The rise of the women’s club was a result of unprecedented historical circumstances. Growing wealth concentrated in the largest cosmopolis of a society which felt it was creating the world anew meant that a lot of wives had time on their hands, an increasing desire to be active outside the domestic environment, plus disposable income and a collective will for improving society and themselves. ‘Women who are not obliged to work for a living should work in one way or another, either politically, artistically, or philanthropically,’ argued an essayist in a 1909 issue of the North American Review. ‘Domestic requirements no longer sufficiently employ either the modern woman’s time or her intellect.’ The potential for influence was felt to be limitless as New York women filled their days with debates and lectures, clubs and leagues. ‘The only danger,’ the essay added, ‘is that she may take up too many interests, so that with multiplied and divergent claims she may be unable to further any one in particular … the interests most adapted to her position or individual capacity should be the ones to command her attention. In these days of specialised effort, one cannot be a Jill of all trades nor a finished performer on more than one instrument.’
Club Women of New York listed Florence’s official address as 34 E 32nd Street, which was the St Louis Hotel just off the thrumming thoroughfare of Park Avenue. In fact her living arrangements were a little more complicated. After Florence’s death St Clair’s list of lodgings where he and Florence cohabited included, in 1910, an establishment called Mrs McGill in Rockaway Beach – a summer retreat on the far side of Long Island which had lost the battle with Newport as the society’s most exclusive seaside haunt. From 1911 they boarded on West 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was a noisy place to live as on their doorstep was the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the world’s biggest Anglican building site. The green oasis of Morningside Park was a couple of blocks away, but prey like other parks to petty crime.
Meanwhile Mary Hoagland Foster had moved to New York and settled at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Without having any idea that she was his mother-in-law, she quickly developed a fondness for the tall Englishman who happily escorted her around the city. She called him Mr Roberts, and often urged him to make her daughter into Mrs Roberts. ‘You must make Florence marry you!’ she’d say.
Having schlepped energetically around the globe, St Clair found that work in New York was growing sporadic. Early in 1910 he was in a musical comedy called King of Cadonia about a royal suitor disguised as a peasant. Despite music by the young Jerome Kern, the New York Tribune thought it ‘rose in no particular above mediocrity’ and constituted ‘uphill work’ for the cast. Later in the year St Clair was part of an emotional production at the Manhattan Opera House which brought carriages thronging to the premiere. Impresario Oscar Hammerstein I had built the theatre on 34th Street and Eighth Avenue in 1906 in order to house a rival to the Metropolitan Opera Company. The venture proved so popular that the Met privately offered Hammerstein a $1.2 million inducement to cease trading. This he accepted, it is thought, to forestall bankruptcy. None of this was known to the public in September 1910 when St Clair joined the cast in Hans, The Flute Player, a piece of comic froth from Monte Carlo about a town in the grip of moral torpor. The composer was Louis Ganne. ‘To say that he has a good memory,’ quipped the Times critic, detecting plagiarised tracts of Parsifal and Butterfly, ‘would not detract from one’s enjoyment.’ During one of the intermissions Hammerstein addressed an audience in tumult. ‘The keen and poignant grief which I felt at having been compelled to abandon the field of grand opera is somewhat softened by this reception tonight.’ Roses rained down on the lavishly ornamented stage. No one knew about the bung from the Met.
