Lena Horne: Obituary

TO THOSE few Americans in the 1950s who did not care about race—who did not quibble about one-thirty-seconds or one-sixty-fourths, and who were happy to share washroom or soda fountain with people of another shade—Lena Horne was simply one of the most beautiful women in the world. There was something of Audrey Hepburn in her large brown eyes, and of Hedy Lamarr in her tall forehead; her nose was bobbed and cute. But to everyone else Ms Horne, before her beauty was even considered, was black.

There were ways of saying this gently, of course. She was not coal or piccaninny black; she was “dusky”, “sepia”, “milk-chocolate”, café au lait. At Harlem’s Cotton Club, where she started her career at 16 as a dancer, she was “tan and terrific”, like the others. The MGM Studios in Hollywood, where she went at 24 in 1941, tried to pass her off as a Latina on her contract. A special make-up, called Light Egyptian, would be rubbed on her skin to make her look more coloured: a better match for the ink-black mammies and funny-men around her.

Her race-blind fans would have been prepared to see her star in any show, as elegant, satin-clad and triumphant as she eventually appeared in 1981 in “The Lady and her Music” in New York. But to casting directors during segregation she could only be a lady’s maid or a jungle girl. At best she could star in all-black comedies, as a devil-sent temptress in “Cabin in the Sky” (1943), or as the lead in the Broadway musical “Jamaica” (1957). She belonged in the piny woods or under the palms.

Because she was lovely, and could sing bewitchingly, she was also allowed a few solo scenes in “white” films. There, like “a butterfly pinned to a column”, she would deliver a number which could be seamlessly cut when the picture was shown in southern cinemas. Her greatest hope was to be allowed to play Julie, a mulatto, in “Show Boat”. But Julie had to fall in love with a white man; so Ava Gardner played her, initially lip-synching to Miss Horne’s recordings and even made browner with her Light Egyptian. Lena and Ava were friends. But it hurt to the end of her days.

It hurt all the more because the young Lena did not think of herself as black particularly. Her blood was mixed up on both sides with white European and native American, so that in her black school she was “yellow” to her playmates, and was whispered to have a white Daddy. Both blacks and whites felt she was not one of them. Her family’s social models were the white bourgeoisie; her father, resplendent in a suit with a diamond stick-pin, had told Louis B. Mayer to his face that he didn’t want his daughter playing maids in Hollywood, because she could have maids of her own. Not that it did any good. At one of her lowest points Miss Horne went to tea with Hattie McDaniel, who had played Mammy in “Gone with the Wind”. They ate tiny sandwiches and cakes in her grand drawing room, while Hattie explained that a maid’s role was her only realistic future on the screen. Pretty soon afterwards, she threw in the acting life.

A tiger inside

Singing, though she made her career in it, proved no simpler. She toured with Charlie Barnet’s all-white band in 1940, sleeping in the band bus when hotels would not take her in, but counted in her repertoire songs like “Sleepy Time Down South”, which blacks were expected to sing. She felt forced into jazz, and not much good at it. Although she covered songs by Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters, her neat enunciation, expressiveness and clarity made her sound more like Judy Garland. Waters’s “Stormy Weather” became her theme, but when she sang it—especially in the film of 1943, against rain-soaked city streets—she looked, and sounded, somewhere over the rainbow, and closer to Kansas.

The insults she suffered, therefore—debarred from lodging houses, spat at in the street, forbidden from mixing with white customers—were all the worse because she did not feel she represented a race, only herself. And conversely, the barriers she broke—first black star on a long-term contract with a studio, first black on the cover of Motion Picture magazine, first star whose picture could be pinned up by black GIs in their lockers—gave her neither pride nor joy, because she thought only of the label that had been stuck on her. She was not a symbol, not a credit, not a first this and that, as she cried bitterly in her old age. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

In the 1950s she was blacklisted for her friendship with Paul Robeson, a communist sympathiser; it hampered her career in her best years, though the voice soared on. In the 1960s she campaigned for civil rights, drawn as much to the militancy of Malcolm X as to Martin Luther King’s non-violence. When a man called her “nigger” in a Beverly Hills restaurant she hurled an ashtray, a lamp and several glasses at him, until he bled. She used her white husband, Lennie Hayton, as a whipping boy for her frustration. “Never hope too hard,” she said. “Never pans out.”

Miss Horne’s producers once complained that she opened her mouth too wide to sing. They meant it was a Negro thing. Certainly Miss Horne had a wide, extravagant smile, a real show-stopper. But it was on the face of a tiger. It hid a lifetime of ferocious resentment and regret.