12: LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

‘After 36 years of happiness in Love, B. leaves me.’ St Clair Bayfield returned to the Seymour Hotel and the long face of Dr Hertz, who imparted the news that Florence was dead. The diary, which for many years contained no more than a series of brief jottings, became almost wordy with grief.

At 9 p.m., St Clair rang Arthur Moritz, an attorney who had handled her affairs in Wilkes-Barre and elsewhere for the previous ten years, to inform him and suggest that he take on the administration of her estate. Moritz immediately phoned Campbell’s in Madison Avenue, where the funeral of Florence’s mother took place in 1930. The New York Times was also contacted.

The following morning was a Monday. The Times announced the death of Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, soprano, founder and president of the Verdi Club. The briefest details of her life were offered. She was the widow of Dr Frank Jenkins of Washington, DC and gave a recital at Carnegie Hall on 25 October. Of her accompanists that night, the flautist’s name was given as Oeste [sic] De Sevo. The final paragraph consisted of four words: ‘No immediate relatives survive.’

St Clair was excused rehearsals that day. Moritz came in from Scarsdale just to the north of the city in order to locate the will. An initial search proved fruitless so he gave orders for the building management to seal the apartment and spent the day arranging for the opening of a box kept at a safe deposit company on Third Avenue in the hope that it would contain the will. The news travelled to Dallas, Pennsylvania, where Florence’s next of kin was George Bulford, a second cousin who was descended from Charles Dorrance Foster’s older half-brother. His permission was sought for the removal of the body and the arrangement of the funeral. This he gave on the understanding that neither he nor any of his relatives would incur any of the cost. Later that day Moritz and St Clair met the funeral director to choose a coffin. ‘The sky shed tears,’ wrote a mournful St Clair before adding, ‘No will to be found.’

On Tuesday the safe deposit box was opened and also found to contain no will. Instead there were savings bank books, leases affecting Wilkes-Barre properties including Florence’s parents’ home in South Franklin Street, a cache of her jewellery, two wristwatches initialled F. F. J. and one initialled S. C. B., an eleven-page genealogical document and a four-page typewritten sketch of Florence’s life and activities. Moritz applied to the Surrogate’s Court of New York, which handled probate and estate proceedings, for sanction to exceed a limit of $250 for expenditure on a funeral to reflect Florence’s wealth and social standing. He was granted an upper tariff of $500 including the cost of shipping the body to Wilkes-Barre and interment. St Clair attended a dress rehearsal of Hand in Glove and didn’t get to bed till four in the morning.

For the funeral on Wednesday he had printed a memorial card showing an elderly Florence beaming brightly under a substantial hat. ‘In Loving Memory,’ it said in a gothic font. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins who passed away with a smile November 26th 1944.’ The funeral took place at 11 a.m. It was conducted by St Clair. A harpist played two tunes and a baritone sang ‘Going Home’ and the Lord’s Prayer over an open coffin. ‘B. looked lovely,’ St Clair wrote. ‘I felt some comfort after I had kissed her and held her little hand. The heavens wept.’ That night Florence’s remains were taken to Wilkes-Barre, accompanied by her old home-town friend Miss Mae Black, with whom she’d stayed on the night of her father’s death in 1909.

Moritz arranged with the office of the public administrator for the Seymour Hotel apartment to be searched more thoroughly in the presence of an attorney representing the next of kin. They found Florence’s home forbiddingly stuffed with papers in every imaginable cranny. ‘There were drawers upon drawers, full to the brim,’ recalled Moritz later in an application to retrieve his unpaid fees; the sheer profusion of documents caused him to slip briefly out of formal legalese. It was agreed that a single day was insufficient to complete the search; the maid Mildred Brown, who expressed her certainty that Florence had left a will, was asked to take on the job. She was still looking for it eleven days later, and most days St Clair’s diary noted that it had not yet been located.

