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.
The city sits on the southern bank of the Susquehanna river in the Wyoming valley. The first white men reached there in 1769. The skirmishes and conflagrations which soon took place in the valley floor offer a microcosm of the struggles that shaped the nation, between settlers and Native Americans, colonists and royalists. The first newspaper was published in Wilkes-Barre in 1795. The following year The Herald of the Times had its first major story when the exiled Duc d’Orléans, later to become King Louis Philippe of France, passed through. In 1806 there was another notable visitation in the form of a travelling elephant show. A bridge was built over the Susquehanna, which variously flooded or froze but was soon navigated by steamboat. In 1831 the first canal boat left Wilkes-Barre bound for Philadelphia bearing, among other necessities, the mineral which would make the valley rich.
The discovery of anthracite coal caused Wilkes-Barre to grow at speed, its workforce swollen above all by immigrants from the mining communities of Wales. It is thought to be the first place on earth where anthracite was burned to generate domestic heat. Wilkes-Barre acquired a moniker: the Diamond City. In the 1860s alone its population doubled to more than ten thousand (it eventually peaked at 87,000 in 1930). By the time Florence Foster was born, Wilkes-Barre was a force in the state. And her forebears had planted their feet near the summit of Pennsylvania society.
Genealogy was the source of fascinated one-upmanship among the descendants of settlers. In such a young country, roots mattered. Florence and her mother were life members of the city’s Genealogical and Biographical Society among numerous other patriotic clubs. A profile of Florence in the New York Times in 1916 described her as ‘born in Pennsylvania of distinguished American ancestry’. She was the product, on both sides of her family tree, of settlers who had sailed for the American colonies in the 1630s. But the claim to pure blood and high-born roots stretched many centuries further into the past. Her father’s branch traced a direct line all the way back to the Norman Conquest. Sir Richard Forester was claimed by his descendants as the brother-in-law of William of Normandy, though genealogists and historians dispute his paternity. But at sixteen he certainly fought at the Battle of Hastings. Another forebear is said to have saved Richard the Lionheart’s life on the Third Crusade. On the strength of the connection, Florence would later join a society called the Order of the Three Crusades.
Her father, Charles Dorrance Foster, was born in 1836, the only child of the marriage between Phineas Nash Foster, a farmer in Jackson County, and Mary Bailey Bulford (née Johnson), a widow with three much older children. As a schoolboy he spent his vacations on the family farm. Later he dabbled as a teacher both locally and all the way off in Illinois. When the United States was convulsed by Civil War in 1861, he did not serve, instead gaining admittance to the Bar of Pennsylvania. He soon had a large practice. In 1870, when he was thirty-three, his wealth was listed as $42,000 in real estate and $10,000 in personal estate. When Foster’s father died in 1878 he inherited two farms in Dallas and Jackson Townships just to the north-west of Wilkes-Barre. His father’s step-children, Charles’s older half-siblings whose surname was Bulford, were left to fend for themselves. The windfall had a demotivating impact on his professional life. A mere five years on, a contemporary history of Luzerne County reported that ‘clients soon came to him, but … he found that possession sufficient to occupy most of his time and for all of his wants, so he gave only incidental attention to legal practice’. Instead he involved himself in buying and selling real estate, farmland and livestock and litigating bullishly on large matters and small: from the distribution of coal board revenues to pesky opera house billboards that sprouted in the street outside his home. ‘$3 REWARD,’ he once offered in a small newspaper announcement. ‘For the name of the person who broke the glass out of my window, Wednesday afternoon, playing ball.’
Foster’s portion of Wilkes-Barre’s wealth and splendour drew a tart portrait from another local historian: ‘He is the possessor of wealth ample enough to gratify anything short of sordid avarice. Few men enjoy, at so early an age, such complete physical, financial, and social advantages.’
