Can the fetching woman seated just a couple feet away in a Manhattan recording studio – her manner so thoroughly youthful and engaging – possibly be entering her ninth decade?
More important, can this soft-spoken, quick-to-smile woman be the same firebrand who defied Hollywood racism in the ’40s, anti-Communist witch-hunts in the ’50s and the foes of Civil Rights in the ’60s?
Apparently so, for Lena Horne, at 81, not only has outlived her enemies, she now can laugh at them.
“In a way, it’s all very funny, because so many of the things that happened were so ridiculous, you know?” says Horne, speaking with a slight Southern lilt that evokes the years she spent growing up in Georgia.
“You wouldn’t be allowed to get on a particular bus, but you’d be asked to sign your autograph. Now that’s funny.”
Horne has good reason to laugh. Though she has conquered Hollywood and Broadway several times over, won more critical accolades than she can remember and reminisced in two autobiographies, she finds herself in an unexpected chapter in an already remarkable life story.
Her recording career reignited in 1994, when she released her first album in more than a decade, “Lena Horne: We’ll Be Together Again,” long after she had considered herself done with her public life. The live recording that followed shortly thereafter, “An Evening with Lena Horne: Live at the Supper Club,” won her a late-in-life Grammy Award (for Best Jazz Vocal), and her newest release, “Being Myself,” may be the best of the bunch. Certainly it’s the most intimate and revealing.
“You have to realize that this is a woman who has experienced just about everything that can be experienced in the show business world, she has lived the legacy of American popular music going back to Bessie Smith through jazz and through blues,” says Rodney Jones, who produced “Being Myself” and plays guitar on the album.
Jones does not exaggerate, considering that Horne made her stage debut at 16, in the mid-1930s, playing the fabled Cotton Club in New York’s Harlem.
“I think she feels that the historical Lena Horne is common knowledge, but this record is a chance to get a little more intimate glimpse of her,” adds Jones. “And, for her, I think that’s a freeing thing.
“Like many great artists, she was always subject to the whims of producers and record companies, and, to some degree, I believe she was imprisoned by her beauty,” continues Jones, referring to the role of glamorous diva to which managers and executives confined her.
“I think `Being Myself’ was a chance for her to let out a part of her that people may not have known, and, remember, she’s the one who picked the title for the recording.”
Indeed, “Being Myself” is the bluesiest and most freewheeling recording in Horne’s long career. From the drenched-in-irony opening tune, “Some of My Best Friends are the Blues,” to the soulful “Willow Weep for Me” to the bittersweet “What Am I Here For,” the album offers a close look at the woman beneath the glittering facade.
The miracle, though, is that this recording — as well as the two excellent ones that led up to it — ever saw the light of day. In a youth-oriented culture, after all, record executives do not typically court female jazz singers who are pushing 80.
Nor did Horne have any intention of returning to the spotlight. Having stopped touring and recording several years earlier, she agreed to make a single concert appearance in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1993 to honor the late composer Billy Strayhorn, one of her closest and most sorely missed friends.
The glowing reviews persuaded Horne to return to the recording studio to make a privately financed tape, which was deposited (unsolicited) on the desk of Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall.
“They brought me a finished master, I loved it, I said I wanted it,” remembers Lundvall. “When the record came out, she agreed to do two nights at Carnegie Hall, which I wanted to record, but she said that was too much pressure.
“So she agreed to do it in a smaller venue (The Supper Club, in New York), and the live record won a Grammy.
“Finally, last summer, right before her 80th birthday celebration at Lincoln Center, she called me and said, `Well, boss, I guess it’s time for me to finish the (next) record,’ ” which she had started after the live CD.
“And when we finished it, she said she would like to do another one. That will make four new recordings from an artist who had decided not to record anymore.”
The releases are important not only because of Horne’s artistry and history but also because her glorious contemporaries — chiefly Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan — have passed on. Thus Horne stands as the last diva, a singer whose artistic lineage runs so deep into the traditions of 20th Century jazz, blues and pop that she has no living peer.
What other still-working female singer, after all, can claim to have learned her art in one of the most storied places in black musical culture, the Cotton Club of the 1930s?
“It was great schooling for me — in fact, it’s too bad we don’t have places like that now,” says Horne.
“Or maybe we have too many teachers. Today, I wouldn’t know whether I should go to Sting or to one of the Monkees to get my schooling,” adds Horne, ever ready with a quip. “But I had my schooling right there in the Cotton Club.
“I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. That was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough (for performers of color).”
