Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American dancer, actress, singer, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned more than seventy years, appearing in film, television, and theatre. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.

Horne advocated for human rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, '' Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music'', which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, retreating from the public eye in 2000.

Early life

Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Both sides of her family were African American. She belonged to the well-educated, upper stratum of black New Yorkers at the time. She was reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family; his nephew, Dr Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun, "owned the slaves whose descendants include... Horne".

Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne Jr. (1893–1970), at one-time owner of a hotel and restaurant, was a gambler—he and "his partner, the gambler and philanthropist Gus Greenlee, owned the Belmont Hotel on Wylie Avenue and ran the numbers racket in the Hill" – who left the family when Lena was three years old and moved to an upper-middle-class African-American community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Lena came to live with him aged 18 until her marriage the next year. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron, was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was from modern Senegal. Horne was raised mainly 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. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne. He was the Dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was twelve years old, after which Horne attended St Peter Claver School in Brooklyn.

She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. At the age of 18, she moved to her father's home in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning music from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short ''Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party'' (1935). A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. 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 when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Horne already had two low-budget movies to her credit: a musical feature called ''The Duke is Tops'' (1938, later reissued with Horne's name above the title as ''The Bronze Venus''); and a two-reel short subject, ''Boogie Woogie Dream'' (1941), featuring pianists Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Horne's songs from ''Boogie Woogie Dream'' were later released individually as soundies. Horne made her Hollywood nightclub debut at Felix Young's Little Troc on the Sunset Strip in January 1942. A few weeks later, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 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 at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in ''Panama Hattie'' (1942) and performed the title song of '' Stormy Weather'' (1943) based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, for 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. She appeared in several MGM musicals, including '' Cabin in the Sky'' (1943) with an entirely African-American cast. She was otherwise not featured in a leading role because of her ethnicity and the fact that her films were required to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. One number from ''Cabin in the Sky'' was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing "Ain't It the Truth" while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film ''That's Entertainment! III'' (1994), which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film's release. Horne was the first African-American person elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In ''Ziegfeld Follies'' (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's version of ''Show Boat'' (1951), 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 friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, although MGM sources state she was never considered for the role. 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.

Changes of direction

Horne became disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She made only two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: ''Duchess of Idaho'' (1950, which was also Eleanor Powell's final film); and the musical ''Meet Me in Las Vegas'' (1956). She said she was "tired of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song. I did that 20 times too often." She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism. She returned to the screen, playing Claire Quintana, a madam in a brothel who marries Richard Widmark, in the film ''Death of a Gunfighter'' (1969), her first straight dramatic role with no reference to her color. She later appeared on screen two more times as Glinda in ''The Wiz'' (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective ''That's Entertainment! III'' (1994), in which she related her unkind treatment by the studio.

After leaving Hollywood, Horne established herself as one of the premier 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 at that time. In 1958, Horne became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical", for her part in the " Calypso" musical ''Jamaica'' (which, at Horne's request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall).

From the late 1950s through to the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows, appearing multiple times on Perry Como's '' Kraft Music Hall'', ''The Ed Sullivan Show'', ''The Dean Martin Show'', and ''The Bell Telephone Hour''. Other programs she appeared on included ''The Judy Garland Show'', ''The Hollywood Palace'', and ''The Andy Williams Show''. Besides two television specials for the BBC
...