The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  In the early summer of 1941, Lena, Edwina, and I took a train to California. Lena had been asked to be one of three stars to open a new Hollywood nightclub, the Trocadero. The opening acts were scheduled to be Duke Ellington and his orchestra, Katherine Dunham and her dancers, and Lena. Pearl Harbor ended the dream of a brand-new big nightclub—now they settled on a small one, the Little Troc, and Lena was the only star. She became, almost overnight, the toast of the town, with lines literally down the street—unheard-of in Hollywood. Achieving her extraordinary MGM contract was really not that difficult. She actually had two very clever Hollywood agents: Harold Gumm and Al Melnick of the Louis Shurr office, who advised her to sing the haunting ballad “More Than You Know” because they knew that MGM was planning a movie version of Vincent Youmans’ Great Day, in which the song appears. She sang it twice: once for Arthur Freed, master of all MGM musicals, and then for Louis B. Mayer himself. The big man cried, which meant that Lena’s contract was a shoo-in. It helped that Lena had arrived in Hollywood just as NAACP head Walter White and former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie were trying to convince movie executives and producers to show more respect to people of color who were America’s allies in the war. It also may have helped that Teddy Horne himself arrived to assist in brokering Lena’s contract and made it perfectly clear that both he and Lena were basically indifferent to Hollywood. He told Mayer that since he could afford to hire a maid for his daughter, he would not appreciate her playing one in the movies. Surprisingly, Mayer agreed—and Lena’s contract stipulated “no maids” and no jungle denizens.

  Lena’s “movie star” year was 1943–1944. She was always told by MGM that she was a movie star, and MGM treated her like a star (all perks and little money was the MGM way) to make up for the fact that she did not really make movies. But in 1943, twenty-six-year-old Lena, with three movies in release, felt like a movie star. She was the first Negro to be signed to a long-term Hollywood contract. But 1943 to 1944 was basically the beginning and end of her so-called movie career. She would be stunned to find out that all of her singing scenes in presumably all-white movies would be cut out when the pictures were shown in the South. The editors simply removed her from the films. Unless the films had an all-black cast, Southern censors refused to show blacks in any roles except as servants.

  Lena Horne at MGM, leaving her personal “movie star” trailer, c. 1943

  Lena actually became a star in New York instead of Hollywood, and it happened before any of her major movies were released. In the same week of January 9, 1943, Time, Newsweek, and Life all featured stories about her—and Life, arguably the most popular magazine in the world at that time, produced beautiful pictures as well as glowing words:

  Each year in New York’s after-dark world of supper clubs there appears a girl singer who becomes a sensation overnight. She stands in the middle of a dance floor in a white dress and a soft light, and begins to sing. The room is hushed and her voice is warm and haunting. Her white teeth gleam, her eyes move back and forth, and her softly sung words seem to linger like cigaret smoke. This year that girl is Lena Horne, a young Negro who has been appearing at the Savoy-Plaza’s Cafe Lounge …

  Life magazine was read by almost everybody. Arthur Laurents, a Cornell student who fancied himself a sophisticate (and later wrote West Side Story and Gypsy for Broadway), read about Lena and went to New York to try to see her. Many years later, in his book Original Story, Laurents described his first memory of Lena and the Savoy:

  On a weekend vacation from college, I heard Helena Horne, as Lena Horne was then known, sing so sweet in that room. I had despaired of getting in, then suddenly, magically, there she was, floating toward me in flame-colored chiffon. I told her I had driven all the way from Ithaca just to hear her sing. She was so beautiful, I believed my own lie.

  Laurents, a gay man who developed an enormous crush on Lena, got it slightly wrong. She was Lena Horne at the Savoy and Helena Horne at Café Society. Laurents and Lena would meet again a decade later and become close friends.

