Florence Foster Jenkins

by Nicholas Martin

  St Clair and Kathleen bought a house in Westchester, while he invested his money and drew an annuity. A rare colour photograph of the Bayfields dressed up for a smart function shows St Clair still lean and imposing in old age. Kathleen clings to his arm, beaming proudly. Their marriage was not necessarily happy. A young pianist called Bill Brady, who lived at the time in Westchester, was introduced to the Bayfields by Adolf Pollitz and came to know them well. In 2006 he gave an interview in which he expressed the view that St Clair was not in love with Kathleen and would never have established contact with her after Florence’s death were he not destitute as he awaited the outcome of the court case. According to Brady, Kay was even more domineering than Florence, and St Clair became animated only when she was not present. As he related it, St Clair’s swimming injury rendered him sexually inactive, much to Kathleen’s frustration.

  The Bayfields returned to England several times in the 1950s, while St Clair kept in touch with grand dames of the English theatre. His correspondents included Edith Evans, with whom he shared a stage in The Lady with the Lamp in 1931, and Sybil Thorndike, whom he knew as one of the young Ben Greet Players in 1907. He also wrote to Flora Robson. His obituary in the New York Times reported that in 1948 he had gone back to London to join her in the cast of George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Confession; in fact he was making his last ever Broadway appearance, with former Hollywood starlet Nancy Carroll, in a comedy about a pair of stage actresses called For Heaven’s Sake, Mother!

  On his last trip to England, in 1959, St Clair described himself in the passenger manifest as a writer. The biography of Florence he embarked on was not his only way of memorialising her. Every July for several years he sent flowers to be laid on the Foster mausoleum at Wilkes-Barre on Florence’s birthday. He also dedicated a seat with her name in a theatre in Abington, Virginia, assembled a scrapbook of her Verdi Club cuttings and kept his collection of their five hundred letters.

  The last words he wrote to Kathleen told a different story: ‘To the most adorable woman I’ve met during my ninety years, my wife.’ At his ninetieth birthday celebration he sang shanties he remembered from his long sea voyage to New Zealand in the 1890s. He died on 19 May 1967 at the age of ninety-one. The following year a plaque in his memory was unveiled at the Larchmont Public Library, which in 1922 he had helped to fund by giving up his summer to direct a cast of local amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  His widow took on the manuscript of Florence’s biography but failed to find a publisher, one of whom advised her to write more about Florence and less about herself. She worked with two collaborators but fell out with both of them. The book never appeared and the manuscript was lost, along with the correspondence between Florence and St Clair, and a scrapbook of photographs of Florence. Nor did the auto-biographical jottings, found in the safe deposit box after Florence’s death, survive.

  Kathleen took better care preserving St Clair’s memory. In 1973 she endowed an annual award to honour the best performance in a supporting role by an actor in a Shakespearean play in the New York area. Until her death in 1988 she enjoyed attending the ceremony at the Actors’ Equity Association, and making the presentation. The winner received a cheque and an engraved crystal plaque. To this day, every year in New York, the St Clair Bayfield Award is presented to a performer who, for all their talent, must cede the limelight to a bigger star.

  EPILOGUE

  In 1957, fifty-one years after his arrival in America, Malton Boyce was last spotted accompanying a soloist on the organ as she sang ‘Ave Maria’ at a wedding in St Stephen’s church, Washington, DC. The Evening Standard in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, reported that ‘the service was lovely’.

  There are still Bulfords in Luzerne County.

  Lucile Collette did not fulfil her early promise as a violin prodigy and instead worked as a piano accompanist in New York. In 1953 she was foreman of a federal jury which convicted thirteen secondary Communist leaders of conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government. She suffered from failing eyesight and left most of her estate to the New York Association for the Blind.

  Florence Malcolm Darnault’s bronze portrait bust of Rear Admiral John K. Robison is in the US Naval Academy Museum. Her portrait bust of Giuseppe Verdi is, at the time of writing, available for purchase from Anthony’s Fine Art and Antiques, Salt Lake City, for $11,800 (global shipping available).

