Bullock Darryl W. - Florence! Foster!! Jenkins!!!: the life of the worlds worst opera singer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darryl W Bullock is a feature writer and publisher who has worked for a variety of local, national and international publications. Since 2007 he has edited the popular blog The Worlds Worst Records ( www.worldsworstrecords.blogspot.co.uk ) and in 2013 he published his first book, The Worlds Worst Records Volume One. He lives in Bristol with Henry the dog, twin cats Nell and Ruby, and his very patient husband.

FLORENCE
FOSTER JENKINS

The True Story of the
Worlds Worst Singer

Darryl W. Bullock

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2016 by Darryl W. Bullock

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The right of Darryl W. Bullock to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EISBN:

UK: 9780715651070

Typeset by Ian Bahrami

Florence Foster Jenkins, An Appreciation was issued by the Melotone Recording Company in 1946, and given away free with copies of her records.

Contents

List of Illustrations

All images come from the authors collection, with the exception of that on , which is reproduced by courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library. Publicity photograph of St. Clair Bayfield, New York Public Library Digital Collections 19001910.

Note on Sources

All direct quotes attributed to Gregor Benko, Donald Collup, Richard Connema, Mark McMunn, Peter Quilter, Nancy Schimmel and Stephen Temperley are from interviews conducted by the author.

All direct quotes attributed to Cosme McMoon come from the RCA audio recording Chick Crumpacker Interviews Cosme McMoon, issued in 1954 to promote the release of A Florence! Foster!! Jenkins!!! Recital!!!!.

All direct quotes from Kathleen Kay Bayfield and Florence Darnault are taken from a conversation recorded by Bruce Hungerford in 1970, known as the Hungerford Tape, currently in the Hungerford Collection of the International Piano Archives, University of Maryland.

Overture

On 25 October 1944 a monumental event in the world of music took place. It may not have had the immediate impact of Elvis Presleys first TV appearance, or of the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, or of Bob Dylan plugging in his electric guitar, but on that night, from the hallowed stage of Carnegie Hall (where, two decades later, both Dylan and the Beatles would appear), a concert was given that like those other magical musical moments people are still discussing to this day. And now, more than seventy years after her death, the woman who stood on that stage that night is finally about to become a star. Routinely cited as the worst opera singer of all time, until now Narcissa Florence Foster, who found infamy under her married name as Florence Foster Jenkins, has been venerated by a select band of admirers as a camp, kitsch legend the tone-dumb darling of the tone-deaf, as critic Irving Johnson put it. Thanks to Meryl Streep, who portrays the discordant diva in Stephen Frears movie of her life, she is on the cusp of being discovered by a whole new audience.

The world of opera has presented us with a wealth of extraordinary singers, whose flames have burned ), the matronly musician stubbornly squawked her way through her material, along the way earning herself the soubriquet The First Lady of the Sliding Scale. Styling herself a coloratura soprano (an opera singer who specialises in music that features lively runs and other high-register vocal gymnastics), she cheerfully attacked material, such as Mozarts notoriously demanding Queen of the Night aria, that would have taxed even the most accomplished singers and, accompanied by her long-suffering pianist Cosme McMoon, treated her besotted audience to what Life magazine described as a series of gargles and hoots that had to be heard to be believed.

Her story is one of triumph in the face of adversity, of courage and conviction, and above all of the belief that with dedication and commitment (and a whole lot of money) one can achieve anything. She wrote plays, poetry and lyrics; she commissioned original material, financially supported young and emerging musicians, designed stage sets and costumes, hired out halls and personally sold tickets to ensure that those same halls were filled to capacity. She took on the most challenging vocal pieces imaginable and made them her own. Narcissa was a narcissist in the truest sense of the word.

There were abysmal performers before her including the atrocious Cherry Sisters, who trod the boards around the turn of the twentieth century with their appalling vaudeville act and were reputedly pelted with everything from rotten vegetables to a broken washing machine for their troubles but none has left behind the recorded legacy she has: nine tracks of light opera and art songs (vocal compositions written to be performed as part of a recital, unlike those written as part of a musical or stage show), recorded in a short burst of creativity during the Second World War, all performed in her inimitable, tuneless style. Other dreadful singers have followed in her wake Anna Russell (who actually could sing, but whose decision to make a career out of mauling Mozart was directly inspired by seeing Madame perform), the silent movie star turned pop pugilist Leona Anderson, Mrs. Miller, whose off-key rendition of Downtown bruised the singles charts in the mid-1960s, the Hong Kong-born Wing and American Idol reject William Hung, to name a few but none Their readers disagreed, sending the album high into the classical charts; her recordings are still available to this day.

What she provided was never exactly an aesthetic experience, or only to the degree that an early Christian among the lions provided an aesthetic experience, wrote William Meredith in The Hudson Review. It was chiefly immolatory, and Madame Jenkins was always eaten in the end.

We live in a society that laps up the mundane: thanks to TV shows such as The X Factor, Britains Got Talent and the like our homes are invaded by bad singers on a weekly basis, and today it seems as if anyone can become a star for a week or two, although that very same celebrity is as disposable as a blunt razor. Florence wasnt just a bad singer: we have evidence that proves that she was a stratospherically, catastrophically awful one. And yet it was her limitations that catapulted her to real, lasting stardom and to ceaseless celebrity. Bad singers usually bring out feelings of revulsion, pity or disgust thanks to their dreadfully off-pitch squealing, but Florence never fails to make the listener smile, to elicit feelings of genuine warmth towards her. As St. Clair Bayfield, her lover, manager and unflinching supporter, once put it: She only ever thought of making other people happy.