Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed
Monday, December 4 | 5 Films
Lena Horne was a trailblazer. Born in 1917, the daughter of Edwin Horne Jr., an entrepreneur and gambler, and Edna Louise Scottron, an actress in a Black theater troupe, Horne rose from the chorus of the storied Cotton Club in Harlem, which she joined at age 16, to become a celebrated singer and nightclub performer, a featured star at MGM, and a civil rights activist in a career that spanned over 70 years. Donald Bogle celebrates her life and her achievements in the new biography “Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed” and joins Ben Mankiewicz for an evening of films starring the legendary performer.
Before arriving in Hollywood, Horne made her feature debut in The Duke is Tops (1938), a low-budget “race film” produced for Black theaters. The film was essentially a star vehicle for Ralph Cooper, the entrepreneurial emcee of Harlem's Apollo Theater who cowrote and coproduced the film. He had developed the costarring role for Nina Mae McKinney, who starred in King Vidor's Hallellujah! (1929), the first major Black cast feature from Hollywood. When she proved unavailable, Cooper reached out to Horne, at the time a rising star on the nightclub circuit. Though she had given birth to her first child just weeks before, she flew from Pittsburg to Los Angeles and jumped into the role of the headliner of a small theatrical revue touring the South. Horne had little time to prepare for her screen acting debut and the ten-day schedule left almost no time for rehearsal. According to her costars, she embraced the experience and was well-liked by the cast, but she returned home feeling cheated. Cooper never paid her salary, even after he cashed in on her later success by rereleasing the film years later under the title The Bronze Venus with Horne promoted to top billing.
Horne returned to the nightclub circuit and was spotted by Roger Edens, an MGM musical director, while headlining in a Los Angeles club in 1941. Edens saw big screen potential in the elegant songstress. Horne was the right person at the right time: America had just entered World War II and Hollywood was under pressure from the NAACP and the War Office to show Black Americans on screen in a more favorable light, in part to remind them that they had a stake in the war effort. They were also a growing economic force and if Hollywood understood anything, it was money. The light-skinned Horne was elegant, talented, beautiful and defied every Black stereotype common to Hollywood movies. In early 1942, MGM signed her to a seven-year contract. It was a first for an African-American performer at a major studio, stipulating that she would not play servants or comic relief of other stereotypical roles that Black performers were reduced to in 1930s and 1940s studio productions. Lena Horne became Hollywood's first Black starlet.
Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-Black musical imported from Broadway and directed for the screen by Vincente Minnelli, gave Horne her first major role in a Hollywood production. It was a portrait of rural Black life steeped in folklore as reimagined by white creators and it was rife with many of the demeaning stereotypes Hollywood was ostensibly attempting to correct. But it also showcased the talents of a cast of great African-American performers, notably the celebrated jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters, reprising her starring role from the stage production as the pious Petunia and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as her likable but lazy husband. Horne was cast as the seductive Georgia. Rex Ingram and Butterfly McQueen costar and musical luminaries Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller make appearances. Minnelli was determined to give both his female stars the same kind of glamorous treatment its white starlets received and was impressed with the patience and professionalism of Horne. Waters, meanwhile, was haughty and imperious on the set and took an instant dislike to the young and beautiful Horne. When Horne broke her ankle filming a big production number, Waters was incensed at the attention Horne received. Meanwhile, Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed were under pressure from the Production Code for the film's portrayal of Horne as a seductive and sexy character. One scene she filmed for the production, singing “Ain't It the Truth” while taking a bubble bath, was cut before the film's premiere. The number was later showcased in the musical documentary That's Entertainment! III (1994).
Mere months later, Lena Horne was back on the screen in Hollywood's second musical with an all-Black cast. Produced by 20th Century Fox, Stormy Weather (1943) featured the legendary Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in a story loosely inspired by the dancer's life and career. Horne, on loan from MGM, plays his love interest, the elegant singer Selina Rogers whose career is on the rise. As with Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather was a showcase for a talented cast, which included such luminaries as Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Dooley Wilson, Ada Brown, Katherine Dunham and the Nicholas Brothers, whose breathtaking acrobatic dance number ends the film and practically steals the show from Robinson and Horne. Unlike the rural southern setting of Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather presented its Black characters in urban life and showcased them in glamorous nightclub settings. It was a landmark in that respect, acknowledging the service of Black soldiers of World War I and offering a portrait of sophisticated, successful Black professionals in the years between the wars. Horne's performance of the song “Stormy Weather,” originally made famous by Ethel Waters, kicked off the film's big production number and ultimately became Horne's signature song. But the experience was a little dispiriting for the 25-year-old Horne, cast in romantic role opposite a man old enough to be her grandfather. Robinson, at the end of a successful career and past his prime as a dancer, was something of a bully according to Horne and other members of the cast. And compared to working at MGM, where the entire cast was welcome to an integrated commissary, at Fox they were restricted to a separate cafeteria and their dressing rooms were segregated from the rest of the studio.
