Horne, Lena

By: Kathleen Thompson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Horne, Lena

Sex:  Female

Born:  Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, United States
30 June 1917

Died:  New York, New York, United States
9 May 2010

Activity/Profession:  Stage / Screen Actor, Jazz Singer, Popular Singer, Television Actor

(b. 17 June 1917),
entertainer, jazz singer.

The great-granddaughter of a freed slave, Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a gambler and a racketeer, her mother a struggling actress. Both of them, however, came from respectable middle class families, and, as a girl, Horne was surrounded by that respectability. She and her parents lived with her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, until her mother and father divorced when she was three.

Edwin Horne was a co-founder of the United Colored Democracy, a lobbying group. Cora Calhoun Horne was a suffragist and a bold defender of black rights. “My grandmother took me to her meetings,” said Horne in an interview for I Dream a World,

"“from the time I was little until I was fifteen. She was in the Urban League, the NAACP, and the Ethical Culture Society. I was surrounded by adult activities.…if I hadn't had that from her, then the other side of my life, which was more bleak, might have finished me.”"

(Lanker, p. 77)

There are probably few other Hollywood legends who were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at two years old.

Unfortunately, Horne was not able to stay permanently with her grandmother. When she was about seven, she rejoined her mother and spent the next few years traveling with her as she pursued her career as an actress. They had no home and, because of Jim Crow laws, could seldom find a hotel to stay in. They slept in the homes of relatives, friends, and even strangers, a common practice in the Southern black community, where hospitality stretched to try to fill the void created by prejudice. Horne then spent several years in Brooklyn, living with relatives, attending the Brooklyn public schools and the Girls High School. When she was fourteen, her mother remarried, returning from a tour in Cuba with a new husband, Miguel Rodriguez. The new family moved to a poor section of the Bronx, having been rebuffed by Brooklyn's black middle class.

Lena Horne, a legendary performer, photographed at a rehearsal at the Minskoff Theater in New York City, 30 October 1975.

© Bettye Lane

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When she was sixteen, Horne had to quit school. Her mother had become very ill, and the household needed money. A friend of her mother's, Elida Webb, was choreographer at the Cotton Club and got Horne a job, solely on the basis of her spectacular looks. The singing and dancing lessons she had taken as a proper young lady in her grandparents home were useful, but Horne started studying music in earnest. She said later that she was never a natural singer and that it took a lot of hard work and a number of years for her to hone her skills. In the meantime, she danced in the chorus on bills with Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters. However, when she was only seventeen she was cast in Dance with Your Gods (1934) on Broadway. At eighteen, she left the Cotton Club for good to be a singer with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra in Philadelphia. Her father was not far away, operating a hotel in Pittsburgh. The two became reacquainted, and he remained an important part of her life until he died.

On the road with the orchestra, Horne was constantly confronted with the harsh realities of racism. Possibly to escape, at nineteen, she married a friend of her father's, Louis Jones, who was twenty-eight. They remained married for four years, long enough for Horne to bear two children. In 1939 she took a starring role in the revue Blackbirds of 1939, and in 1940 she left her husband. When she went to New York, she left her children with their father so that she could make a start and find a place for the three of them to live. Late in the year, she became chief vocalist for the Charlie Barnett band and began recording. Able to provide a home for her children, she went back to Pittsburgh to get them, but Jones would give up only her daughter. Horne agreed to settle for visiting rights with her son. The separation from him was a source of sorrow for her the rest of her life.

Charlie Barnett was one of the first white band leaders to hire African American musicians, but singing and traveling with his band was a difficult experience for Horne. She was often unable to stay in the same hotel with the rest of the band. She frequently was barred from a theater's dressing room and had to change in the bus. She was even prevented from sitting with white members of the band between songs.

While with Barnett's band, Horne started recording. One of her most popular early records, “Haunted Town,” was made with Barnett. Next, she went to the Café Society Downtown, an engagement that might be said to have made her name. There she met Paul Robeson and Walter White, both on the same night. Both of them, as her friends, helped increase her awareness of the political struggles of black people. She also met and started dating boxer Joe Louis. Within the year, she got an offer of a booking at the Trocadero Club in California.

Hollywood

The decision to accept the offer and go to Hollywood was a difficult one. Horne knew it might lead to work in films, but she had serious doubts about battling what she expected would be the rampant racism of the film community. Walter White persuaded her that she would be doing a service to her people if she could break into films. He made her think of the possibility as a challenge. Sure enough, two months after arriving in Los Angeles Horne was auditioning for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Soon she was signing a seven-year contract with a starting salary of $200 per week and a clause saying she did not have to perform in stereotypical roles. “My father had them scared to death. I think that was the first time a black man had ever come into Louis B. Mayer's office and said, ‘I don't want my daughter in this mess.’ He was so articulate and so beautiful, they just said, ‘Well, don't worry.’”

The problem was how to use her. She lost her first chance for a speaking role in a mixed-cast movie because she was too light-skinned. She did not get another shot until 1956. All her performances in between were guest spots in which she only sang. These scenes never included the principals of the film in any important way and were easily edited out so that the films could be shown in southern theaters. Horne did one speaking part at MGM, in an all-black film entitled Cabin in the Sky (1943), and she was lent out for another, Stormy Weather (1943).

