According to the 1901 edition of the Catalogue of Pupils at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, Florence Foster married Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins on 11 July 1883, ten days after the funeral of her sister and eight days before her fifteenth birthday. Her father was still recovering from diphtheria.
How did this happen? The circumstances of their meeting are not known. A sister of Frank Jenkins had been at the Moravian Seminary several years earlier, and perhaps that was how a connection was made. Later in life Florence kept the dance cards of the balls she’d attended as a young woman, and they may have met at one of those. At thirty, Frank was sixteen years her senior and so, in this moment of crisis, would inevitably have played the role of a surrogate father figure.
In 1880 the age of consent in Pennsylvania was ten (a small minority of states put the legal age at twelve). And yet the cusp of fifteen seems extraordinarily young. Many years later Florence would testify in court that she left home at sixteen, while she told St Clair Bayfield that she eloped at seventeen. In the echelons of society in which both newly-weds had been brought up, she married far younger than anyone in her family circle or his. Frank’s youngest sister married the previous year at nineteen. Frank’s late mother was eighteen at her wedding, and Florence’s mother, depending on which census is to be credited, was either twenty-seven, twenty or nineteen. Only once the newly widowed Mary Foster altered her date of birth to 1850 would she have been fifteen on the day of her wedding. Might the school catalogue be wrong? The same page lists five other marriages of pupils from Florence’s year. There are no records for two of them, but the dates given for the three others are corroborated by a newspaper report in one case and in the other two by the US census.
Frank Thornton was the son of a distinguished American naval officer. Rear Admiral Thornton Alexander Jenkins was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1811 and, sponsored by the wife of President Madison, by the age of sixteen had joined the navy, in which he remained for forty-five years. He fought pirates in Cuba, helped suppress a slave rebellion in Virginia, served in the coastal survey and the lighthouse service, and patrolled the seas in the war with Mexico. His moment arrived in the Civil War. He came under considerable pressure from an elderly relative who was congressman for Virginia to side with his native slave-owning state. Instead, he performed secret work for President Lincoln before, despite being wounded, taking a significant commanding role in the defeat of the Confederate navy in the Gulf of Mexico. Admiral Farragut, under whom he served, praised his zeal and fidelity. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1870 and retired three years later.
Like Florence’s father, such a man of substance measured out his position in memberships, and they reveal the pattern of his interests. Rear Admiral Jenkins was a member of the Naval Lyceum, the historical societies of America, Virginia and Sioux City, Iowa, societies in Washington devoted to philosophy, biology and anthropology, and Boston’s Economic Society. A photograph taken in later life shows a much-decorated figure in uniform, wearing a white beard and with a stern look to his deeply shaded eyes. In his later years he was content to read omnivorously and correspond with distant cousins in Wales.
The rear admiral had been through more than one marital campaign too. Jenkins’s first wife died soon after bearing him a second child in 1840. Her family was wealthy enough for Jenkins, inheriting his wife’s portion upon his father-in-law’s death in the same year, to buy a significant property in Maryland. (His association with her relatives turned vexatious. In 1858 he was opposed by them in a Baltimore court.)
In 1848 he married well again. Elizabeth Gwynn was the daughter of Gilbert R. Thornton, who during the Civil War would act as the Massachusetts paymaster-general responsible for remunerating soldiers in the state. Florence’s future husband was the second issue of the marriage, born four years later. Frank and his younger brother Presley were outflanked by sisters. There were three above them and three more below.
As he grew up Frank saw little of his father, who was at sea and, by the time Frank was nine, at war. Just after the Civil War his mother died in her mid-forties, when Frank was thirteen. He was the oldest young male in an overwhelmingly feminine household. Naturally he had no other destiny but the US Navy. In 1869 at the age of seventeen he was appointed by President Grant himself as a cadet to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Three months later he passed his examination and entered the Academy proper as a midshipman. But then another nine months on he went absent without leave and was dropped from the rolls of the Academy. The story of his ejection travelled from Maryland to Washington to Philadelphia where it made the front page of the Evening Telegraph. His failure could not have been made more humiliatingly public. Even the US census seemed to disapprove: when the enumerator visited the home of the rear admiral that August, Francis became one of the teeming sorority himself: he was listed as female.
