America's Forgotten Nightclub Fire | The Beverly Hills Supper Club. No Ai. A Disaster Documentary

[00:00:00]On the evening of the 28th of May, 1977, 21-year-old Dana Stallings dressed for an evening she had been looking forward to for weeks alongside her mother, sisters, aunts, and extended family. She traveled to the Beverly Hills Supper Club to see entertainer John Davidson.

[00:00:22]Before the show began, someone took a photograph of Dana with her mother. It would become the last photograph ever taken of them together. By the time the night was over, Dana would be the only one to walk back out of the building.

[00:00:47]>> [music] >> Stepping inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club was a little like boarding a luxury cruise ship that never left dry land.

[00:00:58]There were elegant dining rooms, cocktail lounges, grand ballrooms, and live entertainment, all contained beneath one roof. Guests drifted from one room to another, while waiters in dinner jackets carried silver trays between them. By 1977, the club had become one of America's premier entertainment destinations, drawing visitors from across Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. An evening there was an occasion. Men arrived in jackets and ties, women in their finest dresses, and reservations were often made months in advance. Weddings filled one ballroom, while anniversaries, birthdays, and family celebrations filled others.

[00:01:41]Beneath glittering chandeliers, white tablecloths stretched across vast dining rooms as conversations blended with the clink of glasses and the sound of live music. It was the grandest venue outside of Vegas. On that Memorial Day weekend, every room was alive with laughter. The headline attraction was television entertainer John Davidson, and the cabaret room was packed with people eager to see the show. Dana and her family could hardly wait for the show to begin. Elsewhere in the building, a wedding reception had recently come to an end in one of the smaller function rooms, the zebra room. Several guests left early as the room was uncomfortably hot, just assuming the air conditioning had failed. In reality, a fire had already been smoldering unnoticed above the ceiling. A short time later, a member of staff noticed the smell of smoke. At first, there was little reason for alarm. Unusual smells were not uncommon. But when the odor refused to disappear, she went to investigate.

[00:02:48]Opening the zebra room door, she was met by a drift of smoke. Realizing something was wrong, she asked another employee to call the fire department while she and several colleagues grabbed fire extinguishers. It was an entirely natural reaction. What they could not have known was that the blaze above the ceiling had been starved of oxygen.

[00:03:09]Opening the door allowed fresh air to rush into the room, feeding the smoldering fire and triggering a flashover. Within seconds, flames swept across the ceiling, and the fire began spreading rapidly beyond the zebra room.

[00:03:23]The fire raced through the hidden voids that connected one part of the complex to another. Guests below continued eating, laughing, and applauding, completely unaware that above their heads flames were already spreading from room to room. With every passing second, heat intensified inside the concealed spaces until the building itself had become a pathway for the fire. On the opposite side of the supper club, Walter Bailey was working in the crowded cabaret room. 18 years old, he was one of dozens of young employees helping to keep the vast complex running that Saturday evening. Working as a bus boy, his job was to clear tables, carry trays, and assist the waiters as they served the hundreds of guests packed into the club's largest showroom. The cabaret room was the heart of the supper club. More than a thousand people had gathered there for the evening's headliner, John Davidson. Until he appeared, the audience was being entertained by the comedy duo Teta and Macdonald, who were midway through their act. Among the audience were Dana Stallings and her family. But like everyone else in that room, they had no idea that a fire had already begun to spread. Unlike the staff in the zebra room, Walter could neither see nor smell any sign of fire. From where he stood, it was just another busy Saturday night.

[00:04:48]Then he heard that there was a fire elsewhere in the building. Walter immediately asked whether the audience should be told, but the manager told him no, that the situation was being handled and there was no need to alarm more than a thousand people unnecessarily. For a young man who suffered from anxiety and stage fright, that instruction should have brought certain relief. Walter had no desire to stand before a crowded room with a microphone in his hand, and no reason to believe that he knew better than the people in charge. Yet, as the minutes passed, the performance continued, and nobody came to evacuate the cabaret room. The comedians remained on stage, and the audience carried on laughing. Walter began to realize that obeying the manager might not be the best course of action. He looked towards the stage and realized exactly what he needed to do. The decision meant ignoring a direct instruction and doing the one thing he feared most. As he made his way toward the stage, Walter tried to arrange the words carefully in his mind. He could not afford to shout fire and send more than a thousand frightened people rushing towards the doors. He would show them where the exits were first, ask them to leave, and only then explain why. Walter climbed onto the stage at around 9:06 p.m. and interrupted the performance. Taking one of the microphones, he turned to face the crowded room. I'd like everyone's attention. If you look to your right, you'll see an exit. If you look behind you, you'll see another exit. And in the left corner, you'll see another one. We need everyone to leave the building.

