As a result, Florence in her own quaintly naive way attempted to gag the press. ‘Are you a … a newspaperman?’ she once asked a suspect gentleman who personally applied for tickets at her apartment. ‘No, Madame Jenkins,’ he replied. ‘A music-lover.’ ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Two-fifty each, please. Now would you like some sherry?’
The recitals acquired a cult popularity. In St Clair’s estimation this was down to what he called her ‘star quality’. This was something he knew about, having observed it at close quarters in the theatre – he certainly didn’t have it himself. ‘On the stage a person will draw the attention of the whole audience,’ he explained. ‘There is something about her personality that makes everyone look at her with relish. That is what my wife had.’
In 1930 there were three hundred in the audience, but when word spread the number swelled to eight hundred. In 1935 there was standing room only as the Musical Courier’s account of the evening became a little less coded. ‘Outbursts of applause punctuated the items presented’ was another way of saying that the clapping interrupted the singing. This increasingly happened at Florence’s recitals: applause was deployed as a way of shrouding guffaws which could not be stifled. McArthur once saw a man stuff his handkerchief into his mouth and roll out of his chair onto the floor.
‘Don’t go away,’ she would say at the end of a set of songs. ‘I’ll be right back.’ Nobody was going anywhere. The cheers were appreciative and even sincere. Madame Jenkins needed no encouragement, but she got it anyway. ‘A frequently wildly applauding audience left no doubt of the enjoyment derived by the throng.’ In 1936 the ‘eagerly awaited’ concert was watched by the New York World-Telegram and ‘a large and highly responsive audience’. Next year the paper was back to hear Florence.
Of course, with due respect to the other artists, the audience had really come to hear the stylistic and inimitable song-readings of Mme Jenkins. And, to tell the truth, there was more than gratification for all the listeners present. Mme Jenkins’s art is many-faceted. It makes no specialty of any one composition or, for that matter, of any one composer. Witness the exacting – not to say exhausting – list of offerings the soprano had chosen for herself. Needless to state, Mme Jenkins gave her interpretative abilities full and untrammeled sway … and that it was so was attested to by the cataract of audible sounds from the hearers that greeted her at practically every one of her nonchalantly tossed off phrases and again by the torrent of applause that followed every selection.
So her Ritz-Carlton concerts were rowdy affairs, but rarely did the behaviour of her spectators take on a malicious flavour. According to McMoon, ‘the audience nearly always tried not to hurt her feelings by outright laughing, so they developed a convention that whenever she came to a particularly excruciating discord or something like that, where they had to laugh, they burst into these salvos of applause and whistles and the noise was so great that they could laugh at liberty.’
St Clair’s memory was different, that the misbehaviour stemmed from the enmity of aspiring singers whom she had not booked for the Verdi Club. ‘Many artists had it in for her,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t hire everyone, so those she didn’t hire for the concerts she sponsored became jealous. They formed a little claque that went to her concerts to laugh.’ Increasingly St Clair made it his business to police the auditorium. ‘I tried to keep them out. At one concert I ordered that no one be allowed in the gallery except those to whom we had given free tickets. We gave many tickets away. When the concert began, the guying started. It came from the gallery. I went up and told those people they had no right to guy when they were guests of the artists. People are so ignorant.’ It was perhaps to discourage misconduct that in the late 1930s the recitals started to omit the intermission.
But the ignorance was more a question of behaviour than of judgement; even St Clair could not defend Florence to the hilt. ‘She had perfect rhythm,’ he said. ‘Her interpretation was good and her languages wonderful. She had the star quality. You could feel that in the applause. People may have laughed at her singing, but the applause was real. She was a natural-born musician. But instrument, there was very little instrument.’ His euphemistic appraisal was not open to misinterpretation: even St Clair knew Florence could not sing.
However absurd she may have seemed as a singer, or as the costumed chatelaine of the Silver Skylark tableaux vivants making her climactic appearance, Florence knew how to charm and persuade. Principally through her tireless leadership, the Verdi Club had jostled a position for itself as a significant presence in New York. In 1933 Florence’s annual recital at the Ritz-Carlton with the Pascarella Chamber Music Society was sandwiched in the New York Times’s concert listings between two performances by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall. The following year her concert was announced in the same column as others involving Jascha Heifetz, Paul Robeson and Otto Klemperer. Another year a Verdi Club recital was listed in the same column inches as news of Prokofiev and Enescu conducting in New York.
