the curtain and everybody got up,” said August. “We were stunned. Eddie Foy came out and tried to compose the crowd. But my mother said, ‘Let’s go.’ Normally someone our age would want to stay and see what happened, but we went right with her.” She told the children to hold hands.
Klimek could hear the pleading cries of mothers and children who had been separated, calling to each other. “We didn’t attempt to leave by the door on the ticket stub,” he said. “We went to the door we came in. That was still open. If we had to get out the door intended for us we never would have made it because it was locked. And as we left through the open door I could see people starting to assemble around the locked exit, trying to get it open and pushing against each other. We would never have gotten out alive.”
In the gallery, Ella Churcher was sitting with her mother and nephew in the fourth row from the front. She could see Foy gesturing, but with all the noise it was impossible to hear what he was saying.
“I couldn’t hear his words,” she said, “but his motions were to sit down and keep our seats, and we did so until I saw the red curtain come down.”
The red curtain! Was it the safety curtain? Most of the backstage crew had by now fled, but obviously someone had figured out the way to lower what was thought to be the asbestos shield. It was inching its way down on a steel cable between wooden guide tracks. As if in slow motion, the curtain descended and then, incredibly, less than twenty feet above the stage, it suddenly stopped, one end jammed on the light reflector projecting out just beyond the proscenium arch, the other end sagging down to within five feet of the stage. The wooden guide tracks tore apart and the curtain that was supposed to have been reinforced with steel rods and wire, began to billow out over the orchestra pit and the first rows of seats like the spinnaker on a sailboat, pushed by the draft coming from the open stage exit that was mobbed by members of the cast and crew.
Some stagehands tried to dislodge the curtain and yank it down. John Massoney, a carpenter working as a sceneshifter, tried, but it was beyond his grasp. The theatre’s engineer, Robert Murray, also attempted repeatedly to jump and dislodge the edge of the curtain, but it was beyond his reach too. It was a foolhardy effort because if Murray had lost his footing while he was jumping, he could easily have missed the edge of the stage and plunged into the empty orchestra pit. After a few failed attempts, realizing it was a lost cause, Murray ran down to the basement and told his crew to shut off steam in the boilers heating the theatre, bank all fires to prevent an explosion, and collect their belongings and get out as fast as they could. Then he helped a group of frightened chorus girls in one of the basement dressing rooms to escape by pushing them, one at a time, up through the theatre’s coalhole into the alley. One or two were dressed in street clothes, but most escaped wearing only their smudged costumes. Some wore even less as they emerged into the frigid air. After that, he said, “I made a trip around the dressing rooms [calling], ‘Everybody out down here?’”
As he rushed back up the stairs to the stage level, the engineer saw a young woman whose costume and tights were shredded and burned and whose skin was horribly blistered. Nellie Reed had somehow become unhooked from her wire but was seriously injured and obviously in great pain. She “was up against the wall, scratching it and screaming,” said Murray. “I grabbed her and went out to the street,” where he handed her to some rescuers and then remembered he had left something behind. He reentered the burning building, retraced his steps to the boiler room and found what he was looking for—a toolbox. Then he made it out through the alley coalhole.
Her long filmy train draped over one shoulder, the terrified fairy queen, Annabelle Whitford, crossed the burning stage heading for the scenery dock. “What had been a mystic fairyland had turned into a blazing inferno,” she said. “The heat was stifling, the smoke suffocating. In another minute we who were backstage would have been in panic if the stagehands hadn’t broken open the big double scenery doors with a heavy steel trapeze standard.”
The act of flinging open the iron doors undoubtedly saved the lives of the remaining cast and crew but sealed the fate of the audience in the upper tiers. Employees and subcontractors of the Fuller Construction Company had not only failed to connect the controls for the roof’s ventilating systems at the switchboard but had nailed shut the vents over the stage and left open the vents above the auditorium, creating a natural chimney. The curtain billowed out over the orchestra pit and front rows of seats, and the blast of cold wind that rushed in through the scenery doors instantly mixed with the super-heated air fueled by flames consuming forty thousand cubic feet of scenery. The result was a huge deadly blowtorch which one fire official later described as a “back draft.”
A churning column of smoke, flames and chemical fumes burst through the opening between the stage and the jammed fire curtain, whirled above the orchestra seats and whipped into the balcony and gallery located just below the open roof vents.
