Meet Florence Foster Jenkins - Her Greatness Went Beyond Her Singing

Early in the movie "Florence Foster Jenkins," Meryl Streep takes to a concert stage to sing an aria. What is heard, though, is far from what you hear at the Metropolitan Opera. With equal amounts of enthusiasm and amateurism, Streep blithely sings with little regard to musical precision. "People may say I can't sing," Florence Foster Jenkins once famously said. "But no one can ever say I didn't sing."

"When you listen to Florence on YouTube, you think, 'I cannot believe that anyone's singing this badly,' and at the same time she breaks your heart," the film's director Stephen Frears recently told the Wall Street Journal. "She is both ridiculous and touching."

Today she's a cult artist, regarded (as she was in her lifetime) as someone who charmed her audiences despite her complete lack of musical skills. Her fans ran from Cole Porter to the late David Bowie, who picked her best-selling album as one of his all-time favorites. Metropolitan Opera star soprano Joyce Di Donato also considers herself a fan. "If I could say one thing to Florence Foster Jenkins," she said recently, "I think I would say, 'you go, girl'!" In 2013, Barbra Streisand told New York Magazine that that if she could be any singer, she would be "Ray Charles and Florence Foster Jenkins."

Vivacious personality

Interest in Jenkins' life and career have prompted a number of plays, a documentary and the soon-to-be-released Hollywood biopic starring Streep in a heartbreakingly touching performance that is already short-listed for an Oscar nomination. Directed by Frears ("Philomena," "The Queen"), from a script by Nicholas Martin, the film centers on Jenkins' final years when she gave a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall in 1944 at the age of 76. Hugh Grant co-stars as St. Clair Bayfield, a wannabe actor who was her companion, and Simon Helberg (from "The Big Bang Theory") as her long-time accompanist Cosme McMoon. The film displays her complete lack of musical skills, but also captures her sweet, guileless personality and her devoted relationship with Bayfield, with whom she first met in 1909. They were a couple, though they never married, for 35 years.

But just who was Florence Foster Jenkins?

During the first half of the last century, Mme. Foster (as she dubbed herself) was a New York City socialite who captivated exclusive audiences with concert performances that fell somewhere between high camp and enthusiastic, if misguided, dilettantism. In these events, which were given to musical club members and invited guests, she fashioned herself a soprano who specialized in the coloratura repertory, which she sang often dressed in outrageous costumes of her own creation that she would change between numbers. In her most famous she was dressed in white satin with two enormous wings protruding from her back, making her look like an elderly, zaftig matron out of a Marx Brothers movie.

Though not in the class of the Astors or Vanderbilts, Jenkins was comfortable enough to support any number of musical clubs that gave wealthy women places to explore their musical appreciation and nurture artists. She was blessed with a kind of vivacious personality that, from reports of her contemporaries, more than compensated for her lack of musical skills. She made recordings at her own cost, performed on the radio and counted among her fans some of the leading luminaries of New York's classical music scene. Porter was said to have never missed one of her recitals. Tallulah Bankhead laughed so loud at Foster's 1944 Carnegie Hall concert that she was asked to leave the hall. She counted amongst her fans such celebrities as Gypsy Rose Lee and musical luminaries as soprano Lily Pons and composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Her critics, though, were harsh. "It was largely a recital without voice," dismissed the music critic from the New York Sun in reviewing that concert.

Insulated by her fans

Yet Jenkins was impervious to ridicule, largely because she believed her vocal caterwauling was art - great art. She was insulated from criticism by her loyal fans, who cheered her as much as they laughed, often filling the stage she sang at with so many flowers that it resembled a funeral home. These were largely done at private events in which she carefully distributed tickets. Music critics were not invited. When she went public at that famous Carnegie Hall event, the critics did come and the reviews are said to have killed her. Five days after the concert, she suffered a heart attack and died a month later, which ended her story on a tragic note.

Up to then, Mme. Jenkins happily lived in a bubble surrounded by a devoted partner/manager St Clair Bayfield and a talented musical director Cosm� McMoon. She had hardships: her father disinherited her when she ran off with a doctor and married with hopes of pursuing a career as a concert pianist. The marriage was a disaster, with Foster contracting syphilis from her husband. In the days prior to antibiotics, she was treated with mercury, which is likely why she became completely bald. When an arm injury left her unable to play the piano, she decided to pursue a career as a vocalist.

