Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  At the intermission ushers and stage crew swarmed onto the stage bearing vast baskets of blooms which were arranged around the piano so that McMoon returned as if to a greenhouse. One critic was reminded of an expensive mortuary. Florence was greeted by a standing ovation as she re-entered to embark on the Russian section of the evening in a gown Slavic in flavour with a tall jewelled headdress. ‘Biassy’, the international mulch she had memorialised on disc, was trailed in the programme: ‘A band rides through the sky, where snow is falling fast. The moon as a coquette smiles fitfully between the clouds. The horses are lost in a trackless waste, lured by an evanescent devil, who is also a friend of the house devil and many other imps who join in the carnival. The question is, is this the funeral of a great king, or the marriage of a beautiful witch?’ This helpful exposition was lost on the audience as Florence fumbled uncertainly into a double maze laid on by the language of Pushkin and the music of Bach. Then Rachmaninov was granted two opportunities to rotate in the grave where, only the previous year, his mortal remains had taken up occupation just up the Bronx River Parkway in Valhalla. Yearningly in ‘In the Silence of the Night’, brightly in ‘The Floods of Spring’, Florence’s Russian repertoire supplied the audience with further insights into her unique properties as a singer.

  As the recital continued the reporters listened to audience reaction and described their own. ‘She didn’t hit three notes in that one,’ one spectator commented. ‘She hit only a few notes; the rest were promissory,’ snarked Irving Hoffman of the Hollywood Reporter. ‘Her notes range from the impossible to the fantastic,’ reported an anonymous critic from Newsweek, ‘and bear no relation whatever to any known score or scale.’ Robert Bager of the New York World-Telegram congratulated Madame Jenkins for having ‘perfected the art of giving added zest to a written phrase by improvising it in quarter tones, either above or below the original notes’. It was the noisiest audience McMoon ever encountered anywhere. ‘I have never seen such a scene,’ he recalled, ‘either a bullfight or at the Yale Bowl after a winning touchdown.’ And yet he had the presence of mind at the end of several songs, as the decibels of mock approval rose in another crescendo, to spring to his feet and kiss Florence’s hand.

  The Pascarella ensemble performed another quartet, this time from Schumann, and stayed onstage to accompany Florence. The young composer Daniel Pinkham, who snuck in at the interval having failed to gain entrance earlier, remembered the oddity of the players all seated with their backs to one another. Florence returned in high style as a Spanish temptress in a shawl, her wig ornamented with a jewel-encrusted comb and a red flower. In this garb she proceeded to sing a poem by Rabindranath Tagore translated from Bengali, which had been set to music by American composer Edward Horsman: the altitudes explored in ‘Bird of the Wilderness’ found Florence in imprecatory mode as she claimed kinship with her winged friends one last time: ‘Let me but soar in that sky, In its lonely immensity! Let me but cleave its clouds, And spread wings in its sunshine.’ Kostalenetz was the only composer present at the recital (apart from McMoon) to hear his work interpreted by Florence. But if his song ‘Interlude’ made an impact it was instantly occluded by what was widely agreed to be the night’s highlight.

  For ‘Clavelitos’, the high-speed tongue-twisting zarzuela by Valverde, Florence delivered a party trick that had long been a popular staple with her audiences. Equipped with a basket full of red rosebuds, she proceeded to lob them towards the audience in time to the rhythmic pulses of the music. This interaction met with such approval that, carried away, Florence eventually let the empty basket follow its contents into the auditorium. The unison of whistles convinced her of the need for an instant encore, but she couldn’t embark on it without the requisite props. The dutiful McMoon, supported by a couple of ushers, trooped down into the stalls to retrieve the basket and the buds. As she started again, the first petal stuck to her finger and she had to make strenuous flicking gestures to fling it off. ‘It cracked me up to the point where I could almost not stand it,’ said Marge Champion. As McMoon remembered it, during ‘Clavelitos’ one celebrated actress in the audience had to be carried out of her box in a state of hysteria. She didn’t miss much. It only remained for Florence to croon McMoon’s ‘Serenata Mexicana’ and, finally, another dose of Hispanic high jinks: Chapi’s ‘Las hijas del Zebedeo’, the zarzuela which once prompted her to compare herself to Luisa Tetrazzini.

