The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  Lena was incredibly lucky that Vincente Minnelli, a New York acquaintance, had arrived at MGM about the time that she had. Minnelli would direct Lena not only in Cabin in the Sky but also in the first two movies that preceded it—Panama Hattie and I Dood It. Minnelli, aged forty, had treated Lena as a sort of muse ever since he saw her at Café Society. He was learning to be a director and Lena, she supposed, was learning to be a movie star. Her singing bits were produced by MGM’s best talents in costume, hair, makeup, and music. MGM was basically the Buckingham Palace of studios.

  Waiting for Cabin in the Sky to finally be made, Lena made her actual movie debut in Panama Hattie. Because she sang a Latin song, some blacks accused her of trying to pass. Perhaps to avoid confusion, in her next film bit directed by Minnelli, I Dood It, she was scheduled to sing “The Battle of Jericho,” a rousing Negro spiritual (“Joshua fought the battle of …”). She not only learned to really sing on I Dood It, but also found a friend. Tall, blond, and chic, Kay Thompson, who came to MGM after Lena, worked on a vocal arrangement for “The Battle of Jericho” at Minnelli’s request. Kay had a genius for vocal arrangements that she had honed as assistant to Fred Waring—once known as “America’s Singing Master” or “The Man Who Taught America How to Sing.”

  Lena and Kay became instant and long-lasting friends. “As naturally friendly as a puppy,” Kay recalled Lena to Sam Irvin, author of the biography Kay Thompson: “All in all, she is one of the few completely real people in Hollywood.” Lena called Kay the “best vocal coach in the world” and said that the most important thing Kay had taught her was breath control. “We were working on her arrangement of ‘Jericho’ and it really extended me and I was hitting notes I didn’t know I could,” she later elaborated. Kay was also working with a large integrated choir. “Jericho” could not be kept under wraps. Word got back to Jack Cummings (Mayer’s nephew). “Jack came down,” Kay remembered, “and we knocked him over with great joy.” The number became the high spot of an otherwise dull movie. So far, the only moviemaker Lena knew was Vincente Minnelli. She and Minnelli were like kid sister and big brother, working on their first movies together. Lena loved working with Minnelli, who made sure that she always looked and sounded wonderful, even if Southerners were going to cut her out of the picture. Thanks to Lena, the makeup department had finally created her look: Max Factor’s “Light Egyptian”—which the department now used on any white actress who had to look vaguely “native.”

  According to Black Women in America, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Lena’s small scenes actually mattered:

  The guest spots had a tremendous impact. Her job, as Walter White had seen it, was to change the American image of black women, and she did. She fit white society’s standard of beauty as well as the most beautiful white women did, but she was clearly a woman of color; she was also a woman of great charm and dignity who was conscious of her position as a representative of black America—her choices about the way she presented herself were influenced by that role … It seemed important at the time to show that a black woman did not have to sing spirituals or earthy, overtly sexual laments; Horne sang Cole Porter and Gershwin. It seemed important that a black woman could be cool, glamorous, and sophisticated; Horne always looked as though she had stepped out of the pages of Vogue. “The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach.”

  My mother never gossiped about people’s love affairs—except for the time that she had the compartment next to Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin’s drawing room on the Super Chief and they never came out of their room during the entire cross-country journey. It seemed the height of both glamour and romance. She enjoyed hearing salacious stories about the high and mighty, but she never repeated them. Nor did she believe in kissing and telling. Other people told me about her romances. She was very cryptic. John Hammond, for example, told me about my mother and Joe Louis. Orson Welles was an exception to her own rule, possibly because he was such an incredible wunderkind. America was not yet into its youth craze. The stars of the day—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Clark Gable—were all grown-up sophisticates. But Orson Welles, in his twenties, became one of the most famous people in the world when he pulled off the greatest Halloween prank in history with a radio drama purporting to be on-scene reporting of the Martian invasion of New Jersey. Enough Jerseyites believed the brilliantly executed concept that Welles, basically just a super-talented kid, was instantly (literally overnight) famous around the world. To most Hollywood “grown-ups,” Welles was a brat and a pain in the backside. He had turned radio upside down. Would anyone believe a live radio news report again? His first movie was a masterwork. Would any other mogul or tycoon be safe again? He was so incredibly young, so full of himself, and so very successful, it’s almost as if he had to self-destruct—which of course he did. Welles was two years older than Lena. She thought he was amazing; he knew everything and was always learning. In any case, it was not a long-lived romance. Welles soon moved on to Dolores del Rio.

