Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  The great artist himself, only a few years younger than Florence, was on hand to make suggestions to St Clair Bayfield about how to bring the Stephen Foster characters from his canvas to life. The painting showed the angel with a sizeable wingspan, dressed in a plunging bodice and clutching a golden lyre. She floats down from above to touch with a single index finger the forehead of the young composer as he sits at the piano. Behind are bonneted maidens and smiling young African-American musicians, all waiting for inspiration to strike so that they can be released by Foster’s imagination. Verdi Club members came as Drake from ‘Swanee River’ (a song also known as ‘Old Folks at Home’), and Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair. Ol’ Black Joe was interpreted by Randolph Symonette, a young Bahamian bass destined for greater things. Adolf Pollitz incarnated Foster himself. Florence unabashedly assumed the guise of the Angel of Genius, draped in jewels over a floor-length figure-hugging gown, a feathered headdress and a vast pair of golden wings.

  Florence’s apotheosis as the inspiration for American music drew vastly on her reserves of self-aggrandisement. A couple of years later a Washington gossip columnist would blithely report that Florence was Foster’s direct descendant – in short, a daughter of the father of American music – though quite how the journalist came by this misinformation is lost to history. And yet a winged Florence was merely a foretaste of her next project. With the 1940–41 season rounded off by the Rose Breakfast in Westchester, in May Florence decided to augment the job description she’d provided to the census. She took a short cab ride to 25 Central Park West with the intention of turning herself into a recording artist.

  In fact Florence had been recorded before. In 1934 at Ithaca College in upstate New York she was invited to make electrical recordings of her voice by Professor Vladimir Karapetoff, an electrical engineer from St Petersburg who was also an accomplished cellist – that year he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the New York College of Music. After Karapetoff’s death a fire in Ithaca College’s record room destroyed his archive of recordings, depriving the curious of a chance to measure the deterioration (if any) in Florence’s singing.

  The studio Florence chose was a private operation whose advertised services included studio and off-the-air recordings, transcriptions and processing. Its two female proprietors were Mera and Lola Weinstock. They called the place Melotone Recording Studio although it had no relation to the budget record label of the same name, discontinued in 1938, which released music by popular dance bands and the likes of singing cowboy Gene Autry and the Delta bluesman Lead Belly. These were not Florence’s label mates. And yet, although frequented by amateurs, Melotone also attracted substantial clients. It recorded the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcasts as well as those of the New York Philharmonic, whose guest conductor John Barbirolli visited the studio.

  Florence took along Cosme McMoon, who had been presented with a medal for his services at her most recent Verdi Club recital. For her first recording she breezed into the studio and plucked from her repertoire the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute. She had been singing ‘Der Hölle Rache’ for two years so felt confident that she knew her way around the peaks and pitfalls of the vengeful queen’s furious challenge to her daughter to murder Sarastro. But Florence had a different sort of murder bubbling up in her larynx. Without anything so precautionary as a warm-up or rehearsal, she filled her lungs and Mozart’s most instantly recognisable aria proceeded to deliquesce into a sequence of hesitant pauses and hopeful yelps. The queen’s thrilling fusillade of coloratura high notes found her occupying a lower harmonic line as if dangling by her fingertips from a jagged cliff edge. She didn’t seem to sing in German, though nor did her hoots and howls have the veneer of English. McMoon at the piano did his loyal best to supply a guide rail for Madame Jenkins’s faulty tuning and stodgy time-keeping, delivering a drastic rallentando as the soloist macheted a path through dense thickets of Mozartian quavers. If she stabbed at a note correctly it was more by accident than design. She concluded on a piercing shriek and the studio fell silent. The face of the engineer can only be imagined as Florence, offered the chance of a second take, declared herself satisfied.

  A single-sided shellac 78 rpm disc was printed and Florence took it home. It was only the next day after she had listened again to the result that she was visited by a rare moment of doubt. She telephoned Mera Weinstock to report her worry about ‘a note’ towards the end of the aria. Weinstock seized gratefully on a semantic loophole. ‘My dear Madame Jenkins,’ she replied, ‘you need feel no anxiety concerning any single note.’ And so she didn’t.

