{"id":135529,"date":"2025-06-30T08:00:56","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=135529"},"modified":"2025-06-29T06:32:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T10:32:33","slug":"happy-birthday-lena-horne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=135529","title":{"rendered":"“I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.” — Lena Horne"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIt’s her birthday today. <\/p>\n

Mitchell and I – in yet another of our series of conversations – discuss Lena Horne. Weirdly, we had an enormous discussion about her one night when I was staying with him in Chicago. We watched endless clips of her singing and talked about her with enthusiasm and love. We woke up to the news she had died. Mitchell looked at me and said, “We didn’t even know it, but last night we gave her a sendoff.” <\/p>\n

Part of this “series” was me asking Mitchell to describe whoever it was in “one word” as a launching point.<\/p>\n

On Lena Horne<\/h1>\n

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\nSOM:<\/big> One word.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

MF:<\/big><\/strong> Angry.<\/p>\n

SOM:<\/big> Talk about that.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

MF:<\/big><\/strong> It’s almost like she was the Mike Tyson<\/strong> of singers. There was always this idea that she might bite. She bit her words, and she bit her phrasing. <\/p>\n

I read that beautiful biography about her, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. It talked a lot about how she would stand in these clubs as a black woman who was considered pretty. How generous of the white audience to consider her pretty, right? And she wouldn’t be able to go in the front door, but she’d sing for these rich white people, and her friends and family couldn’t come in, and she was so furious that it kind of created her style. <\/p>\n

She was angry about a lot of things. She was angry about the fact that she was never really given a role at MGM. All of her roles were AS Lena Horne. Well, not all of them – there were two exceptions and they were primarily black movies. But most of her movies, she was basically Lena Horne singing a song, which they would then take out when the movie played in the South. She was the link between Ethel Waters<\/strong> and Hattie McDaniel<\/strong> and the next generation, with Diahann Carroll<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

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MF:<\/big><\/strong> And she was pissed about it. She didn’t want to be anyone’s link. She wanted to be a movie star, and she wanted to be a top-rated concert singer, and she got stuck in the middle. She was very angry politically, when she got older. Totally justified. She was labeled as a female Uncle Tom, in a way, because her career was based on a white world. Her credibility as a black woman, or a civil rights activist, was called into question and that made her mad. <\/p>\n

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\nMF:<\/big><\/strong> I think a lot of people get disappointed when they hear Lena Horne for the first time. They think she’s going to be a soul singer. And of course she had a soulful voice because she sang from the heart, but she was like Sinatra<\/strong> and Dean Martin<\/strong> and Judy Garland<\/strong> and Peggy Lee<\/strong> and Rosemary Clooney<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

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\nMF:<\/big><\/strong> Lena Horne sang standards. She sang on the jazz edge of standards, but really, she was more of a pop singer. Not a blues singer, not a soul singer, not an R&B singer. She was a black woman who sang the standards. She was famous for singing Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Harold Arlen<\/strong>. She was also stunningly beautiful. It was interesting because she married a white man, and then seemed to regret it. She regretted that she had done that because she felt like it took her credibility away. She seemed to die fairly bitter. If you want to get a real sense of her, watch her in Cabin in the Sky<\/i> (1943). <\/p>\n

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