The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  The Reverend Andrew Young, a New Orleans–born ordained minister and Howard graduate, was a pastor in Atlanta, where he worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1964, aged thirty-two, he became SCLC’s executive director. In 1970 he became the first African American to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives. President Jimmy Carter later named him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but Young had to resign in 1979 because he had met in secret with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s UN observer. The resignation did not stop him from being elected the second black mayor of Atlanta in 1981. As Casey Cason noticed in her mildly ironic way, the entire city government of Atlanta now seemed to be in the hands of 1960s freedom fighters. Following in the footsteps of other business-minded Atlanta mayors, however, Andy Young brought in $70 billion of new private investment.

  CODA/1980s

  Honors/North

  LENA

  THE 1970S took a terrible toll on Lena. They were a time of mourning. All the men in her life died almost at the same time. Big Teddy’s death came first, early in 1970. It was not entirely a surprise—a matter of age and a bad heart. Little Teddy’s death, in September of that year of kidney failure, was not entirely a surprise, either—she knew it might be sooner rather than later. Her beautiful boy had become a gaunt, wasted figure. For Lena, it was a tragedy almost beyond repair. Little Teddy had the cards stacked against him from the beginning. He was under two when his mother suddenly disappeared from his life because of our father’s sexism—“you take the girl, I’ll take the boy.” Consequently, he never had a mother or a sister; Lena never had a son, and I never had a brother. I saw my little brother intermittently—the longest period was in 1943 and 1944, when he played cowboys and Indians and I played with dolls. And his Hollywood kindergarten teacher got into trouble with Lena for reading Little Black Sambo to the class. In the mid-1950s he liked country music and Ike, while I was “Madly for Adlai” and preferred Piaf to Presley. He became a polished, well-dressed Young Republican sophisticate at UCLA, where he starred on the debating team and found himself pursued by all manner and ages of women. In 1959 Teddy transferred from UCLA to Berkeley. The darling little boy who talked about “Snow White and the Seven Drawers” had become a tall, bearded, beautiful, ill man, kept alive by dialysis, who spoke about Hermann Hesse and Frantz Fanon and certainly admired Brother Huey Newton. He lived in Los Angeles, was married twice, and had four children. He felt he was a prisoner of dialysis—and essentially chose to go off it. Teddy’s death was a deep, deep blow to my mother, even though she knew it would probably come at some early point.

  The final blow—Lennie died seven months later, in April 1971. Just as Teddy’s death was not really unexpected, neither was Lennie’s—mainly because he enjoyed bad health habits. He was the ultimate gourmet, with a diet of butter, eggs, red meat, and copious amounts of spirits, wine, and nicotine. Like his first wife, Lennie was a ticking time bomb for a stroke. Because he came of age in the 1920s, he drank all day long (midmorning beer, wine for lunch, midafternoon beer, two or three martinis, wine for dinner, and brandy later). He was never drunk, only smiling and mellow. He also, starting before breakfast, consumed five or six packs of Camel cigarettes every day. Like his first wife, he suddenly sat up with a headache and was gone. Frank Sinatra’s private plane flew Mother, Sidney and me, and Amy and Jenny over extremely bumpy mountains from Los Angeles to Palm Springs for Lennie’s funeral. Bighearted Arthur Freed, whose unit produced the great MGM musical movies of the 1940s and early 1950s, was there to weep over all his “boys” who were dead or dying.

