Perfectly Awful: Finding the truth behind Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer in history

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a preview performance of "Souvenir," a play based on the life of the singer Florence Foster Jenkins. What was her claim to fame? Her Wikipedia article sums it up best:

Florence Foster Jenkins (July 19, 1868 – November 26, 1944) was an American soprano who became famous for her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability.

That assessment doesn't even begin to convey the sheer ear-bleeding awfulness of her voice. Have a cocktail and then listen to this sample. Really. You have to. I'll wait.

That voice — that one! — packed 'em in for regular recitals at the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and other venues in Manhattan for thirty-two years. That voice inspired Cole Porter to compose a song for it (he never missed a recital). That voice counted Enrico Caruso among its admirers. That voice sold out Carnegie Hall in 1944; three thousand fans crowded in and left two thousand more fans outside.

You listen to that voice, and you ponder those facts, and you're left with one question:

WTF?

There are two competing schools of thought:

1. Florence fooled the audience: Her career was an elaborate 32-year joke. "Lady Florence" (as she signed her autographs) was a trailblazing performance artist and the most dedicated comedian ever; Andy Kaufman was a dilettante by comparison. She was assisted in the shtick by her manager and alleged lover, the actor St. Clair Bayfield, and her accompanist, the improbably named Cosme McMoon.
   
   
2. The audience fooled Florence: She sailed through her entire career blissfully unaware of her own incompetence, protected from reality by fiercely loyal society friends, artistic collaborators who went along for the ride, fans who knew their good times would end if she ever caught them laughing, and her own indomitable cluelessness.

I tend toward the latter school, and I have my own supporting theory about why everyone humored and protected Lady Florence for three decades:

   2(a). The gays did it.

It's never easy to determine sexual orientation in the fog of pre-Stonewall misdirection and euphemism, but I theorize the following:

• St. Clair Bayfield was gay. Lady Florence and her society friends probably knew it, or at least knew she was safe with him. The two lived together for 36 years. Despite his claims to be her lover, would this proper matron truly have lived in sin for more than three decades? The glass-closeted gay "squire" was a common figure in New York society up to the time of Truman Capote. I say Bayfield made up the story of being her common-law husband so he could sue Florence's cousins for a share of her estate.


• Cosme McMoon was extremely gay. He was an amateur bodybuilder at a time when bodybuilding was a convenient cover and a good way to meet guys. His bathhouse clerking job was kind of a giveaway too.


• Lady Florence's fan base was gayer than a treeful of goddamn monkeys. Cole Porter, Gian Carlo Menotti, and proto-Gaga female drag queen Tallulah Bankhead were among her ardent admirers. Bayfield described Florence's audience as "lonely women and artistic men." Do you need a translation? Florence was an early camp hit.

Why did the gays love her? News flash: Gays adore larger-than-life tragic heroines. And Lady Florence fit the bill. She was an innocent soul moving in a bubble of happy delusion through the vicious world of Manhattan arts and society, like a tone-deaf Red Riding Hood.

She truly loved the great music that she butchered. She rehearsed faithfully. She spent hours creating elaborate costumes for every number. She donated her recital proceeds and most of her own family fortune to support young artists. She wanted to share the beauty that she heard in every note.

If this generous, sincere woman had ever realized what people thought of her voice, she would have been utterly crushed.

Her friends, artistic collaborators, and fans — nearly all of them gay, I think — conspired to protect her from the wolves: cruel audience members, poison-pen-wielding journalists, even their own treacherous laughter.

Critics gently couched their descriptions with words like "inimitable." Loyal fans applauded and cheered loudly to cover up the guffaws of less-kind listeners. Audiences learned to stuff handkerchiefs into their mouths or run to the lobby if they couldn't hold back the hysterics. Cole Porter would drive his cane into his own foot to keep from laughing during particularly excruciating numbers.

Imagine it: For over three decades, thousands of people spontaneously conspired to keep a sweetly deluded old lady happy. And the gays were the ringleaders.

As the playwright of "Souvenir" puts it, Lady Florence "heard a different sound in her head." Her gay enablers and protectors, for all that they laughed into their wadded-up handkerchiefs, heard it too.

***

See "Souvenir" at Theatre Memphis through Dec. 20. Starring Jude Knight as Florence Foster Jenkins and David Shipley as Cosme McMoon.

***

Reliable sources:

• Florence Nightingale by Brooks Peters, Opera News, June 2001.
  
  
• Liner notes by Francis Robinson, The Glory (????) of the Human Voice (album), ca. 1970, reproduced on MaxBass.com.
  
  
• Florence Foster Jenkins, The Diva of Din by Daniel Dixon, Coronet magazine, December 1957, reproduced on MaxBass.com.
  
