The sound of Florence Foster Jenkins

By the time you got to thinking that Meryl Streep must have already played all the great Academy Award worthy roles available on screen, she springs a surprise that piques the interest of everybody. Her latest is Florence Foster Jenkins in the movie of the same title about the final days of the New York socialite and aspiring opera singer who could not sing which is directed by Stephen Frears who also did The Queen.

So Streep, who for many years made her ability to take on various accents a hallmark of her acting career, has found something new to play with, her singing voice. She can sing and did fine in both Mamma Mia and Into the Woods, but for Florence Foster Jenkins, she had to sing like Florence, which as any real singer will tell you is very difficult. But if she pulls this off, we could be looking at another Academy Award nomination or even a win for Meryl. And all because she could sing awful just like Florence did.

She was like the Emperor in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. She could not really sing and she lived in a state of perpetual self-deception. She was ridiculed but happy that her dream was coming true. What had been written about her mentioned her lack of rhythm, pitch and tone and her frightful diction.  And nobody had the guts to tell her so.

The reason why could be either because they loved and pitied her the way her partner and manager the actor St. Clair Blayfield played with so much heart by the nicely aging Hugh Grant did as well as her accompanist, Cosme McMoon played by Simon Helberg of the TV show Big Bang Theory who it turned out is a superb pianist. Of course, the others were simply scared of losing the largesse that Florence was throwing around.  

It was the love of the people around her and her money that made her recordings, which exist to this day, and performances, with accompanying rave reviews possible. In fact, a month before she died on Nov. 26, 1944, Florence had a full-house concert at Carnegie Hall. Well, they gave away a lot of tickets but what counted was that it was full. That was the ultimate proof of what the movie blurbs have been saying, “It is not how good you are. It is how big you dream.”  

Now please don’t think that Florence is the only one on Earth who ever dreamed of a singing career even if she did not have the voice for it and became famous. There are many others. Among the best known are:

Tryphosa Duncan Bates, Jenkins’ chief rival for the greatest bad singer title, also a writer, socialite and social climber from the early 1900s. The great composer Jules Massenet was her accompanist.

Leona Anderson, a close second, she was known as the world’s most horrible singer back in the ’50s. She recorded an album Music To Suffer By made up of arias, Habanera from Carmen and pop songs, like I Love Paris. 

Mrs. Miller, her shrill, off-key vibrato-filled singing made big novelty hits out of her versions of popular tunes like Downtown, Monday Monday and Lovers Concerto back in the ’60s.

Jonathan and Darlene Edwards who were actually conductor and arranger Paul Weston and his wife, the singer Jo Stafford of You Belong To Me fame. They made off-key recordings only for fun but to their surprise, the albums sold.

William Hung is now a crime analyst in Los Angeles but for a while there, he had an international singing career, thanks to his incredibly off-key and gutsy rendition of Ricky Martin’s She Bangs for his audition in American Idol Season 3.

Finding about Florence Foster Jenkins has also led me to the discovery of other artists who also found fame because they excelled or maybe I should say because they had the guts to be bad at what they believe they are good at.  But that is only because we had been conditioned to think otherwise. That is to see what they are good at, as bad.

Considered as the worst ever in their chosen art are Robert Coates, actor; William McGonagall, a poet; Amanda McKittrick, a writer; and The Shaggs, an all-female rock band from the ’70s.

Google away now.