St Clair didn’t work in New York for another seven years, apart from performing pro bono in one-offs. He did a benefit for the Anti-Vivisection Society in 1911. The next year the Shakespeare Club marked the Bard’s birthday with a performance of Hamlet. Playing Polonius at the Wallack’s Theater was the closest St Clair would come to a featured role in America’s theatrical capital. The following week the cast repeated their performance as a contribution to the relief fund for bereaved relatives of the Titanic dead. The ship had sunk earlier that month, and the inquiry was held at the Waldorf-Astoria. The following year, notwithstanding the threat of icebergs, St Clair sailed home to England again. On his return he toured in a new play about Benjamin Disraeli starring English actor George Arliss, who would return to the role for the next twenty years, filming it as a silent movie then as a talkie, and winning an Oscar for the latter. St Clair’s performance as Disraeli’s gardener was, alongside that of the rest of the cast, ‘entitled to commendation’, said the Herald in Washington. He saw a lot of America between 1913 and 1915: the train took him to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, Wichita, Kansas, as well as the odd metropolis – Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, New Orleans. As he travelled up and down the continent from Winnipeg to Louisiana to Oregon, syndicated newspaper reports listing the actors on the undercard would almost invariably conclude with the words ‘and St Clair Bayfield’. Despite that smile which seduced Florence, he rarely saw his name clamber towards the north end of the credits. And so it would remain. Later in life he was tormented by the memory of turning down a role in a play which went on to be a big success and made a star of the actor who accepted the part instead.
If the tour was within hailing distance, Florence joined him. She came to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Atlantic City and Boston. When St Clair was further away, they wrote. A total of five hundred letters passed between them over thirty-five years. Samples of them proved useful when, after her death, St Clair was attempting to prove that they indeed were married. Very few of the letters have survived, but the ones he submitted to the court betray genuine affection and do indeed suggest that Florence thought of herself as St Clair’s wife. This letter found him in Portland, Oregon, in late 1914, written in her forthright sloping hand:
Dearest Brownie:
Your two little letters one containing that pretty Xmas card and one the two parcel orders reached me safely this morning. Thank you so much for them both, darling. I will buy something pretty with the money which I trust you will like, dear. I sent from Reed and Bartons a ring, a set of studs and a pair of cuff buttons to you. That ring is your Xmas gift the buttons your birthday gift and the studs your anniversary present on January 24. By the way it’s an iron wedding this year, did you know? That’s a difficulty then, isn’t it? I think I shall send you a horse shoe. With the ring sets. I sent the patch.
I hope you will have the jolliest times you have ever had in your life on Xmas. I am giving a dinner of four people in my mother’s honor that day … and on New Year’s Day I shall be at the Astor. I am a very gloomy rabbit when I think you will not be with me.
Best and wish you all joy and happiness and trust that the very best luck will follow you always. The rooms you describe must be awful … The new conductor of the Mozart Society led the Chorus with a knitting needle! Isn’t that the limit?
I have been so busy I’ve scarcely had a chance to breathe and am writing this at speed for yours is about the only Xmas gift I’ve had time to buy. Do let me know at once if you get all these things and with love and best wishes.
I am always yours dearest Brownie
PS I will look for the pudding.
The letter offers an insight into the lightness of her personality, but also illuminates the imbalance in the relationship. Florence had the financial power to be more bounteous in her giving. St Clair’s generosity was as a listener, an enabler. His attempts to supply her with actual presents were sometimes simply rejected. ‘She was superstitious about everything,’ he said. ‘For instance, I was never allowed to put a hat on the bed. She never would give or accept a present with a point. Thought it would break friendship. She wouldn’t let me give her a beautiful paperknife once for that reason.’ Another undated letter, in reply to one sent by St Clair from Kansas City
, again alluded to the gloominess of his lodgings. ‘I hate to think of the poor little stuffy rooms you have had and your sitting there in your pink pajamas and blue woolly coat.’ St Clair was on tour a lot in these years, so much so that Florence complained of hardly ever seeing him. ‘Oh, believe me! The way we have lived for the past four years, I could be married to anybody else, at all, and see as much of you as I do, for after the honeymoon and the first few months are over, nearly any wife can get away for a month or two during the year.’
