In the pantheon of unforgettable divas, there never has been a soprano to rival the legendary Florence Foster Jenkins. She stands alone, a true rara avis -- especially when she appeared onstage sporting a pair of gigantic angel-wings strapped to her back. At the height of her popularity in the 1940s, Lady Florence -- as she liked to be called and invariably signed her publicity stills -- was compared to Frank Sinatra for the contagious effect she had on audiences. High society stepped out in droves, bedecked in evening attire, jewels and furs -- and paying top dollar -- to hear her warble. Cole Porter composed a song for her and never missed a concert. Beatrice Lillie was an ardent fan. Thomas Beecham played her albums on British radio as examples of his favorite recordings. Fashion aficionados gasped at the extraordinary gowns she designed for herself and wore at the invitation-only soirées she gave in the grand ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Early on, Caruso was an enthusiastic friend. Lily Pons is said to have shed tears after hearing her sing.
For those poor unfortunates who have never heard of her, or sadly, never heard her, these accolades must seem perplexing. If such a superstar existed a mere half-century ago, why isn't she better-known today? Perhaps it's because the key to Madame Jenkins's everlasting allure is the overwhelming fact that she was perfectly awful. To put it bluntly, she couldn't sing at all. Well, that isn't really fair, since she definitely sang, and quite often, year after year, for decades, cooing with abandon for her ever-growing circle of sycophantic devotees. The issue is more precisely, why did she choose to sing? Ira Siff, of La Gran Scena Opera Company, which ingeniously skirts the nether regions between parody and performance art, dubs her "the anti-Callas." "Jenkins was exquisitely bad," he says -- "so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater, which is a major achievement unto itself. She would stray from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness. It was infinite -- bless her." Like many budding opera buffs, Siff spent hours during his youth playing Jenkins's records. "I would collapse onto the floor and dissolve into laughter. They say Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad. And yet, think of all the mediocrity in the world. Florence was one of a kind. She was way off the mark. But she was not mediocre."
To describe her voice, one must rely on metaphor, since adjectives do not exist to capture its inherent je ne sais quoi. Imagine the shrill caw of an aging turkey buzzard. Or the wail of a wounded wolverine caught in a trap. Or the caterwaulings of Citizen Kane's hapless protégée, Susan Alexander. Even to the untrained ear, Florence Foster Jenkins sounds peculiar. A critic in the 1940s likened the kick one got listening to her albums to that of smoking pot. In the '60s, she was considered psychedelic; people dropped acid while playing her pieces with headphones on. Her coloratura, if analyzed electronically via sound waves, would look like the hemidemisemiquaverings of an incriminating lie-detector test. Her notorious high F, the lucky result, she confessed, of being jostled in a taxi during a traffic accident, was as faint as a dog whistle; but not even the most devoted mutt, his ear cocked to a Victrola, could have warmed to it as "his master's voice."
For all her flaws, Florence Foster Jenkins was immensely popular. A crowd of 2,000 unlucky ticket-seekers had to be turned away from her 1944 debut at Carnegie Hall. Today, her original 78s, recorded at Melotone, a little-known vanity studio, are highly cherished collectors' items. The two classic LPs, A Florence! Foster!! Jenkins!!! Recital!!!! and The Glory (????) of the Human Voice, released after her death, are increasingly hard to locate. But unlike many songbirds of yore, Jenkins can be found on CD, as fresh and astonishing as ever.
Did Florence Foster Jenkins truly believe she had talent? It's a question that may never be answered. "Florence didn't think she was pulling anyone's leg," says Albert Innaurato, playwright and opera-lore expert. "She was compos mentis, not a lunatic. She was a very proper, complex individual.... It was a different era, when there was still a distinction drawn between high- and lowbrow art. Florence represented the last gasp of that world."
