[Dixielandjazz] Lena Horne Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

I think Norm Vickers tried to post this on the DJML but it may have  
rejected because of the photographs in the article. Anyway, here is  
the text only;

Sadly,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

May 9, 2010 - NY TIMES - By Aljean Harmetz
Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long- 
term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve  
international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York- 
Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and  
lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50  
years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the  
color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she  
was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of  
having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another —  
“Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a  
Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) —  
to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when  
it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American  
performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an  
otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was  
Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till  
the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms.  
Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie,  
a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white  
man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in  
1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who  
did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to  
MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography,  
“Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously  
considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married  
a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie  
Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s —  
the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she  
sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film  
years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena  
Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the  
picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic  
for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds  
of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A  
radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when  
she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in  
1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show  
business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing,  
Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching  
sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature  
songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by  
Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil.  
(One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she  
sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was  
released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in  
other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too  
risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty  
magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In  
addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500  
for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played  
nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black,  
during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army  
radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in  
the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty  
Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her  
criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got  
mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to  
go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled  
a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her  
friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was  
blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven  
years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared  
frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the  
1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost  
any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested  
that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved  
in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, she found success in nightclubs and  
on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a  
well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became  
the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil  
rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches  
and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a  
white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the  
Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway  
musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and  
other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered  
Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her  
Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony  
Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely  
expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as  
singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River”  
that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her  
main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke  
Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David  
Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me  
vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she  
said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also, she said, “the only man I ever loved,” but  
Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a  
romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr.  
Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of  
her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle  
class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early  
members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored  
People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl  
for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in  
trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms.  
Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history,  
“The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York  
Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life  
on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal  
grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to  
audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem  
nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers  
were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and  
the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club  
chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the  
short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old  
Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife.  
Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The  
marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones  
refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits  
with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke  
Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a  
grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the  
impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub  
he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms.  
Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who  
sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip  
Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New  
Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a  
white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms.  
Horne said. “When the neighbors found out,Humphrey Bogart, who lived  
right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing  
around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over  
to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy  
Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing  
at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war  
had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling  
den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer  
of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed  
insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He  
did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get  
better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too.  
In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a  
maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband  
died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very  
clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be  
a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be  
a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman  
that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody  
else.”


Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.