Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  In her own way Florence would come to embody that principle. Charles D. Foster will have needed some persuading on the point. As a domestic accomplishment, Florence’s abilities were to be cherished. But Europe was another matter. Kathleen Bayfield described him as ‘the old-fashioned type who thought girls should stay home, play the piano, paint and be a lady of leisure’. There is no suggestion that Foster had been anywhere near the place, though he will have known the stories of Americans lured to Europe by the siren wail of an older culture. The novels of Henry James – written after prolonged experience of the fleshpots – made cautionary noises about young Americans of an artistic bent venturing into the European lair. James discoursed frankly on children sired out of wedlock, radical politics and terrorist foment, all flavoured with a soupçon of aristocratic hauteur. Roderick Hudson (1875) traced the tragic corruption of Rome on an American artist. The Europeans (1878) told of sober New Englanders ‘exposed to peculiar influences’ when Americans raised across the Atlantic came home. A specifically dire warning was embedded in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in which beautiful young heiress Isabel Archer is pursued by unscrupulous suitors in Europe; she plumps for the worst of the lot, a louche and cold-hearted American expatriate who condemns her to a life of unhappiness.

  Florence is more likely to have taken her inspiration from tales of female empowerment and self-expression in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the vastly successful first volume of which was published in the year of her birth. She may have imagined a future for herself conflated in the fates of the more artistic of the four March sisters. On the one hand Beth is a talented pianist whose life is cut short when she contracts scarlet fever. On the other, Amy is the most selfish and vain of the four, but burgeons as a writer whose ambitions of self-fulfilment and growth are fully realised only when she is taken to Europe. Glimpsed in the full flower of adulthood, she offered a satisfactory template for a creative young American woman with wanderlust: ‘Time seemed to have stood still with Amy, for happiness had kept her young and prosperity given her the culture she needed. A stately, graceful woman, who showed how elegant simplicity could be made by the taste with which she chose her dress and the grace with which she wore it.’

  Meanwhile, the concept of young women studying piano and singing was gaining acceptance in Europe. The Guildhall School of Music and the Royal College of Music were both established in 1880. In the first round of scholarships offered by the latter to young students of the piano, fourteen out of seventeen went to women.

  While it is conceivable that Florence’s stories of thwarted musical ambition were exaggerated, there are enough different sources which talk of her parents banning her from singing to confirm that, in later life, Florence at least believed she had been held back. But there was a far more immediate cause of devastation. In 1883, the eight-year-old Lilly fell ill with diphtheria.

  If the infection developed in the standard way, she would at first have complained of a mild sore throat and developed a fever. Then came the alarming whelps of a croup-like cough and, when she opened her mouth, white patches would be seen forming at the back of her throat. Her neck started to swell, her skin turned blue and she found it excruciatingly painful to swallow, then began to have difficulty breathing. Child mortality rates from diphtheria had been slowly declining from around the year of Lilly’s birth, but there was still no treatment. In New York a physician called Joseph O’Dwyer was developing a system of intubation that could be used on children as young as one to stop them asphyxiating. He did not present his findings for another two years and the apparatus would not be adopted for another five. As the Fosters well knew, diphtheria did not discriminate. Foster was infected too, though as he had survived it earlier in life he was not in danger. But epidemics in America had cut a swathe through populations in New England and, more recently, California. Only five years earlier it attacked the progeny of Queen Victoria, killing Princess Alice and her four-year-old daughter.

  On 29 June 1883, it claimed another victim. ‘Yesterday evening about six o’clock,’ reported the Wilkes-Barre Record,

  the angel of death visited the home of our esteemed townsman, C. D. Foster, Esq., and removed his youngest daughter, Lilly, a little girl only nine [sic] years of age. She fell a victim to that dire disease, diphtheria, after a brief sickness. The little one, so suddenly called away in the very midst of the bright days of childhood, had won her way deep into the hearts of all who knew her. She was of a joyous and kindly disposition, and had given ample evidence of the possession of still nobler qualities which would have made her after life one of great promise. In their deep affliction the sorrowing parents have the sympathy of every one. Their grief, however, is one that cannot soon be overcome, but must be left to the gentle hand of all-healing time to assuage.

