By her mid-thirties Florence had inherited some of her father’s physical heft. Photographs of her as a youngish woman show a full face, a strong jaw and a big-boned frame. She had iridescent blue eyes and used a varying selection of wigs. Throughout her life those who knew Florence remarked on her beautiful speaking voice and her persuasive charm, which she was now about to unleash on the forbidding citadel of New York City high society.
There is no precise date for Florence’s departure from Philadelphia. St Clair Bayfield thought it was in 1902, after the divorce he believed she’d obtained that year, but from 1903 to 1906 Florence continued to be reported as a resident of Philadelphia. The move seems to have happened over the summer of 1906. In the spring her home was described as ‘the Quaker City’. But when she was staying in Washington in October, she was listed in the Post among other visitors from New York.
She joined one of the greatest tides of human history. In 1900 the city had 3.44 million inhabitants. Ten years later the figure had risen to 4.8 million. It was predicted in 1909 that Florence’s new home town would outgrow London as the most populous city on earth within fifteen years. That year furnished the earliest known instance of the phrase ‘big apple’ in connection with the city. (‘Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city,’ wrote Edward S. Martin in The Wayfarer in New York. ‘It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.’) Most of the new arrivals were European immigrants fleeing political upheaval and economic hardship, and half of the city lived in poverty. But by the turn of the century, when half the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of 1 per cent of the population, there were already four thousand millionaires in New York.
Florence swam in on the tide of fashion. New York was Newport all the year round. She arrived just in time for the publication of The Metropolis, Upton Sinclair’s caustic satire of the profligate, party-going, automobile-driving elite. ‘One heard of monkey dinners and pijama dinners at Newport,’ he wrote, ‘of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York.’ It sold dismally: rich New Yorkers didn’t wish to be lectured, while the middle classes, avid for real scandal and gossip, scoured the society pages rather than the bookshops to feed their appetite. However great the inequality between rich and poor, New York was where everyone was heading. ‘I wouldn’t dream of moving from New York to Philadelphia, even,’ drawled Maxine Elliott, the mistress of the banker J. P. Morgan, ‘unless it was in my private car.’ Symbolically, 1908 was the year Philadelphia ceded to New York its claim to the world’s tallest building. The city hall, topped by a vast bronze of the founder of the province of Pennsylvania, William Penn, had been finished in 1894, surpassing Ulm Minster. Now the Singer Building sailed past it towards the heavens.
As a New York neophyte, Florence had her mother’s example to go on. As well as her activities in the capital and New Jersey, where she frequently returned without her husband on Daughters of the Revolution business, Mary Hoagland Foster was a member of the Holland Dames, an organisation which celebrated Dutch ancestry. They regularly convened in New York and sometimes she dragged the Hon. C. D. Foster to their annual luncheons at the Regis Hotel. She also made trips on her own to attend exhibitions and lectures.
Abandoning her home of nearly twenty-five years, Florence was attracted by two overlapping possibilities offered by New York. There was her desire, no different from everyone else’s, to rise in society. But also in recent years she had been much less musically active in Philadelphia. Far greater opportunities awaited in New York, thanks to the phenomenal growth of societies formed by wealthy women with cultural tastes and time to indulge them.
One such club was the Euterpe. Several societies took their name from the Greek muse – there were Euterpes in Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie. As far back as 1870 a Euterpe Choral Society boasted a fifty-strong choir including, so it was claimed in the New York Times, ‘some of the best talent in the country’. The Euterpe which Florence joined was a women’s club devoted to social music-making. ‘This society,’ elucidated a volume called Club Women of New York, ‘is mainly musical in its aims and work. The concerts and musical mornings which are given during the season at the Waldorf-Astoria are social events and are participated in by artists of high standing in the musical world. The club is also given luncheons by its members, and card parties, luncheons and outings are arranged at frequent intervals throughout the season.’ A typical winter calendar would include musical mornings, a dinner dance and an evening concert. The outings might be to Long Island, or a trolley ride to Staten Island, where they’d have lunch and play bridge. As with other women’s clubs, money was raised for deserving causes. ‘This busy little musical and social club,’ as the Times called it, differed from the city’s many other clubs because it continued to meet through the summer for garden parties and al fresco gatherings. Although its activities were reported in the Times’s ‘In the Social Whirl’ column, not all Euterpe members were quite elevated enough to whirl away to the summer fleshpots.
