Mrs Eugene Sieffert has been lost to history but for her walk-on role in the life of Florence Foster Jenkins. She was a guest at a private musical benefit for the Red Cross. At the completion of the entertainment she put to the event’s chairman of music that she should start her own club. Florence, she argued, would then be able to create her own musical programmes and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross. Florence was sceptical, and for all her commitment to clubland, shrank from the idea of becoming a president. ‘How many present would join such a club if I should decide to form it?’ she asked. It wasn’t long before she was handed the names of twenty-five potential members. While she remained non-committal, the notion loitered at the back of her mind. She was at a dinner soon afterwards where, with professional musicians present, she repeated the suggestion made by Mrs Sieffert. They all urged her to do it. ‘You could do so much for music in New York City,’ they trilled in unison, ‘and we would all like to become members of such a club.’ The list of potential members swelled. Still Florence gave it no real consideration.
Then one morning she was having a lesson with her singing coach Carlo Edwards. They were working on ‘Pace, mio Dio’, the aria from La forza del destino in which Leonora prays for peace in death, opening and closing with high held notes of piercing intensity. Edwards was also a part-time journalist and photographer, not yet an assistant conductor of the Metropolitan Opera – he didn’t conduct his first opera there for another decade. The article he was just writing for Pearson’s Magazine happened to be about Florence’s musical work. As he dashed off at the end of a lesson, he asked Florence, ‘Of what club are you president?’ The answer emerged as if from the soup of Florence’s unconscious: ‘The Verdi Club,’ she said.
So the story was told, doubtless finessed and with corrugations removed, in the club programme explaining its own origins. Florence later recounted a different version in which it was Edwards who suggested the name. In either telling, this is the moment the public legend was germinated – of Florence Foster Jenkins, the self-appointed diva, the so-called ‘singing president’ who attracted a devoted following.
Mrs Sieffert takes some of the credit, but there were other tectonic forces at work. Early in 1917 Florence was immobilised by a broken leg. St Clair Bayfield, who was on tour, made frequent trips to visit her in hospital whenever he was within striking distance of New York. The enforced pause in her frenetic activities gave her the opportunity for reflection. On 6 April the United States of America declared war on Germany. Then, just shy of her forty-ninth birthday, a change of status was thrust upon Florence.
Frank Thornton Jenkins lived out his final years knowing of a substantial hoick in the fortunes of the woman whose elopement with him had caused a rift with her parents. Apart from his one statement about his nephews in 1908, Florence’s estranged husband remained incognito in the gloaming of history, to resurface in the record books only on the date of his death: 13 June 1917. He was sixty-five. The end was sudden. His wanderings ceased a long way from the East Coast in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. A short entry in the Evening Star in Washington, which was presumably alerted by his sister Alice, concluded with a request in brackets: ‘(New York papers please copy.)’ In death the midshipman expelled from the US Navy was restored to the heart of his family, relatives of the military dead having the right to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. Florence’s response was to start owning up to the source of her surname. In a Town Topics profile the following year she styled herself as ‘the widow of Dr Frank Thornton Jenkins, son of Rear Admiral Jenkins’. The marriage may have been functionally dead for thirty years, but there was nothing now to stop her making belated capital from her in-laws.
Around this time there was a significant shift in her relations with St Clair, who may have been bruised by such a public reclamation of Florence’s first and official husband. After eight years, their cohabitation came to an end. On 22 October a small announcement appeared in the New York Sun under the heading West Side Suites Rented: ‘to Florence Foster Jenkins at 66 West Thirty-seventh Street’. At the street level a black nameplate was affixed with their names hyphenated and alphabetised: Bayfield-Jenkins. But Florence had no intention of living there herself. It was not remotely an apartment in the style to which she had once more become accustomed since her inheritance. If Florence’s Bohème years were over, St Clair’s were to continue. The rent on the apartment was paid by Florence in lieu of the salary St Clair might otherwise have earned for the work he performed on her behalf, from now on more than ever.
The apartment was on the fourth floor. On the door was a silver star, a heart-shaped wooden plaque and a small horseshoe, perhaps the present from Florence to mark their iron wedding anniversary. The hall was minuscule. The rest of the apartment’s ascetic accoutrements included an iron bedstead covered with a faded maroon silk spread, a couch with a matching bedspread cloth, a blue wicker chair and table, a wooden desk heaped high with St Clair’s papers, a round piano stool at a dressing table on which he ranged photographs and his military hairbrushes, and a half-moon table. Over the years the walls filled with photographs of Florence. In due course a cloth was hung on the wall featuring the masks of tragedy and comedy and bearing the legend, Verdi Club.
The Verdi Club announced itself at the start of the season on 18 November 1917.
