11: PRIMA DONNA OF CARNEGIE HALL
‘Carnegie Hall has been completely sold out for the recital to be given there tomorrow night by Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, assisted by the Pascarella Chamber Music Society.’
On 24 October 1944 Florence’s final concert was soberly announced in the New York Times. The same page featured a review of Stokowski’s account of Shostakovich’s Eighth with the New York City Symphony and a report from Moscow of the concert premiere of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace.
St Clair Bayfield later claimed that he opposed the recital at Carnegie Hall. ‘I didn’t think a person of her age should take on that strain,’ he said. ‘There is something in a vast audience that draws the magnetism out of a person. It sucks you dry.’ Initially Florence agreed with him. The idea was put to her several times, and she demurred. But having demanded and fed off the praise of her Verdi Club friends for so long, she had no means of resisting insincerity. The profiteer whispering sulphurous encouragement in her ear was George Leyden Colledge, who had set up in artistic management in 1932 and operated out of the RKO Building. He was the one who suggested she switch her annual recital from the relative intimacy of the Ritz-Carlton ballroom (capacity, at a stretch: eight hundred) to the premier concert venue in the entire continent (capacity: three thousand). ‘I can do it,’ she finally told St Clair. ‘I’ll show everybody.’ Less than two weeks before the concert, Florence’s fears visited her in her sleep. ‘B told me of a strange dream and was in a nervous condition,’ St Clair recorded in his diary for Friday 13 October. Five days later her nerves were back under control and at a rehearsal she ‘sang well’. Two days before she was ‘in a whirl about seating’. When St Clair delivered some vases to Carnegie Hall on the eve of the concert he saw her picture adorning the frontage of the celebrated venue. Then on the day itself he wrote the word ‘recital’ in red ink.
The price of admission was set at $3 for the orchestra stalls, $1.80 for the dress circle and 60 cents for the balcony, while lower boxes with seats for eight were $24 and upper boxes $19.20. (Tax was included.) Word spread around the city. Those in the know tipped off others who had never heard of Florence that this was an event which should on no account be missed. By the time the doors opened, the box office had long since run out of tickets. Outside the hall were an estimated two thousand disappointed thrill-seekers. Cosme McMoon had to fight his way through a crowd that teemed down the sidewalk of West 57th Street, past the Little Carnegie Playhouse and round the corner into Seventh Avenue. ‘When I approached the hall I could hardly get near it,’ he recalled. ‘You had to prove your identity to get in.’ According to the sculptress Florence Darnault, few of the tickets were actually purchased. St Clair’s diary confirms that Florence gave away $3,000 worth of tickets. Newspapers all reported a box-office take of $6,000.
Among those who managed to gain access to the hall were several celebrities from the world of music and entertainment. They included Cole Porter; the great soprano Lily Pons, wearing a hat with a dangling fringe like a lampshade; her husband Andre Kostelanetz, the popular radio orchestra conductor; burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee; composer-librettist Gian Carlo Menotti; and Marge Champion, the dance model for Snow White and other Disney characters. ‘I’d never heard about her,’ said Champion. ‘I don’t think the average audience would flock there. These people must have heard of her through the grapevine.’ It is always said that Tallulah Bankhead showed up too, though no newspaper journalist reported her presence. And there were plenty in the house who would not have failed to spot her: from the New York Sun, New York Journal-American, New York World-Telegram, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, PM, the Los Angeles Times and Milwaukee Journal. There was no more privileged access for the Musical Courier alone.
The only photograph that survives of the evening was taken by Adolf Pollitz from the dress circle close to stage left as the clock ticked towards half past eight. One eyewitness reported that many in the audience had donned evening dress for the occasion but, while the photograph contains a few bow ties, most of the men were in suits. A lot of the women wore hats. A few Verdi Club matrons sat in dowdy clumps, dressed to the nines and raising the average age of the gathering. Almost everyone in the photograph is laughing or smiling. Several are clutching or reading the programme, which came with a bright blue cover.
