Who was the real 'Florence Foster Jenkins'?

NEW YORK — Florence Foster Jenkins was once one of New York's best-kept secrets. 

For years, the fervidly flat soprano, played by Meryl Streep in a new biopic of the same name (in theaters nationwide Friday), kept her notoriously terrible voice under wraps. Performing exclusively for the loyal friends of her social club, she managed to stay blissfully unaware of her shortcomings with the help of her longtime companion St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), who bribed naysayers and looky-loos to keep them from telling the truth about her singing. That is, until she played her first recital for the public at Carnegie Hall in 1944, where she was mercilessly mocked by critics. 

Meryl Streep is good at being bad in 'Florence Foster Jenkins'

Jenkins suffered a heart attack days later and died at age 76, perhaps devastated by the realization of her musical ineptitude, as the movie suggests. It begs the question: Could she have maintained the same charade in 2016, when the worst singers are chewed up and spit out by reality TV competitions and Internet vultures? 

"Florence in the age of the haters," Streep considers. "He never could've protected her. I don't think it'd be possible." 

Grant jokes: "He'd have to pretend that the Wi-Fi didn't work." More seriously, the movie is about "crazy delusions and people who waste their life on them. Florence was a horrible singer, but it made no difference because she loved it so much." 

Streep originally heard Jenkins' recordings as a student at the Yale School of Drama and remembers being "very amused by her. I'd heard her voice and knew that it was funny and why it was funny," in part because she gets so close to hitting the notes, only to miss them entirely. 

"That's the secret of why it's so endearing," she adds. "You can only hope that that note might be achieved, and you're constantly disappointed. On the recordings, you can hear" — Streep pants loudly — "her excitement. You can literally hear the aspiration." 

Susan Swaney, a voice instructor at Indiana University-Bloomington, says Jenkins' problems stemmed from being too enthusiastic and untrained. "She would tend to fly a little high or breathe too heavily, or not breathe enough so she'd run out of air in the middle of a word," Swaney says. That said, there is plenty to learn from listening to Jenkins' singing, namely that "you can't just emote your way through. You have to be accomplished enough to carry the (listener) along and not have them distracted by something that's not worked out technically."

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But professional singers also need to be reminded sometimes that at the core of a great performance is a love for the art form — something Jenkins had in spades. 

"She's ridiculous, and you laugh helplessly and she breaks your heart," says director Stephen Frears. "I don't know how you do that at the same time." In the end, "it's her courage and her spirit that you come to admire. Who knows what she heard (in her head)? I knew if you answered that question, life would get duller. You had to keep that question alive."