Horne, Lena (1917—)

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Horne, Lena (1917—)

African-American singer and actress whose amazing career spanned over six decades. Born on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York; daughter of Edwin and Edna (Scottron) Horne; married Louis Jones, in 1937(divorced 1940); married Lennie Hayton, in 1947 (died February 1971); children: (first marriage) Gail Lumet Buckley (b. 1937); Teddy Jones (1940–1971).

Spent most of childhood on the road with her mother, an actress; dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the chorus line at Harlem's Cotton Club (1933); while gaining recognition on the nightclub circuit, was discovered by Hollywood, though film roles were mainly limited to cameo singing appearances; blacklisted from film and television industry during the McCarthy era (1950s); returned to the screen (1969) in her first non-musical role; worked nearly continuously in films, television, and live concert appearances, winning a Tony Award on Broadway (1982), undertaking a world tour with her one-woman show (1982–83), and receiving the Kennedy Center's Lifetime Achievement Award (1984).

Filmography:

The Duke Is Tops (1938); Panama Hattie (1942); Cabin in the Sky (1943); Stormy Weather (1943); I Dood It (1943); As Thousands Cheer (1943); Swing Fever (1943); Broadway Rhythm (1944); Two Girls and a Sailor (1944); Ziegfeld Follies (1946); Till the Clouds Roll By (1946); Words and Music (1948); Duchess of Idaho (1950); Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956); Death of a Gunfighter (1969); The Wiz (1978).

Lena Horne marked the beginning of her 77th year, in June of 1994, with a surprising admission. "I really do hate to sing," she told an interviewer, even though that same month marked the latest album release in a recording career spanning 50 years and, little more than ten years before, she had won a Tony, a Grammy, and a Drama Desk award for her record-breaking one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. But to anyone who had known Horne since her Cotton Club days back in 1930's Harlem, Lena's dissatisfaction with her vocal abilities was nothing new.

A career in show business, in fact, had not seemed at all likely for the daughter born to Teddy and Edna Horne in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1917. Both her parents were from solidly respectable middle-class families who had escaped the poverty of the antebellum South by setting down roots in the more prosperous North in the last decade of the 19th century. Edna's parents, the Scottrons, appeared at all the best society affairs staged by Brooklyn's African-American bourgeoisie; while Teddy's parents, Edwin and Cora Horne , were equally well-regarded. Cora in particular was known for her passionate attachment to social causes, having been one of the earliest supporters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its infancy and having made sure her two-year-old granddaughter appeared in the NAACP's official magazine as the organization's youngest member. Although this streak of social activism would surface in Lena many years later, her family's secure position shielded her from the plight of the majority of African-Americans. The Hornes and the Scottrons lived in a world that mirrored that of upper-class American whites, with its opera houses, debutante balls, and high teas. But it was Lena's parents, Edna and Teddy, who would break the mold.

Horne once described her father as a renegade and claimed that the day she was born Teddy was desperately trying to win back the cash earmarked for hospital bills that he had lost at the card table. Teddy had a comfortable desk job with the N.Y. State Department of Labor but ignored his father's pleas to settle down by abandoning Edna and his young daughter in 1920 and moving to Pittsburgh, where he opened the hotel he would manage for the rest of his life. Almost immediately afterward, Edna succumbed to her girlhood dream of being an actress and joined the Lafayette Players, the stock company of Harlem's venerable Lafayette Theater. Lena was left in the care of her Horne grandparents, and Cora made sure to tutor her granddaughter in the nobility of the African-American cause and in the treachery of whites. Lena rarely saw Edna for the next four years, although Teddy paid sporadic visits to Brooklyn to keep an eye on his daughter's upbringing. In 1924, Edna sent a message that she was ill and asked Lena to come and stay with her in Harlem; but as soon as she recovered, Edna went back on the actors' circuit playing tent shows and vaudeville houses throughout the deep South. This time, Lena went with her. In the shanty towns, muddy field camps and urban ghettos on Edna's route, Lena learned for the first time how the majority of American blacks actually lived and the exploitation they suffered at the hands of whites.

By 1928, Lena was back in Brooklyn with her grandparents and was enrolled in the Brooklyn Girls High School, where dramatics and dancing were part of the curriculum. She performed for the first time in public as part of a dance recital staged by the dancing academy which she was also attending on weekends. But with Cora and Edwin Horne's deaths in 1932, Lena's peripatetic childhood found her back with Edna, who had now settled in Harlem and married an ex-officer from the Cuban army, Miguel Rodriguez. With money and steady work in short supply, Edna suggested that an audition could be arranged for Lena at the Cotton Club, which billed its chorus line as "tall, tan, and terrific" and, more important, paid $25 a week.

