Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  The Verdi Club was five years old and, to celebrate, Florence opened the season by singing to its members. Her selection included an aria from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and a suite of French songs for which she hired as her accompanist an Italian violinist from the Metropolitan Opera. The applause was ecstatic. After the encores she was presented with a tall silver vase lined with gold and fifteen large floral pieces by a small regiment of ushers. Her roses and chrysanthemums had to be sent home in a separate taxi. ‘Many friends wired her,’ reported the Musical Courier, ‘sent her letters and called her the next day on the telephone, one of these poetic admirers wiring: “Heaven gave you a silver throat, and blessed you with golden tones.”’ The Courier was certainly paid to reproduce these blandishments verbatim.

  One of the guests of honour was the pioneering Welsh choir mistress Clara Novello Davies, who brought a five-piece ladies’ vocal group with her to perform. (Her more famous brother was Ivor Novello, composer of the wartime anthem ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’; he had conquered the London stage as a composer and actor and was about to become a movie star.) Another eminence who now appeared on the Verdi Club’s list of vice-presidents was Rosa Ponselle, the young star of the Met who started out in vaudeville.

  The annual ball of 1923 heaped further praise on Florence’s head. After acts four and five of Otello she featured in the pageant as the Snow Queen, following which club member Bruce Adams paid gushing homage in a speech which told ‘of the love all bore her, of their devotion to the Verdi Club and its fine president’. He had already published two poems in praise of Florence in the programme, a paean which cannot have happened without her blessing. To conclude the ceremonies, she was presented with a platinum wristwatch set with fifty diamonds. She had the decency to blush.

  Armed with these assurances of devotion, and having now established herself as a soloist in New York, Florence made her first foray outside the city. After the summer she travelled down to Washington, DC where the Washington Hotel held a benefit for the Japanese relief committee. For the first recorded time in her life, she did not share the bill with any other musician. For her accompanist she equipped herself with the best. Malton Boyce was an English-born organist and choirmaster in charge of music at St Matthew the Apostle’s church in Washington. The church (which became a cathedral in 1939) went to some lengths to employ him: he was working in the University of Regensburg when the rector scouted him in 1906. Boyce’s speciality was Gregorian plainsong, so Florence’s repertoire called for quite a step change, while he was also given the floor to perform bits and pieces of Chopin and Debussy. He doubtless welcomed the exposure to high society and the money: he had five children to support, two of them his wife’s from a previous marriage, and already supplemented his income by running a boarding house. Florence’s eminent church musician was still accompanying her twenty years later. The Sunday Star wasn’t invited to that first recital, but received ‘word … from those in charge’ that it was ‘a pronounced success’.

  The series of permissions which Florence gave herself to perform came in incremental stages. The next arrived just over a year later when, for the first time, she put her own name down on a programme she herself had devised. This was not for the Verdi Club but the New Yorkers meeting at the Astor. The newspaper announcement conjured up an image of butter not melting in her mouth: ‘The chairman of music, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, will present the program, including piano solos by Gladys Barnett; songs by Florence Foster Jenkins; harp solos by Arthur Jones.’

  The aura of brazen indomitability was worn as an actual costume by Florence at the Verdi Club’s seventh annual ball in 1924. La forza del destino was presented, but the climax of the evening, even after all the singers had drawn gales of applause, came in the last of a series of tableaux on the theme of ‘A Dream of Fair Women’. Raised on a base of rocks, brandishing a silver spear and golden shield and wearing a white cloak and a mighty horned helmet was the imposing figure of President Florence Foster Jenkins in the guise of a breast-plated, flaxen-maned Brünnhilde in flowing robes. Such was the ovation from the audience that the curtain was drawn back half a dozen times so that the Wagnerian apparition could be marvelled at again and again. The printed programme for the evening had promised as much: its cover featured a portrait of Florence thus bedecked. Her choice of character was redemptive. As a young music graduate Florence chose to sing from Die Walküre at the Sängerfest in Philadelphia, a performance she almost certainly recalled now, omitting to mention her near-paralysing attack of nerves. Thirty-five years later she incarnated herself as a Valkyrie to the thunder of approbation.

