Home, Lena (Mary Calhoun)

Home, Lena (Mary Calhoun), attractive American singer and actress; b. N.Y., June 30, 1917. Home was primarily a nightclub entertainer, though her career, lasting 65 years, also encompassed stints with several big bands during the Swing Era, four Broadway shows, 16 motion pictures, and numerous recordings and radio and television performances. Starting out as a dancer, she drew attention because of her photogenic appearance, then developed into an accomplished singer best known for her clearly enunciated readings of classic pop songs, many of them composed by Harold Arlen. His “Stormy Weather” became a signature song for her, and she enjoyed her greatest theatrical success with his musical Jamaica. But her own experience as an African-American star during a period of racial turmoil in the U.S. gradually became the dominant subject of her art, which she confirmed in her 60s with her award-winning, autobiographical Broadway show Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music.

Home’s parents were Edwin F. Home, a gambler, and Edna Scottron Home. They divorced when she was three, but she and her mother continued to live in the home of her paternal grandparents in N.Y. When she was about five her mother embarked on a career as a traveling actress, and she remained with her grandparents until the age of six or seven, when her mother took her on the road, periodically depositing her with relatives or other caretakers, primarily in the South. When she was 11 or 12 she was returned to the care of her grandparents, but they died within months of each other when she was 13 or 14, after which she was cared for by a family friend. When she was 14 her mother, now remarried, returned to claim her.

In the fall of 1933, Home successfully auditioned as a dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem. With the start of the club’s spring season on March 23, 1934, she was given a featured part in its revue, the Cotton Club Parade, singing “As Long as I Live” (music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler). At this time she began to take voice lessons. During the fall 1934 season, while continuing to perform at the Cotton Club, she made her Broadway debut in Dance with Your Gods (N.Y., Oct. 6, 1934); it ran only nine performances.

Home left the Cotton Club in 1935 to sing with Noble Sissle and His Orch. She made her recording debut with Sissle on March 16, 1936, singing “That’s What Love Did to Me” and “I Take to You,” released on Decca Records. Later in the year, she left Sissle, and in January 1937 in Pittsburgh married Louis J. Jones, a Democratic Party political operative who had a patronage job registering and filing papers at the city coroner’s office. She gave birth to a daughter in December 1937. Though she had intended to retire from show business, she accepted an offer to appear in The Duke Is Tops, a low-budget, all-black movie musical. It was released in July 1938. She returned to performing in the Broadway revue Blackbirds of 1939 (N.Y., Feb. 11, 1939), but it closed after nine performances. In February 1940 she gave birth to a son, but in the fall she separated from her husband (they divorced in June 1944) and moved to N.Y. to revive her career.

Home found work on local and network radio shows and made several film shorts. In December 1940 she became the singer in Charlie Barnet’s orchestra. She left Barnet to accept a solo engagement at the prestigious Café Society Downtown nightclub in N.Y. in March 1941. She remained at the club until September, when she moved to L.A. In December she made her first solo recordings for RCA Victor Records, the label with which she was primarily associated for the next 35 years. In February 1942 she began to appear at the Little Troc club, moving to the Mocambo in July. In between these engagements, she was scouted by the movie studios, and she signed a seven-year contract with MGM, becoming the first African American contracted to a Hollywood studio. Unfortunately, except for two all-black musicals, she was restricted to performing in one or two production numbers in each of her films. The first of these was Panama Hattie, released in October. While at MGM, she worked with vocal coach Kay Thompson.

Home’s limited movie schedule allowed her to continue her career as a nightclub performer, and in October 1942 she returned to N.Y. and appeared at the Café Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel into early 1943 before returning to Hollywood. Her first film to be released in 1943 was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, in which she costarred with Ethel Waters, singing two songs by Harold Arlen (music) and E. Y. Harburg (lyrics); it came out in May, and Home toured to promote it. Two months later she had another costarring role in an all-black musical, having been loaned to 20th Century-Fox for Stormy Weather, in which she revived the Arlen-Koehler title song and made it her own. Before the end of the year, she was also seen singing in Thousands Cheer (September) and I Dood It (November), and in 1944 she was in Swing Fever (January), Broadway Rhythm (April), and Two Girls and a Sailor (June). After this, her film appearances became less frequent.

During World War II, Home undertook many tours of military bases for the USO, and after the war she established herself as a live performer at major nightclubs and hotels in the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, she made a few more appearances in MGM films: Ziegfeld Follies (March 1946); Till the Clouds Roll by (December 1946); Words and Music (December 1948); and Duchess of Idaho (July 1950). In December 1947 she married Leonard George “Lennie” Hayton, a staff composer, arranger, and conductor at MGM, who left the studio in 1953 to become her musical director.

Home performed extensively throughout the first half of the 1950s. She scored her first record hit with a revival of the 1928 song “Love Me or Leave Me” (music by Walter Donaldson, lyrics by Gus Kahn), which enjoyed renewed popularity as the title song of a film biography of Ruth Etting, who introduced it. Home’s RCA Victor recording reached the Top 40 in July 1955. In March 1956 she appeared in a final MGM movie musical, Meet Me in Las Vegas.On Dec. 31 her performance at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in N.Y. was recorded; released as the LP Lena Home at the Waldorf Astoria, it became a Top Ten hit in August 1957. By then she had given up nightclub work temporarily to prepare for her starring role in Jamaica (N.Y., Oct. 31, 1957), with songs by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. The musical was perceived as little more than a star vehicle, but her performance was enough to keep it running 555 performances. During its run, her album Give the Lady What She Wants reached the charts in November 1958.