  Here is Ted Horne, Lena’s incredibly dapper dad in the 1920s.

  Ted Horne, who had introduced his daughter to her husband, began the new decade by introducing her to another important man—namely Joe Louis, the married boxing champion known as the “Brown Bomber.” Edna had upbraided Lena after the first Joe Louis–Max Schmeling bout when Lena was inconsolable over Louis’ loss. “Why are you so upset?” Edna had asked. “You don’t even know this man.” Lena, between sobs, could only blurt out, “Don’t you understand? He belongs to us.” This was a very perceptive remark on the part of young Lena. The romance with the famous, sweetly inarticulate Louis lasted on and off for a year. Lena did most of the talking, which she loved. There is a photograph of Lena and Joe together in a rowboat sometime in early 1941 at Louis’ training camp. The picture, taken by Carl Van Vechten, is basically of Louis’ bare, beautifully sculpted, muscular back as he rows the boat. And Lena, all long hair and long legs, wearing slacks and a striped T-shirt, is opposite him talking away. Louis did not appear to be a boastful or conceited champion; that was why everybody, black or white, liked him. And blacks, collectively, loved him. Every time Louis won, Harlem would erupt in spontaneous New Year’s Eve–like joy. Police let it happen because everyone was happy. Louis was heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1949. Lena and married man Joe “dated” periodically from 1941 through 1942. The romance ended on a sour note when Lena discovered that her married boyfriend was having simultaneous “romances” with her friend Lana Turner and figure skater Sonja Henie. Lena and Joe remained publicly cordial but basically never spoke again after 1942.

  By 1943 Lena was becoming an important symbol in the war effort. Blacks had only a few: General Benjamin O. Davis Sr., the first black brigadier, and his son Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen; Joe Louis; Dorie Miller, the heroic navy cook at Pearl Harbor, first hero of the war, who manned a forbidden-to-blacks gun and brought down a Japanese airplane; and Lena. Despite their failed romance, Louis and Lena must have been gratified when two of the brand-new 155-mm artillery guns used in the Pacific by the first black marines were named Lena Horne and Joe Louis.

  Lena was supposed to represent a new image of the American Negro. American movies had been criticized by Allies of color for demeaning portrayals of nearly every racial group. Most important, she was supposed to raise the morale of black GIs. They finally had a pinup—though Lena definitely hated being the only one. She was also the pinup of some white GIs, including the wonderful actor Richard Basehart, who told her he had carried her picture all through the war. Granted, the military was a Southern institution, but Lena had no idea of the depths of America’s institutionalized racism until she learned about it from black GIs. The surest way for a young black man to learn that he was a Negro in America was to join the U.S. Army and to hear the N-word, and every other form of insult, every single day of his military life. Imagine the culture shock to young Negro recruits from the Nort
h and the West sent to basic training in the Deep South to encounter naked, regional racial hatred for the first time. It could be a terrifying experience.

  Nelson Peery, author of Black Fire, a personal history of a black GI in World War II, wrote about Lena’s visit to his camp:

  “Lena Horne’s walking around talking to the men.” It was true. She came toward us with Warrant Officer Mays, leader of the band. With a few words for this soldier, a smile for that one, she came toward our tent—the dimples, the sparkling white teeth …

  “Are you going to invite me in?” … She glanced around our neat tent and, gracefully crossing her legs, sat on my cot. “I want to thank you for coming out here—I mean talking with the enlisted men,” I said … “I don’t need any thanks. I think I know what you common guys, you GI Joes, are going through. You’re the ones who do the fighting and dying. If my singing and talking helps—“

  “Would you? I mean, sing one verse—just for us?” …

  She stood up humming. The Lena Horne on-stage smile brightened the squad tent. “Don’t buy sugar … you just have to touch my cup.” She pressed her fingertips to her lips and blew the kiss to us. Dreamlike, she disappeared from the tent, leaving five black soldiers in love with her forever.