  After her mugging of Mozart came her demolition of Delibes. ‘The Indian Bell Song’ from the opera Lakmé had been in her recital repertoire since 1935. In the correct rendition by, say, superstar diva Lily Pons, it opened with a wordless, unaccompanied stream of sound before the soloist narrates the legend of a pariah’s daughter who saved Vishnu, the son of Brahma. Florence clattered and caterwauled through the opening, deploying a random parade of notes with only the vaguest relationship to the written music. As McMoon came in, her version of the lyrical tale emerged in a hideous tangle of squeaks and squawks. She also recorded a number especially written for her by McMoon called ‘Serenata Mexicana’, a colourless legato dirge she premiered at the Ritz-Carlton in 1939. It was calculated by the composer to fall at least theoretically within the dedicatee’s limited abilities, but still missed by a distance.

  Florence’s original intention was to distribute her recordings privately among Verdi Club members. The first one she made available was ‘The Bell Song’. Onto Melotone’s sky-blue label, with the words ‘Your Portrait in Sound’ italicised at the top, were typed the credits. Florence’s name was in upper case and red ink. It sold out swiftly, and customers clamoured for more. So Mozart and McMoon were pressed onto either side of a second disc. As demand increased the labels had to be pre-printed rather than typed.

  Weinstock’s recollection of Madame Jenkins’s visits to the Melotone studio made their way into the liner notes of a long-playing compilation on 33 rpm released swiftly after Florence’s death. ‘Rehearsals, the niceties of volume and pitch, considerations of acoustics – all were thrust aside by her with ease and authority. The technicians never ceased to be amazed by her capacity for circumventing the numerous problems and difficulties peculiar to recording. She simply sang; the disc was recorded.’ She also told a story which illustrated the artiste’s unshakeable self-belief. It featured cameos for two of the great sopranos from the golden age of opera – Frieda Hempel, the diva of Leipzig who was a favourite of the Kaiser, and Luisa Tetrazzini, the Florentine prima donna renowned as ‘the queen of staccato’. ‘Lady Florence reported to the studio that, at a recent soiree of one of her friends, all of them music lovers, [they] listened attentively to recordings of the Magic Flute aria by Tetrazzini, Hempel and the redoubtable Jenkins. Unanimity of opinion, Mme Jenkins informed us with modest hesitancy, was that the latter recording was without a doubt the most outstanding of the three.’

  McMoon told a similar story of Florence putting records on the Victrola when she hosted in the Seymour Hotel. Her guests were asked to compare her with the great coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, who was a hugely popular recording artist. ‘She would put on “The Bell Song” by herself and by Galli-Curci, and then she would hand little ballots out and you were supposed to vote which one was the best. Of course they all voted for her, and one woman once voted for Galli-Curci so Madame said, “How could you mistake that? My tones are much fuller than that!” So she really didn’t hear the atrocious pitches in these things. She used to sit delightedly and listen for hours to her recordings.’

  These vignettes are corroborated by another account of her technique for manipulating compliments out of her circle. Adolf Pollitz, who was Stephen Foster to her Angel of Inspiration, was once giving Florence and St Clair a lift to the meeting of one of her clubs. ‘She used to love to put people on the spot,’ he recalled. ‘At
that affair there was one woman who came up to us and spoke and said, “You were a singer, weren’t you?” “I am a singer!” And then she said to me, “Now, describe the concerts.” So I had to launch into a description of her concerts and tell about the smart audiences, wonderfully dressed, and her wonderful tone and the most difficult coloratura and the highest notes ever written and go through all that. I don’t think I did it to her satisfaction either.’ And if others could not be relied upon to sing her praises, Florence sang them herself. In one Verdi Club programme she wrote, ‘Tetrazzini took three breaths to sing this phrase, I do it in one.’ A woman at a recital begged to differ: ‘She did it in twenty-four.’

