“I can do it. I’ll show everyone,” Florence Foster Jenkins excitedly assured St. Clair Bayfield, her devoted life companion for 26 years, before the biggest day of her life as a little girl. At the age of 76, she was preparing for her first solo concert at the famous Carnegie Hall. True, she had chartered it herself and paid for the orchestra herself, but the tickets sold out in a flash. Florence was sure that her hard work would finally be richly rewarded. “What we experienced was crazy funny”, commented actress and dancer Marge Champion on the opera evening she found herself at by chance. Her opinion was shared by everyone except Florence Foster Jenkins, the self-proclaimed best soprano of her time.
But the 3000 tickets really were a bargain, even if the most expensive ones cost 24 dollars and the slightly cheaper ones 19 dollars and 20 cents. The young pianist Daniel Pinkham couldn’t afford them, and the cheap ones, at $3, have been gone for a long time. But he was far from the only one left outside the closed doors of Carnegie Hall, except that he did not have a $20 bill in his pocket to wave in the air and offer in exchange for any ticket, as so many others did.
A unique musical treat was reportedly deprived of 2000 people, even though all the stands were sold out. Many had no idea they were going to see a singer who, Billboard magazine wrote much later, was listening to her “pathetic bleatings akin to eavesdropping on a patient locked in a padded room in a mental hospital”.
Salve Laughter
Marge Champion was one of those who got a shock when Florence Foster Jenkins opened her mouth. “I was completely unprepared for the fact that she didn’t mind in the slightest that everyone in the room was rolling with laughter,” she later recalled of the effect Florence Foster Jenkins’ world-famous arias had on opera lovers.
“I don’t know how she explained all that laughter”, Champion wondered, noting also that the laughter had taken almost as much energy as “Ms Jenkins needed to get those voices out”. Later, critics wrote that Florence had sung everything but the right notes.
For Marge Champion, the highlight of the evening was Joaquin Valverde’s Clavelitos. To capture her Spanish spirit, Florence came on stage with a basket full of flowers and threw them around the stage as she strummed the song.
The audience applauded and demanded a repeat. The half-haired Florence willingly obliged, but only after ordering her pianist Cosmé McMoon to get up from the piano, pick up the flowers from the floor and refill the basket with them. She then sang the piece a second time, to gales of laughter and applause, and would have sung it a third time if the audience had demanded it of her.
“People laughed heartily at her singing, but she didn’t seem to mind,” agreed Kathleen Bayfield, while St. Clair wrote in his diary the same as always: “B.’s performance was very good.” B. was short for Bunny, as he affectionately called his life and business partner.
Florence was also enchanted by herself. “Don’t you think I was really brave to sing the Queen of the Night aria after I had already recorded it in the studio?” she asked one of her friends after the concert, who congratulated her on her performance with genuine sincerity.
Because people loved her, no matter how much she lived under the delusion that her voice was exceptional. Florence so calmly attributed the peals of laughter she heard from the audience to the “wreckers” who had been “planted in the hall by enemies” and to jealous rivals who could not bear defeat.
To be fair, there were a few people in the audience with a keen ear, such as the composer Cole Porter, the soprano Lily Pons and her husband, the conductor André Kostelanetz, and the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who had to be escorted out of the auditorium because she was unable to control her behaviour.
For Lady Florence’s singing abilities, as she wished to be addressed, surely none of them would have put their hands in the fire, but neither would any of them have been as painfully truthful as the critics were the next day.
From ecstasy to heartbreak
One wrote that she staged one of the greatest jokes New York had ever seen, and that she decorated the hall with so many flowers that it resembled a morgue. It said that 3000 people with an extraordinary sense of humour were seated in it, and that together they had paid $6000 for the privilege of squealing, shrieking and cackling to her singing.
The listeners told each other not to laugh so loudly, advised each other what to stuff in their mouths, like a handkerchief, to control their laughter, and told each other what fools they were for coming in the first place.
Jenkins could read in the newspapers that she looked like a blown-up scarecrow on stage, and that she hit a few notes, but all the rest were unfulfilled promises. And that she had given a wonderful party from which everyone had come away dizzy, with a headache and a pounding in their ears.
A third wrote that her performance was more or less voiceless, that the low notes were almost inaudible and the high notes infantile, but that the audience had fun nonetheless. The New York Times limited its malice to a few lines about the fact that she was accompanied by a pianist and a flautist.
