According to one witness, William Bulford learned from Foster in the spring that he would be given the farm, although Attorney Garman managed to establish that Foster never actually mentioned his will in the conversation. Mrs Foster told the court that Bulford was a frequent visitor to Mc-Gahren’s office. If they did indeed conspire, Florence’s arrival in their midst on 14 September will have underlined that Foster did not have long to live. The opportunity might have suggested itself when McGahren was asked by Foster to ratify the first codicil on 16 September. There he saw that William Bulford had indeed been left the farms but only for the duration of his lifetime. Perhaps McGahren then communicated the good news to Bulford, and they concluded that Foster was disposed to be generous, but might do more for his mother’s descendants. Bulford could involve himself in the outcome of the will as an act of altruism. His only child having died at birth, he would be working on behalf of other Bulfords if he laid claim to some of Foster’s money now, for distribution among the family, rather than wait for Florence to die without issue. To avert suspicion, and give Florence a theoretical chance to have a child, they would make the bequest available for distribution only after five years. So McGahren drew up a second codicil granting the Bulford clan $20,000, and in order to secure Foster’s signature without interference, Bulford asked Mrs Foster to go out for the day with his wife. When Florence visited the dentist in the middle of the day, they pounced. The male nurse in attendance was persuaded to be a witness, perhaps with the help of some sort of inducement to sign and later disappear.
Alternatively, none of this happened. What seems clear is that there was wariness on both sides after Florence’s arrival in their midst. She brought with her the airs and scents of another world that to the Bulfords and McGahren will have appeared a profound anathema. Bulford was a horse trader, and the family were farmers – in photographs the various members of the clan wear dowdy dresses and sober suits. Florence had married into a military dynasty from the federal capital, two of whose scions had just been tried for murder. After pursuing a cultural education in Philadelphia, she had penetrated the world of untold American wealth and only recently established herself as a new adornment on the social pages of New York. Finally, she was that ultimate alien, a woman who no longer lived with her husband. When Florence accused McGahren of conspiracy, it was either true, or a devious assault on his reputation from a practically scarlet woman. No wonder if he overreacted and even threatened to make her crawl on her knees.
As for the theft of the will, only three people had access to the safe: Foster, McGahren and his stenographer. As McGahren explained, he kept the keys to the safe in the office, where he placed the will in a locked box, then placed the key to that box in another box, locked an inner steel door, leaving the key in the lock, and then the outer doors using a combination that only he, his stenographer and Foster knew.
The question of how any of the potential culprits could have accessed the safe is beyond the realm of speculation. The fact is that somebody did. Either personally, or acting on behalf of someone else, they stole the will and the first codicil but left the second codicil. So who could it have been? If William Bulford knew the contents of the will and the codicils he had no motive to remove them. If he didn’t (as he claimed in court) he might conceivably have seen an advantage in Foster dying intestate so that the Bulfords’ claims could be evaluated in court. The other possibility is either Florence or her mother, or a party acting for them. Mrs Foster’s attempts to gain access to the safe while her husband was still alive were thwarted by McGahren. Before the safe was opened William Bulford’s wife heard her confidently predict that it would contain no will. This would be an odd thing to say if she herself had stolen the will. As for Florence, she seemed to fear that her father had cut her out of the will after her elopement and not reinstated her. In court she claimed to know nothing of any will. If she did know of the second codicil which diverted so much money to William Bulford, she certainly wouldn’t have left it behind in the safe. If she didn’t, it would explain why it was left behind.
In October there ensued some preliminary jostling over which court would hear the case, while Garman petitioned for the contents of McGahren’s safe and desk to be opened. Florence returned to visit her mother but had gone back to New York City by the time the climactic twist in the melodrama was enacted.
