LEGENDARY SINGER LENA HORNE DIES
ARMENPRESS
MAY 10, 2010
NEW YORK
Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled
the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not
socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom,
died Sunday. She was 92.
Horne died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital
spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details,
AP reports.
Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed
her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason
for her success.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could
accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind
of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I
contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing
with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub
and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role
of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her
rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.
On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was
at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the
sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp"
and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957,
reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable
performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the
best female singer of songs."
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation
of racism.
"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people.
Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out … it was
a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York,
in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker’s book
"I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America."
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in
1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical
numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without
affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy,
"Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm"
in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946.
"Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing
actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.
Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of
self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can’t reach and
therefore can’t hurt" she once said.
Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil
rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode
a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her
Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer
used two renditions – one straight and the other gut-wrenching – of
"Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey
of her five-decade career.
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless.
… tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life
has chiseled, burnished, refined her."
When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress
Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena
Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of
color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave,
was born in Brooklyn June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black
bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book
"The Hornes: An American Family" that among their relatives was a
college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin
D. Roosevelt.
Dropping out of school at 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne
joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night
spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.
She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle’s orchestra,
billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined
Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in 1940.
A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little
Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a
white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an
"Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she
was at MGM.
But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film
Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio’s
efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.
"I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood
sort of hoped I’d become," Horne once said. "I’m me, and I’m like
nobody else."
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the
Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism
until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German
prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were
consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and
– along with her friendship with Paul Robeson – got her name onto
blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the
civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a
racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000
others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave
his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same
year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before
his assassination.
It was also in the mid-’60s that she put out an autobiography,
"Lena," with author Richard Schickel.
The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh
burst of artistry.
She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in
Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and
England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce
in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts
that when Horne was asked by a lover why she’d married a white man,
she replied: "To get even with him."
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970-71,
and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform
or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian
Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with
results that surprised her.
"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It
was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."
And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.
"I wouldn’t trade my life for anything," she said, "because being
black made me understand."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
