St Clair moved on to a roving Irish troupe which called itself the Royal Dramatic Company without necessarily enjoying any sort of endorsement from Her Majesty. For the avoidance of doubt about their style of entertainment, their calling card was a farce helpfully titled The Irishman, which the company toured round New South Wales as part of a trio of rambunctious comedies. The management placed an advertisement boasting of bounteous abilities in the company: they had ‘carefully selected the best Dramatic Talent that could be procured at great expense … The names of the following Lady and Gentlemen Artists will be sufficient guarantee of their good faith.’ St Clair’s name didn’t mean anything at that point, though even in minor roles he was noticed by critics: he was ‘undoubtedly good’, ‘excellent indeed’, and performed ‘creditably’. In a play called Vengeance Is Mine one reviewer said that Mr St Clair Bayfield ‘as villain no. 2 … performed with power’. That same summer he got his byline into an anthology of writings, illustrations and stories. Henslowe’s Annual was lauded by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘Australian in every respect’ even though other contributors included a Harrovian curate and the son of an earl, alongside the grandson of a former governor of India.
At the end of 1900 he joined the Hawtrey Comedy Company. This came about as a result of a family favour. William Hawtrey (as well as his more famous brother Charles) had been a friend of the Reverend Roberts for twenty years. He was now touring Australia, having secured the rights to a big London hit called A Mission from Mars, as well as a farce called Tom, Dick, and Harry and a sex comedy called The Lady of Ostend, plus a couple of one-act curtain raisers. St Clair was given a go in all of them (‘Mr St Clair Bayfield had not much to do as an inebriated law clerk, but he did that little well’). He was also assistant stage manager. For the next year Bayfield saw a lot of Australia, from Tasmania to Perth, and Australia saw a lot of him. A photograph of a lean young man in three-quarter profile with a frothing cravat appeared in the Melbourne Punch. The company sailed for New Zealand to tour from Auckland all the way down to Invercargill – the last stop before Antarctica, which Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton were currently exploring on the Discovery Expedition. St Clair kept a diary for nine months recording his impressions of rehearsals, performances and theatres, and also of the weather and the grandeur of nature. In Wanganui the Hawtrey company took on a local team at cricket. Both XIs were listed by their surnames only, apart from St Clair Bayfield, which was taken by the sub-editor to be a double-barrelled name. At the end of the company’s stay in the town he wrote to the Wanganui Chronicle to thank the local physical culture school for use of their facilities, and for courses in exercise from a kindly instructor. ‘From what I have seen,’ he wrote, ‘the pupils here have a splendid chance of gaining striking developments.’ St Clair was a scrupulously polite fitness enthusiast – he would be a keen swimmer for the rest of his life.
By now he was sufficiently worthy of note for newspapers to report on his movements. In October 1902 the ‘Greenroom Gossip’ column in Punch told its readers that he was to join an American company fronted by Janet Waldorf. His departure for Manila was announced, after which he ‘intends proceeding to London via America’. St Clair took a while to get to London, and indeed didn’t join Waldorf for another six months. In the interim he made his way to New York, where he joined a large company performing the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman. After the backwaters of Bendigo and Ballarat, Kalgourlie and Palmerston North, the noise and mayhem of New York was a violent shock to the system which evidently appealed. The production, which had started in England under the aegis of the Elizabethan Society of London, ran for seventy-five performances in four different theatres and gave him a solid introduction to the city that would provide him with employment for the best part of half a century.
St Clair was lucky in the relationships he formed with that first American job. The director was Ben Greet, an actor-manager who toured the classics in England and was now breaking into America (he was the first producer to take a professional British cast around US campuses). Greet’s American partner was the powerful producer Charles Frohman, who would shortly have a big hit in London with Peter Pan (a frequent transatlantic traveller, in 1915 he was to be an unlucky passenger on the Lusitania).