  On 22 August 1924 the Kansas tenor Ernest Davis sang at a Prom in Queen’s Hall, London. Under the baton of Sir Henry Wood he performed ‘Figlia mia’ from Handel’s Tamerlano (arranged by the conductor) and Haydn Wood’s ‘Love’s garden of roses’. He never made it to the Met.

  Fleming’s Castle in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, remained the headquarters of the Colonel Lowrey Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution until 2005.

  Ben Greet ran the Old Vic Theatre in London during the years of the Great War, where he produced and directed twenty-three of Shakespeare’s plays (and revived Everyman). During his tenure the theatre established links with over four hundred schools.

  The literary career of Thornton Jenkins Hains did not recover after his acquittal, although a prescient short story of his about an ocean-going liner striking an iceberg was published in the Popular Magazine in the same month as the Titanic sank. He had three more children soon afterwards, then another three between 1934 and 1941.

  Eva Hasell of the Caravan Mission continued to drive around the wildernesses of Canada until 1972, when she was eighty-four. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. A memorial to her can be found in St Andrew’s church, Dacre, Cumberland.

  Society proctologist Alcinous B. Jamison responded to the death of his wife, the president of the Euterpe Club, by adding to a list of publications which already included Intestinal Ills: Chronic Constipation, Indigestion, Autogenetic Poisons, Diarrhoea, Piles, Etc. and Intestinal Irrigation; Or, Why, How, and When to Flush the Colon with a volume titled Man: Whence and Whither. He included a foreword, written not by himself, that described him as ‘gifted with a clairvoyant faculty that enables him to see certain things and discern operations of natural law that are at present hidden from more than 99 percent of the human race’.

  After his disgrace Presley Jenkins stayed on in California. Settling in Alemeda over the water from San Francisco, he and his wife went on to have seven children. The last two were boys called Frank and Presley.

  Claudia Libbey’s second marriage lasted for fifty-five years. There were no children. In her uncontested divorce from the convicted killer Captain Peter Hains she lost custody of their three children and was never allowed to see them again. Her second son Hamilton was awarded the Legion of Merit for services in the South Pacific by President F. D. Roosevelt in 1944. He retired as Rear Admiral Hains.

  After his years as the accompanist of Kirsten Flagstad, Edwin McArthur was appointed music director of St Louis Municipal Opera, in which post he remained for twenty-three years; he also conducted the Harrisburg Symphony in Pennsylvania for twenty-four years. In 1976 he conducted Die Walküre in Naples, perhaps the least Wagnerian city in the whole of Europe. He was not, despite the rumours, the real Cosme McMoon.

  After Attorney John McGahren died in 1921 his widow put his farm in Trucksville up for sale. It comprised ‘100 acres in highest state of cultivation; 10 acres of timber; 2 houses, Manor house improved this Spring; 2 barns filled with a bumper crop just harvested; acres of potatoes and cabbage; orchard laden with fruit; 7 registered cows; 4 heifers, chickens, 3 horses, harness, wagons; all new machinery. No agents.’

  Cosme McMoon developed an interest in bodybuilding. In 1974 at the Mr Olympia contest he was photographed being held aloft by Arnold Schwarzenegger and another bodybuilder. He lived in New York until, suffering from pancreatic cancer, he returned to San Antonio, Texas, in 1980, where he died two days later.

  For many years Adolf Pollitz played the piano for the Ben Cutler Orchestra in New York. In later life h
e returned to Oyster Bay, where the widowed Kathleen Bayfield was a neighbour who called him ‘that fairy’ behind his back and demanded he chauffeur her around much as he had once chauffeured her predecessor.

  When the Rev. George Bayfield Roberts died in 1937, his estate was worth £71 8s 9d.

  Sängerfests are still going strong in America.

  The tour of The Prima Donna reached Salt Lake City where a journalist who saw them together was not confident that the marriage of Fritzi Scheff and John Fox Jr had legs. ‘The highly intellectual and interesting Fox is the last person anyone would associate with people or things theatrical, and Fritzi does not seem of the temperament suited to a studious, literary genius.’ The Foxes divorced in 1912. Miss Scheff married a third husband the following year, and divorced him in 1921 on grounds of intolerable cruelty. Out of the blue she received a phone call from St Clair Bayfield on 1 March 1945. His diary does not reveal what they discussed.

