A friend of mine recently introduced me to the fascinating story of Florence Foster Jenkins. For those of you unfamiliar with her, she was a wealthy heiress back in the late 19th-early 20th century who felt she was destined for vocal greatness. Despite the fact that her parents objected to “the excruciating quality of her voice,” in her early teens she ran away to pursue her dream. Suffering great hardships due to her lack of talent, her father came to restore her to her social position, but “with the proviso that she wouldn't sing anymore.” After his death, her more lenient mother allowed her to pursue lessons again though she was forbidden to sing in public.

After her mother’s death in 1928, she was left with the substantial family fortune and decided to finally make her concert career at age 60. At the time, she was encourage along by some of the great singers at the time who, “to kid her along, told her that she was the most wonderful singer that ever lived.” According to an interview with her accompanist:

I might say that every number was memorable, the way she performed it, because it was not only a performance of this sort that we hear on the records, but she added histrionics to every number, generally acting the action, if it were an aria, or other appropriate action if it were a descriptive song, or else she would go into different dances during these numbers, which were extremely hilarious … She came out dressed in a high comb and mantilla, with a gorgeous Spanish shawl and carrying a basket of carnations. During the actual singing of the number, she would pause altogether and toss these flowers out into the audience, with shouts of ¡Olé! And this created such a pandemonium at the end that she was forced to repeat it always. Then of course she had thrown the flowers out, so she asked the audience if they would return them so she could toss them out again … there wasn't any question of semblance of approval, because they approved of it wholeheartedly, but the audience nearly always tried not to hurt her feelings by outright laughing, so they developed a convention that whenever she came to a particularly excruciating discord or something like that, where they had to laugh, they burst into these salvos of applause and whistles and the noise was so great that they could laugh at liberty.

Because Frank Sinatra at the time had started to have teenagers fainting at his shows, she took this as a sign of great approval. She would even throw parties at her mansion where she would put The Bell Song by herself and by Galli-Curci, and then she would “hand little ballots out and you were supposed to vote which one was the best. Of course they all voted for her, and one woman once voted for Galli-Curci so Mme said, "How could you mistake that! My tones are much fuller than that!" So she really didn't hear the atrocious pitches in these things. She used to sit delightedly and listen for hours to her recordings." In her most memorable performance, she used her substantial fortune to rent out Carnegie Hall and sang before a packed audience of amused friends and fans.

If you’ve never heard her before, you owe it to yourself to check out some of her recorded clips on the internet. They are seriously squirt-milk-out-your-nose hysterical!

Anyway, the point to all this is that I’ve always wondered what it must have been like to hang out with Florence Foster Jenkins and listen to her butcher opera with not only a straight face, but actually feigning admiration. But today, after seeing Paris Hilton’s new music video, it struck me -- Paris Hilton is our Florence Foster Jenkins! Clueless and uninhibited, we dress her up in pink frilly clothes, tell her how adorable she is, and then sit back and laugh as she takes herself seriously. She is just like that kid back in middle school that you could pay a dollar to have him eat a worm or to pull his pants down in the cafeteria. I, for one, hope she never grows up!