The Verdi Club, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins president, will have its first morning musicale on November 28 at the Waldorf-Astoria. The new club’s aim is to honor the genius of Verdi. Its war fund, the proceeds from club entertainments, will be given to the Red Cross. During the season there will be three musical mornings, two musical and dramatic afternoons and a song recital at the Waldorf-Astoria. A musicale and reception will be given at the Hotel Astor, a piano recital will take place at Aeolian Hall and the club’s events of the winter will wind up with a dance in April. Among the members are …
And here the New York Sun reeled off twenty-three names of subscribers whose commitment was calculated to attract more members. The list betrayed the key influence of St Clair. Rather than assign precedence to the society dames of the Euterpe (Mrs Jamison and Mrs Marzo enrolled), at the top were Mr and Mrs George Arliss. Arliss was the acclaimed English star of Disraeli whose actress wife toured everywhere with him. St Clair rejoined the Arlisses in 1916 to tour in a play about Paganini. There were other lesser-known actresses. One of them, Edyth Totten, was president of the Drama Comedy Club, which Florence promptly joined. Florentine soprano Olga Carrara Pescia also signed up. Even Enrico Caruso was soon a member, along with the American socialite Dorothy Park Benjamin, twenty years his junior, with whom he eloped in 1918.
The printed programme of the first musicale crossed the Atlantic in the possession of Mrs Sieffert’s husband, who carried it as a mascot around the battlefields of Europe. When he returned he gave it back to Florence to be inserted in the club’s scrapbook.
The commitment to raise money for the Red Cross was central. In 1915 the American Red Cross Society had announced its plan to raise $100 million for war relief, and the women’s clubs threw themselves into the effort. They did not share the view of gossip columnist and hostess Elsa Maxwell that society women regarded the war as ‘simply a beastly inconvenience that interfered with their annual trips abroad’. A year before the United States entered the conflict, New York society women were praised for working ‘like beavers’ to meet an urgent request cabled from the front for surgical dressings. ‘Scores of rich and fashionable women gave up all social engagements and worked ten and twelve hours a day to prepare bandages,’ reported the Evening World. A shipment of 150,000 gauze bandages was dispatched to hospitals in France.
Through the season of 1917–18, Florence entered a period of intense activity as she helped to raise money on several fronts. Her commitments to the Euterpe Club continued unabated. She laid on such curiosities as a wandering Danish lutenist and a young American pianist called Jacques Jolas (who would go on to enjoy a more conventional career than his brother Eugène; he was a poet and translator whose literary magazine transition had a profound influence on James Joyce as he wrote Finnegans Wake). For its next operatic spectacle the Euterpe tacked away from the core repertoire to stage a scene from Friedrich von Flotow’s 1844 opera Martha, a French-flavoured bauble which had enjoyed a great fillip a dozen years earlier when Caruso reintroduced it at the Met. One of the singers engaged for the performance was a coup for the club. Ernest Davis, a promising young American tenor of Welsh descent, spent the season with the Boston Grand Opera Company burnishing his reputation. His voice was ‘of large volume and beautiful quality,’ said the Chicago Journal. ‘The range is exceptional, giving high C and D with entire ease and thrilling effect. In addition,’ it noted with approval, ‘he has enthusiasm.’ Davis’s enthusiasm would later be severely tested by the Verdi Club president.
Meanwhile the Verdi Club’s early gatherings found Florence pinching some of the artists she’d already booked for the Euterpe – a Spanish dancer called Little Dolores was one such – but the way in which she deployed them revealed a more ambitious strategy for her own club. The major guest at one Euterpe musicale was Hungarian violinist Jan Munkacsy, already some way into a long, fruitful career. In January 1918 Munkacsy was booked again by Florence, this time to participate in what was grandly known as the ‘Verdi Club’s string quartette’. Florence was learning the science of branding. The programme also had Euterpe favourite Carl Schlegel alongside more singers with Metropolitan Opera House credits to their names.
In the same month she chaired the annual musicale of the New Yorkers Club at the Astor. While the clubs all had armies of officers and chairmen who ran the luncheons and notified the members, on an artistic level these commitments could not have been met without St Clair, even though he was busy elsewhere. That month he was rehearsing and opening as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice at the Cort Theater (‘a capital, diverting wittol’: New York Tribune). He then went straight on to take part in the New York premiere of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. But he was also moonlighting as Florence’s amanuensis and acted as creative consultant when the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria was decorated for the Verdi Club’s so-called Ball of the Silver Skylarks.
Florence took the name from the ode by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The cover design of the ball programme was ‘originated’ by Florence herself although executed by an artist. The caption elucidated thus: ‘Shelley, the poet, with the Muses in the background, Literature, Art and Music, with the Spirit of the Dance, springing from Music’s brain, receives an inspiration from a flight of skylarks soaring toward the sun, which is immortalized in Shelley’s poem…’ (The least of Florence’s syntactical quirks was a Teutonic preference for aggrandising nouns in upper case.)
The inauguration of an annual ball was a statement of her limitless ambition for the club. Organised by a committee of officers, it offered an operatic performance with full orchestra, a concert which featured an unfolding series of tableaux vivants and afterwards dancing into the small hours. The boxes around the ballroom were decorated with images of the great operatic composers, Verdi taking pride of place. During the course of the evening Florence was presented with a golden laurel wreath surrounding a golden lyre with an enamelled shield of red and grey – the club’s colours. The gift to the president came from the officers of the Verdi’s inaugural season (and it was presented by a real officer: Lieutenant William L. Sayers). This was Florence’s reward for raising enough money to enable the Red Cross to buy and equip an ambulance for France. She gave an interview about this personal triumph to Carlo Edwards in Pearson’s Magazine, in which she explained that the Verdi Club had become godmother to an entire ambulance unit which could count directly on the support of the club for its various needs.
