Happy Birthday Lena Horne

Today would have been the birthday of Lena Horne known to her peers as "The Horne". The electrifying beauty and uncompromising performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women for six-decades through a singing career on stage, television and in films was the model of black womanhood.

She is best described in her own words saying “my identity was clear because I no longer have to be a 'credit,' I don't have to be a 'symbol' to anybody. I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. 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 Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father was a civil servant and gambler who largely abandoned the family, although Ms. Horne reconnected with him in the late 1930’s. Her mother, an actress, was largely absent from Ms. Horne's early life because of work on the black theater circuit. Shifted at first among friends and relatives, Ms. Horne was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, a stern social worker and suffragette in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Ms. Horne said she was influenced by her grandmother's "polite ferocity."

In 1933, when she was 16, Ms. Horne was reunited with her mother and new stepfather, a white Cuban. It was the peak of the Depression, and they lived on relief in Harlem. Ms. Horne was pushed into a job at the Cotton Club by her mother, who knew the Harlem nightclub's choreographer. The segregated club attracted white clientele who liked to watch the top black entertainers of the day, such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, surrounded by what was promoted as a "tall, tan and terrific" chorus of girls.

The Horne, as she was endearing called because of her striking beauty and voice, was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid. This single act transformed the image of the African American woman in Hollywood. As film historian Donald Bogle said, "Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling… Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently... Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact paved the way for a new day" for black actresses.

In Hollywood, Ms. Horne received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Her reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of classic musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. She shared billing with hugely famous white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South. "Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she once told the New York.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as white beauties including Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. James Gavin, who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar." 

Ms. Horne appeared on television and at major concerts halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards. She was formidable and the first black cabaret star for white society.

As a songstress her repertoire consisted of sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Billy Strayhorn. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly. In her singing, Ms. Horne showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout."

She told the New York Times in 1981, "I thought, 'How can I sing about a penthouse in the sky, when with the housing restrictions the way they are, I wouldn't be allowed to rent the place?" In the late 1940’s and 1950’s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in black neighborhoods, but Ms. Horne successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids burn Ms. Horne's sheets.

In 1963, Ms. Horne appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Horne also used her celebrity to rally front-line civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil right groups including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women.

Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Horne said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives. To Ms. Horne's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts was resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the black acting community who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture.

After the triumph of her 1981 Broadway show, she led an increasingly isolated life in her Manhattan apartment. Over my lifetime I have seen and known giants who have illuminated the world. None shined brighter then “The Horne”. A life rich in wonder that now belong to the ages. Rest In Peace Ms. Horne as you take your rest among the ghost of the great.

And that's my Thought Provoking Perspective...

http://johntwills.com

Tales from the Decider

Sometimes as sure as things change, ironically, most often they remain the same. Let me explain, history is hardly ever written the way it actually occurred. Therefore, if that which I have witnessed and know to be true can be altered, no changed, how can I believe any recorded history. In fact, it is more like His-Story.

Case in point, this week our most recent President re-emerged into the public’s view with the launch a new book “Decision Points”. The B&N overview of the book bills it as “a groundbreaking new brand of presidential memoir, Decision Points will captivate supporters, surprise critics, and change perspectives on eight remarkable years in American history and on the man at the center of events.”

I am not sure exactly where it will be placed in your local book store; meaning will it be stocked under true crimes or fiction. Nonetheless, I am old enough and have lived long enough to have seen history made, told, rewritten, and changed to create a narrative that, frankly, fits the agenda. The agenda in this case is supposed to make us forget what we witnessed and know to be true concerning the last eight years in a way to be viewed as compassionate.

It’s understandable, especially as bad as the last eight years were that someone would want to attempt to rewrite this acrimonious history. Honestly, it was about as horrifying and deceitful as one can possibly imagine and yet no one complained as it occurred. At any rate the self proclaimed “Decider” has decided to justify why he was responsible, or not, for the worst period of life that I can remember.

To be fair, I have not read the book and doubt that I will, because I am not too big on fiction. However, I did see some of the interviews promoting the book, and read about it in the newspapers, and I think the interviews were good enough to be Oscar worthy.

While I watched the performance via the interview my thoughts were; would he admit that the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed him President? Would he explain how he allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy to push us to illegally invade a country that posed no threat to us costing over 800 billion and counting? Might the book contain an apology for the enormous cost in lives lost and permanent injuries not to mention the horrible conditions they returned to face at Walter Reed Army Hospital?

Oh, by the way, where’s Bin Laden?

To W’s credit, he does take responsibility for TARP and other Bailouts, which most accuse President Obama for initiating. This was a good thing particularly when a Pew Research Center poll found that nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent knew it originated under Bush. To that the former president said, "Fifty percent of the people were wrong."

He would go on to defended his rationale for supporting TARP: "Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? . . . Or do you take taxpayers' money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter."

Bush acknowledges that he undertook "the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt… helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions." He defends the "automakers' rescue" with federal loans and those given to AIG as "basically a nationalization of America's largest insurance company." By Tea Party’s doctrine, that's heresy. But Bush, in "Decision Points," doesn't back off at all from his defense of the auto industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies - even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party.

He could have use the over 10 billion dollars in cash that just disappeared in Iraq to do some of this financing to pay the fat cats who played roulette on the global casino. Maybe he shares in the book why he gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks. Nor have I heard how sorry he is for the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades as he embraced devastating trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

I was also wondering if he explained in this historical remake; how one can have a huge surplus when you took office, blow it, and leave office with the country trillion’s in debt. Was this what they mean by impact default? Did he mention the 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and account deficits as he borrowed more money from foreign sources than all the previous 42 Presidents combined? Maybe he was focused on the over 200,000 American Citizens who lost their lives because they had no health insurance on his watch.

This is the only president in recent memory that refused to attend or be a guest at any of the annual NAACP Conventions, or frankly do much of anything for the African American community. Except maybe having a few Negroes sprinkled throughout his administration, which was more like eye candy than substance – in my opinion.

What troubled me most was his admission that of all the bad things, horrors of his rule. The worst for him was a comment made by a rapper who said, “George Bush doesn’t like black people”. A comment made as a result of his response, or lack thereof, when he let a major US city, New Orleans, drown while patting his buddy Brownie on the back praising him for doing a “heck of a job”.

Of all the things – this is what he thought was the worst – not the hundreds of thousands died, injured, or wounded and their families suffering as a result of the two wars he started. THIS!!!

After that comment, I am not even going to touch on the outing of a covert CIA operative, the Patriot Act, illegally wiretaps, or torturing people. Oh, he didn’t catch Bin Laden did he?

The most telling statement from what I have gleaned was "I felt like the captain of a sinking ship" he writes in the memoir, adding: "This was one ugly way to end a presidency." So I guess we can say “Mission Accomplished”.

I searched the online book stores for its customer rating: 3 Stars

Listen to internet radio with John T Willschronicles on Blog Talk Radio