Inside on the front page, lettering in the same bright blue announced the star of the evening, ‘Jenkins’ in upper case and occupying its own line. Below were printed a trio of attestations from critics who had attended previous concerts. Grena Bennett of the New York Journal-American was one of them. Then came Dr B. B. James with his blandishments from the capital. In the New York Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman had had a fun night among the orchids and mink at a Sherry’s recital: ‘she is a personage of authority and indescribable charm,’ he confirmed, ‘she is incomparable, her annual recitals bring unbounded joy.’
In the auditorium there was barely any standing room left – ‘It seemed that the people were hanging on the rafters,’ said McMoon – lending some urgency to the notice from the fire commissioner printed just above the details of the recital programme. ‘Look around now and choose the nearest exit to your seat. In case of fire walk (not run) to that Exit. Do not try to beat your neighbor to the street.’
P. B. of the Herald Tribune likened the febrile atmosphere, ‘both in intensity and unanimity of reaction, to that of The Voice, currently drawing the same sort of delighted applause at the Paramount Theater’. The comparison was timely because twenty-four hours earlier the Carnegie Hall stage was occupied by the selfsame Frank Sinatra. The venue had been crammed to the ceiling with bobbysoxers, a hysterical phalanx of teenage fans who showered him with love the way, a generation earlier, their mothers had hot flushes at Valentino. Sinatra was not there to sing – he pleaded laryngitis – but to take part in an electoral rally in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The contrast between the slim hip young crooner and the solidly constructed tone-deaf soprano of seventy-six could not have been greater. And yet, according to McMoon, Florence didn’t see it that way. ‘At that time Frank Sinatra had started to sing, and the teenagers used to faint during his notes and scream,’ he explained, ‘so she thought she was producing the same kind of an effect, and when these salvos of applause came, she took them as great marks of approval of some tremendous vocal tour de force, and she loved that. She would pause altogether and bow, many times, and then resume the song.’
By the time of the concert McMoon had joined Edwin McArthur in Florence’s bad books, having lately developed a vaudevillean style of accompaniment which favoured the audience with winks and nods behind Florence’s back. ‘She was very unhappy with him,’ said Pollitz, ‘but it was too late to do anything about it, even though she had it in mind to fire him.’
The stage was empty but for the seats for the musicians, a bench, the concert grand piano and a floral display of considerable height which, over the course of the evening, expanded into a botanical bower. At the side of the stage was the pass door through which the evening’s performer was about to emerge.
Almost none of the three thousand people knew anything about the inner life of the woman whose entrance they awaited. Many knew that she couldn’t sing but believed she could, that she translated catcalls and whistles into sincere gestures of appreciation for her art. Some had seen her podgy frame squeezed into fancy dress that made her look perfectly ridiculous. But if any of them wondered what inspired this baffling relic of another age to cast herself as an entertainer, none had an answer.
However nonsensical her appearance at Carnegie Hall, everything in Florence’s previous seventy-six years had a role in delivering her onto its hallowed stage. Even if the story she told of her own life was not all true, Florence believed it to be so. That she was a child prodigy thwarted by her father. A bereaved sister who eloped with a man twice her age from a family of brutes and knaves. An innocent wife infected with a disease which permanently disfigured her. A new music graduate who triumphed over nerves in front of a vast festival audience. An impoverished piano teacher who believed herself disinherited. A New Yorker who reinvented herself as an opera producer. A widow liberated to put her married name to work. A fundraiser energised by a world war. A club founder who gave opportunities to ambitious young musicians. A respected friend of the giants of opera. A president who laid on and starred in the most remarkable parties. Who just wanted to sing. Who, when no one minded, sang some more. Who fed off the applause she had been denied for decades. Who as a little indulgence decided to sing every year in one venue, then another, and another and another. Who after twenty-five years was so silted up with praise and adulation that there was no possibility of self-awareness. Who was abetted by a gentle, collusive dependant she first saw smiling up at her on the stage. Who was deaf to the mocking of audiences, which only increased as her voice enfeebled with age and the gap between what she and they heard grew wider and wider.
