Lena Horne, Jazz Legend, Dies at 92
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, has died. She was 92.
Horne died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.
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."
Photos: Lena Horne
"60 Minutes": Ed Bradley talks to Lena Horne
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, New York, on 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."
© 2010 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Horne died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.
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."
Photos: Lena Horne
"60 Minutes": Ed Bradley talks to Lena Horne
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, New York, on 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."
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Here is what Katie who only has to report for 22 minutes on the air missed in her tribute to Lena Horne.
Lena Horne, Pittsburgh, and CBS News deserves better and looks like I will have to provide it, since Katie Couric was too lazy to do her job.
Barrier-breaking Lena Horne honed her talent in Pittsburgh
By Jason Cato
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
New York born and world-renowned, Lena Horne's brief history in the Hill District left an indelible mark on Pittsburgh and solidified her as a darling of the city's golden jazz era.
"She was without a doubt the queen in Pittsburgh," said historian John M. Brewer Jr., author of books on the city's black history. "She was pretty much the queen everywhere she went, but particularly in Pittsburgh."
Horne, the first black entertainer to sign on with a major Hollywood studio, died Sunday in New York. She was 92.
"Pittsburghers claim her as one of their own, almost as if she was born and raised here," said Samuel Black, curator of African-American collections at the Sen. John Heinz History Center. "And it's not only now that they love and cherish her. They did even then."
Born in Brooklyn in 1917, Horne was 3 when her father left the family and ended up in the Hill District. New York had little to do with Lena's musical development compared to Pittsburgh.
Edwin "Teddy" Horne owned a small hotel on Wylie Avenue and was a contemporary of gambling kings William "Woogie" Harris, owner of Crystal Barber Shop, and William A. "Gus" Greenlee, owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Crawford Grill.
Lena Horne dropped out of school at age 16 and joined the chorus line at Harlem's fabled Cotton Club. She left in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra.
Two years later, at age 19, she met and married one of her father's friends, Louis Jones, the son of a Pittsburgh preacher and brother of the city's first black councilman. The couple lived in the Hill District, and Horne sometimes provided entertainment at events hosted by rich families.
"I sang around at parties in Pittsburgh, for money," Horne said in a 1963 interview with Ebony magazine.
Horne's daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, and son, Teddy, were born in Pittsburgh, in 1937 and 1940, respectively.
While living in Pittsburgh, Horne went to Hollywood in 1938 to make "The Duke is Tops," a film eventually released as "The Bronze Venus." She appeared on Broadway in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds in 1939 and 1940, the year she and Jones separated. Their divorce was finalized in 1944.
"It seems that Pittsburgh pretty much was an incubator for her career," Black said.
Horne's time in Pittsburgh coincided with the city's jazz heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Hill District became known as "Little Harlem," Brewer said.
"It absolutely was a must for most artists to come through Pittsburgh," Brewer said.
Those artists included Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, but Pittsburgh produced its own including Billy Strayhorn, who grew up in Homewood and spent much of his career collaborating with Duke Ellington.
While in Los Angeles working on a project, Ellington asked Strayhorn to keep an eye on Horne. Strayhorn mentored Horne and a special friendship developed, said Strayhorn's nephew, Greg Morris. He and his wife, Thelma, lived in a Hill District house on Clarissa Street where Horne once lived.
Horne once said that she would have married Strayhorn if he'd asked. Strayhorn was openly gay.
"They were a very special couple," Morris said. "He loved her in his own way."
In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a few with a Hollywood contract.
Horne later 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.
SOURCE KATIE COULD NOT FIND:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_680465.html
As usual, Katie Couric lack of proper research left off much about Lena Horne, and yet CBS SHAREHOLDERS over pay Katie $15 million a year for shoddy journalism.
Here is what Katie who only has to report for 22 minutes on the air missed in her tribute to Lena Horne.
-----
Did Katie not send you a Christmas card? Still it was a great article that you sent.
p.s. I do not think she reads every paper in the nation. Maybe she can hire you to do that for her.
A very beautiful woman who broke racial barriers in a very bigoted era of Hollywood.
An era filled with blacks playing butlers and maids while playing stupid while supposedly being just smart enough to sing a tune and shine somebody's shoes and OK to call a black man or woman a n*****.
But Hollywood is still racist and through these white owned conglomerates use advertising on-line and with regular TV commercials would still have the average human being believe that romance among the races even in this day and age just doesn't exist. It does if you live in a fantasy world and wear a white sheet over your head. You see it in beer commercials and family vacations.
A Birth Of a Nation made in 1915 by D.W. Griffith addressed the brutality of man against man and showed the true hatred aimed at people of color during times when some blacks would disappear at night and never be seen again all over America.
It's thirst for homegrown terrorism and genocide and lies has never really been attacked for what its is since it was made or its resurrection of the Klan from the ashes. The Emmy's and the Oscars at the end of the year are always supposed to stand for morality, decency, be kind to all human beings man and woman. How can you stand for all of this with this kind of false advertising to the public when it appears that you have no morals at all?
When you think about the era that she grew up in with segregated restaurants and military camps. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to realize how hard it was to be Black in those days. The World Wars didn't bring any new freedom for the blacks that fought for this country. It was an era of WHITE and COLORED only.
When calling the average person Miss or Sir was mandatory.
An era where if a black man looked or whistled at a white woman they would be found and lynched.
Lena Horne 1917-2010
Rest In Peace you made a very big difference in this ever ending argument
about morality and decency among all human beings.
When genocide could be involved to get to the solution.
I know times passes but it hurts just the same -
RIP, Great Lady.
A very beautiful woman who broke racial barriers in a very bigoted era of Hollywood.
An era filled with blacks playing butlers and maids while playing stupid while supposedly being just smart enough to sing a tune and shine somebody's shoes.
But Hollywood is still racist and through these white owned conglomerates would still have the average human being believe that romance among the races even in this day and age just doesn't exist. It does if you live in a fantasy world and wear a white sheet over your head.
Lena Horne 1917-2010 Rest In Peace you made a very big difference in this ever ending argument
about morality and decency among all human beings. When genocide could be involved to get to the solution.
(Why is CBS always preoccupied with race?)
When I was in Canada they did not even have stockings for Black people. My mother and family would take white women's stockings and die them with tea and coffee. There was very little prejudice but also very little makeup or stockings made for women of color. My uncle after WWII started working on the train as a red cap. He went to NY and bought my mother stockings and makeup for her color.
Lena rest in peace you did more than a great deal of people to remove the color barrier. I shall always love and remember you. RIP God has you now and there will be no more tears.
All people of color in Canada, America and probably otheer countries salute you.