  A typical Verdi Club season featured events for all times of day and dotted around the hotels of the city. The composer’s birthday on 9 October was celebrated at a musical luncheon, whereafter the winter passed in a series of morning musicales, supper dances, thés dansants and celebrity breakfasts before the season reached its climax in the annual grand opera, pageant and ball and, finally, the Rose Breakfast at the Westchester Club, an opulent affair in which guests came in costume. Florence always wore pink and carried a shepherdess’s crook. ‘Important Note,’ advised a club leaflet one April as the season closed: ‘Verdi Club dues for next Season are due on April 5th. It will lighten the labors of your Treasurer if you will pay them promptly.’ For one day only in late April the joining fee was waived to encourage new members to step forward.

  As Florence choreographed her rise up the ranks of New York society, St Clair’s career soldiered on. To supplement his income he taught drama at the Institute of United Arts in Riverside Drive. The special classes in drama he advertised incorporated theatre decoration and stage design, and offered lectures by an impressive roster of guest speakers that showed just how well connected St Clair was. Norman Bel Geddes was a stage designer who had worked with Max Reinhardt and Cecil B. DeMille (and was the father of Barbara Bel Geddes, later JR’s wife in Dallas). Russian immigrant Josiah Zuro was a busy New York conductor who spent much of the 1920s in Hollywood composing film scores. Stark Young was the influential drama critic of the New Republic.

  In early 1925 St Clair had a relatively rare streak of three consecutive jobs. The plays were typical of the sort of fare that New York audiences craved and producers supplied: comedies, and moralising melodramas with a British accent. Lass O’Laughter told of a young Scottish woman who rises into the peerage. John Galsworthy’s A Bit o’ Love dramatised the hounding by his congregation of a clergyman who allows his wife to leave him for the man she loves.

  St Clair was frequently called upon to play British characters but he hadn’t seen England since 1913. His steady income in 1925 may have helped him decide to spend that summer visiting relatives in Cheltenham. There was no question of Florence accompanying him. Her experience of sea travel in the juddering colossus SS Deutschland had put her off sailing for life. She was content to observe the ocean from the comfort of the Larchmont yacht club terrace. Nor did she have any feel for the natural world she sang about. The child who was once taken to her father’s farm, and went camping in the Adirondacks, ‘had no longing for the beauties of nature, trees, green fields, fresh air, the sea, the sun and the moon’, St Clair later told his wife Kathleen. The bustle of the city was less appealing to St Clair as the motor car conquered New York. Before he sailed for England he voiced his concern in a letter to the Times. His theme was the rights of pedestrians given insufficient time to get across the road by the whistling cops who marshalled traffic coming from six directions, and the difficulty of catching a car without stepping into the road, thus risking injury and arrest for jaywalking.

  Does the motorist ever consider that he sits in a firm seat and moves by well-regulated machinery, while the pedestrian moves on ‘shank’s pony’ [sic], a very uncertain carrier for a body which has to be kept well balanced? He may twist his ankle, have a sudden pain, trip, get a crick in the back, become nervous, be distracted by the fearful noises all round him, but the motorist as a rule do
es not leave an inch of space for any such possibilities. The motorist sits where he is protected from sun-glare, dust, rain, wind. The pedestrian often moves from deep shadow to glaring sunshine, sometimes cannot avoid having the sun in his face; wind distracts him, rain and dust temporarily blind him; does the motorist allow for such possibilities? Not a bit of it.

  St Clair had a Luddite’s anxiety about the modern age. A month in the sixteenth-century Plough Inn in Temple Guiting, near Cheltenham, provided respite. His aunt and widowed sister-in-law both lived in the same village. It was a long way from the Seymour Hotel, the Ball of the Silver Skylarks and the singing president. He sailed back to New York in late August. (The trip was evidently to his taste, because he returned two years later and again in 1928. Each time he went there were fewer family members to greet him: two aunts were dead by 1927 and in June 1928 he sailed to England on the day his mother died.)