Those of a softer heart wrote that she improvised and sang everything either half a note too high or too low, which in reality is extremely tiring, but that everyone was impressed by her singing, which really cannot be repeated by anyone.
One of the nicer reviews reported that she seemed happy and that “it’s really a pity that so few artists are happy. Her happiness magically spilled over to her listeners, who were thrilled to the point of loudly encouraging her, even with the joyful laughter and ecstasy that mimicked her singing.”
The audience had a crazy time, but didn’t want to hurt her. To spare her, when they could no longer contain themselves, the visitors started clapping, whistling and chanting so loudly that their laughter could not be heard in the general din.
It also drove them crazy when they watched Lady Florence, 76, “put her hands on her hips and started to gyrate them. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. There was a hell of a racket in the room, but she was pleased with herself. And she might as well have been: there was never such enthusiasm, applause and noise in Carnegie Hall again,” her pianist Cosmé McMoon later recalled.
But when she read the reviews, Florence was unable to view her performance with either self-delusion or humour. “She broke down. You know, she didn’t know,” her long-time companion St. Clair Bayfield explained to reporters.
Instead of being at the top of her Olympus, Florence landed at the bottom of the darkest pit. Five days after her performance, she suffered a heart attack and died of a broken heart less than a month later, on 26 November 1944, after decades of steadfastly, determinedly and wholeheartedly pursuing her singing dream.
She firmly believed all her life that she was at least as good as, if not better than, the best sopranos of her time, and then she died with the realisation that she had made a mockery of herself, and without realising that she was nevertheless dear to people’s hearts and remained in their memories even after the names of the truly great professional singers had long since been forgotten.
Wholeheartedly committed
This was the tragic end to a life in which she had marched with the poise and confidence expected of her, having been born on 19 July 1868 to one of the wealthiest couples in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Like all wealthy girls of the time, she was brought up to be a good wife, and she had to know at least the basics of music. A music teacher was hired and the girl became a spellbound girl. She simply fell in love with the piano and showed even then that she could not love moderately, but only obsessively. She practised so devotedly that she began to perform publicly at the age of eight under the name Little Miss Foster, and her childhood piano career even took her to the White House.
My life is lying in front of me, she was convinced, until she heard a resounding no when she told her father she wanted to study music in Europe at the age of 17. It is not clear whether her father was as critical as she was unself-critical, wanting to spare her disappointment and himself the expense, or whether he just did not think that a career in music was suitable for a girl of her age, but in both cases the result was the same: he did not want to pay for her education.
Little Miss Foster turned from one father to the other and without thinking twice, married Frank Thonton Jenkins, a doctor 16 years her senior. Together they eloped to Philadelphia, but she did not fare well: before they finally separated in 1902, she was infected with syphilis and without a dick because her father had disinherited her.
She had lost everything except the unbreakable faith in herself that told her she was capable of surviving on her own. Although she was 34 years old and had never even perceived poverty, she now went by the maiden name of Florence Foster, and met it in Philadelphia when she was trying to make a living by teaching piano.
She did badly, but she did not return home, not even when she injured her hand and learned that she would never be a pianist. The news did not exactly knock her down, probably not least because she had already set herself a new goal: to become the best opera singer she could be.
She didn’t mention anything to her father, because she hadn’t spoken to him that way, but her mother, who often visited her in Philadelphia those days, was very enthusiastic about the idea. She helped her daughter with advice and probably with money, but it couldn’t have been much because in 1907, 39-year-old Florence ended up in court because of her debts.
Her cost of living was high. To make it as a singer, she needed influential people, and she could only meet them in New York, so she and her mother often went there, stayed in the best hotels and tried to break into the social cream of society.
They spent more than they had, but Mr Foster soon took pity on them and died of kidney failure on 29 September 1909. He had forgotten the grudge by then, but he left his daughter a diamond and a piano, his wife furniture, and four times a year alimony from a trust fund.
Now 41-year-old Florence could breathe freely, and for her it meant that she could devote herself wholeheartedly, and above all her money, to her big dream: to become a soprano.
No one knows who all she hired to teach her to sing, because she kept as quiet as a tomb about it, but she was very anxious to appear in the newspapers as often as possible as a member of the upper class. The best way to achieve this was to join every possible women’s club she could think of and to take care of the musical programme.