After leading roles in two major studio productions, both released in 1943, Horne seemed poised for major stardom. Yet back at MGM she was relegated to specialty numbers in musicals and revues like Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), the first of a series of MGM musicals built around the lives of Broadway composers. Robert Walker stars as Jerome Kern and his highly fictionalized journey to stardom becomes little more than a structure upon which to hang a series of production numbers built around his songs and showcasing the talents of MGM's contract players. The film opens with a kind of digest presentation of the first act of the musical “Show Boat,” reimagining the show's 1927 Broadway debut with Horne performing the role of Julie, a character of mixed race who is forced to leave the company when their southern audiences discover that she is part Black. “When Lena Horne came on the screen, one could have heard a pin drop,” recalled Howard Strickland, MGM's head of publicity. “She was ravishing… Everyone was overwhelmed by this beautiful star.”
Horne saw her performance as a kind of audition when, a few years later, MGM embarked on a lavish Technicolor remake of the musical but, according to the studio, they never even considered her. The role eventually went to Ava Gardner, a white actress and, as it turned out, Horne's good friend. It may have been the final straw for Horne in Hollywood. The promise of a new era for African-Americans in Hollywood proved to be more of an unfulfilled dream. Southern white audiences rebelled at any presentation of strong Black characters or suggestions of racial equality. Even without the economic power of the Deep South on Hollywood productions, interracial relationships were forbidden by Hollywood's own production code. For all of the best intentions of the most progressive filmmakers and studio executives, bigotry and racism were still rampant in the culture and in Hollywood itself.
After her leading parts in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, all Horne was offered were specialty acts in otherwise white films like Ziegfeld Follies (1945) and Words and Music (1948). These sequences stood outside of the story and could be easily edited by theaters in the Deep South. She was, as she told a Variety reporter decades later, “tired of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song. I did that 20 times too often.” After yet another isolated musical number in Duchess of Idaho (1950), she cancelled her contract with MGM and spent the next two decades as a nightclub headliner. She made her debut as a Broadway headliner in 1957 in “Jamaica,” a hit musical costarring Ricardo Montalban and featuring a young Alvin Ailey among the dancers.
Death of a Gunfighter (1969), a turn-of-the-century western starring Richard Widmark, gave Horne her first major screen role in more than 25 years and her first straight dramatic role ever on screen. Times had changed and Hollywood was beginning to defy the oppressive censorship of the southern states. In this film, her race is never even mentioned and her character, a brothel madam in a frontier town, has an intimate relationship with Widmark. Though the “color blind” casting intrigued her, Horne approached the part “thinking inside of me that she is black because it gave me something to identify with.” Horne researched the era and hired an acting coach in preparation for the role, and she turned to her son-in-law, the director Sidney Lumet, for advice. His guidance, she recalled, was “Be simple, be still, don't act.” While Horne enjoyed working with Widmark, who was supportive and encouraging from the start, she was nervous about taking on a dramatic role and she found her director, Robert Totten, little help. It proved to be a rocky production, with Widmark clashing with Totten and ultimately having him replaced by Don Siegel. When the film was finally released a year later, neither director wanted screen credit. The film entered Hollywood history books as the first production attributed to Allen Smithee, a pseudonym that evolved into Alan Smithee and was used on films where the director refused credit due to creative interference. In an era before IMDb and social media, audiences and critics were none the wiser and the name was taken at face value as a new filmmaker. Even at the New York Times, film critic Howard Thompson wrote that “the film has been sharply directed by Allen Smithee.”
