One of the animals gave a mischievous kick and got his hind leg over the pole, at once rendering him uncontrollable. A mad plunge was made for a bridge which spans the creek … and the carriage narrowly escaped going over the side. By this time the weight of the horse had snapped the pole off and the carriage went against the heels of the animals and started them off again. In order to prevent a collision with some teams just ahead Mr Foster endeavored to run his horses against a stone wall, but in doing so the carriage careened and scattered the occupants along the road, the wreck finally going over on its side, with Mr Foster out of sight, and the animals plunging furiously. The spectators expected to find Mr Foster killed, but he was found under the wreck still hanging to the ribbons and only slightly bruised. His wife was found to have sustained a compound fracture of the left forearm, their daughter, Mrs Dr Jenkins and Dr Johnson, escaping with insignificant bruises.
Foster was duly elected to serve a two-year term. His legislative duties taking him to Philadelphia, he will have seen his daughter and son-in-law often. In 1895 Frank earned a promotion at work which was hailed as good news in Wilkes-Barre. ‘His friends will be pleased to learn,’ it was reported, ‘that Dr Frank T. Jenkins, son-in-law of our townsman, Hon. C. D. Foster, has been promoted in the office of the Lighthouse Engineers of Philadelphia.’ It attributed his success not only to his abilities ‘but to the fact that his habits have always been strictly temperate, and in consequence could endure more fatigue than those who held positions above him’.
Frank’s avoidance of drink earned the approval of his father-in-law, who was several times invited to address the Temperance Union. Posterity has nonetheless planted a question mark over Frank’s moral rectitude. The story that is integral to the myth of Florence Foster Jenkins is that her husband infected her with syphilis. The venereal disease was relatively easy to contract in the latter part of the nineteenth century in America. Indeed, they married just as syphilis was becoming the cause of a public health disaster. The spread began around 1880 and would continue unabated for decades. By 1900 and for the following two decades, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 per cent of the general population was infected. Even towards the end of that period the disease was still more or less unmentionable. The New York Times Index didn’t allude to it by name until 1917. In the 1880s, when there was no cure, the taboo was all the deeper. Syphilis thrived on public ignorance and spread fast in a climate of secrecy.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that not every carrier knew they were infected. Its primary stage could bring genital sores, while in 50 per cent of cases the secondary stage involved lesions, a rash, or other symptoms which might last for months. But primary-stage symptoms did not always manifest themselves. In the early twentieth century syphilis came to be known as the great simulator because of its ability to mimic the symptoms of other ailments: headaches, aches in bones and joints, fever, rashes. And when physicians could see the signs, early on there was a prevailing tendency not to inform those infected. ‘Even when you are positive that a person has syphilis,’ advised the Baltimore physician Daniel W. Cathell, ‘it is not always best to say so.’ The conspiracy of silence spread into the general populace, for whom the disease brought with it the stigma of shame. Men, being the predominant carriers of syphilis, sought advice from doctors about whether to tell the women they were about to marry. The physician, wrote Claude Quetel in his History of Syphilis, ‘cannot escape the role of mediator, or arbiter, which is forced on him when a former syphilitic comes to his surgery and asks: “Doctor, is it safe for me to marry?” … [A] conflict arises, in which the interests of the patient and the public interest are opposed, for beyond this client stands a young girl, unborn children, a family, and society, and your prohibition will protect them all. What importance the doctor’s mission assumes when he becomes the arbiter of so many common interests in this way!’
Being a qualified physician himself, albeit one who couldn’t find work in medicine, Dr Frank Jenkins will have already known the answer. Because of the disease’s congenital properties, sexual abstinence was insisted upon for anyone planning to have children, for between six months and five years. An article published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1889 reported one doctor’s estimate that ‘a man with untreated syphilis who married and took no special precautions to protect his wife had a ninety-two percent chance of infecting his wife in the first year, a seventy-one percent chance in the second year, a twenty percent chance in the third year, and a negligible possibility every year thereafter’.
