Third Issue: Following Your Dreams

I've been thinking about Tommy Wiseau lately. He's a weird guy. You can read all about him here, and watch his famous film, The Room, online for free in any number of places. He doesn't count as history, or at least he doesn't to me, he's too recent! However, inspired by Mr. Wiseau, this week let's talk about people who followed their dreams...even though they objectively sucked and everyone told them so. I never know how to feel about those people. Should I admire them for never giving up? Or be sad because they spent so long working on something they weren't good at instead of trying something else they might have succeeded even more at? A question I cannot answer.

Robert Coates

Robert Coates was nicknamed "Romeo" because that was his favorite part to play. He was most active at the turn of the 19th century, and he was from England. He was super rich, which is how he continued to act even after professional theater refused to cast him in big roles. Being wealthy enough to follow your dream is a theme that you'll see runs through all of the people I'm going to talk about.

Anyway, so Robert was Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. He designed his own costume which was a little small for him, and his pants split down the butt on stage. His costume had " a flowing, sky-blue cloak with sequins, red pantaloons, a vest of white muslin, a large cravat, and a plumed "opera hat," not to mention dozens of diamonds". He told everyone he was the best actor in Britain, and he'd make up new scenes and dialogue during the play, sometimes repeating parts of it over and over (his favorite was dramatic death scenes, which to be fair, I get how fun that would be). He said he was improving the classics!

The audience loved him, but they spent most of their time laughing and jeering and catcalling him. If they got too loud, Coates would break character and yell right back at them. His fame spread and people would come see him to find out if he was as bad as they had been told. Some say that he was not really that bad of an actor and he was doing a parody, but there really isn't any way to know. Here's a summary of one of his antics during Romeo and Juliet:

"Once, when he dropped a diamond buckle when he was going to exit the stage, he crawled around the stage looking for it. During his first performance of Romeo & Juliet, he pulled out his snuff box in the middle of a scene and offered some to the occupants of a box. Then, during Romeo's death scene, Coates carefully placed his hat on the ground for a pillow and used his dirty handkerchief to dust the stage before lying on it. Finally, at the invitation of the audience, he acted out Romeo's death twice—and was about to attempt a third before his Juliet came back to life and interrupted him.The amusement of the audience was enormous."

Coates only performed in support of charity causes, and by 1816 the craze to see him had died down. He ended up moving to France, marrying, and moving back to London where they had two children. Coates died in 1848 when he got run over by a carriage as he was leaving a performance he had gone to see at the theater on Drury Lane.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins was made into a movie recently, a fact I found out when watching the trailer for it...which due to some type of theater malfunction played without sound at all. It seemed ironic somehow. Anyway, here's what I can tell you about her.

Florence was a talented pianist as a child, and she even performed at the White House for the president. When she graduated high school she wanted to go to Europe to study music, but her father said no, so she eloped with Dr. Jenkins. She got syphillis from her husband the next year and never talked to him again, though she kept her name (some say that the effects from her syphillis affected her mindset as far as believing she was more talented than she was, but who knows if that's true). Anyway, Florence hurt her arm and couldn't pursue her career as a piano player anymore, so she began giving lessons as a piano teacher. She met a man named St. Clair Bayfield and though they didn't marry, they were longterm partners for the rest of her life. After her father died, Florence got some inheritance she used to become a singer.

Florence immersed herself into fancy New York society and would cast herself as the main character in social club tableaux vivants (kind of like plays). She gave private voice recitals and created her own social club that had over four hundred members. By this time she was in her forties. 

Here's the main point: Florence was an awful singer. She was good at piano, but had bad pitch and no rhythym. She was flat and when she sang in other languages she was hard to understand. She picked really difficult opera solos, so that only emphasized how bad she was. She was super popular though! She was "exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater", one opera impresario said. Florence knew she was bad. She was quoted saying, "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing". Her recitals weren't opn to the public, just to her friends, and excluded strangers and music critics. Still, a lot of people thought that she really thought she was good, but it seems like she was too self aware for that. She just loved to sing. 

One time, when she was in a minor car accident, she screamed. Her scream was so high that she was super excited, she got a high F that she'd never been able to reach before. She ended up sending her driver a box of expensive cigars in thanks. When she was seventy-six years old, Florence finally booked Carnegie Hall and gave a performance to the general public. The demand was so high, and the tickets were sold out so far ahead of time that two thousand people were turned away. People were literally incapacitated from laughing so hard. For the first time, critics and others were allowed to come, and there were horrible reviews of her performance. The New York Post said "Lady Florence ... indulged last night in one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen." A few days after the concert, Florence had a heart attack and she died a month later.

William McGonagall

William McGonagall was a handloom weaver. He was married, and had seven children. He did pretty well, despite the industrial revolution, and everything was going great for him.
He was actually kind of interested in acting, and performed as Macbeth in Macbeth - but he had to pay for this privilege. The theater was filled with his friends and coworkers, and when the play should have ended with Macbeth dying, William thought the actor playing Macduff was trying to upstage him, so he refused to die.
After a while, William's luck ran out. He was having trouble finding work, and his daughter had an illegitimate child, ruining the family's reputation. However, something good did happen. In 1877, he wrote, "the most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet". He said he "seemed to feel a strange kind of feeling stealing over him...a flame seemed to kindle up his entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry". William was apparently a pretty bad poet. He realized he'd need a patron, and wrote to Queen Victoria. One of her clerks wrote him back saying no, but he thoguht this was praise for his work. WHenever anyone talked shit about his poetry he'd be like well, Queen Victoria liked it.

WIlliam decided his new goal was to give a live performance to the Queen. He walked sixty miles to go perform, but he was turned away and had to go home. He decided to talk about how drinking was bad, giving speeches and poems about this in pubs and bars. Once, he was reciting a poem about the evils of strong drink, and the bartender threw peas at him. 

He got pretty desperate for money and ended up performing poetry at a circus where the crowd threw eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes, and stale bread at him. William was paid fifteen shillings per night for this, but the city had to ban the event when it got too wild. William was mad about this and wrote a poem called "Lines in Protest to the Dundee Magistrates that began:

Fellow citizens of Bonnie Dundee

Are ye aware how the magistrates have treated me?
Nay, do not stare or make a fuss
When I tell ye they have boycotted me from appearing in Royal Circus,
Which in my opinion is a great shame,
And a dishonour to the city's name (...)

William didn't seem to get that people hated his poetry or made fun of him. Some people think that maybe he was on the autism spectrum, but again, who knows if that's true. In 1893, he wrote an angry poem threatening to leave Dundee because people kept mistreating him in the streets but the newspaper said he'd probably stay another year once he figured out "that Dundee rhymes with 1893". William died in 1902, penniless. 

One of his more famous poems about the Tay Bridge Disaster begins like this: 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

I love it. If only more poetry could be like this. I don't know why people hated his work so much. Let me know if you know of anyone else who fits the category of being so bad at something but following their dreams anyway!