The New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City sits between 7th and 8th Avenue, just off Times Square, and is the star of haunted Broadway. This 11-story building was designed by architects Henry Hertz and Hugh Tallant, and was instantly dubbed “House Beautiful.” The building opened in 1903, and originally contained two theaters, offices, several lounges and a lobby. It also features a spectacular ghost. Olive Thomas, a model and actress in the 1910’s enjoys a bit of mischief and fun, and is known to be, by far, the most active ghost on Broadway.
Olive Thomas, born Olive R. Duffy in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was the eldest of three children, born to James and Rena Duffy, both of whom were of Irish descent. She had two brothers, James and WIlliam. Her father was a steelworker, and died in a work related accident in 1906. After that, the family moved to McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. She and her brothers often stayed with their grandparents while their mother worked in a local factory.
Olive left school when she was 15 to help support her siblings. She got a job selling gingham at Joseph Horne’s department store, for $2.75 per week. At the age of 16, she married Bernard Krugh Thomas. During their two-year marriage, she worked as a clerk at Kaufmann’s, a major department store in Pittsburgh. The couple separated in 1913 and Olive moved to New York City to live with a family member.
In 1914, Olive entered “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York City” contest, held by commercial artist Howard Chandler Christy. She won, and in doing so, she began a career as an artists’ model. She posed for artists such as Harrison Fisher, Raphael Kirchner and Haskell Coffin. Her image was featured on many magazine covers, including The Saturday Evening Post!
Florenze “Flo” Ziegfeld’s Follies, a show that combined melodious songs sung by famous singers with the funniest comedians from vaudeville, was already successful when he moved the show to the New Amsterdam Theater in June 1913. The highlight of his Follies was the beautiful women that wore revealing costumes. Harrison Fisher knew this, and wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of Olive Thomas to Flo Ziegfeld.
Olive made her stage debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 on June 21, 1915. She was so popular, she was cast in Ziegfeld’s more risqué Midnight Frolic show. The Frolic show was set after hours in the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theatre. It was primarily a show for famous male patrons who had plenty of money to spend on the attractive female performers. There was a glass dance floor where the men below could look up ladies skirts, and the dancers often performed on stage nude, covered only with balloons. The male audience would then pop these balloons with the end of their cigars.
Olive received expensive gifts from her admirers; it was even rumored that German Ambassador, Albrecht von Bernstorff, had given her a $10,000 string of pearls.
During her time with The Follies, Olive began an affair with Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld had affairs with other Follies girls although he was married to actress, Billie Burke. Olive broke off their relationship when he refused to leave his wife to marry her.
Olive continued to model and became the first “Vargas Girl” after she posed for a portrait painted by Peruvian artist Alberto Vargas. The portrait was titled, Memories of Olive, and features Olive nude from the waist up, while clutching a rose. Ziegfeld purchase the portrait and hung it in his office at the New Amsterdam Theatre and Vargas kept a copy for his own personal collection, calling Olive, “one of the most beautiful brunettes that Ziegfeld ever glorified.”
One of the men who frequented the Midnight Frolic was Jack Pickford. Pickford was the younger brother of the famous silent film star, Mary Pickford, and starred in various short films. He pursued Olive for eight months, and they finally eloped in 1916.
Many will say that Olive was the love of Pickford’s life. Their marriage was trying and full of highly charged conflict. Pickford’s family did not always approve of Olive. In Mary Pickford’s 1955 autobiography Sunshine and Shadow, she wrote:
“I regret to say that none of us approved of the marriage at that time. Mother thought Jack was too young, and Lottie and I felt that Olive, being in musical comedy, belonged to an alien world. Ollie had all the rich, eligible men of the social world at her feet. She had been deluged with proposals from her own world of the theater as well. Which was not at all surprising. The beauty of Olive Thomas is legendary. The girl had the loveliest violet-blue eyes I have ever seen. They were fringed with long dark lashes that seemed darker because of the delicate translucent pallor of her skin. I could understand why Florenz Ziegfeld never forgave Jack for taking her away from the Follies. She and Jack were madly in love with one another but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together.”
In 1917, Olive signed a deal with Triangle Pictures. Her first film for Triangle, Madcap Madge, was released in June 1917 and her popularity grew with performances in Indiscreet Corrine (1917) and Limousine Life (1918). In 1919, she portrayed a French girl who poses as a boy in Toton the Apache. She made her final film for Triangle, The Follies Girl, that same year.
Olive then signed with Myron Selznick’s, Selznick Pictures Company in December 1918 for a salary of $2,500 a week. She wanted more serious roles, believing that with her husband signed to the same company, she would have more influence. Her first film for Selznick, Upstairs and Down (1919), was quite successful and established her image as a “baby vamp.” She followed with roles in Love’s Prisoner and Out Yonder, both in 1919.
In 1920, Olive played a teenage schoolgirl who yearns for excitement beyond her small Florida town in The Flapper. She was the first actress ever to portray a lead character who was a flapper and the film was the first of its kind to portray the flapper lifestyle. The Flapper was so popular, it became one of Olive’s most successful films.
On October 4, 1920, her final film, Everybody’s Sweetheart, was released.
Olive and Jack decided to take a second honeymoon in Paris. On the evening of September 5, 1920, the couple went out for a night of entertainment and partying at the famous bistros in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. When they returned to their room at the Hotel Ritz, Pickford fell asleep rather quickly. Olive, unable to sleep, rummaged through the bathroom for something to help her rest. She stumbled upon a bottle that smelled of alcohol and drank it down.
