Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  Meanwhile St Clair dashed south. That month he was turned down by the British Army for the third time. He had to find another way of contributing to the war effort, so he devised a production to entertain troops awaiting shipment to the theatre of war. He put together a company to perform a light comedy called It Pays to Advertise to trainee soldiers stationed at Camp McClellan in Alabama. The winter drama season now being over and leading actors out of contract, the cast he managed was full of Broadway players. In case anyone might suspect them of shirking their duty, the Anniston Star reassured readers that ‘all the members of this company subject to draft have fulfilled all requirements exacted by the government’. The company went back south in July and were ‘liberally entertained’ at a reunion dinner with officers.

  Florence’s visit to Washington for the Daughters of the Revolution was her first since she was widowed. The Washington Herald described her as well known in the city ‘not only as the daughter-in-law of the late Admiral Thornton A. Jenkins and wife of the late Dr Francis Thornton Jenkins, but as a singer.’ It mentioned her appearance at the White House before the First Lady. It didn’t mention that she shared the stage with 131 other members of the Mozart Society of New York. (The sense that these news items arrived at the newspaper’s office as more or less pre-written press releases is sometimes overpowering.) Frank’s death brought about a rapprochement with Florence’s sister-in-law Alice, who, it was announced in early May, had been invited to stay with Florence in New York in November.

  In the intervening years Alice Thornton Jenkins had become a person of note herself, not in the sphere of music in which she had excelled as a young woman, but as a leading figure in the struggle for American women’s suffrage. In February 1912 she wrote stirringly to the Evening Star in Washington to oppose the casuistical arguments against giving women the vote which were deployed even by men who supported their right to it. ‘The moment a man admits that woman is entitled to the franchise,’ she reasoned, ‘that moment it becomes his duty to make no argument against her obtaining it.’ Her letter concluded with a derogatory allusion to ‘the pampered rich, well cared for women, who think they enjoy life better without whatever responsibility the ballot might impose’. The next month she wrote to the same paper to upbraid it for its misinterpretation of the battle for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. Soon she was in New York as the leader of the Washington delegation in a suffrage parade of fifteen thousand women. Another of the marchers was an octogenarian who had worked as a nurse in the Civil War.

  Militant striving for a new world existed side by side with her support for militancy in its more traditional form. The previous week she was up in Maine to represent another veteran of that conflict – her own father – when a torpedo boat destroyer was ‘christened’ in the rear admiral’s name. The Washington Times included a photograph of a powerful-looking woman with a direct gaze and angry eyebrows, ill suited to the cinched waist and pearl necklace of her evening gown. She was accompanied to Maine by her younger sister Carrie, but lived in downtown Washington, DC with her youngest sister Nettie, another committed suffragist now divorced from her heroic, facially disfigured husband George, who had remarried and climbed to the rank of rear admiral. Florence is not known to have had any thoughts about her right to vote, for which not every society lady hankered. ‘When in the company of suffragettes, a perverse desire to condone all men’s errors possessed me,’ recalled Consuelo Vanderbilt in her autobiography, ‘for I found female self-sufficiency somewhat ridiculous.’

  Alice duly arrived in New York for the opening of the Verdi Club’s second season on 6 November 1918 at the Waldorf-Astoria. Other guests of honour were seven brides, including the newly wedded Mrs Caruso. Alice stayed for a week and was there for the Armistice. She found Florence installed in an apartment in the Seymour Hotel in West 45th Street off Fifth Avenue. The twelve-storey residential hotel was in considerable contrast to the apartment she rented for St Clair. The drawing room was a decorous riot of elegant furniture and silk cushions. A chandelier hovered over the room; signed photographs covered every surface. On the grand piano, which dominated one end of the room, was a snap of Florence and above it looking down from the wall hung the two oil portraits of Florence as a child and in early middle age, probably painted by her mother. Other mementos of her youth included her dance cards from the 1880s. Edwin McArthur, who would later become Florence’s accompanist, remembered a suite ‘filled with an assortment of bric-a-brac such as you’ve never seen. Pictures of herself in various poses, statuettes, lamps of all descriptions, photographs of artists she knew. And she knew everybody.’ There she had use of a daily maid to dress her, lay on breakfast and serve when guests came round for regular private musicales at which promising young soloists were invited to perform.