Florence’s name was first linked to it in late 1906 when she attended a Thanksgiving luncheon for fifty at a tearoom called At the Sign of the Green Teapot. The menus were printed on little green teapots and like everyone she took home a souvenir of a bonbonnière mounted on a small pumpkin. The following week she joined several hundred guests at the club’s annual afternoon reception, held at the home of its president in West 45th Street. Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison was known before marriage as Mary Ernestine Schmid. The daughter of a prosperous merchant, she owed some of her prominence to the career of her husband, a society proctologist and early proponent of colonic cleansing – a brochure of Dr Jamison’s rejoiced in the title Fourteen Reasons ‘Why the Internal Bath’. He also invented a prototype enema appliance and was a keen occultist. Mrs Jamison presided over a club that knew how to have fun. One bridge and euchre party which Florence, an inveterate dresser-up, enjoyed attending was on a Japanese theme. The committee wore Japanese costume, while unmarried younger members, dubbed Geisha Girls, distributed Japanese favours among the players. Prizes included kimonos and Japanese embroidered scarves. The first concert which Florence attended was the following week: an ‘Annual Olde Folkes Concert of Sacrede and Worldly Musick will be helde at ye Waldorf’, reported the Times, getting into the spirit.
Florence emerged from her chrysalis, aged forty, at a propitious moment in the empowerment of the New York female. An early symbol of emancipation was the establishment in 1903 – by Florence Jaffray Harriman – of the Colony Club, the first such place in New York created by women and for women. Not everyone in society was ready for this development. ‘Denounced from the pulpits of the city and deplored by many eminent citizens in the newspapers,’ writes Emily Katherine Bibby in Making the American Aristocracy, ‘the outrageous enterprise persisted in flourishing, and ladies of the highest social standing happily identified themselves with its defiance of sanctified conventions.’
The advance of women was not always semaphored by a clenched fist. It happened too in the world of culture. In 1908, straight after her divorce, Maxine Elliott opened a theatre off Broadway which bore her name; she became the first woman to manage a theatre in America. On the streets of New York, women took up various enfranchising crazes for riding bicycles, wearing hobble-skirts, and in the New York afternoon even blameless middle-aged wives and spinsters made their way to the ever-expanding selection of grand hotels (including, from 1910, the Waldorf-Astoria) to take part in thés dansants.
The era of new possibilities for women would be marked by the death in 1908 of Mrs Astor, the monolith of old Manhattan. Her passing removed a formidable guardian from the doors of the establishment and offered fresh possibility for women determined to elbow a position for themselves that was not exclusively derived from fathers or husbands.
While in general it was men who made the money, it was women who made the rules in this new American aristocracy. They were the gatekeepers in whose power was the gift of access to the gilded inner sanctum, often blackballing those who aspired to entry for the merest sartorial solecism. They allowed some in and kept others out, and were committed to internecine scrapping. They were ruthlessly twitted in the waspish comedies of Clyde Fitch, who made up to $250,000 per play portraying fashionable heroines with a remorseless eye for social position and a gift for accumulating wealth. The titles told audiences what they were getting: The Climbers (1901), Her Own Way (1903). The Truth, the hit of the 1907 season, told of a suspicious society matriarch who puts a tail on her husband while reserving for herself the right to lie as much as she sees fit.
Who was in or out could be learned from perusing the newspapers, in which there were daily reports during the season of invitations being sent out to receptions. The movements of wealthy women were the stuff of daily gossip, much of it taking place within the official framework of the women’s clubs. The New York Daily Tribune’s ‘Notes of the Club’ column and the New York Times’s ‘Activities in Clubland’, in both of which Florence made increasingly regular appearances, reported the movements of these higher-ups, slaking the curiosity of the aspiring middle classes. ‘Small luncheons, teas, and card parties by the dozen have been the popular entertainment this week,’ chirruped one column. ‘Not in months has there been such a number of cosy affairs given in people’s homes rather than in hotel parlors.’