  Afterwards, as an audience drugged on hysterics filed out into the New York night, Marge Champion spoke for them all: ‘We had sore muscles in our stomachs the next day as we laughed so hard and so long.’ Meanwhile Florence’s friends and associates clambered onto the stage, where Florence and Verdi Club officers were receiving, to rain praise down on her head. Among them was Mera Weinstock of Melotone Recording Studios. Before she could open her mouth the soloist spoke: ‘Don’t you think I had real courage to sing the Queen of the Night again after that wonderful recording I made of it at the studio?’ On his way out Earl Wilson of the Post caught the eye of St Clair Bayfield. ‘Why?’ he asked him. ‘She loves music,’ St Clair replied. ‘If she loves music, why does she do this?’ St Clair explained about the money raised for charity.

  Later he took Florence home and, before he turned in at the conclusion of a momentous day, composed a brief, bathetic diary entry: ‘Took B up to her recital – capacity house – half of them scoffers but half adoring B. Luckily, a fine day.’

  America awoke to thrilling news. ‘U.S. DEFEATS JAPANESE NAVY,’ ran the headline across the front of the New York Times. ‘ALL FOE’S SHIPS IN ONE FLEET HIT; MANY SUNK; BATTLE CONTINUES.’ At the bottom right-hand corner of page nineteen was a six-line item titled ‘Florence F. Jenkins in Recital’. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, gave a recital at Carnegie Hall last night, assisted by the Pascarella Chamber Music Society quartet; Cosme McMoon, pianist, and Oreste De Sevo, flutist [sic].’ The Times hadn’t sent a critic. Others had. Some filed copy while still intoxicated by the mood of celebration. ‘She was exceedingly happy in her work,’ said Robert Bager in the New York World-Telegram. ‘It is a pity that so few artists are. And the happiness was communicated as if by magic to her hearers.’ Grena Bennett, a previous encomium of whose was quoted in the programme, found merit in measuring success by markers other than vocal accuracy. ‘She was undaunted by either the composers’ intent or the opinions of her auditors,’ she wrote in the New York Journal-American. ‘Her attitude at all times was that of a singer who performed her task to the best of her ability.’

  A couple of reporters wondered if the fools and gulls weren’t actually the audience who had stumped up all that money. Others were more inclined to draw attention to the chasm between the audience’s perception of Florence and her own. It was ‘the funniest, saddest of all concerts,’ said the headline in the Milwaukee Journal. ‘The blissful dowager on the platform seemed completely unaware that 3,000 persons were laughing at her – not politely, mind you, but uproariously and in gales,’ wrote its music critic Richard S. Davis. ‘She delivered line after line of her ballad with nothing but her moving lips as evidence that she was singing.’ Earl Wilson observed ‘snickering, squealing and guffawing at her singing, which she took very seriously’. O. T. (the byline of Oscar Thompson) in the New York Sun found an ‘infantile quality’ in her voice, and barely heard a thing. What he did hear ‘was hopelessly lacking in a semblance of pitch, but the further a note was from its proper elevation the more the audience laughed and applauded’. She was spared the verdict of Isabel Morse Jones of the Los Angeles Times who didn’t file a review, but later she dubbed the concert ‘the most pathetic exhibition of vanity I have ever seen’. The prospect of Florence singing folk music in costume prompted her to walk out, disgusted also at the part played by the audience. ‘There was something indecent and barbarously cruel about this business,’ she wrote. In PM, Henry Simon described the audience’s frenzied laughter as ‘the cruellest and least civilized behavior I have ever witnessed in Carnegie
Hall. But Mrs Jenkins met it all with pleased smiles.’

  It was perhaps the sympathetic note struck by PM’s review that persuaded St Clair to give them an interview the following year. ‘I think my wife knew her voice was passing,’ he told his interviewer Betty Moorsteen when she visited him in the fourth-floor apartment on West 37th Street. ‘But she loved singing so much she determined to continue with it. Perhaps she kept on a little too long, but it was her pleasure, her way of expressing herself.’ When St Clair was asked about it years later, he recalled that Florence was already distressed as they made their way back to the Seymour Hotel apartment that night after the concert. His worst fears were confirmed when they both read the newspapers. ‘It turned out the fiasco I expected. Afterward, when we went home, Florence was upset – and when she read the reviews, crushed. She had not known, you see.’

  St Clair went so far as to claim that the critical reception broke Florence’s heart. On a deeper level what it really shattered was her defences. Independent witnesses had no stake in shoring up the potent image of herself she had projected for so many years to all those women’s clubs and her own fiefdom in the Verdi Club. And so they destroyed it.