  
• The mystery of Cosme McMoon (McMunn) and Edwin McArthur: the lost composer(s) of Florence Foster Jenkins by "Dark Knight Dramaturg," Dark Knight Dramaturgy, December 2008.
  
  
• What happened to Cosme McMoon after Florence Foster Jenkins died? by Mark McMunn, Answers.com, December 2008.

Less reliable sources:

• Florence Foster Jenkins, Wikipedia.
  
  
• An afterword on Mme. Florence Foster Jenkins: An Interview with Cosme McMoon (transcript), WCLV Radio, allegedly aired May 1991.

Keeping Mom (or other Facebook friends) out of your business

When you post photos or status updates, you may not want everyone in the world to see them. (Hi Mom!) Good news: you can restrict certain friends from seeing certain parts of the information stream that you generate on Facebook.

Here's how:

First: Create a "restricted" friend list.
You can skip this step if there are only one or two friends that you want to restrict.

1. Click Friends in the top navigation bar to open the Friends page.


2. Click Make a New List on the left-hand side of the page.


3. Choose a name for the list. This is going to be the list of people you don't want to share everything with, so give it a name like "Restricted" or "TMI."


4. Add names to the list by following the instructions on the page.

Next: Restrict information access with privacy settings.
Unfortunately, this is only available for Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info.

1. Click Settings in the top navigation bar to open the menu.


2. Click Privacy Settings to open the Privacy page.


3. Click Profile to open the Profile Privacy page. You'll see a list of different information types with dropdown menus next to each one.


4. Choose the information type that you want to restrict, such as status updates, and click the dropdown menu next to it.


5. Click Customize in the dropdown menu to open the settings box.


6. Look for "Except These People". Remember, this option is only available for the six information types listed above.


7. In the "Except These People" box, start typing the name of the "restricted" friend list that you created above. Or just enter the name of an individual friend. When the list or individual name appears, hit enter.


8. Click Okay.


9. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you just click Okay (step 8) but fail to click "Save Changes," your changes will not be saved.

Last: Test your new settings
It is a very good idea to test your new restrictions to make sure they work the way you expect them to work for certain friends. Here's how:

1. Go to the Profile Privacy page again. You'll see a box labeled "See how a friend sees your profile."


2. Enter the name of a friend on your "restricted" list and hit the enter button. This will load your profile page with the restrictions you chose for that friend or list.

Now, go post that photo of you wearing lingerie and a lampshade. It's okay, Mom won't see it now.

More Info

• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Google Android 2008 = MS Windows 1990 (In a Good Way)

Back in the late Jurassic, Apple had the hottest and most user-friendly OS, but they refused to let anyone else play in their hardware sandbox.

In contrast, Microsoft sold Windows to any hardware manufacturer with a pulse. Result: It took a few years, but Apple lost most of its market share.

Nowadays, Apple has the hottest and most user-friendly smartphone OS, but they refuse to let developers play freely in their applications sandbox, they won’t license it to other hardware manufacturers, and they only offer it through one crappy cellphone carrier.

Now here comes Google with the Android OS for smartphones. It's essentially open-source: any developer with a pulse can build apps for it, any hardware manufacturer can license it, and any carrier can sell Android-equipped phones. (The always interesting T-Mobile is the first.)

Anyone care to guess what will happen to iPhone’s market share in a few years?

Apple remains true to form in creating lovely products and then suffocating them inside a walled garden. Walled gardens are pretty, but they don't last.

More:

• Lifehacker on what to expect from Android
  

Google Chrome is On Your Desktop, Eating Your Local Apps

Joe Nocera of the New York Times says Google's new Chrome browser is a Windows killer. I disagree. After a week of using it, I say Chrome is an Office killer.

See, there's an unheralded little item on Chrome's Page menu labeled "Create application shortcuts." When you navigate to a frequently used site like Gmail, Zoho, or Facebook, you can set a logo-branded shortcut to the selected site on your desktop, start menu, or taskbar.

Once you click that nifty new shortcut, you get your page loaded in a special stripped-down Chrome window with no toolbars, no navigation bar, no bookmarks -- nothing but a title bar. The page is presented to you in pristine unmediated splendor, just like a desktop application.

Better yet, you can leave the page open all the time with no Firefox-style memory-leaking performance degradation.

Bottom line: I leave my online applications open all the time, just like I used to do with Outlook. My Gmail now looks and acts exactly like a desktop email app. The individual documents I edit in Google Docs now have one-click shortcuts on my desktop, just like my old locally stored Word docs.

