NONFICTION
Lena Horne sings a bitter song in ‘Stormy Weather’
“Stormy Weather’s” James Gavin had an interview with Lena Horne that he describes in the introduction to this book. It was 1994, and he met her at the Wyndham Hotel in Manhattan.
“My heart was pounding,” he wrote, “for I was about to meet Lena Horne, an intimidating show-business and cultural icon.”
They talked for two hours. “I never speak to people,” Horne told him, “so when I’m with someone like you I talk too much.” At the end of the interview, Gavin writes, Horne kissed him goodbye.
Good thing she liked him. She appears to have liked hardly anyone else.
The aptly titled “Stormy Weather” paints a portrait of Horne as an angry young woman turned angry old woman (she is now 92, and no longer makes public appearances).
A typical anecdote: “Claude Thompson recalled witnessing Horne at her Waldorf dressing table before a show. A full house awaited her downstairs. As she touched up her makeup she snarled, ‘F#$*& em! F@#$(*& em!’”
Then: “Horne wasn’t out to warm hearts on the fourth episode of ‘The Judy Garland Show’. . .”
And: Closing out a decade of professional triumph, Horne felt anything but jubilant. The singer counted her letdowns. She couldn’t sell records on her own, couldn’t get a movie lead, couldn’t do TV on the level she craved. At 42, she saw her looks and her chances fading ... Worst of all, she felt more isolated within her own race than ever. A black singer swathed in white glamour, she entertained in places where few blacks could afford to go...
It’s hard to blame Horne for being angry. Gavin spends every page justifying her rage. But that leads to another problem: Early on, you realize you are dealing with a writer with an agenda.
Gavin takes a scolding, divisive tone. Clucking over Horne’s Catholic grandmother, Cora, he writes: “Even the lusty sounds of gospel and blues made Cora cringe; in her home, anything that signified a loss of control was shunned. Instead, she listened to Bach and Gregorian chants, cutting off the musical part of Lena’s black heritage.”
You want to shake him and say, no, Cora did not listen to Gregorian chants and shun blues music because she feared a lack of control. She did that because she was Catholic. Are black people not allowed to be Catholic?
Gavin also should know that in that earlier era, many black people, particularly religious black people, did not listen to blues. They saw it as lowdown music. I do not mean to make a big deal out of this one paragraph. But it was the point in the book where I stopped trusting the author.
And it was only page 14!
It’s a pity. I believe Gavin has a sincere love for show biz history. His writing style is wooden, but his book “Intimate Nights” was an entertaining, informal history of the New York cabaret world.
Part of the problem with “Stormy Weather” is that the author’s auspicious first interview with Horne turned out to be the last, as far as I could tell. There is no comment from Horne in retrospect on the events of her life. Gavin fills out the book with anecdotes from other people, quotes from hundreds of interviews Horne gave over the years, and stories from other books.
Though he has not skimped on his research, not a lot is new. The book, while faithfully chronological, jumps awkwardly from one thing to another.
Gavin knows a good story when he sees one. From Mel Torme’s memoirs comes a great image of Judy Garland clashing with Horne in rehearsals for “The Judy Garland Show” and finally saying, “Aw, screw her.”
A long soap opera in the book deals with how Horne, troubled and torn, was the voice of black activism while being married to a white man, the Jewish-American bandleader Lennie Hayton.
“Horne had grown increasingly hostile toward the white man at home, who was dependent on her and beatifically patient,” writes Gavin. He writes that she would sleep at night with her arms crossed, to bar him from touching her. That is one of the most pathetic pictures of a marriage I can recall.
Speculation swirls around Horne’s refusal to let Janet Jackson play her in a TV biopic. It was soon after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl fashion faux-pas, and Jackson is on record saying, “I don’t think the decision came from Lena.” Odds are it did come from Lena, Gavin writes, though of course we will never know for sure.
Such revelations, though, are hidden in the gloom.
Horne, in her defense, might have suspected this would happen. Once, Gavin writes, humorist Art Buchwald asked her why she had never written her memoirs.
“Because I have not lived a very interesting life,” she replied.
Incredible, that she would say something like that.
Equally incredible, that this book makes me think she was right.
Mary Kunz Goldman is The News’ classical music critic and is working on a biography of Buffalo-raised pianist Leonard Pennario.
Stormy Weather:
The Life of Lena Horne
By James Gavin
Atria Books
595 pages, $27
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