Lena Horne Essay Example

civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Both sides of her family claimed a mixture of African-Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians, and both were part of what black leader W.E.B. DuBois called "the talented tenth," the upper stratum of the American black population made up of middle-class, well-educated African-Americans. Her parents, however, might both be described as mavericks from that tradition. Her father, Edwin Fletcher Horne Jr., worked for the New York State Department of Labor, but one of her biographers describes him more accurately as "a 'numbers' banker": his real profession was gambling. Her mother, Edna Louise (Scottron) Horne, aspired to act.

The two lived in a Brooklyn brownstone with Horne's paternal grandparents, teacher and newspaper editor Edwin Fletcher Horne Sr. and his wife, Cora (Calhoun) Horne, a civil rights activist and early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909 and was headed by DuBois. (Indeed, Horne herself could claim a similar association. A photograph of her as a two-year-old appears on the cover of the October 1919 issue of the NAACP's Branch Bulletin, describing her as the organization's youngest member!)

Horne's father and mother separated in August 1920 when she was three, later divorcing. Her father moved to Seattle before eventually settling in Pittsburgh, where he ran a hotel when he wasn't traveling the country to attend and gamble on sporting events. Horne and

her mother initially remained in her grandparents' home, but when Horne was about five, her mother left to pursue her acting career, initially with the Lafayette Stock Company in Harlem. Horne recalled in her 1965 autobiography Lena (written with Richard Schickel) that she visited her mother occasionally and even made her stage debut as a young child in the play Madame X in Philadelphia.

After a couple of years, Horne's mother took her on the road with her, and from the age of six or seven to the age of 11 she was raised in various locations in the South and the Midwest by her mother, relatives, and paid companions, with frequent trips back to Brooklyn. Finally, in early 1929, she returned permanently to her grandparents' home. She stayed there until September 1932, when her grandmother died, then went to live with a family friend. While attending Girls High School in Brooklyn, she also took dancing lessons, even playing with a group at the Harlem Opera House for a week in 1933. Her mother, meanwhile, had been living in Cuba, where she had remarried. She returned to New York and reclaimed her daughter. They lived in Brooklyn, then moved to the Bronx, and eventually Harlem. Money was tight in those Depression years, and Horne's mother obtained an audition for her at the Cotton Club through a friend. She was hired as a chorus girl at the club at the age of 16.

Horne first attracted attention beyond the chorus when she replaced a sick performer in a performance of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "As Long As I Live" with Avon Long. Soon after, she sang "Cocktails

for Two" with Claude Hopkins & His Orchestra on a theater date with the Cotton Club troupe, and she began taking singing lessons. She was spotted at the Cotton Club by a theatrical producer and cast in a small part in the play Dance With Your Gods, which opened a brief run on October 6, 1934, marking her Broadway debut. In 1935, she left the Cotton Club and took a job singing with Noble Sissle & His Orchestra, billed as Helena Horne. She made her recording debut with Sissle on March 11, 1936, singing "That's What Love Did to Me" and "I Take to You," both released by Decca Records.

Horne was introduced to Louis Jordan Jones, a Pittsburgh political operative, by her father. In January 1937, she retired from show business to marry him; their daughter, Gail, was born December 21, 1937. Jones owed his job a clerk in the county coroner's office to political patronage. It did not bring in much money, and in 1938, when Horne was approached by an agent with an offer to co-star in a low-budget all-black movie musical with a mere ten-day shooting schedule in Hollywood, she accepted. The film was The Duke Is Tops, released in July 1938. Later in the year, Horne was asked to take on a more time-consuming project, a part in a new mounting of producer Lew Leslie's all-black musical revue Blackbirds. Again, she accepted in the name of increasing the family income, spending months in rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts before Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 opened on Broadway on February 11, 1939. One of Horne's numbers was "You're So Indifferent," written by Sammy

Fain and Mitchell Parish, a song she would keep in her repertoire. The show ran only nine performances, closing February 18.

Horne returned to Pittsburgh, where she temporarily separated from her husband, then reconciled with him. She began taking singing engagements in the homes of wealthy families in the area. She also became pregnant again, and her son, Edwin Fletcher ("Teddy") Jones, was born in February 1940. That fall, she made a final separation from her husband (they were formally divorced in June 1944) and moved to New York to restart her career. In December, she accepted an offer to join the orchestra of white bandleader Charlie Barnet, one of the few instances of integration among swing bands at the time. She made a handful of recordings with Barnet in January 1941 that were released on RCA Victor's discount label Bluebird Records.

After only a few months, however, the difficulties of encountering racial discrimination while touring and her desire to have a home where she could raise her children (Jones let her have her daughter, but ultimately retained custody of her son) caused her to look for a job in New York, and in March 1941 she began singing at the prestigious nightclub Cafe Society Downtown in Greenwich Village, again billed as Helena Horne. She also did radio work, becoming a regular on the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street series broadcast by NBC. In June 1941, she was the featured vocalist on a series of recordings made by Henry Levine ; the Dixieland Jazz Group of the show for RCA, cutting a selection of W.C. Handy tunes for a 78-rpm album called The Birth of

the Blues. She also sang on recordings by Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson (who was her accompanist at Cafe Society).