John Massoney, the sceneshifter, described it as “a great sheet of circular flame going out under the curtain into the audience.” To Foy, “It felt like a cyclone, it was so quick.” He narrowly escaped being in its path because he was standing to the side of the stage. In the balcony and steep gallery, those who were stampeding for the exits or who had become separated from loved ones, never had a chance. The fireball was suffocating and had enough force to blow doors open.
Moments earlier, Mrs. Pinedo had been sitting quietly in a vacated seat at the edge of the orchestra section, pulling on her rubbers. “I have never seen an audience who were saner than these women and children,” she recalled. “They sat perfectly still … while those sparks changed into flames. They were perfectly calm … Then I saw the big ball of flame come out from the stage … and I thought, ‘Now’s the time to get out.’”
Seconds after the fireball seared or asphyxiated those in the upper levels who had remained in their seats or were caught in the aisles, the last of the stout two-inch Manila lines holding up the scenery flats gave way. With a roar that reverberated throughout the building, tons of wood, rope, sandbags, pipe, pulleys, lights, rigging and nearly 280 pieces of blazing scenery, crashed to the stage. The combined mass struck with the force of a bomb, instantly knocking out the electrical switchboard and plunging the auditorium into total darkness.
Screaming, wailing adults and children clawed and fought their way toward the exits by the light of the inferno raging behind them, which seemed to grow in intensity by the second. Mothers and children were wrenched away from each other and trampled underfoot by those behind them. Skirts, dresses, jackets, vests, trousers and other articles of clothing were ripped to shreds as “a human whirlpool” of people tried to get through the exits and escape the advancing flames and asphyxiating smoke and fumes. The jamming at the doorways was horrible.
Out of desperation, some whose clothing had caught fire jumped from the first balcony to the orchestra floor. Many died instantly. Others were paralyzed and suffered agonizing deaths when they landed on seat backs or arm rests.
A momentary burst of bright light flared suddenly from the stage. The fire had engulfed the jammed safety curtain and in a matter of seconds, it, too, dissolved in flames. The curtain, it turned out, was not made of one hundred percent asbestos but of some cheaper material chosen by the theatre’s co-owner, Will Davis.
The conductor and the rest of the orchestra had long since fled, leaving behind heaps of discarded instruments and overturned wooden music stands. Now it was Foy’s turn to get out. Still standing at the edge of the stage, he thought first of vaulting over the orchestra pit to try and escape through the Randolph Street entrance, but, desperate to find Bryan, he made his way around the burning pile of wreckage on the stage and left through the scenery doors, hoping to locate his son in the milling noisy throng in the alley. “I got out as quickly as I could,” he said.
Those in the side boxes fared better than the others because the fireball missed them. Charlotte Plamondon was in a state of total panic and confusion. Later she had only a vague recollection of leaping over the box railing, being caught in the arms of a man who might have been a theatre employee and being pushed bodily along one of the aisles. It was there, she said, that she heard “a scream of terror … I shall never forget … men were shouting and rushing for the entrance, leaping over the prostrate forms of children and women and carrying others down with them.” Behind her was a sheet of flame that “seemed to be gathering volume and reaching for us.” She found herself jammed against a pillar in a side aisle. “I know I was almost crushed to death, but it didn’t hurt. Nothing could hurt, with the screaming … the agonized cries of women and children ringing in your ears.”
August Klimek, still in his overcoat, had reached the bottom of the stairs and was almost at an exit when the house went black. In the darkness his cousin George stumbled and fell. In reaching down to help him to his feet, Klimek’s mother dropped her mink muff. A few minutes later, as they stood in Randolph Street, shivering as much from shock as from the cold, his mother announced that she wanted to go back inside to retrieve the muff; she said she remembered where she had dropped it.
“We begged her not to go,” said Klimek, and she finally agreed not to make the attempt. “We stood there waiting to see what would happen. We couldn’t hear a sound from inside the theatre. It was all quiet.”
Backstage, it was bedlam.
Just before the switchboard went dead, a terrified young elevator operator, Robert Smith, his face a ghastly white, remained at the controls of his backstage lift, making repeated trips up and down through clouds of smoke to help cast members escape. When the fire started, he brought down a load of hysterical chorus girls from the first level.
