Best Known As: Singer of the jazz standard "Stormy Weather"
A pioneer among African-American performers, Lena Horne had the talent and beauty to crack the race barrier in Hollywood in the 1940s. A smooth singer of bluesy ballads, Horne appeared onstage in Harlem when she was only 14 years old, and by age 16 she was singing in the famous Cotton Club. Eventually she made her way into films, starring in the popular 1943 musicals Stormy Weather (with the tap-dancing The Nicholas Brothers) and Cabin in the Sky (with jazz legend Louis Armstrong). In later years she sang in clubs and was a steady presence on TV and radio. Horne's active career spanned six decades, and in 1989 she was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Horne was due to be played by Janet Jackson in a 2004 TV movie, but Horne barred Jackson from taking the part after Jackson flashed her near-naked breast during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl... Horne was a longtime spokesperson for Sanka coffee.
Lena Horne (born 1917) was one of the most popular Black entertainers of the 20th century. A woman of great beauty and commanding stage presence, she performed in nightclubs, concert halls, movies, and on radio and television.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1917. Her father, Edwin "Teddy" Horne, a numbers game banker, left the household when Lena was three. Her mother, Edna, was an actress with a black theater troupe and traveled extensively. Horne was raised principally by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Even so, her early life was nomadic since her mother often took her on the road with her. They lived in various parts of the south before Horne was returned to her grandparents home in 1931. After they died, Horne lived with a friend of her mother's, Laura Rollock. Shortly thereafter, Edna married Miguel Rodriguez and Horne moved in with them.
From an early age, Horne had ambitions to be a performer - much against the wishes of her family who felt she should have higher aspirations. The Hornes were an established middle class family, with several members holding college degrees and distinguished positions in organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League. Nonetheless, Horne pursued her own course and was hired at age 16 at Harlem's famed Cotton Club to dance in the chorus where she held her own against older and more experienced cast members. In 1934, though she had no previous singing experience, she was assigned a singing duet in the club with Avon Long (of "Porgy and Bess" fame). The success of the number inspired Lena to take voice lessons and also got a small role in an all-black Broadway show "Dance with Your Gods." In 1935 she became the featured singer with the Noble Sissle Society Orchestra, which performed at many first-rate hotel ballrooms and nightclubs, including the Cotton Club. She left Sissle in 1936 to perform as a "single" in a variety of New York clubs.
In 1937 Horne married minor politician Louis Jones, by whom she had a daughter and a son (they separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944). She gained some early stage experience in Lew Leslie's revues, "Blackbirds of 1939" and "Blackbirds of 1940, " and crossed the racial barrier later in 1940 when she joined one of the great white swing bands, the Charlie Barnet Orchestra. But in that strained context she suffered the many indignities of racial prejudice, especially from hotels and restaurants catering exclusively to whites. She left Barnet in 1941, and her career received an immediate boost from impresario John Hammond, who got her a long engagement at the prestigious Cafe Society Downtown, a club in New York City that catered to intellectual and social activists, both black and white. It was at the Cafe Society that Horne learned about African American history, politics and culture and developed a new appreciation of her heritage. She rekindled her acquaintance with Paul Robeson, whom she had known as a child. In her autobiography, In Person: Lena Horne she stated that her conversations with Robeson made her realize "that we [African Americans] were going forward and that knowledge gave me a strength and a sense of unity. Yes, we were going forward and it was up to me to learn more about us and to join actively in our struggle." From that point onward, Horne became a significant voice in the struggle for equality and justice for African Americans in America.
In 1943, a long booking at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel brought her coverage in such national magazines as LIFE and, in conjunction with a number of movie appearances, established her as the highest-paid black entertainer in America. She was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM - the first African American woman since 1915 to sign a term contract with a film studio. "They didn't know what to do with me" she told Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight regarding the studios dilemma, she wasn't dark enough in color to star with many of the African American actors of the day and her roles in white films were limited, since Hollywood wasn't ready to depict interracial relationships on screen.
Given these harsh limitations imposed on blacks in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood movies (they either played menials or performed song and/or dance numbers), Horne's film career is impressive. After singing roles in "Panama Hattie" (1942), "Harlem on Parade" (1942), "I Dood It" (1943), "Swing Fever" (1943), and "As Thousands Cheer" (1943), she was given a starring role as a seductress in an all-black allegory, "Cabin in the Sky" (1943), which also starred her idol, Ethel Waters (with whom she did not get along). There followed another major role in "Stormy Weather" (1943) and then some non-speaking roles in "Broadway Rhythm" (1944), "Two Girls and a Sailor" (1944), and a musical biography of Rodgers and Hart, "Words and Music" (1948). She refused to take on any roles that were demeaning to her as a woman of color. This alienated her from other black performers and caused an uproar among the black Hollywood "extras." Horne's daughter, in her book The Hornes: An American Family called them "a stock company of stereotypes" who felt threatened by Horne's success. They accused her of being a tool of the NAACP. In her own defense Horne herself wrote in her own autobiography Lena, "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into."
Despite her great fame, Horne continued to experience humiliating racial rebukes, and in the late 1940s she sued a number of restaurants and theaters for race discrimination and also became politically allied with Paul Robeson in the Progressive Citizens of America, a leftist group combating racism. While entertaining troops at Fort Reilly, Kansas during World War II, she saw German POW's seated in the front row and African American soldiers forced to sit behind them. Horne left the stage immediately, went to the local NAACP office and filed a complaint. MGM Studios pulled her off the tour, so she used her own money to travel and entertain the troops. She also assisted Eleanor Roosevelt in her quest for anti-lynching legislation. After the war, Horne worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination.
In 1947, shortly after performing at the London Casino, she married white bandleader Lennie Hayton, a marriage that was kept secret for three years because of racial pressures. Until his death in 1971, Hayton was also her pianist, arranger, conductor, and manager.
