Flo was born to rich parents in the late nineteenth century and grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth. She learned to love the stage at an early age. A bit of a piano prodigy, she performed at many society events starting at age seven, culminating with playing for President Hayes at the White House. After graduating from high school she told her father that she wanted to go to Europe to study music. Her father, not a fan of the arts, told her she would be better off marrying a doctor. Not liking this answer, Flo ran off and eloped with a doctor of poor reputation named Frank Jenkins, who, thanks to his love of hookers, gave her syphilis. Upon discovering this, Flo left Frank, though a divorce was never formalized. For a period of time she tried to make it on her own as a pianist, giving piano lessons to support herself, but an arm injury put an end to those dreams and she eventually moved in with her mother in New York City. It was here that she met an Englishman seven years her junior, named St. Clair Bayfield, who also happened to be a failed Shakespearean actor. The two became unofficially married and lived in a strange cohabitation which involved them never sleeping together (because of the syphilis) and St. Clair keeping an apartment and girlfriend on the side.
Before long, Flo's father died, leaving her a fat inheritance. Flo, deciding to restart her musical career, began taking voice lessons and immersing herself in New York's high society. She joined dozens of social organizations and even started her own music club, the Verdi Club (giving herself the title President Soprano Hostess) where she staged lavish tableau's, most of which cast her as a main character, wearing extremely elaborate costumes she designed herself. Flo was generous with her money, donating to most of the major musical and artistic endeavors of the city for the next forty years, and earning the great love and admiration of high society. However, her great dream was to become a singer, a dream largely limited by the fact that the woman couldn't sing worth a shit. This isn't an overstatement. The woman sounded like the death cries of a screaming bird in the mouth of a cat suffering from laryngitis. She had no sense of rhythm, timing, pitch, or tone. She was consistently flat and often mispronounced many of the words she was singing. To make it all worse she always chose to sing operatic solos far beyond her technical abilities and vocal range. It was distorted and terrible, and Flo had no idea.
She first started singing in her forties and it wasn't too long before she began hosting private concerts at her apartment and at small clubs. Attendance was by personal invitation only, restricted to a select group of friends and club members. Strangers and music critics were always excluded. Her friends, who loved her dearly, treated her performances as the highest of arts, and in the rare cases where someone broke into laughter, which invariably happened at every recital, they cheered loudly to cover it up. It was a grand world created by the willingness of people to lie to her and Flo's willingness to lie to herself. She truly enjoyed singing and the stage more than anything else, and saw herself as equal to many of the great opera singers of the day. To be fair to Flo, it is highly likely that her syphilis, and its treatment with mercury and arsenic, caused at least partial hearing loss and perhaps some mental instability. It was madness, but a madness that everyone was willing to go along with as long as the money kept flowing. Few people in history can claim the devotion Flo created amongst her friends and fans.
The mystery surrounding Flo's recitals drove the New York art scene insane. Anything so private as her shows was sure to cause a clamor. At age seventy-six Flo finally gave into public demand and agreed to do a show at Carnegie Hall. Tickets sold out weeks in advance. Numerous celebrities attended. At the height of World War II it was the musical event of the season. Flo, in one of her own wardrobe creations, took the stage. As the audience fell quiet with anticipation, Flo began to sing, and complete pandemonium broke out. The audience broke out into laughter, applause, and cheering. People had to be carried out due to becoming too hysterical. Throughout it all Flo kept going, basking in the attention. Though the audience was kind to her, the critics were not. The scathing reviews of what turned out to be her only public concert hurt Flo deeply. Within a month she died of a heart attack.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Florence_Foster_Jenkins.jpg