Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 20 May 2010 — Page 7

The Muncie Times • May 20, 2010 • Page 7

Continued from page 6 handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South. "Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut." In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Home in movies and advertisements as glamorously as were white beauties including Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Nevertheless, Ms. Home was frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her. James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Home, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they

could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar." Ms. Home appeared on television and at major concert halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Home: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards. Gavin said Ms. Home cultivated a "ferocious" singing personality through her flashing eyes and teeth. Ms. Home said she felt a need to act aloof onstage to protect herself from unwanted advances early in her career, especially from white audiences. "They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman," she told the New York Daily News in 1997. "The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach. ... I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman." Lor her repertoire, she chose the sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Billy Strayhom. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly. In her singing, Ms. Home showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New

Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout." In the early 1960s, Ms. Home said she felt her sophisticated act sounded increasingly obsolete as she saw a younger generation at sit-ins and marches protesting racial discrimination. Ms. Home struggled for years to find a public role on race matters. Her earliest mentors urged her to remain reserved and graceful in public, what she called "a good little symbol." In the late 1940s and 1950s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in black neighborhoods, but Ms. Home successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids bum Ms. Home's sheets. In 1963, Ms. Home appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Home also used her celebrity to rally frontline civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women. Looking back, she said her legacy on race was complicated by her ambition. She said she married the white

conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947, her second marriage, to advance her career, because "he could get me into places no black manager could." "It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me," she told the Times in 1981. "He was a nice man who wasn't thinking all these things, and because he was a nice man and because he was in my comer, I began to love him." The work at Cafe Society Downtown prompted ecstatic reviews and led to Ms. Home's career onscreen. Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Home said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives. To Ms. Home's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts were resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the black acting community, who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture. "I was not trying to embarrass anyone or show up my colleagues," Ms. Home told Richard Schickel for his biography, "Lena" (1965). "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into. It was no cmsade, though of course I hoped

that if I could set my own terms in the movies and also be successful, then others might be able to follow." Bored from infrequent movie work, she began taking outside singing engagements and devoted more time to advocating fair employment and antilynching laws. She also filed a complaint with the NAACP when she sang for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kan., on a studio-sponsored tour and saw German prisoners of war seated ahead of black soldiers. This complaint irritated the studio. MGM producer Arthur Freed was also unhappy that Ms. Home refused to act in a Broadway show he had backed, "St. Louis Woman." She said the black characters were cliches and offensive. She said Freed took revenge by turning down her requests for plum movie assignments. Ms. Home returned to a lucrative singing career. At one point in the mid-1950s, she made $12,500 a week singing at Las Vegas casinos. Her 1957 best-selling album of jazz standards, "At the Waldorf Astoria," captured her at a peak moment — at the Tony New York hotel where she long performed, backed by an orchestra conducted by her husband, Hayton. Hayton, from whom she had long been separated, died in 1971; her son died about the same time from a kidney ailment. Survivors include her daughter, the writer Gail Buckley; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Buckle} is a journalist and author whose articles have appeared in Vogue magazine and the Los Angeles Times.