The lighting for the show, designed by St Clair, kindly aimed soft pastel shades from the footlights. When Madame Jenkins entered she was greeted by a tumultuous ovation which accompanied her on the Via Dolorosa from the pass door to the piano. Now an undeniably stout old woman, her movements were slow and unsteady, and some feared she might never reach her destination. Florence was decked out rustically in the style of a shepherdess, brandishing the crook she always had with her for the March of the Roses, now helpful for maintaining her in the vertical. Her bosom, recalled Marge Champion, was bedecked with the kind of medals usually pinned on chests by Latin American potentates. Such was the uproar that five minutes had passed before calm was sufficiently restored for her to begin. McMoon, seated at the Steinway and possibly nervous, found it impossible to suppress a rictus.
As was her wont, Florence began with a set of songs all from the same part of the world, in this case a sentimental trio from England: hence the bucolic costume. The programme advertised ‘Phyllis’ by Young, then two from prolific early-nineteenth-century composer Sir Henry Bishop (best known for ‘Home, Sweet Home’): ‘Love Has Eyes’ and ‘Lo, Here the Gentle Lark’. This last called for a busy flute obbligato. It was supplied by the burly Oreste De Sevo, formerly of Toscanini’s orchestra in Italy, who contrived against the odds to maintain his embouchure. ‘For the gentle lark was having no less than a hell of a time,’ explained Richard S. Davis of the Milwaukee Journal. Florence had trouble projecting her bat-squeak voice in smaller halls. Here some said she was barely audible to an audience which rushed to smother the last notes of every song with cheers. Others found her all too audible. Al Hubay, a young usher at the Met, was near the rear of the stalls. Her voice ‘was kind of icy. It was audible, it wasn’t big. I think that was probably the problem. I think the people upstairs heard it too well. Especially in the upper reaches of her voice, it got sharper-sounding as it went up.’ Marge Champion remembered a voice that ‘wasn’t big but it was very very penetrative. I’m very sure that I heard every off-note that she sang. And that was consistent. There was nothing inconsistent about her technique.’
Florence departed the stage while the Pascarella strings sawed through a pleasant Haydn quartet. This gave the audience a chance to recover and Florence enough time to shed the shepherdess outfit and pull on a gown variously described by onlookers as either rose pink or pale peach. As she reentered, jewels glittered on her bust and neck and rings glinted on her fingers. In her hand was a sizeable fan of orange-and-white ostrich feathers which, after waving it at the audience, she placed on the piano, before leaning on the instrument herself for support. Next to pass through the prism of Florence’s larynx was a pair of regular favourites from her repertoire: Gluck’s ‘Divinités du Styx’, a roaring romantic aria in which Queen Alceste offers to lay down her life for love, then the Queen of the Night’s furious coloratura howls.
Florence’s manner throughout was ‘an elegant blend of sang froid and studied simplicity’, according to the Tribune. Her impassivity was baffling to Marge Champion: ‘I was just totally unprepared for the fact that it did not seem to bother her in the least that everybody in the audience was convulsed with laughter nor was she in any way thrilled by it. I don’t know what she did with it. I don’t know how she processed that laughter.’ The audience now girded itself into a fresh fit of collective hysteria. Some being familiar with her Magic Flute recording, listeners drowned her own trills with laughter. Not everyone appreciated this. Connoisseurs of Lady Florence’s art wanted to hear every bum note, every error of pitch. Earl Wilson of the Post was in Row T. ‘Around me I heard people saying, “Ssssh, don’t laugh so loud; stick something in your mouth.”‘ Such was the atmosphere of giddy irony that when a stagehand came on to move a chair even he was applauded.
