Michigan-born Dick was a graduate of New York’s Union Theological Seminary and a member of the New York City presbytery, the church’s local governing body, for more than fifty years. From 1942 to 1945 he was the Washington lobbyist for the United Christian Council for Democracy, a federation of the social action agencies of four Presbyterian denominations. The American-Soviet Friendship Council was founded in 1943, at the height of Soviet-U.S. World War II friendship, at a mass rally in Madison Square Garden. A Hollywood rally soon followed, with a message of support signed by Charlie Chaplin, John Garfield, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Gene Kelly, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, and Orson Welles. Every person on that list, except Rita Hayworth, was called a Communist for appearing at the rally. There were Bundles for Britain and everything for General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek—why not a salute to valiant Stalingrad? The council believed that the United States and the Soviet Union should join together in their common fight against fascism, and that peaceful cooperation between the two countries should continue in the postwar era. Stressing education and cultural exchange, the council did not take positions on political issues. In 1945, just before Morford became executive director, the organization was served with a subpoena by HUAC and ordered to submit its membership and financial records. Morford refused to turn over the records and served three months in prison for contempt of Congress. In 1963 the Subversive Activities Control Board, which had previously found the council to be a Communist front organization, unanimously struck down that ruling.
Lena was not the only Horne under a political cloud. In 1948 Dr. Frank Horne, a founder of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) and still a government employee, was questioned by the Civil Service Loyalty Review Board. He defended himself successfully. If Lena was suspect because of her connections with Café Society, Robeson, and Du Bois, Frank was suspect because he was a New Dealer. The Loyalty Review Board questioned him twice, in 1948 and 1954. In 1949 he became a member of the Civil Service Committee of Expert Examiners for the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA). Better still, or so it seemed, he married again. The bride, a glamorous divorcée named Mercedes, came from a famous black Washington family. All the family had the same distinctive trait, a natural streak of white in otherwise jet-black hair. Mercedes looked as white as white could be, but, to my eyes, too much like Snow White’s “wicked queen” to be up to any good. The “wicked” side of her personality came out when she had one or two too many—which was often. Frank was miserable and threw himself into work. Mercedes seemed to have little to do in Washington except shop in stores where Negroes were not allowed and drink in white bars. I suppose she was the “tragic mulatto.” In 1949 Frank was one of the anthologized poets included by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps in The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949.
In 1950 Paul Robeson joined Dick Morford, Howard Fast, artist Rockwell Kent, author-philanthropist Corliss Lamont (whose children were at my school), and others on the left in having his passport revoked. Robeson’s passport would be restored in 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled that the State Department had no right to deny any passport because of “beliefs and associations.” Presumably the others got their passports back also. I once sat on Robeson’s knee as a child and he sang a Russian lullaby. In retrospect, a very socialist gesture—but it seemed to come naturally because he was so big and gentle. I certainly felt safe and protected. I remember his rumbling voice was warm and very soothing. Russians said that he sang like Chaliapin. Cora’s former protégé was also the favorite star of London dockworkers, Welsh miners, and titled British. I think what drove the right wing mad was how much Paul Robeson was loved around the world—the Old World, the New World, and the Third World. He gave concerts everywhere, so taking away his passport took away his livelihood because his only appearances were abroad. He gave a famous concert on the Canadian border, but in America he could sing only in black churches. (Robeson’s brother Ben, World War I chaplain with Edwin Horne’s 369th Regiment, was the longtime pastor of Harlem’s venerable A.M.E. Mother Zion Church.) Although he refused to tell HUAC whether he was a member of the Communist Party, somehow, unlike others who refused to testify, Robeson was never put in prison. The right wing probably feared that he would become an international political martyr, in the manner of Eugene Debs and Mahatma Gandhi. He was possibly a true believer, and certainly a fellow traveler and a recipient of much Soviet benevolence, but not everyone was sure that Robeson, who told Lena not to join, was actually a party member. Some people felt that he was too much the free man to put himself under party discipline. Robeson himself neither confirmed nor denied. He fought racism his whole life. Like Lena and many others, he did not always question the motives of his allies because blacks had so few of them.