It seems unlikely that Frank would have kept himself pure for his future bride. It also seems unlikely that he would have had sexual relations with a woman of his own social standing. He would have gone to a brothel, and might even have done so after his marriage. A report published at the height of the epidemic found that men who contracted syphilis during marriage, as opposed to before, were more likely to infect their wives. In 1916, after a means of identifying the disease in carriers was developed, the Baltimore Vice Commission found syphilis in 64 per cent of the city’s more than 250 prostitutes, and over 90 per cent were infected with gonorrhoea. Nearly half had both, and less than 4 per cent had neither. There is no reason to suppose that Philadelphia, only a hundred miles to the north-east, was any different. Indeed, a paper referring to syphilis as the third great plague was published in the Quaker City in 1920.
There are three questions relating to Florence’s syphilis. Did she actually suffer from it? And if she did, was she infected by her husband? Or was it a figment of her imagination which posterity has allowed to take root as an essential element in the melodrama of her life? The medical evidence is circumstantial. There may have been other reasons for her childlessness, but fear of passing the disease on to another generation is a possible factor. Then there is the physical impact of the treatment. Its incurability did not prevent snake-oil salesmen from marketing magic remedies. ‘Primary, Secondary or Tertiary Syphilis permanently cured in thirty to ninety days,’ ran one advertisement for a company based in Nebraska. ‘We eliminate all poison from the system, so that there can never be a return of the disease in any form. Parties can be treated at home.’ This was rampant profiteering. Until 1908, when a drug was developed which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, the only treatment for syphilis was mercury, which had been around since Paracelsus recommended it to his patients in the mid-sixteenth century. A popular saying warned of ‘a night with Venus, and a lifetime with Mercury’. Unlike the wing-heeled god from which the metallic element took its name, treatment by mercury was slow. Many more sufferers were killed by the mercury than the actual ailment it was supposed to cure. Side effects were many, various and gruesome. They included profuse sweating, corrosion of the membranes of the mouth, gum ulcerations, loosening and eventual loss of the teeth, kidney failure. Florence is not known to have complained of any of the above. But another of the side effects is hair loss. The many photographs of Florence in her pomp seem to display a woman with resplendent hair or, more often, a succession of voluminous hats. In fact she wore a wig, even as quite a young woman. Underneath, her hair thinned until she was completely bald.
Another side effect of mercury poisoning goes even further into the heart of Florence’s story: prolonged exposure to mercury can cause tinnitus. Florence would prove to be a capable musician. While pianists rely on the instrument to be in tune, singers are at the mercy of their own hearing. St Clair Bayfield’s theory was that in her own head she sounded in tune. The vast discrepancy between what Florence’s audiences heard and what she believed they heard may perhaps be explained by the malign influence of mercury-induced tinnitus untuning the music in her ears. One of the indications of the disease’s tertiary stage was ‘the sensation of being serenaded by angels’.
The balance of probability is that Florence did suffer from a disease that could not be mentioned in polite society. That she received it from her husband is unprovable. But many years after her death, K
athleen Bayfield wrote that ‘Florence’s doctor husband had given her a dose of syphilis’. Kathleen had no incentive to present Florence as a victim so she must have considered it an incontrovertible fact.
The marriage certainly foundered, and quickly. Florence later described these years to St Clair Bayfield as a time of profound unhappiness, to the extent that it put her off marriage altogether. Frank may have soon repented of his clandestine seduction of a girl with whom he can have had little in common. But the evidence also suggests that the shining example of Rear Admiral Jenkins simply equipped his sons and grandsons for marital and/or moral failure, some of it far more dramatic than anything perpetrated by Frank.
Frank’s brother Presley would bring dishonour on the family soon after he was appointed as a San Francisco forecast official in the Weather Bureau. Six months into the post he was suspended for ‘neglect of duty and indiscretions in his private life’, all to do with gambling debts and unpaid creditors who ratted on him to his employers in Washington. But his record was nothing compared to that of Frank’s nephew Thornton Jenkins Hains. As a young man Hains, stationed at Fort Monroe in Virginia, had an altercation when out sailing with a lifelong friend and shot him through the heart. Although it wasn’t revealed in court, the argument was over a woman. Hains awaited his trial with equanimity, chatting with friends in the street through his cell window, befriending jail officials who took him out for walks and even playing cards with a juror during the trial. The jury was swayed by an appeal from Hains’s defence attorney not to ‘shed the blood of a young Virginian whose grandfather served his country with honor – whose uncle fell in the Confederate cause’. His acquittal was described as ‘the most puzzling and peculiar case that has interested Americans for many years’. There was far worse to come.