Twenty-four hours on from her funeral, Florence’s body was interred at the Foster family mausoleum in Hollenback Cemetery in Wilkes-Barre. Officiating was the rector of St Stephen’s Episcopal church, which burned down in 1897 and in which a stained glass window in memory of her younger sister Lillian Blanche was endowed by her father. The local newspaper’s obituary mentioned Florence’s many concerts in New York, including her climactic recital; also the deep American ancestry of her parents and her late husband. Finally it alluded to ‘H. Clair Hayfield, who handled Mrs Jenkins’s musical affairs’ and, it was reported, ‘was unable to come here for today’s service’.

St Clair was stuck in New York, denied a second chance to skip rehearsals of Hand in Glove. A psychological murder mystery about Jack the Ripper, the production was directed by James Whale, the maker of several screen horror classics who had been lured from Hollywood by the subject matter. When it opened on 4 December, the Times critic found the play diverting if full of holes and underwritten characters, one of them played by St Clair who had ‘trouble with a retired school teacher’. It was the first time in many years that a review had deigned to notice him.

In the meantime St Clair was being written out of Florence’s life story. His sorrows began even before the funeral when he tried to retrieve some paintings of his from the Seymour Hotel apartment. As it was sealed he needed a lawyer’s assistance. He applied to Nathaniel Palzer, an attorney whom he had known via Florence for a dozen years and trusted implicitly. Palzer had drawn up Florence’s missing will. When he said he’d need a signature on a document, St Clair provided it without looking too closely at what he was signing. What St Clair didn’t know was that the day after the funeral Palzer was appointed to act as the New York attorney for a large body of second cousins from the Bulford clan. St Clair’s diary entry of 8 December refers to him as ‘friend Palzer’, with whom he discussed ‘making a claim on B’s estate’. (To distract himself St Clair also cleaned his golf clubs that day.) Later St Clair was told by an attorney he instructed that his signature consented to Mrs Ella Bulford Harvey becoming the administrator of the estate. In effect, he had inadvertently surrendered any prospect of inheriting Florence’s fortune. According to a later entry in St Clair’s diary, Palzer’s deception was motivated by professional jealousy. Incensed that it was Moritz rather than him who was instructed on the night of Florence’s death, and knowing the missing will left everything to St Clair, Palzer contacted the Bulfords and told them that unless they appointed him their attorney he would make the contents of the will public. St Clair’s attorney theorised that Palzer’s desertion was the ‘result of Jewish incapability of realizing that with a gentleman Honor is not just a ping-pong ball’.

Ella Bulford Harvey was the granddaughter of John Jacob Bulford and Florence’s second cousin once removed. Born in 1888, she had been widowed in her mid-twenties and left with a single daughter. She remarried at nearly forty, was now fifty-six, and was chosen as the Bulfords’ representative presumably because her life experiences had made her resilient. There were a lot of Bulfords to represent: unlike the Fosters, they had bred busily and Mrs Bulford duly submitted a list of twenty second cousins. One each was from New York state, Virginia and West Virginia; two were from Nebraska, three from New Jersey; the majority from Dallas, Luzerne and Trucksville, Pennsylvania.

Palzer passed on to his new clients the information that Florence had left $70,000 in jewellery and securities and $30,000 in cash. Over the next few days Moritz kept him abreast of his search for the will in Wilkes-Barre banks and half a dozen lawyers’ offices in New York and Washington with whom Florence had had dealings as far back as 1913 and as recently as 1940. One of the lawyers, it emerged, had died thirty years earlier. None knew anything about a will. In the apartment a trunk and a cabinet had their locks broken, but nothing was found. On 11 December Mildred Brown, whose rummaging in the apartment had also turned up nothing, mentioned a bag with valuable papers which had not yet been located. She suggested Moritz apply to look for it in a warehouse where Florence rented storage space. A day later she finished her own search, which she calculated had taken her ninety-nine hours and for which she billed Moritz $88. Moritz, getting desperate, took a final peek behind the many paintings in the apartment, including the two portraits of Florence over the Steinway. The next day, which was three days before Christmas, Ella Bulford Harvey filed a petition for letters of administration on the estate – asking the court to appoint her as the official distributor of Florence’s assets. The Bulfords were evidently confident of success because on Boxing Day Palzer confirmed to Moritz that he would receive from them a fee for his services in organising the funeral and searching for the will.