Meanwhile leading sopranos beat a path to the club’s door. In March 1932 the Swedish dramatic soprano Göta Ljungberg inspired an ecstatic review from the Times singing Isolde in her debut season at the Met (whose audience ‘applauded and recalled her … with a fervor that had not attended any Metropolitan performance of this work in years’). In November Ljungberg opened the new season at the Verdi Club. She signed her photograph in the programme ‘to Mme Florence Foster Jenkins: with love and sincere admiration’. Then there was Elda Vettori, an Italian-born former hatshop girl from St Louis who made her Met debut in 1926 (to ‘deafening and insistent applause’). She went on to sing Aida and, opposite Antonio Scotti, Tosca. She hailed Madame Jenkins as an ‘incomparable woman and artiste’ and ‘an inestimable friend to all worthy musicians’, and offered her ‘warmest appreciation of your extraordinary accomplishments’. ‘To the lovely and gifted Lady Florence Foster Jenkins,’ said Texan soprano Leonora Corona, another Met Aida. This stream of bouquets cannot have failed to add another ring of steel to Florence’s adamantine self-belief.
To such a generous patron of the arts, the acquisition of what sounded like an aristocratic English title will have felt like a comfortable fit. She had the decency to deploy inverted commas, as if aware of the transgression. ‘Happy Easter! To Charlie and Betty with love from “Lady Florence”.’ To her accompanist she wrote, ‘To the very best accompanist Edwin McArthur and his charming wife Blanche. With my love from “Lady Florence” July 19th, 32.’
The exchange and mart system of patronage and flattery by which Florence profited extended from soloists to composers. New compositions came her way from the likes of Charles Haubiel (‘Song’), Elmer Russ (‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’) and Luigi Dell’Orefice (‘Notte’). A programme note would clarify that they were ‘dedicated to Mme Jenkins’. Sometimes her accompanist would be unseated so that the composer could leap onstage and play along with the soloist. One such was Grace Bush, whose ‘Spring Gladness’ offered ‘opportunity for the exuberant style of Mme Jenkins’ according to the Musical Courier. Most egregiously, Louis Drakeford wrote a piece called ‘Your Slave Am I’. At a certain point Florence turned to writing lyrics herself, the first of which McMoon either offered or consented to set to music. Premiered in Newport in 1933, the piece took the name of ‘Trysting Time’.
Beneath a rare June moon,
In the fragrant leafy cove
Of a bower of honeysuckle,
I’m waiting for my love.
And mem’ries, Ah, so tender,
That crowd my reverie,
Seem softly to be whisper’d
By the murmur of the sea.
Oh, hours of weary waiting
By the cliffs that gauntly tower,
So lonely and so beauteous
Stilled by the rock’s majestic power.
And then, and then,
At last, your arms around me
The rain of kisses on my lips,
Your dark eyes burning into mine,
The world forgot, my soul complete.
Hearing these sentiments people had no choice but to clap. Later, Adolf Pollitz brought Florence a bunch of trailing arbutuses from his home in Oyster Bay, and she was inspired to write a song in memory of a wintry equestrian outing with her now dead and buried father to find the rare flower. ‘The scent of Arbutus fills the air,’ she concluded. ‘To my aching heart, it brings a message, Of hope and joy, to the love that is there.’ Elmer Russ, who was a very successful composer, set it to music.