‘Here is aid of the most practicable and available sort,’ she enthused:
I know of no way by which we can half so readily translate our impulses into actual help. The tragedy has been that so many of us have passionately wanted to do a little something toward alleviating the frightful suffering in Europe, but either we did not know of anything really helpful to do, or at any rate we could never have the satisfied feeling that our efforts were really doing anything. We could never feel our own hands giving aid. Now, we of the club are in personal touch with the front. The doctors will send immediately to us for supplies, often so desperately needed, and we are going to meet our duty as duty has never been met. What an incitement to us in our musical work! All the funds derived from the club performances are at the disposal of the men at the battle front. It is as it should be: art the handmaid of humanity.
The magazine printed a picture of Florence with a short dark cropped wig and a single string of pearls, looking rather younger than fifty.
Florence’s name was now ubiquitous in the society pages. In the same week she hosted a luncheon at Delmonico’s and dashed off to Washington to fulfil her duties as a delegate for the Daughters of the American Revolution. These events were covered in the same edition of the New York Sun’s report on activities in women’s clubs. (On the same day, Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron, was shot down and killed.) Later that month a self-styled ‘gushing Texan’ wrote home to San Antonio to report on the success in New York of a locally born pianist. Her list of the VIPs at the recital included several professional musicians but the first name was Florence Foster Jenkins, president of the Verdi Club.
Meanwhile St Clair dashed south. That month he was turned down by the British Army for the third time. He had to find another way of contributing to the war effort, so he devised a production to entertain troops awaiting shipment to the theatre of war. He put together a company to perform a light comedy called It Pays to Advertise to trainee soldiers stationed at Camp McClellan in Alabama. The winter drama season now being over and leading actors out of contract, the cast he managed was full of Broadway players. In case anyone might suspect them of shirking their duty, the Anniston Star reassured readers that ‘all the members of this company subject to draft have fulfilled all requirements exacted by the government’. The company went back south in July and were ‘liberally entertained’ at a reunion dinner with officers.
Florence’s visit to Washington for the Daughters of the Revolution was her first since she was widowed. The Washington Herald described her as well known in the city ‘not only as the daughter-in-law of the late Admiral Thornton A. Jenkins and wife of the late Dr Francis Thornton Jenkins, but as a singer.’ It mentioned her appearance at the White House before the First Lady. It didn’t mention that she shared the stage with 131 other members of the Mozart Society of New York. (The sense that these news items arrived at the newspaper’s office as more or less pre-written press releases is sometimes overpowering.) Frank’s death brought about a rapprochement with Florence’s sister-in-law Alice, who, it was announced in early May, had been invited to stay with Florence in New York in November.
In the intervening years Alice Thornton Jenkins had become a person of note herself, not in the sphere of music in which she had excelled as a young woman, but as a leading figure in the struggle for American women’s suffrage. In February 1912 she wrote stirringly to the Evening Star in Washington to oppose the casuistical arguments against giving women the vote which were deployed even by men who supported their right to it. ‘The moment a man admits that woman is entitled to the franchise,’ she reasoned, ‘that moment it becomes his duty to make no argument against her obtaining it.’ Her letter concluded with a derogatory allusion to ‘the pampered rich, well cared for women, who think they enjoy life better without whatever responsibility the ballot might impose’. The next month she wrote to the same paper to upbraid it for its misinterpretation of the battle for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. Soon she was in New York as the leader of the Washington delegation in a suffrage parade of fifteen thousand women. Another of the marchers was an octogenarian who had worked as a nurse in the Civil War.
Militant striving for a new world existed side by side with her support for militancy in its more traditional form. The previous week she was up in Maine to represent another veteran of that conflict – her own father – when a torpedo boat destroyer was ‘christened’ in the rear admiral’s name. The Washington Times included a photograph of a powerful-looking woman with a direct gaze and angry eyebrows, ill suited to the cinched waist and pearl necklace of her evening gown. She was accompanied to Maine by her younger sister Carrie, but lived in downtown Washington, DC with her youngest sister Nettie, another committed suffragist now divorced from her heroic, facially disfigured husband George, who had remarried and climbed to the rank of rear admiral. Florence is not known to have had any thoughts about her right to vote, for which not every society lady hankered. ‘When in the company of suffragettes, a perverse desire to condone all men’s errors possessed me,’ recalled Consuelo Vanderbilt in her autobiography, ‘for I found female self-sufficiency somewhat ridiculous.’
Alice duly arrived in New York for the opening of the Verdi Club’s second season on 6 November 1918 at the Waldorf-Astoria. Other guests of honour were seven brides, including the newly wedded Mrs Caruso. Alice stayed for a week and was there for the Armistice. She found Florence installed in an apartment in the Seymour Hotel in West 45th Street off Fifth Avenue. The twelve-storey residential hotel was in considerable contrast to the apartment she rented for St Clair. The drawing room was a decorous riot of elegant furniture and silk cushions. A chandelier hovered over the room; signed photographs covered every surface. On the grand piano, which dominated one end of the room, was a snap of Florence and above it looking down from the wall hung the two oil portraits of Florence as a child and in early middle age, probably painted by her mother. Other mementos of her youth included her dance cards from the 1880s. Edwin McArthur, who would later become Florence’s accompanist, remembered a suite ‘filled with an assortment of bric-a-brac such as you’ve never seen. Pictures of herself in various poses, statuettes, lamps of all descriptions, photographs of artists she knew. And she knew everybody.’ There she had use of a daily maid to dress her, lay on breakfast and serve when guests came round for regular private musicales at which promising young soloists were invited to perform.
