Henry Birkhardt Harris was a Broadway producer and theatre owner who died in the sinking of the. His wife was future producer Renee Harris, who was injured in a fall on the aft grand staircase of Titanic. She survived the sinking and lived until 1969.
Life
Harris was the son of William Harris Sr., a founder of the Theatrical Syndicate in the 1890s and Rachel Harris Freefield. He had a younger brother, William Harris Jr. Harris was born in St. Louis in 1866 and was a young boy when the family moved to Boston. He began his career selling song books in the theater lobby as a young man in St. Louis. When the family moved to Boston, young Harris began selling song books in the lobby of the Howard Athenaeum. He married Irene Wallach, a legal secretary from Washington, D. C. with an interest in the theater on October 22, 1899. Harris worked for his father in the theatrical business in Boston for a number of years before starting out on his own producing plays in 1901. He managed such stars as Amelia Bingham and Robert Edeson. In 1906, Harris became the owner of the Hackett Theatre on 42nd Street. The theater was later renamed the Harris Theatre, to honor William Harris Sr. He leased and managed the Hudson Theatre in New York and in 1911 built the Folies Bergère Theatre. The Folies Bergère was an attempt to emulate the success of its Parisian namesake. By September 1911 it had failed swiftly and heavily: Harris lost a reported $100,000 on the venture. By April 1912 he was in London, arranging future performances of Maggie Pepper by Charles Klein with his star artiste Rose Stahl and the original American cast from the Harris Theatre. The play was made into a 1919 film of the same name. Harris also acquired an option on the US rights to The Miracle, the world's first full-color narrative feature film that would later show at the Royal Opera House. Harris was one of the nearly 1,500 who died in Titanics sinking on April 15, 1912. Although she had broken her right arm near the elbow in a fall on Titanics aft grand staircase earlier in the day, Renee Harris had refused to be parted from her husband. Mrs. Harris was rescued by the ship. She cabled the Hudson Theatre from the ship, saying that her husband was not among those on board, but hoped he had been saved by another rescue vessel. A story was circulated that Harris had been rescued by another ship and had wired his New York office to that effect, but this proved to be untrue. His body was lost at sea. If it was recovered and brought to Halifax by one of the cable ships sent out to look for bodies, it was never identified as such. In 2019, Gregg Jasper co-authored, with Randy Bryan Bigham, the first biography of Renee Harris titled Broadway Dame: The Life & Times of Mrs. Henry B. Harris."
