The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  I never met Louis B. Mayer. But I did meet his daughter, Irene Mayer Selznick, with whom he was always politically at odds, and her son Danny on the Super Chief. She was a charming, attractive woman who became the producer of A Streetcar Named Desire. Danny and I, who were about the same age, nine or ten, had a grand adventure exploring the train—each car was named for an Indian chieftain. Danny and I would meet again in Cambridge as Harvard and Radcliffe freshmen.

  Although Lena had bonded with “the girls” in early-morning makeup—Ann Sothern, Kathryn Grayson, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner (the latter two had giggled with Lena like sorority sisters over Artie Shaw)—she saw herself as isolated. Old black Hollywood hated her and most of old white Hollywood ignored her. She had few friends—and few people with whom she felt safe besides the Freed Unit. Although Lena was basically barred from most Hollywood restaurants, she and Lennie were welcome at Romanoff’s, Hollywood’s most expensive eatery. “Prince” Mike Romanoff proved that “White” Russians could be just as non-racist as “Reds.” I had no idea that some of our Horn Avenue neighbors had passed a petition to have us removed. The petition was stopped in midcirculation by our air-raid warden Humphrey Bogart.

  The “Battling Bogarts” (Bogie and his alcoholic, argumentative third wife, Mayo Methot) lived across the street on Horn Avenue. He was a very strict air-raid warden—as Teddy and I discovered the night we stayed up late, on November 9, 1944, to listen to Lena on the best radio program ever, Suspense. I think she played a singer somewhere in South America chased by Nazis. I remember being scared—as I was when I saw Cabin in the Sky and had to be taken, weeping, from the theater during the storm scene. Now, in 1944, there was a loud knock on the door. “Close that curtain!” shouted Warden Bogart. Cousin Edwina had not properly closed the blackout curtain.

  The Freed Unit was like the slightly crazed, very funny family Lena never had. The members really liked one another. By now she had met the “decent and interesting friends” she had once despaired of finding in Hollywood—the people who made her feel safe. She had vowed never to go to big Hollywood parties. That was more or less true. But she did seem to spend most of her Hollywood life either going to or giving small Hollywood parties where people sat on the floor, their plates in their laps, with the latest jazz on the record player. When we dined en famille, Lennie put on classical music—but it was always jazz for parties.

  My mother liked everything that did not remind her of California. She especially liked Betsy Blair, Gene Kelly’s wife, who also went out of her way to avoid living or looking like a Californian. Adorable Betsy, who had been a child model, wore bobby socks and no makeup and looked about sixteen. She would not have a swimming pool because she was sincerely socialist. At the actual age of sixteen, living in New York and dancing two shows a night as a chorus girl at the Diamond Horseshoe, she had joined a Marxist study group.

  Fred Astaire was the sublime king of poetry in motion, but Gene Kelly, who was not half as romantic as Astaire (or half the dancer), was wonderfully athletic and peppy in his sailor suit in On the Town—for which Lennie won an Oscar for musical direction. (Lennie did not bother to go to the awards ceremony, since he did not believe in the concept.) Gene was sort of a dancing cartoon; the bubble over his head said “Energy!” Betsy and Gene had left New York at the height of their combined personal success. He was the toast of Broadway in Pal Joey, and she, having graduated from the chorus line to acting, was an overnight success as the ingenue in William Saroyan’s play The Beautiful People. MGM was grooming Gene to be big. The couple could have joined the old prewar Hollywood crowd: playing polo in Beverly Hills, spending weekends in Palm Springs, sailing at Catalina, and dancing at Ciro’s. Those people expected to be photographed every hour of the day. But in spirit, Gene and Betsy and their friends basically never left the Times Square drugstore where all the young actors hung out. They defiantly belonged to the “New York” crowd. Betsy, who wrote The Memory of All That, the story of her life, absolutely refused to “go Hollywood.” Gene didn’t care. Gene cared only about Gene’s career. He wanted to make “important” movies like The Pirate, with Judy Garland. Lennie was the music director on The Pirate. The music was by Cole Porter. The picture was a turkey.