In 1950 Horne experienced great success at London's Palladium. However, upon her return to the United States, Horne became one of the many victims of the political blacklist. Because of her leftist sympathies and her racial militancy, she was denied work in radio, television, films, and recordings, though she continued to work the posh hotel and nightclub circuit. By the mid-1950s, the anti-left freeze had thawed somewhat and she made a movie appearance in "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956) and recorded for the first time in five years. In 1957 she drew record crowds to the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, and in 1958 and 1959 she starred in a Broadway musical, "Jamaica."
During the 1960's Horne was involved in the American Civil Rights movement. She participated in the March on Washington in 1963, performing at rallies in the South and elsewhere, and working on behalf of the National Council for Negro Women. During the same period, she was also very visible on television appearing on popular variety shows and in her own special Lena in Concert in 1969. In 1969 Horne also landed a straight acting role, starring opposite Richard Widmark in the movie "Death of a Gun-fighter."
Lennie Hayton's death in 1971, which followed the deaths of Horne's father and her son, plunged her into a state of depression from which she emerged seemingly more resolute than ever. In 1973 and 1974 she toured England and the United States with Tony Bennett; in 1979, on a bill with composer Marvin Hamlisch at the Westbury (New York) Music Fair, Horne's performance inspired critic John S. Wilson to observe a change in her, "an intensity, sometimes warm and intimate, sometimes ominously commanding in every syllable that she projects." She also, for the first time, shed her customary reserve, even permitting herself some patter between songs, and seemed to let the audience get emotionally closer to her.
In 1981 Horne had her greatest triumph, a Broadway show called "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, " which for 14 months was the talk of show business. It won a special Tony award, and the soundtrack won two Grammy awards. It became the standard against which all one-person shows are measured. In 1982 she took the production on a very successful cross-country tour. Horne wrote of the experience in Ebony magazine (1990) "as the most rewarding event in my entire career."
In the 1990's, Horne cut back on performing telling Time, "I went through this delayed reaction to the deaths … of my father and my son and my husband Lennie Hayton … For about nine years I went underground." She was drawn back from semi-retirement to do a tribute concert for a long-time friend, composer Billy Strayhorn at the JVC Jazz Festival "when I came back to do the concert … and it went over so well, everybody was saying 'You ought to keep singing.' So to shut them up, I did it, " Horne told Jet. At age 76 she released her first album in a decade We'll Be Together Again. In 1997, on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Horne was honored at the JVC Jazz Festival, with a tribute concert and the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement in Vocal Artistry.
Lena Horne was a woman of great beauty and majesty: the eyes sparkled vivaciously and the mouth curled with seething emotion. "She is one of the incomparable performers of our time, " Richard Watts Jr. wrote of Horne in the New York Post in 1957. Her pride in her heritage, her refusal to compromise herself, and her innate elegance, grace and dignity made Horne a legendary figure, whose role as a catalyst in the elevation of the status of African Americans in the performing arts provide an enduring legacy.
Further Reading
An early biography is Helen Greenberg and Carlton Moss's In Person, Lena Horne (1950). A more recent work is Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Horne (1984) by James Haskins with Kathleen Benson. The best sources, however, are Lena's autobiography, Lena (1965, paperback 1986) co-authored by Richard Schickel, and The Hornes: An American Family (1986) by Lena Horne's daughter Gail Lumet Buckley.
Born Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Edwin ("Teddy"; a numbers banker) and Edna (an actress) Horne; married Louis Jones, 1937 (divorced 1944); married Leonard George ("Lennie") Hayton, 1947 (died 1971); children: (first marriage) Gail, Edwin ("Teddy"; deceased). Memberships: NAACP, Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), Delta Sigma Theta (honorary member).
Career
Began singing at Cotton Club in New York City, 1933; appeared in Broadway musical Dance with Your Gods, 1934; featured singer with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra, 1935-37, and Charlie Barnet Orchestra, 1940-41; appeared in musical Blackbirds of 1939, 1939, and at Cafe Society Downtown, 1941; featured performer at Little Troc nightclub, Hollywood, 1942; appeared in motion pictures, including The Duke Is Tops, 1938, Panama Hattie, 1942, Stormy Weather, 1943, Cabin in the Sky, 1943, Death of a Gunfighter, 1969, The Wiz, 1978, and That's Entertainment III, 1993; signed record contract with RCA Victor, 1956; featured in Broadway musical Jamaica, 1957-59; appeared on television, 1950s-80s, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Como Show, and The Cosby Show; starred in Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music on Broadway, 1981-82.
Life's Work
"She is one of the incomparable performers of our time," Richard Watts, Jr., wrote of Lena Horne in the New York Post in 1957. This assessment continued to hold true decades later: Lena Horne, the beautiful, elegant, and talented singer and actress has become a legend. Horne encountered adversity throughout her career: first from her family, who disapproved of her choice of occupation; then from white audiences and managers, who were uncomfortable with her assertiveness; and even from other African American performers, who felt threatened by her refusal to accept stereotypical roles. But her strong sense of her own identity, of justice, and of dignity forced her to struggle against this adversity--and allowed her to triumph.
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Edwin "Teddy" Horne and his wife, Edna. Horne's parents separated by the time she was three years old, and she lived for several years with her paternal grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her early life was nomadic: Horne's mother, who was a fairly unsuccessful stage performer, took the young Lena on the road with her, and they lived in various parts of the South before returning to Horne's grandparents' home in Brooklyn in 1931. After her grandparents died, she was sent to live with her mother's friend Laura Rollock. Shortly thereafter, her mother married Miguel "Mike" Rodriguez, and Horne moved in with them.
Horne had early ambitions to be a performer--against the wishes of her family, who believed that she should aspire to greater heights. The Hornes were an established middle-class family, with several members holding college degrees and distinguished positions in organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Nevertheless, Horne persisted, and in 1933 she began her first professional engagement--at the Cotton Club, the famed Harlem nightclub. She sang in the chorus, and though only sixteen years old, held her own among the older and more experienced cast members. She soon left high school to devote herself to her stage career.