Florence migrated between pianists, all of whom were tasked with keeping a straight face and supplying sympathetic accompaniment. None of them was exposed to her over a longer period than McMoon. At some point after his death a rumour bloomed that McMoon was actually an exotic pseudonym behind which Edwin McArthur protected his identity and his dignity as he played for Florence. It’s true that McMoon was an invented surname. He was born Cosme McMunn in 1901 in a small town in the Mexican state of Durango. His father, whose parents emigrated during the great potato famine, was of Irish descent. The McMunns were uprooted again in 1911: to escape the revolution in Mexico, they moved to San Antonio in Texas. Unlike the rest of the family, the young Cosme gave his name a charismatic tweak, perhaps to encourage the pronunciation he’d grown up with in Mexico. As an eighteen-year-old with a new surname he started appearing in local recitals in the summer of 1919; he had the chutzpah to unveil a composition of his own in a recital also offering Chopin, Brahms, Grieg and Liszt. He soon made for New York where in 1922 the Musical Courier caught him in performance and predicted ‘a bright future … He has real talent and, in addition, a pleasing stage appearance.’
In his recollection, McMoon met Florence socially about a year before the death of Mrs Foster. In fact he performed as a guest soloist at her first Ritz-Carlton recital several years earlier in 1925. His contribution drew on his origins: he performed a Mexican tune called ‘Jarabe’ and a waltz of his own creation which he titled ‘Dolores’. In 1931 he played the song again when Florence was invited to give a recital at the home of friends in Fayetteville in upstate New York. By now McMoon was one of her regular accompanists and he had written a Spanish song of which she was, naturally, the dedicatee. (Consistent with the unspoken arrangement by which invitations were reciprocated, their hostess that evening was Claire Alcee, a singer who would open the season for the Verdi Club a month later.)
It wasn’t easy for any of Florence’s accompanists but some kept their dignity better than others. When she was performing the Jewel Song from Faust at her recital in 1934, at a certain point the lighting fell on McArthur in such a way that the audience laughed. Whatever he’d done by accident to stimulate the laugh he did again by design. Florence was furious. ‘I suppose you won’t have anything to do with me now,’ he said. ‘I certainly will not!’ she replied.
Almost instantly McArthur traded up. In February 1935 the Norwegian dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad made her debut at the Met as Sieglinde in Die Walküre. It was broadcast all over America, as were other performances which established her as the world’s leading Wagnerian soprano. Her popularity was such that she could rake in huge sums for the indigent Met when appealing for donations during broadcast intermissions. McArthur applied for the post as her accompanist and was promptly hired to tour with her, later becoming her conductor too, with whom she insisted upon working all the way through to her retirement. From Jenkins to Flagstad – no sopranos’ accompanist has ever made a more antipodean transition from the ridiculous to the sublime.
McMoon also struggled. ‘It wasn’t only trying to keep a straight face, but she would leave out whole parts of a song unexpectedly. You were always hard put to follow her.’ Others found that McMoon milked the concerts for comedy. ‘I thought it was terrible,’ remembered Verdi Club member Florence Malcolm Darnault. ‘He was paid as an accompanist and then laughed while he played the accompaniment and winked at the audience. He lived on her, she gave him everything.’
Darnault had a pivotal role to play in what was both the greatest and the most revealing moment in the Verdi Club’s history. Since the death of Caruso, much the grandest figure to drift into the orbit of the club was the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, whose latest sojourn in America coincided with his disenchantment with Fascism in his native Italy. The conductor’s political sympathies were not necessarily shared by the predominantly Republican world of women’s clubs. One New Yorker cartoon by Helen Hokinson, whose speciality was twitting the activities of the clubs, depicted a president addressing the members thus: ‘The vote is now fifteen to one that we deplore Mussolini’s attitude. I think it would be nice if we could go on record as unanimously deploring Mussolini’s attitude.’ Among those not deploring his attitude would have been Florence. When the National Fascist Militia Band arrived from Rome for a long tour in 1934, touting themselves as ‘ambassadors of goodwill uniting the musical hearts of America and Italy’, she was one of the sixteen honorary patrons for their Carnegie Hall concert in August.
That year Toscanini attended the grand unveiling of a new bronze portrait of Verdi by Darnault. He was joined in the ballroom of the Plaza by the Italian consul general and Baroness Katharine Evans von Klenner, an elderly doyenne of music education who picked up the title when she married an Austrian diplomat. Darnault was not yet thirty, and it should have been a career high to have her work shown in such company, but it was marred by what she later called ‘the worst thing that ever happened’.
