Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  In fact she had some reason. Until the end of her life Florence was able to count on St Clair’s devotion. She held him utterly in her sway. He was expected to dine with her at six o’clock sharp, and he often accompanied her to the Met on Saturday nights. He ran errands for her and acted as her manager, wrote press releases, booked venues and even engaged the ushers for her Ritz-Carlton recitals. Most importantly, he was the creative director of her empire. It was St Clair’s long experience in the field, and his ability to recruit volunteers from professional theatre, which gave the Verdi Club’s operatic evenings and endless parade of tableaux vivants a patina of artistic credibility.

  In 1932 St Clair met and fell in love with an Englishwoman called Kathleen Weatherley. Nearly a quarter of a century his junior, Kathleen was born in St Pancras in 1899 and brought up in Surrey by her widowed mother; her father, an insurance underwriter, died when she was six. She worked as a music teacher until, needing a change in her early thirties, she volunteered for an organisation which sent missionaries around Canada. The Caravan Mission was the creation of a formidable spinster from the north of England called Eva Hasell. With only a lifelong companion for support, Miss Hasell marshalled a fleet of Ford vans which took Christian succour into the furthest rural reaches of the vast Canadian landmass. She spent the winter recruiting in England and beyond – two women per truck, one of them required to be strong enough to handle the vehicle over off-road terrain. Kathleen was one of a large group of ladies whose passage was paid for by Miss Hasell in May 1931.

  The same month, nearly three decades on from his first appearance in Everyman, St Clair joined an eighteen-strong reunion of the Ben Greet Players for a charity performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It went so well at the American Women’s Association, with a string quartet supplying snippets of Mendelssohn’s music for the Dream, that the whole thing was done again twice in July at the George Washington Stadium with the New York Orchestra. St Clair spent the rest of that summer in England. At a certain point after her summer duties were done, Kathleen gravitated towards New York. There she had Australian friends who gave a tea party to which St Clair was also invited.

  By the time St Clair met Kathleen, what passed for ardour in his relationship with Florence had eased and the separate living quarters at West 37th Street which she paid for and he lived in now became a convenient hideaway in which to conduct this new liaison. After Florence’s death St Clair explained away the oddity of two separate apartments for an allegedly married couple as an escape for both of them. ‘It was our retiring place where we got away from the telephone and railroad tactics of the Seymour,’ he said. ‘The phone was always ringing there. My wife had connections with more than three thousand people.’ But he overstated the frequency of Florence’s visits, and her absence now worked to his advantage.

  He called her Kay and she called him Bay. Kathleen was tall and thin but otherwise her attraction for St Clair was not dissimilar to Florence’s: she too had a domineering personality. It wasn’t quite domineering enough to persuade St Clair to break with Florence. He simply didn’t have the strength of character to cut himself off from the privileged access to high society that Florence provided, while Florence in turn insisted he continue in his role as her escort and artistic director. If anything, his commitment to the Verdi Club’s annual jamboree increased after he met Kathleen. In 1933 he wrote, directed and acted in a play called The Dream of King Henry VIII, in which six matrons of the Verdi Club played the king’s wives. It was adjudged ‘imaginative and poetic to a high degree’ by the Musical Courier. In 1934 he wrote a paean to the American revolution called A Romance of ‘76. In 1935 he adapted Schiller’s Mary Queen of Scots. The spectacular tableaux vivants were as ever his artistic dominion and responsibility. He also popped up elsewhere. In 1937 at Florence’s Newport recital he read from As You Like It, shared stories of the great actors with whom he had been associated and recited verses he’d written as a disenchanted young man eager to run off and join the circus.

