Book Review of: Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin, July 2009, Atria Books.
In 2002 at the Academy Award presentations Halle Berry gave Lena Horne credit for paving the way for her to become the first African American recipient of the Oscar for Best Actress. She had indeed blazed a trail, but like most pioneers she had to pay a heavy price.
For most of her life, Lena Horne has not been a happy camper. But according to Gavin “She may have given as good as she got for many of her 92 years.”
James Gavin's meticulously detailed new biography gives reasons enough for her unhappiness.
Robert Croan in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes: “Even at the height of her fame and fortune, the superstar singer found herself unhappy, discontent and insecure. A black woman in a white world, she was lauded for her beauty and musical talents, but denied full acceptance by white and black society alike. Moreover, raised by a haughty middle-class grandmother in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood, she was taught at an early age to hide her feelings, told ‘You will never let anyone see you cry’."
Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne borrows its title from her signature song, but at first it was Ethel Waters', and her resentment of Horne during the making of Vincente Minnelli’s pioneering film Cabin in the Sky 1943 is reminiscent of Horne's own coolness in later years toward younger stars like Diahann Carroll.
Although Horne was born into a middle-class family, her early life was difficult. Her actress mother frequently left Lena to be brought up by her grandparents. At school, she was taunted for the lightness of her skin. She even tried to tan her skin in the sun, but she also felt uneasy about the way she spoke; Her grandmother was a stickler for “proper English” and punished Lena if she used African American dialect. So she felt out of place with her classmates. Gavin writes that “ A confusion overtook her that she never quite lost."
Only a teenager she began her career as a chorus girl at the Cotton Club and her extraordinary beauty got her parts in movies. Her looks caught the eye of M-G-M chief Louis B. Mayer, who signed her at a time when African Americans like Hattie McDaniel or Butterfly McQueen only played maids or servants, or stereotypes such as those played by Stepin Fetchit.
In her sixty year long movie career Horne only appeared twenty films and was never a leading lady; her film roles were mostly cameos in musicals such as Panama Hattie and Ziegfeld Follies, where she would deliver one song and vanish. In prints shown in southern theaters her scenes were cut out entirely.
Horne hated being a token, but her anger only surfaced in later years. For most of her career, she was confused about her racial identity. Gavin observes that Horne’s "delivery lacks even a hint of black-music influence; she sings with elocution school diction, clean and neat." Later in life she performed for white patrons in swank supper clubs, but cursed at them under her breath.
She became involved in the civil rights movement in the ‘60s. Her extreme activism led her more to the militant Malcolm X than to the passive Martin Luther King Jr. Gavin writes "For all her disappointment over the outcome of the civil rights movement, proud and distinctive black identities had emerged all around her. ... The popular black culture of the day ... gave her the license to be what her career, up to then, hadn't allowed."
Gavin has labored mightily to separate fact from fiction. He discovers that her angry rants about the insults and indignities suffered at MGM were mostly groundless. But at MGM actors were "taught to lie" and, eventually Horne like many stars began to believe her own press clippings and tended to make up her life story as she went along.
Horne was a highly complex woman whose personal struggles with identity were not unlike those Americans of African descent throughout the last century. Gavin’s account of this uniquely American icon is not only a groundbreaking biography, it’s a journey through the American experience in the Twentieth Century.
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