In 1934 Horne had a small role in an all-black Broadway show called Dance with Your Gods. The next year, she left the Cotton Club and began performing as the featured singer with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra under the name "Helena Horne," which Sissle thought more glamorous than "Lena." In 1937 Horne quit her tour with the Sissle Orchestra to marry Louis Jones, a friend of her father, and live with him in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During this short and troubled marriage, Horne went to Hollywood to appear in an all-black film called The Duke Is Tops. In 1939 she had a role in the musical revue Blackbirds of 1939 at the Hudson Theatre in New York City; it ran for only eight nights. Before her marriage to Jones ended in divorce, she had two children, Gail and Edwin ("Teddy").
Horne left Jones in 1940, taking a job as a singer with Charlie Barnet's band and going out on tour with him. Horne was the only black member of the ensemble, and the kind of racial discrimination she encountered from audiences, hotel managers, and others was so unsettling that she decided to quit the band. In 1941, she began performing at the Cafe Society Downtown, a club in New York City that catered to intellectuals and social activists, both black and white.
At the Cafe Society, Horne learned about black history, politics, and culture and developed a new appreciation for her heritage. She rekindled her acquaintance with Paul Robeson, whom she had known when she was a child. In her autobiography entitled In Person: Lena Horne, she said that through her conversations with Robeson, she realized "that we [African Americans] were going forward, and that knowledge gave me a strength and a sense of unity. Yes, we were going forward, and it was up to me to learn more about us and to join actively in our struggle." From this point on, Horne became a significant voice in the struggle for equality and justice for blacks in America.
In the summer of 1941, Horne moved to California after getting an offer to appear at an as-yet-unbuilt club on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood called the Trocadero. Although the plans for the Trocadero fell through, another, smaller club, the Little Troc, opened in February of 1942, and Horne was featured there. In the same year, she signed a seven-year contract with MGM--the first black woman since 1915 to sign a term contract with a film studio. "They didn't quite know what to do with me," she told Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight regarding the studio's resulting dilemma: she wasn't sufficiently dark skinned to star with many of the African American actors of the day, and her roles in white films were limited, since Hollywood wasn't ready to depict interracial relationships on screen. Her first film under contract was Panama Hattie, a 1942 motion picture version of Cole Porter's Broadway musical, in which she had a small singing role in one scene.
Several of Horne's roles in subsequent films were similar. James Haskins, in his book Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Horne, wrote: "The image of Lena, always elegantly gowned, singing while draped around a marble column in a lavishly produced musical sequence, would become virtually standardized. Only her ability to appear enigmatic prevented her from being completely exploited in these stock sequences; she managed to carry them off with a dignity that, coupled with her aloof and detached delivery, enhanced both her mystery and her audience appeal." The sad footnote to this is that Horne's scenes were purposely constructed so that they could be cut out with ease when the films were shown to white audiences in the South.
Horne appeared in the all-black film musicals Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, both released in 1943, but she refused to take on any roles that were demeaning to her as a woman of color. This led to an uproar among the black Hollywood "extras," who represented what Horne's daughter, in her book The Hornes: An American Family, called "a kind of stock company of stereotypes." These actors felt threatened and accused Horne of being a tool of the NAACP. In her own defense, Horne wrote in her 1965 autobiography Lena: "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into."
During World War II, Horne went on USO tours along the West Coast and in the South. She appeared on the Armed Forces Radio Service on programs such as Jubilee,G.I. Journal, and Command Performances and helped Eleanor Roosevelt press for antilynching legislation. After the war, she worked on behalf of Japanese-Americans who faced discrimination because Japan had been an enemy of the United States.
In the fall of 1947, Horne went to Europe with Lennie Hayton, a white musician she had met in Hollywood. They were married in December in Paris because interracial marriages were against the law in California. Back in Hollywood, she appeared in more film musicals, among them, Till the Clouds Roll By in 1946, Words and Music in 1948, and The Duchess of Idaho in 1950.
In the early 1950s, Horne, along with many of her colleagues, was a victim of the anti-Communist "witch hunts" that successfully blacklisted performers who were thought to have ties to Communist organizations or activities. The blacklisting hurt Horne's career and kept her from appearing on radio and television. By the mid-1950s, though, Horne was cleared of these charges. In 1956, she signed a recording contract with RCA Victor. Her albums included Stormy Weather,Lena Horne at the Coconut Grove, and Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria. The latter became the top-selling recording by a female artist in RCA's history. In 1957 Horne was featured in Jamaica, a Broadway musical with an all-black cast. The show had a successful run, closing in the spring of 1959.
In the 1960s, Horne was involved in the American civil rights movement, participating in the March on Washington in 1963, performing at rallies in the South and elsewhere, and working on behalf of the National Council for Negro Women. During the same period she appeared on various television programs, including several performances on the popular Ed Sullivan and Perry Como variety shows, and her own special, Lena in Concert, in 1969. In the same year she appeared in a nonsinging role in the western Death of a Gunfighter.
The 1970s began tragically for Horne: her son, Teddy, died of kidney disease in 1970, her father died in the same year, and Lennie Hayton died of a heart attack in 1971. However, the decade offered a variety of opportunities for Horne to perform. She appeared on Broadway with Tony Bennett in 1974 in a show called Tony and Lena and was featured in several television commercials. In 1978, she played the role of Glinda, the Good Witch, in the film version of The Wiz, the all-black musical based on The Wizard of Oz.
In the summer of 1980, Horne launched a "farewell tour," but her greatest success of the decade was her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which opened in May of 1981 at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre. The show ran for two years and was a tremendous success--so much so that Horne was given a special Tony Award for her performance. She also received a Drama Desk Award and a special citation from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. The soundtrack to the show, produced by Quincy Jones, won two Grammy awards. In Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography, Haskins noted that the show was "not only the longest-running one-woman show in the history of Broadway but the standard against which every future one-person show would be measured." Horne herself, in an article she wrote for Ebony magazine in 1990, described the show as "the most rewarding event in my entire career."