Home’s next chart appearance came with her album of songs from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess recorded with Harry Belafonte; it reached the Top Ten in May 1959 and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Performance, Female. Her second Grammy nomination, in the same category, came for her 1961 album Lena at the Sands, which chronicled one of her regular appearances at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Also in 1961, her theatrical production Lena Home in Her Nine O’Clock Revue tried out in Toronto and New Haven but closed before reaching Broadway. Both of her 1962 albums, Lena on the Blue Side and Lena … Lovely and Alive, reached the charts, and the latter earned her a third Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female.

Starting in 1963, Home became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Her political concerns were expressed in the single “Now!” (music by June Styne, adapted from the Israeli melody “Hava Nagila,” lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolf Green), recorded for 20th Century-Fox Records, which reached the pop charts and the R&B Top 40 in November. For the balance of the 1960s she devoted more time to political activity and benefits and reduced her schedule of recordings and paid live performances.

Home began to become more visible as an entertainer again at the end of the decade, taking a dramatic role in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her first movie appearance in 13 years, in April 1969, and starring in her first U.S. network television special, Monsanto Night Presents Lena Home in September. That month she appeared at Caesar’s Palace with Harry Belafonte, her first engagement in Las Vegas in three years. She and Belafonte then did a television special together. Harry and Lena was broadcast March 22, 1970, and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Single Program—Variety or Musical. In May her duet album with guitarist Gabor Szabo, Lena and Gabor, on Skye Records, became her first chart record in seven years. It featured “Watch What Happens” (music by Michel Legrand, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel), which reached the R&B Top 40.

Lennie Hay ton’s death on April 24, 1971, following the recent deaths of Home’s father and son, caused her to be less active in the early 1970s. But in 1973 she launched a lengthy international tour cobilled with Tony Bennett; they performed together on Broadway in the fall of 1974 and finished in March 1975 in L.A. In addition to her usual performances, in the late 1970s, Home spent six months of 1978 starring in a West Coast production of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical Pal Joey, and she was featured in the film version of the Broadway musical The Wiz (October 1978), directed by Sidney Lumet, who at the time was married to her daughter.

Home undertook a “farewell” tour from June to August 1980, then decided not to retire. Instead she mounted an autobiographical Broadway revue, Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music (N.Y., May 12, 1981), which earned excellent reviews and ran 333 performances, concluding on Broadway on her 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. She was given a special Tony Award for the show, and a double-LP cast album reached the charts and won Grammys for Best Cast Show Album and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. After the show closed in N.Y., she toured with it around the U.S.; she took it to London in the summer of 1984.

Home was semi-retired by the mid-1980s. In September 1988 she released a new album, The Men in My Life, on the Three Cherries label, and it earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female. After making selected live appearances in 1993, notably a tribute to her friend Billy Strayhorn at the JVC Jazz Festival in N.Y., she signed to Blue Note Records and on May 17, 1994, released We’ll Be Together Again, which featured compositions by Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. It earned her another Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. On Sept. 19, 1994, she appeared at the Supper Club in N.Y. and the show was recorded for the album An Evening with Lena Home, released on March 21, 1995. She won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance for the album.

Home celebrated her 80th birthday, June 30, 1997, with a performance at Avery Fisher Hall at N.Y.’s Lincoln Center. On June 2, 1998, Blue Note released her album Being Myself.

Discography

It’s Love (1955); Lena Home at the Waldorf Astoria (1957); Give the Lady What She Wants (1958); The Songs of Burke and Van Heusen (1959); Porgy and Bess (1959); Lena Home at the Sands (1961); Lena Home Sings Your Requests (1963); A Lena Home Christmas (1966); Watch What Happens! (with Gabor Szabo; 1969); Lena, a New Album (1976); Live on Broadway—Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music (1981); Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena (1941–58); (1990); Well Be Together Again (1994); Love Is the Thing (1994); An Evening with Lena Home: Live at the Supper Club (1995); Lena Home at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain’t It the Truth—Motion Picture Anthology (1996); Some of the Best (1997); More of the Best (1997); Being Myself (1998); A&E Biography: Lena Home, A (Musical); Anthology (1998); The Best of the RCA Years (1998); Greatest Hits (2000); Love Songs (2000); Cocktail Hour: Lena Home (2000).

Writings

With R. Schickel, L. (Garden City, N.Y., 1965).

Bibliography

H. Greenberg and C. Moss, In Person: L. H. (N.Y., 1950); A. Dobrin, Voices of Joy, Voices of Freedom: Ethel Waters, Sammy Davis Jr., Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, L. H. (1972); J. Haskins, L. H. (N.Y., 1983); J. Haskins with K. Benson, L; A Personal and Professional Biography of L. H. (N.Y., 1984; updated ed., Chelsea, Mich., 1991); G. Buckley (her daughter), The Homes: An American Family (NY., 1986); L. Palmer, L. H Entertainer (N.Y., 1989); B. Howard, L. H. (Los Angeles, Melrose Square, 1991).

—William Ruhlmann