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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Winifred Greene -- Let's Not Meet Again

The 21-year-old soubrette of the Ginger Girls Company had just completed singing an encore of "The Skeleton Rag" at Kansas City's Gayety Theater on February 24, 1912, when she rushed offstage to her dressing room and downed a bottle of carbolic acid.  She died half an hour later at Emergency Hospital.  A note to her husband, electrician for the company, was brief, but to the point:  "Bert, if you go to heaven, I trust I may go to hell.--W.G."  Moments before fainting at the hospital, the hysterical husband screamed, "I scolded her this afternoon for sending money home, but I wasn't harsh with her.  I never would have thought she'd take it so to heart."  In a separate note to her mother posted the night before, Greene apologized for killing herself.

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