The morning’s entertainment offers an intriguing insight into Florence’s taste, acumen and breadth of knowledge. She laid on an array of duets and solos for male and female voice. A song and an aria by Massenet were in French, but there was an English theme: ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’ was a pleasant canzonetta composed by Haydn during his London sojourn; there were two of Elgar’s Album of Seven Songs (published only two years earlier) and a recital of Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’. She also chose a song by a female composer, Mary Carmichael’s ‘Quaff with Me the Purple Wine’. Significantly she opened with Verdi – ‘Fu la sorte dell’armi a’ tuoi funesta’, in which Amneris tricks Aida into confessing her love for Radamès. Members had the chance to perform or recite some of their own work, and the whole club joined in for a couple of part-songs. If Florence sang, it was as part of the group. The guest soloist she booked was Paul Du Fault, a lyric tenor from Quebec who was a regular performer at such events, suggesting that Florence had familiarised herself with New York’s available talent.
She had an instant impact on the quality of fare at the Euterpe. In April 1908 she represented the club at a dinner held by the Women’s Democratic Club to mark Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. For a wheeze it was decided that each table in the Hotel Majestic dining room, rather than be numbered, would be named after a women’s club. The clubs would each nominate a member to be hostess. Florence was chosen to represent the Euterpe among twenty-eight other clubs. The diners were treated to no fewer than eleven guest speakers. In May another musical evening was hailed as ‘one of the best that the club has presented this season’.
As she made her way in New York society, in the summer of 1908 Florence was given grim cause to doubt the protective properties of the surname she had chosen to retain. On 15 August the whole city erupted at news of a murder involving the name of Jenkins. Frank’s nephew Captain Peter Hains shot dead a man he believed to have seduced his young wife, abetted by his brother Thornton Jenkins Hains. The murder, which was to become one of America’s most sensational crimes of passion in the first half of the twentieth century, cast light on Florence’s story in two ways. It provoked the only recorded public utterance by her estranged husband Frank. It also illustrated the contempt with which dysfunctional males of the Jenkins clan were prepared to treat women who married into the family.
The catalyst of the scandal was Thornton Jenkins Hains, who since his acquittal in 1891 had used his liberty to explore a gift for sensation. He became a successful author of pulp sea stories partly inspired by his grandfather’s naval adventures. His tales – with titles like Bahama Bill, The Black Barque and The Strife of the Sea – invited comparisons with Conrad and Melville, even if these were mainly made by himself. Jack London, whose The Call of the Wild was published in 1903, was an admirer. Hains grew sufficiently notable to make it onto the front page of the New York Times when his yacht sank on the way to the Bahamas (‘Author rescued at sea’) in 1903. That year his wife, who had endured a brutal marriage, died in childbirth.
But making the life of his own wife a misery was not a big enough field of operation for Thornton J. Hains. He also chose to be an agent provocateur in the marriage of his weak-willed younger brother. Peter Hains had married Claudia Libbey in 1900 when she was sixteen – she threatened to elope if her mother did not consent. They had three children. In 1907 Thornton first suspected that she was conducting an affair with a close friend of his brother, society magazine publisher William Annis. He sent word to Peter, who was serving in the Philippines. Claudia’s letters to her husband, which described the riotous time she was having back at home and gently scolded him for his negligence, did nothing to dissuade his imagination from running riot. Captain Hains hastened home to extract a confession from his wife that she had committed adultery. Claudia – described by the San Francisco Call as ‘a woman of rare beauty’ – later claimed she was bullied into signing a confession when under the influence of alcohol and drugs which had been forced upon her. It was even suggested that she signed at the point of a revolver brandished by either her husband, her forbidding father-in-law General Hains, or her vengeful brother-in-law, whose own sexual advances to her she said she had repulsed. She also pronounced her husband a violent pervert (as in homosexual).