Afterwards, theories about the disappearance of the will – and the bag or briefcase in which Florence kept it – laid the blame on two quite different parties. Florence Darnault and Adolf Pollitz believed the thief was Cosme McMoon acting in concert with Mildred Brown. Both, went their theory, had expected to be named in the will. When they discovered they weren’t, they attempted to alter it and, making a hash of it, destroyed it instead. ‘He was a rotter through and through,’ said Pollitz. ‘A terrible person,’ agreed Darnault. Their low opinion stemmed from their disapproval of McMoon’s disloyal stage antics towards the end of Florence’s singing career. It is true that her accompanist was expecting something from the will. ‘This was a part of the background why I was associated with her,’ McMoon said. ‘She had spoken to me about leaving a trust fund for scholarships to talented singers and a musical foundation in a house which she owned in Flemington, New Jersey to be known as the Florence Foster Jenkins memorial.’ On 22 December he asked St Clair to join him and Mildred Brown in employing a lawyer, but St Clair was working on his own case. McMoon went on to sue the estate; Pollitz testified against him and the case was dismissed.

St Clair was later adamant that McMoon had never said an ill word about Florence, and he was convinced that the will was stolen by a member of the Bulford clan. Either party would need to have done it before her death or almost immediately after it, because Moritz had the apartment sealed on the morning of 27 November.

But the ultimate responsibility for the chaos which followed her death rested with the decedent herself. Florence’s distrust of lawyers and bankers, both professions closely connected with her father, meant that she had calamitously failed to lodge her will in a safe place beyond the reach of interested parties. It was her final manipulation.

The emotional cost was borne by St Clair, whose profound grief took on a bitter flavour. The very year he met Florence, indeed not six weeks after their common-law wedding ceremony, Florence had been plunged into an unpleasant court battle occasioned by her father’s missing will. She would have known that the failure to find hers would initiate a second legal scrap with her cousins and that without her money St Clair would be penniless. He was surviving on social security handouts and, unable to afford the rent of $87 a month on the 37th Street apartment that Florence had paid since 1917, he extracted an agreement from the landlord that the payment would be met only after the outcome of his legal challenge to inherit Florence’s fortune. In the meantime he sublet half of the apartment to reduce his financial commitment. Florence’s friends evaporated. He spent Christmas alone in the apartment where every previous year he had hauled a tree up to the fourth floor and decorated it for a party with Florence and friends, who for one night of the year had enjoyed slumming it in St Clair’s cramped quarters with its quaint bare decor. ‘A wet cool miserable day in tune with my regrets about darling B,’ he wrote. ‘It is very lonely without her,’ he later told Betty Moorsteen of PM. ‘But I feel I have no right to be indignant at losing someone who gave me thirty-six years of more happiness than most men ever know.’

After Florence’s death St Clair did not immediately write to Kathleen Weatherley. He grieved in silence for a month. On 30 December he finally broke his silence. As soon as she received the news Kathleen cabled her condolences. Two days after Hand in Glove closed, St Clair confided to her that only she would be able to understand his complicated feelings. ‘My life’s entirely circled round hers,’ he wrote. ‘Whilst Florence lived, if I were in necessity, she would provide for me, and if she died first I was to inherit her personal estate. My statements of her promises are corroborated by three witnesses to whom she said much the same thing, but even if this claim were successful it would produce nothing for twelve months, and then much less than my claim. A mere pittance, yet she intended me to inherit all her estate, of that I am perfectly sure. If a will is found this fact will be proved, but the most expert search has failed to reveal one. We are at a loss.’

Towards the end of January American Weekly caught wind of the legal story brewing and had a field day with Florence all over again. ‘Discordant Diva’s Missing Will’, said the title. ‘What is to happen,’ it asked, ‘to the wealth of Florence Foster Jenkins, whose odd operatic career amounted to murder of the undetectable B sharp?’ No wonder St Clair confided to his diary: ‘Had a burst of emotion which tore me apart, at loss of B. Can’t seem to get my balance.’ He was also suffering from rheumatism. Two days later Florence’s qualities were more generously considered at a luncheon held in her memory at the Shelton. Tributes were paid by Verdi Club members, led by St Clair. A new president was elected: Mrs Owen Kildare, married to an émigré Russian prince who hid his identity behind an Irish name, was a busy broadcaster, ardent Republican and former suffragette who strongly disapproved of stylish fashions. She was a tireless club woman and for years she had taken charge of the pageants at the Silver Skylarks Ball. Without its founder and figurehead, the Verdi Club subsided into invisibility. It was to be mentioned just twice more in the Times, and then only in passing.