Horne left her New York engagement after six months when she received an offer to help open a club in Los Angeles. She arrived on the West Coast in September 1941 to find that the club was not yet ready to open; after Pearl Harbor led to American involvement in World War II and a shortage of building materials, it would not be any time soon. In the meantime, she was contracted directly to RCA and in December 1941 cut eight songs backed by an orchestra conducted by Lou Bring for her first solo album, Moanin' Low.

Among its selections were songs she would sing throughout her career, including a revival of the 1933 Cotton Club song "Stormy Weather," written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, and George and Ira Gershwin's 1928 standard "The Man I Love." Giving up on the large club he had in mind (which was to have been called the Trocadero), Horne's sponsor instead opened a small club, the Little Troc, in February 1942 with her as headliner. She attracted attention immediately, notably from the film community, and entertained offers from the film studios before settling on MGM. Even then, she brought in a representative of the NAACP to consult on her contract so that she would not be forced to play the kind of demeaning roles usually given to African-Americans. As it turned out, however, MGM had very little else for her to play, and in all but two of the 13 features in which she would appear over the next 14

years, she would only sing a song or two, not actually have a speaking part. (The material was gathered together for audio release in 1996 by Turner/Rhino on the CD Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.) The first of these "specialty" appearances came right away; by May 1942 she was at work prerecording songs for a film adaptation of the Cole Porter musical Panama Hattie, one of which was the standard "Just One of Those Things." At the same time, however, she continued her nightclub work, moving from the Little Troc to the Mocambo.

Horne was not credited in Panama Hattie, and with the film's Latin American setting, MGM may have been hoping to pass her off as Hispanic rather than Negro. But her next film would dispel any such notion; it was a treatment of the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, with Horne not only singing but acting opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. She shot the film in the late summer of 1942, then returned to New York where she was booked into the Cafe Lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel starting on November 26. The engagement attracted national attention, with write-ups in magazines like Time and Life, increasing her emerging stardom. By March 1943, she was back in Hollywood for what would be her busiest time of filmmaking. MGM loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for another all-black musical, a fictionalized film biography of dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson called Stormy Weather, in which she co-starred with Robinson himself and again sang the title song, which became her signature tune.

The opening of Cabin in the Sky in April found her on the

road making appearances in black theaters like Washington, D.C.'s Howard and Harlem's Apollo. Then it was back to Hollywood, where MGM quickly began shooting musical sequences with her for one film after another: Swing Fever (an interpolation of "You're So Indifferent"), Thousands Cheer (Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's 1929 song "Honeysuckle Rose"), I Dood It ("Jericho"), and Broadway Rhythm (the 1924 Gershwin standard "Somebody Loves Me"). (Her scenes were usually excised from the prints of the films shown in the South to avoid offending racist white audiences.) Meanwhile, Stormy Weather opened, and with I Dood It and Thousands Cheer out before the end of the year, Broadway Rhythm and Swing Fever following in early 1944, and Two Girls and a Sailor (in which she sang the Mills Brothers hit "Paper Doll") out in April, Horne had appearances in seven major movie musicals released in little more than a year. She would never be so active in film again. In fact, she would appear in only seven more films over the rest of her career.

When her film work eased up, however, Horne had other activities to keep her busy. She entertained troops at military bases; she appeared on radio, notably the African-American-oriented military show Jubilee and the drama Suspense; she continued to do club and theater dates; and with the lifting of the musicians union recording ban that had been imposed in 1942, she was even able to make a few recordings in November 1944, backed by Horace Henderson & His Orchestra, among them her old standby "As Long as I Live." (In 2002, Bluebird reissued these tracks and earlier ones on a CD called The

Young Star, along with a few tracks said to have been recorded in January 1944, at a time when the ban was still in force.)

Back at MGM, her only work was for the anthology film Ziegfeld Follies, in which she sang and performed Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's newly written song "Love." The film, long in gestation, did not come out until January 1946. By then, Horne was working on Till the Clouds Roll By, a film biography of songwriter Jerome Kern, recording and filming a sequence that found her on-stage in Show Boat in the role of Julie LaVerne, the light-skinned Negro attempting to pass for white who sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill." (Horne's performance of "Bill" was cut from the film but released on Lena Horne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain't It the Truth.)

Horne parted ways with RCA in 1946 and signed to the tiny Black & White Records label, for which she recorded that fall. But when Till the Clouds Roll By opened in November, MGM took the opportunity to launch its own record label and release the first original motion picture soundtrack album; featuring Judy Garland, June Allyson, and Tony Martin, along with Horne, the Till the Clouds Roll By soundtrack reached number three in the spring of 1947, and MGM Records became Horne's new label. Meanwhile, again free of studio responsibilities, she traveled to England to perform at the London Casino that spring. She returned to Europe in October 1947 for a lengthier stay that found her performing in England, France, and Belgium. The European trip also had another purpose; she had become involved in a serious relationship with

MGM arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton, but since Hayton was white, the two could not marry in California, where mixed-race marriages were illegal. Instead, they married in Paris in December 1947, and even then kept the marriage secret for two and a half years.

