9: LADY FLORENCE

On 7 November 1930 the death of Mary J. Hoagland Foster, ‘widow of Hon. Charles Dorrance Foster, beloved mother of Florence Foster Jenkins’, was announced in the New York Times. The funeral took place at Campbell’s Funeral Church, a burial and cremation company on 66th Street and Broadway. On 10 November her body was interred in the family mausoleum in Wilkes-Barre. She had spent the last twenty years of her life in New York, living like Florence in a hotel apartment; first at the Waldorf-Astoria, later the Plaza.

Mrs Foster had used her widowhood to pursue her enthusiasms. Her paintings were exhibited in New York and beyond, and according to her obituary ‘won many awards’. Her other hobby was accumulating memberships. She died a member of forty-two clubs and societies, many of them reflecting the stress laid by a young nation upon genealogical pedigree. The Eastern Star, the Huguenot Society, the Society of Virginia Antiquities, the National Society of Patriotic Women and the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames of New York could all count on her support. But the primary focus of her interest was always the Daughters of the American Revolution, meetings of which she continued to attend as a delegate to Washington. One of her last acts of philanthropy was to restore Fleming’s Castle, the small tavern in her native New Jersey whose historic significance derived from a mention in George Washington’s journal. In 1928 she donated it to a chapter of the D.A.R. which took its name from Colonel Lowrey, a non-combatant in 1776 from Mrs Foster’s home town. The year before her death the Colonel Lowrey Chapter was invited en masse to a Verdi Club musicale at the Waldorf by Mrs Foster as she edged towards her eightieth or alternatively her ninetieth birthday, depending on which birth date is to be believed from what she told the US censuses between 1860 and 1910.

But her most personal gesture was inspired by her late daughter. To the Wyoming Historical and Genealogical Society, which tasked itself with preserving the records of local history in the valley, she made a donation of $5,000 in Lillian’s name. She could of course afford it, but this was a far greater gesture in her daughter’s memory than the $1,000 with which her husband endowed a church window in Wilkes-Barre. On Mrs Foster’s death the society’s trustees publicly resolved to send condolences to her surviving daughter.

Earlier in the year Mary Foster had been preceded to the grave by William Bulford, who inherited the family lands in 1909. He did well by the bequest. To his widow he left $150,000. To his brother George Bulford he left the farm, and the responsibility to continue paying Florence and her mother $300 each a year. Other Bulford relatives benefitted too from an estate which was valued in its entirety at $400,000, more than $150,000 in excess of Charles D. Foster’s estate when he died.

Meanwhile, in the week of her mother’s passing, Wilkes-Barreans were informed of the Verdi Club president’s most recent recital, and a photograph which had appeared in the New York society columns. ‘Mrs Jenkins’s costumes,’ the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported, ‘were extraordinarily rich and costly, and the one in which she was pictured was Oriental, with pearl-seeded turban, earrings of cabochon stones, and a white silk brocade robe.’ Even if the recital took place before Florence’s bereavement, her old home town did not approve of this mode of display.

The death of Florence’s mother brought the other half of her father’s fortune into her possession. She therefore became twice as comfortable just as America plunged into the Great Depression. The jobless started to queue at Salvation Army soup kitchens and camp in Central Park shanty towns, while in 1931 nearly a hundred people starved to death in New York. Not all privileged New Yorkers noticed. ‘I don’t think I was aware of the poverty of the Thirties,’ said writer and editor Claudia Stearns. Those who did have their eyes open saw that musicians were not immune. ‘You’d be walking down the street,’ recalled one eyewitness, ‘and somebody would say, “See that guy there? He used to be with the New York Symphony…” They’d just be sittin’ there dejected with a wine bottle in their hands.’

The immensely rich simply became a little less rich. ‘We just don’t have money the way people used to have it,’ moaned Laurence Rockefeller. Various Vanderbilts and their ilk upped sticks from their burdensomely staffed palaces and moved into the big hotels. Further down the scale, people stopped employing maids. But the charity balls continued; the Metropolitan Opera remained a haven of conspicuous display. By one reckoning, the box holders on opening night had a collective wealth of nearly a billion dollars. Florence had a pair of tickets for the Met every Saturday evening in the season, but her finances did not qualify her for membership of this stratosphere. According to the calculation of an article on ‘society and near-society’ published in America in 1932, entrance into the New York Social Register, the elite directory of prominent families, was open to pretty much anyone who had an annual income of $20,000. Even in the 1940s Florence’s income from her invested wealth was $12,000.

The 1930s was a period of great popularity for opera, even for those who couldn’t afford the tickets. The first entire production was broadcast on American radio in 1931. Three years later Four Saints in Three Acts, written for an all-black cast by Virgil Thompson from a libretto by Gertrude Stein, became the longest-running opera in Broadway history. In the new age of celebrity, soprano superstars such as Geraldine Farrar and Lily Pons took opera towards the mainstream. And in 1940 an opera was telecast in the US for the first time.

Florence was sixty-one when her mother died, and her appetite to perform only sharpened. There was the discreetest hint of this when, six months later, the annual Rose Breakfast closed the Verdi Club’s season at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club. After the Silver Skylarks Ball this was the most splendid event in the club’s calendar, for which the committee solicited hostesses to help run things six months in advance. The club laid on coaches to ferry members and their guests to the gathering, which always opened with the floral pageant known as the March of the Roses. There was a prize for the best-dressed woman in this promenade which in 1931 was awarded to Henriette Wakefield of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Perhaps the prize was a gift for services secretly rendered.

Wakefield made her Met debut all the way back in 1907 and would go on to appear with the company nearly eight hundred times over just short of thirty years. She was by no means a name to sell tickets or take major roles. Among her many Wagnerian performances in 1912, for example, was Grimgerde, one of the nine Valkyries. Ten years later she had graduated to Waltraute, another of them. Another decade on she was still singing the role. But she had another clandestine occupation: Wakefield was Florence’s vocal instructor.

