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Florence Foster Jenkins, Patron Saint of Persistence
There are two opposing strains in American conservatism. The scolding, risk-averse strain likes nothing more than to remind people – especially young people – that no one is a special snowflake. In fact, you’re probably a bigger failure than you think you are. And no, you most likely shouldn’t follow your dreams.
The other strain recognizes the importance of risk taking and admires risk-takers (or at least admires them when they succeed). This is the strain that delights in pointing out that big government crushes big dreams. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen, the less scope there is for the big dreamers of the world.
But the very nature of risk means not everyone who’s qualified will succeed. Otherwise, success would be a sure thing: just rack up the qualifications and you’re done (many of us Millennials have been taught exactly that, which might explain why we’re so annoyingly insecure). To admire the the risk-takers when they succeed, yet to have no tolerance for them when they fail, cannot be done without some cognitive dissonance.
I think we conservatives are sometimes guilty of this dissonance. In the spirit of atonement, therefore, I’d like to introduce you to the big dreamer and spectacular failure Florence Foster Jenkins. Lady Florence (as she liked to be called) never succeeded at her dream of becoming a world-class singer, but she never gave up on it either, and ended her days doing something many musicians far, far better than her only dream of doing: performing in Carnegie Hall.
On October 25, 1944, at the age of 76, Lady Florence gave perhaps the most dreadful performance the hall had ever witnessed. Judging by the recordings she made a few years earlier, the whole show probably sounded something like this:
Yet it was a performance so popular that it sold out weeks in advance, grossing $6,000 ($82,172 in today’s dollars, according to this inflation calculator). The hall was packed to maximum capacity, including standees. Two thousand additional fans had to be turned away. Scalpers charged $20 a ticket in ($274 in today’s dollars) just for the privilege of listening to this woman screech.
How did all this happen?
Young Florence’s parents — like many well-off parents of her time (and ours) — encouraged their daughter to develop an amateur interest in music. An amateur interest, not a serious one. Although she was something of a wunderkind at the piano (at the age of eight, she had played at the White House for President Hayes), she fell in love with singing instead. Her singing, though, was hardly wunderbar. When, at 17, she expressed a desire to study opera in Europe in order to pursue it professionally, her parents (rather sensibly, you might say) refused to foot the bill.
She rebelled by eloping with a society physician named Jenkins in order to escape parental control. Dr. Jenkins wound up no more impressed with her musical ambitions than her parents were. The marriage soon soured, and the couple divorced. After she had spent several lean years eking out a living as a tea-room pianist and music teacher (of piano, not voice, I hope!), her father died, leaving her a small fortune. She immediately put that fortune to use pursuing her passion: becoming a coloratura soprano.
Why coloratura soprano? Perhaps she was attracted to the coloratura repertoire because it’s often thought of as the most prestigious repertoire for the female voice; perhaps because she wasn’t noticeably worse at coloratura ornamentation than she was at everything else. Every once in a while, Lady Florence could manage a few microseconds of mediocre coloratura ornamentation, moments that, while far from gorgeous, wouldn’t be entirely out of place as bloopers during a live performance at a major opera house. True, after attaining these dizzying heights of mediocrity, Lady Florence would immediately plunge back into the depths of atonal, arhythmic squawking. Her unadorned passages, though, were more consistently awful, a sort of unholy cross between a mosquito, your granny, and a vacuum cleaner.
Lady Florence gave her first voice recital in 1912, at the already-advanced age of 43. She soon developed a following among society ladies, perhaps because she was an excellent charity organizer and a tireless promoter of many causes (including her own). As her following grew, she staged yearly recitals at New York’s Ritz-Carleton Hotel, eventually attracting upwards of 800 paying guests (the proceeds went to charity). Gatecrashers had to be turned away by the police. True, audience members often had to stuff their handkerchiefs in their mouths to stifle their laughter. But they still paid to see her, and her concerts netted a profit. Her fan base grew to include musical luminaries such as Cole Porter, Lily Pons, Enrico Caruso, and Sir Thomas Beecham.
Not content with simply massacring the music, she also designed elaborate costumes and stage settings for her recitals. For her encore, “Clavelitos” by Valverde (which she, alas, never recorded), she’d don a mantilla, stick red flowers in her hair, and throw roses at the audience. But her favorite costume may have been her “Angel of Inspiration”, complete with tinsel halo, sturdy gold wings, and a figure-skimming gown whose silvery fabric showcased every awkward bulge of her rather dumpy frame.