Younger lover, eternal partner
It was at one of these meetings that, aged 41, she met St Clair Bayfield, a British actor seven years her junior, who specialised in Shakespearean plays. She immediately detected something aristocratic in the posture of this tall, slender, fair-haired man, although she did not know at the time that he was the illegitimate son of an English earl and had been brought up as a member of the British aristocracy on his father’s estate.
Unfortunately, his father forgot to mention him in his will, and after his death St. Clair was left penniless, and more or less penniless even when he was proving himself as a sheep farmer in New Zealand and then when he tried to make it as an actor in New York.
What attracted him most to Florence was the power that she exuded, even though she was not only self-confident but also determined, domineering and egotistical. But he clearly needed a woman like that, because they quickly became involved and married later that year, symbolically of course. Florence was probably still married, although this is not certain, because she never wanted to talk about her husband or her age.
It is probably true that her marriage was not officially over until Jenkins died in 1916 without leaving her a single penny, but at least he gave her the freedom to marry St Clair officially and to shake off the rumours that followed her every step of the way because of her corn business.
Only she didn’t get married. Her father had written in his will that no husband, then or in the future, should have access to her inheritance, so she and St Clair gave up formal marriage in favour of enjoying their money.
With St Clair Bayfield, Florence not only got a lover and an evening companion, but also an unofficial manager of her business, a playwright, a director, a playwright, an actor and everything she needed when she founded her club, the Verdi Club, in 1917.
She invested an enormous amount of energy and money in it, about 2000 dollars a year, although most of it went on the costumes she wore when they did the so-called tableaux-vivants, or tableaux vivants, or live paintings. They tried to recreate world-famous paintings live, and everyone from Bayfield to hired amateur actors took part.
The most important pictures were, of course, always illustrated by her and the evening always ended with her, because there could only be one star and that was Florence. At her recitals, there was no doubt about who was the first and the only one, because she was there alone.
She had no problems with where she was and was not invited to perform, because every time she wanted to sing, she simply booked a hall, preferably at the Ritz-Carlton. Since 1912, when she first did so, she has done so countless times, because no one dared to say no to her, and, in truth, she did no harm at all by performing, so there was no need to say no.
The front row seats were always occupied by her eccentric fans, who obviously liked the fact that she hit the note by mistake, or perhaps she persuaded them with the free snacks she generously treated them to when she stopped entertaining them.
They did not have to pay an entrance fee because only those she personally invited could enjoy her music. On the rare occasions when a ticket had to be bought, new guests had to be interviewed in person first, so that she could assess whether or not they were sophisticated enough music lovers to enjoy her performance. If she liked them, she sold them a ticket, if she didn’t like them, she didn’t sell them a ticket.
If they managed to get through its sieve, they got a programme, usually printed on silver-plated paper and printed in red ink, which was extremely expensive. Her clothes were also chosen as a programme. As a rule, she would come on stage in a silk dress and with a crown or something similar on her head, then change into Spanish costume and finish the performance in Russian national costume, depending on the song.
She dressed in a similar way in her private life as she did on stage, so it always seemed that she was wearing costumes, not clothes. Her friends unanimously agreed that she was no stranger to elegance, even though they usually did not see her when the party lights were out and she was walking around dressed as shabbily as an old woman.
At that time, she was not wearing diamond rings on her fingers, but still wore a wig. No one knows exactly why, but it seems that after the mercury treatment for syphilis, she was left barren and hairless.
Her bare head was accidentally seen by the sculptor Florence Darnault in 1934. Jenkis hired her to make a statue of Giuseppe Verdi for her club, and in January it was unveiled to the public. Darnault was standing among the guests when she was told that it was time for the formal address, but the hostess was nowhere to be found. She opened the door of a nearby room and saw Florence standing in front of her. She was sitting at the table, her wig lying beside her.
“She was completely bald, completely radiant,” Darnault explained later, thinking aloud that the reflection of the light on her head would have been different if she had been wiped clean. “She knew I saw her. She saw me in the mirror and screamed. I assured her that I would never say a word about it to anyone. I was so embarrassed because I saw something I shouldn’t have seen.”
Darnault felt bad, when in fact she should have been furious. Perhaps as a punishment or something, Jenkis later failed to pay her the $200 fee for the statue, but earlier she had upset her by inviting her to lunch at a hotel of her choice, during which she was almost forced to buy four tickets to an event. When the bill was due, Jenkis got up and went to the telephone, sending a waiter to the table to tell Darnault how much of a hurry her acquaintance was in and to bring her the bill so that she could pay it.