That week St Clair was busy rehearsing an English war spy drama, Pigeon Post, about the winged messengers of Verdun (with real pigeons which ‘fluttered and hopped about, cooed and preened their feathers’). The play was a first effort at serious drama by Florenz Ziegfeld, better known for titillating New Yorkers with the fashionable tableaux of the Ziegfeld Follies. Ziegfeld had spied a commercial opportunity in dramas from the front, which now abounded in theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. St Clair was soon in the cast of another London import, this time a musical comedy called The Better ’Ole based on a popular wartime cartoon Tommy called Old Bill. It was ‘as artless and unsophisticated as the original drawings,’ said the Times, but ‘of the utmost freshness and delight’.
In early 1919 Florence’s connections with the great and good of the opera world were strengthened when the Verdi Club celebrated what it branded Caruso Day, which didn’t quite fall on the great tenor’s birthday in February. He did not deign to sing in (or indeed attend) an all-Verdi programme, but the credentials of the guest soloists were trumpeted: club member Olga Carara-Pessia was a soprano ‘from the Royal Theatre, Madrid’; alto Cecil Arden had made her debut with the Met the previous year. This was merely a foretaste of the second Silver Skylarks ball, which was widely advertised. The campus newspaper Columbia Daily Spectator advised its readers that tickets costing $2.00 were available from the Columbia University Press bookstore. There was a performance with full orchestra of Il Trovatore (another booking for Ernest Davis, one of the professional members, supported by an amateur chorus), plus Spanish dancing, Lucile Collette sawing on the violin, and yet more arias and songs. After the entertainment, members enjoyed the chance to become characters from the world of Verdi themselves in a pageant: society dames came dressed as Verdian heroines Amneris, Violetta, Gilda, Desdemona and Mistress Quickly. A male member played the part of Verdi. Others filled out the scene as gypsies and Egyptians. Florence herself was at the head of a group costumed in the Verdi period in a dress festooned with skylarks. The artistic director was none other than President Woodrow Wilson’s niece. The ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria was hung with the flags of the Allies while the consulates of France, Italy and Greece sent representatives to witness this gesture of international solidarity. Guests were also welcomed from the Red Cross and the Tank Corps.
Florence’s holidays were a continuum of the social whirl in New York with added ocean breezes. In August 1919 she took the sea air in Rhode Island as an attendee at the amusingly named Snow Ball at Narragansett Pier. St Clair travelled in the opposite direction, heading to the Midwest to do good. He put together a company to present a play as part of Chautauqua, an adult education movement which former president Theodore Roosevelt was once moved to describe as ‘the most American thing in America’. It had evolved into a touring entity (known as the Redpath-Vawter system) which was starting to branch away from an unrelieved diet of improving lectures. St Clair assembled a cast of Broadway actors to stage the play, which had also been approved by Roosevelt: ‘That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play,’ shouted the president from his box in 1909 when he saw Israel Zangwill’s drama about idealistic refugees from Russian pogroms hoping for a life free of rancour in America. Zangwill, who was British and described as ‘the Dickens of the ghetto’, later received a letter from Roosevelt acknowledging the play as ‘among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life’. St Clair’s company toured Missouri with their own lighting and set. The Macon Republican reported that it would surpass ‘anything of its nature ever attempted by the Redpath folks’. In three months St Clair returned to the Midwest to perform a Shakespearean double bill of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in Cincinnati.
Back in New York the interests of the common-law couple reconverged. Florence, the former student of elocution, was a fan of theatre who attended all of St Clair’s first nights. In February 1920 she was appointed chairman of music for the Dramatic Art Society, a new club devoted to ‘the pursuit and promotion of the best type of American drama, a closer relation between dramatists and theatregoers, and the exchange of opinions on all things concerning theatre’. The first subject for discussion was ‘the modern quiet method of handling dramatic situations’, a stylistic development to which the new society gave its stamp of approval. There was a reading from J. M. Barrie’s 1918 war play A Well-Remembered Voice. In April St Clair was enlisted as a performer at the Silver Skylarks ball on the theme of the Arabian Nights. A thousand guests mustered at the Waldorf-Astoria to see him dressed as an Arabian prince while Florence, costumed as Scheherazade, gleamed in a turban with a conical coronet and a sweeping train, and dangling globular earrings.