On Valentine’s Day (‘Dear B of last year was my Valentine’) St Clair submitted a petition to the Surrogate Court that he and Florence had lived together since 1909 as common-law husband and wife, which various witnesses could confirm, at which date he had abandoned his career to manage hers; and that Florence had made a will of which he was to be the main beneficiary. He also wished to revoke the consent which, erroneously and without knowing his legal rights, he gave to Ella Bulford Harvey, and applied to administer the estate himself. Plus he wanted his paintings back. He signed the document ‘John St Clair Roberts known as St Clair Bayfield’. In early March he answered Mrs Harvey’s demand for proof of his marriage to Florence by submitting a long bill of particulars: it included a description of their meeting and pledge to each other, a list of the addresses in which they had cohabited and the hotels across the country where she had joined him on tour in the 1910s. He added, for effect, that the tours had been with Sir Herbert Tree and George Arliss. A list of fifteen witnesses was supplied who could confirm that he and Florence were married, including her Hungarian accompanist, Prince Galitzen, the new president of the Verdi Club and his landlord. He did not know the date of Florence’s marriage to Frank Thornton Jenkins, but he did claim to know when they were divorced. Also, he knocked a decade off his own age. On 5 March St Clair was in court as witnesses gave evidence that he was Florence’s common-law husband, though he complained that his attorney was ‘utterly outshone’ by Palzer and ‘did not make the most of the excellent witnesses I had marshalled in our favour’. He took the decision to appoint a new attorney.

In due course the newspapers caught wind of St Clair’s petition to be recognised as her heir. ‘The Sour Soprano’s Discordant Legacy’, ran the Sunday Mirror headline in early May. Alongside more of the usual jokes about Florence, the article was unkind about St Clair’s career – ‘he claims that he acted years ago in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s and George Arliss’s Shakespearian troupes’ – and lampooned the image of him as her loyal protector in a verse to ‘a departed chantoose’:

Though others howled when Madame yowled,

Rudely tooted when La Jenkins hooted,

Hissed when she missed,

Booed when she mooed,

Groaned when she moaned,

Blatted when she flatted,

Razzed the very pantos

Off her bel cantos,

Mocked her Puccini

With wilted zucchini,

Rewarded with spinach her lieder in Finnish,

With odorous scallion

Her group in Italian …

Though others did those discouraging things,

NOT St Clair Bayfield! HE cheers in the wings.

This was published on 6 May, and syndicated to the Wilkes-Barre Record on VE Day. Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender offered no distraction for St Clair who started dreaming that Florence was alive and well and with him. He was soon receiving auditory visitations from her. One night he awoke in his apartment to the sound of knocking. ‘I disregarded it and told myself I must not be fooled,’ he wrote in a letter to Kathleen on 14 May. ‘But when some nights later I awaked [sic] for no reason, and then heard a secret knock, very distinctly, in the north room of 66, I went in the dark and talked to her but gained no response. Thinking this was a wish I should communicate, I went to a spiritualist with a handbag of hers. Aware that these people usually preyed on thought reading, I was only astonished when certain things were mentioned which I myself did not know till afterwards verified. Also the message said, “I’m very unhappy you should be suffering because of lack of care on my part. There was a will but it has been destroyed. I love you and shall always love you as much as I ever did with my whole heart, and I send you my blessings. In three months your financial position will be improved, so do not worry. Attend to your stage work to avoid it. Trust in God more than you ever did before, above all I want you to be happy. Bless you, bless you, bless you.” I have written this from memory but have the memo I made immediately after hearing this. The other things mentioned were about her father, and not until I verified them did I know them, so that could not have been thought reading.’ The clairvoyant talked of a safe and Chase Bank and a court case, though they might easily have intuited this information by reading a newspaper.

