August 4, 2007
Florence Foster Jenkins Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:10 PM EST While we are memorializing spectacularly untalented poets, we should not forget the most untalented singer ever to sell out Carnegie Hall, Florence Foster Jenkins. Madame Jenkins, born in 1868, was the daughter of a very successful Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, banker. Though she was given music lessons as a child, when she said that she wanted to travel to Europe to train as a singer, her father refused to foot the bill. She eloped with a young doctor, Frank Jenkins, but he, too, gave her no encouragement. With her divorce in 1902 and her father’s death in 1909 leaving her plenty of money, Florence Foster Jenkins was able to undertake the singing career of which she had always dreamed. Unfortunately she lacked any sense of pitch, rhythm, or tone, defects of which she appears to have been blissfully unaware. She gave her first concert in 1912 and, after her move to New York from Philadelphia, she gave an annual concert in the ball room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. She determined who could get tickets, giving them out to her friends—-who all seemed to be as tone deaf as she was—but they were soon in great demand among New York’s musical cognoscenti, because she was so bad she was howlingly funny. As one writer put it, “Audiences laughed at her—laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks, laughed until they stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths to stifle the mirth—but she was never dismayed. Even when a song was punctured by rowdy applause (her listeners sometimes responded to a piercing clinker with whoops of “Bravo! Bravo!”), the diva simply smiled and bowed. After all, she modestly murmured, didn’t Frank Sinatra arouse the same sort of buoyant enthusiasm among his adoring bobby soxers?” It wasn’t just the singing. She filled the stage with potted palms and flowers and appeared in costumes suitable for the song. For one of her favorites, “Angel of Inspiration,” she would dress in acres of tulle, complete with angel wings adorning her dumpy, unlikely-to-get-airborne figure. She was always accompanied by a pianist with the unlikely name of Cosmé McMoon, who did his best to adjust to her sense of rhythm, or lack thereof. Finally, in October 1944, at the age of 76, she rented Carnegie Hall and allowed the tickets to go on public sale. The concert sold out weeks in advance. The people lucky enough to get tickets cheered her to the rafters, but the critics were, predictably, less enthused. One described her as “undaunted by the composer’s intent.” Another wrote, “Only Mrs. Jenkins has perfected the art of giving added zest by improvising quarter tones, either above or below the original notes.” Robert Bager of the New York World-Telegram was more gentle: “She was exceedingly happy in her work” he wrote. “It is a pity so few artists are. And her happiness was communicated as if by magic to her listeners . . . who were stimulated to the point of audible cheering, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.” Her life work now complete, Florence Foster Jenkins died a month later. Fortunately for us, she recorded several songs and these are still available on Amazon on such albums as Florence Foster Jenkins and Friends: Murder on the High C’s. Or you can catch her splendiferous awfulness on YouTube (earlier bad link now fixed).
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