Born Lena Mary Calhoun Horne on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Edwin ("Teddy"; a banker) and Edna (an actress) Horne; married Louis Jones, 1937 (divorced, 1944); married Leonard George ("Lennie") Hayton, 1947 (died, 1971); children: (first marriage) Gail, Edwin ("Teddy"; deceased). Addresses: Office--5950 Canoga Ave., #200, Woodland Hills, CA 91367.

"She is one of the incomparable performers of our time," Richard Watts, Jr., wrote of Lena Horne in the New York Post in 1957. This assessment continued to hold true decades later: Lena Horne, the beautiful, elegant, and talented singer and actress, has indeed become a legend. Horne encountered adversity throughout her career---first from her family, who disapproved of her choice of occupation, then from white audiences and managers, who were uncomfortable with her assertiveness, and even from other African-American performers, who felt threatened by her refusal to accept stereotypical roles. But her strong sense of identity, justice, and dignity forced her to struggle against these obstacles, and allowed her to triumph.

The great-granddaughter of a freed slave, Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Edwin "Teddy" Horne and his wife, Edna. Horne's parents separated by the time she was three years old, and she lived for several years with her paternal grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her early life was nomadic. Horne's mother, who was a fairly unsuccessful stage performer, took the young Lena on the road with her, and they lived in various parts of the South before returning to Horne's grandparents' home in Brooklyn in 1931. After her grandparents died, Horne was sent to live with her mother's friend Laura Rollock. Shortly thereafter, her mother married Miguel "Mike" Rodriguez, and Horne moved in with them.

Horne had early ambitions to be a performer, against the wishes of her family, who believed she should aspire to greater heights. The Hornes were an established middle class family, with several members holding college degrees and distinguished positions in organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Nevertheless, Horne persisted in her dreams of stardom, and in 1933 she began her first professional engagement, at the Cotton Club, the famed Harlem nightclub. She sang in the chorus, and though she was only 16 years old, she held her own amongst the older and more experienced cast members. She soon left high school to devote herself to her stage career.

Performed in New York and Hollywood

In 1934 Horne landed a small role in an all-black Broadway show called Dance With Your Gods. The next year she left the Cotton Club and began performing as a featured singer with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra under the name "Helena Horne," which Sissle thought more glamorous than "Lena." In 1937 Horne quit her tour with the Sissle Orchestra to marry Louis Jones, a friend of her father's, and live with him in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During this short and troubled marriage, Horne went to Hollywood to appear in an all-black film called The Duke Is Tops. In 1939 she won a role in the musical revue Blackbirds of 1939, which was performed at the Hudson Theatre in New York City; but it ran for only eight nights. By this time, she had had two children, Gail and Edwin ("Teddy").

Horne left Jones in 1940, took a job as a singer with Charlie Barnet's band, and went out on the road. She was the only black member of the Barnet ensemble, and the kind of racial discrimination she encountered from audiences, hotel managers, and others was so unsettling that she decided to quit the band. In 1941 she began performing at the Cafe Society Downtown, a club in New York City that catered to intellectuals and social activists both black and white.

At the Cafe Society, Horne learned about black history, politics, and culture, and developed a new appreciation for her heritage. She rekindled her acquaintance with singer Paul Robeson, whom she had known when she was a child. In her autobiography In Person: Lena Horne, she explained that through her conversations with Robeson she realized, "We [African Americans] were going forward, and that knowledge gave me a strength and a sense of unity. Yes, we were going forward, and it was up to me to learn more about us and to join actively in our struggle." From this point on, Horne became a significant voice in the struggle for equality and justice for blacks in America. Interestingly, Horne carried her sense of pride and independence into her music; although she enjoyed the blues, she refused to sing them. She told Nancy Matsumoto in People, "I am an emancipated woman who refuses to sing about some man walking out."

Horne moved to California in the summer of 1941 after getting an offer to appear at an as-yet-unbuilt club on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood called the Trocadero. Although plans for the Trocadero fell through, another smaller club, the Little Troc, opened in February of 1942, and Horne was featured there. Also in 1942, Horne signed a seven-year contract with MGM---the first black woman since 1915 to sign a term contract with a film studio. "They didn't quite know what to do with me," she told Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight, regarding the studio's dilemma. She wasn't dark-skinned enough to star with many of the black actors of the day, and her roles in white films were limited, since Hollywood wasn't ready to depict interracial relationships on screen. Her first film under contract was Panama Hattie, a 1942 version of Cole Porter's Broadway musical, in which she had a small singing role and appeared in only one scene.

Dignified and Elegant Performances

Several of Horne's roles in subsequent films were similar. James Haskins noted in his book Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Horne, "The image of Lena, always elegantly gowned, singing while draped around a marble column in a lavishly produced musical sequence, would become virtually standardized. Only her ability to appear enigmatic prevented her from being completely exploited in these stock sequences; she managed to carry them off with a dignity that, coupled with her aloof and detached delivery, enhanced both her mystery and her audience appeal." The sad footnote to this is that Horne's scenes were purposely constructed so that they could be easily excised when the films were shown to white audiences in the South.

Horne appeared in the all-black musicals Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, both released in 1943, but she refused to take any role that she felt would be demeaning to her as a woman of color. This led to an uproar among the black Hollywood "extras" who represented what Horne's daughter, in her book The Hornes: An American Family, called "a kind of stock company of stereotypes." These actors felt threatened by Horne and accused her of being a tool of the NAACP. In her defense, Horne wrote in her 1965 autobiography Lena: "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into."