St Clair didn’t mention his dealings with a clairvoyant in the sympathetic interview which appeared in PM. It was published the day before the hearing to establish his marital status. In the Surrogate Court St Clair professed his love for Florence and produced correspondence between them over the years to prove they had thought of themselves as a married couple. One witness brought from Wilkes-Barre told the court that Florence had introduced St Clair as her secretary (‘which is the last thing she would do!’ St Clair exclaimed in his diary). Only one witness was called to testify that they were often seen together, but she was the grandest personage on his list. Mrs Edith Bobe Hague’s sympathy could be counted on as her name had also been dragged through the papers. In 1925 she was physically assaulted and robbed of $40,000 worth of jewellery by three armed men. Her companion for the evening was Robert Hague, the head of the marine division of Standard Oil. The robbery caused their affair to be revealed, Hague to obtain a divorce from his wife and to marry Miss Bobe, who was described as a ‘modiste’. She was widowed in 1939. Her presence in court in 1945 attracted press photographers. A platinum blonde in a fur stole and sunglasses emerged into the early summer gloaming, shielding her face from the camera flashes. St Clair wore a dark suit, a fedora and an anxious smile.

Deliberating his verdict, Judge James Delehanty was unable to overlook the blood ties of Florence’s cousins, but he took pity on St Clair and found his claim to have some merit. In Delehanty’s chambers St Clair’s lawyer negotiated with Palzer and came up with a figure of $22,000. On St Clair’s birthday – 2 August – Delehanty publicly delivered his judgment. The letters of administration were granted to Ella Bulford Harvey, who would be appointed administrator ‘subject to the payment of $22,000 to John St Clair Roberts in full settlement and payment of his claim of common-law husband of the decedent, including any and all claims for services rendered as secretary or manager, or otherwise’.

In Wilkes-Barre this was reported as a victory for Florence’s local heirs. ‘It is understood,’ said the Wilkes-Barre Record, ‘the heirs have made a small settlement with Bayfield.’ In fact, while St Clair had done worse than he had hoped, he fared far better than any other individual in the distribution of Florence’s money. The sum almost exactly matched that granted to the Bulfords by Florence’s father in the contentious second codicil to his will. The tax on his award was to be paid by the estate, which also had to cover the costs of the public administrator’s legal expenses and costs of more than $2,000. Another $3,000 had already been withdrawn from the estate to settle the outstanding rents at both apartments, plus paying for the restoration of the Seymour Hotel apartment to the condition in which Florence entered it in 1917 (a bathroom had been turned into a storeroom). The following year Moritz asked for his unsettled bill of $750 for services rendered to be paid out of the estate too. It was a far more demanding task than he anticipated. ‘The decedent was advanced in years and regarded as eccentric,’ he explained in his petition, ‘had no one (except for Mr St Clair Bayfield) in close relationship with her.’ He submitted a detailed breakdown of the 34⁷⁄₈; hours he’d spent on tidying up her affairs. The next of kin argued that the payment should be met by St Clair. ‘I was never the attorney for Mr Bayfield,’ Moritz said. ‘I never acted on his behalf.’ The judge ruled that the estate must pay. Thus a sum slightly above $70,000 was shared between twenty Bulford cousins. Mrs Harvey also took charge of Charles D. Foster’s considerable portfolio of real estate.

On the day St Clair celebrated his seventieth birthday, at least in prospect he was richer than he had ever been. So were many of his co-beneficiaries. On 7 August George Bulford announced that he would be opening a showroom dealing in farm machinery and hardware. On the 19th the Bulfords held their fifteenth annual reunion picnic in the Luzerne countryside. After they’d opened with the Lord’s Prayer, the treasurer had something more momentous than usual to report. The absentee Bulfords serving in the armed forces were enumerated, including one seriously wounded on D-Day. Three births were recorded, two marriages and two deaths. Although she’d certainly never attended these gatherings, one of the names of the departed belonged to Mrs Florence Jenkins. A measure of how much her money would mean to her more indigent next of kin came on 28 August when the will of Frank Bulford was probated: he left his home and an acre of land to one daughter and $500 each to four grandchildren, splitting between three daughters and one granddaughter the remainder of an estate valued at $1,900.