As usual, Horne had only one film to work on in 1948, and that was Words and Music, a film biography of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in which she performed "Where or When" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Opening in December, the film generated a soundtrack album featuring Garland, Allyson, and Mickey Rooney in addition to Horne that began the first of six weeks at number one on February 12, 1949. Five days later, she was recording "Baby, Come Out of the Clouds" for her next specialty appearance in an MGM musical, the Esther Williams picture Duchess of Idaho. This would be her last film as part of the seven-year contract she had signed in 1942.

As the film was released in June 1950, Horne's career took several new turns. That month, free of her movie contract, she sailed to Europe for another long tour; she revealed her marriage to Hayton to the press; and her name was listed in Red Channels, a publication intended to inform broadcasters of which performers were Communists or Communist "sympathizers." She was not actually called a Communist, but only included because of her association with others, notably Paul Robeson, and because she had assisted various liberal organizations in Hollywood in the 1940s, primarily in connection with their civil rights activities. The inclusion of her name, however, was enough to damage her career significantly. No movie studio

offered her another film contract; she was without a recording contract; and there were no offers to appear on radio or the emerging medium of television. Thankfully, she still had live appearances to keep her going, but she worked in Europe increasingly over the next several years. She came back from Europe in September 1950, and in December opened for the first time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where she would appear annually for the next decade. There were more European trips in 1952 and 1954.

Eventually, Horne managed to get herself "cleared" from the blacklist, and media opportunities in the U.S. opened up again. At the end of 1954, she re-signed to RCA, and she was back in the recording studio in March 1955 cutting a revival of the 1928 Ruth Etting hit "Love Me or Leave Me" to take advantage of the Etting film biography of the same name due for release that spring. The recording gave her something she had never had before, a hit single; it peaked at number 19 in the Billboard chart in July. RCA quickly followed with a full-length LP, It's Love. Horne began to make appearances on television variety shows, and she was even invited back to MGM to perform in the film Meet Me in Las Vegas. Of course, all she did was sing a song. The movie opened in the winter of 1956, and that year she released more RCA recordings, toured Europe again, and, starting on New Year's Eve, opened a long run in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. RCA brought in recording equipment on February 20,

1957, and the result was the live LP Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria, released that summer, which reached the Top 25 in Billboard and the Top Ten in Cash Box and was reported to be the best-selling album by a female artist on RCA up to that time.

Horne, meanwhile, had moved her show to the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood in June, where she recorded a live EP, Lena Horne at the Cocoanut Grove, and announced that she was leaving nightclub work temporarily. She was preparing to star in a Broadway musical. The show was Jamaica, with songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, originally written as a vehicle for Harry Belafonte, who proved unavailable. The creators then rewrote it somewhat to beef up the part of the male lead's girlfriend for Horne. Critics were not impressed with the show itself when it opened on October 31, 1957, but they were impressed with Horne, who carried the production to a run of 558 performances that continued until April 11, 1959. Based in New York, she issued plenty of new RCA recordings during this period, including an LP called Stormy Weather; the Jamaica cast album; Give the Lady What She Wants (a Top 20 hit in the fall of 1958); a duet album with Belafonte of songs from Porgy and Bess recorded to coincide with the release of a film version of the Gershwin opera in 1959; and Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. Horne disliked the Porgy and Bess LP and even sued RCA to prevent the label from releasing it, but when it came out it made the Top 15 in Billboard and the

Top Ten in Cash Box. It also earned her her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Vocal Performance, Female, though she lost to Ella Fitzgerald.

Finished with her Broadway commitment, Horne went back to nightclub work in 1959, performing in Europe that summer and fall and returning to the Sands in Las Vegas. Her schedule was much the same in 1960. That November, RCA again recorded her in concert for the 1961 album Lena at the Sands, which earned her another Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss, this time to Judy Garland, whose Judy at Carnegie Hall also won Album of the Year. Horne next mounted a stage show, Lena Horne in Her Nine O'Clock Revue, that was intended to go to Broadway but closed out of town after tryouts in Toronto and New Haven. She continued to record for RCA, charting with Lena on the Blue Side in April 1962 and Lena...Lovely and Alive in February 1963 (the latter earning her a third Grammy nomination for Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female, and another loss to Ella Fitzgerald), but diminishing sales led to the end of her contract. She signed to Charter Records and recorded two LPs, Lena Sings Your Requests and Goes Latin (later reissued as a two-fer by DRG Records under the title Lena Goes Latin & Sings Your Requests), but her increasing involvement in the civil rights movement of the early '60s (she appeared with civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS, just before he was assassinated on June 12, 1963, and attended the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on August 28) led

her to question her role as an entertainer. She wrote an article for Show magazine called "I Just Want to Be Myself," and it inspired some of her songwriting colleagues to provide her with more politically oriented material. Harold Arlen and E.Y.