During World War II Horne went on USO tours along the West Coast and throughout the South. She appeared on the Armed Forces Radio Service programs Jubilee, G.I. Journal, and Command Performances, and helped First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt press for anti-lynching legislation. After the war Horne worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination because Japan had been an enemy of the United States.

In the fall of 1947 Horne went to Europe with Lennie Hayton, a white musician she had met in Hollywood. They were married in Paris, because interracial marriages were against the law in California. Back in Hollywood, she appeared in more film musicals, among them Till the Clouds Roll By in 1946, Words and Music in 1948, and The Duchess of Idaho in 1950.

Blacklisted

In the early 1950s Horne, along with many of her colleagues, was a victim of the anti-Communist "witch hunts" that successfully blacklisted performers who were thought to have ties to Communist organizations or activities. The blacklisting hurt Horne's career and kept her from appearing on radio and television. By the mid-1950s, though, Horne was cleared of these charges. In 1956 she signed a recording contract with RCA Victor. Some of her albums included Stormy Weather, Lena Horne at the Coconut Grove, and Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria. The latter became the top-selling recording by a female artist in RCA's history. In 1957 Horne was featured in Jamaica, a Broadway musical with an all-black cast. The show had a successful run and did not close until the spring of 1959.

Horne was actively involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, participating in the March on Washington in 1963, performing at rallies in the South and elsewhere, and working on behalf of the National Council for Negro Women. This period also saw her appear on various television programs, including several performances on the popular Ed Sullivan and Perry Como variety shows, and in her own special, Lena in Concert, which aired in 1969. Also in 1969 she appeared in a nonsinging role in the western Death of a Gunfighter.

The 1970s began tragically for Horne: her son, Teddy, died of kidney disease in 1970, her father died the same year, and Lennie Hayton died of a heart attack in 1971. But these years also offered a variety of opportunities for Horne to perform. She appeared on Broadway with Tony Bennett in 1974 in a show called Tony and Lena, and was featured in several television commercials. In 1978 she played the role of Glinda the Good Witch in the film version of The Wiz, the all-black musical based on The Wizard of Oz.

Horne launched a "farewell tour" in the summer of 1980, but her greatest success of the decade was still ahead of her---her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which opened in May of 1981 at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre. The production ran for two years and was a tremendous success, so much so that Horne was given a special Tony Award for her performance. She also received a Drama Desk Award and a special citation from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. The soundtrack to the show, produced by Quincy Jones, won two Grammy Awards. In Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography, Haskins reported that the show was "not only the longest-running one-woman show in the history of Broadway but the standard against which every future one-person show would be measured." Horne herself, in an article she wrote for Ebony magazine in 1990, described the show as "the most rewarding event in my entire career."

In the 1990s Horne cut back on performing, but she continued to be a favorite of audiences throughout the world. In 1998 she received an honorary Doctor Of Humane Letters degree from Yale University. In 1999 she was honored at al all-star gala at New York's Avery Fisher Hall, titled "Lena: The Legacy." The affair was held to support the Lena Horne Youth Leadership Scholarship Awards Program. The program awarded $10,000 college scholarships to several inner-city youths who had worked to improve their communities.

In 2003 the ABC television network planned to begin filming for a movie about Horne's life, starring singer Janet Jackson as Horne. In Daily Variety, Sony executive vice president Helen Verno told Josef Adalian, "This is an opportunity for a new generation to be exposed not only to Ms. Horne's music, but to understand her struggle to overcome the racial prejudices she faced as a black performer in America." However, when Jackson, either accidentally or on purpose, bared her breast during the coverage of the Super Bowl in early 2004, Horne was offended and demanded that ABC remove Jackson from the role. ABC refused, but Jackson withdrew rather than have a confrontation with Horne over the role. The project was shelved, to the disappointment of executive producer Craig Zahan, who told Gail Shister in the Philadelphia Enquirer that it "could have been a blockbuster."

Although Horne has enjoyed lasting success as a performer, some observers consider her most important role that of catalyst in the elevation of the status of African Americans in the performing arts. Despite the strides she has made, Horne has often lamented the sluggishness of progress in Hollywood; if given the chance to do it all again, she told music writer Leonard Feather in Modern Maturity, "I'd be a schoolteacher."

by Joyce Harrison and Kelly Winters

Lena Horne's Career

Began singing at Cotton Club, New York City, 1933; appeared in Broadway musical Dance With Your Gods, 1934; featured singer with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra, 1935-37, and Charlie Barnet Orchestra, 1940-41; appeared in musical Blackbirds of 1939, 1939, and at Cafe Society Downtown, 1941; featured performer at Little Troc nightclub, Hollywood, 1942; appeared in films, including The Duke Is Tops, 1938, Panama Hattie, 1942, Stormy Weather, 1943, Cabin in the Sky, 1943, Death of a Gunfighter, 1969, The Wiz, 1978, and That's Entertainment III, 1993; signed recording contract with RCA Victor, 1956; featured in Broadway musical Jamaica, 1957-59; appeared on television programs, 1950s-1980s, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Como Show, and The Cosby Show; starred on Broadway in Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, 1981-82; appeared at gala, "Lena: The Legacy," 1999.

Lena Horne's Awards

Tony Award, 1981; Drama Desk Award, 1981; Actors Equity Paul Robeson Award, 1982; Dance Theater of Harlem Emergence Award, 1982; Handel Medallion, 1982; Grammy Award for Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1983; Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime contribution to the arts, 1984; Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 1989; Essence Award, 1993; Ebony Lifetime Achievement Award.

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