  And his personal commitment to Florence did not waver throughout the decade. His 1939 diary reveals a routine that was built principally around Florence, interspersed with a supporting role for Kathleen alongside fleeting references to Chamberlain and Hitler. Florence is referred to in the diary as B (for Brownie). ‘January 20th. Wrote Kay. B & self dined City Club. A very delightful quiet evening. January 21st. With B to Cavalleria and Pagliacci at Metropolitan which we enjoyed very much. January 22nd. Lunch with B. B at dinner. January 23rd. Quiet evening with B.’ Kathleen was occasionally out of town but whenever she was in New York the diary looks like the journal of an affair narrated in code. ‘K arrived … Lunch K … K called late … Walked in park with K … Tea with K.’ One night Kathleen went ‘as substitute for B to Carnegie Hall’. But the abbreviations and gnomic annotations cannot hide the bias of his loyalty. Next to ‘B looking well and so glad of that’ on 19 March, St Clair drew a heart. There is only one sign of discord: a few days before Germany invaded Poland, when he was performing in Provincetown, he received an ‘angry letter from B’. He was always on hand for the big events. ‘March 9th. Verdi Club “Ball of the Silver Skylark” went off very well … July 19th. Took B’s Birthday presents.’ And most loyally of all, whatever he later said in interviews after Florence’s death, in the privacy of his diary he revealed an unshakeable conviction that her singing more than passed muster. ‘B sang well last night … B sang extremely well … Heard B singing – very good … B sang delightfully at night. B sang better than ever in public. Floral tributes. A triumph for B.’ And then at the end of the year, ‘B sang at night but became very exhausted and alarmed me.’

  St Clair’s concern for Florence’s health seems not to have been reciprocated. He was often ill in 1939, either generally off colour or with a swollen left side of his face, but made no note of her concern for him. The discrepancy in their status was at its starkest in the heat of summer. As she got older she rented an air-conditioned apartment at the Shelton Hotel in Lexington Avenue, while still maintaining her Seymour Hotel apartment and allowing St Clair to roast on West 37th Street. Previously when the season ended, and before the Wall Street Crash, he had the funds to escape to England to stroll around the Cotswolds and recharge. But St Clair didn’t go home again after 1931, not even when his father died in a London hospital in April 1937. It was just as well that he was keen on exercise, because as often as not he would follow Florence to the ocean where she’d stay in the Westchester Club while he rented a modest room as close by as he could afford. One entry in his diary during the Depression offered a grim vignette of the distribution of power between them: ‘It was a long, hot walk up to the Westchester Club, two miles.’ A similar situation would arise when she moved to Newport for her annual concert. Florence would stay with wealthy friends in hotels or the resort’s well-appointed cottages, while St Clair would languish in a rooming house. At least the ocean enabled him to swim great distances.

  And so St Clair lived a second secret life. While his own common-law wife denied him in public, he had to ensure she did not discover his new relationship with a woman more than three decades her junior. They were safest away on furtive trips out of town. A photograph of them together taken beside the ocean shows the couple in their bathing costumes – a two-tone belted singlet for him, a floral one-piece for her. Kathleen is perched on St Clair’s shoulders, her feet and calves tucked behind his back. They smile brightly for the camera. St Clair is a lean, scraggy figure with pipe-cleaner legs, a high forehead with light hair and always those protruding ears. Kathleen is svelte with narrow shoulders, slender legs and an oval face with short brown hair. She is wearing a thick necklace of beads or shells. They look physically intimate.

  Florence paid rare visits to St Clair’s flat and on one near-disastrous occasion Kathleen was there. ‘He had risked much to have me to his apartment,’ she recalled. ‘It was July 4th weekend and hot as hell. Suddenly the doorbell rang at his apartment at 7am. He knew
instinctively what it was; quickly he told me to get into the closet leading out of the north room. It was all jumbled up with Verdi Club theatricals. As she came in he suddenly spied my very pretty green leather mules under the bed, but he stood in front of them. She only visited for about five minutes. It was the worst I’ve ever experienced. For him it would have been agony if she had found out, though he always said she was psychic … I knew that if anything happened he would desert me at once. He was absolutely tied to her by an umbilical cord.’

  After five years Kathleen’s inability to prise St Clair away from Florence’s clutches drove her back to England – it’s not clear for how long – but she returned to the US in the summer of 1937. If Florence knew about her rival, those in her circle in the Verdi Club were never vouchsafed a hint from her. Adolf Pollitz was convinced that she knew all about St Clair and Kathleen but was content to turn a blind eye so long as there was no public scandal. No matter the double standard this position entailed. After the outbreak of the Second World War, when Kathleen was heading back to Britain to enlist, Florence told a member of the Verdi Club that St Clair had an English friend who was joining up. The member replied that he expected every loyal Englishman would follow suit. ‘It isn’t a man, it’s a woman,’ came the tart reply. ‘And I hope the boat sinks!’