In the 1990s, Horne cut back on performing, but she continued to be a favorite of audiences throughout the world. Her pride in her heritage and her refusal to compromise herself, combined with an innate ability to project elegance, grace, and dignity, have made her a legendary figure. Some observers consider her most important role to be that of a catalyst in the elevation of the status of African Americans in the performing arts. But Horne laments the sluggishness of progress in Hollywood; if given the chance to do it all again, she told Leonard Feather of Modern Maturity, "I'd be a schoolteacher."
Awards
Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award, 1981; Drama Desk Award, 1981; Actors Equity Paul Robeson Award, 1982; Dance Theater of Harlem Emergence Award, 1982; Handel Medallion, 1982; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1983; Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime contribution to the arts, 1984; Essence Award, 1993; Ebony 's Lifetime Achievement Award; two Grammy awards.
Works
Selective Discography
(With the Lennie Layton Orchestra) Lena Goes Latin, recorded in 1963, DRG, 1987.
(With Sammy Davis and Joe Williams) The Men in My Life, Three Cherries, 1989.
Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena, 1941-1958, Bluebird, 1990.
Lena Horne, Royal Collection, 1992.
At Long Last Lena, RCA, 1992.
Greatest Hits, CSI, 1992.
The Best of Lena Horne, Curb, 1993.
Stormy Weather, RCA Victor.
Lena Horne at the Coconut Grove, RCA Victor.
Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, RCA Victor.
Further Reading
Books
Buckley, Gail Lumet, The Hornes: An American Family, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Haskins, James, and Kathleen Benson, Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Horne, Stein & Day, 1984.
Horne, Lena, as told to Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss, In Person: Lena Horne, Greenberg, 1950.
Horne, Lena, and Richard Schickel, Lena, Doubleday, 1965.
Wormley, Stanton L., and Lewis H. Fenderson, editors, Many Shades of Black, William & Co., 1969.
Periodicals
Ebony, May 1980; November 1990.
Modern Maturity, February/March 1993, p. 28.
New York Post, November 1, 1957.
New York Times, May 4, 1981.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from Leonard Maltin's interview with Lena Horne, broadcast on Entertainment Tonight, ABC-TV, March 22, 1993.
(born June 30, 1917, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. singer and actress. In her youth she was a dancer at Harlem's Cotton Club, and by age 18 she was singing with popular bands. She starred in many films, including Stormy Weather (1943) and The Wiz (1978). Her album Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria (1957) was a great success, as was her appearance in the musical Jamaica (1957). Her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music (1981), was hailed as her masterpiece. She continued to perform and record into the 1990s.
Representative Albums: "Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena (1941-1958)," "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," "The Fabulous Lena Horne"
Representative Songs: "Stormy Weather," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Love Me or Leave Me"
Biography
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightclub entertaining, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for more than 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s. In conjunction with her club work, she also maintained a recording career that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unremarked in the script. Horne herself was a pivotal figure in the changing attitudes about race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her day, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that frequently she was encouraged to try to "pass" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social struggle enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out in favor of racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Both sides of her family claimed a mixture of African-Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians, and both were part of what black leader W.E.B. DuBois called "the talented tenth," the upper stratum of the American black population made up of middle-class, well-educated African-Americans. Her parents, however, might both be described as mavericks from that tradition. Her father, Edwin Fletcher Horne, Jr., worked for the New York State Department of Labor, but one of her biographers describes him more accurately as "a 'numbers' banker": his real profession was gambling. Her mother, Edna Louise (Scottron) Horne, aspired to act. The two lived in a Brooklyn brownstone with Horne's paternal grandparents, teacher and newspaper editor Edwin Fletcher Horne, Sr. and his wife, Cora (Calhoun) Horne, a civil rights activist and early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909 and was headed by DuBois. (Indeed, Horne herself could claim a similar association. A photograph of her as a two-year-old appears on the cover of the October 1919 issue of the NAACP's Branch Bulletin, describing her as the organization's youngest member!)
Horne's father and mother separated in August 1920 when she was three, later divorcing. Her father moved to Seattle before eventually settling in Pittsburgh, where he ran a hotel when he wasn't traveling the country to attend and gamble on sporting events. Horne and her mother initially remained in her grandparents' home, but when Horne was about five, her mother left to pursue her acting career, initially with the Lafayette Stock Company in Harlem. Horne recalled in her 1965 autobiography Lena (written with Richard Schickel) that she visited her mother occasionally and even made her stage debut as a young child in the play Madame X in Philadelphia. After a couple of years, Horne's mother took her on the road with her, and from the age of six or seven to the age of 11 she was raised in various locations in the South and the Midwest by her mother, relatives, and paid companions, with frequent trips back to Brooklyn. Finally, in early 1929, she returned permanently to her grandparents' home. She stayed there until September 1932, when her grandmother died, then went to live with a family friend. While attending Girls High School in Brooklyn, she also took dancing lessons, even playing with a group at the Harlem Opera House for a week in 1933. Her mother, meanwhile, had been living in Cuba, where she had remarried. She returned to New York and reclaimed her daughter. They lived in Brooklyn, then moved to the Bronx, and eventually Harlem. Money was tight in those Depression years, and Horne's mother obtained an audition for her at the Cotton Club through a friend. She was hired as a chorus girl at the club at the age of 16.
Horne first attracted attention beyond the chorus when she replaced a sick performer in a performance of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "As Long As I Live" with Avon Long. Soon after, she sang "Cocktails for Two" with Claude Hopkins & His Orchestra on a theater date with the Cotton Club troupe, and she began taking singing lessons. She was spotted at the Cotton Club by a theatrical producer and cast in a small part in the play Dance With Your Gods, which opened a brief run on October 6, 1934, marking her Broadway debut. In 1935, she left the Cotton Club and took a job singing with Noble Sissle & His Orchestra, billed as Helena Horne. She made her recording debut with Sissle on March 11, 1936, singing "That's What Love Did to Me" and "I Take to You," both released by Decca Records.
