The Great Lena Horne Has Died

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American Icon Lena Horne, Who Passed At Age 92, And Her Georgia Heritage

Best known for her long show biz career, beauty and outspokenness, Lena Horne,who was born on June 30, 1917, died last night at the age of 92 at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Horne, whose career achievements include a Tony Award as well as Grammy wins, broke many barriers. Her contract deal with MGM in the 1940s was the most significant of its kind for a black actor. Plum movie roles were still hard to come by, with Horne largely relegated to musical numbers. She did, however, have significant roles in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, films with African American casts. Barriers were still lifted on other levels. Horne dined in the commissary and even appeared on the cover of a major movie magazine, a first for an African American.
Career-wise, Horne made her greatest moves in music, particularly with live performances. In Las Vegas, especially, she was among the highest paid performers. Her 1957 album Lena Horne: Live at the Waldorf-Astoria was the highest selling by a female artist in RCA Victor's history. Her one-woman Broadway show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music documented her musical legacy while also electrifying audiences in 1981.
Little noted in the many stories about Horne's passing is her Georgia heritage. Her paternal grandmother Cora Catherine Calhoun Horne, who is acknowledged as a NAACP founder, was actually born in Atlanta in 1865. Lena Horne's great grandfather, Moses Calhoun, who was born a slave, started out as a retail grocer and had a small restaurant and fruit stand on Decatur Street before buying a boarding house and other significant property.
Very well-educated for a woman of any race at the time, Horne's grandmother attended Atlanta University while her sister Lena attended Fisk. Interestingly, Lena dated W.E.B. DuBois at Fisk. DuBois would later spend part of his academic career in Atlanta. Cora Catherine Calhoun married Edwin Horn, later Horne, who was not black, according to most accounts. Although the couple initially lived in the South, including Chattanooga, as the strains of segregation intensified, they relocated to New York, where they were pillars of Brooklyn's black bourgeoisie. This was the most consistent home that Horne had during her childhood.
Like her grandmother, Horne also spent time in Georgia but her life was not as privileged. Her mother longed to be an actress and that lifestyle was very unstable. Consequently, Horne bounced around a bit. In her 1965 autobiography Lena, Horne discussed happy times spent in Macon with two Christian women who shared Bible stories and great cooking with her. Her uncle was a teacher and dean at Fort Valley High and Industrial School, now Fort Valley State University, and she lived with him and his wife there from 1927 to 1929. Horne rejoined her mother in Atlanta where she attended Washington High School briefly before returning to her native New York. In 1991, Horne was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
Throughout her career, Horne was known for her outspokenness. She was very much present at the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Her life was certainly multifaceted and her living was not done in vain

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html?hp

PART TWO...

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

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