Horne, Lena

Lena Horne

Singer, actress, activist

Performed in New York and Hollywood

Draped Around a Marble Column

Blacklisted

Selected discography

Sources

“She is one of the incomparable performers of our time,” Richard Watts, Jr., wrote of Lena Home in the New York Post in 1957. This assessment continued to hold true decades later: Lena Home, the beautiful, elegant, and talented singer and actress has indeed become a legend. Home encountered adversity throughout her career—first from her family, who disapproved of her choice of occupation, then from white audiences and managers, who were uncomfortable with her assertiveness, and even from other African-American performers, who felt threatened by her refusal to accept stereotypical roles. But her strong senses of identity, justice, and dignity forced her to struggle against these obstacles—and allowed her to triumph.

Lena Mary Calhoun Home was born on June 30, 1917, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Edwin “Teddy” Home and his wife, Edna. Home’s parents separated by the time she was three years old, and she lived for several years with her paternal grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Home. Her early life was nomadic. Home’s mother, who was a fairly unsuccessful stage performer, took the young Lena on the road with her, and they lived in various parts of the South before returning to Home’s grandparents’ home in Brooklyn in 1931. After her grandparents died, Home was sent to live with her mother’s friend Laura Rollock. Shortly thereafter, her mother married Miguel “Mike” Rodriguez, and Home moved in with them.

Home had early ambitions to be a performer—against the wishes of her family, who believed she should aspire to greater heights. The Homes were an established middle-class family, with several members holding college degrees and distinguished positions in organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Nevertheless, Home persisted in her dreams of stardom and in 1933, she began her first professional engagement, at the Cotton Club, the famed Harlem nightclub. She sang in the chorus and though only 16 years old held her own among the older and more experienced cast members. She soon left high school to devote herself to her stage career.

Performed in New York and Hollywood

In 1934 Home landed a small role in an all-black Broadway show called Dance With Your Gods. The next year, she left the Cotton Club and began performing as a featured singer with Noble Sissle’s Society

For the Record…

Born Lena Mary Calhoun Home, June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, NY_;daughter of Edwin (“Teddy”; a banker) and Edna (an actress) Home; married Louis Jones, 1937 (divorced, 1944); married Leonard George (“Lennie”) Hayton, 1947 (died, 1971); children: (first marriage) Gail, Edwin (“Teddy”; deceased).

Began singing at Cotton Club, New York City, 1933; appeared in Broadway musical Dance With Your Gods, 1934; featured singer with Noble Sissle’s Society Orchestra, 1935-37, and Charlie Bannet Orchestra, 1940-41; appeared in musical Blackbirds of 1939 1939, and at Café Society Downtown, 1941; featured performer at Little Troc nightclub, Hollywood, 1942; appeared in films, including The Duke Is Tops, 1938, Panama Hattie, 1942, Stormy Weather, 1943, Cabin in the Sky, 1943, Death of a Gunfighter, 1969, The Wiz, 1978, and That’s Entertainment III, 1993; signed recording contract with RCA Victor, 1956; featured in Broadway musical Jamaica, 1957-59; appeared on television programs, 1950s-’80s, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Corno Show, and The Cosby Show; starred on Broadway in Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music, 1981-82.

Selected awards: Tony Award, 1981; Drama Desk Award, 1981; Actors Equity Paul Robeson Award, 1982; Dance Theater of Harlem Emergence Award, 1982; Handel Medallion, 1982; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1983; Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime contribution to the arts, 1984; Essence Award, 1993; Ebony Lifetime Achievement Award; two Grammy awards.

Member: NAACP; Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP); Delta Sigma Theta (honorary member).

Addresses: Office —5950 Canoga Ave., #200, Woodland Hills, CA 91367.

Orchestra under the name “Helena Home,” which Sissle thought more glamorous than “Lena.” In 1937 Home quit her tour with the Sissle Orchestra to marry Louis Jones, a friend of her father, and live with him in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During this short and troubled marriage, Home went to Hollywood to appear in an all-black film called The Duke Is Tops. In 1939 she won a role in the musical revue Blackbirds of 1939, which would be performed at the Hudson Theatre in New York City; but it ran for only eight nights. By this time, she had had two children, Gail and Edwin (“Teddy”).

Home left Jones in 1940, took a job as a singer with Charlie Barnet’s band, and went out on the road. She was the only black member of the Barnet ensemble, and the kind of racial discrimination she encountered from audiences, hotel managers, and others was so unsettling that she decided to quit the band. In 1941, she began performing at the Café Society Downtown, a club in New York City that catered to intellectuals and social activists, both black and white.

At the Café Society, Home learned about black history, politics, and culture and developed a new appreciation for her heritage. She rekindled her acquaintance with singer Paul Robeson, whom she had known when she was a child. In her autobiography In Person: Lena Home, she explained that through her conversations with Robeson, she realized, “We [African Americans] were going forward, and that knowledge gave me a strength and a sense of unity. Yes, we were going forward, and it was up to me to learn more about us and to join actively in our struggle.” From this point on, Home became a significant voice in the struggle for equality and justice for blacks in America.

Home moved to California in the summer of 1941 after getting an offer to appear at an as-yet-unbuilt club on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood called the Trocadero. Although plans for the Trocadero fell through, another, smaller club, the Little Troc, opened in February of 1942, and Home was featured there. Also in 1942, Home signed a seven-year contract with MGM—the first black woman since 1915 to sign a term contract with a film studio. “They didn’t quite know what to do with me,” she told Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight regarding the studio’s resulting dilemma: she wasn’t dark-skinned enough to star with many of the black actors of the day, and her roles in white films were limited since Hollywood wasn’t ready to depict interracial relationships on screen. Her first film under contract was Panama Hattie, a 1942 version of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical in which she had a small singing role and appeared in only one scene.