  In due course, even the Musical Courier deserted Florence after a quarter of a century of hoodwinking its readers in return for money. Being a periodical it limped in late with a report published on 15 November. The critic could not be persuaded to comment on her singing at all. Instead the Pascarella ensemble was singled out for praise. ‘The quartet also played with the singer in Mr McMoon’s “Mexican Serenade”, written for the soprano,’ it concluded. ‘The vast audience roared bravos at every gesture of the glamorously garbed singer.’ Four days later the San Diego Union, which reported in July on the brisk trade in her recordings, piled in again with a belated compilation of the critics’ raspberries from Carnegie Hall (‘Tone-Deaf Coloratura Makes Bad Singing Pay’).

  But by then Florence wasn’t reading her reviews. She was so exhausted by the occasion that on 28 October she sent St Clair to a dinner in her stead where he said he ‘felt somewhat persona non grata’. On the final day of October she was ‘at last able to relax’, he recorded in his diary, and then two days later was ‘much recovered’. She was well enough to pay a visit to Danbury, seventy miles north of New York in Connecticut, on 4 November, but on the drive home she had a heart seizure. She refused to let St Clair summon a doctor and they went out to dinner. Re-entering the Seymour he noted that ‘she stood still by the door then walked with difficulty’. The next day a physician diagnosed heart strain and complications and prescribed medicine and rest. A couple of days later she presided at a Verdi Club musicale at the St Regis Hotel, whereafter her health fluctuated for a week until, on 16 November, St Clair thought her ‘exceedingly ill’, a fear confirmed the next day by a heart specialist called Dr Hertz.

  Florence’s illness was brought on by either the strain of the performance or the trauma of the reviews. Or both. Or, perhaps, she intuited somewhere deep in the labyrinth of her psyche that the span of her life should end on a major chord of resounding, unrepeatable finality. Confined to bed, where she mostly dozed, she was attended by a nurse, her housemaid of seventeen years, Mildred Brown, and St Clair. He was unable to be there constantly as he was rehearsing a play called Hand in Glove, which was due to open in early December, so he visited before rehearsals and after. On 22 November he took her flowers. Dr Hertz suggested she go to hospital but she refused, and to St Clair she seemed to be through the worst. ‘Dr reports acute stage is past,’ he wrote.

  In the last meaningful act of their long liaison, at some point Florence gestured to her briefcase. ‘In there is my will,’ she said to St Clair, ‘and I am leaving everything to you.’ On 26 November she agreed to her doctor’s demand that a hospital bed be hired. Her conversation was bright in the morning, then she slept in the afternoon, and St Clair felt confident enough to go out to dinner with Prince Galitzen. It was in St Clair’s absence that, at about half past seven, Madame Jenkins, Lady Florence, the prima donna of Carnegie Hall, took her final, shallow breath.

  12: LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

  ‘After 36 years of happiness in Love, B. leaves me.’ St Clair Bayfield returned to the Seymour Hotel and the long face of Dr Hertz, who imparted the news that Florence was dead. The diary, which for many years contained no more than a series of brief jottings, became almost wordy with grief.

  At 9 p.m., St Clair rang Arthur Moritz, an attorney who had handled her affairs in Wilkes-Barre and elsewhere for the previous ten years, to inform him and suggest that he take on the administration of her estate. Moritz immediately phoned Campbell’s in Madison Avenue, where the funeral of Florence’s mother took place in 1930. The New York Times was also contacted.

  The following morning was a Monday. The Times announced the death of Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, founder and president of the Verdi Club. The briefest details of her life were offered. She was the widow of Dr Frank Jenkins of Washington, DC and gave a recital at Carnegie Hall on 25 October. Of her accompanists that night, the flautist’s name was given as Oeste [sic] De Sevo. The final paragraph consisted of four words: ‘No immediate relatives survive.’

  St Clair was excused rehearsals that day. Moritz came in from Scarsdale just to the north of the city in order to locate the will. An initial search proved fruitless so he gave orders for the building management to seal the apartment and spent the day arranging for the opening of a box kept at a safe deposit company on Third Avenue in the hope that it would contain the will. The news travelled to Dallas, Pennsylvania, where Florence’s next of kin was George Bulford, a second cousin who was descended from Charles Dorrance Foster’s older half-brother. His permission was sought for the removal of the body and the arrangement of the funeral. This he gave on the understanding that neither he nor any of his relatives would incur any of the cost. Later that day Moritz and St Clair met the funeral director to choose a coffin. ‘The sky shed tears,’ wrote a mournful St Clair before adding, ‘No will to be found.’