Now 16, Horne certainly fit the first two qualifications of the Cotton Club's description, for she was leggy and thin with the café au lait complexion and Caucasian features which the Cotton Club's white audience found so attractive. (Cora had claimed the Hornes carried Senegalese, Blackfoot Indian, and white blood.) But even Lena admitted her singing and dancing could not be described as "terrific." "I could carry a tune," she once remembered, "but I could hardly have been called a singer. I could dance a little, but I could hardly have been called a dancer. I was tall and skinny and I had very little going for me except a pretty face and long, long hair that framed it rather nicely." It was, indeed, her looks and not her talent that got her the job doing three shows a night wearing little else than three large ostrich feathers. She never went back to school, with Edna keeping the truant officer at bay by claiming that her daughter had simply disappeared.

Despite its location at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in the heart of Harlem, the Cotton Club's clientele was strictly white. It was run by the mob in those heady, violent Prohibition days and was no place for an attractive, light-skinned black girl. Edna came to the club every night to fend off, not always successfully, the advances made on her daughter by white patrons. Many years later, Horne would say that it was at the Cotton Club that she learned to hate white men. Even the swaggering bravado of Edna's husband Miguel was little help, with Miguel finding his head stuck down a toilet one night after foolishly suggesting to the Club's management that Horne should be given a raise. Finally, Edna called on her friend, bandleader Noble Sissle, for assistance.

Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra was one of the first all-black bands to be accepted by white audiences, especially after Noble's work on the score of Broadway's first musical with an all-black cast, Shufflin' Along. Sissle avoided the innovative and sensual jazz forms of the Harlem bands and provided his audiences with much more genteel dance music; he agreed to audition Lena after advising Edna that her underage daughter's contract with the Cotton Club gave her the right to simply leave work one night and never come back. Soon Lena found herself auditioning for Noble with the song "Dinner For One, Please, James." "When I think that really great singers like Ella Fitzgerald were signing with competing bands like Chick Webb's," Horne remembers, "I don't know why Noble wanted me. All I could do was carry a simple tune simply." But that was all Sissle wanted, for he knew that Lena's exotic beauty would do the rest. It was Sissle who gave Horne her first lessons in sophistication and style. "Remember," he would tell her, "you're a lady, not a whore. Don't let them treat you like one." His advice may have been belied by the discrimination the band experienced on the road, often sleeping in their bus and even, one night in Indiana, in a circus tent when whites-only hotels refused them accommodation.

After a year touring with Sissle, Horne obtained Edna's permission to spend Christmas of 1936 with her father in Pittsburgh. During the visit, Teddy introduced her to a young man of his acquaintance, Louis Jones, a minister's son and recent college graduate then working as a clerk for the county coroner's office. The two were married early in 1937, followed by the birth of a daughter Gail (Lumet Buckley) later that same year. Jones had no doubt expected Horne to settle down and raise a family, and even went so far as to forbid her to work, but Lena quickly discovered that being a housewife was not to her taste. Many years later, she would describe her first marriage as the biggest mistake she ever made, its only saving grace being the two children it produced. After a son Teddy was born in 1940, Horne left Jones, put her children in the care of relatives, and auditioned for the man who would do more for her career than anyone else to this point.

Charlie Barnet billed his all-white band as "The Blackest White Band of All." Barnet's idol was Duke Ellington, whose music and style he attempted to emulate, so it was no surprise to anyone when Barnet became one of the first white bandleaders to hire a black female singer. (Artie Shaw had also hired Billie Holiday at about this time.) Barnet's male singer, Bob Carrol, remembers the tall, thin woman with the long hair who showed up one night to sing. "She ran down a few tunes in the basement of the theater and then, without any arrangements, she did the next show—not only did it, but stopped it cold. She was just great!" Horne's experiences with Barnet's band laid the groundwork for her lifelong affection for musicians, black or white. "They didn't seem to care a thing about me except as a singer and a human being," Lena recalls. When Horne was sometimes refused a room in a hotel where the band planned to spend the night on the road, the entire orchestra walked out with her; and Barnet shrugged off

complaints from, on the one hand, audiences who objected to his hiring a black singer, and, on the other, fans who accused Barnet of fakery because Lena didn't look black enough. Still, Horne was forced to sit out her time between numbers in a convenient restroom rather than remaining on stage, and even Barnet suggested that Lena stay home when the band toured the deep South.

But it was Barnet who taught Horne the emotional phrasing and dramatic overtones that are the trademarks of her style, along with the technical knowledge to carry it off. "I learned more about music from the men I worked with in bands than I learned anywhere else," Horne says. "They taught me discipline and the value of rehearsing and how to train." Barnet's work with her paid off, for during this period Horne released her first album for RCA, The Birth of the Blues, and made her first appearance at New York's prestigious Café Society Downtown, then a showcase for new jazz and blues talent. But even with her first flush of success, Horne found it hard to forget her grandmother's warnings about the ways of white people, or the fact that she was a black performer in a mostly white entertainment business. She rarely socialized with any of her white admirers after finishing a show, while at the same time defending herself against the criticisms of other black entertainers who refused to perform for society whites. "Those audiences were getting a singer, not me," she would point out.