Charles D. Foster was a prominent Episcopalian and staunch Republican. He acquired a property at 124 South Franklin Street, in a district where Wilkes-Barre’s conservative elite tended to cluster in elegant and spaciously arranged mansions. Not far away was the St Stephen’s Episcopal church, another few doors down the Westmoreland Club. Foster was a member of both. He was the sort of wealthy pillar of the community whom people wanted on their boards. Thus he was president of the first street railway in Wilkes-Barre, director of one turnpike company, treasurer of another, director of the Wyoming National Bank, a member of sundry Masonic, banking, genealogical and historical associations. To these local accomplishments he added electoral success. He was defeated in his first tilt at the Lower House of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1882, then voted in two years later; he served for a single term.
Photographs of Foster show a well-dressed figure with fair hair atop a heavy brow and a full face rounded off by a forthright jaw. The eyebrows are dense and the moustache substantial. In one portrait of Foster as a younger man it droops either side of his mouth. In a later image it twirls upwards.
Charles D. Foster married Mary Jane Hoagland from Hunterdon, New Jersey, on 4 October 1865. Precisely when she entered the world is uncertain. Four censuses give four different versions, suggesting a streak of vanity. In 1860, when she was still living with her parents, the year of her birth was written down as 1838. A decade later, by which time she was married, she had somehow shed seven years and her birth year was now 1845. Ten years on she was only nine years older, the birth date having been dropped to 1846. There were no further alterations in the following two censuses. Then, after her husband’s death, she suddenly lost another four years.
A photograph of Mary Foster in middle age shows a handsome woman in a high-necked dress, brunette hair piled above a well-proportioned face and a strong mouth. As to what came out of that mouth, the evidence is in short supply. But she was clearly proud of her English and Dutch ancestry. She joined a prodigious number of the lineage associations which abounded in the United States. At some point she came into or acquired a property that was of some significance in American folklore. This was the so-called Fleming’s Castle in Hunterton County, where her grandfather had been a judge. In reality it was a modest clapperboard tavern built in 1756 by Irish-born Samuel Fleming; its importance derived from a reference to ‘stopping at Fleming’s’ in General George Washington’s journal.
Mary Foster gave birth on 19 July 1868 to a daughter, although it’s not clear where as no birth certificate has been unearthed. Florence’s death certificate put her place of birth as Wilkes-Barre, while St Clair Bayfield submitted a legal petition in 1945 stating that Florence was born in Flemington, New Jersey, which is not unlikely: quite often, before hospital birth, women would go home for their confinement. The child was christened Narcissa Florence. Narcissa was not a common name; in 1868 newspapers across the whole of America refer to only eleven women called Narcissa. She was named, perhaps, after Narcissa Whitman, the pioneering missionary who in 1836 became the first white woman to traverse the Rockies. More probably her blonde hair and blue eyes put her mother in mind of a member of the daffodil family. It was not the name by which Florence Foster Jenkins would later be known, but it aptly encapsulated something of her personality.
During Florence’s early years, her father made frequent excursions to the farm to oversee the running of the land but also to drop in on his mother. She was still living in the modest farmhouse where he grew up and which she professed to favour over ‘all the wealth and splendor that a city can afford’. A keen equestrian, Foster drove out in a Portland cutter pulled by a pair of horses he stabled by his house, and he took his daughter with him to visit her grandmother. When the snow came they would wrap up in rugs for enchanting rides in the sleigh through the Luzerne countryside.
Florence was raised as a daughter of the age. She applied herself to crochet and the piano. When she fell in love with the latter, the die was cast. The stories about her early musical career must be taken on trust. In an interview Florence gave in 1927 she said she was a piano soloist at the age of ten, performing in many public concerts, on one occasion ‘facing undismayed an audience numbering ten thousand persons’. St Clair Bayfield dated her debut to an even earlier age, telling an interviewer that she’d first performed in Philadelphia at eight. Neither of these stories has the ring of truth. Florence did later perform in front of thousands in Philadelphia but, while musical ability was a valuable social asset in a young girl, there is room for doubt that Foster would have tolerated the spectacle of his accomplished young daughter playing for anyone but drawing-room guests.