I was excited. It was going to be a very nice unveiling and a lot of people were there who were friends of mine. They came and told me to come onstage right away because they were going to have the unveiling and I said, ‘Well, where is Mrs. Jenkins?’ ‘She’s in that room there.’ I went off the stage and there’s the room where people get ready. I opened the door and looked in and there she was. Half naked. Sitting there without a thing and her wig was sitting there alongside on the table. She was completely bald. Completely shiny. I just couldn’t believe it. But completely shiny. She was polished. I was so embarrassed because I’d seen it and now she knew it. She saw me in the mirror. She gave a yell [ … ] I never said a word about it to her.
Darnault’s bronze showed the composer in the Grecian style, with bare shoulders. The bust was mounted on a modernist base with a thickly whorled surface. A fan hailed the new work in the Times: ‘Since seeing it I have felt that there is hope for American art … that America was really coming into an art of its own, for the sculptor appeared young and represented today. If that is the art of today, then we are having a great day.’ Darnault duly picked up other commissions. At the end of the same year her portrait of the Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, brother of the late Charles, was gifted to the Actors Fund of America. In a speech at the unveiling St Clair was one of the actors paying tribute to Frohman, who was sufficiently moved to commission a bust of his brother from Darnault. Florence, having recovered from Darnault’s visit to her dressing room, attended a reception Frohman held for the sculptress before its completion. And yet according to Kathleen Bayfield, Darnault was never paid the $2,000 due to her for her bust of Verdi.
Among those who knew her, Florence’s stinginess was by now an accepted fact. By the 1940s her investments gave her an income of $12,000 a year, from which she paid $2,000 to run the Verdi Club; the rent on her apartment in the Seymour cost her $330 a month, and St Clair’s apartment was a further $1,050 a year. These, claimed St Clair, were her only extravagances. ‘Instead of sitting back with a French maid and a chauffeur and going to swell restaurants,’ he said, ‘she economised all the time so she would have enough money for her clubs.’ Others with a less rose-tinted perspective took a harsher line. ‘As far as money was concerned Mrs Jenkins was tricky,’ Darnault recalled. ‘She was very careful about money.’ Darnault remembered once buying a coat for $12 which Florence admired. ‘She called me up, and she said to me, “Have you heard about those coats?” I said,
“Yes, I have one.” I had bought one and I fooled everybody, so I said, “Well, I’ll show it to you,” and she said, “Oh, that’s stunning, a beautiful coat.” And she went and bought one and she wore it everywhere, and everybody thought it was fur.’ Florence didn’t disabuse them. (According to Darnault, Florence was a dowdy dresser who ‘just didn’t know how to put things together. She never looked smart.’)
In Darnault’s experience Madame Jenkins was evasive when it came to picking up bills too. ‘She’d say, “Let’s get a cab,” and she’d always get me or anybody else to pay the bill, always, always. And I got so that I’d never, never go out. She’d ask me to come to lunch, but she never paid, never. She had asked me to lunch one day, and we had lunch in a very nice restaurant in a very good hotel. And then she got a phone call, and she went to answer the phone. She sent the bellboy back saying she just had to rush.’
For all her personal charm – Darnault ‘never heard her say a mean thing about a human being’ – Florence was deeply untrusting, particularly of those in professions where trust was an essential element of the relationship. Her suspicion of lawyers was rooted in the trauma of her father’s will case but also perhaps in a deeper ambivalence about her father himself, who for a long time she feared had disinherited her. It found expression in the sheer number of law firms she instructed between 1913 and 1944. Although she was nominally Episcopalian, and came of devout stock, ministers of the church earned her disapproval too. As for dentists, ‘They’re the biggest frauds of all,’ she once said. And perhaps thanks to her experience of marriage, she had very low esteem for the medical profession.
Once, she noticed Adolf Pollitz talking to her about something to do with club business with his eyes closed. ‘You closed your eyes!’ she exclaimed in disbelief. Florence kept her searching blue eyes open all the time. ‘She didn’t trust,’ said Pollitz. ‘She watched all the time.’ Both he and Darnault suspected that she didn’t even trust St Clair.
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