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Elisabeth Marbury

New York, 1856 - 1933, New York

BiographyMarbury, Elisabeth (19 June 1856-22 Jan. 1933), agent and theatrical producer, was born in New York City, the daughter of Francis Ferdinand Marbury, a prominent admiralty attorney, and Elizabeth McCoun. She attended private schools, but her most important education came in her father's office, where she read Blackstone's Commentaries and learned Latin at the age of seven. She saw a play every Friday, and by the time she was sixteen she had met Robert Louis Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, Emma Lazarus, and Henry James. Marbury also traveled to Paris and London, where she met Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Herbert Spencer.

Marbury's socially active life was otherwise unremarkable until 1881, when, intrigued by the newly invented incubator, she used one to hatch 100 chicks in a bedroom of the family home in New York's Irving Place. She took the eighty-seven survivors to the family farm at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and began a thriving poultry-raising business that received a number of exhibition prizes. Marbury's 1885 society theatrical benefit raised $5,000 and brought her to the attention of producer Daniel Frohman, who suggested that she pursue a business career in the theater.

Following the death of her financially overextended father in 1887, Marbury acted on Frohman's suggestion. Observing that the visiting English novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (author of Little Lord Fauntleroy) knew little of stage ways, Marbury volunteered her services and became Burnett's agent and personal manager. Marbury's next client was Frohman's brother Charles Frohman, cofounder of the syndicate that came to dominate American theater. Reading three to five plays daily and crossing the Atlantic to search for more, she soon provided Frohman with most of his material. In 1889 she coauthored A Wild Idea, a mildly successful one-act play. In 1888 Marbury had written Manners: a Handbook of Social Customs which reveals that, despite her own achievements, she continued to believe that, generally speaking, women belonged at home. She resolutely opposed the growing woman suffrage movement.

In 1884 at the Tuxedo Club, Marbury had met Elsie de Wolfe, a stylish, aspiring actress. The two began living together in 1887, an arrangement that continued for twenty-seven years. Impressed by de Wolfe's taste, Marbury urged her to become an interior decorator, a profession dominated by men. Although de Wolfe did not abandon the stage until 1904, Marbury remarked that they had "embarked on the turbulent sea of new careers for women" together. Often accompanied by Anne Morgan, the sister of banker John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., the two began to spend their summers in France, especially Versailles, where in 1903 Marbury purchased the Villa Trianon.

Marbury conceived of the theatrical royalty system in 1891 while stranded in Paris, after her share of a production's profits had been stolen. She approached Victorien Sardou, popular playwright and president of the French authors' society, and expressed her belief that authors would be better off taking a percentage of a play's gross profits instead of a flat fee. Sardou accepted her idea and agreed to make her the society's sole American and British representative. The works of Sardou, Edmund Rostand, and Georges Feydeau were thus introduced in the United States. Marbury estimated that the royalty system earned another client, Alexandre Bisson, $50,000 instead of $4,000. Twice decorated by the French government for service to French authors, Marbury wrote, "I have always found that events which seemed at the time disasters ultimately developed into positive blessings." Her British clients included Oscar Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, Jerome K. Jerome, and George Bernard Shaw.

In 1907 Marbury helped to found New York's Colony Club, "the first all-around gathering place where women could exert their prerogatives as individuals." The colony was de Wolfe's first decorating commission. Marbury returned to personal management in 1913, working to extend the European success of Vernon and Irene Castle, the catalysts of the pre-World War I ballroom dancing craze. She acquired for the Castles a venue opposite New York's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, named it the "Castle House," and hired James Reese Europe's orchestra, the first "society" jazz band. The Castles' income increased fivefold; there followed a rooftop "Castles in the Air" and a "Castles on the Sea" on Long Island.

Marbury's career as a Broadway producer began in 1914, when she formed a partnership with F. Ray Comstock, who was already a successful producer of conventional musicals. She suggested a series of modern musical comedies with music written by Jerome Kern (better-known older composers would have cost too much). The resulting "Princess Theater Musicals," intended for a 299-seat theater, were based upon Marbury's manifesto, dictating casts of no more than thirty, including a twelve-woman chorus. The orchestra was limited to eleven members, and there were just two sets, one for each act. All stories were to take place in contemporary America, their "believable" characters caught in comic situations that, like the songs, were to arise naturally from the plot. Librettist Guy Bolton and lyricist P. G. Wodehouse completed the Princess team, which advanced the art of integrated musical comedy over the next thirty years.

In response to the prolonged rehearsals for Nobody Home (1915), the first Princess show (for which de Wolfe designed the sets), Marbury rejected the convention that denied "chorus girls" extra pay for long hours. Anticipating Actors Equity by a decade, she reclassified the women as "small part players," thus raising their salaries. In 1914 Marbury helped to establish the American Play Company. She wrote in 1915, "I am convinced that Mr Porter [Cole Porter] is the one man of the many who can measure up to the standard set by the late Sir Arthur Sullivan. This looks like a boast, but watch him." After producing See America First, Porter's first show, Marbury gave up entrepreneurship, noting that her ventures into "musical comedy . . . had met with considerable disappointment on the part of my friends."

In the early years of World War I Marbury's Villa Trianon became a hospital; Marbury worked for the French throughout the war. In 1917 she became a member of the mayor of New York's Women's Commission of National Defense. Marbury headed a women's committee supporting Democrat Al Smith's campaign for New York governor in 1918. Sent in 1919 to Europe by Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane to oversee the welfare of American soldiers in France and Germany, Marbury continued this work for the Knights of Columbus. In 1920 she became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and in 1928 a member of the Democratic National Committee. She fought Prohibition bitterly.

At 200 pounds, with a deep, foghorn voice, "Bessie" Marbury dressed "as mannishly as the era allowed" and smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day. She never married, noting, "I never had a really good offer . . . I attracted all the lame ducks." Marbury died at her home in Sutton Place, perhaps New York's most desirable residential area. Jerome Kern's last show, Very Warm for May (1939), is partly based on Marbury's life, which Kern described as "dramatically vital."

Bibliography

Marbury's autobiography is titled My Crystal Ball (1924), and de Wolfe's is titled After All (1935). Marbury's life, times, and contributions are treated in Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern: His Life and Music (1980); Irene Castle, Castles in the Air (1958); Stanley Green, Broadway Musicals: Show by Show (1985); and Robert Kimball, ed., Cole (1971).

James Ross Moore

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Citation:
James Ross Moore. "Marbury, Elisabeth";
http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00788.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Mon Aug 05 2013 16:46:07 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

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