Harburg sent her "Silent Spring," a song that used the title of Rachel Carson's environmentalist book but treated broader social concerns, and Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote the civil rights-oriented "Now!" to the tune of "Hava Na Gila." Horne premiered both at a Carnegie Hall appearance mounted as a benefit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they were heard by a producer at 20th Century Fox Records, who signed her to a new recording contract. A single pairing "Now!" and "Silent Spring" made the lower reaches of the pop charts in November 1963 and even made the Top 20 of Cash Box's R&B chart (Billboard did not publish a separate R&B chart at the time), despite resistance from some radio stations. Horne followed with a recording of Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" and the 1964 LP Here's Lena Now!

Of course, in early 1964 the Beatles led the British Invasion, which tended to marginalize middle-of-the-road performers like Horne in American record stores. Nevertheless, she did what she could, turning more to television, with a special filmed in England in March 1964 and eventually shown in the U.S. in December, and more appearances on variety shows. She moved to another new record label, United Artists, which released Feelin' Good and Lena in Hollywood in 1965 and Lena Soul and the holiday collection Merry from Lena in 1966.

After that, she was without a recording contract for a few years. She had also given up performing in the Nevada showrooms, though she continued to play club dates. In 1969, she acted in the Western Death of a Gunfighter, also singing a song over the opening and closing credits. That September, NBC broadcast her first U.S.-originated television special, Monsanto Presents Lena Horne.

The same month, she returned to Las Vegas, appearing with Harry Belafonte at Caesar's Palace. In October, she recorded a new album for Skye Records accompanied by guitarist Gabor Szabo and issued in the spring of 1970 under the title Lena ; Gabor. The LP reached the pop and jazz charts, with a single, "Watch What Happens," making the Top 40 of the R;B chart in Cash Box. (Although Horne never considered herself a jazz singer, and jazz critics agreed, she frequently performed and recorded with jazz musicians, and from the 1970s on, she, like other traditional pop singers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, often was lumped in with jazz artists for marketing purposes.) Meanwhile, ABC had contracted with Horne and Belafonte to re-create their stage act for TV, and the result was the special Harry and Lena, broadcast on March 22, 1970, and recorded for a soundtrack album released by RCA. Buddah Records acquired the Lena; Gabor album and reissued it under the name Watch What Happens!

The label also signed Horne and had her record a new album, Nature's Baby, released in the spring of 1971, on which she covered contemporary pop/rock songs by Elton John, Leon Russell, and Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, by the time the LP came out, she

was in no condition to promote it. In a period of just over a year, she had suffered a series of devastating losses. Her father had died at 78 on April 18, 1970; her son had died of kidney failure at 30 on September 12, 1970; and, unexpectedly, her husband, Lennie Hayton, died of a heart attack on April 24, 1971, just as Nature's Baby was coming out. She was relatively inactive for a year, but finally began to perform again on a limited basis in March 1972. In 1974, she teamed up with Tony Bennett for a duo act that played in Europe and then came to the U.S., starting with a Broadway run at the Minskoff Theatre that played 37 performances between October 30 and November 24.

The two then toured North America through March 1975. She re-signed to RCA yet again and produced two LPs, Lena and Michel, accompanied by Michel Legrand, in 1975 and Lena, a New Album in 1976. She continued to tour in the mid-'70s, playing dates with Vic Damone and with Count Basie & His Orchestra. Meanwhile, her son-in-law, film director Sidney Lumet, married to her daughter, Gail, was preparing a movie adaptation of The Wiz, the all-black version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that had opened on Broadway in 1975, and he cast her as Glinda the Good Witch. She sang "Believe in Yourself" in the film and on the soundtrack album, which reached the Top 40 and went gold upon its release in the fall of 1978. Meanwhile, she had starred in a revival of the 1940 musical Pal Joey on the West Coast in the

spring of 1978, but the show closed without transferring to Broadway. She continued to make club appearances in the late '70s, but in March 1980 announced her retirement and went on a farewell tour that ran from June to August.

But the 63-year-old singer did not retire. Instead, she mounted a one-woman show that she brought to Broadway. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music opened at the Nederlander Theatre on May 12, 1981, and was an instant hit. Within a month, she was given a special Tony Award marking its success, and the show played 333 performances, the longest run for a one-person production in Broadway history. The double-LP cast album released by Qwest Records made the pop and R;B LP charts, and it finally won her a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female; it also took the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album. After the show closed on June 30, 1982, Horne's 65th birthday, she took it on tour around the country and to London through 1984. At the end of the year, she was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts.