And yet the environment in which she grew up was learned and cultured. Her father was widely read and polymathic in his interests. Students and other Wilkes-Barreans often heard him give amusing and informed talks on a vast range of subjects: Roman history, the superiority of the American school system, the impact of Magna Carta, the US Mint, the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, the cardinal virtues of business, the music of the ancients, contemporary literature, the structure of banks, the influence of the solar system on the turn of the seasons, American history in the colonial epoch and, more than once, temperance. Mary Foster was a keen and increasingly accomplished painter of landscapes and portraits in oil. Later in life Florence hung two large portraits of herself side by side over her Steinway in her New York apartment. One showed her as a child, the other as a woman in early middle age. Both were very probably the work of her mother.
The most character-forming event in Florence’s childhood was the birth, in 1875, of a sister. After such a long wait the arrival of a baby girl, whom her parents named Lillian Blanche, will have been the cause of much celebrating. Older siblings very often have more conflicted feelings about the sudden appearance of a rival. Seven years is a long time for a child to rejoice in the undivided love of her mother and father. Even if only on an unconscious level, Florence now had to work harder for her parents’ attention. Soon after this event the accomplished little pianist seems to have begun performing for domestic audiences in Wilkes-Barre. It is possible to speculate that the uncritical applause provided her with an alternative source of approval and validation.
As a child she would have been taken on the train for jaunts in Philadelphia, just over a hundred miles to the southeast of Wilkes-Barre. It was a city to excite the imagination of a young girl. Its burgeoning wealth manifested itself in the streets and gardens. A seated bronze likeness of Lincoln was commissioned in 1866, the year after his assassination, and unveiled in 1871. (Florence’s parents may well have been among the three hundred thousand who viewed Lincoln’s body as its funeral train passed through the city in the thousand-mile journey from Washington, DC back to Springfield, Illinois.) The Association for Public Art effected an improving face-lift of the city’s public spaces. Sculpture sprouted in the parks and avenues. When she walked through the botanical wonderland of Bartram’s Garden, Florence would have encountered a pair of Medici lions – two of many big cats to prowl the city. These cast-iron copies were emissaries from the cradle of the Renaissance with which Florence shared her name. In 1874, when Florence was six, America’s first zoo opened its doors in Philadelphia, its completion much delayed by the Civil War. For the price of twenty-five cents visitors could view a thousand animals. A century on from the Declaration of Independence, a statue of England’s patron saint George slaying the dragon appeared in Fairmount Park, while the Columbus monument commemorated in marble the Italian who found the Americas. That same year Philadelphia became the first American city to host the World Fair. Across six months, nearly ten million people visited two hundred specially erected pavilions on the site of the Centennial Exposition to marvel at a giant celebration of America’s commercial and industrial prowess. On Pennsylvania Day alone, a quarter of a million people flooded the site. It seems probable that Foster took his eight-year-old daughter to the first public display of such revolutionary concepts as the Remington typographic machine, the Wallace-Farmer electric dynamo, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and Heinz ketchup. The US Navy’s pavilion was overseen by the man, appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant himself, who would one day be her father-in-law.
In July 1878, when Florence had just turned ten, she went with her sister and father to observe a total eclipse of the sun from a hotel at the nearby Harveys Lake, the largest natural body of water in Pennsylvania. She had her father to herself in the summer of 1881 on a ten-day visit to Niagara Falls; a trip taken, so the Wilkes-Barre Record reported, ‘for their health’. This was a period of upheaval for Florence. That autumn she was cast out of the family home to be enrolled at the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: America’s first ever boarding school for young women.
