The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  A few months after I was born, Lena got a call from her sometime agent to say that she was wanted in Hollywood to make a movie. The picture, called The Duke Is Tops, was intended for the Negro market and starred popular black actor Ralph Cooper. Lena took a terrifying flight to the coast because Teddy said it was the only way to go, but she swore never to fly again. Then she was almost sent home because everyone said she was too fat (my fault). So she starved herself through the shoot. However, the fact that she never got paid had nothing to do with weight. It was typical of the producers, the notorious actor-stiffing Popkin brothers. After Lena became known, The Duke Is Tops was rereleased as The Bronze Venus—still, no pay. But Louis, looking to show that he was boss, forbade her to attend the Pittsburgh NAACP benefit opening of the picture. He might let his wife work because he liked the idea of money—but he did not like the idea of her having any recognition.

  The same thing happened a few months later when Lena was asked to come to New York to be one of the stars of the new revue Blackbirds of 1939. The original 1920s Blackbirds had made Florence Mills a legend in her lifetime. The new Blackbirds was a flop, but Lena got good personal reviews.

  Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote: “Among those present is a radiantly beautiful sepia girl, Lena Horne, who sings ‘Thursday’ and ‘You’re So Indifferent’ in an attractive style, and who will be a winner when she has proper direction …”

  Richard Watts of the Herald-Tribune wrote: “Miss Lena Horne … is a young woman of … pleasant singing ability and attractive stage presence. She should go far, even if her vehicle doesn’t accompany her a great distance.”

  And Women’s Wear Daily commented: “Lena Horne makes a very attractive little star, and her stage personality is definitely on the positive side. She sings and dances throughout the evening and the audience seems quite favorably disposed toward her.”

  Typically, a few days after the opening, Louis forbade her to attend the closing night cast party.

  Lena had only one friend among Louis’ crowd, an older, talented pianist named Charlotte Catlin who made money playing after-dinner music for Pittsburgh’s iron, steel, and ketchup magnates. Now Lena joined her for this easy and not unpleasant form of entertainment. Even Louis approved. Lena and Charlotte would arrive after dinner in evening clothes. Charlotte would play and Lena would sing “The Man I Love” and “Sunny Side of the Street” and other favorites, with some of the guests sitting on the floor around the piano. Afterward, Lena and Charlotte would be given dessert and coffee, and guests would tell them how much they enjoyed the performance. Money never changed hands—a generous check would be delivered to Charlotte the next day.

  Lena and Louis’ marriage would have been over sooner than it was—except that they had a second baby. Lena wanted to leave Louis after Blackbirds, but Little Teddy, my baby brother, born February 7, 1939, was the “reconciliation” child. Even adorable Teddy could not help Lena overcome her fury when she discovered that Louis had hidden a brand-new pair of shoes for himself at the back of the closet after they had a screaming fight about her spending. Lena said it was the final straw—though the real final straw was realizing that she was the only person who did not know that Louis had never stopped seeing his longtime Pittsburgh girlfriend, a member of their set. The marriage lasted about four years, and the only good things about it were my brother, Edwin Fletcher “Little Teddy” Jones, and me, called “Gail”—instead of Catherine, Cora, Lena, or Nellie.

  Little Teddy Jones

  Lena Horne’s son, Teddy Jones, in his teenage years

  In 1938 Dr. Frank Horne became a new member of FDR’s Black Cabinet. First known as the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, the so-called Black Cabinet was an informal group of Negro public policy advisers. By mid-1935 there were forty-five blacks working in New Deal agencies and federal executive departments. Frank had signed on as assistant director of the division of Negro affairs, in the National Youth Administration, under Mary McLeod Bethune, a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s. Mrs. Bethune, an ur-black matriarch known as “Ma Bethune” behind her back, was the only female member of the Black Cabinet, which comprised activists, community leaders, scholars, and advisers. It included Walter White, William Hastie (in 1937 the first black federal judge), and Robert C. Weaver (future head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development). The president approved of the cabinet, but the first lady was the driving force. Former Republican Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College, created the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and delivered many votes to FDR. From 1936 to 1944 Mrs. Bethune, the first black woman ever to head a federal agency, was Roosevelt’s special adviser on minority affairs. There is a photograph taken in 1938 that I accidentally came across in the 1980s at the old Smithsonian in Washington, where I had gone to look at my favorite machine in the world—the red McCormick reaper. Having seen the beautiful machine, I turned a corner and there, blown up on the wall, was a photo of Bethune and nineteen members of the Black Cabinet. Frank, looking very “white,” stands front and center, next to Mrs. B., very dark.

