Trudging through the snow about a half block away from the theater, Lyman heard a sudden boom followed by a chorus of terrified screams. The Knickerbocker’s roof had come crashing down, overwhelmed by the weight of the record-breaking snowfall.

In total, the collapse killed 98 people-including David and Kirkland-and injured another 133. According to Kevin Ambrose, author of a 2013 book on the blizzard, the tragedy marked the city’s deadliest single-day disaster. A century later, however, the Knickerbocker Theatre remains little known among the denizens of the nation’s capital.

“It’s not common knowledge now,” says Ambrose. “It was a horrendous disaster at the time … and [publicized] widely. But over the years, it’s slowly been forgotten.”

By the night of January 28, the blizzard had started to wind down. Braving the snow, more than 200 people walked to the theater to watch a silent comedy, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, that has since been lost. Moviegoers paid 25 cents for admission to the Knickerbocker, which Ambrose calls the Titanic of Washington theaters at the time, both for its elegant style and its fatal vulnerabilities to the forces of nature.

“It was the most opulent and luxurious theater in D.C., and it was in a very high-end part of town,” he says.
Opened to great fanfare on October 13, 1917, the Knickerbocker had a seating capacity of 1,700 and boasted both a movie screen and a stage, where a live orchestra played music to accompany the silent film of the day. On the night of the collapse, only about 11 of the 20 musicians showed up to the 9 p.m. showing.

Just after intermission, audience members heard a loud hissing noise that some described as the sound of sheets ripping. The Knickerbocker’s flat roof, burdened by the heavy weight of the wet snow, was starting to split down the middle. A small dust cloud started leaking from a crack in the ceiling above the stage but went unnoticed by most attendees. The orchestra kept on playing until the unthinkable happened.

“In a split second, the entire roof came down in one piece,” Ambrose says. “It was the worst-case scenario.”
The Sunday Star described the collapse in vivid terms: “Came a hiss-a terrific crash-the rattle and clatter of falling timber, stone, steel and plaster. … A stillness, an unearthly pause, followed the din. Then a scream, an agonized cry, a moan. Beneath tons of steel and masonry scores of men, women and children were buried.”

The falling roof struck the theater’s balcony and knocked down chunks of the brick walls. It hit the floor so forcefully that a gust of compressed air blew out the doors and windows, ejecting at least two people outside and inadvertently saving their lives. Other audience members were killed instantly or trapped under the rubble of concrete, twisted steel beams, bricks and plaster. In one haunting case, rescuers found an unidentified man who’d escaped the collapse physically unscathed, protected by steel beams that buckled upward to form an air pocket, but died of an apparent heart attack.

Future World War II general George S. Patton, then a major in the U.S. Army, led the rescue effort. He was recovering from an allergic reaction to seafood when he was called out of bed to coordinate the complicated undertaking. The initial scene was chaotic, with survivors and volunteers on the street scrambling to pull people out of the rubble. By midnight, 200 police officers, soldiers and firefighters were on the scene; by 6:30 a.m., their numbers had ballooned to 600. A fleet of ambulances from Walter Reed Army Medical Center helped evacuate the injured, and every hospital in the area was filled with Knickerbocker victims.

Several thousand onlookers gathered near the theater to watch in horror. According to news reports, local residents provided hot food and coffee for rescuers and blankets and wraps for the injured. Many nearby houses and stores were converted into temporary first-aid stations.

After a succession of operations, doctors were forced to amputate his leg. Marshall remained hospitalized for 13-months, and decided he wanted to return to the theatre, where he diligently learned how to walk with a prosthetic leg. While he was recovering, King George V visited the hospital, and was asked to pick which of the actor’s legs he thought was artificial. The king chose the wrong one.

Throughout his career, Marshall largely managed to hide the fact that he had a prosthetic limb, although it was occasionally reported in the press. He developed a very deliberate square-shouldered and guided walk, largely unnoticeable, to cover up his disability. His mellow baritone and British accent rolled out with a minimum of mouth movement and a nonchalant ease that stood out as unique. His rather blasé demeanor could take on various nuances, without overt emotion, to fit any role he played, whether comedy or drama. He filled the range from sophisticated romantic comedy, dignified military officers, doctors to various degrees of villainy, with his unemotional delivery meshing with the cold, impassive criminal character.

Marshall suffered from his war injury for the rest of his life, both from phantom pain, common to amputees, and from the prosthesis. One friend remembered that he kept holes in his trouser pocket so that he could inconspicuously loosen a strap on his prosthetic leg in order to ease sudden discomfort.The pain in his leg became more pronounced later in life, including bothering him on film shoots in ways noticeable to others and exacerbating his usually very slight limp.

During WW II, Marshall used his own money for travel to many military hospitals in the UK and US. In particular, he focused on encouraging soldiers with amputations to keep a positive attitude and not to think of themselves as handicapped or limited. Despite his usual reluctance to discuss his own injury, he talked freely about his personal experiences in order to give these amputees tips on how to use and adjust to their new artificial limbs. Although mostly kept private, a 1945 article in Motion Picture Magazine reported, against Marshall’s wishes, on his work at military hospitals. The author insisted that his story needed to be told to help injured veterans and their families and to show that “Marshall is doing one of the finest war jobs any human being can do.” She interviewed one young officer, who recalled: “Herbert Marshall gave me back my life. When I found out I had a metal claw instead of a hand, I was completely broken. Then one day, while I was in the hospital, we were told Herbert Marshall, the film star, was coming to talk to us. I was disgusted with the idea. A collar ad, I thought, coming to give us a Pollyanna speech!”

The officer added, “It turned out to be anything but that. Mr. Marshall talked real sense into us. He followed it up with demonstrations, actually showing us what he could do. Before he left, we were convinced that if he had been able to lead a normal life, we could do the same.”

The article also quoted a veteran with a double amputation (left leg and right foot), who praised Marshall for showing him how to dance with a prosthetic leg. He considered the actor’s advice and example to be his Ten Commandments General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Head of the Allied Forces in Europe, noted in private that, of all the film stars he met in Europe during the war, he was most impressed with Marshall and Madeleine Carroll (who worked as a nurse at field hospitals).

In Marshall’s stunning career in cinema, he appeared in Josef von Sternberg’s Blond Venus with Marlene Dietrich; Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) with Miriam Hopkins & Kay Francis and Angel (1937) with Dietrich again; Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) with Joel McCrea; and two by William Wyler, The Letter (1940) &The Little Foxes (1941), both costarring Bette Davis.

The T-Boy Society of Film & Music selected Herbert Marshall’s key film performances as the following: Josef von Sternberg’s Blond Venus; Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) & Angel (1937); Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940; and two by William Wyler, The Letter (1940) & The Little Foxes (1941) both costarring Bette Davis.

See & hear Herbert Marshall & Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitch’s Trouble in Paradise, discovering they’re both stylish criminal characters.

“Trouble in Paradise” (1933) – YouTube