Horne was introduced to Louis Jordan Jones, a Pittsburgh political operative, by her father. In January 1937, she retired from show business to marry him; their daughter, Gail, was born December 21, 1937. Jones owed his job a clerk in the county coroner's office to political patronage. It did not bring in much money, and in 1938, when Horne was approached by an agent with an offer to co-star in a low-budget all-black movie musical with a mere ten-day shooting schedule in Hollywood, she accepted. The film was The Duke Is Tops, released in July 1938. Later in the year, Horne was asked to take on a more time-consuming project, a part in a new mounting of producer Lew Leslie's all-black musical revue Blackbirds. Again, she accepted in the name of increasing the family income, spending months in rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts before Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 opened on Broadway on February 11, 1939. One of Horne's numbers was "You're So Indifferent," written by Sammy Fain and Mitchell Parish, a song she would keep in her repertoire. The show ran only nine performances, closing February 18.
Horne returned to Pittsburgh, where she temporarily separated from her husband, then reconciled with him. She began taking singing engagements in the homes of wealthy families in the area. She also became pregnant again, and her son, Edwin Fletcher ("Teddy") Jones, was born in February 1940. That fall, she made a final separation from her husband (they were formally divorced in June 1944) and moved to New York to restart her career. In December, she accepted an offer to join the orchestra of white bandleader Charlie Barnet, one of the few instances of integration among swing bands at the time. She made a handful of recordings with Barnet in January 1941 that were released on RCA Victor's discount label Bluebird Records. After only a few months, however, the difficulties of encountering racial discrimination while touring and her desire to have a home where she could raise her children (Jones let her have her daughter, but ultimately retained custody of her son) caused her to look for a job in New York, and in March 1941 she began singing at the prestigious nightclub Café Society Downtown in Greenwich Village, again billed as Helena Horne. She also did radio work, becoming a regular on the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street series broadcast by NBC. In June 1941, she was the featured vocalist on a series of recordings made by Henry Levine & the Dixieland Jazz Group of the show for RCA, cutting a selection of W.C. Handy tunes for a 78-rpm album called The Birth of the Blues. She also sang on recordings by Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson (who was her accompanist at Café Society).
Horne left her New York engagement after six months when she received an offer to help open a club in Los Angeles. She arrived on the West Coast in September 1941 to find that the club was not yet ready to open; after Pearl Harbor led to American involvement in World War II and a shortage of building materials, it would not be any time soon. In the meantime, she was contracted directly to RCA and in December 1941 cut eight songs backed by an orchestra conducted by Lou Bring for her first solo album, Moanin' Low. Among its selections were songs she would sing throughout her career, including a revival of the 1933 Cotton Club song "Stormy Weather," written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and George and Ira Gershwin's 1928 standard "The Man I Love." Giving up on the large club he had in mind (which was to have been called the Trocadero), Horne's sponsor instead opened a small club, the Little Troc, in February 1942 with her as headliner. She attracted attention immediately, notably from the film community, and entertained offers from the film studios before settling on MGM. Even then, she brought in a representative of the NAACP to consult on her contract so that she would not be forced to play the kind of demeaning roles usually given to African-Americans. As it turned out, however, MGM had very little else for her to play, and in all but two of the 13 features in which she would appear over the next 14 years, she would only sing a song or two, not actually have a speaking part. (The material was gathered together for audio release in 1996 by Turner/Rhino on the CD Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.) The first of these "specialty" appearances came right away; by May 1942 she was at work prerecording songs for a film adaptation of the Cole Porter musical Panama Hattie, one of which was the standard "Just One of Those Things." At the same time, however, she continued her nightclub work, moving from the Little Troc to the Mocambo.
Horne was not credited in Panama Hattie, and with the film's Latin American setting, MGM may have been hoping to pass her off as Hispanic rather than Negro. But her next film would dispel any such notion; it was a treatment of the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, with Horne not only singing but acting opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. She shot the film in the late summer of 1942, then returned to New York where she was booked into the Café Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel starting on November 26. The engagement attracted national attention, with write-ups in magazines like Time and Life, increasing her emerging stardom. By March 1943, she was back in Hollywood for what would be her busiest time of filmmaking. MGM loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for another all-black musical, a fictionalized film biography of dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson called Stormy Weather, in which she co-starred with Robinson himself and again sang the title song, which became her signature tune. The opening of Cabin in the Sky in April found her on the road making appearances in black theaters like Washington, D.C.'s Howard and Harlem's Apollo. Then it was back to Hollywood, where MGM quickly began shooting musical sequences with her for one film after another: Swing Fever (an interpolation of "You're So Indifferent"), Thousands Cheer (Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's 1929 song "Honeysuckle Rose"), I Dood It ("Jericho"), and Broadway Rhythm (the 1924 Gershwin standard "Somebody Loves Me"). (Her scenes were usually excised from the prints of the films shown in the South to avoid offending racist white audiences.) Meanwhile, Stormy Weather opened, and with I Dood It and Thousands Cheer out before the end of the year, Broadway Rhythm and Swing Fever following in early 1944, and Two Girls and a Sailor (in which she sang the Mills Brothers hit "Paper Doll") out in April, Horne had appearances in seven major movie musicals released in little more than a year. She would never be so active in film again. In fact, she would appear in only seven more films over the rest of her career.
When her film work eased up, however, Horne had other activities to keep her busy. She entertained troops at military bases; she appeared on radio, notably the African-American-oriented military show Jubilee and the drama Suspense; she continued to do club and theater dates; and with the lifting of the musicians union recording ban that had been imposed in 1942, she was even able to make a few recordings in November 1944, backed by Horace Henderson & His Orchestra, among them her old standby "As Long as I Live." (In 2002, Bluebird reissued these tracks and earlier ones on a CD called The Young Star, along with a few tracks said to have been recorded in January 1944, at a time when the ban was still in force.) Back at MGM, her only work was for the anthology film Ziegfeld Follies, in which she sang and performed Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's newly written song "Love." The film, long in gestation, did not come out until January 1946. By then, Horne was working on Till the Clouds Roll By, a film biography of songwriter Jerome Kern, recording and filming a sequence that found her on-stage in Show Boat in the role of Julie LaVerne, the light-skinned Negro attempting to pass for white who sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill." (Horne's performance of "Bill" was cut from the film but released on Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.)