  Hollywood was a bustling, confident place during the war. There was a new appreciation for the movies as a vital industry in the war effort. Movies were almost as important as ships and planes in waging the propaganda and morale war. Besides movie-movies, Hollywood also made training films for GIs and documentaries that explained the war to civilians. There was a new sense of heightened excitement in a normally rather sleepy place. Now Hollywood was a wartime capital—perhaps not as exciting as Washington, but more exciting than New York, which did not live under the expectation of imminent Japanese “invasion.” Movie stars sold war bonds. Aged six or seven, I was aware of the excitement. Most exciting of all was that Lena’s uncle Burke, Ted Horne’s youngest brother, became engaged to one of the first black WAVEs, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Harriet Pickens, a Brooklyn neighbor. A graduate of Smith College, Harriet was the daughter of NAACP field secretary William Pickens—a legendary NAACP figure. William Pickens became the most illustrious graduate of Alabama’s Missionary Talladega College in 1902 when he won a scholarship to Yale, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and won the 1903 Henry James Ten Eyck Prize. Between 1911 and 1923 Pickens actually wrote two autobiographies. Highly visible in the NAACP in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the campaign to support Ethiopia over Italy, he would be charged as a subversive in the 1950s because of his friendship with Socialist leader Norman Thomas. But now his daughter Harriet was one of the first two black WAVEs. (The other young woman was only an ensign, so Harriet was number one.) She looked amazing in her dazzling white uniform by Mainbocher, an expensive and exclusive American designer that did not sell in department stores. The WAVEs were the best-dressed women’s service. I was committed to doing my bit, collecting silver foil, growing my victory garden, and hoping the war would last long enough for me to become a WAVE. Hollywood had a good war—unless you were conspicuously Japanese, Negro, or Mexican.

  By mid-1944 Lena was known to a moviegoing audience that did not live south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where she was liable to be cut out of the picture. That she had as many Southern white fans as she did is amazing. (A white Southern woman friend, my contemporary, had two favorite paper dolls, Sonja Henie and Lena Horne.) In October 1944 Motion Picture made Lena the first person of color to be on the cover of a movie magazine. She was in three less than memorable 1944 movies: Boogie-Woogie Dream, Broadway Rhythm, and Two Girls and a Sailor. Kay worked with Lena on “Paper Doll” (a boy’s song, Lena rightly insisted) for Two Girls and a Sailor. Lena looked incredibly beautiful in the black-and-white film, in a simple, long black dress. Later Kay worked on several Ziegfeld Follies segments, including what Sam Irvin called “Lena Horne’s powerful rendition of ‘Love,’” composed by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and conducted by Lennie Hayton:

  One day during rehearsals, Lena “protested she could not reach high C in a certain passage.” “My voice isn’t that good,” Lena insisted. “Better put it down at least one key.” On the next run-through, Horne hit the note pitch-perfect. “You see?” Lena said. “B-flat is my limit.” “I see.” Kay nodded knowingly. “For your information, I didn’t change the key, and you can hit high C right on the nose as long as you think it’s B-flat!”

  Kay often spoke of Lennie as the best conductor on the lot. He was Arthur Freed’s favorite, but Lena disliked him because he was a friend of Rags Ragland, a comedian who had told a racist joke in her hearing at a party. Lena assumed that Lennie was a racist, too. But Kay convinced her otherwise. Somehow, Lennie began to turn up whenever Lena was around. Thanks to matchmaker Kay, a romance did indeed develop after many nights of his playing and her singing with the gang at Lucy’s restaurant, the favorite Freed Unit hangout. One night the gang all went home and it was just the two of them. An interracial love affair was not easy in those days. They had to be extremely discreet. The laws of California prohibited marriage between the races and so (one presumed) did the laws of MGM. They had romantic weekends in Baja California and elsewhere in Mexico.