A survivor, honey, is exactly what I am.
—Lena Horne

Encouraged by this early success, Horne decided to move to Los Angeles, where she had been told work was more plentiful. Leaving Barnet's band, she opened a solo act at Hollywood's Little Troc club, where she was seen by manager Arthur Freed. Freed candidly admitted that the quality of Lena's voice was not what had attracted him, but rather the way she used it. "When she sings about love," he said, "that's love and you've heard all about it." Freed sensed that Horne's combination of singing and acting made her a natural for film work, and his instincts proved right when Louis B. Mayer signed her to a seven-year contract with his MGM studio in 1941. Her father, to whom Lena had remained close, flew out from Pittsburgh to help with the negotiations and make sure his daughter didn't suffer the same fate as many other blacks working in the film business. "I can hire a maid for her," Teddy told studio executives. "Why should she have to act one?" Consequently, the contract guaranteed her a starring role in at least one mainstream, big-budget MGM musical and contained language that protected Lena against the discriminatory practices of white Hollywood. Horne was among the first African-American performers to sign a long-term deal with a major movie studio, but the distinction was not without cost.

Her first screen test was not to the studio's liking because, it was felt, Horne looked too white, while a second test, in which she was slathered in blackface, was downright grotesque. The legendary Max Factor was called in to concoct a solution, which turned out to be what Factor called "Light Egyptian"—a skin coloring that proved so effective that Horne, some years later, lost the role of the mulatto Julie in the 1951 remake of Showboat to Ava Gardner . MGM finally found a part for her in a Red Skelton film called Panama Hattie, in which Lena sang "Just One of Those Things." Shrewdly, however, the studio made sure that Horne's character had nothing whatever to do with the main storyline of the film, thus allowing her to be cut from the prints when the picture was distributed in the South. The next year, 1943, proved a busy one for Lena, with appearances in As Thousands Cheer and, fulfilling the terms of her contract, starring roles in two adaptations of Broadway musicals featuring the top black entertainers of the day, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, the film that gave Horne her signature song. Between pictures, Lena joined her Hollywood peers in touring with USO shows at World War II training camps around the country, although she was usually sent out with an all-black troupe which was housed separately from white entertainers. Horne and fighter Joe Louis were the two main attractions for both black and white audiences on such tours, and it was said that the two became lovers during the war years.

As in New York, Horne felt trapped between two worlds. Black actors, who could only find film work as butlers and maids or in so-called "jungle films," resented Horne for the treatment her contract specified. Some even accused her of being a propaganda tool for the NAACP. At the same time, Horne was forced to remove her daughter Gail from a private school after a white teacher refused to punish another child for calling Gail a "nigger." Adding fuel to the fire, Lena had met and fallen in love with a white man, a musician named Lennie Hayton who was composing film scores for MGM during Horne's years at the studio. Their relationship probably began long before the two were married in Paris in 1947, and it is possible that Lena left Hollywood when she did because gossip columnists like Louella Parsons were about to reveal her relationship with Hayton. After their marriage became public, Lena's mother refused to speak to her; Hayton's family similarly rejected the couple, to say nothing of the difficulty a black-Jewish couple experienced in finding hotels which would accept them and neighborhoods in which they could purchase a home. In the Los Angeles neighborhood where Horne and Hayton finally settled, Lennie felt compelled to purchase a shotgun after threats began showing up in the mail. But to Lena, her love for Hayton made perfect sense. "Given my experience, I don't think I could have married anyone but a musician," she said, "since they had become the only people with whom I could feel I was myself."

It was Lennie Hayton who gave the final polish to Horne's nightclub act, finding her the right material, arranging it himself to suit her unique style, and then booking her in the clubs where she would receive the most exposure. Both Horne and Hayton knew that her natural environment was in an intimate nightclub setting. "It's so physical," Lena said. "It's all body." Her attraction to nightclubs and cabarets was fortunate, for by the early 1950s Lena found herself blacklisted from Hollywood after being labeled as a suspected Communist during the McCarthy hearings.

