Increasingly, too, she spent time with her parents outside Wilkes-Barre. In February 1903 she was in Washington, DC for a reception at the Elsmere honouring two of the founders of the Daughters of the American Revolution. One was Mary Smith Lockwood, a formidable septuagenarian in whose home the women first convened. She was a friend and associate of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who championed a woman’s right to divorce. The other D.A.R. founder was Mary Desha, who spent much of her life as a clerk in the civil service but came to government attention when, teaching in Alaska in the late 1880s, she sent a written protest about the living conditions of the natives back to Washington, sparking an investigation. Florence was moving in grand feminist circles. Of those women who helped decorate the drawing rooms of the Elsmere with palms and pink azaleas, some were described as wives or relatives of men. Florence was ‘of Philadelphia’. In April she joined her parents at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The housand-room hotel, built in the German Renaissance style on the site of William Waldorf Astor’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, was the largest hotel on the planet and had already given the world its own Waldorf salad as well as Eggs Benedict and Thousand Island dressing. Under its roof, afternoon tea became more than merely a symptom of Anglophile eccentricity. The hotel would become a landmark of great significance for Florence, even after it was demolished in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building and reopened on its current site two years later.
Florence renewed her campaign for acceptance in society’s Olympian heights when she returned to Newport in the summer. The registrations at the Casino on 10 August 1903 included Marquis Torre Hermosa of Madrid and Count Conrad Hochberg of Dambran in Germany, who was a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Also in town was Count Kinsky, known by his fuller title as Ferdinand Bonaventura, 7th Prince Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau, who had only months to live. Florence just missed Mr and Mrs Alfred Vanderbilt, who had married in Newport two years earlier and would divorce in another five years, the woman named as Vanderbilt’s mistress committing suicide, while he later went down with the Lusitania. The couple left town the day Florence arrived.
Newport in August was dedicated exclusively to pleasure. There was eating, dining and dancing, participating in or spectating at summer sports on land and sea. There were half a dozen beaches, albeit only one that counted socially. And there was music. If Florence entertained her fellow lotus-eaters in Newport at the piano, there is no record.
Later that autumn she accompanied her parents on a vacation to California. They travelled with a party from the East Coast courtesy of the Raymond & Whitcomb Company, an agency founded in 1879 by two enterprising Bostonians eager to capitalise on the opening up of the west created by the completion ten years earlier of the transcontinental railroad. New Englanders headed to California to escape the worst of the winter. The Fosters were among the first group of the season. The party comprised over fifty holiday-makers, nearly a quarter of them from Wilkes-Barre, all of them Americans apart from a doctor from Cologne in Germany. It’s an indication of the lowly status of married women accompanying their husbands that unmarried women were mentioned by name while wives and children were not. The news item listed ‘W. P. Billings, Miss Frinces [sic] Billings, Andrew Billings. G. H. Flanagan and wife. C. D. Foster and wife, Mrs Florence Jenkins…’
Riverside was a fashionable resort sixty miles inland from Los Angeles whose wealth was founded on citrus-fruit farming, the groves fanning out along the valley between low mountains. Orange trees were so central to Riverside’s identity that when one of its two surviving navel orange trees from Bahía in Brazil, first planted in 1874, was moved to the famous Mission Inn hotel, the ceremonial task was undertaken by a top-hatted, shovel-wielding President Theodore Roosevelt; this symbolic function being performed by the president in the year of Florence’s visit.
The travelling party stayed at the New Glenwood. A photograph from 1903 shows a rustic colonnade flanking a white facade busy with wrought-iron balconies; sprigs of young palm sprouted from the terraced fourth floor and a ziggurat towered over the entrance. The party stayed for five days before moving on to Los Angeles.
During the trip Foster developed typhoid fever, a potentially fatal bacterial infection which had afflicted Florence’s mother a year earlier. On such occasions he tended to draft a new will, which he did on returning east, though it barely differed from the 1898 version. Despite his illness, California whetted the Fosters’ appetite for occasional long-distance travel and Florence had the chance to enjoy a great deal more of America and beyond. Straight after a summer holiday in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, the family spent September 1905 in Oregon, where they visited Yellowstone Park and trespassed into British Columbia. Their most ambitious journey of all was to Mexico in early 1907, a round trip of ten thousand miles which took them as far as the border with Guatemala.