He went back to school. As a safer option he chose to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania but he was a slow student and it took him a whole decade to qualify. He graduated in 1880, when the census found him restored to his correct gender and able finally to describe himself as a physician. He was living in a boarding house along with a dentist and a carpenter (although, curiously, when the census was completed for his father’s house in Washington a week later he was also listed there, alongside four sisters and three female servants). Not that he managed to find any sort of employment in the medical profession. Instead he clambered onto a low rung of the Lighthouse Engineers of Philadelphia, a job he almost certainly secured via paternal influence.
While Frank’s younger brother Presley attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, the sisters busied themselves in marrying into the military. Virginia’s husband was the eminent military engineer Colonel (later General) Peter Hains, who was much lauded for designing the Tidal Basin, which helped control the flow of the Potomac into the heart of Washington, DC. He had just taken on this appointment in 1882. An interview in the National Republican talked admiringly of his spare build, broad shoulders, clean-cut features and clear blue eyes. In the same year Frank’s youngest sister Nettie married a hero. Lieutenant George Converse, the son of an Ohio congressman, had lost an eye in a skirmish with the Apaches in Arizona (a ‘splendid fight’, said the National Republican). In the same encounter one of the groomsmen had suffered a severe wound to the arm. The guests at the private wedding, an Episcopalian ceremony conducted by a cousin of the bride, were officers of the infantry, cavalry and navy. When he went up for early retirement two years later, Converse was described as ‘a gallant young officer who lost his eye, and almost his life, from an Apache bullet’. At this grand society wedding, Frank must have felt like the only young male neither togged up in a glamorous uniform nor gloriously wounded in the service of his country.
A year later, as he audited his first thirty years, he found little cause for pride. Thrown out of the navy, unwanted in the medical profession and bundled into a clerical job, his chances of basking in the triumph of a great public wedding to a society bride were minuscule. A vulnerable, grief-stricken fourteen-year-old girl was far less likely to discern in him the lineaments of failure. Perhaps her father’s position and wealth increased Florence’s attractiveness. It’s possible that Florence hurled herself at Frank, and demanded that he rescue her. But the responsibility for what happened next lies with him. The logistics of arranging an elopement of such a young girl – by post, or by personal messenger, and at such a time – suggest that Frank was adept at conniving but incapable of imagining the consequences of such a drastic breach in the etiquette of courting.
There was no public announcement of the wedding. It was highly unusual for newspapers, eagle-eyed in their cataloguing of movements in society, to overlook the union of an admiral’s son and the daughter of a prominent barrister. The marriage has an impetuous and furtive look. As Florence later told the story, her father promptly disinherited her. She certainly wasn’t seen in Wilkes-Barre for a year.
She was more welcome at the rear admiral’s grand household on 2115 Pennsylvania Avenue – ‘America’s main street’. Under its roof Florence found an abundance of new in-laws. Two of her new sisters-in-law were a whole generation older than her, but she had one new relative who was closer in age and, more importantly, in spirit. Alice, five years Frank’s junior, had attended the Moravian Seminary, and she was musical. At that moment she was thriving as a composer. Three of her works – a waltz titled ‘Contentment’, a serenade for a tenor (‘Parting’) dedicated to a young naval ensign, and a lively galop named after a fast young thing called ‘Carolyn’ – all went to press in 1883. ‘The character of the work,’ purred the National Republican, ‘speaks well for the musical culture of this city.’ There were also three boys closer to her own age: the young Hains brothers John, Thornton and Peter, who were the sons of Colonel Hains and Frank’s much older half-sister Virginia.