  Actually, 1938 was a terrible year for Frank. In Washington during the week working for the New Deal, every weekend he went back to New York to see Frankye, now very ill at the Tuberculosis League Hospital. To great family sorrow, beautiful Frankye died in the hospital a year later. Frank now went to work on minority housing issues for the U.S. Housing Authority. He eventually became director of the Office of Race Relations. During this time he advised FDR’s administration on racism in public housing. Blacks liked FDR, but were becoming more and more suspicious of the New Deal. No matter what policies came out of Washington, they still had to be implemented by local, often racist administrators. Once again, the very poor were denied a sense of future or old age security. By the end of the decade, the New Deal would be known among some blacks as the “Dirty Deal.”

  At Easter 1939, thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter White, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Marian Anderson famously sang spirituals on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution (whom Langston Hughes called “Aryan hussies”) barred her from Constitution Hall. That same spring, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo introduced a back-to-Africa bill to get all blacks out of America. In the 1930s Germany planned the “final solution” for the “Jewish problem” and boasted that the Nuremberg race laws were based on American Jim Crow. According to historian C. Vann Woodward, white Southerners in the late nineteenth century had referred to the Jim Crow system as the “final settlement” of the “Negro problem.” Black Americans would understand the irony during World War II. “Negroes did not need us at the NAACP to tell them that it sounded pretty foolish to be against park benches marked JUDE in Berlin but to be for park benches marked COLORED in Tallahassee, Florida,” Roy Wilkins, then editor of The Crisis, would write. The NAACP remained public enemy number one in the South, and Jim Crow flourished in the North as well as the South, despite the coming war. The meaning of Jim Crow was the complete separation of the races and the total oppression of blacks as a people. Fortunately, there were no death camps in America.

  Edwin Horne, a man of the nineteenth century, died in September 1939—a sad, lonely, bitter, prejudiced old man who complained that Chauncey Street had become “Africanized.” Edwin had lived so many lives: the Indiana prodigy; the middle border Republican activist; the Tammany star pamphleteer (after a change in party affiliation). He had seen the birth and death of Reconstruction, and he had seen the enemies of black freedom go from strength to strength. One can only wonder if he ever regretted having chosen to be a Negro.

  CHAPTER NINE

  North/1940s

  MOVIE STAR YEAR

  THIS IS the point in the history of the black Calhouns when my mother, Lena, the second “Lena” and fourth generation in the family, unavoidably becomes the star of the story. She was the pride and joy of all the black Calhouns. And she was particularly beloved by black women in the
days before everyone realized that “Black Is Beautiful.” She was a brand-new image for black women—certainly preferable to Aunt Jemima, say. She was a beautiful and dignified Negro woman who made speeches. Because she was simultaneously a token (in the movies), a symbol (to the world that the United States, unlike the Axis powers, was not a racist country), and a forerunner (how difficult it is to be the first anything), and because she was also an enormous moneymaker for nightclubs, she had a triumvirate of protectors: the black center (that is, the NAACP and the Pullman porters); the white Left, which would heavily woo her; and the Jewish Mafia that owned the nightclubs.

