Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  Meanwhile, in the week of her mother’s passing, Wilkes-Barreans were informed of the Verdi Club president’s most recent recital, and a photograph which had appeared in the New York society columns. ‘Mrs Jenkins’s costumes,’ the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported, ‘were extraordinarily rich and costly, and the one in which she was pictured was Oriental, with pearl-seeded turban, earrings of cabochon stones, and a white silk brocade robe.’ Even if the recital took place before Florence’s bereavement, her old home town did not approve of this mode of display.

  The death of Florence’s mother brought the other half of her father’s fortune into her possession. She therefore became twice as comfortable just as America plunged into the Great Depression. The jobless started to queue at Salvation Army soup kitchens and camp in Central Park shanty towns, while in 1931 nearly a hundred people starved to death in New York. Not all privileged New Yorkers noticed. ‘I don’t think I was aware of the poverty of the Thirties,’ said writer and editor Claudia Stearns. Those who did have their eyes open saw that musicians were not immune. ‘You’d be walking down the street,’ recalled one eyewitness, ‘and somebody would say, “See that guy there? He used to be with the New York Symphony…” They’d just be sittin’ there dejected with a wine bottle in their hands.’

  The immensely rich simply became a little less rich. ‘We just don’t have money the way people used to have it,’ moaned Laurence Rockefeller. Various Vanderbilts and their ilk upped sticks from their burdensomely staffed palaces and moved into the big hotels. Further down the scale, people stopped employing maids. But the charity balls continued; the Metropolitan Opera remained a haven of conspicuous display. By one reckoning, the box holders on opening night had a collective wealth of nearly a billion dollars. Florence had a pair of tickets for the Met every Saturday evening in the season, but her finances did not qualify her for membership of this stratosphere. According to the calculation of an article on ‘society and near-society’ published in America in 1932, entrance into the New York Social Register, the elite directory of prominent families, was open to pretty much anyone who had an annual income of $20,000. Even in the 1940s Florence’s income from her invested wealth was $12,000.

  The 1930s was a period of great popularity for opera, even for those who couldn’t afford the tickets. The first entire production was broadcast on American radio in 1931. Three years later Four Saints in Three Acts, written for an all-black cast by Virgil Thompson from a libretto by Gertrude Stein, became the longest-running opera in Broadway history. In the new age of celebrity, soprano superstars such as Geraldine Farrar and Lily Pons took opera towards the mainstream. And in 1940 an opera was telecast in the US for the first time.

  Florence was sixty-one when her mother died, and her appetite to perform only sharpened. There was the discreetest hint of this when, six months later, the annual Rose Breakfast closed the Verdi Club’s season at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club. After the Silver Skylarks Ball this was the most splendid event in the club’s calendar, for which the committee solicited hostesses to help run things six months in advance. The club laid on coaches to ferry members and their guests to the gathering, which always opened with the floral pageant known as the March of the Roses. There was a prize for the best-dressed woman in this promenade which in 1931 was awarded to Henriette Wakefield of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Perhaps the prize was a gift for services secretly rendered.

  Wakefield made her Met debut all the way back in 1907 and would go on to appear with the company nearly eight hundred times over just short of thirty years. She was by no means a name to sell tickets or take major roles. Among her many Wagnerian performances in 1912, for example, was Grimgerde, one of the nine Valkyries. Ten years later she had graduated to Waltraute, another of them. Another decade on she was still singing the role. But she had another clandestine occupation: Wakefield was Florence’s vocal instructor.

  How good or bad a musician was her pupil? Aside from the hired pianist seated at the Steinway in Florence’s Seymour Hotel apartment, only St Clair Bayfield knew the identity of Florence’s teacher. That Wakefield wished for no publicity implies that, long before the end, Florence’s singing abilities were no more than modest. The comportment of those who came to see her perform suggested as much. The 1930s found the cult of the singing president develop from an intimate cabal of devoted Verdi Club ladies to something larger and unrulier. But not all audiences were the same.