Waiting for them on the stage floor was Archie Barnard, an electrician who headed a group of stagehands. As the women burst out of the elevator, some were so frightened and disoriented that they began to run back toward the burning stage. Barnard and his group quickly formed a makeshift human chain and began herding, guiding, pulling, pushing and, in some cases, bodily tossing the young women from man to man until each girl was safely out the stage door. On his second trip, Smith ascended to an area so thick with smoke he could hardly see or breathe. He found one girl on the sixth level and then rescued another load of women from the fifth. By the time he made it down with them, Smith noticed that part of Archie’s clothing and his hair were smoldering, but the electrician remained calm and continued to guide the young actresses to safety in the alley.
Smith’s third trip was his last. He worked his way through the smoke to some women so terrified that they had to be dragged into the elevator, where flames had now reached the controls. His hand badly burned, Smith descended with this last carload and saw them safely out of the building. It was only then that he, Barnard and the rest of the impromptu human chain fled the theatre.
In the darkness, those of the audience who were among the first to reach the exit doors discovered to their horror that these were locked and that the stairways were barricaded with metal accordion gates. Some of the young ushers had deserted their posts at the first cry of “Fire!” and the few who remained, stubbornly followed management orders, and would not, or could not, open the barricades. One, Willard Sayles, said he had been given explicit orders to lock the wooden inner doors to the auditorium once the performance had begun. “We had not got instructions as to what doors we were to attend to in case of fire,” he said. “The only time we got instructions was the Sunday before the house opened [when the head usher] told us to ‘get familiar’ with the house. There were no fire drills or anything of the kind.”
When the fire broke out, Clyde Blair, the powerfully built University of Chicago track star, left his overcoat and hat, grabbed his girlfriend Marjorie and maneuvered her through the pushing, shoving mob toward an exit, followed closely by his friend and teammate Victor Rice and Rice’s date, Anne Hough. “The crush at the door was terrific,” said Blair. “Half the double doors opening into the [promenade] were fastened. People dashed against the glass, breaking it and forcing their way through. One woman fell down in the crowd directly in front of me. She looked up and said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t trample on me.’ I stepped around her, unable to help her up, and the crowd forced me past.” Blair never saw the woman again.
A resourceful eleven-year-old girl in the third row of the orchestra, Winnie Gallagher, almost immediately became separated from her mother in the rush for the exits. Thinking quickly, Winnie climbed onto one of the plush seats and, using them like stepping stones, jumping from seat to seat, kept out of the crowded aisles and managed to reach an exit. There she was nearly crushed in the mob but somehow was able to get out of the theatre.
Even more resourceful was Emil Von Plachecki, a husky twenty-four-year-old civil engineering student, one of the standees in the gallery. As the fireball swept into his area, “everyone started to scream,” he said. “I felt my face burning. It felt like breathing a hot blast from a furnace.” He pursed his lips and held his breath, and when he found that stairways leading from the gallery were blocked, suddenly remembered the washroom he had visited before the performance. It had no exit but it did have a skylight. Using superhuman strength he hardly knew he possessed, the chunky young man pulled himself up, seventeen feet above the floor, hand over hand, on a stout window cord.
Grasping the cord in his left hand, Von Plachecki punched his way through a glass skylight reinforced with wire mesh and hauled himself onto the theatre’s snowy roof, where he bound his bleeding right hand with a tourniquet made from his clothing and waited in the cold until he was rescued by ladder. He had intended to find a ladder and lower it into the restroom so that others might escape, but he was too weak. Von Plachecki was rushed to a pharmacy where oil was poured on his blistered face, head and arms and his lacerated hand was treated.
D. W. Dimmick, the plucky, bearded seventy-year-old Apple River man who minutes earlier had hushed a child to prevent a panic, found himself feeling his way along a wall toward an exit when “the whole front of the stage seemed to burst out in one mass of flame. From all over the house came shrieks and cries of ‘fire!’ I started at once hugging the wall on the outside of the stairway,” he said. “As we went down the platform where the first balcony opens, it seemed … that people were stacked up like cordwood. There were men, women and children in the lot. By crowding out to the wall we managed to squeeze past the mass of people who were writhing on the floor, and … blocking the entrance. As we got by the mass on the floor, I turned and caught hold of the arms of a woman … pinned down by the weight resting on her feet. I managed to pull her out and I think she got down [safely] … I tried to rescue a man who was also caught by the feet, but, although I braced myself against the stairs, I was unable to move him.”