Despite her wide array of commitments to other clubs and societies, back in New York the Euterpe Club was never far from Florence’s thoughts. Hammerstein’s experience with the Metropolitan Opera is instructive. The Met, founded in 1880, had in recent years been graced by visits from Enrico Caruso. In 1908 it poached its director Giulio Gatti-Casazza from La Scala in Milan, who in a tenure of vast creative innovation engaged Mahler and later Arturo Toscanini. The Met’s first ever world premiere took place in 1910 when Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West opened in the country where its story is set. The Metropolitan Opera House at 1411 Broadway, with capacity for nearly four thousand, was the dominant force in the art form. When the Met could shut down a rival with a furtive bribe, it was more or less unthinkable that a women’s club might mount an operatic production without any sort of institutional support. And yet that is what Florence planned next.
One evening in March 1912 the Euterpe booked the lavish, stuccoed ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, the recently built palace on Fifth Avenue. The room was lined with pilasters topped by gilt Corinthian capitals. Florence filled it with an orchestra, scenic designs, and a considerable audience, whom it entertained with excerpts from Carmen. The opera, like others which followed, was intended to resemble in every particular a production audiences might see at the Metropolitan or other great opera houses.
They may have looked like grand opera productions, but they didn’t necessarily sound like them. Carmen was sung in English translation (as were all subsequent Euterpe operas) and the performance confined itself to the highlights rather than slog through the whole thing. As for the soloists, there is no record of the singers booked for Carmen which suggests that they weren’t worth boasting about in any of the women’s clubs columns.
According to the (questionable) testimony of her pianist Cosme McMoon, it was in this period that Florence resumed singing in public. She had not sung in front of an audience of any size since she was a young woman. Why she stopped is open to speculation. ‘During the whole lifetime of her father,’ said McMoon, ‘she did not sing but she had this terrific repression. Finally, when he died, he left her very well provided for and her mother was a little more lenient than her father had been, so she was allowed to take singing lessons again, but not to sing in public.’ This wasn’t exactly how it happened: Florence was getting good notices for her singing in the 1890s. When she started again, her performances were discreet and below the radar, because they went unreported, but in 1915 her mini-résumé in The Musical Blue Book of America (subtitle: ‘recording in concise form the activities of leading musicians and those actively and prominently identified with music in its various departments’) described her as a singer and a pianist. Kathleen Bayfield refers to an injury to Florence’s arm which meant she had to give up playing the piano. It seems likely that one means of musical self-expression replaced the other.
The same letter in which Florence replies to St Clair’s dispatch from Kansas City refers to her singing in opera programmes and taking part in several concerts. The letter is undated but also alludes to St Clair touring to Philadelphia and Omaha. After he met Florence his only tours of that scale took place in the 1910s, suggesting that Florence was an active, ambitious and – above all – perfectly competent singer in her mid-forties. ‘Have had three concerts in a week – one last Wednesday at the Waldorf, one at the Astor on Sunday night and a musical at the Biltmore on Tuesday where I sang the whole programme myself. I am to sing in a concert given by Polaccos, Second Conductor at the Italian Club, which is a critical place to sing.’ The same letter referred to both of them writing articles – him for the Stage, her for Expression, which she fondly upbraided him for failing to mention.
A year on from Carmen, in 1913, Florence scheduled another opera, this time Cavalleria Rusticana. She may well have attended the American premiere in Philadelphia’s Grand Opera House in 1891. Its modest proportions – the competition its composer Pietro Mascagni won in Rome the year before was for one-act operas – meant that it could be performed in its entirety. There was room on the programme for other splendours: a carnival ball tableau with a Spanish ballet, and other tableaux featuring 150 young people. Rehearsals lasted all of March.