But Florence was contemplating a journey of a more permanent nature.
4: CHAIRMAN OF MUSIC
By her mid-thirties Florence had inherited some of her father’s physical heft. Photographs of her as a youngish woman show a full face, a strong jaw and a big-boned frame. She had iridescent blue eyes and used a varying selection of wigs. Throughout her life those who knew Florence remarked on her beautiful speaking voice and her persuasive charm, which she was now about to unleash on the forbidding citadel of New York City high society.
There is no precise date for Florence’s departure from Philadelphia. St Clair Bayfield thought it was in 1902, after the divorce he believed she’d obtained that year, but from 1903 to 1906 Florence continued to be reported as a resident of Philadelphia. The move seems to have happened over the summer of 1906. In the spring her home was described as ‘the Quaker City’. But when she was staying in Washington in October, she was listed in the Post among other visitors from New York.
She joined one of the greatest tides of human history. In 1900 the city had 3.44 million inhabitants. Ten years later the figure had risen to 4.8 million. It was predicted in 1909 that Florence’s new home town would outgrow London as the most populous city on earth within fifteen years. That year furnished the earliest known instance of the phrase ‘big apple’ in connection with the city. (‘Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city,’ wrote Edward S. Martin in The Wayfarer in New York. ‘It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.’) Most of the new arrivals were European immigrants fleeing political upheaval and economic hardship, and half of the city lived in poverty. But by the turn of the century, when half the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of 1 per cent of the population, there were already four thousand millionaires in New York.
Florence swam in on the tide of fashion. New York was Newport all the year round. She arrived just in time for the publication of The Metropolis, Upton Sinclair’s caustic satire of the profligate, party-going, automobile-driving elite. ‘One heard of monkey dinners and pijama dinners at Newport,’ he wrote, ‘of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York.’ It sold dismally: rich New Yorkers didn’t wish to be lectured, while the middle classes, avid for real scandal and gossip, scoured the society pages rather than the bookshops to feed their appetite. However great the inequality between rich and poor, New York was where everyone was heading. ‘I wouldn’t dream of moving from New York to Philadelphia, even,’ drawled Maxine Elliott, the mistress of the banker J. P. Morgan, ‘unless it was in my private car.’ Symbolically, 1908 was the year Philadelphia ceded to New York its claim to the world’s tallest building. The city hall, topped by a vast bronze of the founder of the province of Pennsylvania, William Penn, had been finished in 1894, surpassing Ulm Minster. Now the Singer Building sailed past it towards the heavens.
As a New York neophyte, Florence had her mother’s example to go on. As well as her activities in the capital and New Jersey, where she frequently returned without her husband on Daughters of the Revolution business, Mary Hoagland Foster was a member of the Holland Dames, an organisation which c
elebrated Dutch ancestry. They regularly convened in New York and sometimes she dragged the Hon. C. D. Foster to their annual luncheons at the Regis Hotel. She also made trips on her own to attend exhibitions and lectures.
Abandoning her home of nearly twenty-five years, Florence was attracted by two overlapping possibilities offered by New York. There was her desire, no different from everyone else’s, to rise in society. But also in recent years she had been much less musically active in Philadelphia. Far greater opportunities awaited in New York, thanks to the phenomenal growth of societies formed by wealthy women with cultural tastes and time to indulge them.
