Florence Foster Jenkins: The Real Story

This week the second movie of the year based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins opens in theaters with Meryl Streep as the woman whose love for music was almost as monumental as her lack of talent.

Florence Foster Jenkins was born in 1868, the daughter of a wealthy family who was a child prodigy on the piano and performed for President Rutherford B. Hayes. She wanted to study music but her father refused, and so she eloped with a man who gave her syphilis. This disease and the primitive treatments of the time may have been the reason for her inability to hear herself accurately. She also injured her hand so she could no longer play the piano.

Jenkins left her husband and later entered into a relationship with a British actor named St. Clair Bayfield (played in the film by Hugh Grant). The great pleasure of her life was putting on elaborate concerts and tableaux, performing for her friends, who helped sustain the fiction that she was talented, despite her warped, off-key, singing. One description: “Her singing at its finest suggests the untrammeled swoop of some great bird.” As in the film, she finally did a concert at Carnegie Hall. In real life, it was attended by celebrities including Cole Porter, dancer and actress Marge Champion, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, actress Kitty Carlisle and opera star Lily Pons with her husband, conductor Andre Kostelanetz, who composed a song for Jenkins to sing that night. For the first time, critics were able to attend and their reviews were devastating. Two days later, she had a heart attack and a month later she died.

“Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own” is a documentary.

Earlier this year, “Marguerite,”a French film inspired by Jenkins was released in the US.

There have been at least five plays based on her life, including “Glorious.”

There is something endearingly captivating about the idea of someone so passionately devoted to her art, wealthy enough to make her dreams come true, and so fearless in performing. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in its most benign form. She’s gone, so we have the pleasure of laughing at her (perhaps a little smugly) without hurting her feelings. And now she’s being played by Meryl Streep! Somewhere in heaven, she is smiling and also singing just as beautifully as she always dreamed.