Elisabeth Marbury - Social Life

Social Life

On the domestic front, Marbury was instrumental in assisting her companion Elsie de Wolfe in creating a career in interior decoration and in 1903 restoring Villa Trianon in Versailles, France, where she, de Wolfe, and Anne Tracy Morgan (youngest child of the powerful financier, J.P. Morgan) held court and became noted hostesses, affectionately referred to as "The Versailles Triumvirate".

Also in 1903, along with Morgan and Anne Vanderbilt, Marbury helped organize the Colony Club, the first women's social club in New York. This also served as de Wolfe's professional debut as interior decorator. This same coterie would go on to create the exclusive neighborhood of Sutton Place, along Manhattan's East River, which prompted gossip papers of the 1920s to loudly whisper of an "Amazon Enclave".

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, although she was notably disappointed to not be awarded by the French Legion of Honor, an honor given to de Wolfe for her work in the pioneering Ambrine Mission for Burn Victims.

After at least thirty years of living together, Marbury and de Wolfe had separated by the early 1920s. In 1926, without any forewarning, de Wolfe shocked Marbury and the world at large with the surprise newspaper announcement of her wedding to Sir Charles Mendl, a British diplomat. According to biographies of de Wolfe, the Mendl-de Wolfe marriage was platonic, with the couple keeping separate apartments in Paris and usually only appearing together at social functions.