  Lena, who said that the near-simultaneous losses “cracked her open,” basically retired to Santa Barbara to live with her grief. Eventually, she was coaxed out of retirement by Alan King, one of her favorite people, as good-hearted and wise as he was funny—and a distant cousin of Lennie’s. No one ever had an unkind word to say about Alan or his wife, Jeanette. Alan opened for Lena all over the country when she used to tour the nightclubs—he was her favorite comedian because he was a raconteur. So she slowly went back to work. She fell in love with Sesame Street and sang my Harvard classmate and friend Joe Raposo’s great song “Bein’ Green” with Kermit the Frog. She performed in the musical Pal Joey on the road. She toured in concert with Tony Bennett, singing Harold Arlen medleys. And in 1978 she played Glinda the Good in the movie version of the Broadway musical The Wiz, directed by her son-in-law, Sidney Lumet. Everyone agreed that Lena singing “Believe in Yourself” was the best moment in the picture, whose stars were Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. A sweet, shy, almost fragile young man, Michael Jackson came to dinner and spent all of his time with our children. But Sidney and I were divorced soon after The Wiz—and this did not help Lena’s doldrums. She hated the idea of my divorce even more than she had hated the idea of my marriage. I loved Sidney; we were friends. We had wonderful daughters—but after fourteen years, the marriage was over. I was a different person. It was the height of women’s lib, which I basically ignored—although I admired Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan. I was much too frivolous to be liberated. I was seriously into fashion and parties and movie stars. I did not read books; I read magazines. I was a sad case. Sidney was a workaholic and, like all directors, very controlling. He was really happy only when preparing, shooting, and cutting a film—or spending Sunday afternoons lying on the bed watching football while I took the girls to the playground. But I know the moment I knew I had to have a divorce. It had nothing to do with Sidney’s bad or good qualities, and everything to do with me. This may sound idiotic, but it is true; I saw A Doll’s House on television and I knew it was the story of my life. I had allowed myself to be infantilized and now this marriage was my prison. I had to get out of prison and save my life. Sidney, a very sensible person, said I should try a shrink, not a divorce. My wonderful “shrink” was Mildred Newman, coauthor with her husband, Bernard Berkowitz, of How to Be Awake and Alive, the best-selling mid-1970s popular psychology book. I saw Mildred for a year, but I still wanted a divorce. I had indeed been sleepwalking through my life.

  If the 1970s were a time of mourning, the 1980s were a time of celebration on several fronts. My mother was happy to celebrate my marriage to Kevin Buckley, a journalist and foreign correspondent. Kevin had spent 1968–1972 in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Kevin, Yale class of 1962, a man whom Sybil Burton called “beautiful inside and out,” was a saintly stepfather. His patience and amusement with my teenaged daughters reminded me of Lennie. Amy and Jenny adored him and often called him “Kev.” Amy figured him out: “Dad is hopelessly late thirties—Mom is hopelessly late fifties—at least Kev is early seventies.”

  She said this in the eighties.

  In March 1981 Lena made her famous reappearance on Broadway after twenty-four years. Her one-woman show, The Lady and Her Music, was not just great but phenomenal. The reviews were unanimously extraordinary, and the awards were too numerous to count. On her opening night, I personally saw Leo Lerman, Al Hirschfeld, and Swifty Lazar, separately, wiping away tears. Normally unsentimental, these men had known Lena for forty years and clearly something had been triggered. Lena had become a legend in her lifetime—awarded the Kennedy Center honors. To her surprise, she also became an icon for young women. They lined up outside the stage door amazed by her age, her voice, her beauty, her stamina, her humor, and her cheerful, unapologetic worldliness. When the Daily News asked her, sometime in the 1980s, if she thought President Reagan was sexy, she only replied, “For heaven’s sake!” She became Glinda the Good Witch, the wise woman elder, for all the young Dorothys far from home. Lena admired strong, confident women, but never considered herself a “feminist” because she always needed a male spokesman to feel “protected.” There are many nuances to feminism; “Believe in Yourself” covered them all. By the first quarter of the 2000s there was suddenly a whole new theatrical generation of young women named “Lena.” Not a coincidence, I believe, since “Lena” had never before been a popular name. Th
e real Lena was, of course, unique. Her musicality, like her courage and discipline, was hers alone. But her beauty and stamina came from the black Calhouns and all their admixtures.

