Lena Horne (Radio Edit)

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2:22popular music and director of black studies at the University of Nottingham. They're an expert on musical theatre and especially race and gender identity in popular culture. You'll remember them from our episode on the history of Broadway. It's Dr Hannah Tauracian-Robbins. Welcome back, Hannah. Thanks for having me back. Delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, an introduction feels completely redundant for such a stalwart of You're Dead to Me. She's a comedian, actor and writer. You've seen her all over the TV on Taskmaster, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, QI, Too Hot to Handle. Maybe you've seen her incredible new stand-up show, The Golden Wrath.

2:51And you'll know her from so many episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, Sojourner Truth and the history of Broadway. Not one episode. What an episode that would be. Yes, we're getting the band back together. It's Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Thanks so much for having me back, Greg. It's so nice to be back and find out what the heck happened before. That's the alternative name of the show. Desiree, we have covered several performers before. We have done Josephine Baker together, Paul Robeson, P.T. Barnum to an extent. Yeah, true. Yes. He performed being a human just about.

3:23Just about. So if I come to you and I say the name Lena Horne, what comes to mind? So what comes to mind is Glinda the Good Witch from The Wiz. Because I grew up, that was the Black Wizard of Oz that we grew up on in the 80s. And so that sort of, I think, was my introduction to her. And also seeing her perform on the Cosby Show R.I.P. were my I mean I'm just saying but those were my interactions with her and she kind of I think in my head occupies a similar sort of like Harry Belafonte status of being a performer and an activist as well yeah this is good knowledge okay yeah yeah that's all spot on I think yeah it's quite the life I mean I didn't know half of this stuff and I'm really excited so we better crack on so what do you know

4:17This is the So What Do You Know. This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I'm guessing there's a lot of people who've heard the name Lena Horne, but maybe don't quite know who she is. Maybe it's the Desiree thing of The Wiz. If you're a fan of classic Hollywood movies, maybe you've seen her in Cabin in the Sky or Stormy Weather, or you watched her star turn, as Desiree did, as Glinda, in the Wizard of Oz adaptation The Wiz. Music lovers might recognise the song Stormy Weather, which is how I know about Lena Horne, or know her incredible voice from her dozens of albums.

4:47And, of course, if you were a kid or a grown-up, you maybe grew up watching Sesame Street and The Muppets and saw Lena Horne there. But what about Lena Horne's life story? How did she become the star of stage and screen? And what colour exactly is Light Egyptian? Let's find out. Right. Professor Hannah, starting at the beginning. When was Lena Horne born and what was her family background? Are we, we're 20th century, right? Yeah, absolutely. So she was born on June the 30th, 1917, to what was a middle-class black family. Her father, Edwin, was kind of a Renaissance man. He spoke six languages.

5:24He owned a restaurant and a hotel, but eventually he got caught up in gambling. Her mother, Edna, was an actress. However, her parents separated when she was three and she went to live with her paternal grandparents. Lena's grandmother, Cora, was an amazing character. She was an early feminist, she was a community activist, and she took Lena to organising events and meetings alongside her schooling. She was very restrictive about Lena's original education, and Lena remembered that as the period of sort of stability and comfort during her childhood living with her grandparents. So Desiree, quite a nice start to life.

5:59Judging by the 1917, could have been a lot worse. Could have been extraordinarily a lot worse. Yeah, absolutely. Her father, Edwin, was out of the picture. Edwin didn't really like working and he discovered gambling. I was going to say, if you start getting into gambling, you start getting really out of working really quickly because why work if you can just win money? Yeah. So this is it. Sometimes he was extremely successful and sometimes he was extremely not successful. And he was not closely connected with her grandparents. So when her grandmother died, she was forced to go back to living with her mother and her new stepfather, Mike.

6:33and she said that she couldn't really relate to this white man that her mother had married and they fell on fairly hard times. Obviously, this was the Depression, as you mentioned, and that led to them relocating from a fairly nice house, initially to the Bronx, and then to Harlem and trying to figure out how to make ends meet with both Edna and Mike, losing their jobs in this time. Let's meet teenage Lena. Tina the Lena? Lena the Lena? I don't know. I haven't worked out what I'm doing with that yet, but let's meet her. What does she do to revive the family finances, Desiree? I am guessing that she has figured out some kind of song and dance situation to kind of help out, like she's performing or doing something in the family business.