  So much about the Savoy-Plaza Hotel was important—including the lounge’s acoustics and the location. The acoustics were so perfect that Lena did not use a microphone. Because there was no microphone, she used her hands to underscore the lyrics. Because there was no artificial amplification of her voice, she was able to establish a gently mesmerizing atmosphere (Lena’s typical cabaret audiences always seemed to sit in silent rapture, indeed holding their breath). The audience was hypnotized by her lovely face, form, and hands—and by her lovely voice, which she had just learned to “open up.” The poet Sterling Brown said that Lena had a “clarinet” voice. As for location: Lena had performed uptown and downtown, in Harlem at the Cotton Club and in Greenwich Village at Café Society—with the Savoy-Plaza she finally reached midtown. (FAO Schwarz, the toy store, long stood where the Savoy-Plaza used to be.) From the Cotton Club to the Savoy-Plaza had taken a decade, with a marriage and babies in between. Lena was very busy polishing her craft. She had learned from every job she ever had. From the Cotton Club she had learned to keep smiling and that the show must go on; from Noble Sissle she had learned about elegance and enunciation; from after-dinner entertainment for Pittsburgh’s steel magnates she had learned how to appeal to the carriage trade (they liked Cole Porter and amusing insinuation); from Charlie Barnet and Artie Shaw she began to learn, gently, to swing; and from Café Society’s left-wing teachers she learned not only how to express feelings in her songs, but what it “meant” to be a Negro. “You are a Negro—and that is the whole basis of what you are and what you will become,” Paul Robeson had said to Lena sometime in 1940 at Café Society. “When you live and learn some more you will be Lena Horne, Negro.”

  Of course, Lena knew what it “meant” to be a Negro. It meant second-class citizenship. And, of course, she knew what they did to Negroes in the South. But coming from middle-class Northern parents, she had escaped the Negro condition. She had caught glimpses of that condition as a child in the South, but never for a sustained period of time. She had certainly seen racism in action when she toured with both white and black bands. With white bands, she was the problem; with black bands, they were all problems. Lena hated always being a “problem.” Like Du Bois and her uncle Frank Horne, two Northern Negroes who essentially learned they were black when they went south to teach, Lena had led an integrated life since childhood. But as a middle-class black female child whose grandparents had migrated to the North, and whose parents had been born in the North, she had never come into personal contact with white Southerners. Her only contact with whites was in the North. Her Brooklyn Catholic church had a white pastor; she had white classmates and teachers at her Brooklyn Ethical Culture nursery school; she attended Cora’s integrated club meetings; and her favorite teachers at Brooklyn’s Girls High School were white. Lena actually learned to be a Negro during World War II in Hollywood. She learned from visiting training camps for black GIs what black people in general could expect from America. In 1943 black men in America had to be prepared to fight racism at home as well as fascism abroad every day of their lives.

  Happily, thanks to the 1941 Supreme Court decision in Mitchell v. United States, the Pullman Company desegregated its sleeping cars just in time for Mother and Cousin Edwina (Cora’s niece) and me to go to California on the Super Chief—alone in our blackness, except for Edwina, who looked white. Some of the porters, old-timers, might have known Grandpa Ted Horne. And some of the waiters, traditionally all college graduates, probably knew Uncle Frank. Pullman prided itself on hiring only the most intelligent of Negro men, all of them answering to the generic name “George,” which was Mr. Pullman’s name. Pullman’s employees had Lena’s back from the beginning of her career. “Don’t forget the people down the line,” Paul Robeson had said at Café Society, specifically citing the Pullman porters.

  Robeson was right about the Pullman porters; but he was not necessarily correct about Lena. Being a Negro was not “the wh
ole basis” of what she was and would become. Certainly many Negro men felt this way—that all of life was about color. Until World War II, I do not believe that my mother really thought that much about being a Negro—it was simply a fact of life. She thought much more about being a woman. I believe this to be true of most women, no matter what color they are.

  Describing Lena as “a light-brown, soft-spoken young Negress who came to Hollywood straight from Brooklyn, the Cotton Club, Noble Sissle’s Band and Café Society Downtown,” the New York Times took notice of Lena at the Little Troc in an article by Barbara Berch in November 1942:

  She opened quietly at the Little Troc, a few months ago, in a plain white dress and one soft light. She came on without an introduction and started to sing without even announcing her number. Everybody stopped doing nothing and listened … She just sang “The Man I Love” and “Stormy Weather” and a few other daisies that had been laid away by singers long before Lena ever got out of Girls High School … She stayed at the Little Troc for weeks, and people who never went to nightclubs pushed their way into the place four or five times a week to hear Lena Horne sing straight versions of a lot of numbers they’d been hearing for years … She lives in a five-room duplex in Beverly Hills with her four year old daughter and an aunt. And singing offers come in faster than she has time to refuse them … She [is now at] the Savoy and is … the first Negro girl to play the room.