  Lena had clearly evolved since Miriam Hopkins. She could now fight at least some of her own battles. In the words of Paul Robeson, she was learning to be “Lena Horne, Negro.” In 1943 Robeson was at what his biographer Martin Duberman called “the apex of his fame.” In October he opened on Broadway in Othello. His costars were Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. It was an unqualified smash hit. According to Variety: “The tremendous ovations given to Paul Robeson, the star, are ample indication that these times are when the sweep and majesty of artistry and a democracy must encompass racial barriers.”

  Paul Robeson’s Othello at the Shubert Theatre ran for 296 performances—a record for Shakespeare on Broadway. Eleanor Roosevelt went to see a performance in November and wrote about it in her newspaper column, “My Day,” describing the play as “tense and moving” and “beautifully acted and produced.” Robeson came to California after the run, and the Kellys had a party for the NAACP with Robeson as the guest of honor. Betsy described the evening:

  “After he sang, he spoke, ‘Must I tell my children to tell their children to tell their children that someday things will be better? We will not wait any longer. We cannot wait any longer.’ His words burned into the hearts of everyone in the room. We raised a lot of money.”

  Marxism was probably at its most popular in America in 1943. The siege of Stalingrad had great recruitment value. Benjamin J. Davis Jr., the young Atlanta lawyer in the Angelo Herndon case ten years earlier, whom the judge had called “nigger,” was elected that year to the New York City Council on the Communist Party ticket. Davis, whose best friend was Robeson and whose father, former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, was a lifelong friend of the Calhoun cousins, would be reelected in 1945 and become a member of the Communist Party’s National Committee. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Lena was being politically wooed by Carlton Moss, a black writer and rumored Communist Party member. Moss was taken seriously by Lena and others because he was the screenwriter of the acclaimed Frank Capra documentary The Negro Soldier. One night, Moss drove Lena to the top of the Hollywood Hills. At the sight of the famous Hollywood lights below, he suddenly announced, “All this can be yours if you join the party.” Lena thought he sounded so corny that she started to giggle. Besides, she thought that the whole purpose of socialism was the concept of sharing the wealth, not one person having it “all.” Since at that point Lena believed that everyone, even a man she did not particularly like, was smarter than she was, she kept quiet. Soon after, however, she asked Robeson if she should join the party. His advice, in no uncertain terms, was “Absolutely not!” Robeson may well have been thinking about his mentor, Cora Horne, who would indeed have reeled in her grave. Cora wanted a better America, not another Soviet Union.

  Lena’s Hollywood friends were actually divided between the super politically attuned and the apolitical. Most of the Freed Unit gang, Betsy Kelly aside, was apolitical. Kay Thompson, in particular, was certainly too self-involved to be political. She never had a political thought, but professed to be anticommunist because she had once been fired by a well-known Broadway “Red.” Kay, like so many others in Hollywood, was actually hiding deep personal disappointment. Sam Irvin wrote:

  In his unpublished memoir, jazz composer Alec Wilder observed that after Kay had been in Hollywood for a while, “a tougher, harsher, more cynical person” emerged. She had reason to be cynical. Bolstering the careers of others was a bittersweet endeavor for someone who craved the spotlight so intently.

  Playwright Arthur Laurents, who fell in love with Lena when he first saw her at the Savoy-Plaza, and rediscovered her at the Kelly house, saw the same attitude in Lena. She had to be feeling deep personal disappointment because she had finally realized that she would probably be glued to a pillar for the
rest of her movie career, interacting with no one, for the sake of the white Southern market. Laurents saw Lena evolve, through her anger at the system, into a totally different performer:

  It happened overnight, not in pictures—she was the wrong color for pictures—but at a downtown club called Slapsie Maxie on the night it opened … There is such a thing as cabaret history and it was made at Slapsie’s in one night. Everybody lucky enough to be there (I was one of them: the Kelly group went to support Lena) saw fireworks explode twice. First from the heat of Jack Cole and His Dancers: three highly sexual males, three highly sexual females, dancing unlike any dancers anyone had seen anyplace before. The first number, “Spy,” set to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” fixed the tone—intense and erotic—and the style—angular, slashing, knee slides, tipping hats, twisting torsos and pelvises. That tone, that style, the moves and steps themselves, unseen until then, became a permanent part of the choreographic language of the Broadway musical. Bob Fosse is credited but it all began with Jack Cole in a town that drained and discouraged and finally destroyed him …