  In 1943, Lena’s “movie star” year, only four black people had any place in the national consciousness: Marian Anderson, who made the Daughters of the American Revolution look very bad when they refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall; Paul Robeson, remembered as a nationally known college athlete, now a great singer-actor starring on Broadway in Othello; Sergeant Joe Louis, heavyweight boxing champion of the world, now the number one army public relations asset; and twenty-six-year-old Lena Horne, known as the first black movie star because she had signed a long-term MGM contract and was not relegated to servant parts. Though she would ultimately make few movies, in 1943 Lena had three movies released between January and June, and she broke nightclub revenue records in New York and Chicago. A year later she became the first black to be on the cover of a movie magazine. She was known as a star because of the way she looked (gorgeous), because of the way she sang (sweetly), and because America was at war. Black GIs needed a pinup and Lena was the one and only—they were not permitted white pinups. She christened Liberty ships, toured black army camps, and danced with black GIs at the Hollywood Canteen, which, unlike the USO, was integrated. Above all, Lena was expected to almost single-handedly give proof to the Allies that America, unlike the Axis, was not racist—even though 1943 alone saw four major and bloody race riots, mostly between poor Southern blacks and whites colliding over defense industry jobs. The Nazis and the Japanese had a propaganda picnic. After the war, however, Lena confounded people of both races by marrying Lennie Hayton, a white man. But before all this happened, my mother had to divorce my father.

  Lena Horne and her second husband, Lennie Hayton, in Baja California, c. 1943

  By 1940 Lena and my father, Louis Jones, were officially separated. Leaving the children in Pittsburgh with Ted and her stepmother, Irene, Lena went back to New York to look for a job. She took a room at the Harlem YWCA. Her stepmother gave her some nice dresses and money to tide her over. She ate her meals at lunch counters and her basic entertainment was the radio. She fell in love with Artie Shaw’s recording of “Stardust.” She had no idea, of course, that she would soon be singing with Artie Shaw. She called her old agent from the Blackbird days and tried to find a job. Everywhere she went with the agent, she heard the same refrain: “She doesn’t look like a Negro,” “She’s not black enough”—meaning she was not a stereotype. Or, “Make her Latin and I’ll put her in the show.” After several months of humiliating interviews, Lena almost gave up. But her luck had not run out.

  One afternoon she decided to forget about herself and go to the movies. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the aisle of the Loew’s Victoria at 125th Street. An usher with a flashlight, accompanied by Clarence Robinson, the dance director of the Apollo, beckoned her out of her seat. She was to run to the Apollo immediately, because Charlie Barnet needed a girl singer right away. With no time to fix her hair or makeup, she did as Robinson ordered. “Wow! Who are you?” said Barnet when Lena came in. She sang two songs and his next question was “You want to work in the next show?” So she got the lucky break and her first job as a band singer with saxophonist Charlie Barnet, whose band was known as the “blackest” of the big white bands. (In the 1940s “big bands” had all the impact on young people that rock and roll groups had in the 1960s.) Charlie, who idolized Duke Ellington and Count Basie, had a huge hit that year in “Cherokee,” one of the best big band recordings ever, which all the Harlem jitterbugs adored for its compulsively danceable beat. Ted Horne, however, did not adore Barnet—the very thought of his daughter traveling around the country with fifteen or twenty white men infuriated him. Lena ignored him—it was a very good job, everywhere but in the South and at certain very snooty girls’ schools. Charlie Barnet, four years older than Lena, was the “bad boy,” jazz-loving son of a vice president of the New York Central Railroad. As a rich “good guy,” he kept Lena on full salary when she stayed north while the band toured the South with a white singer.

  Obviously, Ted had not complained when she toured with Sissle because Sissle was a friend of Edwin’s—and he was black. Unlike his younger brother Frank, Ted had no white friends (except for gangsters). Nonetheless, Lena played a famously successful gig with Barnet and band at the Paramount Theater on Broadway. Lena never kissed and told, so I have no idea if she had a romance with Barnet, but he was apparently a very likable guy, with no racist attitudes, and she always smiled when she spoke of him. Charlie would eventually marry eleven times and retire from music in 1949 because he was tired of it. Singing with Charlie brought Lena musical attention. Charlie had no problem with Lena recording with Artie Shaw when the Barnet band went south. Barnet, Shaw, and Benny Goodman were the only white big bands to feature black singers or musicians. Lena soon had two hit records: “You’re My Thrill” (1941, Bluebird Records), with Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra; and “Don’t Take Your Love from Me” (1941, Victor Records), with Artie Shaw.

