Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  As the recording lasted for six minutes it had to be pressed onto both sides of a ten-inch record. Listeners wanting more had to flip the disc. Alberghini stuck around to memorialise another bauble dedicated to Florence by McMoon called ‘Valse Caressante’. This dragged on painfully for another six minutes and sailed far beyond the scope of her abilities, as McMoon must have known it would. In a final session Florence closed her recording career with two more staples from her repertoire that were brief enough to occupy one side, the other being given to a re-release of Delibes’s ‘Bell Song’. For Anatoly Liadov’s twinkling jeu d’esprit ‘A Musical Snuff Box’, Florence tiptoed all over the melody in hobnailed stilettos. To complete her Melotone oeuvre, she drew on another of her own poems, this one invoking once again her fantasy that she sang as if borne aloft on the feathered wings of melody. ‘Like a bird I am singing,’ she sang in ‘Like a Bird’ (lilting music by McMoon).

  Like a bird I am singing, like a bird

  Joy of the morning,

  The river is flowing,

  There’s a silvery way

  O’er the crystalline bay.

  To the notes of thy flute,

  The shady groves filling,

  My thoughts of thee bring me,

  Sweet memories thrilling.

  Like a bird I am singing,

  Like a bird, like a bird.

  Cadences melting

  In music divine

  Bring a vision so pleasant,

  The smile that is thine.

  Inspiration comes o’er,

  When your music is heard,

  In fondest endeavor

  I sing like a bird …

  Like a bird I am singing

  Like a bird, like a bird!

  It was all o’er in one minute and eighteen seconds. The bird Florence was like was not from the soloists’ section of the dawn chorus.

  In April 1944 St Clair finally landed a part in a play. Highland Fling was a comedy about a ne’er-do-well Scottish ghost who refuses to ascend to heaven. It was directed by George Abbott, whose last big splash on Broadway was Pal Joey and whose next would be On the Town. ‘You would not say it could last a long time,’ said one critic, prophetically. It was off within a month. St Clair’s lack of employment meant that he had plenty of free time to supervise the engagements of Florence’s season. At Sherry’s she sang for the Society of New York State Women, who heard several songs from her discography including ‘Like a Bird’, plus some Liszt. And there was one more date with cathedral organist Malton Boyce in Washington.

  But these were private events. At her last ever concert at the Ritz-Carlton, where the audience scrapped for tickets to join in the fun, McMoon now showed ever more overt signs of disloyalty, accompanying Florence with what seemed to one witness ‘an impishly satiric touch’. As the audience hollered in approval every time she clambered up to a high note or attempted a trill, he seemed to mistime his chord placement, either coming in too early or too late, for subtly enhanced comic effect. Fans hoping for the Angel of Inspiration’s wings to make another appearance for her rendition of ‘Like a Bird’ were disappointed. (It had become an instant favourite with the Ritz-Carlton crowds when, making her entrance on a previous occasion, one wing had malfunctioned, causing Florence to pause as the rogue appendage was fixed back in place.) ‘Mme Jenkins is incomparable,’ concluded the New York Daily Mirror. ‘Her annual recitals bring unbounded joy to the faded souls of Park Avenue and the musical elite.’

  Word spread across the Union. Early in 1944 a profile in the Hearst Corporation’s American Weekly, which had a vast nationwide circulation, was read all over America. Titled ‘The Society Songbird Who Sprouts Wings Once a Year’, it was syndicated as far afield as Milwaukee and Oregon. A cartoon illustrated the story with Florence in her angel’s wings singing to an audience in evening dress that was by turns thrilled and appalled. There was also a photograph of Florence at her Steinway, a bower of blooms filling the rest of the frame. The article was a merciless lampoon. She was hailed as ‘the only known diva to achieve fame via the “Bronx cheer” and keep coming back for more’ who had removed ‘some of the more altitudinous notes’ from the classics. McMoon was singled out for notice as ‘the only pianist out of twenty tried so far who has been able to play and keep a straight face’. ‘Wealthy enough to indulge herself in her amateur career, and cheered on by a group of faithful and flattering sycophants, this ambitious songstress today looks forward to greater and greater triumphs as time goes by.’

