CELEBRATE ELISABETH MARBURY (June 19, 1856 -January 22, 1933)

The first dramatist's agent in the United States!

A producer, a personal manager, a playwright, she owed her career to her genteel mother who taught sound bookkeeping skills and her father who taught her to read Latin at the age of seven and exposed her to Greek drama, Plato, and Shakespeare. Plus a weekly trip to the theatre.

She began her theatre career by managing benefit performances for charity.   In 1885, when one of her benefit performances netted $5,000, she came to the attention of producer Daniel Frohman who advised her to make a career as a business woman in the theatre.  Her first client was Frances Hodgson Burnett, who was about to dramatize her novel Little Lord Fauntleroy.  For the production she helped with casting and rehearsed the actors for various companies.  In 1890, while arranging for a French production of this play that she met playwright Victorien Sardou, who engaged her as sole agent for the American and English markets for the French authors' organization., Societe des Gens de Lettres.  She persuaded Sardou it would be more profitable for French playwrights to have their plays produced on a royalty basis than to sell the plays outright for a flat sum, as was then the custom.  It was this association with the French playwrights that initiated her worldwide business as a literary representative.

As a dramatist's agent or "play broker," she served as the link between playwright and manager using her persuasive skills to bring play, actors, and manager together for a successful production. She persuaded J. M. Barrie to rewrite The Little Minister to satisfy the needs of Daniel Frohman's producer-brother Charles, who was looking for a play for Maude Adams.  Barrie had written the play originally for a male lead.

Her New York office was located for several years in the Empire Theatre Building at Broadway and West 40th St, just above the offices of producer Charles Frohman, who acquired most of his plays from her.  Among the French dramatists on her client list were: Edmund Rostand, Georges Feydeau, 
Jean Richepin, and Alexandre Bisson.  Clyde Fitch was probably her best known American client. She also represented J. M. Barrie, W. Somerset Maugham and became George Bernard Shaw's agent early in his career.  Another client, Oscar Wilde, sent the manuscript of The Ballad of Reading Gaol to her
from prison.  New York publishers would have nothing to do with Wilde's poem; she finally sold it to The World for $250.

In 1915 she became a producer.  With various partners and her friends Elsie de Wolfe and Anne Morgan, the daughter of the financier J. P. Morgan, she helped to create the intimate musical.  These shows were performed at the Princess Theatre in New York.  Called the Princess Musicals, they advanced the fledgling careers of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse.
She produced the first of the Princess Musicals, Nobody Home (1915), in association with
F. Ray Comstock; See America First (1916) by herself, and Love O'Mike (1917) with Lee Shubert.

Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe shared three successive homes in Manhattan and one in France.  They were joined by Anne Morgan each summer at Villa Trianon, a mansion she had bought which had been built for the surgeon of Marie Antoinette at Versailles.
                                                        During the latter part of her career Marbury was involved in politics.  In 1918 she was asked to head the women's division of the citizens' campaign committee for the election of Alfred E. Smith as governor of New York.  In 1920 she was a delegate-at-large to the Democratic convention in San Francisco where she was elected a national committeewoman.

Her reputation during her lifetime is evident from the following introduction to an article in
Metropolitan Magazine (Feb. 1911): "The three estates of the dramatic world are playwright, actor, and manager. The fourth is Miss Elisabeth Marbury. She is an institution without precedent, without a possible successor, self-evolved, autogenerated."

With Elsie de Wolfe, her companion for forty years, until Ms. De Wolfe married Sir Charles Mendl in 1924.

Resources:  My Crystal Ball, autobiography published in 1923.

Notable Women in the American Theatre.  Rebecca Strum