  The Musical Courier had the stiffest test yet of its journalistic integrity when invited to witness a recital given over almost entirely to Florence’s singing. The programme consisted of no fewer than a dozen arias and songs in an array of languages calculated to display Florence’s range of taste if not ability. Spanish songs were the most natural fit, it was courteously suggested: ‘her high tones and animated way of singing made effect’. Less effective, by implication, were her attempts at Mendelssohn and Handel or her flirtatious foray into the operatic stratosphere in Musetta’s waltz from La Bohème. Being an intimate of the composer’s sister, she even had a crack at a Novello tune. The list was ‘sung with due appreciation of their musical contents, accompanied by facial expression of appropriate nature’. The report was accompanied by an out-of-date photograph of Florence in a low-cut satin evening dress, a long string of pearls hanging from her plump neck and a widely feathered hat atop a dark wig.

  Florence was evidently thrilled by the results, because that evening she formed two associations that would last her for the rest of her singing career. The venue was a new one for her: the magnificent ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton. Her recitals there were to become an annual event. Meanwhile the only other soloist on the programme was a young pianist called Cosme McMoon, who performed his own compositions. He would be with her to the end. Among his unreliable recollections of the singing president was a suggestion that Florence’s first solos with the Verdi Club were at the Silver Skylarks ball, when she would sing an aria during the intermission. No eyewitnesses mention such an event. And there is a hint of hyperbole in his explanation for the growing frequency of her performances. ‘So great was the enthusiasm and the mirth that people clamoured for more,’ he said. ‘She was encouraged to sing more and more, both by professionals and laymen. There were a great many singers from the Metropolitan in this club and all these people, to kid her along, told her that she was the most wonderful singer that ever lived, and encouraged her that way.’

  There is no independent account of Florence’s singing in the 1920s. It can only be guessed that she never rose above the mediocre, and steadily deteriorated with age. But it is difficult to credit that in her fifties she sang quite as catastrophically as she would later on. It was very difficult for anyone to tell her the unvarnished truth: not Verdi Club membership, not the many opera singers launched upon New York thanks to Florence’s patronage, not charities who profited from her fundraising, not journalists (real critics being uninvited), certainly not St Clair. In whatever spirit they were offered, Florence chose to believe every compliment and accept every invitation. Some of these occasions were both solemn and prestigious. In February 1927 she sang at the 195th anniversary of George Washington’s birth.

  As the Verdi Club approached its tenth anniversary Florence had cemented for herself an unassailable position at the top table of New York society. Her tools were charm, taste, money and influence. In May 1927 an interviewer from the Morning Telegraph’s Realm of Women page was admitted to her apartment for an audience, to be confronted by the ‘large blue eyes that beamed with amiability’. Florence talked about the Verdi Club’s fundraising efforts for the Italian Red Cross, the Veterans’ Mountain Camp for soldiers wounded in the war and, a recent addition, the charity for indigent theatre professionals, the Actors’ Fund of America (presumably included at St Clair’s suggestion). The interview was quietly riddled with misinformation in which Florence disavowed her past: she said she had been a New Yorker nearly all her life, and recalled performing to audiences of ten thousand as a child pianist, in the light of which her claim to have sung twenty times that season invites caution. The paper printed a stern photograph of Florence in a black mantilla. The caption referred to her as a ‘renowned musician’. In the circular world of New York’s society coverage, the Musical Courier reported on this report with its ‘most conspicuous picture’.

  The interview was certainly on the members’ lips as the Verdi Club gathered later that month at the annual Rose Breakfast. The guests of honour included a countess and a princess from Italy, while the committee contained a baroness. But European blue blood allowed Florence precedence, who in the opening promenade – dubbed the March of the Roses – made her entrance flanked by four young girls carrying wands and rose baskets. Luncheon with a side order of musical performances cost $3.50 and bus tickets from the city centre a dollar. ‘No covers laid until paid for,’ advised the invitation.