Horne parted ways with RCA in 1946 and signed to the tiny Black & White Records label, for which she recorded that fall. But when Till the Clouds Roll By opened in November, MGM took the opportunity to launch its own record label and release the first original motion picture soundtrack album; featuring Judy Garland, June Allyson, and Tony Martin, along with Horne, the Till the Clouds Roll By soundtrack reached number three in the spring of 1947, and MGM Records became Horne's new label. Meanwhile, again free of studio responsibilities, she traveled to England to perform at the London Casino that spring. She returned to Europe in October 1947 for a lengthier stay that found her performing in England, France, and Belgium. The European trip also had another purpose; she had become involved in a serious relationship with MGM arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton, but since Hayton was white, the two could not marry in California, where mixed-race marriages were illegal. Instead, they married in Paris in December 1947, and even then kept the marriage secret for two and a half years.
As usual, Horne had only one film to work on in 1948, and that was Words and Music, a film biography of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in which she performed "Where or When" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Opening in December, the film generated a soundtrack album featuring Garland, Allyson, and Mickey Rooney in addition to Horne that began the first of six weeks at number one on February 12, 1949. Five days later, she was recording "Baby, Come Out of the Clouds" for her next specialty appearance in an MGM musical, the Esther Williams picture Duchess of Idaho. This would be her last film as part of the seven-year contract she had signed in 1942. As the film was released in June 1950, Horne's career took several new turns. That month, free of her movie contract, she sailed to Europe for another long tour; she revealed her marriage to Hayton to the press; and her name was listed in Red Channels, a publication intended to inform broadcasters of which performers were Communists or Communist "sympathizers." She was not actually called a Communist, but only included because of her association with others, notably Paul Robeson, and because she had assisted various liberal organizations in Hollywood in the 1940s, primarily in connection with their civil rights activities. The inclusion of her name, however, was enough to damage her career significantly. No movie studio offered her another film contract; she was without a recording contract; and there were no offers to appear on radio or the emerging medium of television. Thankfully, she still had live appearances to keep her going, but she worked in Europe increasingly over the next several years. She came back from Europe in September 1950, and in December opened for the first time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where she would appear annually for the next decade. There were more European trips in 1952 and 1954.
Eventually, Horne managed to get herself "cleared" from the blacklist, and media opportunities in the U.S. opened up again. At the end of 1954, she re-signed to RCA, and she was back in the recording studio in March 1955 cutting a revival of the 1928 Ruth Etting hit "Love Me or Leave Me" to take advantage of the Etting film biography of the same name due for release that spring. The recording gave her something she had never had before, a hit single; it peaked at number 19 in the Billboard chart in July. RCA quickly followed with a full-length LP, It's Love. Horne began to make appearances on television variety shows, and she was even invited back to MGM to perform in the film Meet Me in Las Vegas. Of course, all she did was sing a song. The movie opened in the winter of 1956, and that year she released more RCA recordings, toured Europe again, and, starting on New Year's Eve, opened a long run in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. RCA brought in recording equipment on February 20, 1957, and the result was the live LP Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria, released that summer, which reached the Top 25 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box and was reported to be the best-selling album by a female artist on RCA up to that time.
Horne, meanwhile, had moved her show to the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood in June, where she recorded a live EP, Lena Horne at the Cocoanut Grove, and announced that she was leaving nightclub work temporarily. She was preparing to star in a Broadway musical. The show was Jamaica, with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, originally written as a vehicle for Harry Belafonte, who proved unavailable. The creators then rewrote it somewhat to beef up the part of the male lead's girlfriend for Horne. Critics were not impressed with the show itself when it opened on October 31, 1957, but they were impressed with Horne, who carried the production to a run of 558 performances that continued until April 11, 1959. Based in New York, she issued plenty of new RCA recordings during this period, including an LP called Stormy Weather; the Jamaica cast album; Give the Lady What She Wants (a Top 20 hit in the fall of 1958); a duet album with Belafonte of songs from Porgy and Bess recorded to coincide with the release of a film version of the Gershwin opera in 1959; and Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. Horne disliked the Porgy and Bess LP and even sued RCA to prevent the label from releasing it, but when it came out it made the Top 15 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box. It also earned her her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Vocal Performance, Female, though she lost to Ella Fitzgerald.
Finished with her Broadway commitment, Horne went back to nightclub work in 1959, performing in Europe that summer and fall and returning to the Sands in Las Vegas. Her schedule was much the same in 1960. That November, RCA again recorded her in concert for the 1961 album Lena at the Sands, which earned her another Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss, this time to Judy Garland, whose Judy at Carnegie Hall also won Album of the Year. Horne next mounted a stage show, Lena Horne in Her Nine O'Clock Revue, that was intended to go to Broadway but closed out of town after tryouts in Toronto and New Haven. She continued to record for RCA, charting with Lena on the Blue Side in April 1962 and Lena...Lovely and Alive in February 1963 (the latter earning her a third Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss to Ella Fitzgerald), but diminishing sales led to the end of her contract. She signed to Charter Records and recorded two LPs, Lena Sings Your Requests and Goes Latin (later reissued as a two-fer by DRG Records under the title Lena Goes Latin & Sings Your Requests), but her increasing involvement in the civil rights movement of the early '60s (she appeared with civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS, just before he was assassinated on June 12, 1963, and attended the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on August 28) led her to question her role as an entertainer. She wrote an article for Show magazine called "I Just Want to Be Myself," and it inspired some of her songwriting colleagues to provide her with more politically oriented material. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg sent her "Silent Spring," a song that used the title of Rachel Carson's environmentalist book but treated broader social concerns, and Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote the civil rights-oriented "Now!" to the tune of "Hava Na Gila." Horne premiered both at a Carnegie Hall appearance mounted as a benefit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they were heard by a producer at 20th Century Fox Records, who signed her to a new recording contract. A single pairing "Now!" and "Silent Spring" made the lower reaches of the pop charts in November 1963 and even made the Top 20 of Cash Box's R&B chart (Billboard did not publish a separate R&B chart at the time), despite resistance from some radio stations. Horne followed with a recording of Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" and the 1964 LP Here's Lena Now!