There were many heroic acts that afternoon. Georgia Swift, a young society woman badly shaken and bruised, had been sitting in the orchestra section. “When I reached the back of the auditorium,” she said, “the aisle was choked with people who had fallen. I looked down to avoid stepping on them and as I did, my eyes were caught by those of a little boy about seven who was on the floor and unable to rise. He had large, brown eyes and was so neat he looked like a little gentleman. He fascinated me. It was all in a second, I know, but as he saw me looking at him he said, ‘Won’t you please help me, please do?’ I stooped to raise him if I could, but the crowd was too thick and the rush too strong. I seized him under the arms and was then knocked over to my knees in the aisle. I struggled to my feet but the weight of the crowd was such that I could not turn back, and I was carried on through the door. The little boy was unquestionably trampled to death, and the memory of those eyes will haunt me [forever].”
Modern forensic science has identified two phases of death. Somatic death is the cessation of the vital processes. Molecular death is the progressive disintegration of the body tissues. For most of the victims inside the Iroquois, the end of life would have been classified as somatic death, which, tragically came by varying degrees.
At the first sign of fire, minutes before the blast of smoke and flames burst from under the safety curtain and into the auditorium, the adrenalin in virtually every man, woman and child present, whether members of the audience or those backstage, would have begun pumping in the space of a millisecond. The two pyramid-shaped adrenal glands, one atop each kidney, are not among the body’s larger organs—each is about two inches in diameter—but in situations of sudden stress like the theatre fire, they would instantly have prepared the body for “flight or fight.”
When one becomes frightened, the adrenals release large quantities of the hormone epinephrine into the blood system, which instantly help the body adjust to sudden stress by increasing the rate and strength of the heartbeat, raising blood pressure and speeding up the conversion of glycogen into glucose, providing a burst of energy to the muscles. For those trying to battle their way to the exits, this adrenalin “rush” would have propelled them on in their desperate attempts to escape. But once the victims had become trapped in the doorways or hit by the blast of fire, other bodily processes would have rapidly occurred.
Some people were immediately overcome by inhaling poisonous gasses or fumes containing deadly carbon monoxide produced by the incomplete combustion of wood or paint. Fumes and smoke from the scenery may also have contained equally deadly cyanide. The degree of saturation of these chemicals in the bloodstream, together with soot clogging the air passages of the lungs, could have produced a quick death with no physical signs of disfiguration, as was the case with some of those caught in their seats. If they survived the smoke and flames, their next biggest risk was dying from shock or burn injuries as bodily fluids rushed to the skin. If fluids are not replenished quickly enough, organs can die for lack of blood. There is also what is known as “delayed death” from smoke inhalation. Lungs badly damaged from chemical burns caused by poisonous gasses can fill with so much fluid that the victim dies days or weeks later.
Then there were those seared by the flames. For them, the end would have come quickly. The body exposed to fire often assumes what is called the “pugilistic attitude,” in which the flexor or bicep muscles contract so that the victims’ arms in particular are outstretched and fixed in an attitude commonly adopted by boxers. This “pugilistic attitude” is evidence of exposure of the body to intense heat. “Among the bodies,” one journalist would note that day, “a strange uniformity was observed. In nearly every case the victim’s left arm was held stiff and close to the side, while the right arm was stretched out as if warding off peril.”
Those who were trampled or were piled on top of one another in the doorways died in still another way—by traumatic or crush asphyxia, a particularly horrific end. “The victim of such crushing would have experienced the sensation of tremendous pressure on the body, pressure sufficient enough to fracture ribs. If the person was conscious, he might have felt as if his head were about to explode or his eyes pop out.” Those victims of the Iroquois who lost consciousness immediately were the fortunate ones. Slow asphyxia can take two to three minutes to kill.
Such was the fate of those trapped inside what had been advertised as “the best theatre on earth.” But even as men, women and children died by the hundreds and the piles of bodies grew higher inside the building, scenes equally devastating were occurring outside, in Couch Place. It would soon come to be known as “Death Alley.”