Romany Marie - Biography

Biography

Romany Marie Marchand was a Jewish Romanian American who was born in Moldavia in the mid-1880s. The family name was Yuster, which has also been spelled Youster.

Marie, her sister Rose (who married Leonard Dalton Abbott in 1915), their brother David (the youngest), and their mother Esther (known as Mother Yuster, her portrait was painted by Robert Henri), were all active in the Modern Schools (Ferrer Schools) in New York City and in Stelton, Piscataway Township, New Jersey.

Romany Marie's "centers" for her "circle of thinking people" began in 1912 in their three-room apartment on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, and later in their rented house in The Bronx, before opening in Greenwich Village in 1914.

Her husband Arnold Damon Marchand, also known as A. D. or AD Marchand, was an unlicensed but apparently effective osteopath. He once treated Mabel Dodge Luhan's husband Tony Lujan for a slipped disc, in the winter of 1940, when Lujan and author Frank Waters were visiting New York from Taos, New Mexico.

Author Ben Reitman included Romany Marie among the characters in his fictional autobiography Sister of the Road (1937), which Martin Scorsese adapted for the 1972 film Boxcar Bertha. In the mysteries Free Love and Murder Me Now (2001), which are set in the Village in the early 1920s during Prohibition, author Annette Meyers included both Romany Marie and her husband A. D. Marchand, called Damon, among the characters.

Journalist Robert Schulman, a co-founder of the Louisville Eccentric Observer, was Romany Marie Marchand's nephew. During his youth in New York City he visited her frequently in Greenwich Village. In adulthood, whenever he was in the city, he recorded oral history interviews with her and with many of her devotees. Schulman, whose biography of John Sherman Cooper was published in 1976, published his biography of "that bohemian aunt... with little regard for profit but with central regard for giving unconventional and creative people a place at little cost to talk, think, perform and ponder" in 2006. He died at the age of 91 on January 6, 2008.