On 22 October 1910, before the jury had an opportunity to be sworn in, McGahren received an envelope with a New York postmark on which the address was printed in large letters. Inside was the will and the first codicil. The names of the witnesses to the will had been cut off. There was nothing else in the envelope. A similar envelope containing an earlier version of the will was posted to the People’s Bank of Wilkes-Barre. The case of Bulford v Jenkins was immediately withdrawn. The documents were admitted to probate on 26 October and the will was recorded. Florence and her mother were given no notice. Florence made a last intervention to forestall the enacting of her father’s dying wishes and the bequest of so much of his fortune to the Bulfords, sending an attorney to request a conference before the will could be probated. He was told he had arrived too late. With the court case no longer needed, eight attorneys, four on each side, missed out on the fees that would have come their way. More than two years later some were still attempting to extract from the estate fees owed for the original hearing.
The motive for mutilating the stolen will, then returning it, seems as unfathomable as the original theft. Whoever returned it may have calculated that snipping off the names of the witnesses would invalidate the document. Or perhaps the prospect of a decision being placed in the hands of twelve good men and true seemed too precarious. A jury might decide that the second codicil was signed by Foster when not of sound mind. Or the opposite.
The value placed on the Foster estate was $237,000, of which $100,000 was real estate. The Wilkes-Barre Times, hungry for more drama, reported a possibility of further legal proceedings. The Fosters’ attorney expressed surprise at the speed of events, and said that Mrs Foster would make a public explanation as ‘a cloud has been cast over her’. No record has survived of a challenge to the will, nor of the widow’s statement.
Even after the Bulfords collected their money, mother and daughter were very comfortably provided for. But Florence’s experience in a Wilkes-Barre courtroom would mark her for life. She would never again put her trust in a member of her father’s profession. Nor did she have much faith in dentists.
7: CLUB WOMAN
How good was the ear of Florence Foster Jenkins? History knows the answer to the question, and remembers her for that reason only. But there is countervailing evidence that she had extremely good musical antennae. She awaited the outcome of the case in 1910 in the welcoming bosom of the Euterpe Club. For a morning concert in January at the East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, one of the performers Florence booked was Edna Showalter. When Showalter sang again two months later, it was in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Gustav Mahler.
The programme for the musicale, Florence’s most ambitious yet, offers an insight into her eclectic taste. She mixed works from the European canon (Schumann, Debussy) with the more recherché (Caracciolo, Kaun) and new songs by living composers too. One was by Kurt Schindler, an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. A song called ‘Roguish Cupid’ was by German immigrant conductor Franz X. Arens, who had brought affordable music to the students and workers of New York by introducing seasons of People’s Symphony concerts in 1900. Another was by popular young songwriter Harriet Ware, who three years later would triumphantly perform her own songs at Carnegie Hall.
The impressive young soloists booked to perform also included the pianist Harry M. Gilbert, then thirty, who would go on to play for Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt and Truman in the White House. But it was Miss Showalter who stole the show. Her aria from La traviata was sung ‘with brilliancy of execution and ease’, and she was praised for ‘showering upon her audience
high Cs and cadenzas’. Among the soloists for an evening programme in March were Vivian Holt, who would later make several pleasant recordings of folksy tunes as part of a female duet, and Carl Schlegel, a baritone who would perform nearly four hundred times with the Metropolitan Opera. These events were mentioned in the Musical Courier, a trade outlet begun in 1880 which would provide friendly coverage of Florence’s projects almost to the very last. Coverage could be bought, with the result that Florence turned up in its pages never less than monthly and sometimes weekly during the season, out of all proportion to her musical relevance. Here it reported the enthusiastic applause of an audience consisting of ‘handsomely gowned women’.
The world of handsome gowns was where Florence now spent her time. After her father’s will was probated towards the end of the year, she went to an evening dance in which the main feature was a series of tableaux for a large cast of young people, including the children of the members – the president’s daughter among them. Florence was one of a number of older women, described as matrons, who joined in. The tableau vivant would become an essential feature of a Euterpe extravaganza. Somewhere between amateur dramatics and staged painting, it took a famous scene from myth or history and allowed club members and their younger relatives to pose as gods and icons. The officers threw themselves towards the front. The most elaborate that evening was entitled ‘The Rose Queen and Her Court at the Fete of Flowers’. It offered a starring role to Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison, the eminent proctologist’s wife, as its central figure flanked by other lustrously adorned matriarchs of the Euterpe. All money raised by such extravaganzas was donated to the club’s philanthropic fund for later distribution.