  These sums were paid in high numbers by the members of the Verdi Club even as the Wall Street Crash arrived in 1929. The society seemed to exist within a bubble, immune alike to the vulgarities of vaudeville, the blasts and parps of the jazz band and even thirteen years of Prohibition from 1920. The club’s membership fed itself on other intoxicants: arias and flowers and usefulness. The Silver Skylarks Ball in March 1930, the first since the Crash, was as lavish as ever. There were guests from the army and navy, the French consul attended, and a souvenir programme contained a photograph of the president in a shimmering evening gown and an Egyptian headdress as well as portraits of the soloists and the ball committee. Two conductors were engaged, one to oversee a performance of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act intermezzo Il segreto di Susanna, another to steer the orchestra and choir of women’s voices performing Neapolitan songs. They were trained by Martha Attwood, who had sung Liù in Turandot at the Met two years previously. There were scenes from the life of Byron, and a staging of Disraeli, the hit play St Clair had performed professionally in 1913. First in the long list of participating members’ names was that of the Verdi Club president, who the Musical Courier, ever ready to buff the image, had taken to calling Madame Jenkins. Last was ‘St Clar Bayfield’, whose name the Courier had less compunction about spelling correctly. For her evening’s work the president and founder got a diamond bracelet; her tireless helpmeet got a typo. That May, St Clair sailed home to England and didn’t come back for four months.

  9: LADY FLORENCE

  On 7 November 1930 the death of Mary J. Hoagland Foster, ‘widow of Hon. Charles Dorrance Foster, beloved mother of Florence Foster Jenkins’, was announced in the New York Times. The funeral took place at Campbell’s Funeral Church, a burial and cremation company on 66th Street and Broadway. On 10 November her body was interred in the family mausoleum in Wilkes-Barre. She had spent the last twenty years of her life in New York, living like Florence in a hotel apartment; first at the Waldorf-Astoria, later the Plaza.

  Mrs Foster had used her widowhood to pursue her enthusiasms. Her paintings were exhibited in New York and beyond, and according to her obituary ‘won many awards’. Her other hobby was accumulating memberships. She died a member of forty-two clubs and societies, many of them reflecting the stress laid by a young nation upon genealogical pedigree. The Eastern Star, the Huguenot Society, the Society of Virginia Antiquities, the National Society of Patriotic Women and the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames of New York could all count on her support. But the primary focus of her interest was always the Daughters of the American Revolution, meetings of which she continued to attend as a delegate to Wash
ington. One of her last acts of philanthropy was to restore Fleming’s Castle, the small tavern in her native New Jersey whose historic significance derived from a mention in George Washington’s journal. In 1928 she donated it to a chapter of the D.A.R. which took its name from Colonel Lowrey, a non-combatant in 1776 from Mrs Foster’s home town. The year before her death the Colonel Lowrey Chapter was invited en masse to a Verdi Club musicale at the Waldorf by Mrs Foster as she edged towards her eightieth or alternatively her ninetieth birthday, depending on which birth date is to be believed from what she told the US censuses between 1860 and 1910.

  But her most personal gesture was inspired by her late daughter. To the Wyoming Historical and Genealogical Society, which tasked itself with preserving the records of local history in the valley, she made a donation of $5,000 in Lillian’s name. She could of course afford it, but this was a far greater gesture in her daughter’s memory than the $1,000 with which her husband endowed a church window in Wilkes-Barre. On Mrs Foster’s death the society’s trustees publicly resolved to send condolences to her surviving daughter.

  Earlier in the year Mary Foster had been preceded to the grave by William Bulford, who inherited the family lands in 1909. He did well by the bequest. To his widow he left $150,000. To his brother George Bulford he left the farm, and the responsibility to continue paying Florence and her mother $300 each a year. Other Bulford relatives benefitted too from an estate which was valued in its entirety at $400,000, more than $150,000 in excess of Charles D. Foster’s estate when he died.