the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

PERSISTENCE CAN OUTWEIGH TALENT 65
the others. During the course of a vocal career that stretched from 1912 to
1944, she earned an enduring spot in music history as perhaps the most
breathtakingly awful singer ever to perform in front of a paying crowd.
Her outlandish costumes, mock-profound stage presence, and penchant
for doing violence to the works of Brahms, Mozart, and other great composers
surely made her one of the most preposterous. A 1942 Time magazine
reviewer noted that “she will intrepidly attack any aria, scale its
altitudes in great swoops and hoots, and assay its descending trills with the
vigor of a maudlin cuckoo.” All the same, Florence Foster Jenkins still
managed to win the affections of the most aesthetically exacting, hypercritical
audience imaginable—the highbrow elite of the New York music
world. And by proving it was possible to be both bad and beloved, the
screeching diva who signed her publicity stills “Lady Florence” paved the
way for countless William Hungs to come.
“The Bel Canto Banshee”
Just how bad a singer was Lady Florence? The verdict of contemporary
critics is that she was very, very bad. British reviewer Marc Brindle,
after listening to a recently rediscovered recording of Jenkins, notes
that “where notes should be floated, they have a gale force choppiness”
and that lines “crack as loudly as the splitting hull of the Titanic.” Fergus
Gwyneplaine MacIntyre, who wrote a retrospective for the New York
Daily News in 2004, dubbed her “the Bel Canto banshee.” Opera News
writer Brooks Peters has compared her screechy voice to that of the fi ctional
Susan Alexander, who was forced against her will to become a singer
in the 1941 Orson Welles fi lm Citizen Kane.
But part of Jenkins’s charm was that nothing—not even a total lack
of talent—was going to stop her from singing. Born in 1868, she was the
only daughter of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, lawyer and banker Charles
Dorrance Foster, who for a time served in the state legislature. Her mother,
Mary J. Hoagland Foster, was a member of forty-two different society
clubs and organizations. Florence started music lessons as a young child,