the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 66
and at age eight she gave her first piano recital. She loved to sing as well,
and as she grew into a young woman, her head was filled with dreams of
pursuing a musical career in Europe. Her father nixed that notion—by
some accounts, because he thought a young woman’s place was at home,
though he may simply have been realistic about his daughter’s musical
talents. Not long afterward, Florence eloped to Philadelphia with a young
doctor, Frank Jenkins. The marriage turned out to be an unhappy one,
and the couple divorced in 1902. Jenkins spent seven years eking out a
living as a music teacher.
Lady Florence might have ended up just another embittered matron
contemplating her crushed ambitions, except that in 1909, her father
died and, in addition to a piano, left her a quarterly stipend that made her
independently wealthy. By then, she was in her early forties, too old to
even dream of studying opera at the Paris Conservatoire. But Jenkins
wasn’t content to spend the rest of her life contemplating what outfi t she
should wear to the Long Branch horse show. Within her substantial body
still beat the heart of an aesthete. She would find a way to become a singer
after all.
There was one problem. Jenkins, simply put, could not sing. Her
inability to discern pitch, some believe, nearly matched that of legendary
tin ear Ulysses S. Grant (who once confessed that he knew only two
tunes—“one is ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and the other isn’t”). “Her voice was not
even mediocre—it was preposterous,” recalled Daniel Dixon, who profi
led her in Coronet magazine in 1957. The wealthy widow was unable to
carry a tune, or even keep to a rhythm. At times, she squawked like a
barnyard fowl, or rumbled along in an atonal caterwaul. When she struggled
to hit difficult notes, her vocal cords sometimes simply refused to
cooperate, leaving an awkward silence in the piece. Jenkins worked to
overcome her limitations, apparently to no avail. Actor St. Clair Bayfi eld,
who was Jenkins’s manager—and by his account, romantic companion—
for more than three decades, told Dixon that the would-be diva took sing-