Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne - Hardcover

Gavin, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743271432 ISBN 13: 9780743271431

Publisher: Atria Books, 2009

Synopsis

At long last, the first serious biography of entertainment legend Lena Horne -- the celebrated star of film, stage, and music who became one of the first African-American icons.

At the 74th annual Academy Awards in 2002, Halle Berry thanked Lena Horne for paving the way for her to become the first black recipient of a Best Actress Oscar. Though limited, mostly to guest singing appearances in splashy Hollywood musicals, "the beautiful Lena Horne," as she was often called, became a pioneering star for African Americans in the 1940s and fifties. Now James Gavin, author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, draws on a wealth of unmined material and hundreds of interviews -- one of them with Horne herself -- to give us the defining portrait of an American icon.

Gavin has gotten closer than any other writer to the celebrity who has lived in reclusion since 1998. Incorporating insights from the likes of Ruby Dee, Tony Bennett, Diahann Carroll, Arthur Laurents, and several of Horne's fellow chorines from Harlem's Cotton Club, Stormy Weather offers a fascinating portrait of a complex, even tragic Horne -- a stunning talent who inspired such giants of showbiz as Barbra Streisand, Eartha Kitt, and Aretha Franklin, but whose frustrations with racism, and with tumultuous, root-less childhood, left wounds too deep to heal. The woman who emerged was as angry as she was luminous.

From the Cotton Club's glory days and the back lots of Hollywood's biggest studios to the glitzy but bigoted hotels of Las Vegas's heyday, this behind-the-scenes look at an American icon is as much a story of the limits of the American dream as it is a masterful, ground-breaking biography.

About this title

About the Author:

James Gavin has written about some of the most significant black musical figures of our time, including Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte, and Miriam Makeba. His 300+ CD liner note essays include Grammy-nominated article for the box set Ella Fitzgerald - The Legendary Decca Recordings. He is the author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker and Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1

LORRAINE GERARD, the wife of a bebop pianist named Vinnie Gerard, was nearing eighty in 2005, but time had not dimmed a particular memory from her Depression-era childhood. She grew up in Canarsie, a bayside neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Her family took her for weekend fun to the shore, where buskers entertained for coins on a well-known pier.

In 1933, Lorraine got her first glimpse of a lovely, waiflike teenager whose name, she heard, was Lena Horne. "Every Saturday and Sunday she used to sing and dance on the beach for pennies," Lorraine recalled. "She appeared to be extremely poor. I thought she had the ugliest legs, and I wasn't the only one that thought that. Scrawny, you know? Her dresses were skimpy-looking; you could tell that she was in need." Lorraine's family never spoke to the girl, but she earned their sympathy, and they tossed some change her way.

Her household needed all the help it could get. Lena's mother was a jobless and sickly actress; her Cuban stepfather was unemployed, too. Th ey could barely pay the rent on their small Brooklyn apartment and lived on groceries from relief organizations. For Lena -- who'd been born into the well-heeled respectability of the black middle class -- life now held considerable shame.

A decade later she had good reason to obscure her past. M-G-M had signed her to a long-term contract, the likes of which no one of color in Hollywood had ever known. In the black community, all eyes were on her. As a sex symbol of uncommon refinement, Horne would have to revolutionize the Negro persona in Hollywood. Among the reams of press she received was a profile in PM, a Manhattan leftist newspaper. For an article called "The Real Story of Lena Horne," she told reporter Robert Rice about her distinguished family, which included schoolteachers, activists, and a Harlem Renaissance poet. Apropos of nothing, Horne mentioned that an interviewer had asked her if she'd ever "danced for pennies on the street" as a youngster.

"I told him no," she said.

KEEPING up appearances would always be crucial to Horne, as it was for so many black people throughout her lifetime. They had to take great pains to counter the stereotypes that the white community associated with them. A veneer as painstakingly wrought as Horne's wasn't easily dropped; it was the armor she needed to survive, and it hid lots of secrets. Only in 1963, when the civil rights movement had forced much of America to take an honest look at what it meant to be black, did Horne start delving behind her own mask. She did so for an autobiographical article in Show magazine, "I Just Want to Be Myself."

"I came from what was called one of the First Families of Brooklyn," Horne explained. They shunned discussing the slave ancestry that had spawned them all -- "yet it was the rape of slave women by their masters which accounted for our white blood, which, in turn, made us Negro 'society.'" Home was an immaculate four-story brownstone in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. An iron fence with sharp black spikes protected 189 Chauncey Street on three sides. That barrier told passersby to keep their distance; and for Lena's grandmother Cora, the lady of the house, it shut out the neighborhood's seamier elements -- the poor Irish in tenements across the street, the Swedes who ran a garage a few doors down.

Cora and her husband, Edwin, had lived on Chauncey Street since 1896. That year they joined a northward migration of approximately forty thousand blacks who fled the growing horrors of southern life. Post-Civil War Reconstruction had collapsed, toppled by white supremacists. Negroes had lost most of the rights they'd gained, and segregation was flaring. Hundreds of lynchings had occurred -- each a symbolic warning of what might happen to Negroes who stepped out of line, or even to those who didn't. In contrast, the northern cities -- New York, Chicago, Detroit -- seemed like oases of safety and opportunity.