  While this was hardly an unusual tragedy – a Bulford cousin born in the same year as Florence died at the age of seven – the impact of the death of a child on her parents need not be imagined. For an older sibling it may have been a more complex event. What is known of Florence in later life is that she craved attention. Any such need tends to be established in the earliest days of childhood. After Lilly’s birth Florence experienced the small needling grief of the older sibling nudged out of the parental spotlight. Now in her sister’s death she was consigned to the margins all over again. In her own grief there lurked a quiet unconscious triumph, the intensified sense of her uniqueness as the sole survivor in whom all hopes rested. This time her spell in the sidelines occurred when – as a very young woman shortly to turn fifteen – she had more power to act.

  The funeral cortege left Wilkes-Barre at six in the morning on 1 July, bound for the cemetery eight miles away in Huntsville, near the family farm. The party included Lilly’s parents, Foster’s mother and his Bulford siblings Olive and John, as well as other Bulford cousins, and Florence.

  Ten days after her sister was buried, the fourteen-year-old Florence Foster eloped.

  2: MRS DR JENKINS

  According to the 1901 edition of the Catalogue of Pupils at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, Florence Foster married Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins on 11 July 1883, ten days after the funeral of her sister and eight days before her fifteenth birthday. Her father was still recovering from diphtheria.

  How did this happen? The circumstances of their meeting are not known. A sister of Frank Jenkins had been at the Moravian Seminary several years earlier, and perhaps that was how a connection was made. Later in life Florence kept the dance cards of the balls she’d attended as a young woman, and they may have met at one of those. At thirty, Frank was sixteen years her senior and so, in this moment of crisis, would inevitably have played the role of a surrogate father figure.

  In 1880 the age of consent in Pennsylvania was ten (a small minority of states put the legal age at twelve). And yet the cusp of fifteen seems extraordinarily young. Many years later Florence would testify in court that she left home at sixteen, while she told St Clair Bayfield that she eloped at seventeen. In the echelons of society in which both newly-weds had been brought up, she married far younger than anyone in her family circle or his. Frank’s youngest sister married the previous year at nineteen. Frank’s late mother was eighteen at her wedding, and Florence’s mother, depending on which census is to be credited, was either twenty-seven, twenty or nineteen. Only once the newly widowed Mary Foster altered her date of birth to 1850 would she have been fifteen on the day of her wedding. Might the school catalogue be wrong? The same page lists five other marriages of pupils from Florence’s year. There are no records for two of them, but the dates given for the three others are corroborated by a newspaper report in one case and in the other two by the US census.

  Frank Thornton was the son of a distinguished American naval officer. Rear Admiral Thornton Alexander Jenkins was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1811 and, sponsored by the wife of President Madison, by the age of sixteen had joined the navy, in which he remained for forty-five years. He fought
pirates in Cuba, helped suppress a slave rebellion in Virginia, served in the coastal survey and the lighthouse service, and patrolled the seas in the war with Mexico. His moment arrived in the Civil War. He came under considerable pressure from an elderly relative who was congressman for Virginia to side with his native slave-owning state. Instead, he performed secret work for President Lincoln before, despite being wounded, taking a significant commanding role in the defeat of the Confederate navy in the Gulf of Mexico. Admiral Farragut, under whom he served, praised his zeal and fidelity. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1870 and retired three years later.

  Like Florence’s father, such a man of substance measured out his position in memberships, and they reveal the pattern of his interests. Rear Admiral Jenkins was a member of the Naval Lyceum, the historical societies of America, Virginia and Sioux City, Iowa, societies in Washington devoted to philosophy, biology and anthropology, and Boston’s Economic Society. A photograph taken in later life shows a much-decorated figure in uniform, wearing a white beard and with a stern look to his deeply shaded eyes. In his later years he was content to read omnivorously and correspond with distant cousins in Wales.