How good or bad a musician was her pupil? Aside from the hired pianist seated at the Steinway in Florence’s Seymour Hotel apartment, only St Clair Bayfield knew the identity of Florence’s teacher. That Wakefield wished for no publicity implies that, long before the end, Florence’s singing abilities were no more than modest. The comportment of those who came to see her perform suggested as much. The 1930s found the cult of the singing president develop from an intimate cabal of devoted Verdi Club ladies to something larger and unrulier. But not all audiences were the same.

By 1931 the principal building blocks of Florence’s recital calendar for the rest of the decade were all in place. Each spring she went down to Washington, DC to entertain the members of the League of American Pen Women, set up in 1897 to support female writers and artists. (Florence would eventually be anointed president.) The year after its foundation in 1936, she sang for the Order of the Three Crusades, open to those who, like Florence, could trace their ancestry back to the early crusaders; a senator and a major-general were among the audience. With the eminent organist Malton Boyce supplying discreet accompaniment, in St Clair Bayfield’s estimation these were the most successful of her annual engagements. The audience consisted of hand-picked insiders from the upper echelons of Washington society – including family members. These visits to the capital gave Florence a chance to resume relations with her sisters-in-law. In 1931 she gave a luncheon for fourteen guests, among them not only Alice Thornton Jenkins but also Frank’s youngest sisters whom she first knew in the 1880s as Nettie and Carrie. Nettie turned seventy that year. Florence was still keen to brag about a family connection which resonated in the capital: the Star reminded readers who her father-in-law was.

Another annual tradition was inaugurated in Newport, Rhode Island. At the end of the summer holiday in 1931, Florence performed in the rooms of the Newport Historical Society. For several years she shared the bill with Leila Hearne Cannes, a pianist who was good enough to have her own featured hour on the radio in the late 1920s. She was also a fellow president, in her case of the Women’s Philharmonic Society, founded at the turn of the century to make musical performance accessible to the poorer parts of New York. ‘Both are artists of ability, quite at home with the best music,’ cooed the Newport Mercury and Weekly News reporter who ‘much enjoyed’ their concert in 1932. Florence brought along her own accompanist in the shape of Edwin McArthur.

McArthur was a young Juilliard-trained pianist from Denver who in 1928 was barely twenty-one when Florence heard him performing at the Barbizon Hotel, a recently opened residence for professional women. She invited him for an interview at her apartment; it presumably took the form of an audition in which he had to accompany her. In 1930 he married and, like many who drifted into her orbit, was grateful for the work. ‘I got many engagements through our association,’ he said in an interview nearly twenty years after her death. He also attested that Florence was ‘intelligent and well-informed’.

Florence gave two or three concerts a year at Sherry’s Hotel on Park Avenue, one showcasing living American composers, another in honour of Poetry Week, one for the Society of New York State Women (when ‘many encores were demanded’). But the summit of her annual round remained her Verdi Club recital. A club pamphlet which previewed forthcoming offerings ended with the promise – upper case as ever to the fore – that ‘features of the season will include a Song Recital given by the President in the Grand Ball Room of the Ritz-Carlton’. At the event itself, the Musical Courier was always on hand to serve up a pen portrait that showed Florence in the best possible light. The wording would deftly steer a diplomatic course between trading in outright falsehood and keeping a toehold in truth. A ‘brilliant’ audience ‘heard and applauded’ and ‘paid homage to president-soprano-hostess Jenkins, for in this triangular role she regally filled each part. It was the consensus of opinion that she never sang better.’ That was in 1930. ‘The musico-social affair invariably finds a large audience,’ it advised a year later, when the applause was ‘cordial’. ‘Doubtless the Blue Danube waltz, with its trills and staccato, and “Clavelitos” provided the most enjoyment.’ A reader in the know might pick up encrypted signals that the writer was tipping them the wink. ‘The presence of various presidents of women’s clubs, of prominent musical and society folk, all combined to make the recital highly successful.’ The write-ups could be taken at face value, or understood to mean something more subversive.

Florence’s repertoire was an eclectic grab-bag that displayed great knowledge, ranging from baroque via grand opera to folksy modern tunes. As embodied in the two masks on the Verdi Club emblem, she commuted between tragedy and comedy. Technical difficulties held no fear for Florence. If anything they spurred her on. In 1930 she launched an undaunted assault on ‘Elsa’s Dream’ from Lohengrin. Having already introduced songs by Strauss into her programmes, in due course she became only the second soprano in New York to sing Zerbinetta’s aria from Ariadne auf Naxos. Her rendition was ‘flowing and melodious,’ said one reviewer, ‘broken by an elaborate, coloratura cadenza climaxing in a high D’.

Florence’s pursuit of altitude was a matter of personal pride. A singer who hit the high notes attracted notice. In 1930, starring in Gershwin’s Girl Crazy on Broadway, Ethel Merman sensationally held a high C for sixteen bars. While New Yorkers watched successive skyscrapers climb ever further away from the gathering poverty in the streets below, Florence practised in the hope of surpassing her own personal peaks. Her high B flats, high Cs and high Ds had something in common with King Kong scrambling to the spire of the just finished Empire State Building.

The repertoire’s expansion over the years shows the volume of work she undertook to learn and practise new songs and arias. Indeed she was often complimented for her taste and for her industry. At her Newport recital in 1932 she presented songs ‘of the sort to be appreciated by those who know music when they hear it, for only those who are talented and have been carefully and skilfully instructed, and have done much conscientious work themselves, could present such a program as this’. Florence was nonchalant about scaling the perilous summits of Italian opera: she warbled her way through ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Il barbiere di Seviglia and ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca; she even roused the ghost of Verdi with her lovestruck version of Violetta’s ‘Ah, fors’è lui’ from La traviata. As the decade continued she started inserting little commentaries into her programmes – lavish productions in red ink printed on expensive silvered paper – which blithely solicited comparison with those who had gone before. When she took on Chapi’s ‘Las hijas del Zebedeo’ she advised that ‘its sparkling words, its fiery rhythm, and withal its authentic Spanish grace, have made this song a favorite parade ground of the great sopranos since the inimitable Garcia and Louisa [sic: her name was Luisa] Tetrazzini.’