Of course, in early 1964 the Beatles led the British Invasion, which tended to marginalize middle-of-the-road performers like Horne in American record stores. Nevertheless, she did what she could, turning more to television, with a special filmed in England in March 1964 and eventually shown in the U.S. in December, and more appearances on variety shows. She moved to another new record label, United Artists, which released Feelin’ Good in 1965 and Lena in Hollywood, Soul, and the holiday collection Merry from Lena in 1966. After that, she was without a recording contract for a few years. She had also given up performing in the Nevada showrooms, though she continued to play club dates. In 1969, she acted in the Western Death of a Gunfighter, also singing a song over the opening and closing credits. That September, NBC broadcast her first U.S.-originated television special, Monsanto Presents Lena Horne. The same month, she returned to Las Vegas, appearing with Harry Belafonte at Caesar's Palace. In October, she recorded a new album for Skye Records accompanied by guitarist Gabor Szabo and issued in the spring of 1970 under the title Lena & Gabor. The LP reached the pop and jazz charts, with a single, "Watch What Happens," making the Top 40 of the R&B chart in Cash Box. (Although Horne never considered herself a jazz singer, and jazz critics agreed, she frequently performed and recorded with jazz musicians, and from the 1970s on, she, like other traditional pop singers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, often was lumped in with jazz artists for marketing purposes.) Meanwhile, ABC had contracted with Horne and Belafonte to re-create their stage act for TV, and the result was the special Harry and Lena, broadcast on March 22, 1970, and recorded for a soundtrack album released by RCA. Buddah Records acquired the Lena & Gabor album and reissued it under the name Watch What Happens! The label also signed Horne and had her record a new album, Nature's Baby, released in the spring of 1971, on which she covered contemporary pop/rock songs by Elton John, Leon Russell, and Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, by the time the LP came out, she was in no condition to promote it. In a period of just over a year, she had suffered a series of devastating losses. Her father had died at 78 on April 18, 1970; her son had died of kidney failure at 30 on September 12, 1970; and, unexpectedly, her husband, Lennie Hayton, died of a heart attack on April 24, 1971, just as Nature's Baby was coming out. She was relatively inactive for a year, but finally began to perform again on a limited basis in March 1972. In 1974, she teamed up with Tony Bennett for a duo act that played in Europe and then came to the U.S., starting with a Broadway run at the Minskoff Theatre that played 37 performances between October 30 and November 24. The two then toured North America through March 1975. She re-signed to RCA yet again and produced two LPs, Lena and Michel, accompanied by Michel Legrand, in 1975 and Lena, a New Album in 1976. She continued to tour in the mid-'70s, playing dates with Vic Damone and with Count Basie & His Orchestra. Meanwhile, her son-in-law, film director Sidney Lumet, married to her daughter, Gail, was preparing a movie adaptation of The Wiz, the all-black version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that had opened on Broadway in 1975, and he cast her as Glinda the Good Witch. She sang "Believe in Yourself" in the film and on the soundtrack album, which reached the Top 40 and went gold upon its release in the fall of 1978. Meanwhile, she had starred in a revival of the 1940 musical Pal Joey on the West Coast in the spring of 1978, but the show closed without transferring to Broadway. She continued to make club appearances in the late '70s, but in March 1980 announced her retirement and went on a farewell tour that ran from June to August.
But the 63-year-old singer did not retire. Instead, she mounted a one-woman show that she brought to Broadway. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music opened at the Nederlander Theatre on May 12, 1981, and was an instant hit. Within a month, she was given a special Tony Award marking its success, and the show played 333 performances, the longest run for a one-person production in Broadway history. The double-LP cast album released by Qwest Records made the pop and R&B LP charts, and it finally won her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female; it also took the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album. After the show closed on June 30, 1982, Horne's 65th birthday, she took it on tour around the country and to London through 1984. At the end of the year, she was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts.