At the intermission ushers and stage crew swarmed onto the stage bearing vast baskets of blooms which were arranged around the piano so that McMoon returned as if to a greenhouse. One critic was reminded of an expensive mortuary. Florence was greeted by a standing ovation as she re-entered to embark on the Russian section of the evening in a gown Slavic in flavour with a tall jewelled headdress. ‘Biassy’, the international mulch she had memorialised on disc, was trailed in the programme: ‘A band rides through the sky, where snow is falling fast. The moon as a coquette smiles fitfully between the clouds. The horses are lost in a trackless waste, lured by an evanescent devil, who is also a friend of the house devil and many other imps who join in the carnival. The question is, is this the funeral of a great king, or the marriage of a beautiful witch?’ This helpful exposition was lost on the audience as Florence fumbled uncertainly into a double maze laid on by the language of Pushkin and the music of Bach. Then Rachmaninov was granted two opportunities to rotate in the grave where, only the previous year, his mortal remains had taken up occupation just up the Bronx River Parkway in Valhalla. Yearningly in ‘In the Silence of the Night’, brightly in ‘The Floods of Spring’, Florence’s Russian repertoire supplied the audience with further insights into her unique properties as a singer.
As the recital continued the reporters listened to audience reaction and described their own. ‘She didn’t hit three notes in that one,’ one spectator commented. ‘She hit only a few notes; the rest were promissory,’ snarked Irving Hoffman of the Hollywood Reporter. ‘Her notes range from the impossible to the fantastic,’ reported an anonymous critic from Newsweek, ‘and bear no relation whatever to any known score or scale.’ Robert Bager of the New York World-Telegram congratulated Madame Jenkins for having ‘perfected the art of giving added zest to a written phrase by improvising it in quarter tones, either above or below the original notes’. It was the noisiest audience McMoon ever encountered anywhere. ‘I have never seen such a scene,’ he recalled, ‘either a bullfight or at the Yale Bowl after a winning touchdown.’ And yet he had the presence of mind at the end of several songs, as the decibels of mock approval rose in another crescendo, to spring to his feet and kiss Florence’s hand.
The Pascarella ensemble performed another quartet, this time from Schumann, and stayed onstage to accompany Florence. The young composer Daniel Pinkham, who snuck in at the interval having failed to gain entrance earlier, remembered the oddity of the players all seated with their backs to one another. Florence returned in high style as a Spanish temptress in a shawl, her wig ornamented with a jewel-encrusted comb and a red flower. In this garb she proceeded to sing a poem by Rabindranath Tagore translated from Bengali, which had been set to music by American composer Edward Horsman: the altitudes explored in ‘Bird of the Wilderness’ found Florence in imprecatory mode as she claimed kinship with her winged friends one last time: ‘Let me but soar in that sky, In its lonely immensity! Let me but cleave its clouds, And spread wings in its sunshine.’ Kostalenetz was the only composer present at the recital (apart from McMoon) to hear his work interpreted by Florence. But if his song ‘Interlude’ made an impact it was instantly occluded by what was widely agreed to be the night’s highlight.
For ‘Clavelitos’, the high-speed tongue-twisting zarzuela by Valverde, Florence delivered a party trick that had long been a popular staple with her audiences. Equipped with a basket full of red rosebuds, she proceeded to lob them towards the audience in time to the rhythmic pulses of the music. This interaction met with such approval that, carried away, Florence eventually let the empty basket follow its contents into the auditorium. The unison of whistles convinced her of the need for an instant encore, but she couldn’t embark on it without the requisite props. The dutiful McMoon, supported by a couple of ushers, trooped down into the stalls to retrieve the basket and the buds. As she started again, the first petal stuck to her finger and she had to make strenuous flicking gestures to fling it off. ‘It cracked me up to the point where I could almost not stand it,’ said Marge Champion. As McMoon remembered it, during ‘Clavelitos’ one celebrated actress in the audience had to be carried out of her box in a state of hysteria. She didn’t miss much. It only remained for Florence to croon McMoon’s ‘Serenata Mexicana’ and, finally, another dose of Hispanic high jinks: Chapi’s ‘Las hijas del Zebedeo’, the zarzuela which once prompted her to compare herself to Luisa Tetrazzini.