Florence was a singer for all moods and occasions: she attempted the stately (Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’) and the numinous (Gluck’s ‘Divinités du Styx’), lauded the almighty in Mozart’s ‘Alleluia’ and Bach’s ‘Jubilate’, and threw caution to the wind at the frenetic end of the repertoire, most audaciously of all in ‘Clavelitos’, a Spanish zarzuela sung at breakneck pace. Her rendition of Carl Gilberté’s ‘Laughing Song’ was replete with high hoots and coloratura cackles. And in her late sixties she could also unblushingly play the fragrant innocent in ‘The Virgin’s Slumber Song’.

She was particularly attracted to songs which invoked a congruence between the soprano voice and the airborne twitterings of the bird kingdom: she sang of canaries and doves, larks and nightingales. The unintended irony was not lost on the audience when she sang a song called ‘Charmant Oiseau’ which was ‘interrupted by applause, for antiphonal and piquant singing stirred the hearers’. She even sang of wild geese, which was ‘especiall [sic] to those who are thrilled by the wild, free notes of these birds,’ said a reviewer perhaps reminded all too clearly of a goose’s squawks. And if a song floated free into the realm of the wordless, Florence would gamely give chase. A staple of hers was ‘Song Without Words’ by contemporary Dutch-American composer Richard Hageman (who would have a big hit composing the soundtrack to Stagecoach in 1939). It fetched up on a high D. Above all, her assault on Delibes’s ‘Indian Bell Song’ from Lakmé was destined to be preserved for the appreciation of posterity.

But then Florence always accelerated with purblind enthusiasm towards a challenge. She explained with relish that Mozart’s ‘No, no, che non sei capace’ was composed for his sister-in-law ‘with whom at one time he had been in love but now detested, so as House-Composer compelled to write for her, he tried to make the aria impossibly difficult to sing’. She was hardly likely to duck that one. Languages did not present any obstacle either: she sang suites of songs in French, German, Italian, Russian, and even ventured fearlessly into the polysyllabic minefield that is Hungarian, accompanied by a Hungarian pianist who coached her linguistically. She had a special weakness for the drama and sexual heat of Hispanic music. Her programmes frequently offered Spanish and Mexican songs that found her flirting and swooning and sort of strutting.

The dramatic comedy of Madame Jenkins in performance had a visual element too. Many years of dressing up for the Verdi Club tableaux vivants had given her a taste for fancy dress. In each recital the stage was ceded to the pianist or to an ensemble of Italian-American brothers who called themselves the Pascarella Chamber Music Society. While they played, Florence had time to pull on a new costume backstage – a sultry Mexican temptress in a sombrero, or a Russian peasant, or Hungarian national dress with flowers in her hair-piece. And she was a great believer in the power of props: a fan, a parasol, a spinning wheel for the garden scene from Faust (which was stored at St Clair’s apartment), a basket of carnations for ‘Clavelitos’ whose contents she would fling into the audience. The effect was topped off by her slapdash misapplication of make-up – lipstick smeared, rouge overdone.

In each song she drew on her Philadelphia training to sell the story, but her style of delivery learned in youth was not necessarily suited to a woman advancing into old age. ‘Her gestures and expressions were just as funny as her singing,’ recalled Adolf Pollitz, a German immigrant who joined the Verdi Club as a young pianist. ‘She added histrionics to every number,’ recalled Cosme McMoon, ‘generally acting the action, if it were an aria, or other appropriate action if it were a descriptive song, or else she would go into different dances during these numbers, which were extremely hilarious.’

Quite how unpromising a clotheshorse an elderly Florence must have seemed onstage is suggested by a set of photographs commissioned for Life magazine’s regular ‘Life Goes to a Party’ feature. They were taken by Margaret Bourke-White in 1937 at one of Florence’s Seymour Hotel soirées (though never published). A dozen guests in conventional evening dress mustered in her drawing room, including the caricaturist Al Hirschfield. It was an abstemious gathering: no one had a drink in their hand. Florence changed halfway through the evening from a floral print dress accessorised with scarves, jewels and a headdress to a carpet-sweeping gown which all too faithfully hugged her contours. Both were silk. In some of the images Florence is standing among her politely rapt guests singing, her eyes sometimes closing, her hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. In one photograph two middle-aged women were captured in the act of helping Florence out of a chair.

It was on a night such as this that one witness peered into the bathroom off the long dark corridor leading to the drawing room, and saw the bathtub filled with a vast quantity of potato salad. When Florence catered, she catered in bulk. (For herself, she was a devotee of sandwiches and Manhattans.) A more permanent quirk of her apartment was a collection of upright dining chairs in which eminent Americans had supposedly breathed their last. People tending to die in their beds rather than at dinner, this has the look of another tall story. But through her various genealogical memberships, Florence would have had privileged access to the furniture of deceased generals, senators and judges and thus been able to pursue this arcane interest. Perhaps the collection included the chair of her father-in-law, the rear admiral.

Verdi Club concerts were free to the members but tickets could be bought by the public, which meant that audiences soon started to swell with non-loyalists who had never been to a Silver Skylark ball or a Rose Breakfast. Word spread in the early 1930s about the unique phenomenon of the singing president. In 1934 the audience contained a rogue element who paid $2 for a guest ticket, made their way to the back of the auditorium and laughed their heads off. New York critics were not invited to the concerts but a journalist (from an unidentified publication) snuck in to witness the event and broke cover in a short satirical sketch. It briefly outlined the history of the recitals and explained the source of Florence’s inherited wealth.