For years, her fans urged Lady Florence to perform in Carnegie Hall. Finally, at the age of 76, she acquiesced, hocking her furniture in order to pay the rental fee. There she performed, as a few critics put it, “undaunted by… the composer’s intent”, with a “happiness… 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” The concert was a stunning commercial success: her furniture had not been hocked in vain. She died a month later “with a happy heart.”
So how does this tuneless and quite frankly ridiculous woman who squandered her parents’ fortune indulging delusions of musical competence become a personal hero to me or any other music lover? It’s not for her singing: as a singer, she’s everything I hope not to be. Nor is it for her grasp on reality, which evidently wasn’t too firm. Rather, she’s my hero for her persistence in the face of discouragement.
Failure is no good in itself, but some amount of it is an inevitable byproduct of risk, of dreaming big American dreams. None of us is born into this world knowing exactly where our talents lie, or, when we do have talent, whether we can make a useful living off it. We are forced to guess, and it’s only a guess, however educated it may be. “But what if I fail?” is often the foremost question in our minds. While it’s good to have backup plans in case you do fail, it’s also true that every millisecond spent distracting yourself with worries of failure when your performance is on the line is one less millisecond devoted to being totally absorbed in doing whatever it is you’ve got to do to achieve success. And sometimes all that differentiates ultimate success from ultimate failure is perseverance and devotion in the face of the many failures along the way.
Florence Foster Jenkins had many weaknesses, but allowing herself to become distracted by fears of failure – fears which she had every right to feel – wasn’t one of them. She was fearless. Fear did not prevent her from doing her best, bad as that happened to be.
In that one sense, she was a great performer, and for that, she has my lasting admiration.
Published in General
Did FFJ know she was awful and that she was celebrated for her classic awfulness, the epitome of everything people hate about sopranos? If she knew it and was in on the joke, I do kind of admire her. If not, I don’t. I try very hard not to be too critical of performers because it does take a lot of courage to put yourself out there, but at the same time some self-knowledge is crucial. Spare me the constantly performing tone-deaf singer. I’ve known a few in my time and I do not admire them. But thanks for the story Midge. It’s very interesting.
I loved this post.
No. She was clueless.
I agree that self-knowledge is important to being a truly great performer. But so is the ability to turn off self-criticism every once in a while and just… perform.
I used to resent fellow performers who got so jazzed off performing that they had no idea how much they sucked. But now I see they have a vital trait I lack: fearlessness. While they may lack the skills to profit from their fearlessness, maybe I should admire (and even attempt to imitate) the good trait that they have, rather than resent them for the traits they lack.
The gift is nothing without work. But the gift and the work might both come to nothing without a healthy level of self-promotion.
I don’t resent them, I just feel sorry for them. I feel uncomfortable for them because I know what everyone is thinking, and I know how awful they’d feel if they knew or if they ever find out. I do admire the less than perfect performer who really gets into their performance. I think the audience is usually with that person. In a good way. Heck, I’ve been that person many times! At least I hope I’m that person and not an FFJ!
You’re more gracious than I am, then. I find it hard to pity performers, unless I have specific knowledge of the great job they could be doing if some accident of fate (a cold, a sudden attack of nerves) hadn’t intervened.
Even then, a professional who’s too sick to give anything approximating a good performance and tries anyhow – thereby robbing a possibly very worthy understudy of a big break – does kind of annoy me. One of the best operatic performances I ever heard was done by an understudy, a young baritone called in because the big-name star slated for the role acknowledged he was just too sick to make a go of it that day.
Flo Fo, YOLO.
I think she knew how she sounded and was joking. Anyway, there is such a thing as “so bad it’s good.”
Amen to that. Part of the “work” to me is the self-promotion.
I must disagree. The means (persistence, risk-taking, fearlessness) do not justify the ends (bad singing, inviting ridicule, wasting financial resources). Grit is a conservative value, but self-delusion is not.
Here’s the thing: If you think about success and failure probabilistically (and I agree Lady Florence isn’t the best example for probabilistic purposes since at some point it became pretty certain that she’d never sing well and she just kept on going), the difference between the risk-taker who meets with success and the one who meets with failure becomes less clear.
If person A and person B both have similar levels of talent and persistence, and A happens to meet with success while B meets with failure, is A to be admired for his grit while B is to be mocked for being delusional? Or is it OK to acknowledge that B’s drive and grit are actually good qualities, even if they happened to get him nowhere?
I can see that now. But a person raised to believe that hard work is a virtue while shameless self-promotion is a vice might have trouble seeing it.
I just discovered this delightful post, which I somehow missed. I love Florence and hadn’t heard of her in years. Thank you!