Afterwards, as an audience drugged on hysterics filed out into the New York night, Marge Champion spoke for them all: ‘We had sore muscles in our stomachs the next day as we laughed so hard and so long.’ Meanwhile Florence’s friends and associates clambered onto the stage, where Florence and Verdi Club officers were receiving, to rain praise down on her head. Among them was Mera Weinstock of Melotone Recording Studios. Before she could open her mouth the soloist spoke: ‘Don’t you think I had real courage to sing the Queen of the Night again after that wonderful recording I made of it at the studio?’ On his way out Earl Wilson of the Post caught the eye of St Clair Bayfield. ‘Why?’ he asked him. ‘She loves music,’ St Clair replied. ‘If she loves music, why does she do this?’ St Clair explained about the money raised for charity.
Later he took Florence home and, before he turned in at the conclusion of a momentous day, composed a brief, bathetic diary entry: ‘Took B up to her recital – capacity house – half of them scoffers but half adoring B. Luckily, a fine day.’
America awoke to thrilling news. ‘U.S. DEFEATS JAPANESE NAVY,’ ran the headline across the front of the New York Times. ‘ALL FOE’S SHIPS IN ONE FLEET HIT; MANY SUNK; BATTLE CONTINUES.’ At the bottom right-hand corner of page nineteen was a six-line item titled ‘Florence F. Jenkins in Recital’. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, gave a recital at Carnegie Hall last night, assisted by the Pascarella Chamber Music Society quartet; Cosme McMoon, pianist, and Oreste De Sevo, flutist [sic].’ The Times hadn’t sent a critic. Others had. Some filed copy while still intoxicated by the mood of celebration. ‘She was exceedingly happy in her work,’ said Robert Bager in the New York World-Telegram. ‘It is a pity that so few artists are. And the happiness was communicated as if by magic to her hearers.’ Grena Bennett, a previous encomium of whose was quoted in the programme, found merit in measuring success by markers other than vocal accuracy. ‘She was undaunted by either the composers’ intent or the opinions of her auditors,’ she wrote in the New York Journal-American. ‘Her attitude at all times was that of a singer who performed her task to the best of her ability.’
A couple of reporters wondered if the fools and gulls weren’t actually the audience who had stumped up all that money. Others were more inclined to draw attention to the chasm between the audience’s perception of Florence and her own. It was ‘the funniest, saddest of all concerts,’ said the headline in the Milwaukee Journal. ‘The blissful dowager on the platform seemed completely unaware that 3,000 persons were laughing at her – not politely, mind you, but uproariously and in gales,’ wrote its music critic Richard S. Davis. ‘She delivered line after line of her ballad with nothing but her moving lips as evidence that she was singing.’ Earl Wilson observed ‘snickering, squealing and guffawing at her singing, which she took very seriously’. O. T. (the byline of Oscar Thompson) in the New York Sun found an ‘infantile quality’ in her voice, and barely heard a thing. What he did hear ‘was hopelessly lacking in a semblance of pitch, but the further a note was from its proper elevation the more the audience laughed and applauded’. She was spared the verdict of Isabel Morse Jones of the Los Angeles Times who didn’t file a review, but later she dubbed the concert ‘the most pathetic exhibition of vanity I have ever seen’. The prospect of Florence singing folk music in costume prompted her to walk out, disgusted also at the part played by the audience. ‘There was something indecent and barbarously cruel about this business,’ she wrote. In PM, Henry Simon described the audience’s frenzied laughter as ‘the cruellest and least civilized behavior I have ever witnessed in Carnegie Hall. But Mrs Jenkins met it all with pleased smiles.’