Horne made one more major big screen appearance, playing Glinda the Good Witch of the South in the 1978 screen adaptation of the hit musical The Wiz, directed by none other than her son-in-law Sidney Lumet, but she maintained a busy career on stage, on the small screen and performing for live audiences around the world. She died in 2010 at the age of 92, leaving behind a magnificent legacy. She was the first African-American actress to get the star treatment in Hollywood, but the big screen was only a small part of her career. She was one of the top nightclub performers in the country, a top selling recording artist and a star of stage and screen, earning four Grammy Awards, a Tony and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame over the course of her long life.
Before arriving in Hollywood, Horne made her feature debut in The Duke is Tops (1938), a low-budget “race film” produced for Black theaters. The film was essentially a star vehicle for Ralph Cooper, the entrepreneurial emcee of Harlem's Apollo Theater who cowrote and coproduced the film. He had developed the costarring role for Nina Mae McKinney, who starred in King Vidor's Hallellujah! (1929), the first major Black cast feature from Hollywood. When she proved unavailable, Cooper reached out to Horne, at the time a rising star on the nightclub circuit. Though she had given birth to her first child just weeks before, she flew from Pittsburg to Los Angeles and jumped into the role of the headliner of a small theatrical revue touring the South. Horne had little time to prepare for her screen acting debut and the ten-day schedule left almost no time for rehearsal. According to her costars, she embraced the experience and was well-liked by the cast, but she returned home feeling cheated. Cooper never paid her salary, even after he cashed in on her later success by rereleasing the film years later under the title The Bronze Venus with Horne promoted to top billing.
Horne returned to the nightclub circuit and was spotted by Roger Edens, an MGM musical director, while headlining in a Los Angeles club in 1941. Edens saw big screen potential in the elegant songstress. Horne was the right person at the right time: America had just entered World War II and Hollywood was under pressure from the NAACP and the War Office to show Black Americans on screen in a more favorable light, in part to remind them that they had a stake in the war effort. They were also a growing economic force and if Hollywood understood anything, it was money. The light-skinned Horne was elegant, talented, beautiful and defied every Black stereotype common to Hollywood movies. In early 1942, MGM signed her to a seven-year contract. It was a first for an African-American performer at a major studio, stipulating that she would not play servants or comic relief of other stereotypical roles that Black performers were reduced to in 1930s and 1940s studio productions. Lena Horne became Hollywood's first Black starlet.
Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-Black musical imported from Broadway and directed for the screen by Vincente Minnelli, gave Horne her first major role in a Hollywood production. It was a portrait of rural Black life steeped in folklore as reimagined by white creators and it was rife with many of the demeaning stereotypes Hollywood was ostensibly attempting to correct. But it also showcased the talents of a cast of great African-American performers, notably the celebrated jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters, reprising her starring role from the stage production as the pious Petunia and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as her likable but lazy husband. Horne was cast as the seductive Georgia. Rex Ingram and Butterfly McQueen costar and musical luminaries Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller make appearances. Minnelli was determined to give both his female stars the same kind of glamorous treatment its white starlets received and was impressed with the patience and professionalism of Horne. Waters, meanwhile, was haughty and imperious on the set and took an instant dislike to the young and beautiful Horne. When Horne broke her ankle filming a big production number, Waters was incensed at the attention Horne received. Meanwhile, Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed were under pressure from the Production Code for the film's portrayal of Horne as a seductive and sexy character. One scene she filmed for the production, singing “Ain't It the Truth” while taking a bubble bath, was cut before the film's premiere. The number was later showcased in the musical documentary That's Entertainment! III (1994).
Mere months later, Lena Horne was back on the screen in Hollywood's second musical with an all-Black cast. Produced by 20th Century Fox, Stormy Weather (1943) featured the legendary Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in a story loosely inspired by the dancer's life and career. Horne, on loan from MGM, plays his love interest, the elegant singer Selina Rogers whose career is on the rise. As with Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather was a showcase for a talented cast, which included such luminaries as Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Dooley Wilson, Ada Brown, Katherine Dunham and the Nicholas Brothers, whose breathtaking acrobatic dance number ends the film and practically steals the show from Robinson and Horne. Unlike the rural southern setting of Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather presented its Black characters in urban life and showcased them in glamorous nightclub settings. It was a landmark in that respect, acknowledging the service of Black soldiers of World War I and offering a portrait of sophisticated, successful Black professionals in the years between the wars. Horne's performance of the song “Stormy Weather,” originally made famous by Ethel Waters, kicked off the film's big production number and ultimately became Horne's signature song. But the experience was a little dispiriting for the 25-year-old Horne, cast in romantic role opposite a man old enough to be her grandfather. Robinson, at the end of a successful career and past his prime as a dancer, was something of a bully according to Horne and other members of the cast. And compared to working at MGM, where the entire cast was welcome to an integrated commissary, at Fox they were restricted to a separate cafeteria and their dressing rooms were segregated from the rest of the studio.