Convinced of her guilt, the brothers plotted to eliminate Annis. Apparently without a care whether they were witnessed, Captain Hains confronted his wife’s lover as he sailed his victorious sloop into harbour at a yacht club regatta in Queens. He discharged six rounds into Annis’s body, in front of a large crowd including the victim’s wife and children. His brother kept guard over the dying man with pistol in hand. When Mrs Annis attempted to rush to her husband her way was barred: ‘You move and you’ll get the same,’ the killer’s brother scowled.
The New York public was swiftly reminded that Thornton Jenkins Hains had been acquitted of killing a lifelong friend in 1891. The Washington Herald, while taking a stern position on adultery and deeming the world ‘better off without such a man as Annis’, recalled that T. J. Hains had been ‘the beneficiary of as gross a miscarriage of justice as ever blotted the criminal annals of the century’. To the same paper his mother – Florence’s sister-in-law – made a manipulative appeal for understanding. ‘Ask the good people of New York to suspend judgment … until the truth is known,’ she pleaded. Summoning genealogy to her defence, she added that she had drawn on the same reserves of fortitude ‘which, I am told, was always displayed by my father, Admiral Thornton Jenkins, who was Admiral Farragut’s chief of staff in the battle of Mobile Bay’. She concluded with a character reference for her son, who doted on his three-year-old daughter. ‘This spirit of devotion, so characteristic of him, has prompted Thornton to stand by his brother. So you will see that my boy is not so much of a devil as it has been made to appear since the day of the tragedy.’
Just over a week later Frank Thornton Jenkins, last seen operating as an ear, nose and throat specialist resident in Niagara Falls but now described as ‘a doctor of this city’, made his own contribution to family honour. He issued a statement that in his view Captain Peter Hains had been driven mad by his wife’s conduct, whereas his brother was ‘a mental monstrosity’ who since early adulthood had been ‘wayward, intractable, perverse and stubborn, and he usually managed to set at naught all disciplinary measures aimed at for his good’. He added, for clarification, that the fatal argument in 1891 had been over a woman. This double character assassination was an attempt to exonerate the nephew who had made an unwise marriage to a foolish young woman. To Florence and to any-one who knew of her marriage to Frank, it may have sounded like a coded attack on her. She too was a teenage bride, who had not merely threatened to elope but actually gone through with it.
The unfolding saga must have caused Florence profound relief that she no longer had any direct involvement with such a dysfunctional family of morally degenerate misogynists. It can be easily imagined that the impending trials of her in-laws, who were very close to her in age, was a topic of discussion when she went home to Wilkes-Barre in mid-October to visit her father, who was recovering from a major operation after falling seriously ill (he didn’t leave the house until a week into November). It will have been on her mind as Florence spent the autumn conjuring up further triumphs for the Euterpe Club. In November she arranged what the Times called ‘an unusually attractive program’ for another musical morning at the Waldorf. Florence’s involvement must have again impressed the committee, because for the Jamisons’ annual reception in December she was in charge.
The calendar arranged for Florence’s destiny to run parallel with that of Thornton Jenkins Hains in a quite bizarre double coincidence. The Euterpe reception took place on the same day as the trial began. She organised a costume dance and programmed a reading of Stories from the Orient by Oliver Bainbridge, an author with a new book out who brought back tales of his recent travels in China. Florence went home for Christmas knowing she had scored her greatest social success yet
in New York.
Meanwhile, for the next month, Thornton Hains did his best to measure up to Frank’s description. The trial took place in Flushing, which would be connected to Manhattan later the following year with the completion of the Queensboro Bridge. After twenty-two hours of deliberation, the jury was persuaded to acquit him of conspiracy on the so-called ‘unwritten law’. Otherwise known as dementia Americana, this offered a defendant the option of pleading temporary insanity, incurred when he believes his home and honour to be violated. The husband’s brother claimed to have suffered it vicariously. Unprecedented uproar greeted the verdict in court, which was swiftly deplored by leading lawyers. The freed man’s parents received the news in the Astor Hotel, where Florence had performed her piano solo two years earlier. In his euphoria Hains pledged to write his masterpiece, a long novel based on the unwritten law.