‘Mrs Jenkins,’ it calculated, ‘is well able to pay for the hall. Last week she hired the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and smartly dressed New Yorkers fairly fought for tickets to get in and see Florence Foster Jenkins perform.’ There was a description of her appearance in flaming velvet, her wig a pile of blonde ringlets, before the report moved on to the music. Florence began with two Brahms lieder. For ‘Die Mainacht’, the programme printed the composer’s admonition to the soloist: ‘O singer, if thou canst not dream, leave this song unsung.’ This was tempting fate. ‘Mrs Jenkins could dream if she could not sing,’ snarked the reviewer. The next song was titled no more propitiously: ‘With her hands clasped to her heart she passed on to “Vergebliches Standchen”, which she had labeled “The Serenade in Vain”.’ The audience, ‘as Mrs Jenkins’s audiences invariably do, behaved very badly. In the back of the hall men and women in full evening dress made no attempt to control their laughter.’ For the first time in print, someone had said it: Florence Foster Jenkins was a joke.

As a result, Florence in her own quaintly naive way attempted to gag the press. ‘Are you a … a newspaperman?’ she once asked a suspect gentleman who personally applied for tickets at her apartment. ‘No, Madame Jenkins,’ he replied. ‘A music-lover.’ ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Two-fifty each, please. Now would you like some sherry?’

The recitals acquired a cult popularity. In St Clair’s estimation this was down to what he called her ‘star quality’. This was something he knew about, having observed it at close quarters in the theatre – he certainly didn’t have it himself. ‘On the stage a person will draw the attention of the whole audience,’ he explained. ‘There is something about her personality that makes everyone look at her with relish. That is what my wife had.’

In 1930 there were three hundred in the audience, but when word spread the number swelled to eight hundred. In 1935 there was standing room only as the Musical Courier’s account of the evening became a little less coded. ‘Outbursts of applause punctuated the items presented’ was another way of saying that the clapping interrupted the singing. This increasingly happened at Florence’s recitals: applause was deployed as a way of shrouding guffaws which could not be stifled. McArthur once saw a man stuff his handkerchief into his mouth and roll out of his chair onto the floor.

‘Don’t go away,’ she would say at the end of a set of songs. ‘I’ll be right back.’ Nobody was going anywhere. The cheers were appreciative and even sincere. Madame Jenkins needed no encouragement, but she got it anyway. ‘A frequently wildly applauding audience left no doubt of the enjoyment derived by the throng.’ In 1936 the ‘eagerly awaited’ concert was watched by the New York World-Telegram and ‘a large and highly responsive audience’. Next year the paper was back to hear Florence.

Of course, with due respect to the other artists, the audience had really come to hear the stylistic and inimitable song-readings of Mme Jenkins. And, to tell the truth, there was more than gratification for all the listeners present. Mme Jenkins’s art is many-faceted. It makes no specialty of any one composition or, for that matter, of any one composer. Witness the exacting – not to say exhausting – list of offerings the soprano had chosen for herself. Needless to state, Mme Jenkins gave her interpretative abilities full and untrammeled sway … and that it was so was attested to by the cataract of audible sounds from the hearers that greeted her at practically every one of her nonchalantly tossed off phrases and again by the torrent of applause that followed every selection.

So her Ritz-Carlton concerts were rowdy affairs, but rarely did the behaviour of her spectators take on a malicious flavour. According to McMoon, ‘the audience nearly always tried not to hurt her feelings by outright laughing, so they developed a convention that whenever she came to a particularly excruciating discord or something like that, where they had to laugh, they burst into these salvos of applause and whistles and the noise was so great that they could laugh at liberty.’

St Clair’s memory was different, that the misbehaviour stemmed from the enmity of aspiring singers whom she had not booked for the Verdi Club. ‘Many artists had it in for her,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t hire everyone, so those she didn’t hire for the concerts she sponsored became jealous. They formed a little claque that went to her concerts to laugh.’ Increasingly St Clair made it his business to police the auditorium. ‘I tried to keep them out. At one concert I ordered that no one be allowed in the gallery except those to whom we had given free tickets. We gave many tickets away. When the concert began, the guying started. It came from the gallery. I went up and told those people they had no right to guy when they were guests of the artists. People are so ignorant.’ It was perhaps to discourage misconduct that in the late 1930s the recitals started to omit the intermission.

But the ignorance was more a question of behaviour than of judgement; even St Clair could not defend Florence to the hilt. ‘She had perfect rhythm,’ he said. ‘Her interpretation was good and her languages wonderful. She had the star quality. You could feel that in the applause. People may have laughed at her singing, but the applause was real. She was a natural-born musician. But instrument, there was very little instrument.’ His euphemistic appraisal was not open to misinterpretation: even St Clair knew Florence could not sing.

However absurd she may have seemed as a singer, or as the costumed chatelaine of the Silver Skylark tableaux vivants making her climactic appearance, Florence knew how to charm and persuade. Principally through her tireless leadership, the Verdi Club had jostled a position for itself as a significant presence in New York. In 1933 Florence’s annual recital at the Ritz-Carlton with the Pascarella Chamber Music Society was sandwiched in the New York Times’s concert listings between two performances by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall. The following year her concert was announced in the same column as others involving Jascha Heifetz, Paul Robeson and Otto Klemperer. Another year a Verdi Club recital was listed in the same column inches as news of Prokofiev and Enescu conducting in New York.