  By 1931 the principal building blocks of Florence’s recital calendar for the rest of the decade were all in place. Each spring she went down to Washington, DC to entertain the members of the League of American Pen Women, set up in 1897 to support female writers and artists. (Florence would eventually be anointed president.) The year after its foundation in 1936, she sang for the Order of the Three Crusades, open to those who, like Florence, could trace their ancestry back to the early crusaders; a senator and a major-general were among the audience. With the eminent organist Malton Boyce supplying discreet accompaniment, in St Clair Bayfield’s estimation these were the most successful of her annual engagements. The audience consisted of hand-picked insiders from the upper echelons of Washington society – including family members. These visits to the capital gave Florence a chance to resume relations with her sisters-in-law. In 1931 she gave a luncheon for fourteen guests, among them not only Alice Thornton Jenkins but also Frank’s youngest sisters whom she first knew in the 1880s as Nettie and Carrie. Nettie turned seventy that year. Florence was still keen to brag about a family connection which resonated in the capital: the Star reminded readers who her father-in-law was.

  Another annual tradition was inaugurated in Newport, Rhode Island. At the end of the summer holiday in 1931, Florence performed in the rooms of the Newport Historical Society. For several years she shared the bill with Leila Hearne Cannes, a pianist who was good enough to have her own featured hour on the radio in the late 1920s. She was also a fellow president, in her case of the Women’s Philharmonic Society, founded at the turn of the century to make musical performance accessible to the poorer parts of New York. ‘Both are artists of ability, quite at home with the best music,’ cooed the Newport Mercury and Weekly News reporter who ‘much enjoyed’ their concert in 1932. Florence brought along her own accompanist in the shape of Edwin McArthur.

  McArthur was a young Juilliard-trained pianist from Denver who in 1928 was barely twenty-one when Florence heard him performing at the Barbizon Hotel, a recently opened residence for professional women. She invited him for an interview at her apartment; it presumably took the form of an audition in which he had to accompany her. In 1930 he married and, like many who drifted into her orbit, was grateful for the work. ‘I got many engagements through our association,’ he said in an interview nearly twenty years after her death. He also attested that Florence was ‘intelligent and well-informed’.

  Florence gave two or three concerts a year at Sherry’s Hotel on Park Avenue, one showcasing living American composers, another in honour of Poetry Week, one for the Society of New York State Women (when ‘many encores were demanded’). But the summit of her annual round remained her Verdi Club recital. A club pamphlet which previewed forthcoming offerings ended with the promise – upper case as ever to the fore – that ‘features of the season will include a Song Recital given by the President in the Grand Ball Room of the Ritz-Carlton’. At the event itself, the Musical Courier was always on hand to serve up a pen portrait that showed Florence in the best possible light. The wording would deftly steer a diplomatic course between trading in outright falsehood and keeping a toehold in truth. A ‘brilliant’ audience ‘heard and applauded’ and ‘paid homage to president-soprano-hostess Jenkins, for in this triangular role she regally filled each part. It was the consensus of opinion that she never sang better.’ That was in 1930. ‘The musico-social affair invariably finds a large audience,’ it advised a year later, when the applause was ‘cordial’. ‘Doubtless the Blue Danube waltz, with its trills and staccato
, and “Clavelitos” provided the most enjoyment.’ A reader in the know might pick up encrypted signals that the writer was tipping them the wink. ‘The presence of various presidents of women’s clubs, of prominent musical and society folk, all combined to make the recital highly successful.’ The write-ups could be taken at face value, or understood to mean something more subversive.

  Florence’s repertoire was an eclectic grab-bag that displayed great knowledge, ranging from baroque via grand opera to folksy modern tunes. As embodied in the two masks on the Verdi Club emblem, she commuted between tragedy and comedy. Technical difficulties held no fear for Florence. If anything they spurred her on. In 1930 she launched an undaunted assault on ‘Elsa’s Dream’ from Lohengrin. Having already introduced songs by Strauss into her programmes, in due course she became only the second soprano in New York to sing Zerbinetta’s aria from Ariadne auf Naxos. Her rendition was ‘flowing and melodious,’ said one reviewer, ‘broken by an elaborate, coloratura cadenza climaxing in a high D’.