Horne performed occasionally during the mid-'80s. In the fall of 1988, Three Cherries Records released her new album, The Men in My Life, which made number five in the jazz charts. She was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. She was less active in the early '90s, but then underwent pacemaker surgery, and in June 1993 she performed a special show devoted to the music of her friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's musical partner) at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York. She

recorded an album based on the show that was released by Blue Note Records in May 1994 under the title We'll Be Together Again. It topped the jazz charts and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, but she lost to Etta James. She appeared on Frank Sinatra's million-selling Duets II album and was one of the hosts of the 1994 documentary film That's Entertainment! III, which, like its predecessors, presented some of her 1940s MGM musical performances, including ones previously unseen. She performed at Carnegie Hall in September 1994 and the same month recorded a new live album, An Evening With Lena Horne, issued by Blue Note in 1995. It reached the Top 20 of the jazz charts and won her the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. In June 1997, her 80th birthday was celebrated by a show at the JVC Jazz Festival and the presentation to her of the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement in Vocal Artistry. A year later, she released a new Blue Note album, Being Myself, which made the Top Ten of the jazz charts. She came out of retirement in to record three Billy Strayhorn songs on Classic Ellington, a Blue Note album by Sir Simon Rattle released in September 2000. William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Paul Robeson was the epitome of the 20th-century Renaissance man. He was an exceptional athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. His talents made him a revered man of his time, yet his radical political beliefs all but erased him from popular history. Today, more than one hundred years after his birth, Robeson is just beginning to

receive the credit he is due.

Born in 1898, Paul Robeson grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. His father had escaped slavery and become a Presbyterian minister, while his mother was from a distinguished Philadelphia family. At seventeen, he was given a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he received an unprecedented twelve major letters in four years and was his class valedictorian. After graduating he went on to Columbia University Law School, and, in the early 1920s, took a job with a New York law firm. Racial strife at the firm ended Robeson's career as a lawyer early, but he was soon to find an appreciative home for his talents.

Returning to his love of public speaking, Robeson began to find work as an actor. In the mid-1920s he played the lead in Eugene O'Neill's "All God's Chillun Got Wings" (1924) and "The Emperor Jones" (1925). Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, he was a widely acclaimed actor and singer. With songs such as his trademark "Ol' Man River," he became one of the most popular concert singers of his time. His "Othello" was the longest-running Shakespeare play in Broadway history, running for nearly three hundred performances. It is still considered one of the great-American Shakespeare productions. While his fame grew in the United States, he became equally well-loved internationally. He spoke fifteen languages, and performed benefits throughout the world for causes of social justice. More than any other performer of his time, he believed that the famous have a responsibility to fight for justice and peace.

As an actor, Robeson was one of the first black men to play serious roles in the primarily white American theater.

He performed in a number of films as well, including a re-make of "The Emperor Jones" (1933) and "Song of Freedom" (1936). In a time of deeply entrenched racism, he continually struggled for further understanding of cultural difference. At the height of his popularity, Robeson was a national symbol and a cultural leader in the war against fascism abroad and racism at home. He was admired and befriended by both the general public and prominent personalities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joe Louis, Pablo Neruda, Lena Horne, and Harry Truman. While his varied talents and his outspoken defense of civil liberties brought him many admirers, it also made him enemies among conservatives trying to maintain the status quo.

During the 1940s, Robeson's black nationalist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite his contributions as an entertainer to the Allied forces during World War II, Robeson was singled out as a major threat to American democracy. Every attempt was made to silence and discredit him, and in 1950 the persecution reached a climax when his passport was revoked. He could no longer travel abroad to perform, and his career was stifled. Of this time, Lloyd Brown, a writer and long-time colleague of Robeson, states: "Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever."

It was eight years before his passport was reinstated. A weary and triumphant Robeson began again to travel and give concerts in England and Australia. But the years of hardship had taken their toll. After several bouts of depression, he was admitted to a hospital in London, where

he was administered continued shock treatments. When Robeson returned to the United States in 1963, he was misdiagnosed several times and treated for a variety of physical and psychological problems. Realizing that he was no longer the powerful singer or agile orator of his prime, he decided to step out of the public eye. He retired to Philadelphia and lived in self-imposed seclusion until his death in 1976.

To this day, Paul Robeson's many accomplishments remain obscured by the propaganda of those who tirelessly dogged him throughout his life. His role in the history of civil rights and as a spokesperson for the oppressed of other nations remains relatively unknown. In 1995, more than seventy-five years after graduating from Rutgers, his athletic achievements were finally recognized with his posthumous entry into the College Football Hall of Fame. Though a handful of movies and recordings are still available, they are a sad testament to one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century. If we are to remember Paul Robeson for anything, it should be for the courage and the dignity with which he struggled for his own personal voice and for the rights of all people.

