I don’t normally enjoy stories about those elite groups of socialites, heirs, and heiresses. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But this look inside the life of one set of that elite group won me over. Set in the first couple of years of WWII, Meryl Streep plays the title character, Madame FFJ, undoubtedly the worst singer ever to play Carnegie Hall. I’ve seen other self-funded artists there including a lovely old lady from New Jersey who conducted an orchestra of remarkably talented up-and-coming young classical musicians, including superb soloists, in two concerts a year during the 1980s. These were free to the public if you obtained tickets, which we always did. It was a joy to venture to the Hall for what have thus far been my only visits. They were fun, but they were also very spirited and credible exercises in conducting and performance. They were not the caricature that is/was FFJ. An heiress, she seems the ultimate upper class twit, married to her ‘philandering’ husband, a former second-tier English actor and a son of the aristocracy, albeit on the illegitimate side, St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), who lives with his girlfriend in an apartment FFJ funds. She lives for music and is active in promoting classical music for the right people by hosting gatherings for her class and promoting superb artists—including Toscanini and Lily Ponds—as an angel. The action heats up as she decides to resume her singing lessons and expands from there to performance. Along the way she picks up Cosme’ McMoon, a young, struggling, even starving, esthete pianist, wonderfully played by Simon Helberg. Yes it’s Howard from the Big Bang Theory who, as anyone who’s seen that show knows, plays a mean piano and does his own playing in this film. She is, no true spoiler, a horrifically awful singer and doesn’t have a clue. The question is how and why she can’t hear herself, even on the records she produces and sends to radio shows and promoters?. We learn much more about her and her loving husband (and that’s not ironic). Streep and Grant are wonderful in their roles, and even as you laugh at moments of her deranged vocalizing, you care about her and sympathize deeply with them both. Theirs is a deep if unusual—if not bizarre—love, and the story lets you into it. It is also a tale from another period that we, in the age of AIDS, will do well to remember for the devastation and hellish realities endured by earlier generations of men and women