Lena, whose passport was never in danger, now spent a great deal of time abroad. She felt at home in London because the British had embraced another elegant black singer: Elisabeth Welch, a favorite of both Cole Porter and Noble Sissle. The British seemed to understand what Lena was about. While Lena’s heart was in France, because that was where she married Lennie, she always thought the French secretly wondered why she was not wearing bananas like Josephine Baker. Her fans were not all sophisticated Londoners, however. Lena found “the greatest audiences in the world” in the industrial towns of Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, and Glasgow. She could barely understand what they said, but they were true fans, and they really let the performer know it. They came every night, showing the kind of mass enthusiasm that Lena had experienced only once before, when she appeared in person with Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the big Broadway movie theater where Cabin in the Sky was showing. She found the same stomping, cheering audiences that screamed their appreciation. After the show, hundreds of fans were always waiting, with mounted police to keep order. Lena stood for hours signing autographs. The scenes were repeated all over the Midlands. Were Lena’s fans forerunners of soccer hooligans? Or was Lena the forerunner of a rock star? Perhaps it was simply an appreciation of some American musical “magic” in otherwise pretty grim postwar lives. She was presented in Britain by the Grade brothers, Lew and Leslie, who became titans of British entertainment. A decade or so later in London, when I introduced myself to Lord (Lew) Grade as Lena’s daughter, his eyes lit up. “Lena was our first American star,” he said with a sigh of nostalgia.
For me, the 1950s meant school and traveling. School was where I spent most of my time. Hotels were a close second. In 1950, in the eight grade, I went away to a Quaker boarding school, Oakwood Friends School, in Poughkeepsie, New York. While certain boys’ schools (Exeter and Andover) had long admitted a few blacks, no girls’ boarding school would do so. But Quaker schools were always coed, integrated, and international—like real life. Yoshiro Sanbonmatsu, a Japanese American who taught literature, was the first great teacher I ever had—only the Quakers would hire him. Because of Yosh, I read Moby-Dick straight through on a train from New York to California and felt as if I were drunk on words. I was Oakwood’s first black cheerleader. The tall, slim Dent brothers from New Orleans, sons of a black educator, were basketball stars. The soccer team was terrific because we had the sons of Hungarian refugees as well as Latin American oligarchs. One of the most beautiful girls in the school was Moroccan, and there were Dutch sisters who spent World War II in a Japanese internment camp. There were other celebrity parents besides Lena: Rex Stout, Pearl S. Buck, Poppy Cannon (Mrs. Walter White), and Sylvia Sidney. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at my graduation. Oakwood continues to remain coed, integrated, and international.
Despite Quaker pacifism, Oakwood made news during World War II, because an Oakwood graduate was one of the famous Four Chaplains (two Protestants, a Catholic, and a Jew) who gave up their life jackets to sailors and were seen praying, arms around one another, as their troopship went down. While I was an Oakwood student, we were visited by the Hiroshima Maidens, teenage girls all horribly disfigured by radiation, in America for medical treatment th
anks to the Quakers. When Lennie and Lena (who had become a lifetime member of Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization, after meeting and liking its president at a benefit) went to Israel in 1952 for a series of concerts to celebrate that country’s fourth anniversary, Lennie sent a postcard about the Quaker teacher who was the only person permitted to go back and forth between Israeli and Arab lands without a permit. I admire the Society of Friends for everything it has done and continues to do for humanity.