"I didn't want to be in show business; I wanted to be a teacher," Horne is quick to reveal. "But it happened to me, and I've been very, very lucky." Horne's extraordinary 60-year career has dazzled stage and screen audiences, spawned numerous chart hits, and earned honors including two Grammy Awards (for the 1982 recording of her Broadway show "LENA HORNE: The Lady and Her Music," and a 1989 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award). Horne's achievements on stage, screen and recording speak

of a star for all times, a cultural icon. Perhaps she is, in fact, a teacher as well: her career story is one that is inextricably tied to the development of American society, to changing attitudes about race, sex, and age, and one which played an important role in over a half-century of social change in this country.

Horne admits, "I had to learn how to survive in this business, which isn't always easy, you know." In fact, Horne's career provides a capsule history of the black experience in show business. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1917, the daughter of an actress and a hotel operator, Horne's childhood was an unsettling one, as her parents divorced when she was just three. The first five years of her life were spent living mostly with her grandmother in Brooklyn. Horne's grandmother, a woman of broad background and education, an early suffragette and civil rights activist, is to this day one of Horne's primary influences. After her early childhood in Brooklyn, Horne was boarded out with families and relatives in the South while her mother toured with acting companies. Horne went to work as a teenager, making her debut at sixteen as a dancer at Harlem's famed Cotton Club, where she formed lasting relationships with such greats as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford and many other notable artists.

Horne eventually left the Cotton Club to join the Nobel Sissle Orchestra, staying until she got married. The marriage produced two children, Ted and Gail Jones, and then ended. Horne went back to New York to support her family. "I've always been a woman who worked," she says. "I was

raised poor and people of my generation always wanted to pay their bills. As I woman, I always wanted to be independent." Horne returned to performing, touring with the Charlie Barnet Orchestra before launching a solo act. "The first record I made was called 'Love Me a Little, Little.' After that was one with Charlie Barnet, 'Haunted Town' and 'Good for Nothing Joe.'" After producer John Hammond took her to Columbia Records, Horne recorded with Teddy Wilson's small groups, as well as with Charlie Barnet and Artie Shaw. Her place among the divas of the day is evidenced, for instance, on the CBS recording Billie, Ella, Lena, Sarah.

Horne found her first real professional happiness at the old Cafe Society in Greenwich Village. "It was wonderful. It was the only place with a mixed audience," says Horne, who formed close relationships there with other performers and artists, including the legendary singer Billie Holiday. Those were heady days for these artists, who established something of a family among themselves. "I met Billie Holiday at a time when I needed a friend," Horne recounts. "The man I worked for wanted me to sing the blues and to sing some of the songs Billie made popular. So I sought her out in between shows one night. I went back to her dressing room, and explained the situation. Billie asked, 'Do you have kids? Do you support yourself? Then do whatever you need to do.' From then on we were like sisters."

By this point, Horne enjoyed a fine reputation as a singer and entertainer, which led to numerous opportunities like the Little Troc in Hollywood where Lena was spotted by

an MGM talent scout in the early 1940s, who arranged for a screen test. Ever defiant with self-respect Horne eventually wound up in the office of Louis B. Mayer with her father in tow. Horne's father made it clear to Mayer that Lena did not want to play maids, the customary role for black women in those days. "I'd like my daughter to be in your movies," he said, "but not as a maid. It wouldn't be realistic." The reality, however, was that the studio never did find a comfortable role for Lena Horne, one that fit the demands of a strictly segregated audience. She was light-skinned when compared to other black actors, but too dark to be white. "They didn't make me into a maid," she says, "but they didn't make me into anything else either. I became a butterfly pinned to a column, singing away in Movieland." In her first film, "Panama Hattie," Horne was featured briefly in a specialty number -- billed as herself -- singing a rumba song.

Meanwhile, the studios had invented a special makeup for her called "light Egyptian." Though her next role, in "Cabin in the Sky" was a success, she did not receive any other starring assignments from MGM. She was loaned to Century Fox to do a musical revue based on the life of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and the title song from that film "Stormy Weather" remains one of Horne's signature standards.

Though Horne appeared in several more films for MGM -- including "As Thousands Cheer," "Swing Fever," "Broadway Rhythm," "Two Girls and a Sailor," "Ziegfeld Follies" and "Till the Clouds Roll By," her roles were limited to

guest spots which could be edited out when the films played in Southern theaters. Nevertheless, she became a top nightclub and theater performer, as well as a favored beauty. "I was a pin-up girl for the soldiers," she recalls, "both black and white."

In fact, despite obvious discrimination against her, Horne broke barriers, proving that a black actress could make it in Hollywood. "I was very lonely in Hollywood. The black stars were made to feel very uncomfortable," she says. But it was another man of music, Count Basie, who persuaded her to stay. "They don't give us a chance very often," he told her, "and when they do, we have to take it." Horne continued performing and recording during this time; the period produced what is still one of her favorites, Lena at the Waldorf (on RCA/Victor).

It was in Hollywood that Horne met her second husband, Lennie Hayton, who was also her musical mentor at MGM. He was also white. When the couple announced their marriage in 1950 -- three years after it had actually occurred, they were confronted with angry rejection from the Hollywood community. Despite all the difficulties of a racially mixed marriage, their union flourished, lasting from 1947 until Hayton's death in 1971.