[00:06:34]There is a fire in the building. Walter Bailey's announcement was met with mixed reactions. Some guests thought it was simply part of the comedy act, and even laughed. But then the house lights came up. Without panic, people rose from their seats, collected handbags and jackets, and joined the steadily growing lines making their way towards the exit.

[00:06:56]It was assumed to be little more than a precaution. There was still no indication of fire in the cabaret room, and because of that, some of them decided to stay where they were. Dana Stallings and her family all stood together and followed the crowd towards what they believed was the nearest exit.

[00:07:15]She believed they would be back at their table within a few minutes, so left her handbag where it was, and absent-mindedly picked up a cocktail napkin as she followed her family towards the exit. Around the room, conversations continued as people filtered into the aisles. Chairs scraped across the floor, drinks were left half finished on tables, and guests chatted quietly as they joined the slowmoving cues. There was no rush, no frantic pushing, no sense that time was running out. Standing near the stage, Walter Bailey continued directing people towards the exits he had pointed out only moments earlier. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the evacuation might succeed. Then, at 9:10 p.m., the lights went out. The room was plunged into darkness. In an instant, the orderly evacuation dissolved into confusion. Thick black smoke swept into the room. People who had been calmly walking only moments before suddenly found themselves unable to see the exits, the walls, or even the people beside them. Dana stayed as close to her family as she could, but almost immediately they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. We started going out the wrong way. That's when the fire was bigger and it chased us the other way. Forced to turn back, they found themselves caught among hundreds of other guests, all desperately trying to change direction as smoke continued to spread through the building. Screams began piercing through the noise of the commotion. The corridors clogged with people searching for another way out. Somewhere in the darkness, Dana turned left. Then she lost sight of her family. Unable to see more than a few feet ahead, she pushed forward through the smoke, hoping that somewhere ahead there was an exit. When Dana stumbled outside, she expected the rest of her family to emerge behind her.

[00:09:15]They never did. Six members of her family had made it almost to safety.

[00:09:21]They were later found just inside the same doorway through which Dana had escaped. At just 21 years old, she was the only survivor of her family. Dana Stallings was one of the fortunate few.

[00:09:34]Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the situation was deteriorating by the second. Walter Bailey had never left his position by the exit.

[00:09:44]Even before he stepped onto the stage, the first fire engines had already reached the Beverly Hills Supper Club.

[00:09:50]But arriving at the scene and reaching the fire were two very different things.

[00:09:55]The club's long single entrance driveway had become completely gridlocked.

[00:10:01]Hundreds of frightened patrons who had already escaped from other parts of the sprawling complex were pouring down the same narrow roadway the firefighters were desperately trying to drive up.

[00:10:12]Cars stood abandoned. People ran in every direction. Progress slowed to a crawl. Unable to get their engines close to the building, firefighters were forced to stop well short of the entrance and begin laying hundreds of feet of hose by hand before they could even begin attacking the fire. While firefighters fought their way towards the building from the outside, Walter was fighting to empty the cabaret room from within. Scorching waves of heat blistered skin before the flames even arrived. But even as smoke poured into the room, he remained at the doorway, reaching into the darkness again and again, pulling people towards him as they fought desperately to escape. Each person he managed to drag through the opening was immediately replaced by another. The pressure of the crowd became relentless. The inward opening door, which had seemed of little consequence only minutes earlier, was gradually forced almost shut by the crush of people behind it. The gap through which survivors could escape became smaller and smaller until Walter could barely reach inside, and the screams were relentless. Still, he refused to leave.