  After the opening, the theater staff kept a list of VIP backstage visitors—it was like a roll call of mid-twentieth-century arts and entertainment. Most of these people were her friends, certainly with air-kissing rights. There were musicians and composers: Eubie Blake, Harold Arlen, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Charles Aznavour, and Quincy Jones. There were singers: Bing Crosby, Mabel Mercer, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, Diana Ross, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, Rosemary Clooney, Carmen McRae, Liza Minnelli, Bobby Short, Nancy Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Marilyn Horne, Birgit Nilsson, and Beverly Sills. There were comedians: George Burns, Milton Berle, Red Buttons, and Phyllis Diller. There were dancers and choreographers: Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Zizi Jeanmaire, Arthur Mitchell, Erik Bruhn, Gelsey Kirkland, Sir Robert Helpmann, and Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder. There were Hollywood names: Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney, Jane Withers, Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Angela Lansbury, Ginger Rogers, Claire Trevor, Jane Russell, Lucille Ball, Burgess Meredith, Alexis Smith, Kathryn Grayson, Gregory Peck, James Mason, José Ferrer, Kirk Douglas, Rex Harrison, Gina Lollobrigida, Sam Spiegel, Yul Brynner, Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Taylor, Roddy McDowall, Debbie Reynolds, Janet Leigh, Joan Collins, Julie Andrews, Shirley MacLaine, Anthony Quinn, Sidney Poitier, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Tony Randall, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Dudley Moore, Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Albert Finney, Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, Ruby Dee, Sir John Gielgud, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Rock Hudson, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan, Lena’s ex-son-in-law, Sidney Lumet, and Lena’s two good girlfriends of the 1950s and ‘60s, Suzy Parker and Jinx Falkenburg. There were Broadway luminaries: Helen Hayes, Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Hal and Judy Prince, Neil Simon, Adolph Green and Phyllis Newman, Joel Grey, Nancy Walker, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune, Molly Picon, Stella Adler, and Vincent Sardi. There were media names: Ed Bradley, Harry Reasoner, Johnny Carson, Gordon Parks, Arthur Godfrey, and William S. Paley. There were activist names: James Baldwin, Paul Robeson Jr., Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Dr. Kenneth Clark, and Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine. There were resonant political names: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Coretta Scott King, Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, former mayor Robert Wagner, Governor Hugh Carey, Vernon Jordan, future mayor David Dinkins, and Mayor Ed Koch. There were foreign dignitaries: the president of Vanuatu; Michael Manley, former prime minister of Jamaica; Kurt Waldheim, UN secretary-general; Count and Countess Bernadotte (Swedish friends); and the Nigerian tribal kings. Surprisingly, there were sports stars: “Jersey Joe” Walcott, Roy Campanella, Dave Winfield, Tom Seaver, Bucky Dent, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, Don Newcombe, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Muhammad Ali, and Mrs. Jackie Robinson.

  My favorite tributes came from Bing Crosby, Marilyn Horne, and Lillian Gish:

  “I’ve seen them all—you are the greatest! What you do is artistry of the highest order—dignity—style-class-warmth, and musicianship in rare degree. I always knew you sang like a bird, but seeing you in person is something again. It’s a memory I’ll always treasure.”

  —Bing Crosby

  “Lena is the Queen! I love her! She is the song recitalist of one’s dreams! And how fresh that voice sounds after years and years of using it to its fullest—a tribute to a superior technician.”

  —Marilyn Horne

  “To sit in a capacity filled theatre and discover that the artist on the stage is singing to you alone and no one else is a unique experience, but then that is Lena Horne, a lady who makes me humble to be in her profession and very proud to be an American.”

  —Lillian Gish

  After a year on Broadway, Lena took her show on the road. In San Francisco, the vice president and coach of the 49ers football team came to the opening. In Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley came. And Robert Osborne wrote a review for the Hollywood Reporter.

  It is the ultimate one-woman exhibition. Not only are the lady and her vocal cords at the absolute peak of their sorcery but both are gorgeously presented in a package that makes for one sweet, sassy and deviously disciplined evening in the theatre … Probably the greatest compliment one can pay to the professional side of Lena Horne is that her show … is still a growing recital, sharp as a tack after several hundred performances and still as fresh as if spontaneously devised during a mid-day rehearsal … She’s warm, funny and in total control … Healthy, disciplined and talented as Lena Horne is at age 65, the lady is some inspiration.

  In April 1983 she returned to Atlanta for the first time since childhood—to be greeted somewhat in the manner of a prodigal daughter. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of Sunday, April 17:

  LENA STORMS INTO ATLANTA MS. HORNE SEEKS CHILDHOOD TIES DURING 5-NIGHT ENGAGEMENT …

  In a manner considerably less formal than Alex Haley’s published search for his ancestry, Ms. Horne is hunting for … her family members … By virtue of her personal mission, Atlanta may very well be the most important stop on her U.S. tour, which began shortly after Ms. Horne closed her popular Broadway show June 30th last year—her 65th birthday …

  Asked about her childhood recollections of the city, she said, “I went to Booker T. Washington Junior High (seventh grade) and to Summer Hill Grade School (sixth grade). I remember a school teacher named Mrs. Thelma Rivers. She was a great teacher … I lived on West Hunter Street … I’m sure I have schoolmates there. Some, I hope, still remember me.”