I have to use Office '07 at work and I loathe it. Thanks to Google Chrome, overpriced desktop apps like Office are now dead bloatware walking. In its usual geeky, understated, oh-it's-just-beta way, Google is changing the game again.

More:

• "Does Windows Still Matter?" (NY Times)
• Download Chrome
  
• Chrome video tour
  
• Lifehacker coverage of Chrome
• Google OS coverage of Chrome

Living Memory

Photo: The wax-paper lid on a Mabury Dairy milk jug, Piedmont, Mo., circa 1930s.

The other day, Mom and I were talking about some of the people we knew from all the churches where Dad pastored over the years. One who stood out in our memory was Ida "Granny" Osburn, the oldest member of the First Baptist Church in Sparta, Mo. She was 93 when my family moved there in 1972.

Granny was born in 1879, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. Her part of the Ozarks was utterly lawless at the time. Civil War-era guerrilla raids had been followed by years of revenge killings and vigilantism. The feds were useless, and the state didn't care about an area too poor to tax. She was 10 years old when the last of the Bald Knobbers finally were hanged on the courthouse square in Ozark, just down the road from Sparta.

You had to be tough to make it through times like that. Granny Osburn, barely five feet tall and thin enough to blow away in a stiff wind, was tough all right. I remember her 70-something daughter, fresh out of the hospital, telling us that she and Granny were going to hibernate for the winter. Granny said, "Speak for yourself, Bessie. I'm going to church."

She died a few days short of her 100th birthday. She outlived most of her children and some of her grandchildren. There were great-great-grandkids at her funeral, if memory serves.

When I first met Granny Osburn, it blew my little mind that someone could be that old. She was one of many old folks at our church in Sparta, and I became fascinated by the "old-timers" and their memory of events so far past. One thing that drove me to learn math was trying to figure out how old so-and-so was in such-and-such a year, and how many years ago that was.

For instance, Granny was 19 when the the Spanish-American War broke out. She was 41 when she was first allowed to vote. She was 50 when the stock market crashed. And she was still around to say hello to five-year-old me. Those long-ago events were still in living memory, at least in Sparta, Mo.

The long chain of memory existed in my own family, too. Mom and Dad were 34 and 41, respectively, when I came along. Their own parents were in their 30s and 40s at their births, so our family's living memory easily reached back to the turn of the 20th century.

And simple chronology wasn't all of it. My parents grew up in the Depression-era Ozarks, without plumbing or electricity -- and sometimes without sufficient food if a winter held on too long. Other than the family Fords and Chevys, my folks essentially spent their childhoods in the 19th century.

Having older parents and growing up around old folks like Granny Osburn, my perspective may be a little different from my peers -- not to mention These Kids Today. I think it makes me a little more appreciative of everyday miracles like a warm house in winter or a few YouTubes on a dull afternoon. It makes me a little less patient with reactionaries who pine for the good old days.

Dad, who grew up further back in the hills than Mom, could tell you stories about those "good old days" of icy bedrooms and empty dinner plates and sick babies. He enjoyed his modern conveniences, thank you very much. If it hadn't been for his strokes, I suspect the kid who grew up reading by kerosene lamplight would have been happily surfing the web the last years of his life.

And if Granny Osburn were still around and someone told her these here computers were too complicated for folks her age, I suspect she'd say, "Speak for yourself, Bessie."

Police vs. Peanuts: A Magical Mashup

The Police's "Every Little Thing" becomes a cri de coeur from Linus in this beautifully synched mashup with "A Charlie Brown Christmas":



Go to 2:36 for your moment of Snoopy zen.

More of my YouTube favorites...

Onstage with Helen Keller

To continue with our visit to Ivy Green, Helen Keller's childhood home in Tuscumbia, Alabama:

That evening Mom, her friend Frankie, and I had excellent seats for a production of "The Miracle Worker," William Gibson's dramatization of little Helen's discovery of language with her teacher, Annie Sullivan.

The play is performed for a few weekends each summer on a large outdoor stage behind Ivy Green, just yards away from the real-world setting of Helen's "miracle."

It was a sticky evening and we watched enormous thunderheads roll by, but they kept rolling. I wasn't sold on the idea of a long, sweaty outdoor evening in summertime Alabama, but I was quickly charmed out of my crankiness. The experience wouldn't be the same without the open-air setting. Your car bumps across a grassy lot. You stroll to your seats across a sunny lawn. You can see the little bungalows across the alley and hear the neighbor's dog barking. (He hushed in time for the play.)

The production itself was first-rate community theater. The actors were enthusiastic but rarely clumsy. Production values were polished but not slick.