The newly-weds settled in Philadelpia. Florence’s new metropolitan home had rather more to excite the fantasies of a cultured young woman than Wilkes-Barre. Philadelphia was conscious of its history. It was in Philadelphia that the Founding Fathers met to sign the Declaration of Independence by which thirteen American colonies seceded from the British Empire. The text was ratified by the Continental Congress in the city on 4 July 1776. Eleven years later the US Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia. Its deep revolutionary roots were visible in the largest concentration of eighteenth-century architecture to survive anywhere in America. Among them were the country’s oldest hospital and oldest theatre and, in the Academy of Music, the US’s long-surviving opera house. Then there was Independence Hall, host to the great events of the country’s foundation, where the cracked Liberty Bell resided on the ground floor, with the inscription from Leviticus incised into its flank: ‘Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.’
Philadelphia’s wealth, founded on coal, shipbuilding and trade in sugar and molasses from the West Indies, had long been rooted in the confluence of two rivers, and further riches travelled in on the railroad tracks. After the Civil War the city boasted of its status as the ‘workshop of the world’, home to thousands of looms and lathes, forges and steam engines in mills and plants which operated in almost all of the three hundred industrial activities charted by the US census.
And yet in due course Florence was lured home. A year on from her runaway wedding she returned to South Franklin Street, less to mark her sixteenth birthday than to be present at the last illness of her grandmother, who was eighty-seven. Frank joined her and made himself as useful as an employee of the Lighthouse Engineers could by assisting in the care of Foster’s mother. She died that same month and after the funeral Foster took his family on a healing trip to the sea. When they returned Frank came to stay again for the weekend, and again a month later for the day. Death, initially the cause of a rift with her parents, now brought Florence back into the fold.
She was restored to her father’s affection during, for him, a period of intense importance. Having failed to win election as a Republican candidate for the state legislature two years previously, he was standing again in the autumn. As the election approached, throughout October the Wilkes-Barre Record encouraged its readers to give him their vote. ‘There is scarcely any doubt about the election of Mr Foster,’ affirmed one short item. ‘He will make a creditable Representative.’ ‘Charles D. Foster should receive every intelligent man’s vote irrespective of party affiliations. He will.’ ‘He will not fail.’ He didn’t, although the district very nearly had to find another candidate when he was involved in a terrifying accident driving a pair of inexperienced horses in the countryside outside Wilkes-Barre. Florence and her mother were on board too. The scene was described in detail by another of the passengers, who happened to be the editor of the Wilkes-Barre Record.
One of the animals gave a mischievous kick and got his hind leg over the pole, at once rendering him uncontrollable. A mad plunge was made for a bridge which spans the creek … and the carriage narrowly escaped going over the side. By this time the weight of the horse had snapped the pole off and the carriage went against the heels of the animals and started them off again. In order to prevent a collision with some teams just ahead Mr Foster endeavored to run his horses against a stone wall, but in doing so the carriage careened and scattered the occupants along the road, the wreck finally going over on its side, with Mr Foster out of sight, and the animals plunging furiously. The spectators expected to find Mr Foster killed, but he was found under the wreck still hanging to the ribbons and only slightly bruised. His wife was found to have sustained a compound fracture of the left forearm, their daughter, Mrs Dr Jenkins and Dr Johnson, escaping with insignificant bruises.
Foster was duly elected to serve a two-year term. His legislative duties taking him to Philadelphia, he will have seen his daughter and son-in-law often. In 1895 Frank earned a promotion at work which was hailed as good news in Wilkes-Barre. ‘His friends will be pleased to learn,’ it was reported, ‘that Dr Frank T. Jenkins, son-in-law of our townsman, Hon. C. D. Foster, has been promoted in the office of the Lighthouse Engineers of Philadelphia.’ It attributed his success not only to his abilities ‘but to the fact that his habits have always been strictly temperate, and in consequence could endure more fatigue than those who held positions above him’.
