Lena & Me

A Lady and Her Music

Lena Horne gave me my education in Black History. The iconic star became a friend of mine after a producer pal took me to her glamorous far-flung apartment in the Apthorp, the iconic building on the Upper West side, for a drink. The topic, a one-woman show on Broadway. Nine years later, Lena Horne: A Lady and Her Music opened at the Nederlander Theatre in 1981. Naturally, at our very first meeting, I asked her if she’d sit for a series of conversations with me for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, where I was a contributing editor. Luckily, she said yes! Andy loved movie stars, and we both loved Lena.

The Lena Horne Theatre

Over time, the singer explained that things had always moved slowly for her from the very beginning of her career. In the end we ended up as neighbors, and I’d be invited to pop over now and then to visit and gossip. After Lena’s Broadway show finally opened, I went back a half dozen times over the next 14 months to bask in her beauty, grace, and music; this included her extraordinary last show. You are invited to read excerpts from our far-ranging conversations below that I originally wrote for Andy in 1972. Lena died in 2010, and now, 12 years later, Lena Horne will become the first Black woman to have a Broadway Theatre named after her. The Nederlanders have announced that the Brooks Atkinson Theatre will be renamed The Lena Horne Theatre this fall. Things are still moving slowly for Lena, but she’s back on the Great White Way where she always belonged.

Lena!
By R. Couri Hay

Lena Horne is a dream come true. She is pretty, witty, and wild. Our third meeting in six months never dulled her smile or interest in talking about any and, as you will read, everything. How and where she finds the strength to sing and talk, I don’t know; having lost her father, husband, and
son within a year and a half, you’d think she’d still be on a long vacation. But instead, she’s gone to work with new vitality that’s inspiring to all who hear and see her, and that’s undoubtedly the way her men would have wanted it. Young at a freely stated—I didn’t even ask—fifty-four, with a body and face to match any super-sultry starlet, Lena Horne is adding to her legend. And can she sing! It’s goodbye to the airy-fairy Lena and hello to the sexy soul siren. She has got to be seen and heard to be believed. What a thrill to see the product of a brilliant career singing the songs of and carrying on like a Seventies Super Star. Talk about holding a note; Lena Horne has defied Time.

Because you were the first black movie star, you were always told that you were representative of all Blacks and as such your behavior had to be exemplary. Have you or do you enjoy being representative?

Now, I am not being required to be representative; I’ve served out that time. Personally, I didn’t enjoy it when it was happening. It started when I was eighteen and on the road with Nobel Sisell’s band; he told me that I had to be representative of Black women. It went on when I went into the movies in 1940. Because I was told by the NAACP and the Urban League and those outfits that I was the first one, and you know, I was the first one in white cabarets I couldn’t visit and attend as a customer. I fell for that lie, that I had to be exemplary so the rest following me would have an entree, you dig.

You didn’t enjoy it, but you did it because you felt you had a responsibility.

That’s right, but I found out in 1960 that Black people still had to go to lunch counters not only in the South but in the North too. It took me five years to get an apartment to live in, in New York. I found that my being exemplary one way or another hadn’t proven a damn thing. There was still inequality in hiring, inequality in housing, inequality in wages per se, and what had I proved?

Do you think that your being exemplary was wasted effort?

I think possibly it was.

Do you wish you hadn’t done it?

Oh no; I don’t wish that. I think it was helpful to me in that I could be politically involved with people that were working for these sorts of equalities, and I was useful because the name could be used for that purpose. So I’m not sorry that I did it. I’m sorry that it didn’t accomplish anything. The children in the sixties proved that we no longer need representative people or leaders per se. This generation is going to do its own thing; and anything that I did before isn’t workable at this time.

I don’t believe that what you did didn’t uplift a lot of people; I’m sure it served a positive purpose. Please don’t feel that it was all useless. Good leadership is never wasted.

Well, I look at Jackie Robinson’s life and I think, till he died he still said, “I don’t see a black coach in that corner.”

He was right! How do you describe Lena Horne today?

I won’t say a middle-aged lady because Alan King said, ‘Do you know many people who live to be a hundred?’ So I’ll say I’m an old lady who is still doing a little bit of show business. I’m very interested in young people. I don’t want to be around anybody my own age or older. I’m reasonably happy and reasonably adjusted because I’m not really impressed by too much. I’m more or less pessimistic; I think that keeps me going.

