Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  The doings of high society continued. Almost a year to the day after the outbreak of war, Florence joined the throng of well-dressed ladies at a fashionable horse show in Long Branch, New Jersey. Among the many gowns attentively itemised by the Washington Post was Florence’s white embroidered lace robe, with a white-and-black-striped sport coat banded with white fur. The war impinged more on the conscience of St Clair, being a British national. Despite having turned forty in August 1915, he tried to enlist three times with the British Army, which had a recruiting office in New York. On each occasion he was turned down owing to an injury sustained falling from a horse, presumably as a young rancher in New Zealand in the 1890s.

  His contributions to the war effort had to be restricted to the stage. In October 1915 he went up to the Canadian capital to join the cast of a new play called Under Orders designed to stimulate volunteering by dramatising actual incidents from the conflict. The play, which was set in Tipperary, climaxed with a German submarine failing to torpedo a Canadian transport ship carrying two thousand troops. ‘Probably the best acting of the evening,’ said the Ottawa Journal, ‘was that of St Clair Bayfield as the Englishman, Percival Fitzgibbens Fauntleroy.’ In professional theatre there was less of that kind of employment to be had. His longest job in the war years was in a musical comedy called Nobody Home which toured widely in 1916. Its promotional material referred to it as ‘That Fox-Trotty Combination of Fast Fun, Joy and Elite Zip’.

  A tour later in the year found him in Buffalo where a letter from Florence alludes to him meeting up with his older sister Ida, who had at some point emigrated to America. The letter refers to another singing engagement and the next Euterpe opera. Tantalisingly it mentions a $25,000 lawsuit, the details of which do not survive.

  Dearest Brownie

  I wonder if you got my little letter sent to Buffalo. My cold is all well now I am glad to say. And I am to sing a week from Sunday again. It has been very wet and stormy here and I am busy getting the things ready for the Opera on March 30th. Have a $25,000 damage suit in [illegible] and have been down at the City Hall with a big [illegible] and [illegible]. I am glad you are getting a chance to visit your sister anyway.

  Find this is all at present, from a very lonely, and homesick Rabbit.

  The opera was her most lavish triumph yet. A week before America entered the war, the Euterpe Club presented the fourth act of Rigoletto in a soirée that also presented guest instrumentalists and an array of tableaux vivants, including Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison as the Queen of Harmony in The Bal Masqué. While by no means able to summon world-class talent, Florence secured the best cast yet in the Euterpe’s brief history as a private producer of grand opera. The title role was taken by Alan Turner, a British baritone who had made popular recordings and sung with the Chicago Opera Company (and would eventually set up his own touring company). Miriam Ardini had already sung the role of Gilda with the Boston Opera Company. A Señor Jimenez, with a Havana Opera Company credit to his name, was the Duke. Annie Laurie Leonard, who made her living as a vaudeville crooner, sang Maddalena. Ten years earlier the bass Francis Motley, who sang Sparafucile, had appeared with the Met.

  None of the theatrical effects could have been achieved without the experience and commitment of St Clair. He was an essential resource in the vast technical complexities of competent staging, lighting and set design. But the public credit was Florence’s. The Euterpe evening was ‘another great success for its popular directress,’ explained Town Topics: ‘artistically and socially, and a distinct triumph for the clever and distinguished lady who is devoting all of her time and energies to the club’s aims and ideals, which, mainly, are the fostering of a love and patronage of grand opera in English.’

  As ever at the end of a Euterpe event, a vote of thanks was extended to the chairman of music by the president ‘in recognition of her valuable services to the club’. If thanks were never more merited, they were also a sort of farewell. The energetic club woman had already announced an expansion of her activities, and yet more glory was to come for someone who, Town Topics concluded, ‘it goes without saying, ranks high among America’s Representative Women.’ The clue to Florence’s next venture was in the name of the composer who supplied the evening’s entertainment.