[00:11:27]Somewhere during those desperate minutes, the class ring that he was wearing was torn from his finger. He never found it again. Outside, those who had managed to escape gathered in growing numbers around the supper club.

[00:11:42]Many stood in silence, staring at the smoke pouring from the roof, convinced that husbands, wives, and friends would appear through one of the exits at any moment. Others called out names into the darkness or searched frantically from doorway to doorway. Dana waited anxiously trying to find her mother and sister. Firefighters were met by scenes of confusion and desperation as survivors tried to tell them where loved ones had last been seen. Some pleaded with them to hurry. Others tried to follow them into the building before being held back. But with every passing minute, fewer people came out. Advancing only a few feet at a time, firefighters worked their way through choking smoke and intense heat. Every room they entered was searched for signs of life.

[00:12:33]Some survivors were still being found and carried to waiting ambulances, but as crews penetrated deeper into the building. It became increasingly clear that many had never managed to escape.

[00:12:45]At one of the exits, they found the first bodies and then another and another. Before long, they realized they were not dealing with isolated casualties, but a vast human crush behind the doorway. When firefighters eventually reached the doorway to the cabaret room, 99 people were found behind that single exit, many piled several bodies high, their arms still outstretched towards the fresh air that had been only feet away. As the fire was finally brought under control, the scale of the tragedy slowly began to reveal itself. Temperatures inside had reached 1,800° Fahrenheit. That's 982 Celsius. And because the club's walls and ceilings were lined with nonfire retardant plastics, they melted into a toxic sludge that rained down on victims.

[00:13:40]Firefighters found ladies with purses fused to their arms and their high heels melted into carpets. Near the jammed exit doors of the cabaret room, there were visible claw marks on the walls where people trapped in the crush desperately tried to pull themselves up over the crowd to reach air. And in one room, a bride lay beside her groom, both holding champagne flutes. Ambulances continued arriving long after the last survivors had been carried from the building. The injured were rushed to hospitals across northern Kentucky and Cincinnati. Many suffering from severe burns and the effects of smoke inhalation. Doctors and nurses worked through the night as casualty departments filled with victims arriving faster than they could be treated.

[00:14:29]Outside the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the crowds continued to grow. Relatives who had rushed to the scene after hearing reports of the fire searched desperately for news of loved ones.

[00:14:41]Police officers moved from family to family, collecting names, while survivors tried to remember who they had last seen and where. Every ambulance that pulled away brought fresh hope for some and fresh despair for others. As dawn approached, an unbearable truth was becoming impossible to ignore. Many of those who had entered the supper club that evening had still not been accounted for. Throughout the night, firefighters continued the painstaking task of searching the vast smoke blackened building room by room. What had begun as a desperate rescue operation had become the grim work of recovering those who had never found a way out. By the time the last flames had been extinguished, 165 people had lost their lives and more than 200 others had been injured.

[00:15:33]Families across Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana awoke to a Memorial Day weekend they would never forget. The horror of what had happened was now painfully clear. What remained unclear was how a night that had begun with dinner and a show had turned into the deadliest nightclub fire in American history. The questions began almost immediately. How had a fire that started in a comparatively small function room gone on to claim 165 lives? Investigators soon discovered there was no single answer. The Beverly Hills Supper Club had not been built as one carefully planned complex. Over many years, it had grown in stages with new dining rooms, ballrooms, function suites, and corridors added whenever more space was needed. The result was a sprawling maze-like building where guests could easily lose their sense of direction, even in normal conditions. On the night of the fire, once the lights failed and smoke filled the passageways, that confusion became deadly. The building itself also provided the fire with almost everything it needed to grow.

[00:16:46]Curtains, wall coverings, furnishings, and tablecloths all added to the fuel load, while suspended ceilings and concealed voids allowed flames and superheated gases to spread unseen through large sections of the complex.

[00:17:02]The cabaret room was also carrying far more people than it had originally been designed to accommodate. Extra tables and chairs had been added to maximize seating for the evening's popular headline act, leaving less space for guests to move once the evacuation began. Even before smoke filled the room, more than a thousand people were trying to leave through exits never intended to handle such numbers at the same time. There were no automatic sprinklers to attack the fire in its earliest moments, nor was there any fire alarm system. By the time many guests realized the seriousness of the situation, escape routes had already become compromised by smoke and heat.