I’m not impressed by too much either, but what does impress me is good performance. I’m impressed with that, and I’m impressed with you!

That’s something else; that’s my work.

Are you impressed with other performers?

Are you kidding? I’m a fan! When I said that I wasn’t impressed by much I meant the ego that supposedly goes with this business. It’s a trap if you get caught in it. I’m impressed with singers particularly and dancers. I think the theater is marvelous. I don’t know too much about it, the legitimate theatre. I came along at a bad time, and yet it was a good time. I came along when the great stars like Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Butterfly McQueen were going strong, and we all made Cabin in the Sky together, and they all impressed me very much. When I got my first real singing job, I worked at Cafe Society, and I worked with Teddy Wilson, J.C. Heard, J.C. Higginbottom, and the great musicians. I knew Billy Holliday and I listened to her, and she was a dear friend of mine, a sister, and I loved Dinah Washington, and she helped me. I got the chance to learn from all these great stars; my background was basic.

Good schooling!

Yes, and even now, I learned from the Beatles when they came along; I learn from everything that I hear, because I love music, all kinds. Inside me, Aretha is there. It doesn’t come out sounding that way, but inside she’s there. This is what I’m impressed by: creative people, writers, painters, musicians, artists. I’m not impressed by the B.S. and the entourage and the possessions and the “important people” that one has to deal with.

You still go to the supermarket?

You know it. That’s only putting it mildly.

What was the most impressive thing that ever happened to you in your life?

I went to Jackson, Mississippi, just before they murdered Medgar Evers, to sing in a church there. The people listened to me, they took me in, and they treated me beautifully. I had been away a long time, and I hadn’t been in a Black church for a long time. I wasn’t raised in the church, but they knew I was there to be a part of what was happening, and they let me be a part of it. That was most impressive; it was the greatest audience I ever had in my life.

You mentioned all the stars that were influential in your life. Will you tell me about Billie Holliday?

Billie was to me, very beautiful, very tender, very protective, very aware of sisterhood. She was a big star. Life, people, never let her be happy. She was very pained, she was ill, she was caught, she was trapped, but she was tender and protective about other Black women in the business.

In your opinion, would Billie have been flattered by Diana Ross’s interpretation of her in Lady Sings the Blues?

Oh, I don’t know. I think that Diana—and I’m sure that she is aware of the fact that she has been given the chance to tell a little bit about one of our great ladies—probably gained a great deal from it herself. I have a feeling, and everybody tells me that her performance is phenomenal, that Billie was there with her and into it with her. I don’t know how Billie would react to it because Billie was a lady who was never given a great deal of happiness by many people. She had a few people who were able to get close to her, whom she trusted, but on the whole, she was an unhappy, fragile woman, and life was just too much for her. I don’t know what she’d think about this. She might not be too impressed either, you know.

What about Louis Armstrong, your co-star in Cabin in the Sky?

I only worked with him that once. I knew him as a good person and a jolly man. I know his wife better; she and I were in the Cotton Club together in the chorus. She was always very beautiful and very talented, and I’m sure they had a very happy life together. My husband Lenny and I would go to wherever he was working, when we could, and hear him. He was the same, always great.

There was an ad in Variety not too long ago that said they wanted a Butterfly McQueen type.

Well, why not Butterfly?

Exactly, she showed up. And they said she was too much.

She’s fantastic. Butterfly is sweet and bright, a very brilliant girl. She has always worked with young people uptown in Harlem. She never left her sources. She got treated very badly, but she has taught at schools up there. She has always concerned herself with the theatre. She is a giant.

I saw Ethel Waters singing for Billy Graham the other night; you played with her in Cabin. What do you think of her singing for Billy and God?

I guess that’s wonderful. I don’t know about that feeling of mass religious movement, but she’s certainly marvelous.

What I’m getting at is messages in song, humanitarian messages. Would you sing about the plight of the Blacks, etc?

I do, do them. Not so much because they are messages but because, well, as opposed to some completely unrealistic song about the pie, moon, gloom thing. Whereas people are living, working, and reacting to being hurt and being mistreated much more frequently than they are being offered the riches of the world, and I don’t mean riches, money; I mean happiness. As I grew to be older, I found that I performed more realistic songs. I’m sorry that people always think they’re messages. They’re not. But young people moved into writing songs that said things. And now that the forties and fifties and the Rogers and Harts, and the Lerners and Loews are gone, there has emerged a whole new school of writing, which is very interesting to me. It’s very real.