Meanwhile leading sopranos beat a path to the club’s door. In March 1932 the Swedish dramatic soprano Göta Ljungberg inspired an ecstatic review from the Times singing Isolde in her debut season at the Met (whose audience ‘applauded and recalled her … with a fervor that had not attended any Metropolitan performance of this work in years’). In November Ljungberg opened the new season at the Verdi Club. She signed her photograph in the programme ‘to Mme Florence Foster Jenkins: with love and sincere admiration’. Then there was Elda Vettori, an Italian-born former hatshop girl from St Louis who made her Met debut in 1926 (to ‘deafening and insistent applause’). She went on to sing Aida and, opposite Antonio Scotti, Tosca. She hailed Madame Jenkins as an ‘incomparable woman and artiste’ and ‘an inestimable friend to all worthy musicians’, and offered her ‘warmest appreciation of your extraordinary accomplishments’. ‘To the lovely and gifted Lady Florence Foster Jenkins,’ said Texan soprano Leonora Corona, another Met Aida. This stream of bouquets cannot have failed to add another ring of steel to Florence’s adamantine self-belief.

To such a generous patron of the arts, the acquisition of what sounded like an aristocratic English title will have felt like a comfortable fit. She had the decency to deploy inverted commas, as if aware of the transgression. ‘Happy Easter! To Charlie and Betty with love from “Lady Florence”.’ To her accompanist she wrote, ‘To the very best accompanist Edwin McArthur and his charming wife Blanche. With my love from “Lady Florence” July 19th, 32.’

The exchange and mart system of patronage and flattery by which Florence profited extended from soloists to composers. New compositions came her way from the likes of Charles Haubiel (‘Song’), Elmer Russ (‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’) and Luigi Dell’Orefice (‘Notte’). A programme note would clarify that they were ‘dedicated to Mme Jenkins’. Sometimes her accompanist would be unseated so that the composer could leap onstage and play along with the soloist. One such was Grace Bush, whose ‘Spring Gladness’ offered ‘opportunity for the exuberant style of Mme Jenkins’ according to the Musical Courier. Most egregiously, Louis Drakeford wrote a piece called ‘Your Slave Am I’. At a certain point Florence turned to writing lyrics herself, the first of which McMoon either offered or consented to set to music. Premiered in Newport in 1933, the piece took the name of ‘Trysting Time’.

Beneath a rare June moon,

In the fragrant leafy cove

Of a bower of honeysuckle,

I’m waiting for my love.

And mem’ries, Ah, so tender,

That crowd my reverie,

Seem softly to be whisper’d

By the murmur of the sea.

Oh, hours of weary waiting

By the cliffs that gauntly tower,

So lonely and so beauteous

Stilled by the rock’s majestic power.

And then, and then,

At last, your arms around me

The rain of kisses on my lips,

Your dark eyes burning into mine,

The world forgot, my soul complete.

Hearing these sentiments people had no choice but to clap. Later, Adolf Pollitz brought Florence a bunch of trailing arbutuses from his home in Oyster Bay, and she was inspired to write a song in memory of a wintry equestrian outing with her now dead and buried father to find the rare flower. ‘The scent of Arbutus fills the air,’ she concluded. ‘To my aching heart, it brings a message, Of hope and joy, to the love that is there.’ Elmer Russ, who was a very successful composer, set it to music.

Florence migrated between pianists, all of whom were tasked with keeping a straight face and supplying sympathetic accompaniment. None of them was exposed to her over a longer period than McMoon. At some point after his death a rumour bloomed that McMoon was actually an exotic pseudonym behind which Edwin McArthur protected his identity and his dignity as he played for Florence. It’s true that McMoon was an invented surname. He was born Cosme McMunn in 1901 in a small town in the Mexican state of Durango. His father, whose parents emigrated during the great potato famine, was of Irish descent. The McMunns were uprooted again in 1911: to escape the revolution in Mexico, they moved to San Antonio in Texas. Unlike the rest of the family, the young Cosme gave his name a charismatic tweak, perhaps to encourage the pronunciation he’d grown up with in Mexico. As an eighteen-year-old with a new surname he started appearing in local recitals in the summer of 1919; he had the chutzpah to unveil a composition of his own in a recital also offering Chopin, Brahms, Grieg and Liszt. He soon made for New York where in 1922 the Musical Courier caught him in performance and predicted ‘a bright future … He has real talent and, in addition, a pleasing stage appearance.’

In his recollection, McMoon met Florence socially about a year before the death of Mrs Foster. In fact he performed as a guest soloist at her first Ritz-Carlton recital several years earlier in 1925. His contribution drew on his origins: he performed a Mexican tune called ‘Jarabe’ and a waltz of his own creation which he titled ‘Dolores’. In 1931 he played the song again when Florence was invited to give a recital at the home of friends in Fayetteville in upstate New York. By now McMoon was one of her regular accompanists and he had written a Spanish song of which she was, naturally, the dedicatee. (Consistent with the unspoken arrangement by which invitations were reciprocated, their hostess that evening was Claire Alcee, a singer who would open the season for the Verdi Club a month later.)

It wasn’t easy for any of Florence’s accompanists but some kept their dignity better than others. When she was performing the Jewel Song from Faust at her recital in 1934, at a certain point the lighting fell on McArthur in such a way that the audience laughed. Whatever he’d done by accident to stimulate the laugh he did again by design. Florence was furious. ‘I suppose you won’t have anything to do with me now,’ he said. ‘I certainly will not!’ she replied.

Almost instantly McArthur traded up. In February 1935 the Norwegian dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad made her debut at the Met as Sieglinde in Die Walküre. It was broadcast all over America, as were other performances which established her as the world’s leading Wagnerian soprano. Her popularity was such that she could rake in huge sums for the indigent Met when appealing for donations during broadcast intermissions. McArthur applied for the post as her accompanist and was promptly hired to tour with her, later becoming her conductor too, with whom she insisted upon working all the way through to her retirement. From Jenkins to Flagstad – no sopranos’ accompanist has ever made a more antipodean transition from the ridiculous to the sublime.

