RIP: She's with Fred G. Sanford now (Redd Foxx) -- Lena Horne dead at 92

Taylor

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May 10, 2010, 2:44:09 PM5/10/10

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/lena-horne-dead-singer-di_n_569694.html

Taylor

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May 10, 2010, 2:52:31 PM5/10/10

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On May 10, 2:44 pm, Taylor <lukebenw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/lena-horne-dead-singer-di_n_...

Lena Horne Dead: Singer Dies At 92
VERENA DOBNIK | 05/10/10 01:58 PM | (ap logo, ntvnat logo)

Read More: Gail Lumet Buckley, Hollywood, Jazz, Lena Horn, Lena Horne,
Lena Horne Dead, Lena Horne Dies, Mgm, Music, New York, Race, Racism,
Entertainment News

NEW YORK — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress known
for her plaintive, signature song "Stormy Weather" and for her triumph
over the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not
socialize with them, has died. She was 92.

Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, said hospital
spokeswoman Gloria Chin, who would not release details.

"Her timeless legacy will forever be celebrated as part of the fabric
of American popular music, and our deepest sympathies go out to her
family, friends, and fans worldwide as we all mourn the loss of one of
music's signature voices," Neil Portnow, president and CEO of the
Recording Academy, said Monday in a statement.

Horne, whose striking beauty often overshadowed her talent and
artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her
success: "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people
could accept," she 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."

"I knew her from the time I was born, and whenever I needed anything
she was there. She was funny, sophisticated and truly one of a kind.
We lost an original. Thank you Lena," Liza Minnelli said Monday. Her
father, director Vincente Minnelli, brought Horne to Hollywood to star
in "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943.

In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to
sing with a major white band, to play the Copacabana nightclub in New
York City and when she signed with MGM, she was among a handful of
black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role
of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her
rendition of the title song became a major hit and her most famous
tune.

Horne had an impressive musical range, from blues and jazz to the
sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in such songs as "The Lady Is a
Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." In 1942's "Panama
Hattie," her first movie with MGM, she sang Cole Porter's "Just One of
Those Things," winning critical acclaim.

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957,
reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable
performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the
best female singer of songs."

Story continues below
"It's just a great loss," said Janet Jackson Monday. "She brought much
joy into everyone's lives – even the younger generations, younger than
myself. She was such a great talent. She opened up such doors for
artists like myself."

Horne was perpetually frustrated with racism.

"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people.
Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. ... It was a
damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in
Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I
Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America."

While at MGM, Horne starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," but
in most movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut
when shown in the South and she was denied major roles and speaking
parts. Horne, who had appeared in the role of Julie in a "Show Boat"
scene in a 1946 movie about Jerome Kern, seemed a logical choice for
the 1951 movie, but the part went to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who
did not sing.

"Metro's cowardice deprived the musical (genre) of one of the great
singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.

"She was a very angry woman," said film critic-author-documentarian
Richard Schickel, who worked with Horne on her 1965 autobiography.

"It's something that shaped her life to a very high degree. She was a
woman who had a very powerful desire to lead her own life, to not be
cautious and to speak out. And she was a woman, also, who felt in her
career that she had been held back by the issue of race. So she had a
lot of anger and disappointment about that."

Early in her career, Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-
preservation. Later, she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice
for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life,
she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American
popular music.

Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her
Music," won a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards. (Horne won
another Grammy, in 1995 for "An Evening With Lena Horne.") In it, the
64-year-old singer used two renditions – one straight and the other
gut-wrenching – of "Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the
spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a
leading family in black society. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley,
wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among
their relatives was Frank Horne, an adviser to President Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

She was largely raised by her grandparents as her mother, Edna Horne,
who pursued a career in show business and father Teddy Horne
separated. Lena dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the
chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the
entertainers were black and the clientele white. She left the club in
1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne,
the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet's white
orchestra in 1940.

A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little
Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.

Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a
white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an
"Egyptian" makeup shade especially for her. But she refused to go
along with the studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latina.

"I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort
of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody
else."

Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban
League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945
when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of
war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to
the rear.

That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

She got involved in various social and political organizations and,
partly because of a friendship with singer-actor-activist Paul
Robeson, was blacklisted during the red-hunting McCarthy era.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the
civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a
racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and, in 1963, joining
250,000 others in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also
spoke at a rally that year with another civil rights leader, Medgar
Evers, just days before his assassination.

The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh
burst of artistry. She appeared in her last movie in 1978, playing
Glinda the Good in "The Wiz," directed by her son-in-law, Sidney
Lumet.

Horne had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in
Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and
England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in
1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.

Her father, her son and Hayton all died in 1970 and 1971, and the
grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even
see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King,
took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that
surprised her.

"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It
was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."

And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being
black made me understand."

===

Unlike that awful, awful phony Carol Channing, Ms. Horne was NEVER
afraid to show her pride of her Black roots. Can't wait 'til
Channing's dead. It should have been the other way around.

LidsvilleNine

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May 10, 2010, 9:40:00 PM5/10/10

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That is an incredibly stupid "statement". So Carol is 1/4 Black but
never lived as anything other than a white female. How many people
make a big deal out of such things? My mom is half Cherokee but has
never been near a tribe of Natives. Has she lied by not checking
"other" on her license, etc?