Their philanthropic interests coalesced too when the Verdi Club expanded its field of operation and began staging Shakespeare. They started with King John and followed it up with Twelfth Night, which St Clair directed as well as taking the part of Malvolio. His recreation of the play’s earliest known performance in Middle Temple Hall in 1602 was deemed an artistic triumph. All money raised from tickets of $2.50 went to the Italian Red Cross (which in due course presented Florence with a diploma and a gold medal). Later that season he contributed a talk on the play he had been appearing in at the Belasco Theater. The club took inspiration from these performances and in its 1921 ball there were tableaux vivants on the theme of Shakespeare and/or Verdi, concluding with the shrine of the Sun Goddess, embodied by the club’s president and founder. There was also a full performance of Aida with a chorus of 150 voices: Florence’s zest for laying on epic soirées was growing exponentially each year. And at the end of the entertainment she had her annual apotheosis as one or other great feminine icon. The cheers and applause, it seems sensible to assume, had an addictive quality, and went straight to her head.
While the calendar of the Verdi Club set the pattern of Florence’s year, she still dashed off to Washington as a Daughter of the American Revolution, attended gatherings of the Euterpe and other clubs, often as guest of honour and sometimes programming their musicales. Singing with the Mozart Society involved rehearsals for three evening concerts and monthly musicales at the Hotel Astor; these would take up a whole Saturday afternoon starting with music, then luncheon, then dancing. The season ended with the choir’s annual May breakfast where 1,200 women would turn up in floral hats; Florence was one of the guests of honour escorted to her place by twenty women of the reception committee carrying bowers of roses.
By the start of the 1920–21 winter season Florence had established herself sufficiently to take an audacious step: she decided to perform to the members of the Verdi Club. She put herself on an evening programme at the MacDowell Club on West 55th Street. The choice of venue said much about her perception of herself as a contributor to the city’s musical life. The club was part of a network of what grew to four hundred clubs spread all over the country, set up to honour the memory of composer Edward MacDowell. The New York branch was established in 1905 and supported an artists’ retreat in New Hampshire. Its aim was ‘to discuss and demonstrate the principles of the arts of music, literature, drama, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and to aid in the extension of knowledge of works especially fitted to exemplify the finer purposes of these arts’. Florence surrounded herself with competent amateurs rather than professionals likely to show her up: a violinist, a pianist playing Chopin and an elocutionist reading poems by Oscar Wilde. The applause from loyal acolytes resounded all the way up to the MacDowell Club’s vaulted ceiling. It may have been sincere, but it was also an extension of the gratitude shown by the members who at the end of each season showered Florence with gifts: a gold bracelet studded with diamonds and sapphires one year, plus a dinner in her honour, a heart-shaped pearl pendant with a large ruby another year. The club was also presented with a bust of Verdi by sculptress Lily C. Mayer (née Gidlio). Florence ensured gifts – a pearl necklace, an ostrich-feather fan – were presented to other officers.
Thus the cycle began: in return for her vast social and cultural largesse, Florence received uncritical approbation for her singing. Emboldened, in early 1921 she was invited to sing to the women of the National Society of Patriotic Women of America at the Hotel McAlpin (also a holder of the record for world’s largest hotel). This was another society into which she threw herself, its aim being ‘Americanisation’, its educational fund paying for ten teachers spread across New York. Her gift to the cause was a duet from Aida with the tenor Ernest Davis. Davis knew which side his bread was buttered and sang along, after many rehearsals at Florence’s Seymour Hotel grand piano. He also sang ‘Celeste Aida’ on his own.
By 1920 there were a million members of women’s clubs in America. Their widespread and profound influence on the culture of New York was most manifest on presidents’ day, when club leaderenes annually gathered for a celebration involving talks and performances. Florence was one of the twenty-eight presidents gracing the event with their presence at the Waldorf-Astoria as the season drew to a close in April 1921. The newspapers obligingly alluded to all such attendees as ‘prominent persons’. The ballroom was packed. Many of their activities involved music. The clubs’ cultural contribution was acknowledged by Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony Society, a couple of years later: ‘I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America.’
The Verdi Club’s sphere of influence enlarged: at the start of the next season a hundred new members were ready to enrol. The less cheering news was that the club’s honorary member Enrico Caruso had died of pneumonia, prompting a memorial musicale in tribute with a speech from, among others, the gnarled old Oregonian poet Edwin Markham. With infirmity on Florence’s mind, the club formed a committee to arrange visits to members who were unwell. Perhaps they managed to bring succour to Mrs Alcinous B. Jamison, the president of the Euterpe, before she died at the start of 1922.
Florence rallied to stand before the Verdi Club at an afternoon musicale and deliver a selection of Italian arias and English songs, in gratitude for which she was presented with a set of ruby hairpins. (No matter that she wore a wig.) ‘Mrs Florence Jenkins and Mozelle Bennett Are Artists at Waldorf,’ announced a New York Tribune headline. (Bennett was a violinist well known enough to have a short article that month on the craft of good bowing in the Violinist magazine; she was also dragooned into the newly formed Verdi Club Trio.) The task of chairing the event was taken by another of the club’s officers because Florence could not be seen to programme herself. As it happened the day’s chairman, Miss Edna Moreland, was also a soprano who for three years had been given the opportunity to sing for the Verdi Club. She now returned the compliment. The difference was that Moreland had enough talent to set sail for France later in the year and try her luck in Paris; she was seen off with a reception in Florence’s apartment. Miss Moreland made sure to keep Florence separate from professional singers, but not by much. Only the morning before, the club had been entertained by Austrian baritone Robert Leonhardt, since 1914 a star of the Met where he had sung Papageno and Amfortas (although his career there had been suspended in 1918 because he was deemed an enemy alien).
