Florence Foster Jenkins Read online

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  PROLOGUE

  On the evening of Wednesday 25 October 1944 something like two thousand people were shut out of Carnegie Hall. Crowded onto the New York City sidewalk, some waved $20 bills in an effort to persuade their way in, even though the most expensive tickets, long since sold out, officially cost $3. They could only watch as Cole Porter walked through the doors of the most hallowed concert hall in America, there to be joined by the much-loved superstar soprano Lily Pons, and the queen of burlesque Gypsy Rose Lee. Some say they saw Tallulah Bankhead swan in too. The old hall also swarmed with journalists eager to witness a phenomenon.

  The night before, Frank Sinatra was on the same stage at an election rally in support of President F. D. Roosevelt. The night after, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed under the baton of Artur Rodziński. But on 25 October it was the turn of Florence Foster Jenkins, a sizeable woman in her mid-seventies who had recently released a series of recordings. It was these – including her versions of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria and Delibes’s ‘Indian Bell Song’ – which had created such a feverish thirst to be there.

  The evening has no real right to be remembered on so important a day in the history of the world: 25 October 1944 is such a pivotal date that there is a whole book about it – One Day in a Very Long War by John Ellis. In the Philippines the Battle of Leyte Gulf became the largest naval conflict in history, in which for the first time the Imperial Japanese Navy deployed kamikaze suicide bombers against US warships. In Europe, the last Romanian city under German occupation was liberated by Romanian and Soviet forces, who also pushed the Wehrmacht from their Norwegian base in Kirkenes, while Bomber Command and the US Air Force took part in daylight raids against Essen, Homberg and Hamburg.

  Meanwhile, back in New York, the cover of the recital programme featured a photograph of a stately lady wearing, over short permed brown hair, a tiara with a diadem mounted in the centre. A heavy necklace plunged past her low neckline towards two tentatively clasped hands. On her left hand was a thumb ring. Her eyes were beady and her jaw firm. On a mid-blue background, and under black capitals blazing her name, were the words ‘Coloratura Soprano’.

  Inside the programme, bona fides advised of previous triumphs. Madame Jenkins, as she liked to be known, ‘possesses a marked individuality in style and piquancy in her interpretations’. So reported the New York Journal-American. A Dr B. B. James (publication unattributed) confirmed that a recent audience in the federal capital ‘included persons in the political, cultural and intellectual society of Washington’, all of them ‘critically minded hearers’. The New York Daily Mirror hailed ‘a personage of authority and indescribable charm’ whose annual recitals ‘bring unbounded joy’.

  These notices were in accordance with more or less everything that had ever been written about ‘Lady Florence’ (another of her preferred modes of address). She had been singing to select audiences since the 1910s, mostly in the protected world of the women’s clubs which flourished in great profusion in New York City from the turn of the century. In 1917 she founded her own society and called it the Verdi Club, to whose members she later began singing in an annual recital in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Press coverage was not solicited, other than from the Musical Courier, a trade paper whose friendly discretion could be relied upon, indeed bought. The recitals acquired a cult following and, apart from the odd exuberant heckler, for years no one publicly said the salient and obvious thing about Florence Foster Jenkins: that she was a remarkably talentless singer. Instead they cheered and clapped and stifled their guffaws by stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths.

  In 1941 those recordings introduced her feeble voice and drastic pitching to a wider public, and word started to travel. Then came Carnegie Hall. Supported by a pianist, a flautist and a string quartet, she proceeded to massacre a variety of tunes in a variety of outlandish costumes. The three thousand who crammed Carnegie Hall as it had never been crammed before raised such a commotion that her accompanist Cosme McMoon judged the recital ‘the most remarkable thing that has happened there’. Her assault on the famous aria from The Magic Flute had all the trappings of a brilliant comedic tour de force as she persistently failed to reach the stipulated notes. But it wasn’t meant to be funny, any more than her rendition of ‘Clavelitos’, a short, flirtatious song in the Hispanic idiom which pushed the audience to fresh peaks of hysteria. As Florence lobbed rosebuds into the audience from a basket on her arm, one uncontrollable actress had to be removed from her box. In such a frenzied atmosphere it is hard to imagine anyone creating enough of a disturbance to warrant ejection, and yet apparently it happened. The instant demand for an encore meant that poor McMoon had to make his way down into the stalls to retrieve the flowers. The pleasure – and the pain – was even more intense the second time round. And throughout the evening Madame Jenkins interpreted the gales of laughter and waves of applause as a genuine acknowledgement of her art. Afterwards, her guests mingled with her onstage. ‘Don’t you think I had real courage to sing the Queen of the Night again,’ she said to one of them, ‘after that wonderful recording I made of it at the studio?’

  The next morning news spread far across the United States. ‘Mme Jenkins, if you haven’t heard, and the chances are you haven’t, is a lady who gives song recitals because there’s no law against it.’ That was the Milwaukee Journal. ‘She takes the songs that bring out the best in Lily Pons and permits them to bring out her worst. And the worst of Mme Jenkins, you are herewith assured, is something awful.’ Earl Wilson of the New York Post reported that Florence Foster Jenkins could ‘sing anything but notes’. ‘Hey, You Music Lovers!’ ran the headline above his report. ‘I Heard Madame Jenkins.’ Describing her recital as ‘one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen’, his column – he was not a music journalist – pondered the discrepancy between the serious demeanour of the performer and the unbridled jollity of the audience. On the way out Wilson bumped into a man he described as the singer’s personal representative, whose name he transcribed as Sinclair Bayfield.

