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## The Anna Sage Question: What She Was Wearing and What She Got
The story of Anna Sage — her dress, her motivation, and her ultimate fate — has been slightly distorted in popular retellings over the decades, and the distortions are worth correcting.
Sage’s dress is consistently described in accounts from the evening as orange, though the lights of the Biograph Theater’s marquee gave it a reddish cast that led some observers to describe it as red. The “Lady in Red” label, which became the most widely used popular shorthand for Sage’s role in the events, is based on this ambiguity. The dress was orange. It appeared reddish in certain light. The historical record consistently says orange.
Sage’s motivation was entirely transactional. She was not a romantic figure acting on principle or on personal moral conviction. She was a woman facing deportation who saw an opportunity to protect her status in the United States by offering information she possessed. She approached the FBI, not the other way around.
Her assessment of what the arrangement would produce for her was optimistic. The FBI agents were careful not to promise anything beyond bringing her cooperation to the attention of the Department of Labor. That promise was kept: Purvis and Cowley did contact the Department of Labor on her behalf. The Department of Labor was not persuaded. Anna Sage was deported to Romania in 1936, two years after the Biograph shooting, stripped of everything she had built in the United States. She died in Romania in 1947.