Albert Marshman Palmer was born on July 27, 1838 in North Stonington, New London County, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of a Baptist clergyman, Albert Gallatin Palmer, and Sarah Amelia Langworthy, and a descendant of Walter Palmer who settled in Stonington in 1653.
Albert Marshman Palmer attended New York City schools and the New York University Law School from which he graduated in 1860.
Albert Marshman Palmer never practised law, but his studies stood him in good stead in the management and control of the theatres whose organizations he undertook in a troubled but progressive period of America's theatre history. In 1872 he first entered the theatre as a partner of Sheridan Shook (a theatre owner with no flair for the art of the theatre) in the management of the Union Square Theatre which Shook had on his hands after an unsuccessful experiment in management.
One of their first productions was Sardou's Agnes in line with the current tradition of the American theatre, in which translations of foreign plays or plays adapted or frankly purloined from foreign sources were the most popular material. Although Palmer had not the distinctive theatre talents or training of the other leading managers of his time like Wallack, himself an actor and a dramatist with a long theatre tradition behind him, or Augustin Daly, a talented director and producer, he had, nevertheless, certain outstanding virtues which were of value to him and his theatres. As his experience in the theatre grew, Palmer developed his native qualities of foresight, shrewdness, and good taste.
Each year, until 1883, when he retired from the Union Square, he improved his company, widened his repertory, and began gradually to turn his attention to the cultivation and appreciation of American playwrights and of plays of American life and character. In 1883 he thought he would give up theatre management and travel abroad, but after a year of absence he joined the Mallory Brothers and took over the Madison Square Theatre, where he remained until 1891. He then went to Wallack's Theatre at Broadway and Thirtieth Street, renaming it Palmer's, and operated it with varying success until 1896, when he retired permanently from New York theatre management.
Not the least of his attributes was his ability to select good advisers and associates. His play-reader and adapter, A. R. Cazauran, had an eager and adventurous taste in drama and the fact that he often recommended and pleaded the cause of plays a little out of the conventional line of the day may be the reason for the statement that three of Palmer's most successful productions, The Two Orphans, Sir Charles Young's melodrama, Jim the Penman, with Agnes Booth, and Alabama, by Augustus Thomas, were urged upon him against his own will and judgment. But the choice of Cazauran as play-reader was in itself an indication not only of Palmer's intelligence, but of his willingness to stand by the decisions of his associates in matters they understood, sometimes, better than he did. Palmer has been said to have done more than any other manager of his day to encourage native dramatic ability.
His own statements (Forum, July 1893) give evidence of a forward-looking desire entirely beyond the general thought of his day to get plays not only by American authors but on native American material, especially material which showed the native American as something beyond the clown, the trader, the backwoodsman. It is on his list that such names as Augustus Thomas, Clyde Fitch, Bronson Howard (The Banker's Daughter), and William Gillette (Held by the Enemy) begin to be seen as the familiar property of the theatre. Although he himself is not credited with the creation of any great actors, his companies were always well chosen, often by the addition of favorites from his rival's houses. In 1882 he made a real contribution to the life of the theatre by the foundation of the Actor's Fund of America, a charitable corporation of which he was the second president.
After he had retired from New York theatre management, he managed road tours for Richard Mansfield for some years. Albert Marshman died of a stroke of apoplexy on March 7, 1905 in his sixty-seventh year.
Quotes from others about the person
John Ranken Towse: ". .. a man of considerable cultivation, suave, shrewd, worldly, somewhat hesitant and timid in judgment, but with a first-rate executive ability, and a remarkable faculty of finding means to serve his ends. All his representations were distinguished by vigor and vitality, and that cooperative smoothness and proportion which can only be attained by actors long accustomed to each other's methods and characteristics".
Arthur Hornblow: "He belonged to that school of managers whom we find in control of the leading theatres in Europe - men of culture, refinement and scholarship, when a refined management gave the drama both dignity and form".
Albert Marshman Palmer's second wife was the divorced wife of Sheridan Shook. She had two children who took Palmer's name. They had one daughter, Phyllis.