For that year’s fifth Silver Skylarks ball a programme was printed which detailed the names of twenty-six people who had taken boxes, seventy-eight patrons and patronesses, and seven ushers. There was a strong presence among the guests of military top brass, including two admirals and a general who, having sat through La traviata and a variety of tableaux, were invited – or possibly obliged – to take part in a grand march to initiate the ball.
Every summer Florence now disappeared, to rest on her laurels for four months in Larchmont on the north shore of Long Island Sound. She entertained the many members of the Verdi Club who passed through at the Horseshoe harbour club, one of the oldest yacht clubs in America. In August of 1922 the lazy summer bacchanal was enlivened by a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by an amateur cast driven to heights, according to local paper the Evening World, that rivalled Broadway. ‘And why? There is but one answer and that is St Clair Bayfield.’
St Clair was indefatigable. He had spent six months up until May in Bulldog Drummond, a transfer from London based on H. C. McNeile’s popular stories about a gentleman adventurer back from the trenches, but still he found time to direct and take part in a one-act play for the Verdi Club. Florence had expressed her appreciation for him on Valentine’s Day by throwing a reception in the MacDowell Club for his fellow Cheltonians resident in New York (one of whom was in the Bulldog Drummond cast with him). The expatriates of Cheltenham were treated to a programme of English songs by their hostess. Thus did Florence Foster Jenkins find her name trumpeted as a ‘well-known society leader’ in the Gloucestershire Echo.
Grateful to escape the broiling heat of his New York apartment, St Clair, as ever, devoted his summer to a worthy cause, in this case the Larchmont Library, to be built on land donated by a prominent resident and theatre owner. He sifted through aspiring amateur thespians among the local lotus-eaters for a cast, then drilled them in rehearsals. For an auditorium he used a leafy alfresco setting by the yacht club which enchanted the audience, who were ‘unable to believe that centuries had not melted away leaving them seated on the side of Mount Olympus to watch the gods at play’. Those gods included Larchmont children as fairies in wispy white. The library received $1,500. St Clair gave his Bottom, out of whose mouth came the words that encapsulated the Weltanschauung of his common-law wife, who was a patroness in the audience: ‘Let me do it. I can do it best.’
The Verdi Club was five years old and, to celebrate, Florence opened the season by singing to its members. Her selection included an aria from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and a suite of French songs for which she hired as her accompanist an Italian violinist from the Metropolitan Opera. The applause was ecstatic. After the encores she was presented with a tall silver vase lined with gold and fifteen large floral pieces by a small regiment of ushers. Her roses and chrysanthemums had to be sent home in a separate taxi. ‘Many friends wired her,’ reported the Musical Courier, ‘sent her letters and called her the next day on the telephone, one of these poetic admirers wiring: “Heaven gave you a silver throat, and blessed you with golden tones.”’ The Courier was certainly paid to reproduce these blandishments verbatim.
One of the guests of honour was the pioneering Welsh choir mistress Clara Novello Davies, who brought a five-piece ladies’ vocal group with her to perform. (Her more famous brother was Ivor Novello, composer of the wartime anthem ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’; he had conquered the London stage as a composer and actor and was about to become a movie star.) Another eminence who now appeared on the Verdi Club’s list of vice-presidents was Rosa Ponselle, the young star of the Met who started out in vaudeville.
The annual ball of 1923 heaped further praise on Florence’s head. After acts four and five of Otello she featured in the pageant as the Snow Queen, following which club member Bruce Adams paid gushing homage in a speech which told ‘of the love all bore her, of their devotion to the Verdi Club and its fine president’. He had already published two poems in praise of Florence in the programme, a paean which cannot have happened without her blessing. To conclude the ceremonies, she was presented with a platinum wristwatch set with fifty diamonds. She had the decency to blush.
Armed with these assurances of devotion, and having now established herself as a soloist in New York, Florence made her first foray outside the city. After the summer she travelled down to Washington, DC where the Washington Hotel held a benefit for the Japanese relief committee. For the first recorded time in her life, she did not share the bill with any other musician. For her accompanist she equipped herself with the best. Malton Boyce was an English-born organist and choirmaster in charge of music at St Matthew the Apostle’s church in Washington. The church (which became a cathedral in 1939) went to some lengths to employ him: he was working in the University of Regensburg when the rector scouted him in 1906. Boyce’s speciality was Gregorian plainsong, so Florence’s repertoire called for quite a step change, while he was also given the floor to perform bits and pieces of Chopin and Debussy. He doubtless welcomed the exposure to high society and the money: he had five children to support, two of them his wife’s from a previous marriage, and already supplemented his income by running a boarding house. Florence’s eminent church musician was still accompanying her twenty years later. The Sunday Star wasn’t invited to that first recital, but received ‘word … from those in charge’ that it was ‘a pronounced success’.
The series of permissions which Florence gave herself to perform came in incremental stages. The next arrived just over a year later when, for the first time, she put her own name down on a programme she herself had devised. This was not for the Verdi Club but the New Yorkers meeting at the Astor. The newspaper announcement conjured up an image of butter not melting in her mouth: ‘The chairman of music, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, will present the program, including piano solos by Gladys Barnett; songs by Florence Foster Jenkins; harp solos by Arthur Jones.’