Weekends and short school holidays were spent either with school friends or with saintly Aida Winters, a friend of Lena’s from the Brooklyn Junior Deb days. Aida was a half sister of two great black artists, Romare Bearden and Charles Alston, and the wife of opera singer Lawrence Winters. She was an angel to me. But all real holidays were spent with Lena and Lennie wherever they were, in Europe or America. Although I did everything in Vegas with the Entratter girls, or my stepcousin Michele Hart, the daughter of Lennie’s sister, I mostly traveled alone by train across the country, or by ship to Europe, to meet Mother and Lennie wherever they were. I started with trains at age eleven and ships at thirteen—traveling first class and carrying succinct lists of what to do and how much to tip so-and-so. (No one at any juncture in the 1950s, by the way, seemed to worry about pedophiles or kidnappers.) We traveled only by the French Line; in a pinch we would go by Cunard—but never by the United States Line after Lena’s first trip. Jim Crow ruled America’s waves. But the French Line was really fun and glamorous—and, at least, the British were nice. In 1950 I went to Europe by myself on the De Grasse, the same ship that took Cora Horne to her grand tour in 1929. The De Grasse had seen better days. She had been a troopship during the war and was slightly battered. I was not at all lonely. I enjoyed myself utterly. First of all, I was a fashion voyeur and the women in first class wore beautiful French gowns for dinner. I watched them arrive because I ate in the first sitting (children and old people) at a table by myself, as my mother had requested (to avoid incidents with “bad” Americans), wearing a sort of party dress and happily alone with a book. I dined on soufflés in every possible flavor. I went to the movies every day; they were all in French—but who cared? The actors all had wonderful faces. I fell in love with Gérard Philipe in Le Grand Meaulnes. Since I was never lonely with a book, I made a new reading discovery. The only English-language novels in the first-class library were by H. G. Wells. I discovered Tono-Bungay and could not have been happier. Only once did I fly. As I was flying alone to Las Vegas, the plane ran into a storm—a scary storm, with lightning and turbulence and flight attendants shooting looks at each other. We finally got in safely, but long overdue. Mother, red-eyed and calming down from hysterics, met me at the airport and did not let me fly again anywhere until I was out of college. I had not been frightened in the plane. I thought it was sort of exciting fun, like a roller coaster. Unlike my mother, I had no concept of mortality. (I was never afraid on a plane until I brought my two-month-old daughter Amy home to New York from London where she was born. It did not take a storm—fear began at takeoff. For years after, I could not fly without a pill and a drink.)
Aged thirteen, I was “Madly for Adlai,” but otherwise indifferent to politics. Lena campaigned for Stevenson early on. From Lee Israel’s biography of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen:
There was a party once, during the early fifties, at the Greenwich Village apartment of Bob and Jean Bach. Adlai Stevenson was running for president. Lena Horne was standing in front of the piano. To the tune of “I Love to Love,” Lena sang: I love the Guv / The Guvnah of Illinois. As she was singing, she looked at Dorothy and said, “Hope I’m not offending you.” Dorothy raised her glass and replied in a shy, slightly inebriated voice, “That’s all right. It’s a better song than ‘I Like Ike.’”
In 1950 W. E. B. Du Bois, aged eighty-two, ran for U.S. senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket and got just over two hundred thousand votes. (It is somehow touching that two hundred thousand New Yorkers, all probably very young or very old, would want to put eighty-two-year-old Du Bois in the U.S. Senate.) I met Dr. Du Bois two years before his political run, in my mother’s dressing room at the Copacabana. He sat in a chair and held his carved African cane almost as if he were a chieftain holding a spear. I could only stare. I was eleven; he was eighty—I was transfixed. He wore a cream-colored linen suit, perfect with his beige face and little white beard. He looked so perfect and so important. I remember shaking his hand and feeling utterly tongue-tied with an impulse to curtsy. I remember my mother saying, “Dr. Du Boyze has just come back from Africa.”
In the summer of 1950 we stayed in the most glamorous hotel I had ever seen, all curving marble staircases and blazing chandeliers. The Hotel Raphael in Paris had been the home of the German high command during the occupation. It was from the Raphael that Lena and Lennie revealed their marriage of three years earlier. It was from there that Lena and Lennie went out to pose at a sidewalk café for Life magazine: Lennie in his distinctive yachting cap, and Lena in her Jacques Fath suit and incredibly becoming Parisian hat. Lena got hate mail from both blacks and whites.