Founded in 1785 by a branch of the Protestant Church that had its roots in the fifteenth-century Hussite movement in Bohemia, the school’s education was steeped in religion. A prospectus published in 1876 explained that ‘the moral and religious training of the young is shaped after the teachings of Christ, and by no means subordinated to the acquisition of mere human knowledge’. The principal was appointed from the clergy and, on a strictly non-sectarian footing, there were daily visits to the chapel to cleanse the soul before the day started. The majority of pupils were drawn from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey but others came from further-flung states in the Union – California, Texas, Louisiana – and some came from beyond the country’s borders: Canada, Central and South America, England. As for the academic schooling on offer, twenty resident tutors alongside specialist teachers between them taught several subjects that would one day stand Florence in good stead (German, French, rhetoric, mythology, book-keeping, vocal and instrumental music, painting, drawing, elocution and – given her later obsession with birdsong – ornithology). There were also quite a few that wouldn’t (mineralogy, astronomy, wax-work, natural sciences, logic). Florence doubtless baulked at the restricted opportunities for freedom of movement. Even in their leisure hours, she and her schoolmates were constantly under the eye of a tutoress, who would accompany them everywhere: the refectory, the dormitory, the school grounds for walks. There were plenty of pianos for her to practise on: the school boasted forty-six of them, plus two cabinet organs. But musical attainment was secondary to the overall emphasis on producing young women with an instinct for good behaviour. ‘The government of the household aims at instilling right principles and forming good habits,’ explained the prospectus. ‘Hence the pupils are amenable to a code of rules touching their moral obligations as individuals and their duties as members of a family; while the constant supervision which characterizes the daily regime enables the tutoresses to exercise an influence for good over their charge, which otherwise might not be done. The method of instruction is patient, laborious and hence likely to be thorough.’ For three terms of Moravian improvement to his daughter, Charles Foster paid a fee of around $300 (it was $280 in 1876). The bill encompassed such sundries as washing and choir singing, use of the library and cutlery, access to stationery, medical care from a house physician, fuel, baths and pew rents.
The school record does not indicate if she stayed any longer than a year; two years seems more probable. There were other changes afoot. In September 1882 Florence’s father was nominated to stand as a Republican for Luzerne County in the assembly in Philadelphia. And it was around this time that the Fosters moved house to 27 South Franklin Street, which was even closer to the church.
Another story told by St Clair Bayfield is that as a girl Florence expressed a desire to study music in Europe. To a young pianist it may have seemed a logical ambition. When her fingers touched the keyboard, they produced sounds of European civilisation. This was the music America listened to. Tannhäuser had just been performed at the recently opened Metropolitan Opera in New York while the repertoire of the newly formed Boston Symphony Orchestra was overwhelmingly European. The city’s much older orchestra clarified its allegiance in its name: the Handel and Haydn Society. When the Strasbourg-born émigré composer F. L. Ritter published the first major history of American music in 1883, he found it still heavily under European influence and in only the early stages of self-discovery. In the first half of the 1880s, several important events separately heralded a distinct identity for American music: Marshall W. Taylor published the first anthology of negro spirituals, while a choir of black singers sang at the White House; a chorded zither was patented in the US; and Scott Joplin sat down at a piano in the Silver Dollar Saloon in St Louis, Missouri, and invented ragtime.
Events which may have been more closely observed by Florence, all of them reported in the newspapers, showed that women could play a significant part in the musical life of the nation. In 1882 an opera called The Joust was premiered in Omaha, Nebraska. Its music was composed by one G. Estabrook, whose real name was Gussie Clowry. When she died in 1897, one of her songs was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer to have sold over a million copies. Closer to home was the creation in Potsdam, New York, of what is now known as the Crane School of Music. Its remit was to train public-school music teachers, and it was the brainchild of a thirty-year-old woman, Julia Ettie Crane. ‘Is there any one thing more universally demanded by mankind than music?’ she wrote. ‘Nothing brings greater return in real understanding and development, for the time spent, than music.’
In her own way Florence would come to embody that principle. Charles D. Foster will have needed some persuading on the point. As a domestic accomplishment, Florence’s abilities were to be cherished. But Europe was another matter. Kathleen Bayfield described him as ‘the old-fashioned type who thought girls should stay home, play the piano, paint and be a lady of leisure’. There is no suggestion that Foster had been anywhere near the place, though he will have known the stories of Americans lured to Europe by the siren wail of an older culture. The novels of Henry James – written after prolonged experience of the fleshpots – made cautionary noises about young Americans of an artistic bent venturing into the European lair. James discoursed frankly on children sired out of wedlock, radical politics and terrorist foment, all flavoured with a soupçon of aristocratic hauteur. Roderick Hudson (1875) traced the tragic corruption of Rome on an American artist. The Europeans (1878) told of sober New Englanders ‘exposed to peculiar influences’ when Americans raised across the Atlantic came home. A specifically dire warning was embedded in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in which beautiful young heiress Isabel Archer is pursued by unscrupulous suitors in Europe; she plumps for the worst of the lot, a louche and cold-hearted American expatriate who condemns her to a life of unhappiness.