  Then in August a report surfaced in San Diego which talked of record collectors ‘with a taste for the bizarre’ who were buying up the discs. ‘There should be a new word for what she does with the human throat,’ it was suggested. ‘She persists in spite of the most caustic criticism. And perhaps she feels vindicated because her recordings are selling briskly. Although they hurt the ears, there is a certain fascination in her vocal escapades.’

  Florence had almost lost control of her reputation. But not yet entirely.

  11: PRIMA DONNA OF CARNEGIE HALL

  ‘Carnegie Hall has been completely sold out for the recital to be given there tomorrow night by Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, assisted by the Pascarella Chamber Music Society.’

  On 24 October 1944 Florence’s final concert was soberly announced in the New York Times. The same page featured a review of Stokowski’s account of Shostakovich’s Eighth with the New York City Symphony and a report from Moscow of the concert premiere of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace.

  St Clair Bayfield later claimed that he opposed the recital at Carnegie Hall. ‘I didn’t think a person of her age should take on that strain,’ he said. ‘There is something in a vast audience that draws the magnetism out of a person. It sucks you dry.’ Initially Florence agreed with him. The idea was put to her several times, and she demurred. But having demanded and fed off the praise of her Verdi Club friends for so long, she had no means of resisting insincerity. The profiteer whispering sulphurous encouragement in her ear was George Leyden Colledge, who had set up in artistic management in 1932 and operated out of the RKO Building. He was the one who suggested she switch her annual recital from the relative intimacy of the Ritz-Carlton ballroom (capacity, at a stretch: eight hundred) to the premier concert venue in the entire continent (capacity: three thousand). ‘I can do it,’ she finally told St Clair. ‘I’ll show everybody.’ Less than two weeks before the concert, Florence’s fears visited her in her sleep. ‘B told me of a strange dream and was in a nervous condition,’ St Clair recorded in his diary for Friday 13 October. Five days later her nerves were back under control and at a rehearsal she ‘sang well’. Two days before she was ‘in a whirl about seating’. When St Clair delivered some vases to Carnegie Hall on the eve of the concert he saw her picture adorning the frontage of the celebrated venue. Then on the day itself he wrote the word ‘recital’ in red ink.

  The price of admission was set at $3 for the orchestra stalls, $1.80 for the dress circle and 60 cents for the balcony, while lower boxes with seats for eight were $24 and upper boxes $19.20. (Tax was included.) Word spread around the city. Those in the know tipped off others who had never heard of Florence that this was an event which should on no account be missed. By the time the doors opened, the box office had long since run out of tickets. Outside the hall were an estimated two thousand disappointed thrill-seekers. Cosme McMoon had to fight his way through a crowd that teemed down the sidewalk of West 57th Street, past the Little Carnegie Playhouse and round the corner into Seventh Avenue. ‘When I approached the hall I could hardly get near it,’ he recalled. ‘You had to prove your identity to get in.’ According to the sculptress Florence Darnault, few of the tickets were actually purchased. St Clair’s diary confirms that Florence gave away $3,000 worth of tickets. Newspapers all reported a box-office take of $6,000.

  Among those who managed to gain access to the hall were several celebrities from the world of music and entertainment. They included Cole Porter; the gre
at soprano Lily Pons, wearing a hat with a dangling fringe like a lampshade; her husband Andre Kostelanetz, the popular radio orchestra conductor; burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee; composer-librettist Gian Carlo Menotti; and Marge Champion, the dance model for Snow White and other Disney characters. ‘I’d never heard about her,’ said Champion. ‘I don’t think the average audience would flock there. These people must have heard of her through the grapevine.’ It is always said that Tallulah Bankhead showed up too, though no newspaper journalist reported her presence. And there were plenty in the house who would not have failed to spot her: from the New York Sun, New York Journal-American, New York World-Telegram, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, PM, the Los Angeles Times and Milwaukee Journal. There was no more privileged access for the Musical Courier alone.

