Marbury, Elisabeth

Elisabeth Marbury, (born June 19, 1856, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Jan. 22, 1933, New York City), American theatrical and literary agent who represented a stellar array of theatrical performers and writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Marbury grew up in an affluent and cultured home and was privately educated, to a large extent by her father. In 1885 a successful benefit theatrical performance that she had organized prompted Marbury to try her hand at theatre management. In 1888 she persuaded Frances Hodgson Burnett, who had written a dramatic version of her best-selling Little Lord Fauntleroy, to hire her as business manager and agent. The association quickly proved highly profitable to both women.

In 1891 Marbury traveled to France, and for 15 years she was the representative in the English-speaking market for playwright Victorien Sardou and the other members of the Société des Gens de Lettres, including Georges Feydeau, Edmond Rostand, Ludovic Halévy, and Jean Richepin. Her work on their behalf included securing suitable translations, sound productions with leading actors, and full royalties. She also represented George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie (whom she prevailed upon to rewrite The Little Minister for Maude Adams), Hall Caine, and Jerome K. Jerome, among British authors, and Rachel Crothers and Clyde Fitch among Americans. Her office thus became a centre of the New York theatrical business, and for many years Marbury worked closely with Charles Frohman and his Theatrical Syndicate in bringing order to a rapidly expanding field of enterprise. She later worked with the rival Shubert brothers’ organization. In 1914 Marbury joined several other agents in forming the American Play Company, and she then turned to producing and helped stage Nobody Home (1915), Very Good, Eddie (1915), and Love o’ Mike (1916), all with music by Jerome Kern, and See America First (1916) with music by Cole Porter. These works contributed significantly to the development of the characteristically American form of musical comedy.

Marbury’s other successes include bringing Vernon and Irene Castle, whom she had seen on one of her innumerable trips to Paris, to New York in 1913 and setting them up in a fashionable dancing school that was the springboard for their brief but spectacularly popular career; assisting her close friend and companion Elsie de Wolfe in creating a career in interior decoration; and in 1903 restoring the Villa Trianon near Versailles, France, where she and de Wolfe became noted hostesses. Also in 1903 she helped organize the Colony Club, the first women’s social club in New York.

During World War I Marbury devoted much time to relief work for French and later American soldiers and spent several months in France working in military hospitals and giving talks to the troops. She translated Maurice Barrès’s The Faith of France (1918) and was decorated by the French and Belgian governments. In 1918 she became active in the Democratic Party. In 1923 she published an autobiography, My Crystal Ball. She had earlier published Manners: A Handbook of Social Customs in 1888.