  Lena opened at the Savoy on November 26, 1942. The opening night audience included Cole Porter, Ethel Merman, and Richard Rodgers—Broadway giants. It was Thanksgiving—the town was full of visitors. On January 9, 1943, Time wrote:

  Manhattan’s quietly swank Savoy-Plaza Café Lounge was last week doing the biggest business in its history as a nightspot … No opulent floor show was packing in the customers. The attraction was the face and the shyly sultry singing of a milk-chocolate-colored Brooklyn girl, Lena Horne … Flashing one of the most magnificent sets of teeth outside a store she seethes her songs with the air of a bashful volcano. As she reaches the end of “Honeysuckle Rose” … her audience is gasping …

  By March, she was back in Hollywood. By June, three of her movies—Swing Fever, Cabin in the Sky, and Stormy Weather—were released. By the end of the year she had become the highest-paid Negro entertainer in America.

  The first Hollywood party that Lena was invited to, early in 1942, was an afternoon pool party at Cole Porter’s for the integrated touring cast of the Broadway show This Is the Army. Naturally, Lena revered Porter—a sad man with lovely non-racist manners. She knew she would have to sing for her supper, but the mere fact that Porter liked the way she did “Just One of Those Things” made it all worth it. She had a problem, however, with one of Porter’s other guests—the white Southern actress Miriam Hopkins, in the waning days of her stardom. Not the nicest of women at the best of times (as Bette Davis found out in so many movies), that afternoon, with her face frozen in a fixed smile and her voice dripping honeyed venom, forty-year-old Hopkins cornered twenty-five-year-old Lena to tell her how “different” she was from “the others,” dissecting her features one by one. Lena froze—the proverbial pinned butterfly. She had never experienced racism up close before. She had no defenses. She was literally speechless. Later, of course (blaming the victim), Lena was angry with herself. She probably replayed the moment, imagining all sorts of horrible revenge. She had a sort of revenge, however, by soon becoming the toast of the town, singing at the new nightclub, the Little Troc, with real movie stars like Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, who lined up to see her more than once. To hell with Miriam Hopkins! Strangely enough, very soon some of the people she would love best in Hollywood would be gay white Southerners, who had suffered themselves at the hands of their compatriots.

  Color was a complicated concept. While color mattered a bit for a band singer, it was never everything. Artie Shaw had two band singers of color, Billie Holiday and Lena Horne, without audience complaint. And no one boycotted Benny Goodman over Lionel Hampton or Teddy Wilson. Color in nightclubs was idiosyncratic—it depended on the owner and the audience. In the movies, however, color was everything. And color would have everything to do with Lena’s movie career. (It would also have everything to do with the initial years of her second marriage because she was committing a crime.) The war changed her, made her much more aware of injustice. I was six or seven when I received my first civics lesson from my mother, a tearful accounting of her singing “America the Beautiful” for a Nisei war veteran who had lost both his legs in the war and had his house burned down because he was Japanese American. But the real color shock of World War II for Lena was how badly the U.S. Army treated black GIs.

  She actually learned a lot during World War II. She learned how to sing. She learned how to raise the morale of black GIs by listening to them. She learned about being Lena Horne, Negro. She also learned about Lena Horne, star. But she did not learn a lot about being Lena Horne, parent. It was absolutely not her fault—she did the best she could. She was loving and affectionate—but she was a single mother breadwinner. I have finally processed something important about Hollywood that I probably learned during the war. It was terrible to be a child star, and it was also terrible to be the child of a star. The first had no childhood and the second had no parent.