  That week St Clair was busy rehearsing an English war spy drama, Pigeon Post, about the winged messengers of Verdun (with real pigeons which ‘fluttered and hopped about, cooed and preened their feathers’). The play was a first effort at serious drama by Florenz Ziegfeld, better known for titillating New Yorkers with the fashionable tableaux of the Ziegfeld Follies. Ziegfeld had spied a commercial opportunity in dramas from the front, which now abounded in theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. St Clair was soon in the cast of another London import, this time a musical comedy called The Better ’Ole based on a popular wartime cartoon Tommy called Old Bill. It was ‘as artless and unsophisticated as the original drawings,’ said the Times, but ‘of the utmost freshness and delight’.

  In early 1919 Florence’s connections with the great and good of the opera world were strengthened when the Verdi Club celebrated what it branded Caruso Day, which didn’t quite fall on the great tenor’s birthday in February. He did not deign to sing in (or indeed attend) an all-Verdi programme, but the credentials of the guest soloists were trumpeted: club member Olga Carara-Pessia was a soprano ‘from the Royal Theatre, Madrid’; alto Cecil Arden had made her debut with the Met the previous year. This was merely a foretaste of the second Silver Skylarks ball, which was widely advertised. The campus newspaper Columbia Daily Spectator advised its readers that tickets costing $2.00 were available from the Columbia University Press bookstore. There was a performance with full orchestra of Il Trovatore (another booking for Ernest Davis, one of the professional members, supported by an amateur chorus), plus Spanish dancing, Lucile Collette sawing on the violin, and yet more arias and songs. After the entertainment, members enjoyed the chance to become characters from the world of Verdi themselves in a pageant: society dames came dressed as Verdian heroines Amneris, Violetta, Gilda, Desdemona and Mistress Quickly. A male member played the part of Verdi. Others filled out the scene as gypsies and Egyptians. Florence herself was at the head of a group costumed in the Verdi period in a dress festooned with skylarks. The artistic director was none other than President Woodrow Wilson’s niece. The ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria was hung with the flags of the Allies while the consulates of France, Italy and Greece sent representatives to witness this gesture of international solidarity. Guests were also welcomed from the Red Cross and the Tank Corps.

  Florence’s holidays were a continuum of the social whirl in New York with added ocean breezes. In August 1919 she took the sea air in Rhode Island as an attendee at the amusingly named Snow Ball at Narragansett Pier. St Clair travelled in the opposite direction, heading to the Midwest to do good. He put together a company to present a play as part of Chautauqua, an adult education movement which former president Theodore Roosevelt was once moved to describe as ‘the most American thing in America’. It had evolved into a touring entity (known as the Redpath-Vawter system) which was starting to branch away from an unrelieved diet of improving lectures. St Clair assembled a cast of Broadway actors to stage the play, which had also been approved by Roosevelt: ‘That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play,’ shouted the president from his box in 1909 when he saw Israel Zangwill’s drama about idealistic refugees from Russian pogroms hopi
ng for a life free of rancour in America. Zangwill, who was British and described as ‘the Dickens of the ghetto’, later received a letter from Roosevelt acknowledging the play as ‘among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life’. St Clair’s company toured Missouri with their own lighting and set. The Macon Republican reported that it would surpass ‘anything of its nature ever attempted by the Redpath folks’. In three months St Clair returned to the Midwest to perform a Shakespearean double bill of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in Cincinnati.

  Back in New York the interests of the common-law couple reconverged. Florence, the former student of elocution, was a fan of theatre who attended all of St Clair’s first nights. In February 1920 she was appointed chairman of music for the Dramatic Art Society, a new club devoted to ‘the pursuit and promotion of the best type of American drama, a closer relation between dramatists and theatregoers, and the exchange of opinions on all things concerning theatre’. The first subject for discussion was ‘the modern quiet method of handling dramatic situations’, a stylistic development to which the new society gave its stamp of approval. There was a reading from J. M. Barrie’s 1918 war play A Well-Remembered Voice. In April St Clair was enlisted as a performer at the Silver Skylarks ball on the theme of the Arabian Nights. A thousand guests mustered at the Waldorf-Astoria to see him dressed as an Arabian prince while Florence, costumed as Scheherazade, gleamed in a turban with a conical coronet and a sweeping train, and dangling globular earrings.