  After the success of ‘The Bell Song’, the Mozart/McMoon disc was released onto the market in what Florence called a ‘souvenir recording’. Customers were required to mail cheques written out to ‘Recordings: Mme Jenkins’ to a PO Box in Times Square station. It was also available at Melotone, which is how someone at Time magazine came to hear about it. In an edition with a cover image of Chen Cheng, a leading figure in the Sino-Japanese war, on 16 June 1941 Time published a small item about Mozart’s ‘immensely difficult coloratura soprano aria, even for markswomanly singers’. It went on:

  Last week a recording of this air [sic], advertised entirely by rumour, enjoyed a lively little sale at Manhattan’s Melotone Recording Studio. It was recorded – to sell to her friends at $2.50 a copy – by Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, rich, elderly amateur soprano and musical club-woman. Mrs Jenkins’ night-queenly swoops and hoots, her wild wallowings in descending trill, her repeated staccato notes like a cuckoo in its cups, are innocently uproarious to hear, almost as much so as the annual song recital which she gives in Manhattan. For that event, a minor phenomenon in US music, knowing Manhattanites fight for tickets. Mrs Jenkins is well pleased with the success of her Queen of the Night record and hopes to make others. Her fans hope so too.

  There was a picture of Florence taken on the day Liane de Gidro’s portrait bust of her was unveiled, wearing a tall Austrian hat with various flowers and medals pinned to her tweed jacket.

  The Gramophone Shop on East 48th Street listed her first release under ‘Historical’ and described it as ‘a most unusual record which must be heard to be believed’. Readers of the October issue of Esquire were encouraged to write to Melotone and order a copy. The magazine’s record reviewer, Carleton Sprague Smith, who also happened to run the New York Public Library’s music division, usually concentrated on more refined releases. Elsewhere in the same column another soprano’s release elicited comparisons with Tetrazzini and Flagstad. Florence was relegated to the bottom of the column. The shock to Smith’s ears resulted in a misnomer. ‘To add spice to your collection,’ he said, ‘write to Melotone Recording Studios … for Florence Foster Jones’s singing of the dramatic aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute. What I might say about it would be libellous, so I won’t. You buy it and, if it isn’t worth the price of admission, I’ll refund your money.’

  Did St Clair Bayfield attempt to stop Florence’s craving for publicity? His affair with Kathleen Weatherley may have been a distraction for him, as well as a spur for Florence. Florence had other companions, young acolytes like Pollitz and well-bred hangers-on such as Prince Michael Galitzen, a White Russian refugee and minor member of the noble Russian house who found a home in the Verdi Club. Once, a gossip columnist got the wrong end of the stick and suggested an autumnal romance between the prince and ‘the veteran cantatrice, whose annual concerts at the Ritz have been the musical sensation of every season for two or three decades’.

  Meanwhile St Clair’s career had entered a slump. Just before Christmas in 1940, for three performances only, he appeared in an Irish play set in County Down by tub-thumping anti-Catholic playwright Paul Vincent Carroll. It was called The Old Foolishness. In the month before Florence embarked on her recording career, he was in the large cast for a family entertainment, set in a Sixth Avenue luggage shop, by the giant of comedy S. J. Perelman and his wife Laura called The Night Before Christmas. After it closed he had no stage work again in New York for another three years.

  Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t stop Florence from singing. But he viewed her performing as a harmless indulgence for which she had earned the right. ‘Why did she go on singing?’ he said. ‘Because she loved it. After all, she spent all of her time and money promoting other musicians … Singing was her only form of self-expression. She was entitled to give her personal recitals. She was so engrossed in her singing, she didn’t give a hang about the guying. And she had the stamina to go on, the stamina.’ In fact it’s not quite true that she simply ignored her critics. ‘They are so ignorant, ignorant!’ she was heard to say, denouncing the ‘hoodlums’ and ‘spiteful enemies’ who mocked her from the back of the stalls.