Frank’s avoidance of drink earned the approval of his father-in-law, who was several times invited to address the Temperance Union. Posterity has nonetheless planted a question mark over Frank’s moral rectitude. The story that is integral to the myth of Florence Foster Jenkins is that her husband infected her with syphilis. The venereal disease was relatively easy to contract in the latter part of the nineteenth century in America. Indeed, they married just as syphilis was becoming the cause of a public health disaster. The spread began around 1880 and would continue unabated for decades. By 1900 and for the following two decades, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 per cent of the general population was infected. Even towards the end of that period the disease was still more or less unmentionable. The New York Times Index didn’t allude to it by name until 1917. In the 1880s, when there was no cure, the taboo was all the deeper. Syphilis thrived on public ignorance and spread fast in a climate of secrecy.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that not every carrier knew they were infected. Its primary stage could bring genital sores, while in 50 per cent of cases the secondary stage involved lesions, a rash, or other symptoms which might last for months. But primary-stage symptoms did not always manifest themselves. In the early twentieth century syphilis came to be known as the great simulator because of its ability to mimic the symptoms of other ailments: headaches, aches in bones and joints, fever, rashes. And when physicians could see the signs, early on there was a prevailing tendency not to inform those infected. ‘Even when you are positive that a person has syphilis,’ advised the Baltimore physician Daniel W. Cathell, ‘it is not always best to say so.’ The conspiracy of silence spread into the general populace, for whom the disease brought with it the stigma of shame. Men, being the predominant carriers of syphilis, sought advice from doctors about whether to tell the women they were about to marry. The physician, wrote Claude Quetel in his History of Syphilis, ‘cannot escape the role of mediator, or arbiter, which is forced on him when a former syphilitic comes to his surgery and asks: “Doctor, is it safe for me to marry?” … [A] conflict arises, in which the interests of the patient and the public interest are opposed, for beyond this client stands a young girl, unborn children, a family, and society, and your prohibition will protect them all. What importance the doctor’s mission assumes when he becomes the arbiter of so many common interests in this way!’
Being a qualified physician himself, albeit one who couldn’t find work in medicine, Dr Frank Jenkins will have already known the answer. Because of the disease’s congenital properties, sexual abstinence was insisted upon for anyone planning to have children, for between six months and five years. An article published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1889 reported one doctor’s estimate that ‘a man with untreated syphilis who married and took no special precautions to protect his wife had a ninety-two percent chance of infecting his wife in the first year, a seventy-one percent chance in the second year, a twenty percent chance in the third year, and a negligible possibility every year thereafter’.
It seems unlikely that Frank would have kept himself pure for his future bride. It also seems unlikely that he would have had sexual relations with a woman of his own social standing. He would have gone to a brothel, and might even have done so after his marriage. A report published at the height of the epidemic found that men who contracted syphilis during marriage, as opposed to before, were more likely to infect their wives. In 1916, after a means of identifying the disease in carriers was developed, the Baltimore Vice Commission found syphilis in 64 per cent of the city’s more than 250 prostitutes, and over 90 per cent were infected with gonorrhoea. Nearly half had both, and less than 4 per cent had neither. There is no reason to suppose that Philadelphia, only a hundred miles to the north-east, was any different. Indeed, a paper referring to syphilis as the third great plague was published in the Quaker City in 1920.
There are three questions relating to Florence’s syphilis. Did she actually suffer from it? And if she did, was she infected by her husband? Or was it a figment of her imagination which posterity has allowed to take root as an essential element in the melodrama of her life? The medical evidence is circumstantial. There may have been other reasons for her childlessness, but fear of passing the disease on to another generation is a possible factor. Then there is the physical impact of the treatment. Its incurability did not prevent snake-oil salesmen from marketing magic remedies. ‘Primary, Secondary or Tertiary Syphilis permanently cured in thirty to ninety days,’ ran one advertisement for a company based in Nebraska. ‘We eliminate all poison from the system, so that there can never be a return of the disease in any form. Parties can be treated at home.’ This was rampant profiteering. Until 1908, when a drug was developed which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, the only treatment for syphilis was mercury, which had been around since Paracelsus recommended it to his patients in the mid-sixteenth century. A popular saying warned of ‘a night with Venus, and a lifetime with Mercury’. Unlike the wing-heeled god from which the metallic element took its name, treatment by mercury was slow. Many more sufferers were killed by the mercury than the actual ailment it was supposed to cure. Side effects were many, various and gruesome. They included profuse sweating, corrosion of the membranes of the mouth, gum ulcerations, loosening and eventual loss of the teeth, kidney failure. Florence is not known to have complained of any of the above. But another of the side effects is hair loss. The many photographs of Florence in her pomp seem to display a woman with resplendent hair or, more often, a succession of voluminous hats. In fact she wore a wig, even as quite a young woman. Underneath, her hair thinned until she was completely bald.