  Kathleen once went to a Verdi Club ball and took along some British merchant seamen in uniform. ‘He [St Clair] said I should be lost amongst the crowd and not observed and he could have a dance with me. I had on a lovely white ball gown with a peculiar velvet sash and he looked ravishing in his tails. I was sitting on a side table and beckoned him as he came round. Somehow or other we missed, and he didn’t hear me call out “St Clair!” as he passed and he didn’t notice me. He had so much on his mind, naturally anxious that the ball should go well. I was so timid and also scared of anything going wrong that I should have been noticed. I would have loved to dance with St Clair at the Plaza ballroom. He often talked of it after and he felt the sadness of it really acutely.’

  As the 1930s drew to a close the cult of Lady Florence acquired an unstoppable momentum, and she did everything to encourage it. In the annual tableaux vivants she transmogrified variously into Louis XV’s mistress the Comtesse du Barry (in a golden wig and gown) in a Three Musketeers tableau, and then Catherine the Great (in which guise she was ‘the cynosure of interest’). In every one of her triumphant apotheoses, she was blissfully unaware of the judgement of younger onlookers. Florence Darnault remembers her appearing as Aida, this time to sing. ‘She came out in costume, she had all these harem women, she had all the other faces darkened, but she didn’t darken hers. These women were all dark, none of them sang, they couldn’t sing a tone, they were from the Verdi Club, they were all big women and they all had these chiffon trousers … I think that was the worst I ever saw, I think that was really the end of everything.’

  And yet Lady Florence was increasingly sought after and celebrated. In 1938 she gave a private recital to two hundred guests at a house in Queens, and embarked on her first ever concert tour of New England. In McMoon’s memory these were dismally attended; in Provincetown she sang to an audience of fifteen. When she returned to embark on the Verdi Club’s twenty-first season, she was presented with a portrait bust of herself. The sculptress was Baroness Liane de Gidro, whose previous subjects had included Caruso, Liszt and Mussolini. A jowly and resolutely unflattering bronze portrait was unveiled in a ceremony directed by St Clair and attended by, among others, the Italian consul general and a retired rear admiral who spoke of the great contribution made by women as society’s champions of culture. To add to the jollity of the occasion, a motion picture of one of Madame Jenkins’s recent concerts was shown to the 250 guests. Florence’s Ritz-Carlton recital was now filmed as a matter of course, and then shown at subsequent musicales. Verdi Club members were encouraged to ‘come and see yourselves as you appear in a moving picture’.

  As Florence’s career as a society soprano continued to levitate, the career of her vocal coach Henriette Wakefield ran aground. She made her last appearance with the Met in 1935, and became the chairman of the Verdi Club. Under Wakefield’s aegis, on 9 October 1939, the club celebrated Verdi’s birthday with a morning musicale at the Regis Hotel, as it did every year. A soprano sang, a violinist fresh off the boat from Czechoslovakia played. And the address was given by Edward Page Gaston, a temperance activist and vocal supporter of returning the remains of Pocahontas from England to her native America. The title of his lecture took the form of a question: ‘What Would Verdi Do If He Lived Today?’ Some in the audience perhaps considered the possibility that if Verdi were indeed alive in the 1930s, he would have been relieved of the task of spinning in his grave.

  10: QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

  On 15 April 1940 an enumerator for the US census visited the Seymour Hotel. There were thirty-three inhabitants, listed as ‘guests’. The majority came from all over the country, while another three were English, one German and one Irish. Florence’s name was last but one. She described herself as a widow. In the box where her age was entered, the number sixty-six has been circled, perhaps on grounds of implausibility. While even St Clair Bayfield was unsure of her true age, in reality she was a few months shy of her seventy-second birthday. Even more questionably, in the column marked ‘Occupation. Trade, profession, or particular kind of work, as – frame spinner, salesman, laborer, rivet heater, music teacher’, Florence described herself as a ‘concert singer’. Three days later she did indeed sing in a concert in Washington where she performed, among others, works by Handel, Gluck, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and McMoon.