  The rear admiral had been through more than one marital campaign too. Jenkins’s first wife died soon after bearing him a second child in 1840. Her family was wealthy enough for Jenkins, inheriting his wife’s portion upon his father-in-law’s death in the same year, to buy a significant property in Maryland. (His association with her relatives turned vexatious. In 1858 he was opposed by them in a Baltimore court.)

  In 1848 he married well again. Elizabeth Gwynn was the daughter of Gilbert R. Thornton, who during the Civil War would act as the Massachusetts paymaster-general responsible for remunerating soldiers in the state. Florence’s future husband was the second issue of the marriage, born four years later. Frank and his younger brother Presley were outflanked by sisters. There were three above them and three more below.

  As he grew up Frank saw little of his father, who was at sea and, by the time Frank was nine, at war. Just after the Civil War his mother died in her mid-forties, when Frank was thirteen. He was the oldest young male in an overwhelmingly feminine household. Naturally he had no other destiny but the US Navy. In 1869 at the age of seventeen he was appointed by President Grant himself as a cadet to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Three months later he passed his examination and entered the Academy proper as a midshipman. But then another nine months on he went absent without leave and was dropped from the rolls of the Academy. The story of his ejection travelled from Maryland to Washington to Philadelphia where it made the front page of the Evening Telegraph. His failure could not have been made more humiliatingly public. Even the US census seemed to disapprove: when the enumerator visited the home of the rear admiral that August, Francis became one of the teeming sorority himself: he was listed as female.

  He went back to school. As a safer option he chose to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania but he was a slow student and it took him a whole decade to qualify. He graduated in 1880, when the census found him restored to his correct gender and able finally to describe himself as a physician. He was living in a boarding house along with a dentist and a carpenter (although, curiously, when the census was completed for his father’s house in Washington a week later he was also listed there, alongside four sisters and three female servants). Not that he managed to find any sort of employment in the medical profession. Instead he clambered onto a low rung of the Lighthouse Engineers of Philadelphia, a job he almost certainly secured via paternal influence.

  While Frank’s younger brother Presley attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, the sisters busied themselves in marrying into the military. Virginia’s husband was the eminent military engineer Colonel (later General) Peter Hains, who was much lauded for designing the Tidal Basin, which helped control the flow of the Potomac into the heart of Washington, DC. He had just taken on this appointment in 1882. An interview in the National Republican talked admiringly of his spare build, broad shoulders, clean-cut features and clear blue eyes. In the same year Frank’s youngest sister Nettie married a hero. Lieutenant George Converse, the son of an Ohio congressman, had lost an eye in a skirmish with the Apaches in Arizona (a ‘splendid fight’, said the National Republican). In the same encounter one of the groomsmen had suffered a severe wound to the arm. The guests at the private wedding, an Episcopalian ceremony conducted by a cousin of the bride, were officers of the infantry, cavalry and navy. When he went up for early retirement two years later, Converse was described as ‘a gallant young officer who lost his eye, and almost his life, from an Apache bullet’. At this grand society wedding, Frank must have felt like the only young male neither togged up in a glamorous uniform nor gloriously wounded in the service of his country.

  A year later, as he audited his first thirty years, he found little cause for pride. Thrown out of the navy, unwanted in the medical profession and bundled into a clerical job, his chances of basking in the triumph of a great public wedding to a society bride were minuscule. A vulnerable, grief-stricken fourteen-year-old girl was far less likely to discern in him the lineaments of failure. Perhaps her father’s position and wealth increased Florence’s attractiveness. It’s possible that Florence hurled herself at Frank, and demanded that he rescue her. But the responsibility for what happened next lies with him. The logistics of arranging an elopement of such a young girl – by post, or by personal messenger, and at such a time – suggest that Frank was adept at conniving but incapable of imagining the consequences of such a drastic breach in the etiquette of courting.