The aura of brazen indomitability was worn as an actual costume by Florence at the Verdi Club’s seventh annual ball in 1924. La forza del destino was presented, but the climax of the evening, even after all the singers had drawn gales of applause, came in the last of a series of tableaux on the theme of ‘A Dream of Fair Women’. Raised on a base of rocks, brandishing a silver spear and golden shield and wearing a white cloak and a mighty horned helmet was the imposing figure of President Florence Foster Jenkins in the guise of a breast-plated, flaxen-maned Brünnhilde in flowing robes. Such was the ovation from the audience that the curtain was drawn back half a dozen times so that the Wagnerian apparition could be marvelled at again and again. The printed programme for the evening had promised as much: its cover featured a portrait of Florence thus bedecked. Her choice of character was redemptive. As a young music graduate Florence chose to sing from Die Walküre at the Sängerfest in Philadelphia, a performance she almost certainly recalled now, omitting to mention her near-paralysing attack of nerves. Thirty-five years later she incarnated herself as a Valkyrie to the thunder of approbation.
A typical Verdi Club season featured events for all times of day and dotted around the hotels of the city. The composer’s birthday on 9 October was celebrated at a musical luncheon, whereafter the winter passed in a series of morning musicales, supper dances, thés dansants and celebrity breakfasts before the season reached its climax in the annual grand opera, pageant and ball and, finally, the Rose Breakfast at the Westchester Club, an opulent affair in which guests came in costume. Florence always wore pink and carried a shepherdess’s crook. ‘Important Note,’ advised a club leaflet one April as the season closed: ‘Verdi Club dues for next Season are due on April 5th. It will lighten the labors of your Treasurer if you will pay them promptly.’ For one day only in late April the joining fee was waived to encourage new members to step forward.
As Florence choreographed her rise up the ranks of New York society, St Clair’s career soldiered on. To supplement his income he taught drama at the Institute of United Arts in Riverside Drive. The special classes in drama he advertised incorporated theatre decoration and stage design, and offered lectures by an impressive roster of guest speakers that showed just how well connected St Clair was. Norman Bel Geddes was a stage designer who had worked with Max Reinhardt and Cecil B. DeMille (and was the father of Barbara Bel Geddes, later JR’s wife in Dallas). Russian immigrant Josiah Zuro was a busy New York conductor who spent much of the 1920s in Hollywood composing film scores. Stark Young was the influential drama critic of the New Republic.
In early 1925 St Clair had a relatively rare streak of three consecutive jobs. The plays were typical of the sort of fare that New York audiences craved and producers supplied: comedies, and moralising melodramas with a British accent. Lass O’Laughter told of a young Scottish woman who rises into the peerage. John Galsworthy’s A Bit o’ Love dramatised the hounding by his congregation of a clergyman who allows his wife to leave him for the man she loves.
St Clair was frequently called upon to play British characters but he hadn’t seen England since 1913. His steady income in 1925 may have helped him decide to spend that summer visiting relatives in Cheltenham. There was no question of Florence accompanying him. Her experience of sea travel in the juddering colossus SS Deutschland had put her off sailing for life. She was content to observe the ocean from the comfort of the Larchmont yacht club terrace. Nor did she have any feel for the natural world she sang about. The child who was once taken to her father’s farm, and went camping in the Adirondacks, ‘had no longing for the beauties of nature, trees, green fields, fresh air, the sea, the sun and the moon’, St Clair later told his wife Kathleen. The bustle of the city was less appealing to St Clair as the motor car conquered New York. Before he sailed for England he voiced his concern in a letter to the Times. His theme was the rights of pedestrians given insufficient time to get across the road by the whistling cops who marshalled traffic coming from six directions, and the difficulty of catching a car without stepping into the road, thus risking injury and arrest for jaywalking.
Does the motorist ever consider that he sits in a firm seat and moves by well-regulated machinery, while the pedestrian moves on ‘shank’s pony’ [sic], a very uncertain carrier for a body which has to be kept well balanced? He may twist his ankle, have a sudden pain, trip, get a crick in the back, become nervous, be distracted by the fearful noises all round him, but the motorist as a rule does not leave an inch of space for any such possibilities. The motorist sits where he is protected from sun-glare, dust, rain, wind. The pedestrian often moves from deep shadow to glaring sunshine, sometimes cannot avoid having the sun in his face; wind distracts him, rain and dust temporarily blind him; does the motorist allow for such possibilities? Not a bit of it.
St Clair had a Luddite’s anxiety about the modern age. A month in the sixteenth-century Plough Inn in Temple Guiting, near Cheltenham, provided respite. His aunt and widowed sister-in-law both lived in the same village. It was a long way from the Seymour Hotel, the Ball of the Silver Skylarks and the singing president. He sailed back to New York in late August. (The trip was evidently to his taste, because he returned two years later and again in 1928. Each time he went there were fewer family members to greet him: two aunts were dead by 1927 and in June 1928 he sailed to England on the day his mother died.)