Another side effect of mercury poisoning goes even further into the heart of Florence’s story: prolonged exposure to mercury can cause tinnitus. Florence would prove to be a capable musician. While pianists rely on the instrument to be in tune, singers are at the mercy of their own hearing. St Clair Bayfield’s theory was that in her own head she sounded in tune. The vast discrepancy between what Florence’s audiences heard and what she believed they heard may perhaps be explained by the malign influence of mercury-induced tinnitus untuning the music in her ears. One of the indications of the disease’s tertiary stage was ‘the sensation of being serenaded by angels’.
The balance of probability is that Florence did suffer from a disease that could not be mentioned in polite society. That she received it from her husband is unprovable. But many years after her death, Kathleen Bayfield wrote that ‘Florence’s doctor husband had given her a dose of syphilis’. Kathleen had no incentive to present Florence as a victim so she must have considered it an incontrovertible fact.
The marriage certainly foundered, and quickly. Florence later described these years to St Clair Bayfield as a time of profound unhappiness, to the extent that it put her off marriage altogether. Frank may have soon repented of his clandestine seduction of a girl with whom he can have had little in common. But the evidence also suggests that the shining example of Rear Admiral Jenkins simply equipped his sons and grandsons for marital and/or moral failure, some of it far more dramatic than anything perpetrated by Frank.
Frank’s brother Presley would bring dishonour on the family soon after he was appointed as a San Francisco forecast official in the Weather Bureau. Six months into the post he was suspended for ‘neglect of duty and indiscretions in his private life’, all to do with gambling debts and unpaid creditors who ratted on him to his employers in Washington. But his record was nothing compared to that of Frank’s nephew Thornton Jenkins Hains. As a young man Hains, stationed at Fort Monroe in Virginia, had an altercation when out sailing with a lifelong friend and shot him through the heart. Although it wasn’t revealed in court, the argument was over a woman. Hains awaited his trial with equanimity, chatting with friends in the street through his cell window, befriending jail officials who took him out for walks and even playing cards with a juror during the trial. The jury was swayed by an appeal from Hains’s defence attorney not to ‘shed the blood of a young Virginian whose grandfather served his country with honor – whose uncle fell in the Confederate cause’. His acquittal was described as ‘the most puzzling and peculiar case that has interested Americans for many years’. There was far worse to come.
As for Florence’s marriage, a trajectory of deteriorating relations is suggested by her and Frank’s movements, annotated as ever by the Wilkes-Barre press. The Fosters were seen ‘visiting Mrs Dr Jenkins’ in Philadelphia in May 1886. She repaid the visit in the summer: on 13 July the Wilkes-Barre Record reported that the Fosters were ‘having a visit from their daughter’. Frank was evidently there too because two days later he returned to Philadelphia ‘after a brief visit with Representative Foster’. In late September Foster accompanied his daughter to Philadelphia. She visited them again in October, and again at Christmas. She was in Wilkes-Barre three times in 1887, and took a holiday with her parents in Quebec and went on a late-summer outing with them to Harveys Lake, where she and her sister had been taken as children by their father. Frank Jenkins, on the other hand, was never seen in Wilkes-Barre again. The marriage, therefore, seems to have broken down some time in 1886.