St Clair was still wounded by sorrow and self-pity. On the anniversary of his common-law marriage he wrote, ‘This day 1909’ in his diary. At the end of August he was still hearing Florence’s knocks. ‘Will see spiritualist and find if B wishes me to get in touch.’

On a more concrete plane he and Kathleen made plans to reunite. She sought release from the War Office but didn’t sail to New York until January 1946, arriving just as St Clair was going into rehearsals for a play called Jeb about a black soldier returning to the US after three years in the South Pacific. She too had not seen him for three years. In Kathleen’s judgement, the hunted look she had known when their affair had to be kept a secret had now disappeared. She attributed the change to Florence’s death. Two days before they married St Clair, a keen swimmer till the end of his life, had a serious accident in a pool which meant that for several years he was unable to raise his arms above his head. And yet, said Kathleen, ‘After a couple of years’ marriage with me, even though he was then seventy-three years old, his face completely changed, he became fatter, was exceedingly happy.’

St Clair and Kathleen bought a house in Westchester, while he invested his money and drew an annuity. A rare colour photograph of the Bayfields dressed up for a smart function shows St Clair still lean and imposing in old age. Kathleen clings to his arm, beaming proudly. Their marriage was not necessarily happy. A young pianist called Bill Brady, who lived at the time in Westchester, was introduced to the Bayfields by Adolf Pollitz and came to know them well. In 2006 he gave an interview in which he expressed the view that St Clair was not in love with Kathleen and would never have established contact with her after Florence’s death were he not destitute as he awaited the outcome of the court case. According to Brady, Kay was even more domineering than Florence, and St Clair became animated only when she was not present. As he related it, St Clair’s swimming injury rendered him sexually inactive, much to Kathleen’s frustration.

The Bayfields returned to England several times in the 1950s, while St Clair kept in touch with grand dames of the English theatre. His correspondents included Edith Evans, with whom he shared a stage in The Lady with the Lamp in 1931, and Sybil Thorndike, whom he knew as one of the young Ben Greet Players in 1907. He also wrote to Flora Robson. His obituary in the New York Times reported that in 1948 he had gone back to London to join her in the cast of George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Confession; in fact he was making his last ever Broadway appearance, with former Hollywood starlet Nancy Carroll, in a comedy about a pair of stage actresses called For Heaven’s Sake, Mother!

On his last trip to England, in 1959, St Clair described himself in the passenger manifest as a writer. The biography of Florence he embarked on was not his only way of memorialising her. Every July for several years he sent flowers to be laid on the Foster mausoleum at Wilkes-Barre on Florence’s birthday. He also dedicated a seat with her name in a theatre in Abington, Virginia, assembled a scrapbook of her Verdi Club cuttings and kept his collection of their five hundred letters.

The last words he wrote to Kathleen told a different story: ‘To the most adorable woman I’ve met during my ninety years, my wife.’ At his ninetieth birthday celebration he sang shanties he remembered from his long sea voyage to New Zealand in the 1890s. He died on 19 May 1967 at the age of ninety-one. The following year a plaque in his memory was unveiled at the Larchmont Public Library, which in 1922 he had helped to fund by giving up his summer to direct a cast of local amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

His widow took on the manuscript of Florence’s biography but failed to find a publisher, one of whom advised her to write more about Florence and less about herself. She worked with two collaborators but fell out with both of them. The book never appeared and the manuscript was lost, along with the correspondence between Florence and St Clair, and a scrapbook of photographs of Florence. Nor did the auto-biographical jottings, found in the safe deposit box after Florence’s death, survive.

Kathleen took better care preserving St Clair’s memory. In 1973 she endowed an annual award to honour the best performance in a supporting role by an actor in a Shakespearean play in the New York area. Until her death in 1988 she enjoyed attending the ceremony at the Actors’ Equity Association, and making the presentation. The winner received a cheque and an engraved crystal plaque. To this day, every year in New York, the St Clair Bayfield Award is presented to a performer who, for all their talent, must cede the limelight to a bigger star.