If there is a single theme that runs through Horne’s life and her conversation, it is the restrictions that have been placed on black artists throughout the American experience. Perhaps her heightened awareness of the tragic side of American culture should come as no surprise, considering her lineage. Her grandmother, Cora Calhoun Horne, held key positions with the NAACP and the National Urban League; her grandfather was the first black member of the Brooklyn Board of Education; her uncle was an adviser on race relations to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But Lena Horne — born in Brooklyn and raised in various Southern and Eastern cities, thanks to an absentee father and a mother who toured as an actress — says she learned about the meaning of race in America from an authority on the subject, Paul Robeson.
“When I worked at Cafe Society (in the ’40s), that was the one place in New York that had no (color barriers), and he would talk to me,” remembers Horne.
“He helped me come to an understanding about my people, and again to build up the kind of fierce pride I have about them now.”
The lessons must have taken hold quickly, for after emerging a star in musical films such as “Cabin in the Sky” and “Stormy Weather” (both in 1943), Horne refused to take the roles of whores and maids routinely offered to black female actors at the time. As a result, she appeared only in musical segments of feature films, her footage excised for movie theaters in the South.
If her movie career stalled in the ’40s, it virtually ground to a halt in the ’50s, when she was condemned in various anti-Communist publications for her well-known friendship with Robeson. Yet she had no intention of severing her ties with Robeson.
“I never had the great urge to be in the movies in the first place,” she says today, “only because I saw that it was Tarzan or nothing, you know?
“I never fell for the myth. So when I saw the way things were going, I just got on out.”
Nor did Horne’s brush with Hollywood mark her first refusal to play the racial-political game. In a notorious incident during WWII, she triggered a scandal while performing for troops at Ft. Riley, Kan. Looking into the audience, she realized that German prisoners of war were seated in front of black American soldiers.
“Accounts of what happened next differ,” notes “Current Biography Yearbook,” but the military and Horne quickly parted company.
So exactly what did happen between Horne and the U.S. military?
“I just walked off the stage and went up and sang to the back of the room,” says Horne, reveling in the moment.
“It happened a couple of times, and they finally said, `Get her out of the USO.’
“I just reacted as Lena, you know, me. And my grandmother taught me about facing down, you know, looking people in their eyes and saying, `I don’t like it.’
“That’s the reason people always used to say, `You’re a civic leader,’ and all that, but, no, it’s just me.”
In 1960, she reportedly tossed ashtrays, plates and a lamp at a customer in a Beverly Hills restaurant who had tossed a racial slur her way, and she spent most of the ’60s traveling through the South to appear at Civil Rights rallies.
But the controversies that perpetually swirled around Horne did nothing to diminish her popularity and may even have accentuated it, as she proved with acclaimed TV specials in the ’70s, a Tony Award-winning Broadway show (“Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”) in the ’80s and now, surprisingly, a coda to her career in the ’90s.
Having survived two marriages, the deaths of her second husband (musician Lennie Hayton, in 1971) and her son Teddy (of kidney failure, at about the same time), Horne clearly has faced her share of personal hurdles. (Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, lives in New York and accompanies her to interviews.)
Today, says Horne, she has changed as an artist, her work on stage considerably different than before.
“I think, at some point, I began to like my audiences more,” says the diva, long considered somewhat aloof as a stage and screen performer.
“I learned to enjoy the interplay with them, completely, and that only happened in the ’80s. I was never really aloof, that was people’s image of me, but it came about because I didn’t ever think that I should be anything but perfect for the audience.
“I found out along the way that they like you a little imperfect.”
Whether Horne will return to the stage is an open question, though she says sometimes “I feel 100.”
Whatever happens, though, she endures as the last of an inimitable generation of singers whose virtuosity and style will not be heard again. Like Ella, Billie, Sarah and Carmen, she’s known and revered around the world by a sweet, single name — Lena.
“Oh, I’d love to be thought that good,” she says. “That’s a compliment, but I’m not sure I’m the last.
“I certainly hope not.”
LENA’S RETURN
Following is a look at the CDs that have marked Lena Horne’s return to recording:
“Lena Horne: We’ll Be Together Again” (Blue Note), 1994. Rarely has a comeback recording sounded as self-assured and sophisticated as this. Horne sounds as if she never went away, her voice in mint condition, her reading of lyrics first-rate.
“An Evening With Lena Horne: Live at the Supper Club” (Blue Note), 1995. The electricity in the room is palpable in this live recording, with Horne clearly responding to the enthusiasm of the audience. Her interpretations of standards by Duke Ellington, Cole Porter and others are savvy, personal and musically unerring.
“Lena Horne: Being Myself” (Blue Note), 1998. By far the most intimate and autobiographical of the lot, “Being Myself” is a gritty bluesy album, its vocals by turns heartbreaking, melancholy and disarming. Listeners who have pegged Horne as a theater singer will be startled by the blues eloquence of virtually every track.