  When I got to know Lennie, he let me bang on the piano and gave me silver paper from his Camels to add to my collection of foil for the war effort. He was totally indulgent. He would become my stepfather—and I adored him. I have no memory of ever hearing Lennie raise his voice. He was everything a stepfather should be: kind, gentle, loving, and funny. He was actually already a stepfather. He was a widower with another stepdaughter when my mother married him. His stepdaughter was a teenager, whom I also loved, called Peggy Husing. Lennie had been married to the ex-wife of radio disc jockey star Ted Husing of Make Believe Ballroom. Lennie’s wife had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. “I have a terrible headache,” she said one day—and then she was gone.

  Louis B. Mayer now asked Lena, as a personal favor, to sing at a friend’s Chicago nightclub, Chez Paree. It was a barn of a place that was losing money, but people lined up around the block to see Lena. Because she broke every house record, and he heard that she liked star sapphires, the club’s owner gave her a huge ring at the end of her run. Lennie, half as a joke, asked if she had “wiped the blood off.” Lena realized that nightclubs, despite being mob-run and rejecting black customers (except for very special friends of Lena), were a great fallback to a movie career that might not be going anywhere.

  Lena was now used to crowds and big audiences, but when she appeared at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago, this was like nothing she had ever seen. Wearing a midriff dress and a hibiscus in her hair, and escorted by an incredibly handsome black naval officer, who turned out to be an old friend from Brooklyn, she heard the roar of thousands of black sailors and GIs and finally felt like a movie star. I think it was a twofold roar of approval: one roar for Lena and her midriff and hibiscus, and the other for her escort, Ensign Reginald Goodwin, one of the first thirteen black navy officers (known in the black press as the “Golden Thirteen”). Anyway, it was a very movie star moment. Lena was always treated like a movie star in army camps. Because she basically had no movie roles to play and no parts to learn, she had time to visit army camps for the USO; time to become the first Negro member of the board of the Screen Actors Guild; time to work for the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which investigated hiring discrimination, with black California assemblyman Gus Hawkins; and time to work with the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). It was HICCASP, with its liberal attitudes about race, that would get Lena and others into very hot political waters in the red-baiting late 1940s and early 1950s.

  Not only was Lena learning about politics; she was learning to be tough. When she went to sing at an army camp in Arkansas and discovered that the German prisoners of war were seated in front of black GIs for her performance, she thought at first to walk past the Germans
and sing only to the blacks. But she refused to sing at all and demanded to see the NAACP. The Arkansas NAACP was a single courageous woman, Daisy Bates, who later led black Little Rock high school students through their desegregation ordeal. When Lena returned to California, she was essentially kicked out of the USO for refusing to sing for the Germans. Meanwhile, the Justice Department threatened sedition charges against black newspapers for headlining stories of injustices against black GIs. Everywhere that Lena went, she heard horrendous stories from black GIs—not about enemy depredations, but about American ones.

  She also made weekly appearances at the integrated Hollywood Canteen (as opposed to the segregated USO) to dance with black GIs. The Hollywood Canteen was founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield. Their combined liberal spirits—Yankee-abolitionist and Jewish-left-wing—guaranteed that the Canteen would be integrated. As far as race relations went, the nicest people in Hollywood were either gay or left wing. Other than gays and left-wingers, there were very few white Americans beyond the Freed Unit who would open their homes to Lennie and Lena. On the other hand, a group of mostly liberal stars could be counted on to be friendly, respectful, and even hospitable. Lena considered them to be the “decent” people of Hollywood. There were probably other nice people, but these are ones I remember my mother speaking of. Besides the Freed Unit (“decent” to a man and woman), her list included: Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, Gregory Peck, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Benchley, George Cukor, Joan Crawford (yes), Humphrey Bogart and his divine fourth wife, Betty (Lauren) Bacall, and the first Mrs. Frank Sinatra, who went out of her way to be nice by bringing one of her beautifully dressed, white-gloved daughters to tea. The “indecent” included everyone at Paramount and Republic.