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Singing legend Lena Horne dies at age 92
She started out as a 16-year-old dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and later won two Grammys
Lena Horne, the silky-voiced singing legend who shattered Hollywood stereotypes of African Americans on screen in the 1940s as a symbol of glamour whose signature song was "Stormy Weather," died Sunday. She was 92
Horne died at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, a spokeswoman said. No cause of death was given.
Beginning as a 16-year-old chorus girl at the fabled Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933, Horne launched a more than six-decade career that spanned films, radio, television, recording, nightclubs, concert halls and Broadway.
As a singer, Horne had a voice that jazz critic Don Heckman described in a 1997 profile in the Los Angeles Times as "smooth, almost caressing, with its warm timbre and seductive drawl _ honey and bourbon with a teasing trace of lemon."
She was, Heckman wrote, "one of the legendary divas of popular music" _ a singer who "belonged in the pantheon of great female artists that includes Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae."
Horne, 80 at the time and cutting a new album, took a different view.
"Oh, please," she said. "I'm really not Miss Pretentious. I'm just a survivor. Just being myself."
When Horne first began dancing in the chorus at the Cotton Club _ three shows a night, seven nights a week for $25 a week _ she did so to help out her family's troubled finances during the Depression.
By the time she arrived in Hollywood for a nightclub job in 1941, she had been a vocalist for the Noble Sissle and Charlie Barnet orchestras, had done some recording and was a cabaret sensation at the prestigious Cafe Society Downtown club in New York's Greenwich Village.
She created a similar response performing at the Little Troc, a small club on the Sunset Strip, where, according to one news account, "she has knocked the movie population bowlegged and is up to her ears in offers."
Signed by MGM to a seven-year contract in an era when no other blacks were under long-term contracts at the major movie studios, Horne went on to become one of the best-known African-American performers in the country.
With her copper-toned skin, strong cheekbones and dazzling smile, she was a breakthrough on the silver screen _ "Hollywood's first black beauty, sex symbol, singing star," as Vogue magazine put it decades later.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," Horne 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."
Refusing to play maids and other stereotypical roles offered to black actors at the time, Horne appeared in a nonspeaking role as a singer in her first MGM movie, "Panama Hattie," a 1942 comedy musical starring Red Skelton and Ann Sothern.
That set the tone for most of her screen appearances in the '40s, a time in which she appeared in more than a dozen movies, including "I Dood It," "Swing Fever," "Broadway Rhythm" and "Ziegfeld Follies."
In most of them, she had only cameos as a singer, who was typically clad in a glamorous evening gown and singing while leaning against a pillar. It became her on-screen trademark.
"They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me into anything else either," she wrote in "Lena," her 1965 autobiography. "I became a butterfly pinned to a column singing away in Movieland."
Horne's musical numbers usually were shot independent of the films' narratives, making them easy to be deleted when screened in the Jim Crow South.
Two exceptions were the all-black musicals in which she was one of the stars: "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy "Weather," both released in 1943.
Her memorable rendition of Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather" in the movie became a hit recording for Horne, as well as becoming her signature song.
A World War II pinup girl, the glamorous Horne in 1944 became the first black to appear on the cover of a movie magazine, Motion Picture.
"Anybody who was not madly in love with Lena Horne should report to his undertaker immediately and turn himself in," actor and friend Ossie Davis said on "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice," a 1996 installment of PBS' "American Masters" biography series.
"In the history of American popular entertainment, no woman had ever looked like Lena Horne. Nor had any other black woman had looks considered as 'safe' and non-threatening," Donald Bogle wrote in his book "Brown Sugar: Over One Hundred Years of America's Black Superstars."
"The Horne demeanor _ distant and aloof _ suggested that she was a woman off somewhere in a world of her own .... who appeared as if all her life she had been placed on a pedestal and everything had come easily to her. That was the way she appeared to be. ... The reality was another matter."
She was born Lena Mary Calhoun Horne on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Her family lived in the home of her father's middle-class parents in Brooklyn, where Horne's grandmother was active in the Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the women's suffrage movement.
Horne's father left his wife and daughter when Horne was 3. And her mother, unhappy living with her strong-willed mother-in-law, soon moved out to pursue an acting career with a Harlem-based black stock company.
That left young Lena in the care of her grandparents until she joined her mother on the road in the South a few years later.
Horne was living in Harlem with her mother and her out-of-work stepfather when she left school at 16 and joined the chorus at the Cotton Club in 1933.
While continuing to work at the club, she made her Broadway debut in 1934 with a small role in "Dance With Your Gods," an all-black drama that ran only nine performances.
Leaving the Cotton Club in 1935, she became a featured singer in the all-black Noble Sissle Society Orchestra but quit two years later to marry Louis Jones, a Pittsburgh friend of her father's who was some nine years her senior.
At 19, she settled into domestic life in Pittsburgh and gave birth to her two children, Gail and Teddy. But she and her husband separated in 1940 and were divorced in 1944.