  8: THE SINGING PRESIDENT

  Mrs Eugene Sieffert has been lost to history but for her walk-on role in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins. She was a guest at a private musical benefit for the Red Cross. At the completion of the entertainment she put to the event’s chairman of music that she should start her own club. Florence, she argued, would then be able to create her own musical programmes and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross. Florence was sceptical, and for all her commitment to clubland, shrank from the idea of becoming a president. ‘How many present would join such a club if I should decide to form it?’ she asked. It wasn’t long before she was handed the names of twenty-five potential members. While she remained non-committal, the notion loitered at the back of her mind. She was at a dinner soon afterwards where, with professional musicians present, she repeated the suggestion made by Mrs Sieffert. They all urged her to do it. ‘You could do so much for music in New York City,’ they trilled in unison, ‘and we would all like to become members of such a club.’ The list of potential members swelled. Still Florence gave it no real consideration.

  Then one morning she was having a lesson with her singing coach Carlo Edwards. They were working on ‘Pace, mio Dio’, the aria from La forza del destino in which Leonora prays for peace in death, opening and closing with high held notes of piercing intensity. Edwards was also a part-time journalist and photographer, not yet an assistant conductor of the Metropolitan Opera – he didn’t conduct his first opera there for another decade. The article he was just writing for Pearson’s Magazine happened to be about Florence’s musical work. As he dashed off at the end of a lesson, he asked Florence, ‘Of what club are you president?’ The answer emerged as if from the soup of Florence’s unconscious: ‘The Verdi Club,’ she said.

  So the story was told, doubtless finessed and with corrugations removed, in the club programme explaining its own origins. Florence later recounted a different version in which it was Edwards who suggested the name. In either telling, this is the moment the public legend was germinated – of Florence Foster Jenkins, the self-appointed diva, the so-called ‘singing president’ who attracted a devoted following.

  Mrs Sieffert takes some of the credit, but there were other tectonic forces at work. Early in 1917 Florence was immobilised by a broken leg. St Clair Bayfield, who was on tour, made frequent trips to visit her in hospital whenever he was within striking distance of New York. The enforced pause in her frenetic activities gave her the opportunity for reflection. On 6 April the United States of America declared war on Germany. Then, just shy of her forty-ninth birthday, a change of status was thrust upon Florence.

  Frank Thornton Jenkins lived out his final years knowing of a substantial hoick in the fortunes of the woman whose elopement with him had caused a rift with her parents. Apart from his one statement about his nephews in 1908, Florence’s estranged husband remained incognito in the gloaming of history, to resurface in the record books only on the date of his death: 13 June 1917. He was sixty-five. The end was sudden. His wanderings ceased a long way from the East Coast in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. A short entry in the Evening Star in Washington, which was presumably alerted by his sister Alice, concluded with a request in brackets: ‘(New York papers please copy.)’ In death the midshipman expelled from the US Navy was restored to the heart of his family, relatives of the military dead having the right to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. Florence’s response was to start owning up to the source of her surname. In a Town Topics profile the following year she styled herself as ‘the widow of Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins, son of Rear Admiral Jenkins’. The marriage may have been functionally dead for thirty years, but there was nothing now to stop her making belated capital from her in-laws.

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bsp; Around this time there was a significant shift in her relations with St Clair, who may have been bruised by such a public reclamation of Florence’s first and official husband. After eight years, their cohabitation came to an end. On 22 October a small announcement appeared in the New York Sun under the heading West Side Suites Rented: ‘to Florence Foster Jenkins at 66 West Thirty-seventh Street’. At the street level a black nameplate was affixed with their names hyphenated and alphabetised: Bayfield-Jenkins. But Florence had no intention of living there herself. It was not remotely an apartment in the style to which she had once more become accustomed since her inheritance. If Florence’s Bohème years were over, St Clair’s were to continue. The rent on the apartment was paid by Florence in lieu of the salary St Clair might otherwise have earned for the work he performed on her behalf, from now on more than ever.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor. On the door was a silver star, a heart-shaped wooden plaque and a small horseshoe, perhaps the present from Florence to mark their iron wedding anniversary. The hall was minuscule. The rest of the apartment’s ascetic accoutrements included an iron bedstead covered with a faded maroon silk spread, a couch with a matching bedspread cloth, a blue wicker chair and table, a wooden desk heaped high with St Clair’s papers, a round piano stool at a dressing table on which he ranged photographs and his military hairbrushes, and a half-moon table. Over the years the walls filled with photographs of Florence. In due course a cloth was hung on the wall featuring the masks of tragedy and comedy and bearing the legend, Verdi Club.