Do you feel that music is evolving for the better?

I think so. I think that music is one of the better things that man has been able to have; music, painting, the arts came here to keep the bestial side of our nature at bay as long as possible. I don’t know whether the beasts are winning over, and I don’t mean the animals. I mean the beast in us. I think as long as there are creative people and beautiful sounds, this is why music is valuable, all kinds of music. I’m like Duke Ellington. He says he likes everything, including Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk.

How do you like the Motown sound?

Oh well, of course it’s marvelous. Let’s start with Ray Charles and go on up.

What do you think about the comeback of Jazz and the Big Band sound?

I’m happy about that because that’s where I got my schooling. It’s been basically there, Jazz in the church has been the thing that’s kept music alive this long.

What does it mean to be a Star today? Are there any more Stars today?

I think Al Green is a Star, Marvin Gaye to me is a Star, but that’s my idea, and The Temptations are Stars, and Nina Simone is a Star. I think that very talented people are Stars; but it’s not the kind of explanation that used to be. It used to be that they were people who had large groups of people carrying their luggage and their telephones.

Money doesn’t make a Star.

No, no, not at all, and I hope they get a new word for that. Aretha is a Star. I think that being a Star is gauged by the impact you have on an audience. It’s that thing, that vibration that comes from you and goes to the audience.

Did you ever lose that touch of a Star during your career?

One night I worked at the Concord and lost it. I laid the biggest egg I ever laid. Nobody listened.

How do you feel about yourself as a Star? Do you worry about another night like that?

No, that had never happened to me before; and I thought that when that happened, I would just be destroyed. But it came at a time when a lot of things were happening in this world that were more important to me, so it didn’t destroy me. I went on to work three days afterward, and I did fine. It was just a lapse, and I’m glad it happened, because it showed me that one just gets up if one’s knocked down and goes ahead and does the thing again right.

You’ve got to work at it always.

Oh, I never take anything for granted especially an audience, oooeee, good God, no!

Were you ever a part of that Hollywood Star syndrome?

I was never a part of that Star system. I worked in movies at MGM, but I sang in a number that could be separated from the rest of the picture and cut very easily. Because during the forties and fifties, some places in the South and in certain countries like South Africa, they wouldn’t show a Black on the screen with somebody else. So I never got carried away with being in the movies, then.

Just how scandalous was it when they first put you in the movies?

There was a big scandal, yeah.

Was Mr. Mayer or Mr. Thalberg foresighted in that respect, what do you think the reasoning was?

They said that they were very interested in doing something with a Black person, something different than Tarzan pictures.

Do you think it was for monetary or social reasons?

I don’t think it was for money. I think Mayer told himself it was for social reasons, but then when the first flak came from white audiences, they cut it out.

What about Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky? You sang and acted in those two pictures all the way through.

Yes, but those were the only two that I had any concern with other people in the cast. The other ones that I was in, I sang separately by myself in a scene. And I never had any conversation with the white people in the cast.

Well, how did you feel about them cutting your parts out?

Just think I had to wait until 1960 to really work because after Stormy Weather and Cabin, movies began to not do anything. There were no more black musicals made.

Why didn’t they make any more?

Don’t ask me. I don’t know.

Did you feel those films exploited Blacks?

No, not at all; I didn’t feel that then. I was glad they put us to work.

What movie did you make that you would like to resee again on TV?

Nothing, none of them. I hate them.

Why?

I couldn’t sing; I didn’t act. I didn’t know if I could act because I didn’t get the chance to. I wasn’t too bad in Cabin, but I began to learn during the years, and I think I sing better now than I did then. My learning process didn’t come from acting in movies. Mine came from working all over.

Currently we are witnessing a Black blitz in movies, and I’d like you to comment on it. Have you seen Super Fly, Sounder, and Blacula? Do you think the Black movies are representative of the Black people?

I’ve got to say, just as Billie Holliday said to me when I first was heading into the movies and was getting flak from all sides, Black and White: “If you’ve got to feed your children, you go ahead and do it.” The only thing is, if you’re making so much money for that Man whose making that movie and you’re not getting an equitable piece of it, then that blitz should be unblitzed. I don’t think that it’s bad. I think the more the better, or I should hope that they will get better in quality and in content, I should hope. I don’t know how the cash was divided up in Super Fly, but Sounder and Blacula wasn’t all Black money. I talked to a White distributor the other night, and he said that all of us are in this business to make money, and I’m going to show it, as long as they make it, and it’s making money. And he wasn’t particular about the content, because he was talking about Blacula, and now they are going to do a Black Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde; and I think it’s going to be in another year or two that we are going to be inundated with this sort of thing. I was offered a part in Come Back Charleston Blue as some lady who had buried a gangster or something but didn’t take it. It’s going to be a little while yet before the well runs dry, and then they will stop and worry about what they’re writing and what they’re working in.