Through the 1950s and '60s, Horne came into her own as a consummate performer and an important fixture of the American cultural landscape. A 1952 Down Beat review states "Horne has rightfully gained a top niche in show business -- one which will stand up for many years to come." She starred in several shows, including the Broadway musical "Jamaica," recorded albums, and was in demand at nightclubs and stages

around the world, appearing with such notable talents as Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstine and Harry Belafonte.

"My grandmother was a civil rights activist and a suffragette in the early days," Horne says. True to that spirit, and obviously moved by her own personal struggles, Lena Horne became active in the civil rights movement herself. She worked consistently with the NAACP and toured the South speaking on human rights. "When the sixties happened, when Malcolm X was killed, I changed," she says. "I don't forget the segregated world." Horne points out, "It helped me to survive, but I've also watched America change. I've seen black heroes develop in football and baseball. During the civil rights movement, I saw black and white people working and playing together. It brought out the best in Americans."

In the early 1970s, after her husband, father and son all passed away within the space of 18 months, Horne took some time away from performing. "I felt like two different Lenas," she admits, "the one you looked at on stage, and the one who had to find where she was." Horne traveled to the South, "looking for people who had known me when I was little, people who had taken me in as a child." This very personal search for identity, coupled with the pain of loss affected Horne greatly. "It cracked me open, made me feel compassion."

When Horne returned to performing, it was with renewed vigor and a passionate sense of purpose. Her showstopping number, "If You Believe," from the movie musical "The Wiz" became a popular hit. Then in 1981, after a long hiatus, Horne electrified Broadway with her record-breaking one-woman show,

"LENA HORNE: The Lady and Her Music." Newsweek summed up her riveting performance this way: "She slicks up nothing and celebrates nothing but being there. There is precious little razzle-dazzle. Instead...by simply being herself, Lena Horne is a revelation -- or astonishing power and complexity." In addition to Grammy Awards, the show's triumphant run earned Horne (then in her sixties) a steady stream of honors, including a special Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, a special New York Drama Critics Circle Award and New York's highest cultural award, the Handel Medallion.

For Horne, there were more personal rewards to reap from this ground-breaking show, too. "When people came backstage and said, 'It's so inspirational, I'm not afraid of getting older anymore' I thought, 'How wonderful. If I'm having this effect on people, I'm learning to grow myself..'" For Horne, still radiantly beautiful, the show represented a newfound inner force. "I had literally begun to live at fifty, and I learned to love the audience as much as myself. They believed me."

In 1994, inspired by her performance at a Lincoln Center tribute to the legendary Billy Strayhorn (who had been a close friend of Horne's), Blue Note Records President Bruce Lundvall convinced Lena to return to the studio. In recording We'll Be Together Again, the legendary vocalist was reunited with the music and lyrics of some of her dearest musical friends, most notably Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. A live album, An Evening With Lena Horne, captured a performance at New York's Supper Club. Now, at nearly 81, Lena is back with Being Myself. Being Myself was produced by Hornes longtime musical associate Rodney Jones, who has performed,

produced, written and arranged for artists such as R&B legend Ruth Brown, Chaka Kahn, Charles Aznavour and Dolly Parton. He is currently featured as the guitarist on The Rosie ODonnell Show. Being Myself features 10 tracks written by George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Frankie Lane, and other accomplished songwriters, sung in Hornes distinctive style. Featured are timeless songs such as Autumn in New York, Imagination, Its Alright With Me and more. Lena is accompanied throughout by Jones (guitar), Benjamin Brown (bass) and Akira Tana (drums). Other guests include Mike Renzi (piano, keyboards), Milt Jackson (vibes), George Benson (guitar), Bobby Forrester (organ) and Donald Harrison and Houston Person (saxophones).

Hornes illustrious career spans 60 plus years on the stage, screen, and in the recording studio. She has had numerous chart hits, and earned honors including two Grammy Awards (for the 1982 recording of her Broadway Show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, and a 1989 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award) and a Kennedy Center Honors Award in 1994. Lena celebrated her 80th birthday last year with a performance at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Recently, Horne has lent her sophisticated style to the ultra-hip Gap ads, appearing in their Christmas television campaign.

Horne's stellar career achievements and tireless devotion to civic causes have earned her widespread formal recognition from peers and public alike. For the little girl who always wished to be a teacher, pride is drawn from Horne's Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Howard University and Spelman College. She received the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 1984, the Governor's Arts Award from the State of New York, the Springarn Medal from the NAACP, the 1986

Black Achievement Award from the Johnson Publishing Company, 1987 Pied Piper Award, the 1987 Radcliffe Medal and the 1988 Frederick D. Patterson Award from the United Negro College Fund.

