Dire Diva of Din

People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.
                                       —Florence Foster Jenkins

Who was Florence Foster Jenkins, subject of the recent film starring Meryl Streep? Between 1919 and 1940, Florence Foster Jenkins attracted a devoted group of the social elite of New York to her rare concerts and fundraisers, including such opera luminaries as Caruso, who said he loved her. But as the journalist and poet Fergus Gwynplaine MacIntyre wrote:

At private recitals, she usually donned her Angel of Inspiration costume, a tulle gown and a tinsel tiara buttressed with a pair of feathered wings that made her resemble an overgrown turkey. To the accompaniment of a beleaguered pianist, who rejoiced in the name Cosmé McMoon, she would launch into her opening number, usually the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. The audience got caught full-blast with a sound like alley cats pitching whoopee. She billed herself as a coloratura soprano, but Florence Foster Jenkins couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Her voice shifted abruptly between a shriek and a whisper. Utterly tone-deaf, she wandered all over the scale, occasionally singing the right note by sheer accident. When attempting the high notes of an aria, her mouth would continue forming the words but no sound would emerge from her throat. Audience members would cram handkerchiefs into their mouths to muffle their guffaws.

I have been a fan of this unique woman for decades. There are two films I have been patiently waiting for some inspired director to make: the first, on the life of J.S. Bach; the second, on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins. Films have been made about Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, just about every serious composer—except Bach. I became so desperate to see a movie about Bach that ten years ago I wrote my own novella about him, Bequeathed, with a view to finding a production company to produce it, just so I could watch it myself. Fortunately, I no longer have to write a script about Florence Foster Jenkins, my favourite “un-singer” of all time.

I find it interesting that the movie about Jenkins was made in the UK, with distribution deals all over Europe, but the very last market it secured a deal for was the USA. Americans have always had a hard time grasping satire of their own culture, and although Jenkins was dead serious, many of them didn’t get the beautiful joke, especially the music critics of her time.

Florence Foster Jenkins was born Narcissa Florence Foster in 1868, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She was descended from seventeenth-century settlers on both sides of her family. Her family tree went back to 1050 and included William the Conqueror and King Robert of France.

She was a child prodigy as a pianist, known as “Little Miss Foster”, once performing before President Rutherford B. Hayes. But her father refused to pay for her further musical education in Europe so, at seventeen years old, she rebelled, eloping with Dr Frank Jenkins, sixteen years her senior. She contracted syphilis from him, and left him. No further mention is made of Dr Jenkins. He simply vanished. No one knows if they divorced or separated. She lived in poverty for a time in Philadelphia, making a bare living as a pianist and teacher. She omitted Narcissa as her first name, but kept Jenkins as her last.

Florence met St Clair Bayfield in 1909. Bayfield was born in England, and worked for a time as a sheep farmer in England and New Zealand before becoming a professional actor.

Florence’s mother, Mary J. Hoagland Foster, had been an active member of forty-two clubs and societies and was proud of her lineage, once presenting a fully restored revolutionary war era home, “Castle Fleming”, to the Daughters of the Revolution.

When Florence’s father, Charles Dorrance Foster, died of kidney failure, Florence was left a sizeable fortune with which she was finally able to pursue her thwarted musical ambitions. Her father had been an Episcopalian and lifelong Republican, active in the party and elected to the Pennsylvania legislature, but unsuccessful in a bid for the US Congress. He had been president of the Wilkes-Barre Railway and director of the Wyoming National Bank, and it was said about him, “He is the possessor of wealth ample to gratify anything short of sordid avarice. Few men enjoy, at so early an age, such complete physical, financial, and social advantages.”

Florence’s new financial independence streng­thened her resolve and she became a member of twelve women’s clubs in New York, including the Colonial Descendants of America and the Rubinstein, Mozart and Criterion clubs. She was President of the National League of American Pen Women and President of the National Society of Patriotic Women of America, and founded her own women-only establishment, the Verdi Club, and through it, raised money, from her own invitation-only concerts, for charitable causes. She was known affectionately in such circles as President Soprano Hostess Jenkins. Of one performance at the Verdi Club, an unidentified article said:

The high point of her song session … is a composition of her own entitled “I’m a Bird” and to properly set the stage for this piece de resistance, Madame emerges like a butterfly from its cocoon, wearing a costume fitted with wings.

The article goes on to say that some kind of live recording was made once of her performance of Adele’s “Laughing Song”:

a newspaperman who heard the disc gave it a “rave” notice that has been widely quoted. He promised the record would give the listener “more of a kick than the same amount ($2.50) invested in tequila, zubrovka, or marijuana” …

Florence Foster Jenkins believed she was a brilliant coloratura soprano and was firmly convinced of her own talent. In 1919 she moved in with St Clair Bayfield in a common-law marriage and he became her manager. He also believed in her ability, and somehow managed to keep her insulated from any negative criticism about her ability.

Florence possessed unusual diction, which some attributed to the syphilis that had gradually made its way into her brain and auditory system. Active neurosyphilis can mimic Alzheimer’s disease and can occur sometimes two decades after the initial infection. She also suffered from the mercury and arsenic treatments of the day, as there was no known cure for this disease until the discovery of penicillin. This caused her to lose her hair, which kept her wearing wigs all of her life.

