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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