As for Florence’s marriage, a trajectory of deteriorating relations is suggested by her and Frank’s movements, annotated as ever by the Wilkes-Barre press. The Fosters were seen ‘visiting Mrs Dr Jenkins’ in Philadelphia in May 1886. She repaid the visit in the summer: on 13 July the Wilkes-Barre Record reported that the Fosters were ‘having a visit from their daughter’. Frank was evidently there too because two days later he returned to Philadelphia ‘after a brief visit with Representative Foster’. In late September Foster accompanied his daughter to Philadelphia. She visited them again in October, and again at Christmas. She was in Wilkes-Barre three times in 1887, and took a holiday with her parents in Quebec and went on a late-summer outing with them to Harveys Lake, where she and her sister had been taken as children by their father. Frank Jenkins, on the other hand, was never seen in Wilkes-Barre again. The marriage, therefore, seems to have broken down some time in 1886.
Florence’s uncertain marital status in this period was reflected in the papers’ bewildering array of permutations on her name: she was variously Mrs Dr Jenkins, Mrs Florence Jenkins, Mrs N. Florence Jenkins and, in a musical context, Madame Foster Jenkins. If they made their separation a legal fact, they did not do so immediately. In a History of Luzerne County published in 1893, the entry on Charles Dorrance Foster alludes – with a misspelling of Frank’s middle name – to ‘one surviving child a daughter, Narcissa Florence, wife of Dr. Frank Hornto Jenkins, of Philadelphia, whose father, Hornto A. Jenkins is a rear admiral in the United States Navy’.
The question of whether Dr and Mrs Jenkins ever divorced was still of legal relevance more than sixty years later. St Clair Bayfield submitted a petition in 1945 which alluded to a divorce obtained on 24 March 1902, and to a decree which he believed had been found in a safe deposit box. That is the year given for the Jenkinses’ divorce by the Dictionary of American Biography. But no such document has ever surfaced, and at the time it was in St Clair’s interest to show that the Jenkins marriage had been legally terminated.
The divorce rate in the era of the Jenkins marriage was extremely low, even if marginally on the rise and a cause for alarm among religious and social conservatives who feared for the moral welfare of the nation. In 1885 the National Divorce Reform League was formed with the goal of counteracting ‘individualism’, seen as a tendency among wronged and battered women to place their own happiness above the wider interests of social cohesion built on the family. The opposing strain of thought was an integral element of the campaign for women’s rights, as embodied by the pioneering activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. ‘I think divorce at the will of the parties,’ she argued, ‘is not only a right, but that it is a sin against nature, the family, and the state for man or woman to live together in the marriage relation in continual antagonism, indifference, and disgust.’
The other disincentive for both parties was that divorce could be enacted only in a courtroom, which enabled newspapers to feed a ravenous public appetite for salacious stories of marital discord and breakdown. The law furthermore called for some sort of ‘causative reasoning’: one party had to take the blame. In the majority of states, cause was usually desertion or infidelity, later supplemented by various forms of cruelty. Some physicians argued for syphilis to be legally accepted as grounds for divorce (partly proposed as a disincentive for infected spouses-to-be from entering into matrimony). By the early 1890s, after the antics of his brother and his nephew, Frank may have felt – or been encouraged to feel by his family – that the Jenkins name had been sullied in the public domain quite enough already.
Frank became gradually invisible. There was a rare sighting in January 1893 when he represented his father, who was too ill to travel, at the funeral of an admiral in Newport, Rhode Island. Then on 2 August Rear Admiral Thornton Alexander Jenkins suffered a heart attack and died. ‘Sea Warrior Dead,’ ran the headline in San Francisco’s Morning Call (which a month later would report on his son Presley’s suspension). The Evening Star in Washington praised his bravery, courtesy and generosity: ‘his loss will be deeply felt by a large circle of friends and relatives, many of whom have been the recipients of his bounty and his influence.’ He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, founded during the Civil War as a final resting place for Americans who gave their lives in military conflict. The funeral ‘was conducted without military display and with unusual privacy for the obsequies of one so prominent as the deceased officer’. The New York Times obituary noted that among his surviving children was ‘Dr. F. T. Jenkins of this city’. Frank had moved to New York. In this period he seems to have been of no fixed abode. As the male head of the family, he gave away his sister Carrie in December 1895, when he was described by the Evening Times in Washington DC as ‘Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins, of Connecticut’. In 1898 he was living in Buffalo but that year moved to Niagara Falls where he opened a practice for the treatment of maladies relating to ears, nose and throat.
