Lena Horne
By:
June 30, 2009
For much of the 1940s, LENA HORNE (born 1917), Hollywood’s “sepia Cinderella,” was relegated to one or two set-piece numbers per film. Opulent, glamorous, and static, her turns in Two Girls and a Sailor and As Thousands Cheer bespeak segregation in action, but even these were risky at a time when so much as an eyeline match between black and white characters could get a scene (or a whole film) cut from Southern distribution. Among the revelations in Stormy Weather, James Gavin’s new biography of the singer, is that her career’s early direction owed no more to MGM than to the NAACP: her activist grandmother signed Horne up for the organization at the age of two, and it was political pressure that led Louis B. Mayer to place her under contract. In later decades, she grew far more independent, artistically and especially ideologically, admiring Malcolm over Martin, and telling talk-show host Mike Douglas that blacks and whites “don’t really need to love each other.” Eventually, she would speak with open bitterness about the studio system (and much else) in Lena Horne: Her Life and Music, her 1981 one-woman Broadway comeback. Gavin’s sleuthing suggests that Horne’s construal of events was as fantastic as any publicity hack’s puff piece — but this time, at least, the fairy-tale was of her own devising.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | Elaine Scarry |
READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).