How do you feel about being beautiful?

I was lucky. It hindered, but it helped a great deal too. I’m at the stage now where I find people saying oohh woo, and they get very close to try to find the scars of the lifting, and I keep thinking, well this year the screw is going to fall.

How did you like working with Frank Sinatra?

I like him as a performer very much. We don’t like each other personally. It’s been that way for a very long time. It started with Ava Gardner and . . .

Several famous White men have put on Black face for the stage and screen. What did you think of Black men reversing this and playing in White face?

We had a great Black actor who did that a long time ago when he played in The Duchess of Malfee, which is a very murderous tale of killings and rape and all this sort of thing, and he played in White face.

Are the Blacks going to reverse the screen and segregate against Whites?

Well, you know I don’t know. Politically, I can’t tell you too much about it, except a great many Black people are disenchanted with integration. Now I don’t know what my personal views are yet about it; as a performer, I don’t find myself with people in the street enough to stand right up and say, “I’m against integration.” First of all, I work with White musicians as well as Black. I work to audiences that are mixed; I was married for many years to a White man; my grandchildren are mixed. I would say at the moment that I am unhappy about the slow rate of better education for Blacks and Browns, and other minority groups. I’m unhappy about unequal hiring in construction, and I’m unhappy about it backstage in the theatres.

Do you get briefed by the NAACP or other concerned Black groups about these injustices?

They used to in the forties, but they don’t anymore. I see it myself. I see it in hotels where I live. I just moved from an apartment where there was Latin help but only one or two Blacks. There are very few Black doormen. There are beginning to be a few around town. I see these inequalities in my daily life. I’m more sensitive to it because I am Black. The NAACP knows that the young people are going to do what they want to do. I think the NAACP has had a marvelous record as far as legal rights are concerned, but they are still having to batter their heads against stone walls trying to see that these things that we are even promised under the law we get. So they don’t have time any more to worry too much about our leaders. I never classed myself as a leader. The people that we respect and adore—leaders like Malcolm and Medgar and Martin, the Kennedys were killed; they were knocked off. I wouldn’t risk a leader anymore. I don’t want to see any more slaughter. I don’t think that they should say anybody’s a leader anymore or representative, you know. Not that I’ve ever been in fear of my life, but I certainly have gotten a lot of scurrilous mail during my years, and I’m sick of that too.

Some young Blacks don’t like the slow pace of equality either, so they are turning to bricks and bombs. Do you condone or condemn these tactics?

I can’t encourage or discourage it. I feel that young people may know something I don’t know; they certainly should. What makes me so unhappy is that every time there has been a riot in Watts or in Washington, or when they murdered Martin Luther King, for a few months or a year maybe, they got things together a little bit more and they moved one inch further. Is that what it takes?

What are you going to tell young people when they ask you that?

I hope not.

I know you and I hope not, but how can I look some kid in the eye after he says,
“Well, how come they passed the law right after Martin got it, but now they’ve stopped?”

It’s terrible. Is the Black woman still the matriarch of her family?

Oh, I hope not. We never wanted it that way. It was a forced thing, anyway. It was forced by the establishment from the era of slavery on, you know that. Just think how I felt when my son called me a matriarch. I hated it.

You give your support, your presence, and talent to a lot of charities. We talked when you sang at Roseland in support of Phoenix House and their drug abuse program. You recently were up in Harlem singing for Arthur Mitchell. How do you decide what to support and what not to support?

I’m getting tired of doing so much charity work. It’s very easy to get yourself in a circle of performing for organizations, and I find that one’s potential as a fund raiser grows less the more frequently you’re seen. My one big objection is that the so-called “expenses” of these affairs sometimes take more money than the charity itself winds up receiving; I find this happening more and more, and I resent it. I’m trying to cut down as much as I can. I sang for Phoenix House because I know so many young people that need a Phoenix House, people very close to me who are into dope. I also am interested in young people, and Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem is one of the things that I do.

