Florence Foster Jenkins: How do we live with limitations?

Is there something about which you are passionate – something that you deeply appreciate? And is this object of passion something that you can participate in - something that you can do with some but not great proficiency?  For me, that passionate object would be basketball.  I started playing basketball consistently in graduate school in Saturday pick-up games that a friend invited me to.  I had played in a city league in college, though I was mostly kind of a mascot.  I am tall – and look like I should be able to play, so I would tip the ball at the beginning of the game and then ride the bench the rest of the time.  But in practices, one of the students who had played in high school taught us the rudiments of the game including how to work together and move as a team and I found the idea of basketball fascinating.

In fact, I was hooked.  Basketball was like dancing – something else that I like to do but have no formal training or great skill at doing- but with a purpose and a way to keep score.  In graduate school, while I was learning very esoteric things about the human condition and how to study it, basketball was a place where I could concretely see myself learning and improving from week to week.  My shot improved, my dribbling improved – I made fewer turnovers and by the time our Saturday group entered the intramural league, I was one of the better players. 

Basketball, then, became the stuff of dreams.  I would think about plays that I had made as I drifted off to sleep.  I watched college and professional basketball games to learn skills that I would then try out on the court.  Because my college had no intercollegiate athletics, I still had academic eligibility and toyed (in the very private recesses of my mind) with trying out for the University’s team.  I would even joke about it, but that joke betrayed a wish – a secret desire that I made ever so slightly public – to get out there on the big stage and show the world my stuff: to play with the big boys.

Florence Foster Jenkins, a society girl born in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania in 1868, had enough musical aptitude to play the piano in a recital at the White House when she was a young girl.  She was passionate enough about pursuing a musical career that she eloped with a man who supported her career – and gave her syphilis, an incurable disease at that time, and the mercury treatments used to keep her symptoms at bay had terrible side effects – she lost her hair – and did not prevent the disease from progressing – which, at that time, it did until people became demented.  Until penicillin was discovered, 50% of patients in mental hospitals were there because of tertiary symptoms of syphilis.  Foster Jenkins defied her wealthy father’s wishes to pursue a vocation that he did not understand, so he disinherited her.  She left her husband after discovering her syphilis and reconciled enough with her father that he returned to supporting her and, as the only living child, leaving her his considerable estate when he died.

Lady Florence, as she came to call herself, took up with a modestly talented Shakespearean Actor from England named St. Clair Bayfield and they had an apparently chaste relationship – at least in part so that he would not contract syphilis.  She shifted from piano to singing in part because the syphilis weakened one of her arms.  If she had aptitude for the piano, she had little or none for singing.  I don’t know, and the biopic starring Meryl Streep as Foster Jenkins and Hugh Grant as St. Clair (who had a separate abode and a mistress on the side) does not much help with understanding the various motives that led St. Clair to care for her, but in the movie it is apparent that he does – deeply.  Whether he was initially drawn by the money – or recognizing a kindred spirit – someone with just a bit of talent but a great deal of passion – or by her joi de vive, we don’t know. 

We do get to see the blossoming of affection that occurs when she hires a pianist to accompany her, Cosmé McMoon (Yup, that was his stage name – he changed it from McMunn when he moved from San Antonio to New York, though Cosmé was his given name) (played in the film by Simon Helberg, Howard on the Big Bang) who, while worried about the effect  accompanying her singing would have on his legitimate musical career, grew from ridiculing her to having a weird sort of connection and even concern for her (and considerable appreciation for her monetary largesse).   I wish that I had felt the blossoming of such a sense of empathy as we get to know her character, but mostly I felt pity, especially as the depth of difficulty she had from the syphilis became apparent.  It is possible that some of her behavior – and her difficulties singing – can be traced to later stage syphilis problems.  In any case, I had trouble gaining access to sympathizing with her as a character.

