Florence Foster Jenkins by Nicholas Martin

Author:Nicholas Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250115966
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

8: THE SINGING PRESIDENT

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.

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