  On Tuesday the safe deposit box was opened and also found to contain no will. Instead there were savings bank books, leases affecting Wilkes-Barre properties including Florence’s parents’ home in South Franklin Street, a cache of her jewellery, two wristwatches initialled F. F. J. and one initialled S. C. B., an eleven-page genealogical document and a four-page typewritten sketch of Florence’s life and activities. Moritz applied to the Surrogate’s Court of New York, which handled probate and estate proceedings, for sanction to exceed a limit of $250 for expenditure on a funeral to reflect Florence’s wealth and social standing. He was granted an upper tariff of $500 including the cost of shipping the body to Wilkes-Barre and interment. St Clair attended a dress rehearsal of Hand in Glove and didn’t get to bed till four in the morning.

  For the funeral on Wednesday he had printed a memorial card showing an elderly Florence beaming brightly under a substantial hat. ‘In Loving Memory,’ it said in a gothic font. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins who passed away with a smile November 26th 1944.’ The funeral took place at 11 a.m. It was conducted by St Clair. A harpist played two tunes and a baritone sang ‘Going Home’ and the Lord’s Prayer over an open coffin. ‘B. looked lovely,’ St Clair wrote. ‘I felt some comfort after I had kissed her and held her little hand. The heavens wept.’ That night Florence’s remains were taken to Wilkes-Barre, accompanied by her old home-town friend Miss Mae Black, with whom she’d stayed on the night of her father’s death in 1909.

  Moritz arranged with the office of the public administrator for the Seymour Hotel apartment to be searched more thoroughly in the presence of an attorney representing the next of kin. They found Florence’s home forbiddingly stuffed with papers in every imaginable cranny. ‘There were drawers upon drawers, full to the brim,’ recalled Moritz later in an application to retrieve his unpaid fees; the sheer profusion of documents caused him to slip briefly out of formal legalese. It was agreed that a single day was insufficient to co
mplete the search; the maid Mildred Brown, who expressed her certainty that Florence had left a will, was asked to take on the job. She was still looking for it eleven days later, and most days St Clair’s diary noted that it had not yet been located.

  Twenty-four hours on from her funeral, Florence’s body was interred at the Foster family mausoleum in Hollenback Cemetery in Wilkes-Barre. Officiating was the rector of St Stephen’s Episcopal church, which burned down in 1897 and in which a stained glass window in memory of her younger sister Lillian Blanche was endowed by her father. The local newspaper’s obituary mentioned Florence’s many concerts in New York, including her climactic recital; also the deep American ancestry of her parents and her late husband. Finally it alluded to ‘H. Clair Hayfield, who handled Mrs Jenkins’s musical affairs’ and, it was reported, ‘was unable to come here for today’s service’.

  St Clair was stuck in New York, denied a second chance to skip rehearsals of Hand in Glove. A psychological murder mystery about Jack the Ripper, the production was directed by James Whale, the maker of several screen horror classics who had been lured from Hollywood by the subject matter. When it opened on 4 December, the Times critic found the play diverting if full of holes and underwritten characters, one of them played by St Clair who had ‘trouble with a retired school teacher’. It was the first time in many years that a review had deigned to notice him.

  In the meantime St Clair was being written out of Florence’s life story. His sorrows began even before the funeral when he tried to retrieve some paintings of his from the Seymour Hotel apartment. As it was sealed he needed a lawyer’s assistance. He applied to Nathaniel Palzer, an attorney whom he had known via Florence for a dozen years and trusted implicitly. Palzer had drawn up Florence’s missing will. When he said he’d need a signature on a document, St Clair provided it without looking too closely at what he was signing. What St Clair didn’t know was that the day after the funeral Palzer was appointed to act as the New York attorney for a large body of second cousins from the Bulford clan. St Clair’s diary entry of 8 December refers to him as ‘friend Palzer’, with whom he discussed ‘making a claim on B’s estate’. (To distract himself St Clair also cleaned his golf clubs that day.) Later St Clair was told by an attorney he instructed that his signature consented to Mrs Ella Bulford Harvey becoming the administrator of the estate. In effect, he had inadvertently surrendered any prospect of inheriting Florence’s fortune. According to a later entry in St Clair’s diary, Palzer’s deception was motivated by professional jealousy. Incensed that it was Moritz rather than him who was instructed on the night of Florence’s death, and knowing the missing will left everything to St Clair, Palzer contacted the Bulfords and told them that unless they appointed him their attorney he would make the contents of the will public. St Clair’s attorney theorised that Palzer’s desertion was the ‘result of Jewish incapability of realizing that with a gentleman Honor is not just a ping-pong ball’.