Horne performed occasionally during the mid-'80s. In the fall of 1988, Three Cherries Records released her new album, The Men in My Life, which made number five in the jazz charts. She was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. She was less active in the early '90s, but then underwent pacemaker surgery, and in June 1993 she performed a special show devoted to the music of her friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's musical partner) at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York. She recorded an album based on the show that was released by Blue Note Records in May 1994 under the title We'll Be Together Again. It topped the jazz charts and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, but she lost to Etta James. She appeared on Frank Sinatra's million-selling Duets II album and was one of the hosts of the 1994 documentary film That's Entertainment! III, which, like its predecessors, presented some of her 1940s MGM musical performances, including ones previously unseen. She performed at Carnegie Hall in September 1994 and the same month recorded a new live album, An Evening With Lena Horne, issued by Blue Note in 1995. It reached the Top 20 of the jazz charts and won her the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. In June 1997, her 80th birthday was celebrated by a show at the JVC Jazz Festival and the presentation to her of the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement in Vocal Artistry. A year later, she released a new Blue Note album, Being Myself, which made the Top Ten of the jazz charts. She came out of retirement to record three Billy Strayhorn songs on Classic Ellington, a Blue Note album by Sir Simon Rattle released in September 2000. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Born: Jun 30, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Occupation: Actor
Active: '40s-2000s
Major Genres: Music, Musical
Career Highlights: Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather, Two Girls and a Sailor
First Major Screen Credit: The Duke Is Tops (1938)
Biography
The daughter of an actress and civil rights activist, African-American entertainer Lena Horne was a chorus girl in Harlem's Cotton Club at the age of 16. One year later, she had her first featured role -- as Quadroon Girl -- in the Broadway play Dance With Your Gods. Lena then went on to work as a dancer and singer for Noble Sissles's orchestra, gaining popularity with both black and white audiences, though in keeping with the racial status quo of the '30s, she was denied entrance to all-white facilities and hotels in most of the cities where she headlined on stage. Following her film in The Duke is Tops (1939), Lena was signed as a specialty performer by MGM Studios. In most of her film appearances, Lena would sing in a sequence separate from the plotline and her white costars, so that her scenes could be edited out when shown in certain Southern theatres. She managed to survive on these terms and even won leading roles in two major-studio feature films, Cabin in the Sky (1943) and Stormy Weather (1943) - both of which had all-black casts. Hollywood's attitude towards African-Americans in the '40s was slightly better than in the '30s, but producers still treaded very slowly and cautiously: Lena was allowed romantic interests in her two starring films, but her leading men were middle-aged comedians and dancers like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Dooley Wilson, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, so as not to offend those white viewers who felt threatened by handsome black men. Additionally, Lena was allowed to be sexy but not too sexy, lest she arouse dreams of miscegenation in the minds of impressionable white males; her most erotic scene in Cabin in the Sky, wherein she was discreetly "nude" in a bubble bath (the bubbles providing censor-proof camouflage) was removed from the film, not to be seen in public until shown in the 1994 compilation That's Still Entertainment. Idiotic corporate decisions like this only intensified Lena's mistrust of white men, an attitude drummed into her by her mother; yet privately she managed to find lasting happiness as the wife of white musician Lennie Hayton. Lena's career suffered in the '50s, when she had difficulty securing TV work not only because of her race but also because of her friendship with Paul Robeson, the famed black singer who'd embraced Communism. Eventually talent won out over ideology, and Lena starred on Broadway in Jamaka in 1957, following this personal triumph with numerous media and live performances. Still, Lena and her husband found a more hospitable reception when they travelled to France, a country where a mixed marriage did not automatically result in rude stares and snide newspaper commentary. In 1969, Horne returned to films in Death of a Gunfighter, where thanks to relaxed racial tensions she was able to play the former lover of white sheriff Richard Widmark. Still beautiful and in terrific voice, Lena Horne was going strong into the '90s, outlasting most of her racist detractors and attaining the rare status of Living Legend. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Lena Horne was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. Both sides of her family are mixture of African American, Native American, and Caucasian descent. Both were part of what W. E. B. Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth," the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated African Americans.[1][2] She grew up in an upper-middle-class black community. Her father, Edwin "Teddy" Horne, who worked in the gambling trade as a numbers kingpin, left the family when she was three. Her mother, Edna Scottron, was the daughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with an African-American theater troupe and traveled extensively. Horne was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her uncle, Frank S. Horne, was an adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[3] She is a reported descendant of the John C. Calhoun family. Lena Horne attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn which has since become Boys & Girls High School, on Fulton Street; she dropped out without earning a diploma.
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 Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's film swan song), and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her political views.[4] She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda in The Wiz (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, Lena Horne established herself as one of the premiere nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the US, 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 largest selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA-Victor label.
From the late 1950s through the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows, appearing multiple times on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, Ed Sullivan, The Dean Martin Show and The Bell Telephone Hour. Other programs included, The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace and The Andy Williams Show. Besides two television specials for the BBC (later syndicated in the US), Horne starred in her own US television special in 1969, Monsanto Night Presents Lena Horne. 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 US and UK in a show together. A very memorable appearance was in the 1976 program "America Salutes Richard Rodgers," where she sang a lengthy medley of Rodgers songs with Peggy Lee and Vic Damone. Horne also made several appearances on The Flip Wilson Show.
In the summer of 1980, Lena 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 May 1981, The Nederlander Organization booked Lena Horne for a four week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre (formerly the Trafalgar, the Billy Rose and the National) on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne 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 65 birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, the entire show was performed again and video taped for television broadcast and home video release. The tour began a few days later at Tanglewood (MA) during the 1982 July 4 weekend. "The Lady and Her Music" toured 41 cities in the U.S and Canada through June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984.
In 1958, Horne was nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" (for her part in the "Calypso" musical Jamaica) In 1981 she received a Special Tony Award for her one-woman show, Lena Horne: "The Lady and Her Music". 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. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men In My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
The 1990s found Horne considerably more active in the recording studio - all the more remarkable considering she was approaching her 80th year. Following her 1993 performance at a tribute to the musical legacy of her good friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's longtime pianist and arranger), 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. Though the album was largely derided by critics, the Sinatra-Horne pairing was generally regarded as its highlight. In 1995, a "live" album capturing her Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, at the age of 81, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne essentially retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle's Classic Ellington album.
Civil rights activism
Horne also is noteworthy for her contributions to the Civil Rights movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson, a singer who also combated American racial discrimination. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or to groups in which GermanPOWs were seated in front of African American servicemen" [5], according to her Kennedy Center biography. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed in behalf of the NAACP, SNCC and the National Council for Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. [6]
Tributes and rereleases
In 2003, ABC announced that Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biopic. In the weeks following Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. "ABC executives resisted Horne's demand," according to the Associated Press report, "but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part." Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.
In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note. Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne in remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge" and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006.
In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January, February, and through March 1, 2009).
Personal life
Horne married Louis Jordan Jones in January 1937 and they lived in Pittsburgh. In December 1937 they had a daughter, Gail and in February 1940, a son, Edwin. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and they divorced in 1944.
Lena Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish American, from December 1947 until his death in 1971. Hayton was one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial married couple. However, she later admitted (Ebony, May 1980) that she really married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.
Screenwriter Jenny Lumet, known for her award-winning screenplay Rachel Getting Married, is Horne's granddaughter. She is the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet and Horne's daughter Gail.