  Florence’s pursuit of altitude was a matter of personal pride. A singer who hit the high notes attracted notice. In 1930, starring in Gershwin’s Girl Crazy on Broadway, Ethel Merman sensationally held a high C for sixteen bars. While New Yorkers watched successive skyscrapers climb ever further away from the gathering poverty in the streets below, Florence practised in the hope of surpassing her own personal peaks. Her high B flats, high Cs and high Ds had something in common with King Kong scrambling to the spire of the just finished Empire State Building.

  The repertoire’s expansion over the years shows the volume of work she undertook to learn and practise new songs and arias. Indeed she was often complimented for her taste and for her industry. At her Newport recital in 1932 she presented songs ‘of the sort to be appreciated by those who know music when they hear it, for only those who are talented and have been carefully and skilfully instructed, and have done much conscientious work themselves, could present such a program as this’. Florence was nonchalant about scaling the perilous summits of Italian opera: she warbled her way through ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Il barbiere di Seviglia and ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca; she even roused the ghost of Verdi with her lovestruck version of Violetta’s ‘Ah, fors’è lui’ from La traviata. As the decade continued she started inserting little commentaries into her programmes – lavish productions in red ink printed on expensive silvered paper – which blithely solicited comparison with those who had gone before. When she took on Chapi’s ‘Las hijas del Zebedeo’ she advised that ‘its sparkling words, its fiery rhythm, and withal its authentic Spanish grace, have made this song a favorite parade ground of the great sopranos since the inimitable Garcia and Louisa [sic: her name was Luisa] Tetrazzini.’

  Florence was a singer for all moods and occasions: she attempted the stately (Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’) and the numinous (Gluck’s ‘Divinités du Styx’), lauded the almighty in Mozart’s ‘Alleluia’ and Bach’s ‘Jubilate’, and threw caution to the wind at the frenetic end of the repertoire, most audaciously of all in ‘Clavelitos’, a Spanish zarzuela sung at breakneck pace. Her rendition of Carl Gilberté’s ‘Laughing Song’ was replete with high hoots and coloratura cackles. And in her late sixties she could also unblushingly play the fragrant innocent in ‘The Virgin’s Slumber Song’.

  She was particularly attracted to songs which invoked a congruence between the soprano voice and the airborne twitterings of the bird kingdom: she sang of canaries and doves, larks and nightingales. The unintended irony was not lost on the audience when she sang a song called ‘Charmant Oiseau’ which was ‘interrupted by applause, for antiphonal and piquant singing stirred the hearers’. She even sang of wild geese, which was ‘especiall [sic] to those who are thrilled by the wild, free notes of these birds,’ said a reviewer perhaps reminded all too clearly of a goose’s squawks. And if a song floated free into the realm of the wordless, Florence would gamely give chase. A staple of hers was ‘Song Without Words’ by contemporary Dutch-American composer Richard Hageman (who would have a big hit composing the soundtrack to Stagecoach in 1939). It fetched up on a high D. Above all, her assault on Delibes’s ‘Indian Bell Song’ from Lakmé was destined to be preserved for the appreciation of posterity.

  But then Florence always accelerated with purblind enthusiasm towards a challenge. She explained with relish that Mozart’s ‘No, no, che non sei capace’ was composed for his sister-in-law ‘with whom at one time he had been in love but now detested, so as House-Composer compelled to write for her, he tried to make the aria impossibly difficult to sing’. She was hardly likely to duck that one. Languages did not present any obstacle either: she sang suites of songs in French, German, Italian, Russian, and even ventured fearlessly into the polysyllabic minefield that is Hungarian, accompanied by a Hungarian pianist who coached her linguistically. She had a special weakness for the drama and sexual heat of Hispanic music. Her programmes frequently offered Spanish and Mexican songs that found her flirting and swooning and sort of strutting.