Olive screamed, “Oh my God!” waking her husband who ran to her aid. He picked her up and she was taken to the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. She died five days later.
Unable to refuse a good story, the press began reporting various rumors from her having attempted suicide after having a fight with Pickford, to Olive having a drug addiction, to her and Pickford were involved in “champagne and cocaine orgies.” Some even said that Pickford tricked her into drinking poison so he could collect her insurance money. Jack denied all rumors, stating “Olive and I were the greatest pals on Earth. Her death is a ghastly mistake.”
On September 13, 1920, Pickford gave his account of that night to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner:
“We arrived back at the Ritz hotel at about 3 o’clock in the morning. I had already booked airplane seats for London. We were going Sunday morning. Both of us were tired out. We both had been drinking a little. I insisted that we had better not pack then, but rather get up early before our trip and do it then. I went to bed immediately. She fussed around and wrote a note to her mother. … She was in the bathroom.
Suddenly she shrieked: ‘My God.’ I jumped out of bed, rushed toward her and caught her in my arms. She cried to me to find out what was in the bottle. I picked it up and read: ‘Poison.’ It was a toilet solution and the label was in French. I realized what she had done and sent for the doctor. Meanwhile, I forced her to drink water in order to make her vomit. She screamed, ‘O, my God, I’m poisoned.’ I forced the whites of eggs down her throat, hoping to offset the poison. The doctor came. He pumped her stomach three times while I held Olive.
Nine o’clock in the morning I got her to the Neuilly Hospital, where Doctors Choate and Wharton took charge of her. They told me she had swallowed bichloride of mercury in an alcoholic solution, which is ten times worse than tablets. She didn’t want to die. She took the poison by mistake. We both loved each other since the day we married. The fact that we were separated months at a time made no difference in our affection for each other. She even was conscious enough the day before she died to ask the nurse to come to America with her until she had fully recovered, having no thought she would die.
She kept continually calling for me. I was beside her day and night until her death. The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had. She held onto her life as only one case in fifty. She seemed stronger the last two days. She was conscious, and said she would get better and go home to her mother. ‘It’s all a mistake, darling Jack,’ she said. But I knew she was dying.
She was kept alive only by hypodermic injections during the last twelve hours. I was the last one she recognized. I watched her eyes glaze and realized she was dying. I asked her how she was feeling and she answered: ‘Pretty weak, but I’ll be all right in a little while, don’t worry, darling.’ Those were her last words. I held her in my arms and she died an hour later. Owen Moore was at her bedside. All stories and rumors of wild parties and cocaine and domestic fights since we left New York are untrue.”
Olive’s death was attributed to acute nephritis, caused by mercury bichloride absorption, after an autopsy was performed. Her death was ruled accidental, and her body was brought back to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for burial.
At the New Amsterdam Theatre, however, odd things started to happen. Workers began telling friends they had run into Olive backstage. She would continue to appear periodically throughout the 1920’s, but then seemed to disappear.
When Disney bought the theater in the mid 1990’s, sightings began to pick up again. Construction workers would tell stories of a woman carrying a blue bottle in their off-limits work area.
Dana Amendola, the man in charge of the restoration work, reportedly hearing the sound of tap-dancing as he passed below the stage. He quickly climbed up to stage level, and found he was alone. He now keeps records of all her appearances.
One evening, soon after Disney purchased and renovated the theater, a night watchman witnessed a woman cross the stage and disappear through a solid wall. He resigned on the spot.
Employees report seeing a woman, or disembodied feet climbing a staircase, in the trap that was once the stage on the New Amsterdam Roof Theater, the very space where Amendola heard the mysterious tap dancing. The space is now used for storage.
Guests and employees alike have described seeing a young woman wearing a sash and carrying a bottle of pills. She would sometimes speak, and when asked how she sounded, people would imitate her voice in exactly the same way.
During previews of Aladdin, a female replacement conductor who knew about Olive, was getting ready in one of the dressing rooms. She spoke out loud to Olive, “Well Olive, I’m back again, and I’m a little nervous. I just wanted to introduce myself again and, ask if you could please give me some good luck. I wonder what the Follies girls would have thought of a female conductor?” Just then, four of the round dressing room bulbs flickered off and on for a few seconds before stopping. The bulbs were all new, and the conductor said, “It was like a wink. She was signaling that she was fine with the idea.”
One other documented appearance was shortly after the opening of Aladdin in 2014. An audience member came up to one of the ushers during a performance and asked if she could have a booster seat for her child. He later reported, “We don’t like to interrupt a show so we waited until the intermission and came to her with a booster. But we found she already had one. When we asked where she had gotten it, she said a ‘lady at the back of the theater’ had gestured to where they were. Now, we don’t have a woman at the back of the house who does that in the middle of a show. We checked and none of the staff had done it…”
Amendola has said that if there really are such things as ghosts, and if the New Amsterdam Theater is truly haunted by one, he doesn’t mind. “We embrace it. She’s never violent, always playful. She kind of embodies what we’re all about here at Disney. We’re in the business of happiness, and to have someone from so long ago acknowledging that she’s pleased makes us feel like we’re doing the right things.”
Photographs of Olive have been placed at every entrance to the theater so workers can greet her when they arrive to work each day (Which they believe keep her mischief to a minimum). Most are only visible to Disney employees, but audiences who enter through the main entrance on 42nd Street can see one too. Olive Thomas is the last photo on the right side as you enter.
If Olive Thomas can haunt a Broadway Theater, is it possible that Rudolph Valentino can have a cursed ring?