Marion Fairbanks

Biography

On a crisp November day in 1900, two identical cries rang out in a Manhattan tenement—Marion and Madeline Fairbanks had arrived, daughters of actress Jennie Fairbanks (who preferred the spotlight as “Jane”) and a quiet man whose own father had marched with the Union Army. Before the twins could spell their surname, they were spelling audiences across the country: first in touring companies of Alias Jimmy Valentine, Mother, Salomy Jane, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and a carousel of other plays, then—around 1910—stepping before a Biograph camera the way other children step into puddles, with glee and no idea how deep it might get. By 1912 Thanhouser Film Corporation had snapped them up, branded them “The Thanhouser Twins,” and kept the cameras turning until 1916. Between takes they darted back to Broadway, and in 1917 they slipped into the Ziegfeld Follies, kicking in perfect unison through chorus after chorus for several glittering seasons. In 1923 the mirrored act cracked: Madeline hungered for straight drama, Marion for syncopated light. While Madeline tackled Ibsen and Shakespeare, Marion skipped across the map as Little Nellie Kelly, a musical moppet twice her real age. Loneliness outran applause; the sisters met again under George White’s Scandals marquee, finishing each other’s steps like a sentence they’d started in the cradle. Love arrived wearing a Yale letter sweater: McCormick Steele, gridiron hero, became Marion’s first husband in 1927. Newspapers gorged on their breakup; gossip writers upgraded from ink to acid. Two more marriages—Ray Smith, then William Delph—followed, each wedding ring eventually slipped off as casually as a glove. In 1932 she slid into Eleanor King’s high heels to play the leading lady in Whistling in the Dark at the Waldorf Theatre, but the footlights were dimming. By the Depression’s midpoint, Marion traded greasepaint for cold creams, opening a smart beauty salon and steering a cosmetics firm’s satellite office. The cameras stopped, the applause faded, and the bottles—once just backstage props—became nightly companions. Marion Fairbanks closed her eyes for the last time on 20 September 1973, age 72. No children stood at the bedside; only Madeline, her womb-mate and life-mate, remained to remember when two little girls first faced an audience and the world called it wonder.