7:12No, you're spot on, I think. We start our story with not singing yet. Dancing? Yeah, absolutely. So she's 16 years old. Neither her mother or her stepfather have a job. So she secures an audition at Harlem's legendary Cotton Club. And it's worth saying that the Cotton Club, although kind of legendary to us now, was a really complicated space. It didn't allow black patrons in. The black musicians and chorus people were not allowed to use the bathrooms. They could only rehearse the final rehearsals in the building. It was quite a tense setup. But at the same time, a number of major artists like Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Adelaide Hall, were all working there.

7:55And Duke Ellington was crucial. If you want to make a welcoming space for black people, you don't call it the Cotton Club. Well, there is that. I'm guessing it's not a vibe. Like, hey, come on down to the Cotton Club. Was she working solely as a dancer? Was she singing at this point and dancing as well, if she's been there for a while? So she began as a dancer, but she was singing as well. The chorus was multifaceted. And she certainly started to get spots during this time. She stars in her first Broadway musical called Dance With Your Gods. And she would go do that and then come back and perform at the Cotton Club.

8:28So in 1935, aged 18 or so, she does leave the Cotton Club and she's off on tour. She decides the only way to break her contract at the Cotton Club, given the environment, is to run away. So she flees and she runs off to, I think, Philadelphia. So not that far. In those times, I mean, that was more than just an Amtrak. Yeah, cool. And she secures an audition with Noble Sissel, who some listeners may remember from his involvement in Shuffle Along and various other Harlem Renaissance activities. He is now running a major orchestra called the Society Orchestra and he signs her. But she was under considerable pressure because her stepfather, Mike, and her mother travelled with the band.

9:16And she was constantly on edge expecting that Mike was going to lose his cool and cause a problem. And actually, he does yell at Noble Sissel for letting the musicians use the kitchen exit in a segregated hotel and not respecting his players. And eventually Mike is kicked off the tour. She manages to escape her parents. Desiree, what is the classic escape your parents move at 19? She picks up a line bike and just floors it. She's like, this is the only way they'll never keep up. Mike's in the back running like Tom Cruise and she's like, you'll never catch me. She does an ET thing. She just cycles away from the government.

9:53Just a scooter. Just carrying her heels in a big dress like, I'm going to get out of here. She doesn't pick up a bike. She picks up a fur. Oh, okay. The original bike. Hannah, who is her beloved hubby? Yeah, in 1937, she runs away to Pittsburgh this time. And she marries this guy, Louis Jordan Jones, or Louis Jordan Jones. I think it is actually. And he is from a similar middle class black background. He's the son of a minister. He's a college graduate. He's an aspiring politician. But their marriage is made challenging by the fact that Lena Horne continues to work. And he was looking for a different kind of wife who was going to support his political aspirations rather than make her own money.

10:35She moves to New York and that does go well, or at least that's the plan. She doesn't get work immediately. But once she does, it starts to gain momentum. and she secures an audition via the record producer John Hammond, who's aware of her from Decca, to audition at Cafe Society Downtown. So there were two cafe societies, one uptown and one downtown, as a solo artist. And it is the up-and-coming cabaret venue in New York and it boasts artists like Billie Holiday. Paul Robeson is a regular performer and that's how they become friends. And it is really the beginning of Lena Horne becoming Lena Horne.

11:14This is a very beautiful, glamorous young woman in her mid-twenties or so. Desiree, obvious question. Is showbiz all about image first, technique later? Yes. Okay. I mean, look, there's an incredible amount of talent, I think, probably, in showbiz at that time. She's meeting them all over the place. But clearly she was already making quite a bit of money on the image factor. So I imagine that that and just sort of a general being comfortable around artists in that world got her a lot further than actually needing to employ talent. We're now into the 1940s. She's a singer. She's a performer. But in 1942, she did what every performer with a song in their heart and a dream in their soul does.

12:00She headed to Tinseltown. Yeah, it's really interesting. She always said she never wanted to be a film star. She was never interested in Hollywood. She didn't like California. but her agent wanted to run away from her parents and that's as far as you can get in america i would say that her transition into hollywood is a reluctant one and in the end it's mgm the producer roger edens who sees horn and takes her seriously and decides to take her to meet arthur freed arthur freed is the head of the division producing screen musicals and they decide together along with Vincent Minnelli who they bump into who she already knows that she should go and audition for L.B.