Florence is more likely to have taken her inspiration from tales of female empowerment and self-expression in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the vastly successful first volume of which was published in the year of her birth. She may have imagined a future for herself conflated in the fates of the more artistic of the four March sisters. On the one hand Beth is a talented pianist whose life is cut short when she contracts scarlet fever. On the other, Amy is the most selfish and vain of the four, but burgeons as a writer whose ambitions of self-fulfilment and growth are fully realised only when she is taken to Europe. Glimpsed in the full flower of adulthood, she offered a satisfactory template for a creative young American woman with wanderlust: ‘Time seemed to have stood still with Amy, for happiness had kept her young and prosperity given her the culture she needed. A stately, graceful woman, who showed how elegant simplicity could be made by the taste with which she chose her dress and the grace with which she wore it.’
Meanwhile, the concept of young women studying piano and singing was gaining acceptance in Europe. The Guildhall School of Music and the Royal College of Music were both established in 1880. In the first round of scholarships offered by the latter to young students of the piano, fourteen out of seventeen went to women.
While it is conceivable that Florence’s stories of thwarted musical ambition were exaggerated, there are enough different sources which talk of her parents banning her from singing to confirm that, in later life, Florence at least believed she had been held back. But there was a far more immediate cause of devastation. In 1883, the eight-year-old Lilly fell ill with diphtheria.
If the infection developed in the standard way, she would at first have complained of a mild sore throat and developed a fever. Then came the alarming whelps of a croup-like cough and, when she opened her mouth, white patches would be seen forming at the back of her throat. Her neck started to swell, her skin turned blue and she found it excruciatingly painful to swallow, then began to have difficulty breathing. Child mortality rates from diphtheria had been slowly declining from around the year of Lilly’s birth, but there was still no treatment. In New York a physician called Joseph O’Dwyer was developing a system of intubation that could be used on children as young as one to stop them asphyxiating. He did not present his findings for another two years and the apparatus would not be adopted for another five. As the Fosters well knew, diphtheria did not discriminate. Foster was infected too, though as he had survived it earlier in life he was not in danger. But epidemics in America had cut a swathe through populations in New England and, more recently, California. Only five years earlier it attacked the progeny of Queen Victoria, killing Princess Alice and her four-year-old daughter.
On 29 June 1883, it claimed another victim. ‘Yesterday evening about six o’clock,’ reported the Wilkes-Barre Record,
the angel of death visited the home of our esteemed townsman, C. D. Foster, Esq., and removed his youngest daughter, Lilly, a little girl only nine [sic] years of age. She fell a victim to that dire disease, diphtheria, after a brief sickness. The little one, so suddenly called away in the very midst of the bright days of childhood, had won her way deep into the hearts of all who knew her. She was of a joyous and kindly disposition, and had given ample evidence of the possession of still nobler qualities which would have made her after life one of great promise. In their deep affliction the sorrowing parents have the sympathy of every one. Their grief, however, is one that cannot soon be overcome, but must be left to the gentle hand of all-healing time to assuage.
While this was hardly an unusual tragedy – a Bulford cousin born in the same year as Florence died at the age of seven – the impact of the death of a child on her parents need not be imagined. For an older sibling it may have been a more complex event. What is known of Florence in later life is that she craved attention. Any such need tends to be established in the earliest days of childhood. After Lilly’s birth Florence experienced the small needling grief of the older sibling nudged out of the parental spotlight. Now in her sister’s death she was consigned to the margins all over again. In her own grief there lurked a quiet unconscious triumph, the intensified sense of her uniqueness as the sole survivor in whom all hopes rested. This time her spell in the sidelines occurred when – as a very young woman shortly to turn fifteen – she had more power to act.
The funeral cortege left Wilkes-Barre at six in the morning on 1 July, bound for the cemetery eight miles away in Huntsville, near the family farm. The party included Lilly’s parents, Foster’s mother and his Bulford siblings Olive and John, as well as other Bulford cousins, and Florence.
Ten days after her sister was buried, the fourteen-year-old Florence Foster eloped.