She was born Florence Foster in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, sometime around 1868. Her father, Charles Dorrance Foster, was a banker and member of the Pennsylvania legislature who instilled in his daughter a passionate respect for music. Providing her with piano lessons, he discovered she was a child prodigy. At the age of eight, she gave a recital in Philadelphia. By the time she was seventeen, she yearned to study music overseas and make the grand tour. Her father, disapproving, refused to sponsor her. It was a background similar to that of the hopelessly plain debutante in the Henry James novel Washington Square. Perhaps to spite her father, Florence soon ran off with a doctor named Frank Thornton Jenkins. They quickly married and settled in Philadelphia. By 1902, however, they were divorced. Unable to rely on her father, Florence scraped by, giving music lessons and playing piano at ladies' luncheons. But in 1909 her father died, leaving her his fortune. At last she was free to move to New York and make a name for herself.
Florence Foster Jenkins began her curious artistic odyssey by becoming the chairman of music at the Euterpe Club, a gathering of dilettantes and connoisseurs. At one of its evenings at the Waldorf-Astoria, she met a dashing, if somewhat ghoulish, English actor named St. Clair Bayfield, who became her consort and confidant, and by his own account, her lover. Sixteen years her junior, he'd had a modicum of success as an actor but had an earlier checkered career as a sailor, a soldier and a sheep- and cattle-rancher in New Zealand. "We were never married in the conventional way," he confided to a journalist. "She told me that if she ever married again, it would be a common-law marriage. She was very superstitious about it." He claimed they lived together at his apartment on West Thirty-seventh Street for the next thirty-six years, although Florence maintained a suite at the Hotel Seymour, where she gave interviews and presented a less bohemian front. In 1912, Florence founded the Verdi Club, an ambitious endeavor that sponsored musicales of the composer's work. It cost her $2,000 a year, but it was her ticket to the inner sanctum of Knickerbocker society.
It's not clear when the prospective diva first took up singing, but she studied voice with Carlo Edwards, a maestro at the Metropolitan Opera. Soon Florence was giving recitals in Newport, Washington, Boston and Saratoga, the elite spots at the time. In 1928, at the Barbizon Club, she was introduced to Edwin McArthur, a gifted musician and later accompanist to Kirsten Flagstad. Florence engaged him as her pianist for the next six years, but she ultimately fired him for guffawing during one of her numbers. McArthur was succeeded by Cosme McMoon, a stylish pianist and composer, who set her sonnets to music and managed somehow to keep a straight face.
At first, Florence contented herself with organizing small recitals at the St. Regis, the Sherry-Netherland or the Ritz-Carlton hotels. As word of her unusual act spread across Manhattan, as many as 800 fans packed the salons to hear her. No tune was too difficult to add to her arsenal: "Vissi d'arte," Lakmé's bell song, enchanting melodies by Ivor Novello, cantatas by Bach. In 1937, at the Ritz, she made a splash by essaying Zerbinetta's notoriously difficult coloratura aria from Ariadne. It was only the second time the aria had been heard in New York, noted one of her bemused reviewers, giving the impression that it wouldn't be done again any time soon -- at least not by her. She earned enthusiastic applause for her spirited rendition of Adele's laughing song "Mein Herr Marquis" from Die Fledermaus, although the number usually had her listeners stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths to keep from responding in kind. Perhaps her signature number was the Queen of the Night's treacherously pyrotechnic aria ("Der Hölle Rache"), which she tossed off with customary abandon. As one critic noted, "Mme. Jenkins gave her interpretative abilities full and untrammeled sway."
Her star turns were equally notable for their jaw-dropping costumes. She would appear garbed as a Greuze shepherdess, a Mexican señorita, or draped lavishly in an eighteenth-century white silk hoopskirt and tiara, looking like a cross between Marie Antoinette and Margaret Dumont. She invariably capped her outfit with an outrageous hat, or twirled a parasol, or fanned herself with giant ostrich plumes. Sometimes her efforts would exhaust her. At the end of one concert, Florence asked her audience to forgive her for not singing an encore, but she was too tired. She requested instead that they send her letters telling her which songs they liked best. "It may not be important to you," she insisted, "but it is very important to me. Next week, I am singing in Ithaca."