One such club was the Euterpe. Several societies took their name from the Greek muse – there were Euterpes in Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie. As far back as 1870 a Euterpe Choral Society boasted a fifty-strong choir including, so it was claimed in the New York Times, ‘some of the best talent in the country’. The Euterpe which Florence joined was a women’s club devoted to social music-making. ‘This society,’ elucidated a volume called Club Women of New York, ‘is mainly musical in its aims and work. The concerts and musical mornings which are given during the season at the Waldorf-Astoria are social events and are participated in by artists of high standing in the musical world. The club is also given luncheons by its members, and card parties, luncheons and outings are arranged at frequent intervals throughout the season.’ A typical winter calendar would include musical mornings, a dinner dance and an evening concert. The outings might be to Long Island, or a trolley ride to Staten Island, where they’d have lunch and play bridge. As with other women’s clubs, money was raised for deserving causes. ‘This busy little musical and social club,’ as the Times called it, differed from the city’s many other clubs because it continued to meet through the summer for garden parties and al fresco gatherings. Although its activities were reported in the Times’s ‘In the Social Whirl’ column, not all Euterpe members were quite elevated enough to whirl away to the summer fleshpots.
Florence’s name was first linked to it in late 1906 when she attended a Thanksgiving luncheon for fifty at a tearoom called At the Sign of the Green Teapot. The menus were printed on little green teapots and like everyone she took home a souvenir of a bonbonnière mounted on a small pumpkin. The following week she joined several hundred guests at the club’s annual afternoon reception, held at the home of its president in West 45th Street. Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison was known before marriage as Mary Ernestine Schmid. The daughter of a prosperous merchant, she owed some of her prominence to the career of her husband, a society proctologist and early proponent of colonic cleansing – a brochure of Dr Jamison’s rejoiced in the title Fourteen Reasons ‘Why the Internal Bath’. He also invented a prototype enema appliance and was a keen occultist. Mrs Jamison presided over a club that knew how to have fun. One bridge and euchre party which Florence, an inveterate dresser-up, enjoyed attending was on a Japanese theme. The committee wore Japanese costume, while unmarried younger members, dubbed Geisha Girls, distributed Japanese favours among the players. Prizes included kimonos and Japanese embroidered scarves. The first concert which Florence attended was the following week: an ‘Annual Olde Folkes Concert of Sacrede and Worldly Musick will be helde at ye Waldorf’, reported the Times, getting into the spirit.
Florence emerged from her chrysalis, aged forty, at a propitious moment in the empowerment of the New York female. An early symbol of emancipation was the establishment in 1903 – by Florence Jaffray Harriman – of the Colony Club, the first such place in New York created by women and for women. Not everyone in society was ready for this development. ‘Denounced from the pulpits of the city and deplored by many eminent citizens in the newspapers,’ writes Emily Katherine Bibby in Making the American Aristocracy, ‘the outrageous enterprise persisted in flourishing, and ladies of the highest social standing happily identified themselves with its defiance of sanctified conventions.’
The advance of women was not always semaphored by a clenched fist. It happened too in the world of culture. In 1908, straight after her divorce, Maxine Elliott opened a theatre off Broadway which bore her name; she became the first woman to manage a theatre in America. On the streets of New York, women took up various enfranchising crazes for riding bicycles, wearing hobble-skirts, and in the New York afternoon even blameless middle-aged wives and spinsters made their way to the ever-expanding selection of grand hotels (including, from 1910, the Waldorf-Astoria) to take part in thés dansants.
The era of new possibilities for women would be marked by the death in 1908 of Mrs Astor, the monolith of old Manhattan. Her passing removed a formidable guardian from the doors of the establishment and offered fresh possibility for women determined to elbow a position for themselves that was not exclusively derived from fathers or husbands.
While in general it was men who made the money, it was women who made the rules in this new American aristocracy. They were the gatekeepers in whose power was the gift of access to the gilded inner sanctum, often blackballing those who aspired to entry for the merest sartorial solecism. They allowed some in and kept others out, and were committed to internecine scrapping. They were ruthlessly twitted in the waspish comedies of Clyde Fitch, who made up to $250,000 per play portraying fashionable heroines with a remorseless eye for social position and a gift for accumulating wealth. The titles told audiences what they were getting: The Climbers (1901), Her Own Way (1903). The Truth, the hit of the 1907 season, told of a suspicious society matriarch who puts a tail on her husband while reserving for herself the right to lie as much as she sees fit.