  ‘Why?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘She loves music,’ said St Clair Bayfield, an Englishman in his late sixties who for many years had been a minor Broadway actor. There was only one question Wilson could ask next.

  ‘If she loves music, why does she do this?’

  * * *

  ‘People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ That’s what Florence Foster Jenkins is reported to have said towards the end of her life. It certainly sounds like her. She lived for music and she loved to perform. She refused, utterly and triumphantly, to dwell on her limitations as a singer or to be cowed by those who mocked her. Indeed there is a poignant possibility that Florence simply could not hear those limitations. Audiences certainly rejoiced in he
r sincerity, and the pleasure she derived from entertaining them. Her performances, by dint of sheer charisma, somehow transcended technique. So inspirational is her example that even the greatest singers have found a place in their hearts for her. In 1968 the young Barbra Streisand was asked by New York magazine which other singers she’d like to be: ‘Ray Charles and Florence Foster Jenkins,’ she said. For Vanity Fair in 2003 David Bowie nominated The Glory (????) of the Human Voice, the RCA album of Florence’s recordings released in 1962, as one of the 25 LPs that he counted as his greatest discoveries. (The only other soprano listed among all the blues, jazz and rock was Gundula Janowitz singing Strauss’s Four Last Songs.)

  Nowadays Florence is not alone. One of the reasons why her extraordinary story resonates, long after the great prima donnas to whom she absurdly compared herself have been forgotten, is that there are Florences all around us: less than entirely talented performers who nonetheless have a yearning to be heard. Latter-day incarnations of Florence audition on The X Factor or America’s Got Talent and, like her, are mystified by the howls of ridicule. Florence is their patron saint. As Cosme McMoon explained, ‘She thought she was great.’

  And yet Florence was also a complete one-off. It is almost always overlooked that she was a passionate, serious and hugely knowledgeable lover of music, and an impresario who for thirty-five years was a very significant patron of young talent in New York. Some of the burgeoning stars of opera were grateful for her friendship. If her pursuit of audience approval manifested an unconscious need to heal some sort of psychic wound – and it certainly looks that way – the cause lies somewhere in what went before. Earl Wilson passed on a story he heard that Florence’s musical ambitions were blocked by her parents and then her husband, only to be liberated after all of them had died. It’s a neat fairy tale. But is it a true fairy tale?

  In general terms, hers is a story of her time: about an American woman’s quest for an education, about a Darwinian urge to clamber up the ladder of society, about the stigma of divorce in the nineteenth century, about female empowerment embodied in the rise of women’s clubs, and about the value of culture. Her progress through a boom society ruled by money is archetypal but it is also profoundly personal. She was born just after the Civil War, played her part in one world war and survived into another. Early on, her marriage took her to the heart of America’s military establishment, where she found much to admire in her principled female in-laws while the males made for a grim array of the arrant, the psychotic and the morally spineless. Her husband’s failings, she claimed with some justification, scarred her physically, and lastingly. And then there is the melodrama of her own family squabbles, which not once but twice necessitated the intervention of the law.

  From the early years of Florence’s life, when the human psyche is malleable clay, primary sources are scarce. It’s not even clear whether she was born in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Her elusiveness is written in the many variations of her name in the newspapers which later reported on her movements: Miss Florence Foster, Mrs Dr Jenkins, Mrs F. F. Jenkins, Madame Foster Jenkins, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, Mme Jenkins, Lady Florence – plus any number of typographical misnomers: Mrs F. E. Jenkins, Mrs Florence Foster Jekins, Florence Foster Jones and, the name she would have loved best of all, Florence Verdi Jenkins. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that an elderly woman celebrated for having no voice was vouchsafed none in the first half of her life story. Nothing that she actually said was written down and remembered until she was past the age of forty. Averse to self-examination, she left no diary and gave only two interviews. The biographer’s task is further frustrated by the disappearance of all but four of the five hundred letters which passed between Florence and St Clair Bayfield over thirty years of common-law marriage.

  This is, secondarily, his story too. By the time St Clair arrived in New York as a young man, he had already enjoyed a great many adventures of his own. In his career he spent vastly more hours on stage than Florence, but her two hours in Carnegie Hall eclipse them all. He didn’t seem to mind because he was utterly devoted to her. Instead, posterity has made him the principal conduit for her life story. One of the main sources is a biography which he embarked on after her death and which was continued after his by his widow Kathleen. It was never published, and most of it has been lost, but in 1971 Mrs Bayfield read out a substantial chunk in a joint interview alongside two Verdi Club members who had known Florence personally. Even here caution is advisable: it is necessary to scrape away the accretions from what Florence told St Clair, what St Clair told Kathleen, and what Kathleen wrote down, each narrator being guided by their own agenda. Florence was certainly an unreliable narrator who moulded her memories into a shape that made sense to her. She preferred to project an inspiring image of herself. The climax of the Verdi Club’s annual ball always featured its president appearing in the guise of the great women of myth or history. One year she dressed up as a winged Angel of Inspiration. Another she was revealed proudly trussed up in the armour of Brünnhilde, the Wagnerian Valkyrie. The image, with horned helmet and spear, suggested spellbinding potency. But what was she protecting behind that awesome breastplate?