McMoon also struggled. ‘It wasn’t only trying to keep a straight face, but she would leave out whole parts of a song unexpectedly. You were always hard put to follow her.’ Others found that McMoon milked the concerts for comedy. ‘I thought it was terrible,’ remembered Verdi Club member Florence Malcolm Darnault. ‘He was paid as an accompanist and then laughed while he played the accompaniment and winked at the audience. He lived on her, she gave him everything.’

Darnault had a pivotal role to play in what was both the greatest and the most revealing moment in the Verdi Club’s history. Since the death of Caruso, much the grandest figure to drift into the orbit of the club was the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, whose latest sojourn in America coincided with his disenchantment with Fascism in his native Italy. The conductor’s political sympathies were not necessarily shared by the predominantly Republican world of women’s clubs. One New Yorker cartoon by Helen Hokinson, whose speciality was twitting the activities of the clubs, depicted a president addressing the members thus: ‘The vote is now fifteen to one that we deplore Mussolini’s attitude. I think it would be nice if we could go on record as unanimously deploring Mussolini’s attitude.’ Among those not deploring his attitude would have been Florence. When the National Fascist Militia Band arrived from Rome for a long tour in 1934, touting themselves as ‘ambassadors of goodwill uniting the musical hearts of America and Italy’, she was one of the sixteen honorary patrons for their Carnegie Hall concert in August.

That year Toscanini attended the grand unveiling of a new bronze portrait of Verdi by Darnault. He was joined in the ballroom of the Plaza by the Italian consul general and Baroness Katharine Evans von Klenner, an elderly doyenne of music education who picked up the title when she married an Austrian diplomat. Darnault was not yet thirty, and it should have been a career high to have her work shown in such company, but it was marred by what she later called ‘the worst thing that ever happened’.

I was excited. It was going to be a very nice unveiling and a lot of people were there who were friends of mine. They came and told me to come onstage right away because they were going to have the unveiling and I said, ‘Well, where is Mrs. Jenkins?’ ‘She’s in that room there.’ I went off the stage and there’s the room where people get ready. I opened the door and looked in and there she was. Half naked. Sitting there without a thing and her wig was sitting there alongside on the table. She was completely bald. Completely shiny. I just couldn’t believe it. But completely shiny. She was polished. I was so embarrassed because I’d seen it and now she knew it. She saw me in the mirror. She gave a yell [ … ] I never said a word about it to her.

Darnault’s bronze showed the composer in the Grecian style, with bare shoulders. The bust was mounted on a modernist base with a thickly whorled surface. A fan hailed the new work in the Times: ‘Since seeing it I have felt that there is hope for American art … that America was really coming into an art of its own, for the sculptor appeared young and represented today. If that is the art of today, then we are having a great day.’ Darnault duly picked up other commissions. At the end of the same year her portrait of the Broadway producer Daniel Frohman, brother of the late Charles, was gifted to the Actors Fund of America. In a speech at the unveiling St Clair was one of the actors paying tribute to Frohman, who was sufficiently moved to commission a bust of his brother from Darnault. Florence, having recovered from Darnault’s visit to her dressing room, attended a reception Frohman held for the sculptress before its completion. And yet according to Kathleen Bayfield, Darnault was never paid the $2,000 due to her for her bust of Verdi.

Among those who knew her, Florence’s stinginess was by now an accepted fact. By the 1940s her investments gave her an income of $12,000 a year, from which she paid $2,000 to run the Verdi Club; the rent on her apartment in the Seymour cost her $330 a month, and St Clair’s apartment was a further $1,050 a year. These, claimed St Clair, were her only extravagances. ‘Instead of sitting back with a French maid and a chauffeur and going to swell restaurants,’ he said, ‘she economised all the time so she would have enough money for her clubs.’ Others with a less rose-tinted perspective took a harsher line. ‘As far as money was concerned Mrs Jenkins was tricky,’ Darnault recalled. ‘She was very careful about money.’ Darnault remembered once buying a coat for $12 which Florence admired. ‘She called me up, and she said to me, “Have you heard about those coats?” I said, “Yes, I have one.” I had bought one and I fooled everybody, so I said, “Well, I’ll show it to you,” and she said, “Oh, that’s stunning, a beautiful coat.” And she went and bought one and she wore it everywhere, and everybody thought it was fur.’ Florence didn’t disabuse them. (According to Darnault, Florence was a dowdy dresser who ‘just didn’t know how to put things together. She never looked smart.’)

In Darnault’s experience Madame Jenkins was evasive when it came to picking up bills too. ‘She’d say, “Let’s get a cab,” and she’d always get me or anybody else to pay the bill, always, always. And I got so that I’d never, never go out. She’d ask me to come to lunch, but she never paid, never. She had asked me to lunch one day, and we had lunch in a very nice restaurant in a very good hotel. And then she got a phone call, and she went to answer the phone. She sent the bellboy back saying she just had to rush.’

For all her personal charm – Darnault ‘never heard her say a mean thing about a human being’ – Florence was deeply untrusting, particularly of those in professions where trust was an essential element of the relationship. Her suspicion of lawyers was rooted in the trauma of her father’s will case but also perhaps in a deeper ambivalence about her father himself, who for a long time she feared had disinherited her. It found expression in the sheer number of law firms she instructed between 1913 and 1944. Although she was nominally Episcopalian, and came of devout stock, ministers of the church earned her disapproval too. As for dentists, ‘They’re the biggest frauds of all,’ she once said. And perhaps thanks to her experience of marriage, she had very low esteem for the medical profession.

Once, she noticed Adolf Pollitz talking to her about something to do with club business with his eyes closed. ‘You closed your eyes!’ she exclaimed in disbelief. Florence kept her searching blue eyes open all the time. ‘She didn’t trust,’ said Pollitz. ‘She watched all the time.’ Both he and Darnault suspected that she didn’t even trust St Clair.