The guest spots had a tremendous effect. Her job, as Walter White had seen it, was to change the American image of black women, and she did. She fit white society's standards of beauty as well as the most beautiful white women, but she was clearly a woman of color. She was also a woman of great charm and dignity who was conscious of her position as a representative of black America. Her choices about the way she presented herself were influenced by that role. It seemed important at the time to show that a black woman did not have to sing spirituals or earthy, overtly sexual laments; Horne sang Cole Porter and Gershwin. It seemed important that a black woman could be cool, glamorous, and sophisticated; Horne always looked as though she had stepped out of the pages of Vogue.

When not singing on screen, she was singing in clubs. Horne had staying power. During the 1940s, she commanded as much as $10,000 a week at the clubs. Her recordings—including “Birth of the Blues,” “Moanin' Low,” “Little Girl Blue,” and “Classics in Blue”—were highly successful, and she was in demand on the radio. During World War II, she traveled extensively to entertain the troops, an experience that was not always salubrious. There are many versions of the story about one of her performances, at Fort Riley, Kansas. She stepped onstage and saw that German prisoners of war were seated in front of African American soldiers. Some versions of the story say she walked out, some that she stayed, and some that she walked down the aisle, past the Germans, and serenaded the black soldiers. In an interview in 1997 in U.S. News and World Report, Horne said, “To set the record straight, I did walk out. I went immediately to the local office of the NAACP and filed a complaint. As a result, MGM Studios pulled me off the USO tour. So I began to use my own money to travel and entertain our troops.”

In 1947, Horne secretly married Lennie Hayton, whom she had been seeing for years. Hayton was white, and Horne's position as a symbol for African Americans rose up to haunt her again. She did not reveal her marriage until 1950, and when she did, her mail was filled with hate letters from white racists and bitter reproaches from black Americans. It was a reaction she had anticipated. “Isn't it ironic?” she said in a 1965 Ebony article. “For three years I preferred to let the world think I was a woman living in sin than admit that I had married a white man.”

At the beginning of the 1950s, Horne was at the top of her form. By 1948 she received $60,000 a week for appearing at the Copacabana in New York. In 1950 she made her first television appearance, on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town. In 1956 she had her first speaking role in a mixed-cast film, Meet Me in Las Vegas. In 1957 she starred on Broadway for the first time in Jamaica. However, she lost the film role she had most hoped for, the mulatto Julie in Show Boat, to her friend Ava Gardner. Her marriage to Hayton may have been the deciding factor in her loss of the role, but Horne took it as a sign that Hollywood had nothing to offer her. Also, because she remained loyal to friends who were being blacklisted for supposed Communist sympathies, particularly Paul Robeson, she was eventually blacklisted herself from television work. Her second appearance in that medium was nine years after her first, on The Perry Como Show in 1959.

During the 1960s, Horne, like many others, became more and more involved in civil rights. She was at the March on Washington in 1963. In the atmosphere of change, she also separated from her husband. “I took a chance,” she told Ebony in 1968. “I said, ‘Lennie, I'm going through some changes as a black woman. I can't explain them. I don't know what they're going to mean, what they're going to do to me, but I've got to be by myself to work it out.’” They remained apart for three years and then came back together to go on with their twenty-four year marriage. In the meantime, Horne toured for the National Council of Negro Women, speaking to black women all over the South. Her autobiography, Lena, which she wrote with Richard Schickel, appeared in 1965.

In 1970 Horne's father died, followed, in just a few months, by her son, Teddy, who was just thirty years old and the father of a family. Less than a year later, her husband died. The next few years were filled with grief and sorrow. She had lost the two people she most depended on and three of the people she most loved.

In 1974 Horne was back on Broadway, performing with Tony Bennett. Four years later, she played Glinda, the Good Witch, in the film The Wiz. On 30 April 1981, at the age of sixty-four, she opened on Broadway with Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which became the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history and won her a special Tony Award, the New York City Handel Medallion, the Drama Desk Award, and a Drama Critics' Circle citation.

Horne continued to appear on television regularly and to record. She appeared in That's Entertainment III in 1994, saying “I never felt like I really belonged to Hollywood. At that time, they didn't know what to do with me, a black performer.” In 1994 Blue Note released her “We'll Be Together Again” and in 1995 “An Evening With Lena Horne,” recorded live at New York's Supper Club, won her a Grammy. In 1996, she stopped the show at a tribute concert for her old friend Billy Strayhorn. Her album Lena Horne: Being Myself came out in 1997 and was received with praise and gratitude by critics and the public. She received both an Image Award and the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, as well as the Kennedy Center Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Arts. In 1979 she accepted an honorary doctorate from Howard University, and in 1998, she received the same honor from Yale. She also received the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Society of Singers. In 1996, Public Broadcasting's American Masters series presented “Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice,” a documentary of her life. In 2003 Sony Pictures Television, along with ABC and Storyline Entertainment, announced that it would be making a film biography of Horne, starring Janet Jackson and based on Horne's autobiography, Lena.

It is difficult to assess the historical importance of Lena Horne's life and work. In part, this is because she was so remarkably contemporary. Thinking of her as a historical figure strains the imagination. Her image as a beautiful, proud, self-assured black woman suggests that nothing, not even history, could or would dare impinge on her. She responded to this idea when she talked about the time she struck a white man in a Hollywood nightclub for a racist insult. The incident was widely reported by journalists.

Later, Horne said that she got telegrams from black people saying that they never knew she had the same problems they did.

Lena Horne's position as a symbol of and for her race worked hand in hand with racism to limit her possibilities as a performer and a person. However, she managed to transcend those limitations to carve out a remarkable stage, film, and recording career and a life of personal fulfillment.

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