  Their philanthropic interests coalesced too when the Verdi Club expanded its field of operation and began staging Shakespeare. They started with King John and followed it up with Twelfth Night, which St Clair directed as well as taking the part of Malvolio. His recreation of the play’s earliest known performance in Middle Temple Hall in 1602 was deemed an artistic triumph. All money raised from tickets of $2.50 went to the Italian Red Cross (which in due course presented Florence with a diploma and a gold medal). Later that season he contributed a talk on the play he had been appearing in at the Belasco Theater. The club took inspiration from these performances and in its 1921 ball there were tableaux vivants on the theme of Shakespeare and/or Verdi, concluding with the shrine of the Sun Goddess, embodied by the club’s president and founder. There was also a full performance of Aida with a chorus of 150 voices: Florence’s zest for laying on epic soirées was growing exponentially each year. And at the end of the entertainment she had her annual apotheosis as one or other great feminine icon. The cheers and applause, it seems sensible to assume, had an addictive quality, and went straight to her head.

  While the calendar of the Verdi Club set the pattern of Florence’s year, she still dashed off to Washington as a Daughter of the American Revolution, attended gatherings of the Euterpe and other clubs, often as guest of honour and sometimes programming their musicales. Singing with the Mozart Society involved rehearsals for three evening concerts and monthly musicales at the Hotel Astor; these would take up a whole Saturday afternoon starting with music, then luncheon, then dancing. The season ended with the choir’s annual May breakfast where 1,200 women would turn up in floral hats; Florence was one of the guests of honour escorted to her place by twenty women of the reception committee carrying bowers of roses.

  By the start of the 1920–21 winter season Florence had established herself sufficiently to take an audacious step: she decided to perform to the members of the Verdi Club. She put herself on an evening programme at the MacDowell Club on West 55th Street. The choice of venue said much about her perception of herself as a contributor to the city’s musical life. The club was part of a network of what grew to four hundred clubs spread all over the country, set up to honour the memory of composer Edward MacDowell. The New York branch was established in 1905 and supported an artists’ retreat in New Hampshire. Its aim was ‘to discuss and demonstrate the principles of the arts of music, literature, drama, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and to aid in the extension of knowledge of works especially fitted to exemplify the finer purposes of these arts’. Florence surrounded herself with competent amateurs rather than professionals likely to show her up: a violinist, a pianist playing Chopin and an elocutionist reading poems by Oscar Wilde. The applause from loyal acolytes resounded all the way up to the MacDowell Club’s vaulted ceiling. It may have been sincere, but it was also an extension of the gratitude shown by the members who at the end of each season showered Florence with gifts: a gold bracelet studded with diamonds and sapphires one year, plus a dinner in her honour, a heart-shaped pearl pendant with a large ruby another year. The club was also presented with a bust of Verdi by sculptress Lily C. Mayer (née Gidlio). Florence ensured gifts – a pearl necklace, an ostrich-feather fan – were presented to other officers.

  Thus the cycle began: in return for her vast social and cultural largesse, Florence received uncritical approbation for her singing. Emboldened, in early 1921 she was invited to sing to the women of the National Society of Patriotic Women of America at the Hotel McAlpin (also a holder of the record for world’s largest hotel). This was another society into which she threw herself, its aim being ‘Americanisation’, its educational fund paying for ten teachers spread across New York. Her gift to the cause was a duet from Aida with the tenor Ernest Davis. Davis knew which side his bread was buttered and sang along, after many rehearsals at Florence’s Seymour Hotel grand piano. He also sang ‘Celeste Aida’ on his own.