  The closing act at Slapsie Maxie’s was Lena Horne with a trio led by Lennie Hayton. She wasn’t Metro’s Lena Horne, she wasn’t the Helena Horne I remembered from the Savoy-Plaza, she wasn’t the Lena who sat removed and bemused at the Kellys’. The voice deeper, the lyrics almost bitten and spat out, the eyes glittering, this was a new Lena. This Lena was angry sex …

  In the early Sixties, when we were so close, I asked her what was in her head when she came out on the elegant floor of the Waldorf in New York or the Fairmont in San Francisco. She bared her teeth in the smile those expensive audiences waited for.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “That’s what I think when I look at them. Fuck all of you.” She meant it figuratively, they took it literally.

  The new Lena Horne was not about “angry sex.” She was far too much of a romantic to be that interested in sex. Since Lena loved dancers, and adored the strange, “angry” genius Jack Cole, she may well have been influenced by Cole’s dancers, famous for their intense erotic energy and the fact that they never grinned when taking bows. Lena’s smile was always dazzling and gracious, but Lena, like Cole, was “angry.” She was angry at her career. She had changed the public image of black women, but she was still the definition of tokenism—all alone in a white world with nothing to do. And she hated nightclubs.

  Lena’s anger, like Jack Cole’s, was elegant, contained, and controlled by intelligence. She treated her audience with deference and courtesy. But she never gushed and was never sentimental. She let audiences know that while they might be getting the singer, they were not getting the woman. As the first black to appear in so many of the clubs she worked, she had built a wall between herself and the audience—mostly because she had no idea what her reception might be. She spoke very little beyond “thank you” and introducing her musicians. She was also too “tasteful” to be obviously “sexy”—if anything, women in her audience loved her as much as, or more than, men for her looks and gowns. Graciousness aside, unlike most performers, Lena never sought the audience’s approval—but the audience seemed to seek hers. There was always absolute hushed silence when she sang, and not an ice cube tinkled unless she wanted laughs. The beat of silence, then rapturous applause, as audiences, mesmerized by her seemingly “aloof” self-absorption, as well as her voice and face, begged her to love them. This creative tension helped make her the highest-paid female international nightclub star throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

  At Slapsie Maxie’s Lena was announcing that she was no longer a saccharine ingenue or a dignified token. She was taking her career and her life into her own hands. As for Lena’s profanity, while Cora Horne would have been shocked, in many circles it would have been considered the appropriate response to the Miriam Hopkinses of the world.

  Once the war was over Lena remained a musical star, but she was never again a movie star. She always hated Hollywood and hated the way she had to make movies. Unless the picture had an all-black cast, Hollywood wanted her only to sing, never to speak—all for the sake of the Southern market. It is clear, some seventy years later, that her MGM contract was purely a wartime propaganda gesture. Without the war, Lena would probably never have made a movie. But in World War II she was propaganda gold—proving that America, unlike Germany and Japan, did not oppress racial minorities. Lena was, in a sense, a human “perfect storm.” As a stand-in for all minorities, she was portrayed with so much “dignity” that she was practically paralyzed. Within a decent interval at the end of the war, Lena and MGM parted ways. Despite her unhappiness with her so-called movie star career, MGM and Lena actually did well by each other. Thanks to Lena, MGM did its bit for the United Nations, as the Allies were called, and thanks to MGM, Lena learned to really sing (as well as make up her face). MGM also helped her to become a nightclub superstar before television began to keep nightclub patrons at home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  South/1940s

  WAR BRIDES

  BY 1940 a black Calhoun, Antoine Graves Sr., a handsome and imposing white-haired figure beloved in Negro Atlanta, and the first black man to receive a real estate broker’s license, had been in business for fifty-five years—longer than any other Atlanta broker, white or black. Dealing with the city, the state, and the white power structure, he became one of the best-known and most important black businessmen in Atlanta. From his real estate offices in the Kimball House on Atlanta’s Wall Street, a street otherwise occupied by white businesses, he brokered the deal for the sale of the land for the Georgia State Capitol. A man of many firsts besides his broker’s license, he was the first to envision an upscale residential Negro neighborhood in Atlanta—a wild success. Earlier in the century he had been responsible for building the first Negro schools. And he was forever known as the hero of 1886, for losing his job as principal of the Gate City Public School when he refused to march in a mandated parade honoring the remains of Jefferson Davis.

