by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Florence Foster Jenkins, a 2016 film that told the story of the woman
sometimes considered the worst opera singer of all time — or at least the worst
one that got to sing concerts and make records. Florence Foster Jenkins was
born to a wealthy family on July 19, 1868 and had ambitions to be a concert
singer and pianist. Her first husband, Frank Thornton Jenkins, gave her
syphilis — she ended the relationship when she found out but it’s unclear when,
or even whether, she divorced him. In 1909 she met the man who would become her
second husband, St. Clair Bayfield, a British actor specializing in recitations
from Shakespeare. In 1917 she founded an organization called the Verdi Club to
promote opera in New York City and advocate for performances of opera in
English. She inherited a large trust when her father died and used much of the
money for musical philanthropies. She also became a singer in public, making
people put her on as a condition of her generosity, and she sporadically tried
for a professional career in voice. The principal documentation of her “art,”
if you can call it that, comes from the last few years of her life, the early
1940’s, when she and Bayfield attempted to carve out a career for her that
included a semi-private recital, records (for the small Melotone label) and a
big concert at Carnegie Hall. At least some writers have speculated based on
reviews of performances she gave in the ’teens that Jenkins actually once had a
passable, if not great, voice, but by the time she recorded Jenkins was in her
70’s and whatever vocal talent she’d ever had had totally evaporated. Opera
critic and founder of La Grand Scena Opera Company di New York (a travesty show
with men in drag portraying comically bad divas) Ira Siff said, “Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad
that it added up to quite a good evening of theater ... She would stray
from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her
voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the
horribleness ... They say Cole Porter had
to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang.
She was that bad.”
What we hear on her records — and what Meryl Streep, who
played Jenkins, supplies in the film (she did all her own singing and Simon
Helberg from The Big Bang Theory,
who plays her long-suffering accompanist Cosmé McMoon, did his own piano
playing) — is a well-meaning amateur with virtually no voice at all. She sounds
O.K. in the midrange but as soon as the music goes high or requires coloratura
ornamentation, she’s hopelessly bad. (I joked during the movie that if I’d met
her I’d probably have advised her to go in for a career as a torch singer,
where it didn’t matter if you
couldn’t sing — Exhibit A: Libby Holman.) One of the arias the real Foster
Jenkins recorded, and Streep gamely plows through in the film, is the Queen of
the Night’s second-act aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute — a piece so challenging even professional opera
singers with solid talents have trouble with it. (In one of her
autobiographies, Beverly Sills acknowledged that she’d sung it perfectly only once in her whole career.) Directed by Stephen Frears,
who made his bones with My Beautiful Laundrette and has specialized in stories about people trying
to build their lives based on impossible dreams, and written by Nicholas
Martin, Florence Foster Jenkins
isn’t a great movie but it is a
quite entertaining one. One can’t escape the resemblance to Citizen
Kane — though with the obvious difference
that Susan Alexander knew she
didn’t have an opera-quality voice and it was her husband who pushed her into a
vocal career she knew she didn’t have the chops for — the hopelessly untalented
singer living in a huge mansion with the best professional vocal coach money
could buy and being trained for a recital program she’s obviously unfit for.
Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane
made Susan Alexander a figure of real pathos, but Streep turns Florence Foster
Jenkins into a dotty but lovable old lady who’s charming enough we want to see her make it even though we realize her ambition
is insane.
The film also does a nice job of dramatizing the life of St. Clair
Bayfield — played by Hugh Grant, who came out of what the imdb.com page on this
film calls “semi-retirement” for the chance to work with Streep — who has an
apartment on the side and a girlfriend named Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson) with
whom he can have sex, since he and Florence agreed to keep their relationship
platonic because she had syphilis. There’s a great scene in which Foster
Jenkins arrives unexpectedly at her husband’s apartment while Kathleen is there
— and so is McMoon, after having passed out from too much champagne at a wild
party the night before, and Agnes Stark (Nina Arianda, who plays as if she’s
auditioning for yet another biopic of Marilyn Monroe), wife of 1-percenter
Phineas Stark (Stanley Townsend), who has somehow let himself get roped into
being part of Bayfield’s circle. I also liked the subtle way Frears and Martin
depicted Cosmé McMoon’s sexuality; while we get the impression that he’s a
naïve young man who hasn’t yet had sex with anybody, in two different scenes other men in the
Bayfield-Jenkins circle start stroking him in an obviously cruisy way. He’s
also shown working out with weights — apparently the real McMoon abandoned
music after his association with Jenkins tarred him and took up a career as, of
all things, a bodybuilder and personal trainer. And there’s a great scene in
which New York Post columnist
Earl Wilson tries to get a ticket to one of la Jenkins’ private
recitals; at first Bayfield wants him barred, but later he relents and offers
him a ticket in an envelope with a large-denomination bill. “I only need the
ticket,” Wilson says. “It’s both or nothing,” Bayfield replies — so later, when
Foster Jenkins gives her public concert at Carnegie Hall, Wilson is determined
to crash it and ends up writing a scathing review which Bayfield tries and
fails to keep Foster Jenkins from seeing.
The film makes it look as if the
shock of the dreadful review led to her death from her long-standing syphilis
infection — in fact she died of a heart attack about a week after her big
concert. Also the film draws on the fact that it takes place while World War II
was going on and depicts Foster Jenkins’ records getting on the air and
becoming a big hit with servicemembers who need a few laughs between battles. Florence
Foster Jenkins is probably a minor item in
the Streep canon but she scores
by making the character dotty and lovable — in some ways she’s less like Susan
Alexander (or the suddenly rich woman Mae West played in Goin’ to
Town who determines to become an opera
singer and sings “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson
et Dalila like an amateur with a decent
voice who was just out of her depth — West did her own singing for the scene,
and one can tell) than like Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s film, another story of an
incompetent artist with a vastly inflated idea of his own talents who has a
sort of worm-turning success as a climax. Streep even gets to expire with a
line attributed to the real Jenkins — “They can say I couldn’t sing, but no one
can say I didn’t sing” — at the
end of a film which, despite some flaws (notably the all-too-typical
past-is-brown cinematography by Danny Cohen and a typically reticent musical
score by Alexandre Desplat — though for once Desplat’s reticence works for his
film: an all-out Korngold or Steiner assault on the senses would have taken
away from the simple charms of both the music Foster Jenkins chooses to sing
and the wretched way she sings it), manages to work largely on the sheer charm
of Streep’s performance and Frears’ typically understated direction.