While not everyone was vouchsafed entry, Florence had a set of advantages on which she could draw. For a start, divorce – or its near equivalent, marital failure – at this social altitude was no longer a guarantee of banishment for an ex-wife. Not that Florence was necessarily divorced; she still deployed the distinguished name of Jenkins like the prow of an icebreaker. But her most important calling card was music. Her musical training earned her a status that floated free from distinction conferred by a man. In January 1907 she was on the bill of an entertainment put on by the Society of the Daughters of Indiana. There were solos for voice and for cello, an address on art student life in Paris, and ‘a piano solo by Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins’. Such gatherings often took place in the morning. The venue was chosen from any one of the vast hotels that had sprouted all over midtown Manhattan, each of which had reception rooms for hire. In this case she performed in the Hotel Astor. (The Mexico trip came straight afterwards.)
In order to perform, Florence kept up her study of the piano. An extensive résumé of schools she attended, published in Town Topics in 1918, included something she called the Virgil Conservatory in New York. In fact there were two rival Virgil schools, set up by a pair of divorcees after their acrimonious split. Neither of them had this name. Almon and Antha Virgil were eminences in piano education who met over their shared interest in methods of teaching the instrument in groups. She founded the Virgil Piano School in 1891 while a decade later he retaliated with the Virgil School of Music. Both pedagogues produced instruction manuals for pianists trading on the Virgil brand. According to Kathleen Bayfield, Florence studied with A. M. Virgil, which means Antha (whose second name was Minerva). But Florence wasn’t concentrating only on the piano. With singing in mind, she also signed up for enunciation classes at the Henry Gaines Hawn Dramatic School. The school’s founder wrote a handbook called Diction for Singers (To Say Nothing of Composers).
And she was not confined to her new home town. In April 1907 Florence was merely an onlooker at a splendid gathering in Washington, DC of the annual continental congress of the D.A.R. The event was dominated by the gift to the tireless president of a silver chalice and a white flag with the stars and stripes at its centre. ‘A great many of the Daughters,’ it was reported, ‘expressed themselves as not caring to see the flag made subservient to a flag of truce.’ Florence was among a hundred other bellicose ladies who, after singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, dressed in gowns, jewels and ‘priceless old lace’ and convened for dinner round a long flower-decked table in the banqueting hall of the New Willard Hotel. There were plentiful toasts, augmented whenever a rowdy group of international barristers called in from an adjoining room. The British ambassador looked on from the threshold and went no further. Most of the attendees were identified in the Evening Star by the Christian name of their husband. A small minority were referred to by their own name, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins among them.
In December, when her parents visited New York for a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, she would have been able to tell them about organising her first ever musicale since moving to New York. It was at a private home in White Plains, a growing suburb just to the north of the city, the programme after luncheon including songs, monologues and piano solos performed to a selection of Euterpe members. By the start of 1908 Florence had a permanent address in New York City – she was living at the St Louis Hotel on 32nd Street. She also completed her journey from the periphery to the official heart of the Euterpe. The club’s events were run by a series of officers – a lady in charge of luncheon, for example. There were also various chairmen – chairman of the day, of ways and means, of the reception committee, and of the entertainment committee. In late January Florence was chairman for the day – and chairman of music – at a musical morning at the Waldorf. She exercised a new-found gift for publicity, because for the first time ever the Times reported the contents of the Euterpe’s musical programme.
The morning’s entertainment offers an intriguing insight into Florence’s taste, acumen and breadth of knowledge. She laid on an array of duets and solos for male and female voice. A song and an aria by Massenet were in French, but there was an English theme: ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’ was a pleasant canzonetta composed by Haydn during his London sojourn; there were two of Elgar’s Album of Seven Songs (published only two years earlier) and a recital of Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’. She also chose a song by a female composer, Mary Carmichael’s ‘Quaff with Me the Purple Wine’. Significantly she opened with Verdi – ‘Fu la sorte dell’armi a’ tuoi funesta’, in which Amneris tricks Aida into confessing her love for Radamès. Members had the chance to perform or recite some of their own work, and the whole club joined in for a couple of part-songs. If Florence sang, it was as part of the group. The guest soloist she booked was Paul Du Fault, a lyric tenor from Quebec who was a regular performer at such events, suggesting that Florence had familiarised herself with New York’s available talent.