  But before this, in late 1940, Louis Jones had told Lena that she could have “the girl,” but he would keep “the boy.” So Lena returned to Brooklyn with me, and, at Teddy Horne’s suggestion, Cousin Edwina, daughter of Lena Calhoun Smith, came east to help take care of me. Lena was happily installed on Chauncey Street, hoping to make some more records and to find a New York job with no touring. She now asked John Hammond, a wealthy white liberal friend of Frank Horne’s who had followed her career since the Noble Sissle days in Boston, for help, and he was instrumental in getting her a job at Café Society—Greenwich Village’s relatively new, totally hip nightclub.

  Barney Josephson, Café Society’s young owner, gave Lena a chance, although she did everything wrong at her audition by singing two wildly politically incorrect songs: one was racist (“Sleepy Time Down South”), and the other (“Down Argentina Way”) hinted that she was “passing.” (Although Lena was one of the “darkest” members of her family, her looks were such that she could have been all sorts of nationalities—and her vocal style was definitely not what was called “black.” But “passing,” except for the briefest pragmatic reasons, was never a black Calhoun thing, even for the “whitest” members of the family.) Josephson now told her to sing “Summertime” and think of her children—and to ask Billie Holiday about how to sing the blues. Lena’s repertoire at Café Society included Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” as well as songs by Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill. Radio beckoned. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, NBC’s popular jazz series, and starred on WOR’s Cats ‘n’ Jammers show. Josephson, to John Hammond’s disgust, had renamed Lena “Helena,” telling her that “Lena” reminded him of his Jewish aunt.

  By the time Lena went to work at Café Society in the spring of 1941, it had become above all a political nightclub. It was also the only integrated nightclub outside Harlem, with mixed dancing (blacks and whites of opposite sex). Being in Greenwich Village, Café Society was allowed a certain leeway. It was an open secret, however, that the whole concept was a way of making money for the CPUSA. Josephson, the nominal owner, had been a young Communist shoe salesman who loved jazz and whose brother, a heroic casualty of the Spanish Civil War, had been a friend of Hemingway’s. When his brother was killed in Spain, the CPUSA asked Josephson if he would like to run a nightclub and gave him $200 to rent a place. Except for the jazz musicians, who were of no interest to red-baiters, every per
former who ever appeared at Café Society was later blacklisted. At the time, however, the club represented the birth of radical chic: future right-winger Clare Boothe Luce gave the club its name, younger Vogue editors “discovered” it, one or more of the Roosevelt boys (FDR’s sons) were there nearly every night, and members of the new integrated National Maritime Union got free beer at the bar.

  For Lena, it was “the best job” she ever had. Making seventy-five dollars a week seemed like a fortune. She lost much of the fear and prejudice against white people that she had learned in the South. Now, she had conversations with white people; or rather she listened to them. Marshall Field III, a committed progressive on race who owned the afternoon tabloid PM, saw that “Helena” got plenty of publicity. She was a new Village “star.” Best of all, Louis allowed Little Teddy to have a long visit. She loved that the children could play under her cherry tree and stay safely in Brooklyn in her family home, while she took the subway back and forth to Sheridan Square and her great new job at Café Society.

  After Barney Josephson, Lena’s second left-wing mentor was Paul Robeson, now a political and theatrical icon, who told her stories about his own mentor, Cora Horne. “She was a mother to me when I needed one,” he said of Cora. Half-joking, Paul said that Lena was “too self-centered,” had “too much of a temper,” and obviously liked “nice things” too much to be an effective militant—but she could still work to change this. Paul told her that the battle could never be won through anger or bitterness; it could be won only through pride and a belief that the cause was just. Paul, a loving and generous man who was fond of Lena’s family, obviously saw that she was politically naive, needing protection as well as instruction. Like everyone else, Lena adored Paul and loved his attention—as she loved the attention of all these serious Café Society “grown-ups.” She found herself wooed by Broadway as well as the left wing—George Abbott and Vincente Minnelli came to see her about a musical version of Serena Blandish. And now she was also wooed by Hollywood.