Reality at home was very different—and stranger than ever. Hollywood’s biggest red-baiter and blacklister, Roy Brewer, from 1945 to 1963 head of the powerful International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators (IATSE, pronounced I-At-See), suddenly changed his mind about Lena. In 1950 he had listed her as a subversive in his infamous booklet Red Channels. But in 1952 he was suddenly eager to help clear her name. IATSE was heavily rumored to be mobbed up. I believe that it was really to do a favor for his mob friends. Lena may have voiced opinions that powerful people did not like, but the Jewish mob that ran American nightclubs needed her and the movies needed Jewish mob money.
On November 13, 1952, Roy Brewer wrote to a CBS executive “with respect to Lena Horne,” saying there “should be no further question about her position.” The executive replied that Brewer’s letter would be “helpful in removing any cloud that may have restricted the use of Miss Horne’s services.” As quickly as Brewer had tried to smear her, he had turned around and cleared her. CBS was considered the most liberal network. Lena had powerful CBS-connected friends. (With Robeson’s career destroyed, perhaps HUAC felt it did not want to look as if it was going after every important black person in the country, even though it was.) Meanwhile, Lena developed ulcers—but continued to fight for her earning power. She learned how to get off the blacklist with the help of Lennie’s agent, who told her to contact Brewer himself, who would steer her to one of the “clearing” people who would get the word out that she might get off the blacklist. Without going before a congressional committee, she could be hired again.
On June 28, 1953, two days before her thirty-sixth birthday, Lena wrote a twelve-page letter on Sands Hotel stationery to Roy Brewer. Here are excerpts:
Dear Mr. Brewer,
If at any time I have said or done anything that might have been construed as being sympathetic toward communism, I hope the following will help to refute this misconception.
To begin with, I am aware that a good deal of my attitudes were motivated by personal prejudices which were conditioned in me from birth. You will probably understand this.
There has been a great deal of curiosity about my friendship with Paul Robeson. My family had known him for many years. My grandmother, who was an ardent social worker, was instrumental in obtaining a scholarship for him when he was very young … I have heard it said many times that he influenced me sympathetically toward communism. This I must emphatically deny. However, at the time I met Robeson, in 1940, I was going through a serious personal crisis. I had begun to realize that I was being classified as a “lucky Negro.” I heard this from Negro leaders and read it in the press. I realized that there were many Negroes who hadn’t received the “breaks” as I presumably had. This became a very heavy burden … I explained this problem to Robeson at the time and he suggested that I might help myself by taking an
active interest in the problems of other people, generally, and in the Negro people, specifically. As an example, he recommended that I help raise money for a milk fund being sponsored by the Council for African Affairs [W. E. B. Du Bois’ organization] for the benefit of African mothers … Many similar benefit appearances followed thereafter …
She spoke about HICCASP (the bogeyman of the right wing), which supported the Fair Employment Practices Bill and helped her when Hollywood neighbors tried to have her evicted. She revealed that she had been invited to join the party in 1941 by “a man named Pettis Perry.” Perry, a Negro, was the Communist Party candidate for lieutenant governor of California in 1934. He was indicted for conspiracy under the Smith Act in 1951 (he would be convicted in February 1953 and sentenced to three years in prison). Lena realized that Communists had “played upon my racial insecurities, and made me overly sensitive to each slight and injustice to Negroes to the point where I was quite willing to appear for any cause that might aid them.” She understood that it was “in the classic pattern which the communists design for minority people.” She ended the letter:
I have always known that America offers the greatest chance to all people, to achieve human dignity—and since this terrible experience I am more determined than ever to do what I can to impress these principles on the thinking of all people I come in contact with.
She signed her letter “Most sincerely.” I find the tone of the letter to be utterly sincere and very slightly defiant. When she talks about “personal prejudices” that Brewer would “probably understand,” she is talking about white racism. She is truthful about Robeson—he advised her in no uncertain terms not to join the party. She admitted helping Du Bois’ organization, the Council on African Affairs, but did not say that he was a friend of her grandparents’. And by saying she was “more determined than ever” to impress the principles of “human dignity” on everyone she met, Lena made it clear to Brewer that while she intended to be quiet, she would not entirely shut up.
The Black Calhouns Page 25