Having escaped the electric chair, he made an exhibition of himself in his brother’s trial three months later, earning an admonition for his theatrical behaviour in the witness box and at one point being thrown out of court. Dementia Americana could not save Captain Hains. From the witness box his father the general tried to engineer a positive picture of a war hero who had protected him in the war with Spain in 1897 by throwing his body in the line of fire. To no avail. His son was found guilty of manslaughter and dispatched to Sing Sing, the notorious New York jail. General Hains made strenuous efforts to persuade the jury to appeal to the state governor for a pardon. Two years later his son was released. Claudia Hains did not contest her divorce and lost custody of her three children. She never saw them again.
But that was to come. Soon after Florence returned from Wilkes-Barre at the start of 1909, twelve good men and true retired to ponder the fate of Thornton Jenkins Hains. The very day the jury considered its verdict would be remembered by Florence for the rest of her life.
5: MRS ST CLAIR BAYFIELD
On the morning of 14 January 1909 Florence Foster Jenkins was at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a Euterpe Club musicale. From the stage she spotted a face in the audience. Decades later she still had a clear recollection of the moment, down to her own choice of outfit for the occasion. ‘I was wearing my violet velvet gown, I saw your smile in the audience from my flowers upon the stage and said to myself, “Why, there is a man with the loveliest smile which I have ever seen in my life.” Little did I imagine at that moment, that that smile would bring something into my life for thirty years to come.’
The owner of the smile was tall (six foot three), thin, rangy and English, with strawberry-blond curls and blue eyes set in a long, bony face. His name was St Clair Bayfield. He had a forthright nose but much his most prominent feature – an irony, given the identity of the woman whose life he was about to share – was a sizeable pair of ears. At thirty-three, he was seven years her junior.
Every 14 January for the next thirty-five years, St Clair would send Florence flowers to mark the anniversary of their meeting. There was an immediate connection. St Clair was a professional actor, currently appearing at the Knickerbocker Theater off Broadway in a production of a new operetta called The Prima Donna (Florence no doubt hastened to catch it). He was a man of culture with a rich orotund voice, an English accent that was starting to fade, charm, intelligence, education and old-world manners. Also, running through Bayfield’s blood was a commodity Florence had been brought up to value: a noble pedigree, even if it did come from the wrong side of the bed.
St Clair Bayfield’s great-grandfather was Attorney General then Lord Chief Justice, who took the title of Baron Ellenborough of Ellenborough after a Cumbrian village associated with his forebears. In 1842 his son Edward Law rose even higher. A powerful orator and distinguished administrator, friend of and cabinet minister under the Duke of Wellington, he was appointed governor-general of India and charged with restoring the peace. The task proved beyond him and he was recalled after two years, to be made the first Earl of Ellenborough, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath and First Lord of the Admiralty. While these peaks were successively conquered, St Clair’s grandfather had an eventful romantic career. His first wife died young of tuberculosis in 1819. His much younger second wife – the intensely beautiful Jane Digby – bore an heir, though Lord Ellenborough was not the father; her cousin was. The boy died before his second birthday and the Baroness embarked on further affairs. One was with the Austrian diplomat Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg; their trysts at his address in Harley Street caught the attention of political cartoonists and in 1830 caused her husband to seek a divorce by Act of Parliament. As witnesses gave evidence to the House of Commons, The Times devoted five columns to his public humiliation. The Earl had had enough of matrimony. In 1846, not long back from India, he sired three daughters via his mistress. St Clair Bayfield’s mother Ida was the eldest. She was born in Belgravia, and married there too to George Bayfield Roberts, an Oxford-educated curate from Cheltenham.