Florence didn’t programme every one of the Euterpe’s musical mornings, but when someone else was in charge the performers tended to be less eminent. Increasingly she had commitments which lured her elsewhere. She joined the Mozart Society of New York, newly formed in 1909 by Dr Adelaide Wallenstein with the object of the advancement and enjoyment of good music. It met for the standard diet of afternoon musicales and private evening concerts. In the Prussian-born conductor Arthur Claassen it had a figurehead of some pedigree. As a student composer in Weimar he was noticed and encouraged by Liszt. Lured to New York by Leopold Damrosch, another Liszt protégé, he set up in Brooklyn as the conductor of the Arion male chorus, which performed for Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1900 and with whom he made several recordings. He will have cost the Mozart ladies quite a bit to hire, as would the orchestra and professional soloists such as Carl Schlegel. A typical programme that Florence had to learn comprised several songs across a range of styles. In December 1910 they sang Grieg’s stirring ‘Land Sighting’, a Victorian part-song by English composer Eaton Faning, and ‘Love’s Dream After the Ball’, a dreamy waltz by Austro-Hungarian Alphons Czibulka. Florence remained a member of the club for another decade.
In May 1911 the Mozart Society of New York sent a formidable choir of 132 women to Washington, DC to perform for the wife of President Taft in the White House garden. Claassen had previously performed with other societies for the President and First Lady and had asked if they’d like to hear his Mozartian ladies. The entire choir stayed at the Arlington Hotel and enjoyed a day trip down the Potomac to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. As they chugged downriver, perhaps Florence told her fellow choristers about the plans to stop the tidal floods designed by her brother-in-law, the military engineer General Hains.
A few days after the performance at the White House, no doubt inspired by her participation, a photograph of Florence was published in the New York Times. It was taken by the Campbell Studio, a leading firm of society portraitists which opened its New York branch on Fifth Avenue in 1900. Its first manager, William A. Morand, used his high-society connections to build a portfolio of influential clients. After his death in 1909 the studio branched out into theatrical photography, which explains Florence’s wide-brimmed hat and the bouquet of flowers clutched dramatically to her bosom like a favoured lapdog. Unlike other portraits of her, her face is calm and free from affectation.
Aside from music, the Euterpe gathered for luncheons where the same names were always in attendance: Mrs T. W. G. Cook, Mrs William H. Corbin, Mrs Frank Parsons Lant, Mrs Eduardo Marzo, Mrs Thomas Byrne, Mrs Addison J. Rothermel, Mrs J. Alphonso Stearns, Miss Ida Judson, Mrs George Hattler. As ever Florence, being sundered from her husband, was the only one regularly identified by her own Christian name. Sometimes one or another of them was off to California for the winter or just back from a world tour. (The typesetters, crushed by the sheer weight of names listed in the social columns every week, often varied initials or spellings or marital status.) They subscribed for tables at card parties at the Waldorf-Astoria where ‘handsome prizes’ were promised, or ‘silver prizes for each table’. Card parties were a respectable and enjoyable means of gathering women together without the business of arranging musical or theatrical performance. And they knew the rules to sundry card games: pivot bridge and euchre were the staples – in the accepted shorthand, such and such a host would be said to ‘give a bridge’ – but they were supplemented by audition, five hundred, pinochle. Some card clubs were open to all; others guarded their exclusivity. A pivot bridge club Florence joined which met twice a month over the winter at the Hotel Marseilles was ‘strictly social, and in no way a public card club, members being admitted only when known to [its founder] Mrs Wood and two of the members or patronesses’. The bridge club also held a thé dansant twice a season, plus assembly dances on New Year’s Eve and Lincoln’s birthday.