She had an instant impact on the quality of fare at the Euterpe. In April 1908 she represented the club at a dinner held by the Women’s Democratic Club to mark Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. For a wheeze it was decided that each table in the Hotel Majestic dining room, rather than be numbered, would be named after a women’s club. The clubs would each nominate a member to be hostess. Florence was chosen to represent the Euterpe among twenty-eight other clubs. The diners were treated to no fewer than eleven guest speakers. In May another musical evening was hailed as ‘one of the best that the club has presented this season’.
As she made her way in New York society, in the summer of 1908 Florence was given grim cause to doubt the protective properties of the surname she had chosen to retain. On 15 August the whole city erupted at news of a murder involving the name of Jenkins. Frank’s nephew Captain Peter Hains shot dead a man he believed to have seduced his young wife, abetted by his brother Thornton Jenkins Hains. The murder, which was to become one of America’s most sensational crimes of passion in the first half of the twentieth century, cast light on Florence’s story in two ways. It provoked the only recorded public utterance by her estranged husband Frank. It also illustrated the contempt with which dysfunctional males of the Jenkins clan were prepared to treat women who married into the family.
The catalyst of the scandal was Thornton Jenkins Hains, who since his acquittal in 1891 had used his liberty to explore a gift for sensation. He became a successful author of pulp sea stories partly inspired by his grandfather’s naval adventures. His tales – with titles like Bahama Bill, The Black Barque and The Strife of the Sea – invited comparisons with Conrad and Melville, even if these were mainly made by himself. Jack London, whose The Call of the Wild was published in 1903, was an admirer. Hains grew sufficiently notable to make it onto the front page of the New York Times when his yacht sank on the way to the Bahamas (‘Author rescued at sea’) in 1903. That year his wife, who had endured a brutal marriage, died in childbirth.
But making the life of his own wife a misery was not a big enough field of operation for Thornton J. Hains. He also chose to be an agent provocateur in the marriage of his weak-willed younger brother. Peter Hains had married Claudia Libbey in 1900 when she was sixteen – she threatened to elope if her mother did not consent. They had three children. In 1907 Thornton first suspected that she was conducting an affair with a close friend of his brother, society magazine publisher William Annis. He sent word to Peter, who was serving in the Philippines. Claudia’s letters to her husband, which described the riotous time she was having back at home and gently scolded him for his negligence, did nothing to dissuade his imagination from running riot. Captain Hains hastened home to extract a confession from his wife that she had committed adultery. Claudia – described by the San Francisco Call as ‘a woman of rare beauty’ – later claimed she was bullied into signing a confession when under the influence of alcohol and drugs which had been forced upon her. It was even suggested that she signed at the point of a revolver brandished by either her husband, her forbidding father-in-law General Hains, or her vengeful brother-in-law, whose own sexual advances to her she said she had repulsed. She also pronounced her husband a violent pervert (as in homosexual).
Convinced of her guilt, the brothers plotted to eliminate Annis. Apparently without a care whether they were witnessed, Captain Hains confronted his wife’s lover as he sailed his victorious sloop into harbour at a yacht club regatta in Queens. He discharged six rounds into Annis’s body, in front of a large crowd including the victim’s wife and children. His brother kept guard over the dying man with pistol in hand. When Mrs Annis attempted to rush to her husband her way was barred: ‘You move and you’ll get the same,’ the killer’s brother scowled.