Although she had no children of her own, Florence had a good deal of contact with other people’s. A matron at a Euterpe evening of tableaux, she was a chaperone to young revellers at a dance to raise money for Stony Wold, a sanatorium in upstate New York for underprivileged women with tuberculosis. The cult of wealth had yet to be subordinated to the cult of youth but, as young people pursued increasing opportunities for pleasure, the chaperone was a figure of growing significance in a city where, in the age of Mrs Astor, rigid etiquette and pitiless snobbery continued to instil a fear of moral ruin. A gossip columnist such as ‘The Saunterer’ in the society rag Town Topics ticked off fast girls for breaches of etiquette. So did The Bazaar Book of Decorum. From a slightly earlier era, Mrs Annie White in Polite Society at Home and Abroad explained etiquette as ‘the frame which is placed around a valuable picture to prevent it being marred or defaced’. The Euterpe and other clubs that arranged social events played host to hundreds of young women at a time, which acted as a honeypot to young men not all of whose motives could be trusted. Where etiquette was a self-policing code of conduct, the chaperone was there to enforce it, often on behalf of the girl’s mother. Having eloped at fourteen with such unhappy consequences, Florence was well acquainted with the dangers of male charm and female naivety.
Florence’s musical entertainments were only the most spectacular manifestations of an ever-growing interest in music-making in New York society. ‘Club women are more interested in musical affairs this winter than they have been in some seasons,’ reported the New York Times before Christmas in 1913. ‘Besides the morning musicales and afternoon musicales with tea, there is music in the evening, sometimes followed by dancing, sometimes not. The afternoon tea dance has somewhat superseded the afternoon bridge party, and it is no unusual thing for the young girls to dance together after a program of music, such a hold has the tango taken on the young set.’ Meanwhile, on the same day, Florence was a bit-part singer as the Mozart Society sang at the Astor before an audience of two and a half thousand. The star of the evening was Frances Alda, a doyenne of the Met (and wife to its Italian director), who regularly duetted with Caruso. It was ‘one of the most brilliant evenings in the history of the club’.
Having mounted Cavalleria Rusticana in March 1913, a year later the Euterpe moved on to Pagliacci, the Leoncavallo opera with which it was joined at the hip almost from its inception. For its third operatic production Florence felt emboldened to publicise the singers she’d booked to sing the main roles. They were by no means of the same calibre as the soloists she’d booked for musicales – none would go on to have any sort of operatic career. Marta Kranich advertised her services as an opera and concert soprano in the Musical Courier, and was perhaps related to the founder of the hugely successful New York piano manufacturers Kranich and Bach. A jobbing tenor called Horatio Rench was also in a barbershop outfit called the Criterion Quartet which for several years recorded spirituals and folk songs. Both did well enough to be invited back for a morning musicale in the autumn, alongside other Euterpe favourites. As a taster for the main event there were no fewer than nine tableaux. Afterwards came dancing. Florence knew how to lay on an entertainment, though even she accepted the limits of possibility. The Euterpe was not to mount another complete opera, although the
excerpts chosen were from operas created on a grander scale. In 1915 the Euterpe staged the garden scene from Gounod’s Faust, giving extensive rein to Florence’s developing mania for cluttering the stage with botanical ornament.
By now the war in Europe was filling the papers, the news from the western front reaching America ever more swiftly (the first trans-continental phone call was made in 1915). A whiff of turmoil on the old continent even found its way into the refined feminine oasis of club gatherings. Florentine tenor Umberto Sorrentino, working out the conflict by touring America, seduced the ladies with lush romantic tunes including ‘O Sole Mio’, though his choice of encore, the popular English ballad ‘I Hear You Calling Me’, was thought unwise by the Musical Courier. Nine months before she played for the Euterpe, Lucile Collette, a violin prodigy from Oregon, had been in France on the fateful evening of 28 July 1914. She was about to perform at the casino in Le Havre when news that war was declared reached the orchestra, who swiftly abandoned the stage to don military uniform. ‘Mother and I were obliged to leave all our earthly belongings behind us when we returned to this country,’ she told the Oregonian and no doubt the Euterpe. ‘Upon leaving France I never expected again to see the shores of America, as the mines and submarines were plentiful. I never was so thankful in my life as when I saw once more the Statue of Liberty.’ Her performances with, among others, Sir Henry Wood’s orchestra in London had to be abandoned.
Florence Foster Jenkins Page 11