Charles D. Foster hadn’t heard about a divorce. That year Florence’s father drew up a will, which referred to Florence’s ‘present husband’, simply for the purpose of specifically excluding him. ‘The bequests to my said daughter shall not be subject to anticipation or any execution or attachment on any account whatever and the same shall be free from the control of her present or any future husband.’ Although she had no means of knowing, it wasn’t Florence who was cut out of the will; it was Frank. Florence’s legacy from her relationship with the failed physician was a distrust of doctors, a wariness of marriage, and a surname which she would use for the rest of her life.
3: PHILADELPHIAN
Long after Florence Foster Jenkins’s death, Cosme McMoon, her Carnegie Hall accompanist, gave a radio interview. Invited to describe what he knew of her early life, McMoon was casting back nearly seventy years to events which once upon a time had been related to him by an unreliable narrator. So on several levels, his recollections are unsafe.
‘Very early she demonstrated this desire to sing,’ he explained, ‘and her parents objected to the excruciating quality of her voice, and in her early teens she ran away from home and went to Philadelphia to try to make her way. There she suffered great hardships and privations until her father, hearing
of it, came down to town and took her back home. She was restored to her social and wealthy position, but with the proviso that she wouldn’t sing anymore.’
The story of a total musical interdict, and the low parental opinion of her singing, is another essential element of the Florence legend. Indeed, St Clair Bayfield’s testimony is that Frank Jenkins was no more sympathetic to her musical leanings than her parents. Unromantically, the evidence resists a full endorsement of this version of events. In 1886, the year she turned eighteen, Florence enrolled as a student at the Philadelphia Academy of Music for a two-year course. As to who paid her fees, it seems far more likely that it was her father rather than her husband, and that the break with Frank is what enabled her to return to music.
As a student Florence thrived. In February 1888 the Wilkes-Barre Record reported on her progress in a column on ‘former Wilkes-Barreans’. ‘Mrs Dr Jenkins, maiden name Miss Florence Foster, daughter of Hon. C. D. Foster … will graduate in May at the head of the class. She is now second in a class of over 800, and will probably take the highest honors.’ Mrs Jenkins, it added, ‘is a brilliant musician and is so considered in classical circles. She is very popular in social circles about Spruce and Pine Streets above Twentieth. Her many friends here will be glad to hear of her success.’
Spruce Street was home to the Academy. Its German principal was Richard Zeckwer, who took charge in 1876, bought the premises and ran it for the next forty years. Its classrooms were full of upright pianos and plastered in riotous flock wallpaper. Zeckwer’s pedagogic style was trenchantly outlined in a prospectus for 1905–6. It offered twenty lessons for each ten-week term. Private half-hour lessons for finishing students cost $20, and it cost $5 to practise on a conservatory piano for an hour a day. The teachers for the high levels were all men, mostly with pendulous moustaches, none more than Zeckwer. The system of teaching large classes was to give as many people as possible access to a musical education. ‘The masses must be educated thus or not at all,’ explained the prospectus. Hence those eight hundred students. (In fact the Academy had room for two thousand.) One lesson a week focused on études, the other on pieces. ‘Each pupil has the benefit of the entire hour, as the time not occupied in playing they are required to give attention to the performance of the other members of the class; to notice their errors; to endeavor to avoid a repetition of them.’ Pupils were encouraged to correct, explain, criticise and approve as they listened to their peers, with the result that ‘shyness, that bane of young performers, is cured or abated’. Florence’s prediction of second place was not an idle boast. ‘Having such a large number of scholars,’ the rules and regulations made clear, ‘it is possible to classify very exactly.’
Florence Foster Jenkins Page 4