Starting with her arrival in Los Angeles some ten years earlier, Horne had often spoken for, and worked with, organizations like the Council on African Affairs and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, among the many liberal groups the House Un-American Activities Committee considered "communistic." Lena also suffered from her friendship with actor Paul Robeson, an outspoken proponent of African-American dignity and racial tolerance whose acting career in the United States was ruined because of his suspected ties with left-wing groups. Although she was never officially accused of being a Communist, Horne was cited in McCarthy's published mouthpieces, Red Channels and Counterattack. "Sure those years hurt me financially," she once said, "but they also educated me to a lot of things. I began to grow as a person under the blacklist/redlist. I didn't torture myself because it's never unusual for black people to have a bad time." Like many others who had been named or publicly accused, including Robeson, Horne found refuge in Europe, where Lennie booked her into the Palladium in London and at the same club where Josephine Baker was playing in Paris.

When the couple ventured back to America, Lennie managed to keep Lena's career on track, finding that nightclub and cabaret audiences

were more interested in having a good time than in worrying about who was or was not a Communist. Under Hayton's guidance, contracts were negotiated that allowed Horne privileges then thought unusual for a black performer, such as being allowed to enter and leave a hotel by the front door, call for room service, and use the main elevators rather than the freight elevator. Horne took swift action against any hint of discrimination, suing a restaurant in Chicago for refusing her service and canceling her appearance at a Miami Beach hotel which denied her and her musicians rooms. "Discrimination deteriorates you mentally," she said as, with the rise of the civil-rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, she took a more activist stance against racial prejudice. She joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and donated the proceeds of her performance at a benefit concert in 1963 to the Southern National Christian Conference (SNCC), both organizations being at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights. She electrified the audience at the benefit by singing the

protest song "Now!," which had been especially written for the occasion and which included the lyrics: "We want more than just a promise, Say goodbye to Uncle Thomas."

Horne's recording of the song sold well, even though many radio stations considered it inflammatory and refused to play it. Later in that tumultuous decade, Lena attended a conference on civil rights arranged by then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, appeared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and spoke with Medgar Evers just two days before his assassination in Mississippi. Friends warned Horne that her carefully cultivated public image as the "good negro" was in danger, but her anger became increasingly evident in her public speeches, especially after the murders of Robert Kennedy and Dr. King. "All of us who have been symbols of Negro aspirations for the past couple of decades have minded our manners … and nothing has come of it," she said. "My generation has been sold a bill of goods … a cheap bill of goods." Even after the passage of anti-discrimination legislation and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, Horne still smoldered. "When people say 'Hasn't there been progress?,' I'm forced to say, 'Yes, a little.' But I don't like to settle for a little!"

Despite her friends' warnings, Horne's career only seemed to prosper. One sign was the first movie offer from Hollywood in nearly 20 years, Death of a Gunfighter, in 1969. It was her first non-musical role, playing the madam of a brothel in the Old West who falls for the local sheriff, played by Richard Widmark, whom she dubbed "my blue-eyed soul brother." The end of the film, in which Horne's and Widmark's characters marry, mirrored Lena's real-life interracial marriage to Hayton. While shooting the picture, Lena found that Hollywood was a different place from the old red-baiting days, and she began to think that maybe that little bit of progress had been worth something after all. "Now that I admit that I have prejudices and so do [whites], I find myself a little more at ease with people," she said. "I'm not afraid to feel things, even though I'm angry just as much." While keeping up a recording and touring schedule, Horne also appeared in several television specials during the late 1960s and early 1970s, finding comfort in her work when three of the people closest to her died within a year: her father, of whom she said that "everything inside of me that was like him has protected me," then her husband Lennie, and finally her son Teddy, who died of a kidney infection.

In 1978, Horne appeared on Broadway in a revival of the musical Pal Joey and found a new, younger audience by playing Glinda, the good witch, in Sidney Lumet's film The Wiz, in which she sang the show-stopper "If You Believe." (Lumet was her former son-in-law, having married and divorced Gail some years earlier.) Then, in May of 1981, Horne returned to Broadway with what was to have been a one-month engagement at the Nederlander Theater of a one-woman show, Lena: The Lady and Her Music. No one involved with the show, including Horne, was prepared for its phenomenal success, running for 13 months before closing on Lena's 65th birthday, on June 30, 1982. Musicologist Jonathan Schwartz called her performance an "unnarcissistic presentation of self: an adult woman, intensely awake, a performer without facade at full vocal and emotional power." Horne put it more simply. "On the stage," she said, "I'm not lying about anything." Her work won her a special Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Grammy, spurring Lena to take the show on a world tour in 1982 and 1983.

After taking Broadway by storm, Horne began to give herself more time between appearances and, since the mid-1980s, has performed mainly at benefit concerts or special cabaret appearances. But she continued to record, her later albums being a tribute to the late composer Billy Strayhorn, 1994's We'll Be Together Again and 1995's How Long Has This Been Going On. But even after a half-century of singing, Lena Horne still saw room for improvement. "The truth is that these days I'd like to sound like Aretha Franklin. But I'm not," she says with a smile. "I'm Lena."