Are you okay financially after all these years of ups and downs?

I don’t know, but I should imagine I’m all right. But you see, I’ve never lived lavishly. My husband and I loved to travel, and the most money we ever spent was when we would take much less salary to be in the place we wanted to be, that was our extravagance. And whenever I did work, I tried to have great musicians. But I didn’t need cars because I don’t drive; I don’t own a lot of houses. Once I had two; now I don’t own any. I live in an apartment very comfortably, I guess. I don’t have a lot of jewels and furs and yet I’m happy.

You have had two husbands. Would you marry again?

No. I believe that the outside world has made marriage a little difficult. I always thought I was a marriageable animal. I always wanted to be married. I was raised that way. If you are going to dig a man, you married him, which is not the right reason at all. As it worked out, my second one was more successful because that really was a working partnership, and I had something to offer to that, that is my creative self. Whereas I was a terrible first wife, because I didn’t work, and it
brought out of me something I hadn’t had. I came from a displaced family, and I was left around with people. I learned no kind of family attitude at all. So I was completely unfit for my first marriage, whereas by the time I married Lenny, I had an art and I polished it, learned it, and grew in it and we shared that together.

Are you sure you wouldn’t marry again?

I don’t think so. I’m a little lonely sometimes, but I was lonely when I was with people. I’m by nature rather lonely.

Is there romance in your life?

Oeeee, Jesus God; I think that all men are beautiful. I don’t think that all men want to be attached to older women, but sometimes I think oh, all right, great, that will be a nice romance, but it doesn’t upset me too much.

You wrote a book called Lena. Do you have you any plans to write another book?

I don’t think so. That book came at a turning point in my life, and I stopped singing right after I wrote that book. I went on the road with the National Counsel of Women for a year and a half on a membership drive for the South—high schools and colleges and met with groups of Black women who are involved—and it interested me tremendously, much more than my so-called career. But I don’t know if I will eventually go into that kind of work or not; I’m a little lazy also, and I have to be pushed.

How does your working day go?

I have a little supper after I work, go to bed around three, get up around two or three in the afternoon, get breakfast, which is a steak and a salad, then I go downstairs to the dressing room and get geared up for that first show, and it’s the same thing over and over.

Speaking of Vegas, you don’t gamble, you don’t booze like the Rat Pack …

I can’t booze and work, so afterwards I have a couple of drinks, eat my supper, and go to bed. I can’t drink before the show, but that’s all that’s happening.

That’s why you don’t go to Las Vegas, because you’re not into what’s there?

You’re whoring, or vacationing, or gambling, and I don’t do that.

Do you feel you have as much energy now as when you made Cabin in the Sky?

When I’m working, yes, with good musicians. I find myself tired when I’m not doing anything, really.

Do you think you sing better now than you ever did?

Yes, I think I sing better than I did; I hope it will last for a while. But listen, I’m still learning.

Lena Horne On Broadway
By Linda Feliz

Lena Horne had many firsts. In 1942 the brilliant singer, dancer, actor, and valiant civil rights activist became the first African-American performer to sign a long-term contract with one of America’s leading entertainment companies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). She was also the first African American elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors. This was a milestone for her career. In 1958, she became the first African-American woman nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Jamaica. Today, Horne will be the first Black woman to have a Broadway Theatre named after her. The Nederlander Organization announced that the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York City will be renamed after her, honoring the vast impact she made on Broadway and on the world. The Brooks Atkinson Theatre is currently home to the musical Six.

When it opened in 1926, the 1,031-seat auditorium was known as the Mansfield Theatre after the actor Richard Mansfield. Of course, Broadway theaters have always been named after theatrical giants, among them, George and Ira Gershwin, Eugene O’Neill, and Neil Simon. This honor, however, has not been bestowed on Black artists in the past. As a Brooklyn-born actress who started her career at the Cotton Club, Horne rarely played a leading role in her movies because she was Black, which would have called for revisions in cities that won’t screen black films. In spite of this, Horne recorded albums, appeared in countless films, and performed on stage, setting a precedent for others to follow.

In response to the news, Mayor Eric Adams said, “As a daughter of Brooklyn, a civil rights leader, an artist, and an activist, there is no one who embodies the spirit of this great city more than Lena Horne. With this renaming, an iconic New Yorker will rightly take her place amongst an iconic New York industry while being introduced to new generations as they visit this beautiful theater.