It is clear, however, that St. Clair does.  He is a special kind of lover – one who helps Lady Florence fall asleep by reciting a bit of Shakespeare (I think) that talks about true love not wanting to change the lover, but loving the beloved for who it is that the beloved actually is.  And he enacts the poem in his love for her, though it clearly takes great effort, over the course of decades – shepherding and protecting Lady Florence as she starts various musical guilds that she presides over – groups of little old ladies who get together largely to watch tableaux – staged pictures of heroic moments – with Lady Florence frequently playing the final Grand Dame.  And he also helped her with recitals – some of them intimate – in the living room of the hotel suite where she lived and one, annually, more public - in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton.  The audience was always hand-picked – tickets were only given to people who would admire the singing and the critics from the main papers were not invited, though specialty papers ran politely supportive reviews probably written by friends or, as suggested in the film, by paid off reviewers.

I’m not sure who’s at fault for my failure to resonate with Lady Florence.  As in another Streep film, August Osage County, I think the medium is partly at fault.  The visual impact of an elderly woman (Lady Florence was 76 during the period of the film) dressed in costumes that seem more out of the 1890s or maybe 1920s than the 1940s was off-putting.  So, frankly, were some of the tenderest images – those where St. Clair is tending to Lady Florence’s physical difficulties.  But I think there is more to it.  The care that Sr. Clair and McMoon and others took to shield her from knowing how bad she was – her own tone deafness not just to her singing but also to the ways that people laughed at her when she sang – made her less heroic than lost, out of touch, and hidden – something that was emphasized when she drops in on St. Clair’s lair and can’t recognize, despite a great deal of evidence, that he is living a double life.  She prefers to remain in her bubble.

Historically, it is clear that many people resonated with Lady Florence.  She financially supported the musical world in New York City – Toscanini was a friend and she was his patron.  And there were bona fide musicians who came to her performances and enjoyed them – despite her limited tonal abilities.  Cole Porter had to work not to laugh, but he came to see her annually – something brought him there.  Florence Foster Jenkins also recorded and my Mother, brought up in Chicago, remembers listening to her recordings.  In fact, the movie stated that her recordings were the best sellers her record label – melotone – ever had.  And her concert at Carnegie hall, a performance that was not carefully regulated in the ways that the others were – was a sellout with many turned away at the door (and, according to the movie – many tickets given away to military men who hooted and hollered).

I wonder if the appeal was a bit like that of the early rounds of American Idol where they highlight earnest but incompetent singers – people who really want to be good singers – put their hearts into it – but ultimately just don’t have the chops to support their ambitions.  Streep’s performance, though, felt ungainly – and I think that the sycophants – the under director of the Metropolitan Opera who was her singing coach and fed her with Bromides like “You’ve never sounded better,” left me feeling that this woman was living in a delusional cocoon – she had no Simon Cowell to give it to her straight - which feels lonely and isolating.  Rather than singing her heart out despite whatever people might think – something that I find noble, she comes off as lost.  Despite her statement, “some say that I can’t sing, but they can’t say that I didn’t sing,” the movie doesn’t give the sense that she knows how bad her singing actually is.

That said, I was stung this week when one of the truly good basketball players in our game, in talking with me about a play where I was trapped, commented that one of the newbies didn’t yet know not to send the ball to me in that situation because I didn’t have the skills to manage it.  Now, I have seen players choose not to pass that ball to me in similar situations for decades – and I am relieved when they don’t – but I also delude myself into thinking – if they had sent it, I would have done something spectacular this time.  And the odd thing is, every once in a while I do something – if not spectacular – serviceable, even if in a difficult situation – and this helps sustain the delusion.  So it stung to hear the truth – that I have limited basketball skills, especially one-on-one in the open court moving toward the basket.  I didn’t want to hear it, even though I know it to be the case.

I think that I had trouble connecting with Foster Jenkins’ character because she was frequently singing opera arias – which are unforgiving and which I don’t know well enough to know what it is she attempting.  Sometimes my own basketball ineptitude is so bad that it is undeniable – but usually my skills are passable and I can imagine from the inside what we see in the movie when we hear Streep singing what Jenkins must be hearing – Streep’s wonderful and actual singing voice.