  The Verdi Club announced itself at the start of the season on 18 November 1917.

  The Verdi Club, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins president, will have its first morning musicale on November 28 at the Waldorf-Astoria. The new club’s aim is to honor the genius of Verdi. Its war fund, the proceeds from club entertainments, will be given to the Red Cross. During the season there will be three musical mornings, two musical and dramatic afternoons and a song recital at the Waldorf-Astoria. A musicale and reception will be given at the Hotel Astor, a piano recital will take place at Aeolian Hall and the club’s events of the winter will wind up with a dance in April. Among the members are …

  And here the New York Sun reeled off twenty-three names of subscribers whose commitment was calculated to attract more members. The list betrayed the key influence of St Clair. Rather than assign precedence to the society dames of the Euterpe (Mrs Jamison and Mrs Marzo enrolled), at the top were Mr and Mrs George Arliss. Arliss was the acclaimed English star of Disraeli whose actress wife toured everywhere with him. St Clair rejoined the Arlisses in 1916 to tour in a play about Paganini. There were other lesser-known actresses. One of them, Edyth Totten, was president of the Drama Comedy Club, which Florence promptly joined. Florentine soprano Olga Carrara Pescia also signed up. Even Enrico Caruso was soon a member, along with the American socialite Dorothy Park Benjamin, twenty years his junior, with whom he eloped in 1918.

  The printed programme of the first musicale crossed the Atlantic in the possession of Mrs Sieffert’s husband, who carried it as a mascot around the battlefields of Europe. When he returned he gave it back to Florence to be inserted in the club’s scrapbook.

  The commitment to raise money for the Red Cross was central. In 1915 the American Red Cross Society had announced its plan to raise $100 million for war relief, and the women’s clubs threw themselves into the effort. They did not share the view of gossip columnist and hostess Elsa Maxwell that society women regarded the war as ‘simply a beastly inconvenience that interfered with their annual trips abroad’. A year before the United States entered the conflict, New York society women were praised for working ‘like beavers’ to meet an urgent request cabled from the front for surgical dressings. ‘Scores of rich and fashionable women gave up all social engagements and worked ten and twelve hours a day to prepare bandages,’ reported the Evening World. A shipment of 150,000 gauze bandages was dispatched to hospitals in France.

  Through the season of 1917–18, Florence entered a period of intense activity as she helped to raise money on several fronts. Her commitments to the Euterpe Club continued unabated. She laid on such curiosities as a wandering Danish lutenist and a young American pianist called Jacques Jolas (who would go on to enjoy a more conventional career than his brother Eugène; he was a poet and translator whose literary magazine transition had a profound influence on James Joyce as he wrote Finnegans Wake). For its next operatic spectacle the Euterpe tacked away from the core repertoire to stage a scene from Friedrich von Flotow’s 1844 opera Martha, a French-flavoured bauble which had enjoyed a great fillip a dozen years earlier when Caruso reintroduced it at the Met. One of the singers engaged for the performance was a coup for the club. Ernest Davis, a promising young American tenor of Welsh descent, spent the season with the Boston Grand Opera Company burnishing his reputation. His voice was ‘of large volume and beautiful quality,’ said the Chicago Journal. ‘The range is exceptional, giving high C and D with entire ease and thrilling effect. In addition,’ it noted with approval, ‘he has enthusiasm.’ Davis’s enthusiasm would later be severely tested by the Verdi Club president.