Before that, St Clair did indeed join up with Janet Waldorf. She was a prodigiously energetic young protégée of her touring partner Mrs Ada Dow-Currier. They had been travelling the world for four years, leaving the US behind for Japan, India, China and Australia. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser in Hawaii found St Clair ‘highly amusing’ in a comedy called Turned Up. He also played the lubricious Earl of Lovelace in a play about Nell Gwynn and a general in a Napoleonic melodrama called The Royal Divorce. But most of the drama took place offstage as the company’s figureheads fell out with each other. With distances so great and travel costs so high, the productions lost money in Honolulu, and Waldorf lost her temper. She told the Hawaiian Star that ‘four years spent in the orient was time wasted’, blaming Mrs Dow-Currier, who replied that Waldorf ‘was a financial failure as a “star” attraction in the States’. Although there were reports that some of the actors had not been paid and so were stranded in Honolulu, St Clair slipped out of the country and was shocked to read a couple of months later that Janet Waldorf had died of pneumonia back home in Pittsburgh. Mrs Dow-Currier expressed ‘the greatest sorrow at this final severing of so many pleasant associations’ while clarifying that when the Janet Waldorf Company disbanded ‘all members were paid in full and were provided with funds for their transportation’. A couple of weeks later news percolated through that Waldorf had not died after all and that ‘the popular comedienne is enjoying good health in New York’. For St Clair it was not a propitious introduction to female management or star misbehaviour.
Back in New York his Englishness was a calling card, and he could count on alliances he’d made with more reliable employers. Greet cast him in the eye-catching roles of Shylock’s faithless servant Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and the lovelorn shepherd Corin in As You Like It. But England called for real and in the summer of 1904 St Clair sailed home to see his family for the first time in at least eight years. There was plenty that he’d missed. His older brother Aleth had been declared bankrupt after purchasing a church furnishing business which failed to yield the anticipated income. The 1901 census found him living outside Derby and describing himself as a wagon carriage painter. Within a year he’d died of pneumonia, leaving a pregnant widow and three children under five.
St Clair stayed for two years and worked sporadically. In The Era, the theatrical newspaper in which actors placed news of their movements – before the days of agents – he had a small weekly ad announcing whether he was either engaged or disengaged. He was as often the former as the latter. Back home in Cheltenham over Christmas 1905 he advertised his availability in the Gloucestershire Chronicle. ‘Amateur Theatricals. Mr St Clair Bayfield coaches, acts and recites. Late of Court Theatre, London; Shaftesbury Theatre, London; and Ben Greet Company. Terms on application.’ He gave the address of the Actors’ Association in Covent Garden. The most prestigious job he secured was at the Savoy Theatre in a new play about the seventeenth-century courtesan and free-thinker Ninon de l’Enclos. She was played by Leah Ashwell, a formidable young actress just embarking on theatrical management. She was halfway through a drawn-out divorce from her husband triggered by her affair with the American proto-heart-throb Robert Taber (who promptly died of pleurisy).
St Clair found himself once again under the wing of a female boss. And yet when she took the production to New York, he didn’t travel with it. Instead he put an announcement in The Era that he had been engaged in a different production in New York. At the Madison Square Theater he resumed his association with his old employer William Hawtrey, who had brought his Australian production of The Two Mr Wetherbys, a hit London comedy for which he needed convincing English actors. The play’s author was St John Hankin, a
minor Edwardian playwright who drowned himself three years later (George Bernard Shaw called his suicide ‘a public calamity’).
In early 1907 St Clair was back touring with Greet’s repertory company, sharing the stage with Sybil Thorndike and Sydney Greenstreet, then both in their twenties. Florence, who was firmly ensconced in New York by now, may well have seen him, whereafter he disappeared from New York yet again, this time to tour Mrs Warren’s Profession. The advertising made much of its status as ‘the most talked of play of the day!’ During its first performance in New York in 1905 the theatre was raided by the police, who arrested the cast and crew under the law passed for the suppression of trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature. Shaw’s play about the morality of prostitution was closed after one night and only returned two years later once the producers had taken their case to the courts and, for an added precaution, invited the city’s clergymen to attend a performance (more than three hundred turned up). In the touring cast St Clair donned a dog collar and went about his father’s business. The role took him to the far ends of the US: Omaha, North Dakota, Utah, Washington. ‘It is a frank discussion of a serious social condition as it exists in Europe, not America,’ sniffed a syndicated review. ‘The sanctimonious [sic] of St Clair Bayfield,’ it added, ‘was well interpreted.’