In 1989, Horne was honored by the recording industry with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy ceremonies. That same year, the Parsons School of Design honored her for her contribution to the world of fashion, and New York Newsday presented the first Lena Horne Scholarship Fund for jazz and popular music vocalists in New York schools; the scholarship program is now in its fifth year. This year, Horne received Turner Broadcasting's Trumpet Award, along with honorees including Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali and Senator Carol Moseley Braun. She will serve as on-air host for the forthcoming Jazz Smithsonian Radio Series. Horne has reflected candidly on her life and times in two autobiographies, In Person: Lena Horne '60 and Lena '66. In another book, The Hornes: An American Family, her daughter Gail Lumet Buckley traces the family history, from their entrance into the black bourgeoisie in the late 1800s (when America was almost color-blind) to the racism later encountered.

Lena Horne received a special Tony Award for distinguished achievement in the theater for her one-woman Broadway hit Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music which opened to rave reviews in 1981 and played to capacity audiences there for 14 months before going on tour. She reached that pinnacle of her 50-year-career via a road that started in the Harlem of the 1930s and was bombarded with stormy weather.

In the early days, she was referred to as a "cafe au lait Hedy Lamarr" and a "chocolate chanteuse." Even

after she achieved stardom as a singer, she was refused a room at the hotels where she was performing--even in New York City as late as 1942--because she was black. In the Hollywood of the 1940s, she says she was invited to parties only with the unwritten understanding that she provide the entertainment.

But Lena Horne fought back--and she fought her way to the top of her profession. When Horne was a child, her parents were divorced, and her mother, an aspiring actress, took her south and boarded her with various families while she attempted to find work. By the early 1930s, she returned to New York with her re-married mother and briefly entertained the idea of becoming a teacher, a dream the depression helped to shoot down. She quit Girls High School in Brooklyn and took her first steps into show business as a dancer in the chorus at Harlem's famous Cotton Club, where blacks entertained a strictly white clientele. If the performers' relatives or friends tried to gain admittance, they were bounced. Although she was not allowed to sing, she did get to meet and observe such renowned artists as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Ethel Waters, and Billie Holiday.

When her stepfather was physically abused by the club owners for pushing the idea of her singing there, she decided that she "had to get out."

After a brief marriage at the age of 19 to Louis Jones, the college-educated son of a minister, during which she lived in Pittsburgh and had two children, Gail and Teddy (Teddy died in 1970 from a kidney ailment), Horne returned to New York and jazz and the Big

Band sounds. She began singing with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra, honing her distinctive vocalizing style and elegant manner as she toured amidst applause and racism, having to sleep in tenement boarding houses, the bus, and once in circus grounds in Indianapolis.

In 1940, she became the first African American to tour with an all white band, Charlie Barnet's outfit, a move she considers to be the real beginning of her success as a singer. She was the featured singer.

It was while she was singing at a New York nightspot that an MGM talent scout caught her act and arranged a screen test for her which landed her a contract to the studio, where she faced more hurdles.

She recalls serving, however, as "window dressing" in such films as Panama Hattie, Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, and Duchess of Idaho, after having refused to try to "pass as a Latin" because of her light coloring.

She starred in two memorable black musicals : Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. The studio sent her on a tour of its theaters to promote the films in song. As a result she became one of the top nightclub and theater box office attractions in the country.

While entertaining the troops during World War II, Horne got into another battle of her own. She refused to sing for segregated audiences or to groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen. She also became the pin-up girl for thousands of African American G.I.s. She was later to take her fight for integrated audiences out of the war zone and onto the nightclub and theater stages.

Her second marriage,

to musical arranger Lennie Hayton, took place in 1947 but was not announced for three years because he was white, which offended both blacks and whites to the extent that the couple received hate mail and threats of violence.

Horne admitted that she married Hayton not because she loved him, but because "he had more entree than a black man." But as their married years went by--and there were 24 of them before his death in 1971--she "learned to love him because of how good he was to me and patient."

She had become a ranking international star playing to SRO audiences throughout the world, sharing the stage with the likes of Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstein, Vic Damone, and Harry Belafonte.

She also starred in musical and television specials with such giants as Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra.

Long before her triumph in Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, for which she also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk Award, the distinctive star tested her soon-to-become formidable talent on the Broadway musical stage in Blackbirds of 1939. She later scored a major triumph in Harold Arlen's Jamaica.

Horne has also always found time to devote to the causes in which she truly believes, and starting with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, she had company in her battles for equality.

Her paternal grandmother, a suffragette and activist, enrolled her in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when she was two, and she has worked with it and with such organizations as the National Council of Negro Women, the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Urban League, speaking

at rallies and singing at demonstrations.

In 1978, Horne returned to films as Glinda the Good Witch, in The Wiz.

One of the achievements about which she is proudest is an honorary doctorate she received from Howard University in 1980. "I had been offered doctorates earlier," she said, "and had turned them down because I hadn't been to college. But by the time Howard presented the doctorate to me, I knew I had graduated from the school of life, and I was ready to accept it."

Selected Lena Horne Quotations

In my early days I was a sepia Hedy Lamarr. Now I'm black and a woman, singing my own way.

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.

Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death.

It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.

You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.