  That said, I adored my mother completely. She sang “The Owl and the Pussycat” and read Winnie-the-Pooh whenever I asked. She taught me to link my fingers and say, “Here is the church and here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.” She took me to Mass and let me light candles. I never felt anything less than loved, protected, and indulged when I was with her. She was a doting parent—I just never knew when she would be there, or when I would be with her. Since my brother mostly lived with our father in Pittsburgh and I lived with our mother in Hollywood, I was basically an only child with rare playmates. Actually, most of my playmates were adults. I have only one unpleasant memory of my babysitter Cousin Edwina, who once made me sit all morning before an uneaten bowl of Wheaties. I have always hated Wheaties.

  I saw my mother briefly once or twice a day. I would kiss her good-bye early in the morning in my pajamas at the top of (aptly named) Horn Avenue, a steep little hill off Sunset Strip that ended in sort of a cul-de-sac, while she waited for the cab that would take her to the studio. She refused to learn to drive—it was part of her instinctive anti-California bias. I would then go to the kindergarten down the hill where my schoolmate asked me why my arm was “so brown.” I had no reply. “I don’t know,” I had said. I was the only “brown” child in the class, but I have no memory of that bothering me. I remember being happy in school, although I had few playmates. I did have a sometime neighbor, a little French refugee named Olivia, who taught me to say “poupée.” Fortunately, like my mother, I learned to read early and found enormous companionship in books. One of the great gifts my mother gave me was to sit me on her lap and teach me to read. Besides books and dolls, I loved music on the radio. I danced around our small Hollywood living room to the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me).”

  Lena’s color was both a hindrance and a help in her career. It was a hindrance because there were no parts for her to play. It was a help because it made her stand out, which meant that she was less likely to be randomly exploited, or to fall victim to the kind of predators who ruined the lives of young Hollywood women, black and white. Too many people were aware of Lena—or had her back. Besides the Pullman porters, there was the NAACP. In 1942, when Walter White and Wendell Willkie complained to the studios about the undignified stereotyping of Negroes in film, Lena had no idea that she would soon become a dignified stereotype. Both White and Ted Horne thought that Lena could establish a new kind of image for black women.

  Walter White, like James Weldon Johnson before him, was an Atlanta University graduate and the right NAACP leader for the times. He was also a man of boundless enthusiasm, energy, and imagination. Im
mediately after Pearl Harbor, the NAACP had called on all Negroes to give wholehearted support to the war effort. White (like Eleanor Roosevelt) certainly seemed to be everywhere during the war: popping up in the South Pacific to defend black GIs against American racism; popping up in Mississippi to investigate a lynching; popping up at the White House to confer with the president; and popping up in Hollywood to “take charge” of Lena’s career and tell her how to dress. He did not actually “take charge,” but he certainly promoted her career by telling Louis B. Mayer how much America needed someone like Lena in the movies. He oversaw her wardrobe to the extent that he scolded her for wearing a dress that had “good luck” written on it in several languages. “Never wear a dress with writing on it,” he said.

  James Weldon Johnson, a true Renaissance man (poet, composer, diplomat, author, educator, and more), had been admired and respected by important whites as well as blacks. Johnson knew many of America’s most powerful people, but White knew everybody. When Lena met White he let her know that he knew her entire family, North and South, and intended to oversee her future. It is no wonder that members of the old black Hollywood basically regarded her as an undercover operative for the NAACP, which they disdained and feared because having no more “undignified stereotypes” could mean less work for the small “club” of black actors who controlled black extras’ employment. The last thing Lena expected when she signed her contract was to get into trouble with her own race. The anti-Lena crowd called a meeting to denounce her “no stereotyping” contract. Hattie McDaniel, the 1939 Oscar winner for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, was the only person to defend her. “Do what’s best for you and your children,” said the kind and gracious McDaniel when she invited Lena to tea. (I gained new respect for Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, when I learned that she had written an admiring fan letter to McDaniel after she saw the picture.) But by now, Lena was totally fed up with Hollywood, and so desperately homesick, that she flew back to New York to make a decision about quitting the whole MGM thing entirely. She knew she always had a job with Barney Josephson. It was Count Basie who made the difference. As she was crying about how much she hated California, Basie said, “They never choose us. But they’ve chosen you. You have to go back so that other people can have your opportunities.”