  While the audiences at the Ritz-Carlton paid to take part in an uproarious celebration of her uniqueness, in the capital Florence could still count on a respectful reception. Although her Washington-based sister-in-law Alice had died in 1935, the audience continued to consist of a handpicked gathering from the worlds of politics, the military and high society. From the evidence of her next trip, in April 1941, she seemed to be able to hand-pick her own critic too. Someone called Bartlett B. James (PhD) wrote a gushing encomium containing artful arabesques of approval. Florence’s programme was ‘of such excellence that it will stand out among the notable performances of this New York musical celebrity. The hall was filled and the audience select, critical and appreciative.’ Dr James chose to contextualise her recital as cultural balm available to sensitive Americans while Europe girded itself for the next phase of self-immolation. A snippet of Haydn, her rendition of ‘Ah, fors’è lui’, plus bits and pieces by minor composers including McMoon – all moved Dr James to see her work as a contribution on a larger plain.

  In her great musical achievements in New York, in Newport, and in the nation’s capital, Florence Foster Jenkins is vindicating the as yet but faintly realised type of society. That in which, even as God is symbolically represented as walking in the gardens of Eden, the spirit of man will move triumphantly amid the ruins of economic and mechanistic force – or the shadows of its unloveliness. By thus weaving the singer’s performances into basic significance it is possible to see in them the continuity, amid chaos, of the things which endure and enlarge. Thus, was it interpreting, her program – uplifting!

  If this hyperbole was tongue-in-cheek, it wore a straight-faced disguise.

  The war was soon to leave its stamp on New York. Rationing, shortages and blackouts became commonplace. There were meat shortages at the Astor and Waldorf-Astoria, which did not dissuade officers from heading for the roof to dance under the stars. Brooklyn Navy Yard became the busiest shipyard in the world. Women, personified as ‘Rosie the Riveter’, took men’s places on the production line, while there was a growing presence in the streets of young men in uniform, all of whom wanted entertaining. One or two managed to scalp a ticket to Florence’s recitals. Concerts to support ‘Bundles for Britain’ were hosted at Carnegie Hall, where on the day the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, audiences were not told until
the New York Philharmonic had finished.

  The war seemed to pass Florence by. The First World War had galvanised her; her compulsion to do good fundraising work for the Red Cross had greatly contributed to establishing the reputation of the Verdi Club. Now the Verdi Club simply marched on. The season just ended included a Ball of the Silver Skylarks in which Florence outgunned herself as an apparition of majestic absurdity. The occasion featured a grand pageant in which members were given the opportunity to dress up not only as iconic figures from literature, the arts, history and legend, but also as the performers who brought them to life on stage and screen. Thus Mrs Ross Raymond Sigsbee became Geraldine Farrar as Musetta in La Bohème, Mrs Oliver Pittman Cooke became the Milanese soprano Amelita Galli-Curci as Gilda from Rigoletto; from the silver screen Mrs Louis Dana Knowlton impersonated Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette, Feodor Nikanov dressed up as Valentino in The Sheik, perhaps hoping that women would faint as they had at the original in the film. Theatrical doyennes included Lillian Russell in Wildfire and Julia Marlow as Mary Tudor. There was a Schubert, a D’Oyly Carte, a Nell Gwynne, a Salome, a Carmen and a Violetta. Someone came as the Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind, another as Anna Pavlova doing the Blue Danube Waltz. Exhuming the memory of a former club member, Mr Franklin Schalk even dressed up as the great Caruso as Don Alvaro. And of course there was a Verdi.

  Around forty people paraded around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria before the grand finale. The theme of this last tableau vivant was ‘Stephen Foster Inspired by the Angel of Genius’, in which a painting by Howard Chandler Christy was reproduced with living figures. This was a double celebration of great Americans. Foster was universally acknowledged as the father of American music, whose songs from the middle of the nineteenth century included ‘Camptown Races’, ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’. Christy was the great popular painter of the age. He made his name with stirring images of military combat and appeals to patriotic duty on recruitment posters before spending the interwar years obsessively documenting every contour of the naked female form; he married one of his models, then, after a bitter and public divorce, married another (who was a Verdi Club member). He had a child with a third.