Lena Horne on Broadway

LENA HORNE: THE LADY AND HER MUSIC

If she had had her way, says Lena Horne, she probably would have been a schoolteacher, telling children about the three Rs. Lucky children! Fortunate parents! Celestial meetings of the P.T.A.! But with all due respect to the nation’s teachers, one must add that it is truly the impossible dream. On opening night last week it was hard to imagine the lady anywhere else than on the stage of Broadway’s Nederlander Theater, where she was doing what she was obviously born to do: singing, strutting and enchanting audiences.

The show, which will run through the summer and then go on to San Francisco and London, displays Horne in all her moods—all 10,000 of them.

She is cool and she is hot, sultry and cerebral, soft and brassy —loud enough to wake the folks in New Jersey. She does her standards, like Can’t Help Loving Dat Man of Mine, and successfully essays a few that are not attached to her name, like The Surrey with the Fringe on Top. When she begins Rodgers and Hart’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, a premonitory shudder passes through the theater. She does not disappoint, and the words—”I’m a rich, ripe, ready plum again”—are not sung but caressed, as if they were old friends, which they clearly are. Sixty-four next month, Horne has not only been around, she has been all around for a long, long time.

Her career provides a capsule history of the black experience in show business. Her mother was an actress who always wanted to be what Lena is now, glamorous and successful, and her father was a gambler and numbers runner. The first five years of her life she spent mostly with her grandparents in Brooklyn, where she was born; after that she was boarded out with families in the South while her mother toured with acting companies. The acting did not bring in much money, however, and when she was 16, Lena became the wage earner, dancing and singing in the chorus of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. It was not a happy time. Working conditions backstage were terrible, pay was bad, and when Lena’s white stepfather tried to get her a bigger role, the club’s white owners beat him up and pushed his head into a toilet bowl. After joining another band, she recalls, “I literally ran away and married the first man I met.”

The marriage produced two children, a boy and a girl, and then ended. Horne found her real happiness at the old Café Society Downtown in Greenwich Village, at that time “the one place in New York that had a mixed audience.” With other performers, like Billy Daniels, Billie Holiday and Paul Robeson, she found the family life she had always wanted. Robeson was both father and teacher, and after the show was over, the two of them would often talk until dawn. “He’d tell me about black people, about my people, my grandmother,” she says. “He was supplying all the things I had missed when I was living with strangers.”

Hollywood called in the early 1940s, and Horne answered, eventually winding up in the office of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. She made it clear to him that she did not want to play maids, the usual role for black women then, but no one on the Culver City lot could think of any other part for a beautiful and talented woman with Horne’s pigmentation. They finally decided that she was light enough to pass for a Latin. Horne insisted that she was dark enough to be what she was, a black. Perplexed, the studio bosses put her into two all-black films, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, and otherwise gave her bit roles so small that they could be excised easily when the movies played in the South. It was not until 1969 that she played a major character in a major movie, the madam of a whorehouse and Richard Widmark’s lover in Death of a Gunfighter. But by then, she says, “I didn’t care. It was too little, too late.”

Despite the obvious discrimination against her, Horne broke barriers for black entertainers, and both races found in her a symbol, a proof that black actors could make it in Hollywood. She was desperate to return to New York, which she loved, and to all of her friends. Says she: “I really hated Hollywood and I was very lonely. The black stars felt uncomfortable out there.” But no less a person than Count Basie persuaded her to stay. “You have to,” he argued. “They don’t give us a chance very often. When they do, we have to take it.” She did her duty, but she did not enjoy it.

Like her mother, she married a white man the second time around, Bandleader Lennie Hayton, and she is frank enough to admit that she married him because he was white. “It was cold-blooded and deliberate. I married him because he could get me into places a black man couldn’t. But I really learned to love him. He was beautiful, just so damned good. I had never met a man like him.” But when they announced their marriage in 1950 — three years after it had actually occurred — Hayton had to buy a shotgun and build a wall around their house to protect them from hostile Hollywood neighbors. Those years of humiliation and rejection left angry scars that are raw to this day.

Always proud of her race, Horne joined the civil rights movement of the late ’50s and ’60s. When a patron in a restaurant called her “just another nigger,” she threw an ashtray at him, causing headlines around the world. After that, she spoke and marched and supported the cause in every way she could. “I no longer felt alone,” she explains. An unexpected series of blows, however, came in the early ’70s, when, within 18 months, the three men in her life — her husband, her father and her son Teddy — died. “They were my keystones,” she says. “And when I lost them, I thought that I was nothing. But the pain of loss somehow cracked me open, made me feel compassion. Now I’m kinder to myself and to other people.”

Part way through her show, Horne sings her trademark song, Stormy Weather,softly and seductively, just as the audience expects to hear it. Then, near the very end, she announces that she is going to do a number that she had to “grow into.” And once again she begins, “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky.” But this is a different Stormy Weather, sung from the gut and the soul, as if she had not only grown into it but out of it. The message is clear: it has taken a lot of doing, and a lot of stormy weather along the way, but Lena Horne has finally grown into being Lena Horne. —By Gerald Clarke