Draped Around a Marble Column

Several of Home’s roles in subsequent films were similar. James Haskins, in his book Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Home, noted, “The image of Lena, always elegantly gowned, singing while draped around a marble column in a lavishly produced musical sequence, would become virtually standardized. Only her ability to appear enigmatic prevented her from being completely exploited in these stock sequences; she managed to carry them off with a dignity that, coupled with her aloof and detached delivery, enhanced both her mystery and her audience appeal.” The sad footnote to this is that Home’s scenes were purposely constructed so that they could be easily excised when the films were shown to white audiences in the South.

Home appeared in the all-black musicals Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, both released in 1943, but she refused to take any role that she felt would be demeaning to her as a woman of color. This led to an uproar among the black Hollywood “extras” who represented what Home’s daughter, in her book The Homes: An American Family, called “a kind of stock company of stereotypes.” These actors felt threatened by Home and accused her of being a tool of the NAACP. In her defense, Home wrote in her 1965 autobiography Lena: “I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into.”

During World War II, Home went on USO tours along the West Coast and throughout the South. She appeared on the Armed Forces Radio Service programs Jubilee, G.I. Journal, and Command Performances and helped First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt press for antilynching legislation. After the war Home worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination because Japan had been an enemy of the United States.

In the fall of 1947, Home went to Europe with Lennie Hayton, a white musician she had met in Hollywood. They were married in December—in Paris, because interracial marriages were against the law in California. Back in Hollywood, she appeared in more film musicals, among them Till the Clouds Roll By in 1946, Words and Music in 1948, and The Duchess of Idaho in 1950.

Blacklisted

In the early 1950s, Home, along with many of her colleagues, was a victim of the anti-Communist “witch hunts” that successfully blacklisted performers who were thought to have ties to Communist organizations or activities. The blacklisting hurt Home’s career and kept her from appearing on radio and television. By the mid-1950s, though, Home was cleared of these charges. In 1956, in fact, she signed a recording contract with RCA Victor. Some of her albums included Stormy Weather, Lena Home at the Coconut Grove, and Lena Home at the Waldorf-Astoria. The latter became the top-selling recording by a female artist in RCA’s history. In 1957 Home was featured in Jamaica, a Broadway musical with an all-black cast. The show had a successful run and did not close until the spring of 1959.

Home was actively involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, participating in the March on Washington in 1963, performing at rallies in the South and elsewhere, and working on behalf of the National Council for Negro Women. This period also saw her appear on various television programs, including several performances on the popular Ed Sullivan and Perry Como variety shows and in her own special, Lena in Concert, which aired in 1969. Also in 1969 she appeared in a nonsinging role in the western Death of a Gunfighter.

The 1970s began tragically for Home: her son, Teddy, died of kidney disease in 1970, her father died the same year, and Lennie Hayton died of a heart attack in 1971. Still, these years also offered a variety of opportunities for Home to perform. She appeared on Broadway with Tony Bennett in 1974 in a show called Tony and Lena and was featured in several television commercials. In 1978, she played the role of Glinda the Good Witch in the film version of The Wiz, the all-black musical based on The Wizard of Oz.

Home launched a “farewell tour” in the summer of 1980, but her greatest success of the decade was still ahead of her—her one-woman show, Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music, which opened in May of 1981 at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre. The production ran for two years and was a tremendous success—so much so that Home was given a special Tony Award for her performance. She also received a Drama Desk Award and a special citation from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. The soundtrack to the show, produced by Quincy Jones, won two Grammy awards. In Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography, Haskins reported that the show was “not only the longest-running one-woman show in the history of Broadway but the standard against which every future one-person show would be measured.” Home herself, in an article she wrote for Ebony magazine in 1990, described the show as “the most rewarding event in my entire career.”

In the 1990s, Home cut back on performing, but she continued to be a favorite of audiences throughout the world. Still, some observers consider her most important role that of catalyst in the elevation of the status of African Americans in the performing arts. Despite the strides she’s made, Home has often lamented the sluggishness of progress in Hollywood; if given the chance to do it all again, she told music writer Leonard Feather in Modern Maturity, “I’d be a schoolteacher.”

Selected discography

(With the Lennie Layton Orchestra) Lena Goes Latin (recorded in 1963), DRG, 1987.

(With Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joe Williams) The Men in My Life, Three Cherries, 1989.

Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena, 1941-1958, Bluebird, 1990.

Lena Home, Royal Collection, 1992.

At Long Last Lena, RCA, 1992.

Greatest Hits, CSI, 1992.

Best of Lena Home, Curb, 1993.

Stormy Weather, RCA Victor.

Lena Home at the Coconut Grove, RCA Victor.

Lena Home at the Waldorf-Astoria, RCA Victor.

Sources

Books

Buckley, Gail Lumet, The Homes: An American Family, Knopf, 1986.

Haskins, James, and Kathleen Benson, Lena: A Personal and Professional Biography of Lena Home, Stein & Day, 1984.

Home, Lena, as told to Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss, In Person: Lena Home, Greenberg, 1950.

Home, Lena, and Richard Schickel, Lena, Doubleday, 1965.

Many Shades of Black, edited by Stanton L. Wormley and Lewis H. Fenderson, William & Co., 1969.

Periodicals

Ebony, May 1980; November 1990.

Entertainment Weekly, July 9, 1993.

Modern Maturity, February/March 1993.

New York Post, November 1, 1957.

New York Times, May 4, 1981.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from an interview with Leonard Maltin broadcast on Entertainment Tonight, ABC-TV, March 22, 1993.

—Joyce Harrison