  The dramatic comedy of Madame Jenkins in performance had a visual element too. Many years of dressing up for the Verdi Club tableaux vivants had given her a taste for fancy dress. In each recital the stage was ceded to the pianist or to an ensemble of Italian-American brothers who called themselves the Pascarella Chamber Music Society. While they played, Florence had time to pull on a new costume backstage – a sultry Mexican temptress in a sombrero, or a Russian peasant, or Hungarian national dress with flowers in her hair-piece. And she was a great believer in the power of props: a fan, a parasol, a spinning wheel for the garden scene from Faust (which was stored at St Clair’s apartment), a basket of carnations for ‘Clavelitos’ whose contents she would fling into the audience. The effect was topped off by her slapdash misapplication of make-up – lipstick smeared, rouge overdone.

  In each song she drew on her Philadelphia training to sell the story, but her style of delivery learned in youth was not necessarily suited to a woman advancing into old age. ‘Her gestures and expressions were just as funny as her singing,’ recalled Adolf Pollitz, a German immigrant who joined the Verdi Club as a young pianist. ‘She added histrionics to every number,’ recalled Cosme McMoon, ‘generally acting the action, 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.’

  Quite how unpromising a clotheshorse an elderly Florence must have seemed onstage is suggested by a set of photographs commissioned for Life magazine’s regular ‘Life Goes to a Party’ feature. They were taken by Margaret Bourke-White in 1937 at one of Florence’s Seymour Hotel soirées (though never published). A dozen guests in conventional evening dress mustered in her drawing room, including the caricaturist Al Hirschfield. It was an abstemious gathering: no one had a drink in their hand. Florence changed halfway through the evening from a floral print dress accessorised with scarves, jewels and a headdress to a carpet-sweeping gown which all too faithfully hugged her contours. Both were silk. In some of the images Florence is standing among her politely rapt guests singing, her eyes sometimes closing, her hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. In one photograph two middle-aged women were captured in the act of helping Florence out of a chair.

  It was on a night such as this that one witness peered into the bathroom off the long dark corridor leading to the drawing room, and saw the bathtub filled with a vast quantity of potato salad. When Florence catered, she catered in bulk. (For herself, she was a devotee of sandwiches and Manhattans.) A more permanent quirk of her apartment was a collection of upright dining chairs in which eminent Americans had supposedly breathed their last. People tending to die in their beds rather than at dinner, this has the look of another tall story. But through her various genealogical memberships, Florence would have had privileged access to the furniture of deceased generals, senators and judges and thus been able to pursue this arcane interest. Perhaps the collection included the chair of her
father-in-law, the rear admiral.

  Verdi Club concerts were free to the members but tickets could be bought by the public, which meant that audiences soon started to swell with non-loyalists who had never been to a Silver Skylark ball or a Rose Breakfast. Word spread in the early 1930s about the unique phenomenon of the singing president. In 1934 the audience contained a rogue element who paid $2 for a guest ticket, made their way to the back of the auditorium and laughed their heads off. New York critics were not invited to the concerts but a journalist (from an unidentified publication) snuck in to witness the event and broke cover in a short satirical sketch. It briefly outlined the history of the recitals and explained the source of Florence’s inherited wealth.

  ‘Mrs Jenkins,’ it calculated, ‘is well able to pay for the hall. Last week she hired the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and smartly dressed New Yorkers fairly fought for tickets to get in and see Florence Foster Jenkins perform.’ There was a description of her appearance in flaming velvet, her wig a pile of blonde ringlets, before the report moved on to the music. Florence began with two Brahms lieder. For ‘Die Mainacht’, the programme printed the composer’s admonition to the soloist: ‘O singer, if thou canst not dream, leave this song unsung.’ This was tempting fate. ‘Mrs Jenkins could dream if she could not sing,’ snarked the reviewer. The next song was titled no more propitiously: ‘With her hands clasped to her heart she passed on to “Vergebliches Standchen”, which she had labeled “The Serenade in Vain”.’ The audience, ‘as Mrs Jenkins’s audiences invariably do, behaved very badly. In the back of the hall men and women in full evening dress made no attempt to control their laughter.’ For the first time in print, someone had said it: Florence Foster Jenkins was a joke.