  Meanwhile the Verdi Club’s early gatherings found Florence pinching some of the artists she’d already booked for the Euterpe – a Spanish dancer called Little Dolores was one such – but the way in which she deployed them revealed a more ambitious strategy for her own club. The major guest at one Euterpe musicale was Hungarian violinist Jan Munkacsy, already some way into a long, fruitful career. In January 1918 Munkacsy was booked again by Florence, this time to participate in what was grandly known as the ‘Verdi Club’s string quartette’. Florence was learning the science of branding. The programme also had Euterpe favourite Carl Schlegel alongside more singers with Metropolitan Opera House credits to their names.

  In the same month she chaired the annual musicale of the New Yorkers Club at the Astor. While the clubs all had armies of officers and chairmen who ran the luncheons and notified the members, on an artistic level these commitments could not have been met without St Clair, even though he was busy elsewhere. That month he was rehearsing and opening as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice at the Cort Theater (‘a capital, diverting wittol’: New York Tribune). He then went straight on to take part in the New York premiere of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. But he was also moonlighting as Florence’s amanuensis and acted as creative consultant when the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria was decorated for the Verdi Club’s so-called Ball of the Silver Skylarks.

  Florence took the name from the ode by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The cover design of the ball programme was ‘originated’ by Florence herself although executed by an artist. The caption elucidated thus: ‘Shelley, the poet, with the Muses in the background, Literature, Art and Music, with the Spirit of the Dance, springing from Music’s brain, receives an inspiration from a flight of skylarks soaring toward the sun, which is immortalized in Shelley’s poem…’ (The least of Florence’s syntactical quirks was a Teutonic preference for aggrandising nouns in upper case.)

  The inauguration of an annual ball was a statement of her limitless ambition for the club. Organised by a committee of officers, it offered an operatic performance with full orchestra, a concert which featured an unfolding series of tableaux vivants and afterwards dancing into the small hours. The boxes around the ballroom were decorated with images of the great operatic composers, Verdi taking pride of place. During the course of the evening Florence was presented with a golden laurel wreath surrounding a golden lyre with an enamelled shield of red and grey – the club’s colours. The gift to the president came from the officers of the Verdi’s inaugural season (and it was presented by a real officer: Lieutenant William L. Sayers). This was Florence’s reward for raising enough money to enable the Red Cross to buy and equip an ambulance for France. She gave an interview about this personal triumph to Carlo Edwards in Pearson’s Magazine, in which she explained that the Verdi Club had become godmother to an entire ambulance unit wh
ich could count directly on the support of the club for its various needs.

  ‘Here is aid of the most practicable and available sort,’ she enthused:

  I know of no way by which we can half so readily translate our impulses into actual help. The tragedy has been that so many of us have passionately wanted to do a little something toward alleviating the frightful suffering in Europe, but either we did not know of anything really helpful to do, or at any rate we could never have the satisfied feeling that our efforts were really doing anything. We could never feel our own hands giving aid. Now, we of the club are in personal touch with the front. The doctors will send immediately to us for supplies, often so desperately needed, and we are going to meet our duty as duty has never been met. What an incitement to us in our musical work! All the funds derived from the club performances are at the disposal of the men at the battle front. It is as it should be: art the handmaid of humanity.

  The magazine printed a picture of Florence with a short dark cropped wig and a single string of pearls, looking rather younger than fifty.

  Florence’s name was now ubiquitous in the society pages. In the same week she hosted a luncheon at Delmonico’s and dashed off to Washington to fulfil her duties as a delegate for the Daughters of the American Revolution. These events were covered in the same edition of the New York Sun’s report on activities in women’s clubs. (On the same day, Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron, was shot down and killed.) Later that month a self-styled ‘gushing Texan’ wrote home to San Antonio to report on the success in New York of a locally born pianist. Her list of the VIPs at the recital included several professional musicians but the first name was Florence Foster Jenkins, president of the Verdi Club.