  The only photograph that survives of the evening was taken by Adolf Pollitz from the dress circle close to stage left as the clock ticked towards half past eight. One eyewitness reported that many in the audience had donned evening dress for the occasion but, while the photograph contains a few bow ties, most of the men were in suits. A lot of the women wore hats. A few Verdi Club matrons sat in dowdy clumps, dressed to the nines and raising the average age of the gathering. Almost everyone in the photograph is laughing or smiling. Several are clutching or reading the programme, which came with a bright blue cover.

  Inside on the front page, lettering in the same bright blue announced the star of the evening, ‘Jenkins’ in upper case and occupying its own line. Below were printed a trio of attestations from critics who had attended previous concerts. Grena Bennett of the New York Journal-American was one of them. Then came Dr B. B. James with his blandishments from the capital. In the New York Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman had had a fun night among the orchids and mink at a Sherry’s recital: ‘she is a personage of authority and indescribable charm,’ he confirmed, ‘she is incomparable, her annual recitals bring unbounded joy.’

  In the auditorium there was barely any standing room left – ‘It seemed that the people were hanging on the rafters,’ said McMoon – lending some urgency to the notice from the fire commissioner printed just above the details of the recital programme. ‘Look around now and choose the nearest exit to your seat. In case of fire walk (not run) to that Exit. Do not try to beat your neighbor to the street.’

  P. B. of the Herald Tribune likened the febrile atmosphere, ‘both in intensity and unanimity of reaction, to that of The Voice, currently drawing the same sort of delighted applause at the Paramount Theater’. The comparison was timely because twenty-four hours earlier the Carnegie Hall stage was occupied by the selfsame Frank Sinatra. The venue had been crammed to the ceiling with bobbysoxers, a hysterical phalanx of teenage fans who showered him with love the way, a generation earlier, their mothers had hot flushes at Valentino. Sinatra was not there to sing – he pleaded laryngitis – but to take part in an electoral rally in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The contrast between the slim hip young crooner and the solidly constructed tone-deaf soprano of seventy-six could not have been greater. And yet, according to McMoon, Florence didn’t see it that way. ‘At that time Frank Sinatra had started to sing, and the teenagers used to faint during his notes and scream,’ he explained, ‘so she thought she was producing the same kind of an effect, and when these salvos of applause came, she took them as great marks of approval of some tremendous vocal tour de force, and she loved that. She would pause altogether and bow, many times, and then resume the song.’

  By the time of the concert McMoon had joined Edwin McArthur in Florence’s bad books, having lately developed a vaudevillean style of accompaniment which favoured the audience with winks and nods behind Florence’s back. ‘She was very unhappy with him,’ said Pollitz, ‘but it was too late to do anything about it, even though she had it in mind to fire him.’

  The stage was empty but for the seats for the musicians, a bench, the concert grand piano and a floral display of considerable height which, over the course of the evening, expanded into a botanical bower. At the side of the stage was the pass door through which the evening’s performer was about to emerge.

  Almost none of the three thousand people knew anything about the inner life of the woman whose entrance they awaited. Many knew that she couldn’t sing but believed she could, that she translated catcalls and whistles into sincere gestures of appreciation for her art. Some had seen her podgy frame squeezed into fancy dress that made her look perfectly ridiculous. But if any of them wondered what inspired this baffling relic of another age to cast herself as an entertainer, none had an answer.

  However nonsensical her appearance at Carnegie Hall, everything in Florence’s previous seventy-six years had a role in delivering her onto its hallowed stage. Even if the story she told of her own life was not all true, Florence believed it to be so. That she was a child prodigy thwarted by her father. A bereaved sister who eloped with a man twice her age from a family of brutes and knaves. An innocent wife infected with a disease which permanently disfigured her. A new music graduate who triumphed over nerves in front of a vast festival audience. An impoverished piano teacher who believed herself disinherited. A New Yorker who reinvented herself as an opera producer. A widow liberated to put her married name to work. A fundraiser energised by a world war. A club founder who gave opportunities to ambitious young musicians. A respected friend of the giants of opera. A president who laid on and starred in the most remarkable parties. Who just wanted to sing. Who, when no one minded, sang some more. Who fed off the applause she had been denied for decades. Who as a little indulgence decided to sing every year in one venue, then another, and another and another. Who after twenty-five years was so silted up with praise and adulation that there was no possibility of self-awareness. Who was abetted by a gentle, collusive dependant she first saw smiling up at her on the stage. Who was deaf to the mocking of audiences, which only increased as her voice enfeebled with age and the gap between what she and they heard grew wider and wider.