By the time he met Florence in January 1909, St Clair had been an actor for a decade. He had travelled tens of thousands of miles across the English-speaking world, seen his name on the same bill as some of the giants of the age, and had considerable exposure to the new-fangled theatrical concept of the female employer. The job in The Prima Donna was much the most commercial production with which he had ever been associated, and he was hoping for a period of settled employment after his odyssey on the high seas. The auguries were good. Composer Victor Herbert and lyricist Henry Blossom had previously collaborated with the half-Viennese star soprano Fritzi Scheff to create a huge hit at the same theatre three years earlier. In Mlle Modiste Scheff played a hat-shop girl yearning to become an opera singer; the show ran for two hundred performances and was revived three times. Scheff stepped into the vacancy left by the waning career of Lillian Russell, the doyenne of New York operetta, whose voice had entered into a decline in her forties. She commanded an astronomical salary of $1,000 a week. She was also one half of a celebrity couple: having divorced her first husband, a baron in the German Army, two weeks into the run she married John Fox Jr, author of the year’s big hit novel, The Trail of the Lonesone Pine.
When The Prima Donna opened on the last day of November 1908 the New York Times was full of good cheer. ‘An exceptionally pleasurable entertainment,’ it purred. ‘New York is going to welcome The Prima Donna open-handed and keep her for its own for some time to come … It will run Mlle Modiste a strong race for lasting popularity.’ However, Scheff’s kittenish allure in long skirts, short skirts and hats aplenty was not enough to rescue a tired libretto about a star of the Paris Opera who is loved by two officers. Having played a French general in Honolulu, here St Clair played a French colonel.
The Prima Donna had only two weeks left on Broadway when St Clair went along to a gathering of the Euterpe Club and met for the first time its chairman of music. He met her again that evening after the performance at a party on Riverside Drive, presumably lured there by her invitation. St Clair was lonely, feeling the pinch and living at a down-at-heel boarding house on West 23rd Street, a few blocks from the theatre.
They were ideally suited. Her vignette of their first encounter encapsulated the dynamic between them. Florence fell for the owner of the admiring smile who validated her sense of herself as a natural stage presence. Her rash escapade with a husband twice her age had been a disaster. At the age of forty, as she established a new identity in a new city, she had no use for such a retrograde prop as a father figure. This younger, gentler Englishman promised uncritical devotion, a craving for her company, and was content to play second fiddle. The subordinate role suited him too. His theatrical experiences as a company member had made St Clair adaptable and accommodating, and knowledgeable in the specialist area of female impresarios. It would be misleading to say that Florence rescued him from penury. The arrangement which lasted for the next thirty-five years was built on a bedrock of affection. And Florence was not yet independently wealthy. It would prove a mutually satisfying union of tastes and temperaments.
It’s not certain how quickly the connection deepened into a romance, but some point in 1909 Florence temporarily vacated the St Louis Hotel, St Clair abandoned his boarding house, and they moved to the American Hotel in Union Square. Presumably early on in their new life of domestic proximity, she had to tell him about her hair loss, and about contracting syphilis, the still-unmentionable disease for which there was no certain cure (and wouldn’t be until the year before Florence’s death). Even though her marriage had ended more than twenty years earlier, she was burdened by the knowledge that syphilis bacteria could lie dormant for decades. The following year an arsenic compound called Salvarsan became available which provided specific chemotherapy against syphilis. But as a powder which had to be dissolved in distilled water then injected, it was difficult to administer and fraught with the potential for unpleasant and even life-threatening side effects. A safer derivative was made available in 1912 and became the standard treatment up until the development of penicillin. As for whether they enjoyed sexual intimacy in the circumstances, posterity has closed the bedroom door.