  The essential unknowability of a historical figure is attractive to speculators. Wherever there is no final key to the inner life of an enigma, writers, film-makers and artists are to be found clustering like thirsty herds at a watering hole. Increasingly this has been true of Florence. There have been several plays about her, and each has earned more attention than the last. The first was Terry Sneed’s Precious Few, premiered in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1994. Charles Fourie’s Goddess of Song was seen in Cape Town in 1999. Her story graduated to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001 in a play called Viva La Diva by Chris Ballance. In 2005 Florence made it to Broadway in Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir. That same year Glorious! by Peter Quilter opened in the West End in London and has gone on to be performed in over forty countries and in twenty-seven languages.

  Now a celebratory film brings the name of Florence Foster Jenkins to wider attention than ever before. The script by Nicholas Martin, which concentrates on the climactic final years of her musical odyssey, has attracted some of the highest achievers in cinema. Meryl Streep, who has earned more Academy Award nominations than any actor in history (nineteen and counting, of which she has won three), charmingly embodies an indomitable woman who inspires devotion by blithely turning a blind eye – and a deaf ear – to any hurdles planted in her path. Her Florence makes the world a brighter place. Hugh Grant gives the most touching performance of his career as the debonair but sensitive St Clair Bayfield. The film also offers a hugely engaging performance from Simon Helberg as Cosme McMoon. The director is Stephen Frears, whose previous studies of fascinating women include Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen and Philomena. Madame Jenkins would have been thrilled with all the attention.

  It is rare – maybe unprecedented – for a biography and the script of a biopic to be published in harness. Florence Foster Jenkins feels like an ideal fit for such treatment, being a figure with a splendid flair for self-dramatisation. The film, as films should and must, takes the facts and fashions them into an entertainment that, in this case, rejoices in the comic and innocent side of her personality. The script alludes to many of Florence’s delightful eccentricities – her collection of dining chairs in which great Americans had supposedly died, her phobia of sharp objects, the limitless supply of potato salad stored in the bathtub when she entertained. Along the way many of the supporting players in her life pop up in Nicholas Martin’s script – Carlo Edwards, who secretly gave her singing lessons; Kathleen, the mistress of St Clair Bayfield; Earl Wilson, the author of that Carnegie Hall review the morning after. There are even cameos for the great maestro Toscanini and for Tallulah Bankhead, who, at least in the film, definitely makes it to Carnegie Hall.

  While film-goers discover Florence on film, this biography attempts to spool back to the beginning and unpick the complexities of an unusual life wh
ich held back the moment of highest drama till the end.

  1: WILKES-BARRE, PA

  What does the world know about Wilkes-Barre? All American eyes have turned on the Pennsylvania coal town only once. In 1926 the celebrated baseball slugger Babe Ruth hit what was then thought to be the longest ever home run. The ball flew so far he asked for it to be measured. It came out at around 217 yards. For the rest of its history, Wilkes-Barre has tended not to hit the ball out of the park.

  It has tiptoed into the purview of American culture as a byword for Ordinaryville, USA. Listen closely in All About Eve and at one point Bette Davis can be heard dropping the name. ‘The evil that men do – how does it go? Something about the good they leave behind. I played it once in Wilkes-Barre.’ She’s quoting Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Wilkes-Barre was a very long way from ancient Rome, which is why the great writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, multiple winner of Academy Awards and a Wilkes-Barre native, dropped a joke into the script.

  Wilkes-Barre is memorialised in a long-forgotten Broadway musical romcom from 1963 called Tovarich. Adapted from a Thirties play and film which made light of communism, the show includes a song called ‘Wilkes-Barre, Pa’. It’s sung by a young man who has fallen in love with the maid, who happens to be a countess on the run from the Russian revolution. He paints his home town as an all-American heaven.

  Take me back where I belong

  Tell my baby I was wrong,

  Never should have gone away

  Wilkes-Barre, Pa!

  In the role of the countess, Vivien Leigh won a Tony award for best actress in a musical. It can’t have been for her singing. Like Wilkes-Barre’s most celebrated daughter, she could barely hit a note.

  The city’s name is rooted in the journey to independence. John Wilkes was a member of the British parliament who was such a zealous reformer he was imprisoned for sedition. Later he championed the cause of the American rebels. So did Isaac Barré, a Dublin-born son of a French Huguenot, who was blinded in one eye at the Battle of Quebec – he is among the group immortalised in Benjamin West’s epic painting The Death of General Wolfe. A fiery orator, he dubbed the colonists ‘sons of liberty’. Yoked by a hyphen, and in the nineteenth century often lumped together in the single word Wilkesbarre, these two men gave their names to Florence Foster’s home town.