In fact she had some reason. Until the end of her life Florence was able to count on St Clair’s devotion. She held him utterly in her sway. He was expected to dine with her at six o’clock sharp, and he often accompanied her to the Met on Saturday nights. He ran errands for her and acted as her manager, wrote press releases, booked venues and even engaged the ushers for her Ritz-Carlton recitals. Most importantly, he was the creative director of her empire. It was St Clair’s long experience in the field, and his ability to recruit volunteers from professional theatre, which gave the Verdi Club’s operatic evenings and endless parade of tableaux vivants a patina of artistic credibility.

In 1932 St Clair met and fell in love with an Englishwoman called Kathleen Weatherley. Nearly a quarter of a century his junior, Kathleen was born in St Pancras in 1899 and brought up in Surrey by her widowed mother; her father, an insurance underwriter, died when she was six. She worked as a music teacher until, needing a change in her early thirties, she volunteered for an organisation which sent missionaries around Canada. The Caravan Mission was the creation of a formidable spinster from the north of England called Eva Hasell. With only a lifelong companion for support, Miss Hasell marshalled a fleet of Ford vans which took Christian succour into the furthest rural reaches of the vast Canadian landmass. She spent the winter recruiting in England and beyond – two women per truck, one of them required to be strong enough to handle the vehicle over off-road terrain. Kathleen was one of a large group of ladies whose passage was paid for by Miss Hasell in May 1931.

The same month, nearly three decades on from his first appearance in Everyman, St Clair joined an eighteen-strong reunion of the Ben Greet Players for a charity performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It went so well at the American Women’s Association, with a string quartet supplying snippets of Mendelssohn’s music for the Dream, that the whole thing was done again twice in July at the George Washington Stadium with the New York Orchestra. St Clair spent the rest of that summer in England. At a certain point after her summer duties were done, Kathleen gravitated towards New York. There she had Australian friends who gave a tea party to which St Clair was also invited.

By the time St Clair met Kathleen, what passed for ardour in his relationship with Florence had eased and the separate living quarters at West 37th Street which she paid for and he lived in now became a convenient hideaway in which to conduct this new liaison. After Florence’s death St Clair explained away the oddity of two separate apartments for an allegedly married couple as an escape for both of them. ‘It was our retiring place where we got away from the telephone and railroad tactics of the Seymour,’ he said. ‘The phone was always ringing there. My wife had connections with more than three thousand people.’ But he overstated the frequency of Florence’s visits, and her absence now worked to his advantage.

He called her Kay and she called him Bay. Kathleen was tall and thin but otherwise her attraction for St Clair was not dissimilar to Florence’s: she too had a domineering personality. It wasn’t quite domineering enough to persuade St Clair to break with Florence. He simply didn’t have the strength of character to cut himself off from the privileged access to high society that Florence provided, while Florence in turn insisted he continue in his role as her escort and artistic director. If anything, his commitment to the Verdi Club’s annual jamboree increased after he met Kathleen. In 1933 he wrote, directed and acted in a play called The Dream of King Henry VIII, in which six matrons of the Verdi Club played the king’s wives. It was adjudged ‘imaginative and poetic to a high degree’ by the Musical Courier. In 1934 he wrote a paean to the American revolution called A Romance of ‘76. In 1935 he adapted Schiller’s Mary Queen of Scots. The spectacular tableaux vivants were as ever his artistic dominion and responsibility. He also popped up elsewhere. In 1937 at Florence’s Newport recital he read from As You Like It, shared stories of the great actors with whom he had been associated and recited verses he’d written as a disenchanted young man eager to run off and join the circus.

And his personal commitment to Florence did not waver throughout the decade. His 1939 diary reveals a routine that was built principally around Florence, interspersed with a supporting role for Kathleen alongside fleeting references to Chamberlain and Hitler. Florence is referred to in the diary as B (for Brownie). ‘January 20th. Wrote Kay. B & self dined City Club. A very delightful quiet evening. January 21st. With B to Cavalleria and Pagliacci at Metropolitan which we enjoyed very much. January 22nd. Lunch with B. B at dinner. January 23rd. Quiet evening with B.’ Kathleen was occasionally out of town but whenever she was in New York the diary looks like the journal of an affair narrated in code. ‘K arrived … Lunch K … K called late … Walked in park with K … Tea with K.’ One night Kathleen went ‘as substitute for B to Carnegie Hall’. But the abbreviations and gnomic annotations cannot hide the bias of his loyalty. Next to ‘B looking well and so glad of that’ on 19 March, St Clair drew a heart. There is only one sign of discord: a few days before Germany invaded Poland, when he was performing in Provincetown, he received an ‘angry letter from B’. He was always on hand for the big events. ‘March 9th. Verdi Club “Ball of the Silver Skylark” went off very well … July 19th. Took B’s Birthday presents.’ And most loyally of all, whatever he later said in interviews after Florence’s death, in the privacy of his diary he revealed an unshakeable conviction that her singing more than passed muster. ‘B sang well last night … B sang extremely well … Heard B singing – very good … B sang delightfully at night. B sang better than ever in public. Floral tributes. A triumph for B.’ And then at the end of the year, ‘B sang at night but became very exhausted and alarmed me.’

St Clair’s concern for Florence’s health seems not to have been reciprocated. He was often ill in 1939, either generally off colour or with a swollen left side of his face, but made no note of her concern for him. The discrepancy in their status was at its starkest in the heat of summer. As she got older she rented an air-conditioned apartment at the Shelton Hotel in Lexington Avenue, while still maintaining her Seymour Hotel apartment and allowing St Clair to roast on West 37th Street. Previously when the season ended, and before the Wall Street Crash, he had the funds to escape to England to stroll around the Cotswolds and recharge. But St Clair didn’t go home again after 1931, not even when his father died in a London hospital in April 1937. It was just as well that he was keen on exercise, because as often as not he would follow Florence to the ocean where she’d stay in the Westchester Club while he rented a modest room as close by as he could afford. One entry in his diary during the Depression offered a grim vignette of the distribution of power between them: ‘It was a long, hot walk up to the Westchester Club, two miles.’ A similar situation would arise when she moved to Newport for her annual concert. Florence would stay with wealthy friends in hotels or the resort’s well-appointed cottages, while St Clair would languish in a rooming house. At least the ocean enabled him to swim great distances.