My basketball playing skills, despite their meteoric improvement early on – leveled off well below where I would have liked them to have gone.  The varsity players never actually had the least thing in the world to fear from me.  Now that I am seeing age related declines in my already limited skills, I am regularly embarrassed by mishandling a ball that even I would have handled with some competence at an earlier time.  Yet I still play – and contribute – after a fashion – to the games that are increasingly being decided by much younger men, though, frankly, they have always been determined by other men – at least when I have been in the A game.  I still play a contributing if diminishing role even when the best players are there.

Foster Jenkins, if she hadn’t lived in New York City and if she hadn’t been quite so wealthy, might well have presided over the local ladies music club just as she did in New York and it might never have gone on from there.  Because she had money and connections, something greater happened.  She recorded a few songs – they were played on the radio and she sang one glorious sold out night at Carnegie Hall – a night where the audience was not hand-picked and laughed out loud.  She struck a chord, not just with St. Clair Bayfield and Cosmé McMoon, but with people who took her semi- seriously – who heard in what she sang something familiar – maybe something they wished they had the guts to do – a performance driven by desire more than skill – the enactment of a fantasy – only, instead of pretending to be the Michael Jordan of Opera – she was more like George Plimpton as the Paper Lion -  a passionate sports writer playing an NFL down despite not being competent to do that.  And don’t we all, in our heart of hearts, want to be not Michael Jordan doing what Michael Jordan does, but to be ourselves doing what he can do.  And don’t we derive direct and vicarious pleasure - from the effort to emulate his ability to fly?

Having said all of that, I am aware that it is also the case that we laugh at Foster Jenkins.  She can’t sing, we say.  Maybe part of my inability to empathize is my wish to keep her as someone I can deride.  If I don’t feel myself to be like her, I can simply laugh at the silliness of thinking that she could try out for the varsity team and not recognize that it’s me who will never in a thousand years be able to do that.  And the laugher of those, like Cole Porter, who can do what only the gods can do – they use the experience of hearing Foster Jenkins sing or seeing me play basketball to truly appreciate the gift that they have – to realize that it just isn’t given to everyone.  And maybe we all need to appreciate just how rare and special real talent is – and not having a talent – or hearing or seeing someone who doesn’t have that talent – makes us all the more appreciative of those who do.


Addendum: This post was more difficult than most to write - it simply didn't flow.  I had to do more editing than I usually do.  I think this is because it illustrates something that I have long struggled with and actually only now have words to describe:  We need feedback - information - about how we are failing and falling short in order to improve.  Regardless of whether we have a great deal of talent or not, those of us who are able to take in feedback improve and those who cannot don't.  Many of us who are extremely talented can't handle criticism - because talent of whatever sort is in a different box from being able to hear criticism and to know that we are still OK - in fact to welcome it even though it stings because it helps us improve.  Michael Jordan spent a considerable amount of time working on his left hand - even brushing his teeth left handed - because he knew that to be an area that needed improvement.  Others of us, even if we welcome the feedback, simply aren't going to get that much better - no amount of left handed tooth brushing is going to help my left handed layup enough to get me to the show.

I think what is bothering me about this film is that it is unclear whether Foster Jenkins could have used more critical feedback.  What good would it have done her?  Would she have folded up her musical tent and gone home?  She wanted, based on an early scene, to hold Carnegie Hall in the palm of her hand the way that a talented soprano that she and St. Clair went to see together was able to.  She was never going to be able to do that.  I talked with a musician about the movie, and he said that when he was at Julliard the faculty would play her records and laugh at her.  The irony is that protecting her from knowing how poorly she sang ended up leading her to expose herself to an unprecedented level of ridicule - a level that no one should have to endure.  I think it also allowed her to live out a dream.  I'm not sure that I wouldn't trade a little ridicule to run up and down Madison Square Garden's court, even if in a humiliating defeat.  At least I would have played.

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