After leading roles in two major studio productions, both released in 1943, Horne seemed poised for major stardom. Yet back at MGM she was relegated to specialty numbers in musicals and revues like Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), the first of a series of MGM musicals built around the lives of Broadway composers. Robert Walker stars as Jerome Kern and his highly fictionalized journey to stardom becomes little more than a structure upon which to hang a series of production numbers built around his songs and showcasing the talents of MGM's contract players. The film opens with a kind of digest presentation of the first act of the musical “Show Boat,” reimagining the show's 1927 Broadway debut with Horne performing the role of Julie, a character of mixed race who is forced to leave the company when their southern audiences discover that she is part Black. “When Lena Horne came on the screen, one could have heard a pin drop,” recalled Howard Strickland, MGM's head of publicity. “She was ravishing… Everyone was overwhelmed by this beautiful star.”
Horne saw her performance as a kind of audition when, a few years later, MGM embarked on a lavish Technicolor remake of the musical but, according to the studio, they never even considered her. The role eventually went to Ava Gardner, a white actress and, as it turned out, Horne's good friend. It may have been the final straw for Horne in Hollywood. The promise of a new era for African-Americans in Hollywood proved to be more of an unfulfilled dream. Southern white audiences rebelled at any presentation of strong Black characters or suggestions of racial equality. Even without the economic power of the Deep South on Hollywood productions, interracial relationships were forbidden by Hollywood's own production code. For all of the best intentions of the most progressive filmmakers and studio executives, bigotry and racism were still rampant in the culture and in Hollywood itself.
After her leading parts in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, all Horne was offered were specialty acts in otherwise white films like Ziegfeld Follies (1945) and Words and Music (1948). These sequences stood outside of the story and could be easily edited by theaters in the Deep South. She was, as she told a Variety reporter decades later, “tired of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song. I did that 20 times too often.” After yet another isolated musical number in Duchess of Idaho (1950), she cancelled her contract with MGM and spent the next two decades as a nightclub headliner. She made her debut as a Broadway headliner in 1957 in “Jamaica,” a hit musical costarring Ricardo Montalban and featuring a young Alvin Ailey among the dancers.
Death of a Gunfighter (1969), a turn-of-the-century western starring Richard Widmark, gave Horne her first major screen role in more than 25 years and her first straight dramatic role ever on screen. Times had changed and Hollywood was beginning to defy the oppressive censorship of the southern states. In this film, her race is never even mentioned and her character, a brothel madam in a frontier town, has an intimate relationship with Widmark. Though the “color blind” casting intrigued her, Horne approached the part “thinking inside of me that she is black because it gave me something to identify with.” Horne researched the era and hired an acting coach in preparation for the role, and she turned to her son-in-law, the director Sidney Lumet, for advice. His guidance, she recalled, was “Be simple, be still, don't act.” While Horne enjoyed working with Widmark, who was supportive and encouraging from the start, she was nervous about taking on a dramatic role and she found her director, Robert Totten, little help. It proved to be a rocky production, with Widmark clashing with Totten and ultimately having him replaced by Don Siegel. When the film was finally released a year later, neither director wanted screen credit. The film entered Hollywood history books as the first production attributed to Allen Smithee, a pseudonym that evolved into Alan Smithee and was used on films where the director refused credit due to creative interference. In an era before IMDb and social media, audiences and critics were none the wiser and the name was taken at face value as a new filmmaker. Even at the New York Times, film critic Howard Thompson wrote that “the film has been sharply directed by Allen Smithee.”
Horne made one more major big screen appearance, playing Glinda the Good Witch of the South in the 1978 screen adaptation of the hit musical The Wiz, directed by none other than her son-in-law Sidney Lumet, but she maintained a busy career on stage, on the small screen and performing for live audiences around the world. She died in 2010 at the age of 92, leaving behind a magnificent legacy. She was the first African-American actress to get the star treatment in Hollywood, but the big screen was only a small part of her career. She was one of the top nightclub performers in the country, a top selling recording artist and a star of stage and screen, earning four Grammy Awards, a Tony and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame over the course of her long life.