A lady of dubious taste
Florence was wealthy, but she spent her money very prudently. She never regretted giving dinners, but only if they were written about in the newspapers. She also never scrimped when it came to her singing career. She hired pianists and fired them if they offended her, such as the famous Edward McArthur.
St. Clair Bayfield has never resented her, nor she him, although he could have. He was her lover, unofficial husband and colleague, but they never lived together. She moved from one respectable hotel to another, then settled in the Seymour Hotel, and in 1919 she rented him a not very comfortable flat with poor ventilation. Although she paid the rent, he worked for her in return and the rent was a kind of payment for services rendered.
She only came to him when she wanted to escape her everyday life, or when she had to send him an urgent message, because of course his flat didn’t have a telephone and all matters concerning her performances and the Verdi Club were communicated to her.
So the phone rang at her house on the 4th of July, when St.Clair was at home, but not alone. Kathleen, an Englishwoman, was with him when the doorbell rang at seven in the morning. He knew immediately who it was. He pushed Kathleen, whom he had been seeing secretly for some time, into the wardrobe, as in the film, and when Florence was standing in front of him, he noticed that the woman’s green slippers had been left by the bed.
He quickly covered them with his body and diverted Florence’s attention elsewhere, but he was relieved five minutes later because she had no intention of staying a minute longer in his overheated apartment that hot morning.
Nevertheless, it made for a stressful start to the day, although in reality all the moments of his affair were tense. Financially he was totally dependent on Florence and he was aware of it, but fortunately for him she was also rational enough never to forget his worth. Without his help and talent, she would not have been able to shine in public as she did, and when she discovered that he was cheating on her, she asked him only to be discreet.
He respected the agreement, even though their relationship had been strictly professional since 1932, but he also often came to her home, which she had decorated in blue and gold, although she preferred pink, for business reasons.
Self-loving as she was, she decorated the walls with pictures of herself in all sorts of poses, and with dance cards listing the names of important men she had danced with since 1880. Wherever there was any space left, she hung a picture of one of her acquaintances, and she stuck lamps and statuettes where they had nothing to do.
Guests could sit on chairs where famous people have died. To make sure they didn’t miss it, she had them decorated with plaques that said, for example, “In this chair, so and so general died then and there”.
Her apartment should have been luxurious, but it was just like her, essentially shabby and littered. One day, the comedian Alan King was invited to a group dinner. As he walked down the long corridor to the living room, he couldn’t help but peer through the open door into the bathroom. The bathtub was full of potato salad.
Florence was very consistent with her agreements. Dinner in the hotel restaurant was always at six o’clock sharp. If Bayfield was a minute late, he heard them. She was equally adamant in her superstition. For example, she never accepted or handed over a gift containing a sharp object. Sharpness would cut the thread of friendship, she believed, and she liked her friends, but only those who always agreed with her.
At musical evenings held in her home, she would sometimes play the same aria for her guests in three different performances: one by her, the other by two professional sopranos. She would then ask her guests to vote for the one they liked best.
Predictably, she always won, and she was always genuinely happy, until one day someone voted truthfully by mistake. She has completely lost control of herself. She started shouting that her record was perfect and accused her guest of not being able to appreciate a voice as perfect as hers.
She believed in herself without a shadow of a doubt. One day, a stranger approached her. “You were a singer, weren’t you?” she said. Florence replied sharply, “I am a singer!” She then asked her friend Adolf Pollitz to describe her concerts to the stranger in detail, to praise the refinement of her audiences, to admire the wardrobe of her guests and so on, but in spite of all the superlatives, in the end she was not satisfied with his presentation of her and her achievements.
Lady Florence was relatively sensible in all other areas of her life, but in singing she completely failed. She was not at all self-critical, and it is true that she did not have many negative experiences either.
Her audiences may have laughed themselves to tears at her performances, but they admired her nonetheless because she was hugely entertaining, knew no fear of failure and believed without a shadow of a doubt that she was at least as great as her contemporaries, if not more so.
The plates go for honey
Life magazine said of her that her “insatiable determination to sing” “overcame perhaps the most complete and utter lack of talent ever seen in Manhattan”. So confident was she that she went into the studio at the age of 73.
Between May and September 1941, she recorded nine operas and a number of songs. As a rule, she was satisfied with the first recording, because she had no idea that technical factors could affect its quality. She held the reins firmly herself, of course, but she did, for example, require the pianist to sit down at the piano almost as soon as he walked through the door. She also sang Mozart, for example, without any trepidation and was delighted with herself.