St Clair’s ancestry on his father’s side included a bizarre overlap with Florence’s English forebears. Like Florence, St Clair had an ancestor who followed William the Conqueror to England, and another who had personal dealings with Richard the Lionheart. There was also a line back to the Saint-Clairs of the Isles, the kings of Orkney; hence his colourful Christian name. More prosaically, his great-grandfather was an eminent metallurgist whose discoveries contributed to advances in the iron industry.
The Reverend George Bayfield Roberts inherited a talent for music-making from his father. Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who built the Savoy Theatre to stage the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, once heard him conduct HMS Pinafore in Cheltenham. Roberts would fondly boast that D’Oyly Carte was so impressed he refused him permission to conduct the operettas again for fear of shaming his own touring productions. A committed high churchman, Roberts became an active member of the English Church Union, the body which supported the cause of Anglo-Catholic priests, and wrote its history. In 1902 he was one of the figures interviewed in a book called Distinguished Churchmen and Phases of Church Work. St Clair later bragged about his father within earshot of journalists, which is why the Rev. Roberts was once described in a New Zealand newspaper as ‘an English divine well-famed for his ritualistic controversies’.
A flavour of Roberts’s charismatic kindliness lingers in a wedding gift he and his wife made to a young couple he married in his church in 1900. Two silver vases were accompanied by a sonnet.
When, in the glory of a summer day,
A blushing rosebud or a drooping spray
Of honeysuckle charms thy sense;
Forget not us who live where sewage smells
And immemorially polluted wells
Their aromatic charms dispense.
In 1875 he was working as a curate in Lower Brixham, the Devon fishing village, when John St Clair was born on 2 August, the third of four children. The family moved to Folkestone, where Roberts was required to bury almost all of the 252 German sailors who drowned after their battleship was accidentally rammed by a sister vessel off the English coast. He conducted the services in German, earning the gratitude of Kaiser Wilhelm I. In 1879 they returned to Gloucestershire when he was appointed vicar of Elmstone Hardwicke, just outside Cheltenham. He would preach from its pulpit for more than forty years.
For all the family’s aristocratic lineage, not much of the Earl of Ellenborough’s fortune of almost £60,000 had trickled down to his eldest daughter when he died in 1871. Unlike their father, there was no question of university for the Roberts children. The oldest boy, Aleth, went to sea with the merchant service at twelve, returned depressed a decade later and did nothing for a year but convert to Catholicism and marry. The young St Clair decided to seek advancement and adventure at the furthest-flung outpost of the empire. In New Zealand he tried his hand at anything going: he worked as a sailor, a dairy farmer, a journalist, a horse trader, got jobs in a gold mine, on a cattle-boat and with the New Zealand government’s Survey Department. He also may have volunteered as an
infantryman. By 1898, the year he turned twenty-three, he had parlayed his way into a touring variety company led by one Master Chevalier. The Auckland Star described Mr St Clair Roberts from England as a ‘vocalist of no mean ability, possessing a fine baritone voice of good quality’. He shared the bill with Miss Olive May Stokes, a thirteen-year-old prodigy from Auckland who had been singing, declaiming and playing the piano from the age of ten and had just come from a tour fronting her own comedy drama company.
Rather than stick with his family name, he took the Christian name, Bayfield, by which his father was known, to fashion a more theatrical handle, and embarked on a wonderfully eventful apprenticeship. At some point St Clair seems to have decided that the life of an itinerant performer could be better pursued in Australia, where there were more opportunities. In late 1900 he made his dramatic debut at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney. The play was Henry V, the role Sir Thomas Grey, who has all of twelve lines. St Clair entered the theatre just as his employer was leaving it: George Rignold had been giving his King Hal off and on for a quarter of a century. He was such a great Shakespearean that Edith Wharton later picked him out as an exemplary artist in The Age of Innocence, set in 1870s New York. This was his final tilt at the role before getting on the boat back to England.
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