  By 1920 there were a million members of women’s clubs in America. Their widespread and profound influence on the culture of New York was most manifest on presidents’ day, when club leaderenes annually gathered for a celebration involving talks and performances. Florence was one of the twenty-eight presidents gracing the event with their presence at the Waldorf-Astoria as the season drew to a close in April 1921. The newspapers obligingly alluded to all such attendees as ‘prominent persons’. The ballroom was packed. Many of their activities involved music. The clubs’ cultural contribution was acknowledged by Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony Society, a couple of years later: ‘I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America.’

  The Verdi Club’s sphere of influence enlarged: at the start of the next season a hundred new members were ready to enrol. The less cheering news was that the club’s honorary member Enrico Caruso had died of pneumonia, prompting a memorial musicale in tribute with a speech from, among others, the gnarled old Oregonian poet Edwin Markham. With infirmity on Florence’s mind, the club formed a committee to arrange visits to members who were unwell. Perhaps they managed to bring succour to Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison, the president of the Euterpe, before she died at the start of 1922.

  Florence rallied to stand before the Verdi Club at an afternoon musicale and deliver a selection of Italian arias and English songs, in gratitude for which she was presented with a set of ruby hairpins. (No matter that she wore a wig.) ‘Mrs Florence Jenkins and Mozelle Bennett Are Artists at Waldorf,’ announced a New York Tribune headline. (Bennett was a violinist well known enough to have a short article that month on the craft of good bowing in the Violinist magazine; she was also dragooned into the newly formed Verdi Club Trio.) The task of chairing the event was taken by another of the club’s officers because Florence could not be seen to programme herself. As it happened the day’s chairman, Miss Edna Moreland, was also a soprano who for three years had been given the opportunity to sing for the Verdi Club. She now returned the compliment. The difference was that Moreland had enough talent to set sail for France later in the year and try her luck in Paris; she was seen off with a reception in Florence’s apartment. Miss Moreland made sure to keep Florence separate from professional singers, but not by much. Only the morning before, the club had been entertained by Austrian baritone Robert Leonhardt, since 1914 a star of the Met where he had sung Papageno and Amfortas (although his career there had been suspended in 1918 because he was deemed an enemy alien).


  For that year’s fifth Silver Skylarks ball a programme was printed which detailed the names of twenty-six people who had taken boxes, seventy-eight patrons and patronesses, and seven ushers. There was a strong presence among the guests of military top brass, including two admirals and a general who, having sat through La traviata and a variety of tableaux, were invited – or possibly obliged – to take part in a grand march to initiate the ball.

  Every summer Florence now disappeared, to rest on her laurels for four months in Larchmont on the north shore of Long Island Sound. She entertained the many members of the Verdi Club who passed through at the Horseshoe harbour club, one of the oldest yacht clubs in America. In August of 1922 the lazy summer bacchanal was enlivened by a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by an amateur cast driven to heights, according to local paper the Evening World, that rivalled Broadway. ‘And why? There is but one answer and that is St Clair Bayfield.’

  St Clair was indefatigable. He had spent six months up until May in Bulldog Drummond, a transfer from London based on H. C. McNeile’s popular stories about a gentleman adventurer back from the trenches, but still he found time to direct and take part in a one-act play for the Verdi Club. Florence had expressed her appreciation for him on Valentine’s Day by throwing a reception in the MacDowell Club for his fellow Cheltonians resident in New York (one of whom was in the Bulldog Drummond cast with him). The expatriates of Cheltenham were treated to a programme of English songs by their hostess. Thus did Florence Foster Jenkins find her name trumpeted as a ‘well-known society leader’ in the Gloucestershire Echo.

  Grateful to escape the broiling heat of his New York apartment, St Clair, as ever, devoted his summer to a worthy cause, in this case the Larchmont Library, to be built on land donated by a prominent resident and theatre owner. He sifted through aspiring amateur thespians among the local lotus-eaters for a cast, then drilled them in rehearsals. For an auditorium he used a leafy alfresco setting by the yacht club which enchanted the audience, who were ‘unable to believe that centuries had not melted away leaving them seated on the side of Mount Olympus to watch the gods at play’. Those gods included Larchmont children as fairies in wispy white. The library received $1,500. St Clair gave his Bottom, out of whose mouth came the words that encapsulated the Weltanschauung of his common-law wife, who was a patroness in the audience: ‘Let me do it. I can do it best.’