12:42Mayer the second M in MGM himself and she decides to take her father Edwin who she's reconnected with at this point it was a very surprising audition L.B. Mayer is immediately taken with her he can see the appeal he immediately understands what Roger Edens who who is an associate producer, has recognised. But they are not prepared for her and Edwin to come in and negotiate what she is and isn't going to do. Right. So with his help, she says that they're not going to accept any old part. And he says that he could just hire Lena Horne a maid with his own money. So she's not going to be playing servants on screen.

13:21They also negotiate that she won't play any illiterate or uneducated parts and she won't play any Jungle or Tarzan stereotypes. Thank God. And she gets an extraordinary contract for a first-time debutante, a seven-year gig. So she'd done a couple of independent black films at the end of the 30s, but basically those had not been widely distributed. They were not prominent movies. She had the appeal. I think that's the thing we can say. She had the appeal, but also they saw an opportunity to represent a different kind of music within some of these film musicals that are made. She gets, in the end, a seven-year film contract, and she was the first Black actor of any gender to get such a major deal.

14:06This was that one year they were really doing DEI at MGM, and they just really knocked it out of the park, and nobody else ever got that deal ever again. 1942 to 1943. It's the golden year. Yeah, the golden year. Oh, my goodness. So Alina Horne's debut, MGM debut, is a film called Panama Hattie. And she's playing herself? Panama Hattie is an adaptation of a stage musical by Cole Porter. And I think it's a really interesting insight into what MGM attempted to do with her. They deliberately immediately start to lean on the idea of her being slightly ethnically ambiguous. But I think it's also really important to say that this is also a time where black actors were sometimes listed as props.

14:49and not as cast people in the paperwork at the studios. So the complexity of the ways in which they are conceptualizing race cannot be overstated. Can you give me an example of how they were listed as props? So they would produce these documents outlining the contents of the films. This would include the list of scenes, the number of songs, who the cast were, and then they would have a prop list where they would have table, kettle, six chairs, and Louis Armstrong. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Like, it was, it's a bleak fact, but it is a really important nuance to understanding what it might have been like to be making a film for her at that time.

15:29Her films that sort of have stood the test of time, I suppose, would be Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. Those are the kind of classic early movies that, you know, you can still watch now, I guess. Those are all black casts or predominantly black cast. These are films with great stars in all the main roles. So she's part of a black ensemble. yeah and if you look at her filmography really those two films cabin in the sky which is an adaptation of a hit stage show and stormy weather which was an original film made by fox are really the highlights of her film career in the 40s and yeah as you say they are all black cast so it's important to say that everybody behind the camera was white and what happened there was they got the great and good of black performance into these films and created these amazing celebrations in those films they are the only examples where Lena Horne has dialogue where she gets to interact with other people and she actually has character arcs after that she basically loses the opportunity to have a meaningful interaction with the plot of any musical film and you said when we did our preparatory Zoom call you said something quite shocking she would sometimes not be allowed to stand too close to fellow actors so they could physically cut her out of movies yes there's an amazing sequence Your eyes went very wide there.

16:44Yeah. Yeah, this is like before CGI. They were just literally like, we will just splice the film just in case. They literally just had a sort of frame around her. The other thing I suppose we have to talk about in terms of racism or at least, you know, prejudice on set would be her hair and makeup, Desiree. Do you know what? I'm like, I know her hair and makeup was bad because it's not good now. So I can only imagine. We mentioned it very early on. You may recall Light Egyptian. Oh, my goodness. Do you know what that might refer to? I mean, a light Egyptian. I imagine that that was the makeup colour skin tone that they were going for and not like the name of the perm they were using on the hair, but either way.

17:23What is light Egyptian? And how was her hair and makeup in some ways othering of her in other ways sort of glamorising? In the 40s, the white press couldn't decide what her skin tone was. But one of the ways in which she was racialised is that they always refer to her skin colour. but in headlines she was referred to as sepia as copper as chocolate like these are not the same shades of foundation to put it a horrible way and i think there's a really important point about how she was lit and how she was represented so yeah you're right the max factor max space factor was working for mgm and was used to making bespoke foundation shades so he made one called platinum for Jean Harlow.

18:04And he makes Light Egyptian for Lena Horne. But we also have the reality that the hairdressers union ban their members from touching her head. Not only is she subject to this appalling condition, but she can't have her hair and makeup done in the same room as the white actors who are being treated by union members. So some of the stories about her being isolated, about her being cold and aloof from other performers and particularly from other black performers was specifically to do with the way in which the hairdresser union treated her. I may need you to repeat half of that because I went for a tailspin the second you said that the hairdresser was not allowed to touch her head.