With her mother's financial help, she moved to New York and established herself as a socialite with extra-musical interests. She joined a number of private musical societies, forming one - The Verdi Club - in 1917, in which her presence became more and more integral as part of their annual concerts. She invariably took the lead role in "tableaux vivantes," in which famous paintings or theatrical scenes were recreated. At one she was Brunnhilde appointed with silver spear, gold vest and helmet; in another she impersonated Madame DuBarry at the court of Louis XV. Over time, she began to sing at these events with such determination and unabashed innocence that her celebrity was born.

"Florence was a person who kept something we all have when we are children - when you can't really do anything that well, but you hurl yourself into the imagining of it and take delight in the doing," Meryl Streep told the Guardian this past May prior to the British release of the film. "It's the purist meaning of the word amateur. She only sang for her friends and hand-picked audiences - the exception being the Carnegie Hall performance - because she couldn't sing that well, but she loved it and loved music, and there's something of that delight in our script."

Hilarious and dreadful

Jenkins' celebrity in modern times - she has been the subject of a number of plays and the recent French film "Marguerite" (for which Catherine Frot won last year's Cesar Award for Best Actress) - came about through her slim repertory of recordings. In 1941 she went to Melotone Recording Studios and put down a track of Mozart's "Der Holle Rache," (the Queen of the Night aria from "The Magic Flute") on a single take. When she finished, she questioned a particular note she didn't quite get right; to which Melotone executive Mera Weinstock countered: "My dear Madame Jenkins, you need feel no anxiety concerning any single note."

She may have mauled Mozart, but her recording quickly became a collector's item. "Critics have long wondered whether Coloratura Jenkins' art can be described as singing at all. But she will intrepidly attack any aria, scale its altitudes in great swoops and hoots, (and) assay its descending trills with the vigor of a maudlin cuckoo," reviewed Time Magazine. Yet she would have just become a curious musical footnote if RCA Victor hadn't released her recordings on a single disc in 1954. These recordings haven't been out-of-print since, and help create the Jenkins' legend.

They also inspired Frears to want to direct the biopic. "There is a famous recording of her, and I was told that back in the 60s people used to play it at dinner parties," Frears told the Guardian. "I heard her singing [in an audio clip] on YouTube and it was gobsmacking. The recording is so hilarious and dreadful but also touching and so affecting."

What Streep does so well in her performance is convey that childlike joy that Jenkins brought to her singing. She once said that she only sang to bring happiness to her audiences, which she did with blinders on. Despite being advised by Bayfield not to perform at Carnegie Hall because at her age (76), her voice was worn, she persisted. "I can do it...," she said. "I can do everything."

Still in demand

The concert, recreated in the film, proves to be her greatest triumph and, ironically, the event that led to her death at the age of 76. Those who attended it compare it to a raucous carnival. "What we experienced was so hilarious," dancer Marge Champion reported in Donald Collup's 2008 documentary "Florence Foster Jenkins: A World Of Her Own." Champion was "unprepared for the fact that it didn't bother her in the least that the audience convulsed with laughter." The late American composer Daniel Pinkham compared attending it as akin to going to a "drag party."

One critic put is succinctly: "She hit only a few notes. The rest were promissory." Another from the New York PM Daily described it this way: "Mrs. Jenkins, who started singing in public comparatively late in life, has been giving recitals in hotels for the past few years, and her performances have developed quite a large following. She now possesses only a pitiful remnant of vocal equipment. The audience, a very large one, punctuated the sounds she made with uncontrollable waves of laughter and applauded at the end of the three numbers I heard as though they had created a new Flagstad. It was the cruelest and least civilized behavior I have ever witnessed at Carnegie Hall, but Miss Jenkins met it all with pleased smiles. She was giving the herd pleasure."

"Most people probably went to see her in order to scoff," Jenkins' biographer Darryl W. Bullock told the BBC, "but it's clear that they were won over by her charm and the sheer joy she got from performing. Florence loved music and wanted others to love it too. She was absolutely sincere, and she was a 'good sort': it's said of her that she never had a bad word to say about anyone. People genuinely liked her."

And in death her legend continues. Inquiries to Carnegie Hall as to the most requested concerts performed there have Jenkins in the top three, along with Judy Garland and The Beatles.

"Florence Foster Jenkins" arrives in theaters on August 12. For more on the film, .

Watch Donald Collup's 2008 documentary ""Florence Foster Jenkins: A World Of Her Own":