A small percentage of the newly settled black families were considered special. This was the "black bourgeoisie," a prosperous middle class of teachers, doctors, businessmen, and others of education and grooming. They or their elders had descended from "favored slaves" -- privileged blacks who, by virtue of their brains or their sexual allure to their masters, had worked in the house, not in the field. During the decadelong heyday of Reconstruction, they'd used their cachet to start businesses and gain social standing. Now, in the North, they were helping pave the way for a new Negro image -- one that challenged every cliché of black women as household help, black men as shiftless loafers. The Negro aristocracy tended to shun anyone who embodied a past they wanted to bury. "Uppity" became a popular word to describe ambitious blacks.

Respectability was their gospel, and they upheld it at all costs. Actress Jane White, whose father, Walter White, became the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1931, recalled the code of behavior dictated by the black bourgeoisie. "You didn't laugh too loud," she said. "You didn't go out in messy clothes, you were always polished and ironed; you learned how to speak well, and with a modulated voice. It was a tight cage you were in."

The Whites lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, the most prestigious address in Harlem. At fourteen stories, it towered above the rest of Sugar Hill, a gold-ring neighborhood for the Negro elite. Residents through the years included NAACP cofounder and preeminent activist W.E.B. Du Bois; Jimmie Lunceford, one of Harlem's star bandleaders; and Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who worked for the NAACP before becoming the Supreme Court's first black justice. In the 1940s, Marshall often dropped by the White apartment for poker nights. "There would be hootin' and hollerin' and drinkin'," said Jane, "and they would let their hair down, and Thurgood talked one way amongst them. When he argued in court he talked another way. One may laugh, but it's rather sad." In public, she said, "you couldn't be what you were."

Many in the black bourgeoisie wound up emulating the values and even the looks of middle-class whites. From the 1920s through the 1960s, magazines for black readers advertised lye-based skin-lightening creams and hair-straightening treatments. "'Lighter is brighter' -- that was an actual expression then," said Gene Davis, who produced dozens of black cultural documentaries before his death in 2007. "The social structure in the black community until recently was based on how light you were. And the lighter you were, the more acceptable you were." The notion that "black is beautiful" did not appear until the civil rights movement, when African roots were flaunted, not hidden, and the Negro slave ancestry celebrated for its strength.

In his 1957 book Black Bourgeoisie, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier defined that group in terms that could have applied to Lena Horne. In Frazier's view, it lacked "cultural roots in either the Negro world with which it refuses to identify or the white world which refuses to accept it." By struggling so hard for the respect of both, he wrote, members of the black bourgeoisie suffered from a constant identity crisis.

But a more enlightened age could never have come without bridges, and the black bourgeoisie was uniquely equipped to fight for change. Its members had education, social access, and manners a white society might come to heed. If they had to deny their history in order to find a foothold in the white man's world, they didn't hesitate.

So it was at the Horne residence, the hub of a family with a sprawling history explored by Gail Lumet Buckley in her book The Hornes: An American Family. Before Lena's birth in 1917, six people lived in the house. Reigning over them was Cora Calhoun Horne, her dictatorial grandmother. Fifty-two when Lena arrived, Cora was a community activist of warrior determination. She looked the part, with her austerely pulled-back salt-and-pepper hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and near inability to smile.

Cora battled for so many Negro civic groups that her gentler husband seemed to wilt by comparison. Back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was born, Edwin had published and edited Justice, a prominent black newspaper; later he worked as a schoolteacher and politician. In Brooklyn he became secretary-general of the United Colored Democracy of Greater New York.

Astonishingly, Edwin wasn't even a Negro, but the son of a white Englishman and a Native American mother. During Reconstruction, Native Americans had suffered worse discrimination than blacks. For his children's sake, he'd decided to "pass" as Negro. Apparently that went undiscussed among the Hornes -- no surprise, given their disdain for whites.

Edwin and Cora had four sons. Edwin Frank Horne, Jr., the handsomest of the boys, lived on the top floor with Edna, his wife. Errol had served as a sergeant in an all-black army troop until influenza killed him. Burke and Frank were teenagers when Lena was born.

The Hornes seemed like a model family. Outsiders didn't know that Edwin and Cora slept in separate rooms and barely spoke. One of the rumored causes was a past affair between Edwin and a white editor of Vogue. But in a Catholic household like theirs, divorce was as verboten as philandering; best to avoid discussing either. "As a family," said Lena, "we were very reticent, hiding feelings."

Certain parts of their lineage went unmentioned, too -- especially by Cora, whose café au lait skin, thin lips, and delicate nose betrayed generations of intermingling with whites. Her maiden name, Calhoun, came from her father's and grandmother's slave master in Georgia, Dr. Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun. His uncle, Senator John C. Calhoun, had championed slavery as God's will -- another unvoiced source of shame among the Hornes.

But Cora had revered Moses, her mulatto father. After decades as a house slave, he'd become a top Atlanta business owner and had married a white woman. Cora and h...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0743271432
• ISBN 13: 9780743271431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608