Anne Marsh Caldwell was born in
Boston, Massachusetts. She began her career at the Juvenile Opera Co. as one of only four female songwriters active in the early 1900s. She was a charter member of the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, where her output between 1907 through 1928 focused mainly on Broadway scores. In 1929, lured by producer
William LeBaron, she went to
Hollywood where she became a
script doctor and wrote lyrics for
RKO Pictures. It was announced that she was engaged by
Max Hart to write songs with Harry Tierny. By October, she was signed to write the lyrics for the film
Dixiana. From 1900 to the mid-1920s, she mostly collaborated with composer
Jerome Kern. Her first collaboration with Kern was the musical,
She’s a Good Fellow, followed by
The Night Boat (1920), and
Sally (1920).
The Night Boat was one of Caldwell and Kern's more successful shows but is generally not considered revivable today. The plots and comedy of their shows don’t satisfy contemporary audiences. Her final credited work was a radio adaptation of the 1933 film (on which she had also worked)
Flying Down to Rio. Until the careers of Caldwell, along with
Rida Johnson Young and
Dorothy Donnelly, writing American musical comedy was a male profession. They helped established the idea that a female writer could create works for the stage that were equally as satirical, witty, timely, and simply as comical as the work of any man. Caldwell married William L. Vinal on August 2, 1885, in
Manhattan, New York. They had a daughter, Marianna Sarah "Molly" Vinal (1886–1950). William Vinal was killed on March 4, 1897, in a gas explosion in Boston on the
Tremont Street Subway at the
Boylston station. She remarried lyricist James J. O'Dea on August 15, 1904, in Brooklyn. ==Death==