  There was no public announcement of the wedding. It was highly unusual for newspapers, eagle-eyed in their cataloguing of movements in society, to overlook the union of an admiral’s son and the daughter of a prominent barrister. The marriage has an impetuous and furtive look. As Florence later told the story, her father promptly disinherited her. She certainly wasn’t seen in Wilkes-Barre for a year.

  She was more welcome at the rear admiral’s grand household on 2115 Pennsylvania Avenue – ‘America’s main street’. Under its roof Florence found an abundance of new in-laws. Two of her new sisters-in-law were a whole generation older than her, but she had one new relative who was closer in age and, more importantly, in spirit. Alice, five years Frank’s junior, had attended the Moravian Seminary, and she was musical. At that moment she was thriving as a composer. Three of her works – a waltz titled ‘Contentment’, a serenade for a tenor (‘Parting’) dedicated to a young naval ensign, and a lively galop named after a fast young thing called ‘Carolyn’ – all went to press in 1883. ‘The character of the work,’ purred the National Republican, ‘speaks well for the musical culture of this city.’ There were also three boys closer to her own age: the young Hains brothers John, Thornton and Peter, who were the sons of Colonel Hains and Frank’s much older half-sister Virginia.

  The newly-weds settled in Philadelpia. Florence’s new metropolitan home had rather more to excite the fantasies of a cultured young woman than Wilkes-Barre. Philadelphia was conscious of its history. It was in Philadelphia that the Founding Fathers met to sign the Declaration of Independence by which thirteen American colonies seceded from the British Empire. The text was ratified by the Continental Congress in the city on 4 July 1776. Eleven years later the US Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia. Its deep revolutionary roots were visible in the largest concentration of eighteenth-century architecture to survive anywhere in America. Among them were the country’s oldest hospital and oldest theatre and, in the Academy of Music, the US’s long-surviving opera house. Then there was Independence Hall, host to the great events of the country’s foundation, where the cracked Liberty Bell resided on the ground floor, with the inscription from Leviticus incised into its flank: ‘Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.’

  Philadelphia’s wealth, founded on coal, shipbuilding and trade in sugar and molasses from the West
Indies, had long been rooted in the confluence of two rivers, and further riches travelled in on the railroad tracks. After the Civil War the city boasted of its status as the ‘workshop of the world’, home to thousands of looms and lathes, forges and steam engines in mills and plants which operated in almost all of the three hundred industrial activities charted by the US census.

  And yet in due course Florence was lured home. A year on from her runaway wedding she returned to South Franklin Street, less to mark her sixteenth birthday than to be present at the last illness of her grandmother, who was eighty-seven. Frank joined her and made himself as useful as an employee of the Lighthouse Engineers could by assisting in the care of Foster’s mother. She died that same month and after the funeral Foster took his family on a healing trip to the sea. When they returned Frank came to stay again for the weekend, and again a month later for the day. Death, initially the cause of a rift with her parents, now brought Florence back into the fold.

  She was restored to her father’s affection during, for him, a period of intense importance. Having failed to win election as a Republican candidate for the state legislature two years previously, he was standing again in the autumn. As the election approached, throughout October the Wilkes-Barre Record encouraged its readers to give him their vote. ‘There is scarcely any doubt about the election of Mr Foster,’ affirmed one short item. ‘He will make a creditable Representative.’ ‘Charles D. Foster should receive every intelligent man’s vote irrespective of party affiliations. He will.’ ‘He will not fail.’ He didn’t, although the district very nearly had to find another candidate when he was involved in a terrifying accident driving a pair of inexperienced horses in the countryside outside Wilkes-Barre. Florence and her mother were on board too. The scene was described in detail by another of the passengers, who happened to be the editor of the Wilkes-Barre Record.