The New York public was swiftly reminded that Thornton Jenkins Hains had been acquitted of killing a lifelong friend in 1891. The Washington Herald, while taking a stern position on adultery and deeming the world ‘better off without such a man as Annis’, recalled that T. J. Hains had been ‘the beneficiary of as gross a miscarriage of justice as ever blotted the criminal annals of the century’. To the same paper his mother – Florence’s sister-in-law – made a manipulative appeal for understanding. ‘Ask the good people of New York to suspend judgment … until the truth is known,’ she pleaded. Summoning genealogy to her defence, she added that she had drawn on the same reserves of fortitude ‘which, I am told, was always displayed by my father, Admiral Thornton Jenkins, who was Admiral Farragut’s chief of staff in the battle of Mobile Bay’. She concluded with a character reference for her son, who doted on his three-year-old daughter. ‘This spirit of devotion, so characteristic of him, has prompted Thornton to stand by his brother. So you will see that my boy is not so much of a devil as it has been made to appear since the day of the tragedy.’
Just over a week later Frank Thornton Jenkins, last seen operating as an ear, nose and throat specialist resident in Niagara Falls but now described as ‘a doctor of this city’, made his own contribution to family honour. He issued a statement that in his view Captain Peter Hains had been driven mad by his wife’s conduct, whereas his brother was ‘a mental monstrosity’ who since early adulthood had been ‘wayward, intractable, perverse and stubborn, and he usually managed to set at naught all disciplinary measures aimed at for his good’. He added, for clarification, that the fatal argument in 1891 had been over a woman. This double character assassination was an attempt to exonerate the nephew who had made an unwise marriage to a foolish young woman. To Florence and to any-one who knew of her marriage to Frank, it may have sounded like a coded attack on her. She too was a teenage bride, who had not merely threatened to elope but actually gone through with it.
The unfolding saga must have caused Florence profound relief that she no longer had any direct involvement with such a dysfunctional family of morally degenerate misogynists. It can be easily imagined that the impending trials of her in-laws, who were very close to her in age, was a topic of discussion when she went home to Wilkes-Barre in mid-October to visit her father, who was recovering from a major operation after falling seriously ill (he didn’t leave the house until a week into November). It will have been on her mind as Florence spent the autumn conjuring up further triumphs for the Euterpe Club. In November she arranged what the Times called ‘an unusually attractive program’ for another musical morning at the Waldorf. Florence’s involvement must have again impressed the committee, because for the Jamisons’ annual reception in December she was in charge.
The calendar arranged for Florence’s destiny to run parallel with that of Thornton Jenkins Hains in a quite bizarre double coincidence. The Euterpe reception took place on the same day as the trial began. She organised a costume dance and programmed a reading of Stories from the Orient by Oliver Bainbridge, an author with a new book out who brought back tales of his recent travels in China. Florence went home for Christmas knowing she had scored her greatest social success yet in New York.
Meanwhile, for the next month, Thornton Hains did his best to measure up to Frank’s description. The trial took place in Flushing, which would be connected to Manhattan later the following year with the completion of the Queensboro Bridge. After twenty-two hours of deliberation, the jury was persuaded to acquit him of conspiracy on the so-called ‘unwritten law’. Otherwise known as dementia Americana, this offered a defendant the option of pleading temporary insanity, incurred when he believes his home and honour to be violated. The husband’s brother claimed to have suffered it vicariously. Unprecedented uproar greeted the verdict in court, which was swiftly deplored by leading lawyers. The freed man’s parents received the news in the Astor Hotel, where Florence had performed her piano solo two years earlier. In his euphoria Hains pledged to write his masterpiece, a long novel based on the unwritten law.
Having escaped the electric chair, he made an exhibition of himself in his brother’s trial three months later, earning an admonition for his theatrical behaviour in the witness box and at one point being thrown out of court. Dementia Americana could not save Captain Hains. From the witness box his father the general tried to engineer a positive picture of a war hero who had protected him in the war with Spain in 1897 by throwing his body in the line of fire. To no avail. His son was found guilty of manslaughter and dispatched to Sing Sing, the notorious New York jail. General Hains made strenuous efforts to persuade the jury to appeal to the state governor for a pardon. Two years later his son was released. Claudia Hains did not contest her divorce and lost custody of her three children. She never saw them again.
But that was to come. Soon after Florence returned from Wilkes-Barre at the start of 1909, twelve good men and true retired to ponder the fate of Thornton Jenkins Hains. The very day the jury considered its verdict would be remembered by Florence for the rest of her life.