18:40Is this like a Jim Crow thing? Like no water fountains, no hair, you can't touch your head because it'll bite your fingers off. Hannah, when we talk about the Jim Crow laws, these are segregation laws keeping white and black people apart in public spaces? Yeah, the Jim Crow laws were about protecting quote unquote white interests. They were about restricting interracial marriage. They were about restricting employment rights post the abolition of slavery. And they existed well into the 20th century. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Like those$5 roses at a gas station or a secondhand piece of technology that breaks in the first 10 minutes?

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21:50Unlucky in love, Miss Horn does get married again. So I've got good news there. And hubby number two, is this someone Lena can lean on? Is he going to be a kind of loyal, loving hubby who lets her be the star? Certainly at the beginning, yes. Okay. He is. Lena Horne marries the MGM arranger and conductor Lenny Hayton. Initially, they didn't get on. She didn't trust white men, in her words, and he didn't trust singers. But eventually, they get acquainted. That's the best way that sentence could have ended, because I was worried. Yeah. Yeah, could have framed that better. Never mind. They build this relationship together and eventually in 1947, they get married in Paris.

22:31But their partnership is extremely controversial in public and private because interracial marriage is still illegal in California. So they're married in Paris simply because it's illegal in the place they live and work. So interracial marriage is made legal in California a year later in 1948. This comes at a time where Lena's film career is starting to stall. She's refusing to play these anti-Black stereotypes and they're trying to push her to do it. And that leads her to be suspended from MGM's payroll for a period in 1945 because she won't take the part she's being given. She's also got these associations with radical Black groups.

23:06She's pouring her income into union organizing and she's known to be a friend of Paul Robeson. So they have a context in which the studio is starting to see her as a problem and then she goes and marries Lenny. I mean, if she's hanging out with Paul Robeson and doing all the organizing. Is she about to get the big C stamped all over her? Because this is that time, right? Absolutely right. I mean, I suppose Senator Joe McCarthy. Not cancer kits. No, no. I mean, we're talking here about the communist witch hunt in Hollywood. Okay, okay. That is what brings down Paul Robeson. To a certain extent, she dodges it by going abroad, right?

23:39Is that fair? Or is she forced abroad? I mean, her and Lenny, I'm going to call them Leany. That's their couple name. Lena and Lenny Leany. They're overseas, right? From 50 to 52? Yeah. So Lena Horne is named in Red Channels as a communist. And that's basically the end of her time at MGM for a number of years. She goes to Europe, as you say. Ultimately, I think the civil rights movement is a turning point in her life. And she meets Martin Luther King early on that process, who asks her to sing at a rally. And through that, she becomes involved in fundraising for him, fundraising for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

24:16She works with Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-lynching legislation. She attends the March on Washington with Josephine Baker. There's a beautiful photo of them standing in front of the monument. And this is kind of the beginning of her being very prominently vocal about, you know, political activism. In the 1970s, she speaks out for black women radicals like Angela Davis when she's incarcerated. But I think it's also worth saying that through the 40s, she had been supporting radical politicians, helping with union fundraisers and thinking about the ways in which like black political organizing could function and then in civil rights she came to understand that the way she'd been used as a figurehead or an aspirational symbol of blackness was actually really negatively loaded and started to talk publicly about that and kind of relearn her black radical consciousness I guess.

25:06The sort of Stormy Weather that she'd sung about in in 43 unfortunately Stormy Weather came for her in 1970-71. She had a sort of a really tragic 18 months or so where she lost a lot of people she loved. Yeah, so by this point she and Lenny have separated because she was just less interested in her music career and more involved in political activism. I have no idea what Lenny did or what he was like. He was just a white man she didn't trust but then she did enough to marry him. He gave her a career in Europe and then he dipped. He was just like, I'm a plot device, bye! What the heck? Well, sometimes it's nice that it goes that way for them.

25:45Lenny McGuffin. I mean. And Lenny passed away. So they separate and then her father and her son both pass away within six months of each other. Tell us about her music career in the 80s. So the appearance on The Wiz is really symbolic because she has transitioned into being essentially an industry veteran and she gets to basically sing a song that Diana Ross has just performed and we have a kind of classic version and then we have this blues gospel reworking of it specifically for her and that throws out what she sounded like at MGM and completely reforms her sound. As a result, she starts working live again and she has a one-woman show called The Lady and Her Music which opens in 1981 and runs on Broadway for a year.