  Meanwhile she expanded her repertoire and, allegedly, her range. She was travelling in a taxi one day when the driver was forced to slam hard on the brakes. His passenger was hurled forward and emitted a high-pitched squeal – higher in pitch, she suspected, than she’d ever reached before. When she got home to the Seymour Hotel she marched over to the Steinway, hit a high F above C and confirmed, at least to herself, that the accident had given her a new top note a semitone higher than her previous personal best. She’d only ever reached a high E before.

  For Florence’s next cacophonous visit to the recording studio she made a stab at merriment with ‘Adele’s Laughing Song’ from Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, a fluttering waltz with a repeated refrain of chortled ‘ah ha ha’s. For the other side she trampled all over ‘Biassy’, a poem by Pushkin set to music inspired by a Bach prelude. The composition was attributed to an obscure figure billed as Count Alexis Pavlovich. This proved to be Florence’s most surreal foray yet into the outer wastelands of hapless atonality. It presented the sound of someone catastrophically flunking an exam in sight-reading, both of German music and Russian poetry. As ever she concluded with a confidently held yowl before a relieved McMoon crashed out a final chord.

  The reviewers were not to be blindsided again by a new release, and didn’t expect their readers to be either. ‘It will probably suffice to say that here is a new Florence Foster Jenkins record,’ said one publication. ‘The soprano considers it her best. The recording clearly reproduces all the idiosyncratic touches that have made Mrs Jenkins’ record of one of the Queen of the Night’s arias from Die Zauberflöte a collector’s item.’ One newspaper counselled that listening to ‘Adele’s Laughing Song’ would provide ‘more of a kick than the same amount ($2.50) invested in tequila, zubrovka, or marijuana, and we ain’t woofin’!’

  If the press in New York could not be persuaded to laud her efforts, Dr James in Washington was there again to serve up contorted paeans of praise. The next time Florence was in the capital he enjoyed a programme which offered ‘facets of aesthetic interest for her critically minded hearers’. When she plucked an aria from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, he simpered that ‘nothing could be more baffling and intricate to anyone not so musically capable as the singer’. There was ‘roguishness’ in a Mexican number and ‘delicacy’ in ‘Una voce poco fa’.

  Washington seemed to hear her singing through a prism which filtered out the awfulness. No wonder she went back in the autumn to share the stage with genuine eminences. The French bass Léon Rothier made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1910 as Méphistophélès and sang with the company until 1939. Clarence D. Batchelor, a celebrated cartoonist with the New York Daily News, was booked as a guest speaker. He had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936 for an image in which a young European youth is beckoned up the stairs of a boarding house by a barely draped blonde with a skull for a face and ‘War’ stencilled on her sternum: ‘Come on in, I’ll treat you right!’ she says. ‘I used to know your Daddy.’ And then there was Florence.

  They all gathered in the Hotel Wellington for a patriotic occasion: to celebrate the 2,000th performance of ‘America Forever Free’, Elmer
Russ’s stirring popular hit from 1941 which had been learned by glee clubs and church choirs all over the country. Russ, a baritone who composed, had picked up the moniker ‘the champion of American song’. He was also a member of Florence’s court of composers who dedicated new songs to her. When Florence came back to Washington in April 1943 to perform ‘Una voce poco fa’ ‘by request’, Dr B. B. James was once more among the patrons leafing through a handsome programme, its frontispiece printed in a gothic font, a side-on photograph of Madame Jenkins hinting at sly amusement. As an encore she rendered her own fragrant lament, ‘Trailing Arbutus’.

  For her next visit to the Melotone studios, Florence and McMoon were accompanied by a third party. Her account of ‘Charmant Oiseau’ – from Félicien David’s opéra comique La perle du Brésil – called for a flute to accompany the avian calls of the soloist. She had more than one flautist to summon, others having accompanied her in recitals, but on this occasion the fee went to Louis Alberghini, a flautist with the Met. Of all her recordings this perhaps exposed her most cruelly: although technically simpler for the singer, the flute’s obbligato fills and several climactic bars called for at least theoretical unison between flute and voice and set in relief Florence’s most unbirdlike clumsiness and the erratic nature of her tuning.