SF Chronicle Review: 'Stormy Weather' by James Gavin

David Wiegand / SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

For most of her life, Lena Horne has been a very angry woman. She may have given as good as she got for many of her 92 years, but as related in James Gavin's definitive new biography, she had reason enough.

"Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne" takes its title from her signature song, but in the beginning, it wasn't even her song: It was Ethel Waters', and the older star's resentment of Horne during the making of the groundbreaking film "Cabin in the Sky" would presage Horne's own iciness years later toward younger singer-actresses like Diahann Carroll.

Although Horne was born and raised in a middle-class family, her early life was no walk in the park. Her mother was an actress who frequently left Lena to be raised by her grandparents. At school, she was taunted by other black kids for the lightness of her skin. "In her first memoir," Gavin writes, "Horne recalled their abuse. 'Yaller! Yaller!' they chanted. 'Got a white daddy! Shame! Shame!' " Gavin tells us she tried to darken her skin by spending time in the sun, but she also felt self-conscious about the way she talked: "At her grandmother's home, to use anything but textbook English was grounds for punishments. But [other African Americans] talked in thick southern accents, using Negro dialect. A confusion overtook her that she never quite lost."

As a teenager, she was hired as a chorus girl at the Cotton Club and broke into films largely on the basis of her extraordinary beauty. MGM found her when African Americans were routinely portrayed as maids or servants, or as shuffling stereotypes.

Most of Horne's film roles were cameos in musicals such as "Panama Hattie" and "Ziegfeld Follies," where she would be shown standing against a column, beautifully coiffed and gowned, to deliver a song. When the song was over, she was gone. And when the films played the South, she was gone entirely.

Image becomes weapon

Horne was a token, and it angered her, but it took years for her to voice that anger. For much of her life, she was conflicted about racial identity. At 18, she posed for ads for Dr. Fred Palmer's Skin Whitener Ointment. As a young woman, she sang "white," according to bandleader Artie Shaw, one of her lovers. On the song "Good for Nothin' Joe," recorded in 1941, Gavin observes that "[h]er delivery lacks even a hint of black-music influence; she sings with elocution school diction, clean and neat." In the '50s, she performed for white audiences in pricey supper clubs, but swore at them under her breath when she took her bows.

"If her beauty had lured people in," Gavin writes, "Horne would taunt them with it, dangle it out of reach, just as film roles had been held out of hers. She found a way to use her torrid image as a weapon, not just an enticement."

But all of that anger couldn't be contained forever. Gavin points to a 1960 incident at a cheesy Hollywood restaurant as pivotal to the emergence of Horne's latter-day activism. While her second husband, Lennie Hayton (who was white), was away from their table, Horne was insulted by a white patron and threw an ashtray and two hurricane lamps at him.

In the '60s, she became involved in the civil rights movement, but at first, the idea of speaking at a rally or singing in an all-black Southern church scared her, in part because she'd been both adored by African Americans and criticized as a sellout for so many years.

Once uncaged, her anger was such that she counted herself a follower of Malcolm X and was less than convinced by Martin Luther King Jr.'s more passive response to prejudice.

Civil disappointments

"What was 'honest' about Lena Horne had become harder to discern," Gavin writes of Horne in the '70s and after. "For all her disappointment over the outcome of the civil rights movement, proud and distinctive black identities had emerged all around her. ... The popular black culture of the day ... gave her the license to be what her career, up to then, hadn't allowed."

Her personal life was always as much of a struggle as her professional life. She married an African American early on and had two children, her son, Teddy, who died of kidney failure after years of drug abuse, and her daughter, Gail, who married filmmaker Sidney Lumet. She wasn't close to her children early on, although she developed a relationship with her daughter later.

The power of Gavin's biography is that he has clearly labored to separate fact from fiction. In the future, it may be easier for biographers to detail the lives of current celebrities whose every move is seemingly captured by TMZ and tabloid TV.

But MGM stars, as one observer of Horne's life puts it, were "taught to lie" and, after a while, Horne seemed to believe much of her own hype and revised her life story whenever she thought it necessary. Beyond that, she was a complicated woman whose personal struggles with identity were inextricably intertwined with those of African Americans throughout the 20th century. In Gavin's capable hands, Lena Horne's story is both uniquely her own and an integral part of a larger cultural journey.

Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne
By James Gavin (Atria Books; 598 pages, $27)