Danielle Woerner inquires:

>Or how about some Florence Foster Jenkins?... Has anyone on the list
>actually heard her?

I've got her on an LP, The Glory (???) of the Human Voice, RCA Victor, Red
Seal, LM 2597.  Never heard her in person, as I was only seventeen when she
died in 1944, and to get a ticket to one of her very rare performances was
a trick only manageable by the deftest of New York insiders.  To tell you
what she was about, let me turn to Francis Robinson, in Florence Foster
Jenkins"s day assistant manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and what he
wrote on jacket:

   "She emphatically declined to appear in New York oftener than once
   a year...  her annual recital at the Ritz Carlton was a private
   ceremonial for the select few...the word began to get around.  Tickets
   became harder to get than for a World Series...Finally, on the evening
   of October 25, 1944, Madame Jenkins took the big step...she braved
   Carnegie Hall...Carnegie Hall was sold out weeks in advance and
   grossed $6,000.  The late Robert Bragar wrote in the New York World
   Telegram:"She was exceedingly happy in her work..."

   "Madame Jenkins died full of years--76 to be exact {about a month
   after the Carnegie Hall eclat]...Neither her parents nor her husband
   gave her any encouragement whatever to her musical ambitions, but
   with her divorce and the money inherited from her father...she was
   free to turn her sights on New York...All this gave free rein to her
   costume design, a faculty which was to prove almost as startling as
   her vocal flights...Small wonder that the late [ New Yorker cartoonist]
   Helen Hokinson was an ardent Jenkins fan...it is too bad she did not
   record her favorite encore, Clavelitos...a contemporary account
   describes Madame Jankins as appeariang in a Spanish shawl, with a
   jewelled comb and, like Carmen, a red bloom in her hair.  She punctuated
   the rhythmic cadences of the song by tossing tiny red flowers from
   her pretty basket to her delighted hearers....After a taxicab crash
   in 1943 she found she could sing "a higher F than ever before..."
   She sent the driver an expensive box of cigars."

I've read elsewhere that Cole Porter was an afficionado--and like the
rest of her socialite circle took great pleasure,while listening to her
perform, in almost choking to death on genteely suppressed laughter.  As
a coloratura Florence Foster Jenkins excelled because, like Jean Cocteau's
Beast which was so incredibly ugly that it attained thereby the quality of
beauty, Madame Jenkins was ever so excruciatingly off key that she came to
personiify a splendorous key of her own.

Denis Fodor                     INTERNET:[log in to unmask]