The nine tracks she recorded in this way were then released separately on small discs. Her fans had the honour of hearing Bell song first, which critics said she had cracked and they loved so much that they bought it. This encouraged Florence to release Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Serenata Mexicana by Cosmé McMoon.
Time magazine said that listening to the Queen of the Night was “cringe-inducing”, but that the singer was “very happy” with her success. Her records were wittily promoted by saying that they would bring more joy to people for $2.50 than tequila, zubrowka (vodka) or marijuana. That was the price, even though at first they could not be bought in shops, but could only be ordered by mail order. If they enclosed money in an envelope, they would receive a precious record at home.
The recording at Melotone Recording Studio was, of course, financed by Florence herself, as are all her singing ventures, and she released the records herself. Although all the recordings seemed to be Tom and Jerry fighting, neither of them able to keep up the pace, as the critics said, she sold out and even made money from them.
She was happy, not only because of her success, but also because she had miraculously expanded her singing range. One morning, as she was taking a taxi to the studio, the taxi driver crashed into the car in front. Florence screamed in terror in the back seat. Then she rushed home and sat straight at the piano.
She tried to catch the tone in which she screamed and realised that she had never been able to sing such a high F in a taxi before. Impressed by the taxi driver’s new skill, she did not sue but rewarded him with expensive cigars.
She offered no reward to Adolf Pollitz when he had to drive her around in military uniform during the war because there was not enough petrol for civilian vehicles, and she refused to walk or take public transport at any cost.
She was full of her own whims, including carrying all important documents in her bag, lest they fall into the manipulative hands of some lawyer, priest, doctor or dentist.
No one knew why she despised them so much, but on 26 November 1944, when she breathed her last, her doctor was by her side. St. Clair Bayfield was not there. He had just had dinner with the members of her Veri Club.
The news broke him completely. “All the glamour of the last 26 years was over. No more parties, no more Verdi Club. The circle has come full circle”, reported his then lover Kathleen. At the age of 69, he is said to have lamented his fate. It was said that he found it difficult to walk the streets where they had once walked together, and impossible for him to go to a funeral, even if for different reasons.
She just wanted to make people happy
He spent 26 years with Florence and was, in his own way, devoted to her, but he was not her husband, so he had no formal rights. When her distant relatives, with whom she had no contact, appeared in town, he could only withdraw in silence. He was not even allowed to attend the funeral in her home town of Wilkes-Barre, let alone discuss the inheritance with him.
He and Florence have reportedly agreed that he will be her heir. She is said to have told this to three other people, who were willing to testify. She did not leave a will herself, but her father stipulated in his that if Florence died childless, the estate should go to the descendants of two half-brothers and a half-sister born of his mother Mary’s first marriage to the late Mr Bulford.
To add to the confusion, Cosmé McMoon claimed that she had wanted to use her fortune to set up a fund to pay the tuition fees of talented singers, but died before she could carry out her plan.
Bayfield was convinced that the relatives had hidden the will, but in any case they, he and McMoon ended up in court. McMoon argued that Florence was in love with him, but no one took him seriously.
St. Clair Bayfield showed several hundred love letters she had written to him as proof of her relationship with the deceased. He was doing well, but the trial dragged on. Before the litigation was over, he could no longer pay the $76 monthly rent.
When the court mills had run their course, he became the owner of 10,000 dollars, a very small share of the inheritance. Kathleen, who had travelled to England in the meantime, returned to America. They married and bought a house with his inheritance, where they lived until Bayfield died in May 1967, aged 91.
Cosmé McMoon made his living teaching piano and singing, and also took up bodybuilding. He reportedly even judged a competition in South Africa before dying of cancer in August 1980.
“Many have tried to emulate her but have failed, and that is because they were not as sincere in their efforts as she was. She is inimitable,” he remained sympathetic to Florence.
“People may have laughed at her singing, but the applause was real. All that mattered to her was making people happy,” added St. Clair Bayfield.
Ten years after her death, eight of her recordings have been reissued, only now collected on one album, Florence Foster Jenkins Recital. Her ninth recording was lost for a long time, and was only added to the first eight when her compositions were released on CD. For no matter how critics have derisively called her an icon of suck music worshippers, her recordings have never disappeared from circulation.
