Lena Horne
Opening Remarks
Lena Horne had a long career, but it could have been so much more. She was the victim of two things which severely hampered her ability to gain the attention her talents warranted. One, she was a black woman in an age where black women took a back seat, in life and in show business. Secondly, she was an activist and got blacklisted. Many of the great black women artists of the day, Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Halle Berry and many more owe a great deal to those like Lena Horne who stood up for what they believed and paved the way for the future generation. Her signature song, Stormy Weather was an apt song to pin to her. Her life was stormy yet interesting and she never lied down for anyone, in any way.
She was a survivor, and someone, who despite all her troubles lasted more than 60 years in the business.
She was a survivor, and someone, who despite all her troubles lasted more than 60 years in the business.
The Facts Of Life
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York City
Reported to be descended from the John C. Calhoun family, both sides of her family were a mixture of African American, Native American—notably, Blackfoot—and European American descent, and each belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth", the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated African Americans
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=174
Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne, Jr., a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three and moved to an upper-middle-class black community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother Edna was an actress with a black theater troupe and traveled extensively
was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne
When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother., they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old.
At the age of 18 she moved in with her estranged father in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine as well as other Jazz Greats.
Joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood
Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.
Horne married Louis Jordan Jones in January 1937 and lived in Pittsburgh. On December 21, 1937 they had a daughter, Gail (later known as Gail Lumet Buckley, a best-selling author)
and a son, Edwin Jones, born on February 7, 1940, and died on September 12, 1970 of kidney disease) Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944.
Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947 in Paris. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971.
In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial couple. She later admitted in an Ebony, May 1980 interview she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business, but had learned to love him in a way.
(at the end of this profile will be the whole Ebony magazine interview, less all the ads). Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen"  |
In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall who took Lena under her wing.
She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months to headline a nightclub revue on the west coast.
Horne was primarily a nightclub performer during this period, and it was during a 1943 club engagement in Hollywood that talent scouts approached Horne to work in pictures. She chose Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and became the first black performer to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio.
November 1944 she was featured in an episode of the popular radio series, Suspense, as a fictional nightclub singer, with a large speaking role along with her singing. In 1945 and 1946 she sang with Billy Eckstine's Orchestra.
She made her debut in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, (1943)
She appeared in a number of musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (also 1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that films featuring her had to be re-edited for showing in states where theaters could not show films with black performers.
Horne wanted to be considered for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life, due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release, though her voice was heard on the soundtrack album.
Changes of direction
By the mid-1950s, Horne was disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She only made two major appearances in MGM films during the decade, 1950's Duchess of Idahoand the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas.
She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her political views. She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter
Glinda in The Wiz (film) (1978)
and co-hosting the 1994 MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III, in which she was candid about her treatment by the studio.
After leaving Hollywood, Horne established herself as one of the premiere nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In 1957, a live album entitled, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, became the biggest selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA-Victor label.
Horne was nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" (for her part in the "Calypso" musical Jamaica) which, at Lena's request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall.
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| Horne performing on The Bell Telephone Hour, 1965. |
In 1970, she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in the hour-long Harry & Lena for ABC
In 1973, she co-starred with Tony Bennett in Tony and Lena. Horne and Bennett subsequently toured the U.S. and U.K. in a show together.
Horne also made several appearances on The Flip Wilson Show.
Horne played herself on television programs such as:
The Muppet Show
Sesame Street
Sanford and Son
as well as a 1985 performance on The Cosby Show and a 1993-appearance on A Different World.
In the summer of 1980, Horne, 63 years old and intent on retiring from show business, embarked on a two month series of benefit concerts sponsored by Delta Sigma Theta. These concerts were represented as Horne's farewell tour, yet her retirement lasted less than a year.
In 1980, Horne earned a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, the entire show was performed again and videotaped for television broadcast and home video release. The tour began a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the July 4, 1982 weekend. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada through June 17, 1984.
Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects.
The 1990s found Horne considerably more active in the recording studio. Following her 1993 performance at a tribute to the musical legacy of her good friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's longtime collaborator), she decided to record an album composed largely of Strayhorn's and Ellington's songs the following year, We'll Be Together Again.
To coincide with the release of the album, Horne made what would be her final concert performances at New York's Supper Club and Carnegie Hall. That same year, Horne also lent her vocals to a recording of "Embraceable You" on Sinatra's Duets II album.
In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne essentially retired from performing and largely retreated from public view.
Ebony Magazine Interview
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