  Cousin Catherine was in Milwaukee, but Cousin Harriet was in Atlanta to greet Lena. The Journal-Constitution recorded their first meeting:

  OCCASION FOR JOY—Lena Horne and a previously unknown cousin, Harriet Chisholm of Atlanta, meet each other for the first time backstage at the Fox Theatre … a “joyous occasion.”

  And she met her beloved teacher, Miss Helena (not Thelma) Rivers—a meeting also recorded by news photos:

  A teacher and her “star” student—Miss Lena [sic] Rivers, a retired Atlanta Public School Teacher who taught at the world famous Washington High School, is warmly revisited by her world famous “star” student, Miss Lena Horne.

  Lena met not only Miss Rivers, but a much-loved playmate, Mildred White. She and Lena and Miss Rivers were also photographed together:

  Ms. Helena Rivers and Mildred White Smith visit with Lena Horne in her dressing room during her appearance at the Fox Theatre. Mildred was a playmate of Lena Horne … This picture depicts the three reviewing pictures of her childhood days with several playmates.

  It was a busy five days. Accompanied by her new best friend and black Calhoun cousin, fun-loving Harriet, Lena toured Atlanta. She was photographed happily pointing out the attractive brick house on West Hunter Street, renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The house was now the office of the black newspaper the Atlanta Inquirer, whose “computer room” had been Lena’s bedroom. She also made flying visits to Booker T. Washington High School, Morehouse College, and the Atlanta University Library, where she toured the W. E. B. Du Bois Collection and looked up Cora’s graduation date. Her visitors backstage at the Fox included delegations of students from Spelman and Clark colleges—part of Asa Ware’s dreamed-of Atlanta University complex. And with great pleasure, she dined after a performance with Mayor Andrew Young and his wife, Jean.

  The honors continued to be reported in Atlanta even after she left. In May the Constitution noted: “Nancy Reagan, Lena Horne and Connie Chung were voted among the 10 most influential women of the year by sorority members of the University of Southern California …”

  The Inquirer wrote that Lena, Richard Burton, and Jack Lemmon would host the 1983 Tony Awards and that Lena would receive the 1983 NAACP Spingarn Medal. Cora Horne and Walter White would definitely have been pleased.
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  When Lena left Atlanta, Cousin Harriet put together a photo album with a sweet message:

  Welcome back, Lena. Welcome to Atlanta. Hoping your “trip back home” added pleasant and meaningful moments to your life. It added much to mine in a very real sense. Perhaps, in another time and place Cora, Lena and Kate are happy too.

  When Lena died on Mother’s Day 2010 at the age of ninety-two, she was remembered and eulogized around the world and close to home. An editorial in the Tablet, a Brooklyn Catholic newspaper, remembered her as a child singer at St. Peter Claver Church, whose pastor, Father Bernard J. Quinn, a pioneer in black Catholic ministry, is being considered for sainthood. The piece, by Ed Wilkinson for the column, “The Editor’s Space,” went on to say that Father Quinn built the parish center where Lena first performed in public:

  Not only was Lena Horne born in Brooklyn, but she was also baptized a Catholic in Brooklyn and educated in a Catholic school in Brooklyn. Father Paul Jervis, pastor of St. Martin of Tours parish in Bedford Stuyvesant, explains that Horne was baptized in Holy Rosary Church on Chauncey Street … Horne remained true to the faith, with burial from St. Ignatius Loyola Church on the upper East Side of Manhattan … Jesuit Father Walter Modrys, the retired pastor of St. Ignatius Loyola, celebrated the funeral Mass. In his eulogy, he recounted a time when, upon first meeting Horne, she admitted to “feelings of shyness.” She referred to her “persona” that she shared with others. It was her performance mode, she said. Father Modrys recalled that, years later, at Horne’s 80th birthday party at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, someone asked her to sing. “She started slowly, clearly struggling,” he said, but “here comes that ‘persona’ clicking in.” And “sure enough,” the priest added, “we watched the transformation of an elegant 80-year-old woman into the 25-year-old-starlet that no one could ever forget.”