Florence’s uncertain marital status in this period was reflected in the papers’ bewildering array of permutations on her name: she was variously Mrs Dr Jenkins, Mrs Florence Jenkins, Mrs N. Florence Jenkins and, in a musical context, Madame Foster Jenkins. If they made their separation a legal fact, they did not do so immediately. In a History of Luzerne County published in 1893, the entry on Charles Dorrance Foster alludes – with a misspelling of Frank’s middle name – to ‘one surviving child a daughter, Narcissa Florence, wife of Dr. Frank Hornto Jenkins, of Philadelphia, whose father, Hornto A. Jenkins is a rear admiral in the United States Navy’.
The question of whether Dr and Mrs Jenkins ever divorced was still of legal relevance more than sixty years later. St Clair Bayfield submitted a petition in 1945 which alluded to a divorce obtained on 24 March 1902, and to a decree which he believed had been found in a safe deposit box. That is the year given for the Jenkinses’ divorce by the Dictionary of American Biography. But no such document has ever surfaced, and at the time it was in St Clair’s interest to show that the Jenkins marriage had been legally terminated.
The divorce rate in the era of the Jenkins marriage was extremely low, even if marginally on the rise and a cause for alarm among religious and social conservatives who feared for the moral welfare of the nation. In 1885 the National Divorce Reform League was formed with the goal of counteracting ‘individualism’, seen as a tendency among wronged and battered women to place their own happiness above the wider interests of social cohesion built on the family. The opposing strain of thought was an integral element of the campaign for women’s rights, as embodied by the pioneering activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. ‘I think divorce at the will of the parties,’ she argued, ‘is not only a right, but that it is a sin against nature, the family, and the state for man or woman to live together in the marriage relation in continual antagonism, indifference, and disgust.’
The other disincentive for both parties was that divorce could be enacted only in a courtroom, which enabled newspapers to feed a ravenous public appetite for salacious stories of marital discord and breakdown. The law furthermore called for some sort of ‘causative reasoning’: one party had to take the blame. In the majority of states, cause was usually desertion or infidelity, later supplemented by various forms of cruelty. Some physicians argued for syphilis to be legally accepted as grounds for divorce (partly proposed as a disincentive for infected spouses-to-be from entering into matrimony). By the early 1890s, after the antics of his brother and his nephew, Frank may have felt – or been encouraged to feel by his family – that the Jenkins name had been sullied in the public domain quite enough already.
Frank became gradually invisible. There was a rare sighting in January 1893 when he represented his father, who was too ill to travel, at the funeral of an admiral in Newport, Rhode Island. Then on 2 August Rear Admiral Thornton Alexander Jenkins suffered a heart attack and died. ‘Sea Warrior Dead,’ ran the headline in San Francisco’s Morning Call (which a month later would report on his son Presley’s suspension). The Evening Star in Washington praised his bravery, courtesy and generosity: ‘his loss will be deeply felt by a large circle of friends and relatives, many of whom have been the recipients of his bounty and his influence.’ He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, founded during the Civil War as a final resting place for Americans who gave their lives in military conflict. The funeral ‘was conducted without military display and with unusual privacy for the obsequies of one so prominent as the deceased officer’. The New York Times obituary noted that among his surviving children was ‘Dr. F. T. Jenkins of this city’. Frank had moved to New York. In this period he seems to have been of no fixed abode. As the male head of the family, he gave away his sister Carrie in December 1895, when he was described by the Evening Times in Washington DC as ‘Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins, of Connecticut’. In 1898 he was living in Buffalo but that year moved to Niagara Falls where he opened a practice for the treatment of maladies relating to ears, nose and throat.
Charles D. Foster hadn’t heard about a divorce. That year Florence’s father drew up a will, which referred to Florence’s ‘present husband’, simply for the purpose of specifically excluding him. ‘The bequests to my said daughter shall not be subject to anticipation or any execution or attachment on any account whatever and the same shall be free from the control of her present or any future husband.’ Although she had no means of knowing, it wasn’t Florence who was cut out of the will; it was Frank. Florence’s legacy from her relationship with the failed physician was a distrust of doctors, a wariness of marriage, and a surname which she would use for the rest of her life.