It was perhaps the sympathetic note struck by PM’s review that persuaded St Clair to give them an interview the following year. ‘I think my wife knew her voice was passing,’ he told his interviewer Betty Moorsteen when she visited him in the fourth-floor apartment on West 37th Street. ‘But she loved singing so much she determined to continue with it. Perhaps she kept on a little too long, but it was her pleasure, her way of expressing herself.’ When St Clair was asked about it years later, he recalled that Florence was already distressed as they made their way back to the Seymour Hotel apartment that night after the concert. His worst fears were confirmed when they both read the newspapers. ‘It turned out the fiasco I expected. Afterward, when we went home, Florence was upset – and when she read the reviews, crushed. She had not known, you see.’
St Clair went so far as to claim that the critical reception broke Florence’s heart. On a deeper level what it really shattered was her defences. Independent witnesses had no stake in shoring up the potent image of herself she had projected for so many years to all those women’s clubs and her own fiefdom in the Verdi Club. And so they destroyed it.
In due course, even the Musical Courier deserted Florence after a quarter of a century of hoodwinking its readers in return for money. Being a periodical it limped in late with a report published on 15 November. The critic could not be persuaded to comment on her singing at all. Instead the Pascarella ensemble was singled out for praise. ‘The quartet also played with the singer in Mr McMoon’s “Mexican Serenade”, written for the soprano,’ it concluded. ‘The vast audience roared bravos at every gesture of the glamorously garbed singer.’ Four days later the San Diego Union, which reported in July on the brisk trade in her recordings, piled in again with a belated compilation of the critics’ raspberries from Carnegie Hall (‘Tone-Deaf Coloratura Makes Bad Singing Pay’).
But by then Florence wasn’t reading her reviews. She was so exhausted by the occasion that on 28 October she sent St Clair to a dinner in her stead where he said he ‘felt somewhat persona non grata’. On the final day of October she was ‘at last able to relax’, he recorded in his diary, and then two days later was ‘much recovered’. She was well enough to pay a visit to Danbury, seventy miles north of New York in Connecticut, on 4 November, but on the drive home she had a heart seizure. She refused to let St Clair summon a doctor and they went out to dinner. Re-entering the Seymour he noted that ‘she stood still by the door then walked with difficulty’. The next day a physician diagnosed heart strain and complications and prescribed medicine and rest. A couple of days later she presided at a Verdi Club musicale at the St Regis Hotel, whereafter her health fluctuated for a week until, on 16 November, St Clair thought her ‘exceedingly ill’, a fear confirmed the next day by a heart specialist called Dr Hertz.
Florence’s illness was brought on by either the strain of the performance or the trauma of the reviews. Or both. Or, perhaps, she intuited somewhere deep in the labyrinth of her psyche that the span of her life should end on a major chord of resounding, unrepeatable finality. Confined to bed, where she mostly dozed, she was attended by a nurse, her housemaid of seventeen years, Mildred Brown, and St Clair. He was unable to be there constantly as he was rehearsing a play called Hand in Glove, which was due to open in early December, so he visited before rehearsals and after. On 22 November he took her flowers. Dr Hertz suggested she go to hospital but she refused, and to St Clair she seemed to be through the worst. ‘Dr reports acute stage is past,’ he wrote.
In the last meaningful act of their long liaison, at some point Florence gestured to her briefcase. ‘In there is my will,’ she said to St Clair, ‘and I am leaving everything to you.’ On 26 November she agreed to her doctor’s demand that a hospital bed be hired. Her conversation was bright in the morning, then she slept in the afternoon, and St Clair felt confident enough to go out to dinner with Prince Galitzen. It was in St Clair’s absence that, at about half past seven, Madame Jenkins, Lady Florence, the prima donna of Carnegie Hall, took her final, shallow breath.