Two women stood to the side of the action and translated every line into American Sign Language. They were fine actors themselves, using body language and facial expressions to frame their signed dialogue. Their performance of "Hush Little Baby" (a lullaby that recurs in the play) was a kind of synchronized ballet.

Race and class are the elephants in the room of Southern culture, and "The Miracle Worker" is no different. The Keller family's cook and her two children are the only African-American roles in the script. The three actors did their best to infuse their characters with humanity and dignity, but their roles are written as comic relief.

This isn't surprising since the script dates to 1957, but it is disappointing. In real life the cook's daughter, Martha Washington, helped Helen improvise her first hand signs before Annie Sullivan ever came to Ivy Green. Program notes or an interpretive talk before the play would go far in correcting the deficiencies of a script from another era.

Unfortunately, I don't have a program for the play and I can't credit the fine cast and crew by name. Can anyone help out?

Previously: At Home with Helen Keller.

At Home with Helen Keller

Recently I went with my mother and a friend of hers to visit Ivy Green, Helen Keller's childhood home in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

The home, now a museum, is open all year. For a few weeks each summer Ivy Green also hosts weekend performances of "The Miracle Worker" (more on that in the next post), William Gibson's dramatization of little Helen's discovery of language thanks to the patient work of her teacher, Annie Sullivan:

[S]he realized that the motions her teacher was making on her palm, while running cool water over her hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

Helen's breakthrough took place at the water pump behind the house, the one shown here. Subsequently she learned to write, read Braille, and even speak. With Sullivan at her side, she became the first deaf-blind person to graduate college, a feat she accomplished at Radcliffe in 1904.

The house museum is packed with mementos of Keller's 87-year life, including eight-year-old Helen's handwritten letter to her little cousins in Memphis. Only the painstaking, squared-off lettering betrays the tremendous effort that went into her cheerful note.

The adult Keller strayed far from her upbringing as the daughter of a Confederate army officer, but you wouldn't know it from the museum. The exhibits focus on Keller's childhood and on her adult role as a champion for people with disabilities. You won't learn about Keller's socialist activism or her spiritual journey to mysticism. I only learned it after Wikipedia-ing her. (Is that a verb yet?)

The editing doesn't detract from the sheer power of the museum to awe and inspire visitors. It just leaves an incomplete picture of a complex woman who developed a powerful intellect and deep understanding of the world through touch and scent alone.

Next: Onstage with Helen Keller.

Pride and Pep Rallies

I just got back from a long weekend in Atlanta for their Pride festival. My very first Pride-like event was a doozy: the 1993 March on Washington. Myself and a few zillion other queers (that was the term preferred by many youngsters back in the day) descended on DC to dance, lobby congresscritters, eat out, dance some more, and then march. Little Rock looked awfully dreary through the airplane window on my way back.

Since then I've attended Pride in three cities. Each one reflected something of the city in which it took place: Memphis Pride was small but spirited, Nashville Pride was pleasant but bland, and Atlanta Pride was big but ramshackle.

All of the Prides, including the '93 March, reminded me of high-school pep rallies. I always wished our team the very best, but I didn't want to stand up and clap and holler "we've got spirit, yes we do." I was not a Mountain Home Bomber (yeah, it was a lame team name); I was David. Nor am I a Gay; I am David. Please do not force a Bomber pennant or a rainbow flag down my throat.

I still wish my team the very best, but I root for it in my own way. I am open and honest with family and friends. I assist useful organizations. I support politicians who respect me as an equal citizen, and I don't get all peppy about politicians who don't. I'm not a perfect gay citizen, but I can count a fair number of people who look at The Gays in a different light thanks to something I said or did.

Pride can be a fun way to spend a weekend, and the occasional pep rally didn't kill me either. But I prefer to lead my own cheers and dance in my own parade.

From the Dance Floor to the Bedroom to the Church: Al Green Gets His Due

Insanely talented Memphian the Rev. Al Green got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the B.E.T. Awards tonight, and I was condemned to watch the festivities with the sound off at a bar (after Mike Rickard's performance and during some bad rock band's gig). The intertubes come to the rescue again: the BET site has video of the fabulous Jill Scott covering Green's "I'm Still In Love With You" along with the rest of the tribute performance.

A few years ago I got to visit the Hi Records studio in South Memphis where Green recorded his hits. Every surface in the studio is covered with shag: walls, floors, and ceiling. Those acoustics, along with the talents of Green and his producer Willie Mitchell, produced an intimate and inimitable sound. Presenter John Legend tonight aptly described Green as moving the listener "from the dance floor to the bedroom to the church."

Love and happiness to you, Rev. Green!

Photo: Dwight McCann / Chumash Casino Resort via Wikipedia.