  In September 1940 the ailing Graves received a note of appreciation from a local woman doctor:

  Dear Sir:

  I have known of your confinement to your home for some time and being a physician I have hesitated to come to see you. The rest you are taking I hope you will continue to take long enough to fully restore you to your former self, because Atlanta wants you as long as possible in its midst.

  Your outstanding qualities of manhood wherever it was involved has endeared you to the real people of Atlanta. I shall never forget how you exerted it while you were principal of Gate City School. I hope you remember.

  Sincerely yours,

  B.B.S. Thompson, M.D.

  Dr. Blanche B. S. Thompson, physician and surgeon, of 161 Hilliard Street NE, was unusual not only in her gender, but in her profession. In 1940 there were only 3,939 registered Negro physicians and surgeons in the United States (an increase of 740 since 1910) and there were 1,175 lawyers (an increase of 396 since 1910). There were probably more physicians than lawyers because doctors, unlike lawyers, did not get into political or civil rights issues. In white thinking, a few black doctors were probably necessary—black lawyers were not.

  On March 10, 1941, Antoine Graves, aged seventy-nine and about to retire, was summoned to serve as a grand juror in the city of Atlanta. In many parts of the South, blacks were forbidden to serve on juries at all. On March 16, the day he officially retired from active professional work, he learned that his wife’s much-loved cousin Lena Calhoun Smith had died in Chicago the day before, aged seventy-two. On March 21 Antoine Sr. died in his sleep of heart failure.

  The following obit must be from a Negro paper because the honorifics “Miss” and “Mrs.” are used:

  The deceased handled some of the biggest real estate deals in the city’s history. At one time he sold the Governor’s mansion to the state. To his union with Miss Kate Webb were born six children … At one time, Mr. Graves was prominent in the Republican party. He is a past grandmaster of the Odd Fell
ows … Internment will be in the family mausoleum at Oakland cemetery. His body will be cremated and the ashes of his son, Antoine Graves, Jr., which were kept in the father’s room up until the time of the latter’s death, will be interred at the same time.

  The Graves mausoleum was the only mausoleum in the black section of Oakland cemetery. It is touching that Antoine Sr. kept the ashes of his only son, Judge, in his room. There is a photo of Antoine Sr. and Katie Webb Graves circa late 1930s. They are a handsome, dignified old couple—the way old people used to look. They both have white hair. Still slim and erect, Antoine actually looks like a dark “Kentucky Colonel” in his three-piece linen suit and with his little white goatee. After seventy-something years and six children, Katie Webb Graves no longer has a waistline, but she is not overweight. Her posture is good. She is still elegant. She wears a light dress and good shoes and shows slim ankles. In another picture, she wears a pretty, entirely age-appropriate evening gown and, fresh from the beauty parlor, sits on a settee waiting patiently for a party to begin.

  If the New York branch of the black Calhouns was a patriarchy, with Edwin Horne and his four sons forcing their feminist mother to fend for herself and make her own life, the Atlanta branch, the whole Brown-Nash clan, was a matriarchy that became a sorority. There were two sets of sisters and cousins, all slightly younger than their distant cousin Lena Calhoun Horne, who were also best friends. The Browns and the Nashes were the grandchildren of Katie Webb and Antoine Graves Sr. The Browns, three daughters and a son, were the children of Nellie Graves and Noel Brown. There is a picture, probably taken in the late 1930s, of the three Brown girls: Kathryn, Antoinette, and Nellie. The Nashes, four daughters and a son, were the children of Marie Graves and Dr. Homer Nash. The Nashes were Catherine, Helen, Harriet, Dorothy, and Homer Jr.