Hollywood could not articulate it but there was something ferocious about Lena Horne. Not fierce, that favorite adjective of drag queens, hipsters, and the publicists who love them.
I am talking ferociousness.
That is what I saw during the early 1980s when she came to the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco for the national tour of her award-winning one-woman show. The gay aesthetic that had wafted around other Hollywood grande dames who made Broadway turns late in their careers -- think Marlene Dietrich -- may have existed for Horne, too. But if it was present during that run at the Golden Gate, it escaped me.
As a 19 year old, what I tasted in the zeitgeist surrounding that tour of “Lena: The Lady and her Music” was a rather vanilla appreciation of a good old fashioned musical roman a clef. It was Biography, expertly Broadway-ized, which is to say that Lena Horne’s life story was recounted over two hours with a big dose of fiction stirred into the witty anecdotes and expertly-arranged American Songbook numbers.
The appeal of the production crossed race class, and gender lines.
“The Lady and Her Music” did boffo box office in the 40 cities where it played throughout 1982. My mom had been in primary school when Horne co-starred in splashy Hollywood ‘40s movie musicals, including “Panama Hattie” and “Stormy Weather.” Mom brought me, her youngest child, born in 1963, to The Golden Gate to see “The Lady and Her Music” largely because I had been a Theater Kid in high school. At that time, I had already witnessed performances of Beverly Sills in “Lucia di Lammermore” at San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, and Leontyne Price at Davies Symphony Hall, but they didn’t ignite my imagination in the same way.
Horne by the early 1980s represented glamorous, mid-20th century pop culture mixed with a low-key kind of race pride. I didn’t know if she had ever marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or been on the Edmund G. Pettus Bridge in Alabama when John Lewis was clubbed by racist white cops. But I knew that many of her alluring performances in Golden Age Hollywood musical pictures had been edited out at the time they’d premiered back in the ‘40s
And if the Lena Horne that I watched on stage in ’82 chewed up the sparse scenery while she told those stories of Hollywood injustice, well, who could blame her?
Still, “The Lady and her Music” really wasn’t revolutionary. It was a stagey autobiography put forth by a canny senior citizen ... who happened to have been the first black contract player at MGM. But Lena Horne was undeniably a great personality and performer, a trouper with flashing dark eyes, stunning cheekbones under luminous skin, and the whitest, sharpest teeth I’d ever seen.
Was it all stagecraft? Who can say? But we all sat agog as she deployed those teeth with a ferocity that cut to your core.