St Clair was contracted to follow The Prima Donna on tour to Washington. Deciding against joining the production the following year, he was spared a farcical merry-go-round in which Scheff suffered from tonsillitis, fainted onstage in Detroit, took off in a huff after her understudy had such a brilliant success, and set fire to her dressing room in Pittsburgh.
Florence meanwhile threw herself back into the life of the Euterpe Club. In early February 1909 she took part in a series of tableaux and dances at the Plaza Hotel, contributing to musical readings of Love’s Regret. Her precise role – vocal or instrumental – was not recorded. The Wilkes-Barre Times, proudly keeping an eye on her activities in its ‘Folks You Know’ column, described her as a chairman of music of ‘the Enterfe Club’, a misnomer that wasn’t an atypical event from its careless compositors.
Florence could not devote all her time to club activities. In March she was at home for two weeks with her parents, her father being once more unwell. (The local paper got it wrong again when it spotted ‘Mrs Jenkins and daughter Florence’ paying a social visit.) While in her home town she missed a Euterpe concert which took place that week, another member chairing the musical programme. When her parents went off on a recuperative trip to Florida and Cuba in April, Florence did not join them. Possibly she didn’t approve of one of their travelling companions, as would emerge later, or perhaps she was now too absorbed by her obligations in New York. One Sunday that month it was announced that Mrs Agostine Strickland and Miss Lillian George would be giving tea four days hence for Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins at the Don Carlos in Madison Avenue. ‘They will receive from 4 until 7.’ She had come a long way from the life of Bohème.
While Florence stayed in New York, St Clair had an important journey to make. In late May, not long after Peter Thornton Hains was sentenced, St Clair boarded a steamship for home. He docked in Glasgow on 1 June. Since his last visit there had been two more deaths – his father’s sister and his grandmother, the mistress of the Earl of Ellenborough. He paid his respects in Cheltenham. But he also went to Arundel in West Sussex where he had an engagement to break off. The woman who had been waiting for him was quite as impressive a figure as Florence. Rosalind Travers, two years older than St Clair, was the daughter of a retired army major and an artist, with whom she still lived. She was a published poet and playwright who, while expecting St Clair to return from America, became one of the first English people of either gender to write about their winter travels in Finland. She had come back only a few months earlier.
St Clair hurried home to New York a free man. On 16 August he and Florence entered into a common-law marriage. The private ceremony was almost as clandestine as Florence’s first wedding in 1883. It took place in the Hotel Vanderbilt and was witnessed by four people whose identities have not been revealed; they were presumably not young as none was called as a witness in 1945 after Florence’s death when St Clair attempted to support his claim that they had been man and wife. Rings were exchanged: St Clair gave Florence a ring of his grandmother’s – presumably his late mother’s mother, and perhaps presented to him for this purpose on his recent trip home – while Florence gave him a gold ring with a blue lapis lazuli stone. She called it a ring of intertwining love and he planted it on the fourth finger of his left hand.
There was no legal document to support the marriage. ‘My enemy in the whole thing,’ he later said, ‘was the fact that she had a very unhappy first marriage to Frank Thornton Jenkins. She said that if she ever married again it would be a common-law marriage. She was very superstitious about it.’ It seems just as likely that her superstition was a smokescreen designed to cover up the fact that she was not in a position to marry St Clair Bayfield as she was still married to Frank Jenkins.
Soon after their common-law wedding, St Clair Bayfield – described in the Times as ‘the young English character actor’ – was cast in a loose comic adaptation, translated back into English from German, of Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Little Dorrit. It was called The Debtors. St Clair played Mr Chivery, the turnkey at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. In real life he was to be the debtor.
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