Who was in or out could be learned from perusing the newspapers, in which there were daily reports during the season of invitations being sent out to receptions. The movements of wealthy women were the stuff of daily gossip, much of it taking place within the official framework of the women’s clubs. The New York Daily Tribune’s ‘Notes of the Club’ column and the New York Times’s ‘Activities in Clubland’, in both of which Florence made increasingly regular appearances, reported the movements of these higher-ups, slaking the curiosity of the aspiring middle classes. ‘Small luncheons, teas, and card parties by the dozen have been the popular entertainment this week,’ chirruped one column. ‘Not in months has there been such a number of cosy affairs given in people’s homes rather than in hotel parlors.’
While not everyone was vouchsafed entry, Florence had a set of advantages on which she could draw. For a start, divorce – or its near equivalent, marital failure – at this social altitude was no longer a guarantee of banishment for an ex-wife. Not that Florence was necessarily divorced; she still deployed the distinguished name of Jenkins like the prow of an icebreaker. But her most important calling card was music. Her musical training earned her a status that floated free from distinction conferred by a man. In January 1907 she was on the bill of an entertainment put on by the Society of the Daughters of Indiana. There were solos for voice and for cello, an address on art student life in Paris, and ‘a piano solo by Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins’. Such gatherings often took place in the morning. The venue was chosen from any one of the vast hotels that had sprouted all over midtown Manhattan, each of which had reception rooms for hire. In this case she performed in the Hotel Astor. (The Mexico trip came straight afterwards.)
In order to perform, Florence kept up her study of the piano. An extensive résumé of schools she attended, published in Town Topics in 1918, included something she called the Virgil Conservatory in New York. In fact there were two rival Virgil schools, set up by a pair of divorcees after their acrimonious split. Neither of them had this name. Almon and Antha Virgil were eminences in piano education who met over their shared interest in methods of teaching the instrument in groups. She founded the Virgil Piano School in 1891 while a decade later he retaliated with the Virgil School of Music. Both pedagogues produced instruction manuals for pianists trading on the Virgil brand. According to Kathleen Bayfield, Florence studied with A. M. Virgil, which means Antha (whose second name was Minerva
). But Florence wasn’t concentrating only on the piano. With singing in mind, she also signed up for enunciation classes at the Henry Gaines Hawn Dramatic School. The school’s founder wrote a handbook called Diction for Singers (To Say Nothing of Composers).
And she was not confined to her new home town. In April 1907 Florence was merely an onlooker at a splendid gathering in Washington, DC of the annual continental congress of the D.A.R. The event was dominated by the gift to the tireless president of a silver chalice and a white flag with the stars and stripes at its centre. ‘A great many of the Daughters,’ it was reported, ‘expressed themselves as not caring to see the flag made subservient to a flag of truce.’ Florence was among a hundred other bellicose ladies who, after singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, dressed in gowns, jewels and ‘priceless old lace’ and convened for dinner round a long flower-decked table in the banqueting hall of the New Willard Hotel. There were plentiful toasts, augmented whenever a rowdy group of international barristers called in from an adjoining room. The British ambassador looked on from the threshold and went no further. Most of the attendees were identified in the Evening Star by the Christian name of their husband. A small minority were referred to by their own name, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins among them.
In December, when her parents visited New York for a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, she would have been able to tell them about organising her first ever musicale since moving to New York. It was at a private home in White Plains, a growing suburb just to the north of the city, the programme after luncheon including songs, monologues and piano solos performed to a selection of Euterpe members. By the start of 1908 Florence had a permanent address in New York City – she was living at the St Louis Hotel on 32nd Street. She also completed her journey from the periphery to the official heart of the Euterpe. The club’s events were run by a series of officers – a lady in charge of luncheon, for example. There were also various chairmen – chairman of the day, of ways and means, of the reception committee, and of the entertainment committee. In late January Florence was chairman for the day – and chairman of music – at a musical morning at the Waldorf. She exercised a new-found gift for publicity, because for the first time ever the Times reported the contents of the Euterpe’s musical programme.
Florence Foster Jenkins Page 6