Edwin McArthur worked with her for six years as her piano accompanist. In an interview for Opera News in 1963, he described her hotel room:

Her suite was filled with an assortment of bric-a-brac such as you’ve never seen … Pictures of herself in various poses, statuettes, lamps of all description, photographs of artists she knew. And she knew everybody.

McArthur was fired “for guffawing during one of her numbers”. She then began her collaboration with Mexican concert pianist Cosmé McMoon (born Cosmé McMunn).

I transcribed a rare audio interview with McMoon, recorded before he died in the early 1970s. He was candid about her special magic:

I met Madame Jenkins socially, and knowing that I was a concert pianist she asked me when she had decided upon her first concert if I would coach her program and supervise numbers, which I did. I might say that every number was memorable the way she performed it because it was not only a performance of this sort that we hear on the records but she added histrionics to every number, generally acting the action as if it were an aria, or other appropriate action if it were a descriptive song, or else she would go into different dances during these numbers which were extremely hilarious.

Audiences would try not to hurt her feelings by laughing—instead they would applaud and cheer loudly to mask the guffaws. People would bring extra handkerchiefs to stuff into their mouths to muffle the sound. The last two rows of the auditorium were highly sought after—so people could quickly run into the lobby when they couldn’t hold it in any longer. McMoon says:

At that time, Frank Sinatra had started to sing and the teenagers used to faint during his notes and scream, so she thought she was producing the same kind of an effect. When these salvos of applause came, she took them as great marks of approval for some tremendous vocal tour de force.

She limited her live concerts to a single annual fundraiser in the Grand Ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. She possessed amazing endurance and could sing for two hours at a stretch, with no intermissions. She handled her own ticket sales and anyone wishing to attend had to meet her personally, in her hotel room, where she would question them as to their seriousness. If she liked them, she would sell them a $2.50 ticket. Only 800 people were admitted to the benefits and police were engaged to chase away gatecrashers. In this way, she controlled who actually heard her sing and always excluded professional music critics. If anyone laughed out loud during her performances, she wrote them off as “hoodlums … planted by my rivals”.

In an uncharacteristic move, in 1944, when she was seventy-six, she held a final concert at Carnegie Hall, but this time she allowed it open for public ticket sales. She hocked all her furniture to finance the event. Fortunately, the 3000-seat concert sold out instantly, 2000 people were turned away, the hall filled past capacity, with lines stretching down Seventh Avenue and around 56th Street. Tickets were being scalped outside the theatre at ten times their value. Even Cole Porter was photographed in attendance.

McMoon said of the audience reaction at the final concert:

Her performance in Carnegie Hall was the most remarkable thing that has happened there, I think. The house held a record audience. It seemed that the people were hanging on the rafters besides taking up every inch of available standing room. When she came out … in a sort of shepherdess’s gown, with a shepherd’s crook, the ruckus was so great that it lasted five minutes before there was enough quiet for her to begin. Then the concert went on in the most noisy and abandoned applause—I have never seen such a scene, either at a bullfight, or at the Yale Bowl after a winning touchdown.

She chose to sing the most challenging songs in the operatic canon. Critics were allowed into the show this time, but their satirical mocking reviews the next day, with phrases such as “undaunted by the composer’s intent” and “only Mrs Jenkins has perfected the art of giving added zest by improvising quarter tones, either above or below the original notes” and “the First Lady of the Sliding Scale”. The New York Sun wrote, “she can sing anything, but notes”; and the New York Post, “one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen”. Irving Hoffman of the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “She hit only a few notes; the rest were promissory.”

The scathing reviews, the first she had ever seen of her singing, were said to have crushed her spirit. Two days after the concert she had a heart attack, and died a month later.

Jenkins made only five recordings, on seventy-eights, but they have never gone out of print and the originals remain treasured collectors’ items.

She told McMoon she had wanted to leave a trust fund for scholarships for talented musicians—a foundation that would be called the Florence Foster Jenkins Memorial, but he believes she was superstitious about preparing a will (which, according to her, invited death) and she died intestate, with her nearest relatives inheriting her estate.

The sheer enthusiasm Florence Foster Jenkins had for opera, child-like in so many ways, transcended everything preciously and, some might say essentially, technical, and the audiences, and her fellow artists, could feel it. In a review of one of her albums, Irving Kolodin wrote: “I have … seen Sir Thomas Beecham laugh till tears ran from his eyes.” One of her biographers, Donald Collup, said of her:

There was a quaint nobility about this woman that quelled derision and softened ridicule. She was tireless. She was genuine. And she was indomitable. Neither she nor the vision she clung to could be squelched … In the end Madame Jenkins was more than a joke. She was also an eloquent lesson in fidelity and courage.

Florence Foster Jenkins brought joy and an inadvertent element of humour and virtual audience participation into a very serious and regimented art form. She certainly made me feel good when I first heard her. She still does.

Cosmé McMoon remarked: “Many have tried to imitate her but without success. And the reason is that they’re not sincere in their efforts as Madame Jenkins was. She is inimitable.” Mozart would have loved her.