The Musical Courier had the stiffest test yet of its journalistic integrity when invited to witness a recital given over almost entirely to Florence’s singing. The programme consisted of no fewer than a dozen arias and songs in an array of languages calculated to display Florence’s range of taste if not ability. Spanish songs were the most natural fit, it was courteously suggested: ‘her high tones and animated way of singing made effect’. Less effective, by implication, were her attempts at Mendelssohn and Handel or her flirtatious foray into the operatic stratosphere in Musetta’s waltz from La Bohème. Being an intimate of the composer’s sister, she even had a crack at a Novello tune. The list was ‘sung with due appreciation of their musical contents, accompanied by facial expression of appropriate nature’. The report was accompanied by an out-of-date photograph of Florence in a low-cut satin evening dress, a long string of pearls hanging from her plump neck and a widely feathered hat atop a dark wig.
Florence was evidently thrilled by the results, because that evening she formed two associations that would last her for the rest of her singing career. The venue was a new one for her: the magnificent ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton. Her recitals there were to become an annual event. Meanwhile the only other soloist on the programme was a young pianist called Cosme McMoon, who performed his own compositions. He would be with her to the end. Among his unreliable recollections of the singing president was a suggestion that Florence’s first solos with the Verdi Club were at the Silver Skylarks ball, when she would sing an aria during the intermission. No eyewitnesses mention such an event. And there is a hint of hyperbole in his explanation for the growing frequency of her performances. ‘So great was the enthusiasm and the mirth that people clamoured for more,’ he said. ‘She was encouraged to sing more and more, both by professionals and laymen. There were a great many singers from the Metropolitan in this club and all these people, to kid her along, told her that she was the most wonderful singer that ever lived, and encouraged her that way.’
There is no independent account of Florence’s singing in the 1920s. It can only be guessed that she never rose above the mediocre, and steadily deteriorated with age. But it is difficult to credit that in her fifties she sang quite as catastrophically as she would later on. It was very difficult for anyone to tell her the unvarnished truth: not Verdi Club membership, not the many opera singers launched upon New York thanks to Florence’s patronage, not charities who profited from her fundraising, not journalists (real critics being uninvited), certainly not St Clair. In whatever spirit they were offered, Florence chose to believe every compliment and accept every invitation. Some of these occasions were both solemn and prestigious. In February 1927 she sang at the 195th anniversary of George Washington’s birth.
As the Verdi Club approached its tenth anniversary Florence had cemented for herself an unassailable position at the top table of New York society. Her tools were charm, taste, money and influence. In May 1927 an interviewer from the Morning Telegraph’s Realm of Women page was admitted to her apartment for an audience, to be confronted by the ‘large blue eyes that beamed with amiability’. Florence talked about the Verdi Club’s fundraising efforts for the Italian Red Cross, the Veterans’ Mountain Camp for soldiers wounded in the war and, a recent addition, the charity for indigent theatre professionals, the Actors’ Fund of America (presumably included at St Clair’s suggestion). The interview was quietly riddled with misinformation in which Florence disavowed her past: she said she had been a New Yorker nearly all her life, and recalled performing to audiences of ten thousand as a child pianist, in the light of which her claim to have sung twenty times that season invites caution. The paper printed a stern photograph of Florence in a black mantilla. The caption referred to her as a ‘renowned musician’. In the circular world of New York’s society coverage, the Musical Courier reported on this report with its ‘most conspicuous picture’.
The interview was certainly on the members’ lips as the Verdi Club gathered later that month at the annual Rose Breakfast. The guests of honour included a countess and a princess from Italy, while the committee contained a baroness. But European blue blood allowed Florence precedence, who in the opening promenade – dubbed the March of the Roses – made her entrance flanked by four young girls carrying wands and rose baskets. Luncheon with a side order of musical performances cost $3.50 and bus tickets from the city centre a dollar. ‘No covers laid until paid for,’ advised the invitation.
These sums were paid in high numbers by the members of the Verdi Club even as the Wall Street Crash arrived in 1929. The society seemed to exist within a bubble, immune alike to the vulgarities of vaudeville, the blasts and parps of the jazz band and even thirteen years of Prohibition from 1920. The club’s membership fed itself on other intoxicants: arias and flowers and usefulness. The Silver Skylarks Ball in March 1930, the first since the Crash, was as lavish as ever. There were guests from the army and navy, the French consul attended, and a souvenir programme contained a photograph of the president in a shimmering evening gown and an Egyptian headdress as well as portraits of the soloists and the ball committee. Two conductors were engaged, one to oversee a performance of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act intermezzo Il segreto di Susanna, another to steer the orchestra and choir of women’s voices performing Neapolitan songs. They were trained by Martha Attwood, who had sung Liù in Turandot at the Met two years previously. There were scenes from the life of Byron, and a staging of Disraeli, the hit play St Clair had performed professionally in 1913. First in the long list of participating members’ names was that of the Verdi Club president, who the Musical Courier, ever ready to buff the image, had taken to calling Madame Jenkins. Last was ‘St Clar Bayfield’, whose name the Courier had less compunction about spelling correctly. For her evening’s work the president and founder got a diamond bracelet; her tireless helpmeet got a typo. That May, St Clair sailed home to England and didn’t come back for four months.