And so St Clair lived a second secret life. While his own common-law wife denied him in public, he had to ensure she did not discover his new relationship with a woman more than three decades her junior. They were safest away on furtive trips out of town. A photograph of them together taken beside the ocean shows the couple in their bathing costumes – a two-tone belted singlet for him, a floral one-piece for her. Kathleen is perched on St Clair’s shoulders, her feet and calves tucked behind his back. They smile brightly for the camera. St Clair is a lean, scraggy figure with pipe-cleaner legs, a high forehead with light hair and always those protruding ears. Kathleen is svelte with narrow shoulders, slender legs and an oval face with short brown hair. She is wearing a thick necklace of beads or shells. They look physically intimate.

Florence paid rare visits to St Clair’s flat and on one near-disastrous occasion Kathleen was there. ‘He had risked much to have me to his apartment,’ she recalled. ‘It was July 4th weekend and hot as hell. Suddenly the doorbell rang at his apartment at 7am. He knew instinctively what it was; quickly he told me to get into the closet leading out of the north room. It was all jumbled up with Verdi Club theatricals. As she came in he suddenly spied my very pretty green leather mules under the bed, but he stood in front of them. She only visited for about five minutes. It was the worst I’ve ever experienced. For him it would have been agony if she had found out, though he always said she was psychic … I knew that if anything happened he would desert me at once. He was absolutely tied to her by an umbilical cord.’

After five years Kathleen’s inability to prise St Clair away from Florence’s clutches drove her back to England – it’s not clear for how long – but she returned to the US in the summer of 1937. If Florence knew about her rival, those in her circle in the Verdi Club were never vouchsafed a hint from her. Adolf Pollitz was convinced that she knew all about St Clair and Kathleen but was content to turn a blind eye so long as there was no public scandal. No matter the double standard this position entailed. After the outbreak of the Second World War, when Kathleen was heading back to Britain to enlist, Florence told a member of the Verdi Club that St Clair had an English friend who was joining up. The member replied that he expected every loyal Englishman would follow suit. ‘It isn’t a man, it’s a woman,’ came the tart reply. ‘And I hope the boat sinks!’

Kathleen once went to a Verdi Club ball and took along some British merchant seamen in uniform. ‘He [St Clair] said I should be lost amongst the crowd and not observed and he could have a dance with me. I had on a lovely white ball gown with a peculiar velvet sash and he looked ravishing in his tails. I was sitting on a side table and beckoned him as he came round. Somehow or other we missed, and he didn’t hear me call out “St Clair!” as he passed and he didn’t notice me. He had so much on his mind, naturally anxious that the ball should go well. I was so timid and also scared of anything going wrong that I should have been noticed. I would have loved to dance with St Clair at the Plaza ballroom. He often talked of it after and he felt the sadness of it really acutely.’

As the 1930s drew to a close the cult of Lady Florence acquired an unstoppable momentum, and she did everything to encourage it. In the annual tableaux vivants she transmogrified variously into Louis XV’s mistress the Comtesse du Barry (in a golden wig and gown) in a Three Musketeers tableau, and then Catherine the Great (in which guise she was ‘the cynosure of interest’). In every one of her triumphant apotheoses, she was blissfully unaware of the judgement of younger onlookers. Florence Darnault remembers her appearing as Aida, this time to sing. ‘She came out in costume, she had all these harem women, she had all the other faces darkened, but she didn’t darken hers. These women were all dark, none of them sang, they couldn’t sing a tone, they were from the Verdi Club, they were all big women and they all had these chiffon trousers … I think that was the worst I ever saw, I think that was really the end of everything.’

And yet Lady Florence was increasingly sought after and celebrated. In 1938 she gave a private recital to two hundred guests at a house in Queens, and embarked on her first ever concert tour of New England. In McMoon’s memory these were dismally attended; in Provincetown she sang to an audience of fifteen. When she returned to embark on the Verdi Club’s twenty-first season, she was presented with a portrait bust of herself. The sculptress was Baroness Liane de Gidro, whose previous subjects had included Caruso, Liszt and Mussolini. A jowly and resolutely unflattering bronze portrait was unveiled in a ceremony directed by St Clair and attended by, among others, the Italian consul general and a retired rear admiral who spoke of the great contribution made by women as society’s champions of culture. To add to the jollity of the occasion, a motion picture of one of Madame Jenkins’s recent concerts was shown to the 250 guests. Florence’s Ritz-Carlton recital was now filmed as a matter of course, and then shown at subsequent musicales. Verdi Club members were encouraged to ‘come and see yourselves as you appear in a moving picture’.

As Florence’s career as a society soprano continued to levitate, the career of her vocal coach Henriette Wakefield ran aground. She made her last appearance with the Met in 1935, and became the chairman of the Verdi Club. Under Wakefield’s aegis, on 9 October 1939, the club celebrated Verdi’s birthday with a morning musicale at the Regis Hotel, as it did every year. A soprano sang, a violinist fresh off the boat from Czechoslovakia played. And the address was given by Edward Page Gaston, a temperance activist and vocal supporter of returning the remains of Pocahontas from England to her native America. The title of his lecture took the form of a question: ‘What Would Verdi Do If He Lived Today?’ Some in the audience perhaps considered the possibility that if Verdi were indeed alive in the 1930s, he would have been relieved of the task of spinning in his grave.