Although Horne gave up show business when she married Jones, money problems during the marriage prompted her to accept the co-starring role in "The Duke Is Tops," a low-budget, 1938 black movie musical shot in 10 days.
She also appeared in "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939," a Broadway revue that had only nine performances.
Moving back to New York after her marriage broke up, Horne was hired as a vocalist with the Barnet Orchestra, becoming one of the first black performers to sing with a major white band, with whom she had a hit record, "Good for Nothing Joe."
After leaving the Barnet band in 1941, Horne began an extended engagement at Cafe Society Downtown, where she first met and became friends with singer-actor and political activist Paul Robeson.
While under contract to MGM in the '40s, Horne met Lennie Hayton, a white staff composer and arranger at the studio who became her second husband.
Fearing public reaction when they married in Paris in 1947, they did not announce their marriage until three years later.
Horne later said she initially became involved with Hayton because she thought he could be useful to her career.
"He could get me into places no black manager could," she told The New York Times in 1981. "It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me." But, she said, "because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him."
But being married to a white man, whom she once said "taught me everything I know musically," took a toll _ from her impatience with black critics who questioned the marriage to her sometimes using her husband as a "whipping boy" and making him "pay for everything the whites had done to us."
Horne's last film for MGM _ a singing cameo in the musical "Duchess of Idaho," starring Esther Williams and Van Johnson _ was released in 1950, the same year she triumphantly appeared at the London Palladium.
Primarily due to her friendship with Robeson and her involvement with the Council for African Affairs and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee to the Arts, Science and Professions, both of which were named as Communist fronts, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to appear on radio and television in the early '50s.
But the cabaret business remained untouched by the blacklist, and she focused on her critically acclaimed nightclub/cabaret act.
Her "Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria" became RCA Victor's biggest-selling album by a female vocalist in 1957.
Horne, who was able to resume appearing on television in 1956, also starred in the hit Broadway musical "Jamaica," which ran from 1957 to '59 and earned her a Tony Award nomination.
Unable to stay in many of the hotels she performed in because she was black, Horne developed what she later described as "a toughness, a way of isolating" herself from the audience as a performer.
"There was no cuteness or coyness about her," comedian Alan King said of Horne on "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice." "Lena came out there and stuck it right in their face _ boom! She was radiantly and subtly brazen, saying to herself, 'You want to take me to bed, but you won't let me come in the front door.' "
Throughout her early career, Horne experienced the injustices suffered by African Americans at the time.
While touring with the USO during World War II, she was expected to entertain the white soldiers before the blacks.
A day after performing for white soldiers in a large auditorium at Fort Riley, Kan., she returned to entertain black troops in the black mess hall.
But when she discovered that the whites seated in the front rows were German prisoners of war, she became furious. Marching off the platform, she turned her back on the POWs and sang to the black soldiers in the back of the hall.
Horne's long-suppressed anger over the treatment of blacks in white society erupted in 1960 when she overheard a drunken white man at the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills refer to her as "just another nigger."
Jumping up, she threw an ashtray, a table lamp and several glasses at him, cutting the man's forehead.
When reports of her outburst appeared in newspapers around the country, Horne was surprised at the positive response, mostly from African Americans.
"Phone calls and telegrams came in from all over," she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1984. "It was the first time it struck me that black people related to each other in bigger ways than I realized."
In the early '60s, Horne became more active in the civil-rights movement, participating in a meeting with prominent blacks in 1963 with then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the wake of violence in Birmingham, Ala., and singing at civil rights rallies.
In the early '70s, Horne faced three personal blows within an 18-month period: In 1970, the same year her father died, her son died of kidney disease; and her husband died of a heart attack in 1971.
Horne later said she "stayed in the house grieving" until Alan King "bullied" her out of her depression, and she returned to singing and recording.
She also toured with Tony Bennett, as well as doing 37 performances on Broadway of "Tony & Lena Sing" in 1974. And she played Glinda, the Good Witch in "The Wiz," the 1978 movie musical directed by Sidney Lumet, her then-son-in-law.
Then, in 1981, she made a triumphant return to Broadway in the hit "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music."
Then 63, Horne went on to win the Drama Desk Award and a special Tony Award for her autobiographical show that ran on Broadway for more than a year and led to a Grammy Award-winning soundtrack album and a cross-country
Her rendition of "Stormy Weather" was, naturally, a show stopper.
She actually sang the song twice, first as she had in the movie when she was in her 20s and, she said in an interview, she couldn't sing it "worth a toot."
Then, at the end of the show, she electrified her audience by singing it again from the perspective of a woman in her 60s, who had experienced a lifetime of love and misery.
As Horne said in the documentary "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice": "My life has been about surviving. Along the way I also became an artist. It's been an interesting journey. One in which music became first my refuge and then my salvation."
Horne was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 1984, and she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1998.
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