[00:17:45]Investigators also examined how the fire itself had behaved. What had begun as a concealed fire above the suspended ceiling in the zebra room changed dramatically when the room was opened.

[00:17:58]Fresh air rushed inside, triggering a violent flashover that transformed a smoldering fire into an inferno within seconds. From that moment, flames spread with astonishing speed through concealed spaces above the ceilings, racing far ahead of the people trying to escape below. The official investigation concluded that the fire had most likely been caused by an electrical fault within the concealed wiring serving the zebra room. Yet the electrical fault was only the beginning. What turned a single fire into one of the worst disasters in American history was a devastating combination of building design, combustible materials, inadequate fire protection, and the speed with which the fire was able to spread. The search for accountability lasted far longer than the fire itself. Multiple investigations examined every aspect of the Beverly Hills Supper Club, from its construction and fire safety measures to its management and compliance with building regulations. And the result was one of the largest and most complex disaster lawsuits ever undertaken in the United States. Rather than pursuing hundreds of separate cases, the claims of victims and their families were brought together in an enormous class action style legal battle involving the club's owners, utility companies, insurers, and the manufacturers of electrical wiring and other materials used throughout the building. More than a thousand individuals and companies were drawn into the litigation as lawyers attempted to establish where responsibility for the fire truly lay. The proceedings continued for 8 years. Settlement after settlement gradually created a compensation fund worth around $50 million for survivors and the families of those who had died. The final major agreement came in 1985 when General Electric settled shortly before the case was due to go to the jury. No one was ever convicted of a crime in connection with the disaster. The tragedy did, however, leave a lasting legacy. Fire safety regulations across the United States was strengthened with far greater emphasis placed on automatic sprinkler systems, improved fire detection, and alarm systems. There were also stricter occupancy limits and safer building designs.

[00:20:29]Many of the lessons learned from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire continue to influence building and fire safety standards to this day. There is one final footnote to the story. The tragedy of 1977 was not the first time fire had visited the Beverly Hills site. More than 40 years earlier, in 1936, the original club had also been destroyed in a blaze after its owner reportedly refused to sell to organized crime figures. There was one life lost on that occasion. Whether history had repeated itself or merely cast a long shadow over the hillside is a question that has lingered ever since and is maybe the basis for a different video.

[00:21:15]But for the 165 people who died on the 28th of May, 1977, the only events that truly mattered were those that unfolded that night. Walter Bailey never forgot the night he ignored the instruction not to warn the audience. In the years that followed, Walter Bailey received numerous awards recognizing his courage. Many called him a hero, although he always rejected the title, insisting he had simply done what he believed was right. Today, he still speaks about the disaster, determined that those who died will never be forgotten. Dana Stallings escaped the Beverly Hills Supper Club, but almost everyone else she loved remained inside.

[00:21:59]Her mother, her sisters, and other members of her family never came home.

[00:22:05]The photograph taken before the show became the last picture they would ever have together. Today, the Beverly Hills Supper Club is gone. After standing empty for more than 40 years, the 80 acre hillside was redeveloped into a residential community known as Memorial Point. Yet, one part of the site will never be built upon. Under the terms of a legal agreement with the victim's families, the footprint of the cabaret room has been permanently preserved.

[00:22:36]Nearby, a public memorial bears the names of the 165 people who lost their lives alongside the first responders who answered the call that night. The building may have disappeared, but the memory of what happened there has not.

[00:22:52]For the families who carried their grief into every year that followed. For the survivors whose lives were forever changed, and for those who rushed into danger to help strangers, the 28th of May 1977 will never be measured by statistics or records, but by 165 ordinary people who left home for an evening of music, laughter, and celebration, and never returned.

[00:23:19]I think this disaster was another classic example of how buildings of that era could allow fire to spread so quickly due to the structure and the use of so many flammable materials. Our condolences go out to the families of those people who lost their lives and to anyone who was affected by this terrible incident.

[00:23:42]I hope you appreciated the way the information was presented. I'll see you on the next one and I'll wish you bye-bye for now.