Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.
Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.
Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.
“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of Show Boat” included in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Horne said in an interview in 1990.
In 1947, when Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.
Horne’s first MGM movie was Panama Hattie (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s Just One of Those Things. Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”
She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for Stormy Weather, one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs.
In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of US$1,000 a week, she was earning US$1,500 for every radio appearance and US$6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program Command Performance.
Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.
In the early 1960s Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.
She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels. She conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.
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.
Looking back at the age of 80, 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.”
Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley.
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