So, in 1944, it came as little surprise to her fans that Florence -- who claimed to be in her sixties but was closer to seventy-six -- should attempt to scale the highest of heights: Carnegie Hall. (She rented the space.) Broadway veteran Cris Alexander, who photographed the Patrick Dennis classics Little Me and First Lady, attended her debut. "Yes, I was there. I went with Gian Carlo Menotti, who was a great fan of hers," he recalls. "She really was divine. Heavenly. It was one of the funniest nights in the theater. For one number, she came out with a large salad bowl filled with rose petals that she scattered onto the floor. After the song was over she got down on her honkers, scooped them all up and did the entire number over again. It was one of the highlights of my entire theatrical life. Right up there with Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie."
Alix B. Williamson, who was the press agent for Richard Tucker and the Von Trapp family, was also in the audience that momentous evening. "I went to several of her concerts," she recalls. "It was unbelievable, let's put it that way. Jenkins had no voice of any kind. She was a large, big-busted lady. Everyone would laugh out loud when she sang. She would go to change her costumes and say to the audience, 'Now don't go away.'" Then she would reappear in her "Angel of Inspiration" costume or come out trilling "Like a Bird" (a song by Cosme McMoon).
But was Madame Jenkins serious? "I had a friend who knew her," Williamson says, "and he thought she was very sincere. She took him aside once and said, 'I really like you, so I'm going to sing for you privately.' She wasn't spoofing anything. I imagine that she was tone-deaf. The more people laughed, the happier she was. I'll tell you a funny story. One day I was meeting with Eugene Ormandy. He wanted to do a concert version of a Strauss opera, but he needed a coloratura soprano. So I said kiddingly, 'Do you know Florence Foster Jenkins? She might be ideal for that purpose.' He'd never heard of her. So I took him up to my place at the Essex House and put on her record. I sat there deadpan. He was deadpan, too. I could see him start to squirm. He didn't know my taste or what to do. I went out of the room, because I just had to laugh. I finally came back in and said, 'You can laugh now, too.' He almost killed me."
There are those who believe that the unusually harsh reaction Florence endured during and after her recital at Carnegie Hall was the blow that killed her. Her friend Francis Robinson, who was assistant manager at the Met and penned the liner notes to her first album, vehemently denied this, claiming she went to her grave with a "happy heart." Yet there's no denying that the barbs flung at her after her debut hit home. Perhaps because it was Carnegie Hall, with 3,000 paying attendees, critics didn't pull punches. Earl Wilson ridiculed her, complaining of "dizziness, a headache and a ringing in the ears." She suffered a heart attack a few weeks later and never recovered. She died on November 26, with her trusted squire, St. Clair Bayfield, by her side.
Bayfield, prey to all kinds of superstitions, had cautioned her against performing that one last evening. "I opposed the concert at Carnegie Hall," he told an interviewer after her death, during a protracted will contest in which he sued her heirs -- fifteen of her second cousins -- for his share of her estate. "I didn't think a person of her age should take on that strain. There is something in a vast audience that draws the magnetism out of a person. It sucks you dry. My wife would be alive today if she'd stuck to her regular Ritz concert." And what did he think of Florence's singing? "She had perfect rhythm," he noted. "Her interpretation was good, her languages wonderful. She had ... 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 the instrument.... There was very little instrument."
Perhaps Florence herself put it best. "Some may say that I couldn't sing," she admitted toward the end of her life. "But no one can say that I didn't sing."
BROOKS PETERS is a freelance writer based in New York. He first heard Florence Foster Jenkins on NPR and thought his radio signal had been taken over by a ham operator or an alien from outer space.
FLORENCE on CD: FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS:
The Glory (????) of the Human Voice.
With Cosme McMoon (piano); with Jenny Williams (soprano), Thomas Burns (baritone) in Faust selections. RCA 09026-61175-2.
photo: Roger Gross, Ltd.
OPERA NEWS, June 2001 Copyright © 2001 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
BROOKS PETERS tells the story
Florence Nightingale
of the legendary Florence Foster Jenkins, a soprano without peer "Lady Florence," complete with wings of song, above,
and in modified Spanish mode, opposite
Perhaps the key to Madame Jenkins's everlasting allure ...... is the overwhelming fact that she was perfectly awful.