  In 1908 Miss May V. Smith and a companion embarked on a four-month tour of nineteen nations. In 1912 she gave lectures with pictures on Egypt, Turkey and Palestine to audiences in the Methodist Episcopal church in Wilkes-Barre and the Ladies’ Missionary Society of the Christian Church of Plymouth in Forty Fort. Later that year she acquired a Cadillac touring car.

  Five years after the termination of her engagement to St Clair Bayfield, Rosalind Travers married Henry Hyndman, the founder of the British National Socialist party (which was eventually absorbed into the Labour Party, and should not be confused with a similarly named German party). He was thirty-one years her senior and died in 1921. Her book The Last Years of H. M. Hyndman was published in 1924, the year of her own death at the age of fifty-one.

  Janet Waldorf’s career never recovered from her misreported death. She continued acting in the early 1900s, and even turned up in Wilkes-Barre in a touring production of The Three of Us (advertised as ‘the greatest of all American plays’). She returned to Pittsburgh to marry, divorce and keep boarders. Her real name was May Maud Midgley.

  The Wilkes-Barre Record was absorbed into the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, itself a merger of the Wilkes-Barre Times and Wilkes-Barre Leader, in 1939. Between 1923 and 1960 the paper in its various permutations housed its printing and distribution facility in the former Grand Opera House behind the Foster homestead on South Franklin Street. After a bitter strike over wages and working conditions, a group of employees set up the Citizens’ Voice, which has since become the longest-running strike newspaper in the country. Wilkes-Barre, Pa, is thus an American rarity: a town with two newspapers.

  Florence’s father, Charles Dorrance Foster, was a wealthy Wilkes-Barre lawyer who spent much time in politics and property.

  Florence’s mother, Mary Hoagland Foster, was a keen painter and genealogist who gave several different birth dates to the US census.

  The so-called Diamond City on the banks of the Susquehanna owed its surging population to the discovery of anthracite coal.

  Rear Admiral Thornton Alexander Jenkins, a hero of the Civil War and father to many daughters, plus Florence’s underwhelming husband Frank Thornton Jenkins.

  Frank’s nephew, Thornton Jenkins Hains, was a successful author of adventure yarns who twice in his life was acquitted of murder.

  A studio portrait of Florence taken after the age of forty, soon after her arrival in New York, betrays a flair for self-dramatization.

  The serious actor St Clair Bayfield aged around thirty, not long before he met Florence.

  The Waldorf Astoria on Fifth Avenue, built in the German Renaissance style, was the largest hotel on the planet. Women’s societies, including the Euterpe Club and the Verdi Club, often met here for their musicales.

  Florence had a special weakness for eye-catching hats and headdresses, which she often wore in her Ritz-Carlton recitals.

  The tableaux vivants of the Verdi Club’s annual Ball of the Silver Skylarks always culminated in the spectacular appearance of Florence in costume as a heroine from myth or history. In 1924 she enjoyed six curtain calls in the guise of Brünnhilde.

  Age did not wither Florence’s taste for fancy dress, but some of her folkloric outfits gave audiences ever more reason to laugh at her.

  At the Ball of the Silver Skylarks in 1940, Florence cast herself as the winged inspiration of a great American composer when re-enacting Howard Chandler Christy’s painting ‘Stephen Foster and the Angel of Inspiration’. Newspapers had much fun with this image.

  From 1930, Florence gave an annual recital in Newport, Rhode Island, the society watering hole she first visited in 1902. St Clair Bayfield sometimes participated, too. This performance took place the same week war broke out in Europe.

  In 1937, Life magazine sent the photographer Margaret Bourke-White to capture one of Florence’s private gatherings in her Seymour Hotel apartment for its series ‘Life Goes to a Party’. Here, Florence sings for her guests. The photographs were never published.