Membership of one women’s club by no means precluded joining others. Early in 1912 Florence arranged a musical and literary programme at the Hotel Astor for a club founded in 1907 called the New Yorkers. Music was much less central to a society whose function was to ‘facilitate social intercourse, broaden intellectuality, encourage congeniality and harmony, and promote the general progress of New York women’. Membership was open to women born in the state or those who had been resident for five years. Florence could have joined no earlier than six months previously.
A compendious guide entitled Club Women of New York listed two hundred such clubs and patriotic societies, incorporating their manifestos plus the names and addresses of presidents and other officers. There were well-meaning clubs devoted to economics, education, women’s suffrage, hygienic reform, relief of the needy. Some helped women maintain their ancestral or geographical identity: the Society of the Daughters of the Seventeenth Century or of 1812, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of Ohio, Indiana and so on. Many were formed for cultural appreciation. The object of Gotham Club (est. 1907) was ‘social enjoyment and the consideration of philanthropy, art, literature, hygiene, music, drama, dancing and patriotism’. At the Minerva Club (1898) ‘book discussions take place and papers on current topics are read for analysis and comment’. The Société des Beaux Arts (1908) was ‘purely educational’ in its study of fine arts, literature and science (membership limited to one hundred). The Club for the Study of Life as a Fine Art considered ‘the dignity and worth of the body and soul and the relation of one to the other’. The goal of the International Sunshine Society (1896) was ‘to incite its members to a performance of kind and helpful deeds and thus to bring the shine of happiness into the greatest possible number of hearts and homes’. It claimed more than three hundred thousand members. The mother of them all was Sorosis, formed in 1868 to ‘render women helpful to one another; actively benevolent to the world; and to aid in promoting useful and agreeable relations between women of literary, artistic and scientific tastes’. The club’s paragraph in Club Women of New York added that as with all pioneers their history was one of ‘hardships encountered, prejudices conquered, and difficulties overcome’. The Waldorf-Astoria did very well out of all these clubs. The biggest hotel in the world had room for them all.
There was even a City Federation of Women’s Clubs which had elected officers for everything from suffrage to anti-suff
rage via household economics, the milk committee, probation, taxation and temperance. The activities of all these organisations were scrupulously detailed in the pages of the city’s newspapers. They didn’t always meet in hotels. ‘Small luncheons, teas, and card parties by the dozen have been the popular entertainment this week,’ reported the Times’s ‘Activities in Clubland’ column. ‘Not in months has there been such a number of cozy affairs given in people’s homes rather than in hotel parlors.’
Florence spent the decade accumulating memberships and positions. In the 1910–11 edition of Club Women of New York she listed memberships of not only the Euterpe and the New Yorkers but also the New York branch of the Dickens Fellowship (est. London 1902) and the Pocahontas Members Association. She spent the decade expanding that portfolio to become vice-president and chairman of music of the National Round Table, historian of the National Opera Club (‘educational work in music’), plus a member of the Rubinstein Club (‘musicales and social meetings … membership limited to five hundred’), and the quasi-masonic Eastern Club. For the Twilight Club in 1912 she was on a committee in charge of organising a dinner where the topic under discussion would be ‘The Task of the Dramatist’. Among the eight speakers booked were writers, critics, an actor, a rabbi and Hans von Kaltenborn, later destined for distinction as a broadcaster. They were all men. Brought up to vaunt her antecedents, Florence also had life membership of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. It wasn’t all about culture: she joined the Knickerbocker Relief, founded in 1906, to help the needy, especially those in danger of eviction for non-payment of rent, offering clothing, money and access to medical care. They met twice a month at the home of its president to raise money through ‘euchres, musicales, teas and other social functions’. Perhaps even more than other society women in New York, Florence was prodigiously busy. An exceptionally attentive reader of the society pages might sometimes find her name cropping up twice or even three times in relation to quite separate gatherings: an Italian conversazione with speakers and singers at the National Opera Club, say, alongside a regular event in the Euterpe calendar.
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