Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 13, 1994 TAG: 9407070006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
NEW YORK - Yes, she's still beautiful. Yes, she can still sing. Yes, her smile still gleams and her eyes dance, and she's vivacious, talking animatedly about her past and her new recording.
Lena Horne, at 76, lightheartedly noticing flaws nobody else sees, thinks she needs her first face lift. ``But it's too late now,'' she says. ``To hell with it.''
In 1981, Horne opened on Broadway in ``Lena Horne: the Lady and Her Music,'' which ran a year and closed on her 65th birthday. She meant it as a last hurrah.
``I sort of stopped singing,'' she says. ``I was asked a lot, but I was just appearing for college foundations and charities and so forth.''
This graceful slide into retirement halted when a love of long ago brought her back last year for a JVC Jazz Festival concert, a recording and many more offers for concerts. The love was the late Billy Strayhorn, best-known for his longtime collaboration with Duke Ellington and for composing ``Take the A Train'' for the Ellington Band.
``George Wein asked me to sing at a salute to Billy last year,'' Horne says. ``Billy's name brought me out.''
The New York Times began its review, ``Lena Horne gave a performance on Sunday evening that should become legend. In rivetingly energized performances of several Strayhorn songs topped off with a fiery rendition of `Stormy Weather,' she brought the audience to its feet.'' Another critic called it a performance of ``breathtaking passion, not just focused but driven and defiant, not just strong but dominating.''
Blue Note Records, whose president Bruce Lundvall as a teen-ager had heard Horne at Manhattan's Cafe Society and was still smitten, offered a contract for a recording.
``We'll Be Together Again,'' released last month, is the result. She made a video of one cut, ``Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me.''
``Now there's all this activity,'' she says. ``At this age of my life can't you just see me going out, trying to remember lyrics?''
Horne met Strayhorn in 1941 at a Los Angeles performance of Duke Ellington's musical, ``Jump for Joy.'' ``Billy was the same color as me, wore big eyeglasses. He looked like a very pretty brown owl. He was small. I think he was the softer side of Ellington.
``Part of my growing up in myself was with him. We would end and start each other's sentences. I
wanted to marry Billy. He would have made a wonderful husband. He was intelligent, he could cook and love you. He knew I didn't know much about music. I was hungry to know. I began to listen to music, jazz and classical. I'm so angry he left me.''
Strayhorn died in 1967.
Horne was married to Lenny Hayton, an MGM music director, from 1947 until his death in 1971.
``He was a fine musician,'' she says. ``He continued my education. I guess because Lenny was so much like Billy Strayhorn is why I married him. My children adored him. He happened to be white. His mama was very sweet to me, a little old-fashioned Jewish lady. She loved me.''
Horne recalls her grandmother, Cora Calhoun Horne, who started the Brooklyn chapter of the Big Sisters and Big Brothers organization. Prominent in the NAACP, she enrolled Lena at age 2.
``After my people were divorced, I was with her four months out of the year until I was 15,'' Horne says. ``Otherwise, I lived with people all over the South who were kind enough to take me in. I had to be grateful to so many strangers. It's hard to be grateful all the time.''
For years, Horne cultivated a charismatic but aloof performing style, placing an emotional barrier between herself and listeners. She says, ```The Lady and her Music' on Broadway, that's when I really felt like singing to people. I'm a very late bloomer.
``I was not musical at all. Every musician I worked with, I picked up something from. I learned it from an intellectual standpoint. I never felt it inside me until after the 1960s were over.''
An MGM executive heard Horne at a Los Angeles nightclub, where she'd gone from Cafe Society, in 1942 and signed her to a seven-year movie contract.
``Count Basie made me stay in California,'' she says. ``I was running away. I didn't want to be in the movies. Basie said, `You've got to do it and do what they ask. You've got to stay and give other [black] people a chance.'''
While she was in movies, Horne lived in a house that white people had rented for her, across the street from Humphrey Bogart and his first wife. ``Neighbors came around; they'd made a petition to put me out. They came to Bogart and he got a gun out. He said, `If you touch that lady, I'll kill you.' He didn't know me.''
Horne only did two movies she liked, ``Stormy Weather'' and ``Cabin in the Sky.''
``In Hollywood we couldn't stand too close to a white performer,'' she says.
``I had a nervous breakdown because I was so alienated from everybody.''
Because of her exposure in the movies, during World War II Horne was a favorite pinup among the GIs. She also sang for servicemen, traveling with the USO, and was again stung by racial discrimination.
At Fort Riley, Kan., she recalls, ``I saw Italian prisoners of war in fatigue uniforms in the front seats and black soldiers sitting in the back. I got so angry I went back to the last two row and sang to them with my back to the front.
``The brass sent word to the USO I was a troublemaker.''
When the USO decided not to send her on any more tours, Horne traveled to camps to sing for black servicemen at her own expense.
Horne isn't sorry now she spent her life in show business but, early on she didn't want to.
``I really wanted to be a teacher,'' Horne says. ``I didn't choose this business.'' Her mother needed help financially, knew people at the Cotton Club in New York and took her pretty daughter there.
``I went into the Cotton Club at 16. The only reason I got hired was because of the way I looked. I didn't know how to do a thing. My mother had wanted to be an actress and had no luck. She wanted me to be a star. I didn't like it. I had to hoof, tap-dance. I didn't know how. I learned a few steps. Whenever one of the showgirls was absent I'd carry her fans. I listened to Adelaide Hall, a star there. Before her was Ethel Waters, who first sang `Stormy Weather.' I used to hear her on the radio.
``I thought, `I'm going to get married and get away from this.' I did and had two beautiful children, then I had to get a job.'' Horne married Louis J. Jones of Pittsburgh in 1937. They separated in 1940.
``In 1940 I got a job with Charlie Barnet's orchestra. I was with him three or four months. Barney Josephson [of Cafe Society] let me audition after John Hammond told him, `This girl can't sing, but she looks good and she needs a job and wants to stop going on the road because she has two babies.'
``My second life started in the 1940s with Barney and my beginning to know artists of my own people. I found so many people to be proud of. I found that my grandmother was a role model.
``When I finally learned I wasn't by myself, I just fed off my audience. They want to pour out love; they're not sure where to pour it. OK, I'm here; pour it at me. It was wonderful.''
by CNB