  The lighting for the show, designed by St Clair, kindly aimed soft pastel shades from the footlights. When Madame Jenkins entered she was greeted by a tumultuous ovation which accompanied her on the Via Dolorosa from the pass door to the piano. Now an undeniably stout old woman, her movements were slow and unsteady, and some feared she might never reach her destination. Florence was decked out rustically in the style of a shepherdess, brandishing the crook she always had with her for the March of the Roses, now helpful for maintaining her in the vertical. Her bosom, recalled Marge Champion, was bedecked with the kind of medals usually pinned on chests by Latin American potentates. Such was the uproar that five minutes had passed before calm was sufficiently restored for her to begin. McMoon, seated at the Steinway and possibly nervous, found it impossible to suppress a rictus.

  As was her wont, Florence began with a set of songs all from the same part of the world, in this case a sentimental trio from England: hence the bucolic costume. The programme advertised ‘Phyllis’ by Young, then two from prolific early-nineteenth-century composer Sir Henry Bishop (best known for ‘Home, Sweet Home’): ‘Love Has Eyes’ and ‘Lo, Here the Gentle Lark’. This last called for a busy flute obbligato. It was supplied by the burly Oreste De Sevo, formerly of Toscanini’s orchestra in Italy, who contrived against the odds to maintain his embouchure. ‘For the gentle lark was having no less than a hell of a time,’ explained Richard S. Davis of the Milwaukee Journal. Florence had trouble projecting her bat-squeak voice in smaller halls. Here some said she was barely audible to an audience which rushed to smother the last notes of every song with cheers. Others found her all too audible. Al Hubay, a young usher at the Met, was near the rear of the stalls. Her voice ‘was kind of icy. It was audible, it wasn’t big. I think that was probably the problem. I think the people upstairs heard it too well. Especially in the upper reaches of her voice, it got sharper-sounding as it went up.’ Marge Champion remembered a voice that ‘wasn’t big
but it was very very penetrative. I’m very sure that I heard every off-note that she sang. And that was consistent. There was nothing inconsistent about her technique.’

  Florence departed the stage while the Pascarella strings sawed through a pleasant Haydn quartet. This gave the audience a chance to recover and Florence enough time to shed the shepherdess outfit and pull on a gown variously described by onlookers as either rose pink or pale peach. As she reentered, jewels glittered on her bust and neck and rings glinted on her fingers. In her hand was a sizeable fan of orange-and-white ostrich feathers which, after waving it at the audience, she placed on the piano, before leaning on the instrument herself for support. Next to pass through the prism of Florence’s larynx was a pair of regular favourites from her repertoire: Gluck’s ‘Divinités du Styx’, a roaring romantic aria in which Queen Alceste offers to lay down her life for love, then the Queen of the Night’s furious coloratura howls.

  Florence’s manner throughout was ‘an elegant blend of sang froid and studied simplicity’, according to the Tribune. Her impassivity was baffling to Marge Champion: ‘I was just totally unprepared for the fact that it did not seem to bother her in the least that everybody in the audience was convulsed with laughter nor was she in any way thrilled by it. I don’t know what she did with it. I don’t know how she processed that laughter.’ The audience now girded itself into a fresh fit of collective hysteria. Some being familiar with her Magic Flute recording, listeners drowned her own trills with laughter. Not everyone appreciated this. Connoisseurs of Lady Florence’s art wanted to hear every bum note, every error of pitch. Earl Wilson of the Post was in Row T. ‘Around me I heard people saying, “Ssssh, don’t laugh so loud; stick something in your mouth.”‘ Such was the atmosphere of giddy irony that when a stagehand came on to move a chair even he was applauded.