  Cosme McMoon was an Irish–Mexican composer who set Florence’s lyrics to music and was her loyal accompanist on stage at Carnegie Hall.

  Carnegie Hall in the 1930s, capacity 3,000. The night before Florence’s performance, Frank Sinatra had appeared there at a Democrat rally.

  The cover of the programme for Florence’s Carnegie Hall recital. Florence is wearing a coronet and a thumb ring.

  The full programme for Florence’s Carnegie Hall recital. ‘Do not try to beat your neighbor to the street’, advises the fire notice.

  Three times Academy-Award-winning actress Meryl Streep between takes as she plays Florence Foster Jenkins.

  Debonair St Clair Bayfield, played by Hugh Grant. For the film’s dance sequence, Grant practised for several hours each day for six weeks.

  Bayfield and Florence return from Carnegie Hall after hearing Lily Pons sing. Inspired, Florence decides to take more singing lessons. And so her journey to Carnegie Hall and infamy begins …

  Florence and Bayfield listen to a recording of ‘The Bell Song’ sung by Lily Pons, one of the great sopranos of the age. The part in the film was performed by Russian star Aida Garifullina.

  Florence performs the ‘Laughing Song’ from Die Fledermaus at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel before a carefully selected audience. ‘My waistline so slim and charming!’ she sings.

  Pianist Cosme McMoon, played by Simon Helberg, attends a party thrown by Bayfield and his girlfriend Kathleen after Florence’s concert at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

  Florence and Bayfield enjoy the reviews of her Ritz-Carlton concert. ‘By the end of her performance, the stage was a bower of blooms, and Madam Jenkins retired to thunderous applause,’ reads Bayfield.

  Florence records ‘The Bell Song’ at the Melotone studio. ‘You wanna try another take?’ asks the sound engineer. ‘I don’t see why, that seemed perfect to me,’ replies Florence.

  Bayfield learns that Florence has booked Carnegie Hall, where she intends to sing. ‘You’re not strong enough, Bunny,’ he worries. ‘What if it kills you?’ ‘Then I shall die happy!’ replies Florence.

  The moment of truth: Florence, with trusted Bayfield at her side, prepares to make her entrance onto the Carnegie Hall stage where she opens her show with ‘Valse Caressante’, a song written by Cosme McMoon.

  Meryl Streep, playing Florence, prepares to sing the second Queen of the Night aria on the set of Carnegie Hall. The set was built within the Apollo Theatre, Hammersmith, where Streep sang live to over 600 actors and supporting artists.

  Acknowledgements and Bibliography

  In researching this biography I was able to stand on the shoulders of others, from which lofty perch the view of Florence Foster Jenkins’s life and career was greatly enhanced. Gregor Benko has conducted a vast amount of research over many years and he was unstintingly generous in sharing the fruits of it, both in documentation and photographs. Donald Collup is the creator of A World of Her Own, the authoritative feature-length documentary about Florence, and has been tirelessly supportive of this British interl
oper constantly soliciting advice. Some of the eyewitness accounts of the Carnegie Hall concert, including his wonderful interview with Marge Champion, come from his DVD. I also had the good fortune to strike up a productive correspondence with Elizabeth Skrapits, a Florence fan and a journalist with the Citizens’ Voice in Wilkes-Barre who was pricelessly kind in sharing her enthusiasm and her local knowledge. To all three I owe a debt of gratitude the size of Carnegie Hall itself.

  I also relied on help from those closer to home. Luke Davis meticulously researched the historical background to Florence’s life in New York plus those forays to Newport, Rhode Island. With great generosity Alastair Boag rooted productively around the St Clair Bayfield archive in the New York Public Library. Florence Rees read the book in draft and offered valuable comments. Emily Maitland provided precious insights as a psychotherapist into the deep undercurrents of Madame Jenkins’s unconscious. My thanks to them all.

  My thanks also to Linda LaPointe of the Moravian College (as Florence’s school is now known) for unearthing revelatory details from the school yearbook and Susan Law for information relating to St Clair Bayfield’s grandfather, the Earl of Ellenborough.