The Lady and her Music

I'm reading a biography of Lena Horne at the moment, marveling at the enormous strength of character it must have taken to have made for herself the life that she did, faced as she was at every turn by the most unpromising circumstances you can imagine, from a spectacularly unhelpful family background to the seemingly insuperable walls of racism into which she ran at every turn.

Most remarkable, so far (I'm just about halfway through) is how entirely she had to create herself, the public image that became Miss Lena Horne.  She was at the beginning a gawky, unmusical chorus girl, with early observers at a loss trying to figure out why it was that audiences were drawn to her.  It's as if she started with the star quality, and only on top of that built the craft that helped it shine through.  It seems impossible to believe, but many, early on, were deeply unimpressed by her singing, ridiculing her too-careful diction and, in the beginning, her inability to connect on an emotional level with the lyrics she sang.

Well, she certainly took care of that, turning her early limitations into her greatest assets, selling the numbers she sang by crisply putting over the words while finding ways to subtly make even the blandest arrangements bluesy and insinuating.

We see her here in the era that must have been for her the most infuriating of her professional life, even as it brought her the mass audiences on which she built the subsequent decades of her long and distinguished career.  Her contract with MGM at first seemed like an amazing breakthrough, the first time an African-American performer made it to the top in the movies without kowtowing to demeaning and degrading stereotypes.  The problem was that, without those stereotypes, even L.B. Mayer - her greatest partisan - didn't really know what to do with her.  Instead of becoming a genuine leading lady, she found herself dropped into film after film as a specialty number, as disposable as the kinds of novelty acts that lesser studios like Fox threw into their comparatively ramshackle musicals.  She even found herself resented by other black performers, particularly the ones who had built successful careers on the very roles - servants, mammies, comic buffoons - she repudiated.

Here she briefly takes center stage in Words and Music, the 1948 attempt to dramatize (and sanitize) the life and work of Rodgers and Hart.  She puts over "The Lady is a Tramp" like nobody's business, looks sensational in her Helen Rose costume, and turns the artificial conventions of being an MGM girl singer (the stylized gestures and what she would later call "pretty mouth singing") into something that only highlights the arch and genially racy nature of the song (her little moué at being "all alone when I lower my lamp" is worth the price of admission).

Horne seems to have been a complicated lady, one whose public image - all dignified achievement, ladylike glamour, and slighty haughty intelligence - masked a lot of anger, resentment, and even bitterness.  Never mind.  The best of her shines through in even her most perfunctory movie appearances, and later on she found ways to channel her demons into performances - on Broadway and beyond - full of fire and self-mockery.  Personally, I can't think of anybody I rather have on hand for a trip to Hobohemia, can you?

Au Petit Matin

MGM's 1938 Marie Antoinette is a film better known as the Widow Thalberg's last fling with the Grade-A Prestige Pictures she'd been making since she hit her stride at the top of the decade than it is as an actual movie-to-have-seen.*  I haven't, and so was all the more surprised to see, as above, how realistically - for a Norma Shearer picture - it plays the dénouement of the sad lady's life.  Would you know this was Norma Shearer, if you didn't know it was Norma Shearer?

All of which comes to mind because today marks the 219th anniversary of the onetime Austrian archduchess's death-by-guillotine.  It was an extreme end to a life of extravagance and so has remained a source of much fascination ever since. 

As a character, the indispensable IMDb tells us, the ill-fated queen has appeared in nearly 100 differents guises on the large and small screens, with a cavalcade of actresses joining Shearer, from silent pioneer Julia Swayne Gordon in 1916's My Lady's Slipper to Jayne Meadows as a guest on Steve Allen's faux/historico talk show, Meeting of Minds.  She has inspired at least one contemporary opera, The Ghosts of Versailles (I was at the premiere, but really almost all I remember is Marilyn Horne playing Samira the Turkish Entertainer in an interpolated star turn that really could be a Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion all on its ownsome).  She also crops up in La Révolution française, the 1973 rock opera by the team of Boublil and Schönberg, who went to on operatize, as it were other picturesque conflicts in Les Mis and Miss Saigon.   She gets to sing a very pretty song, "Au petit matin (16 October 1793)", which you can sample here.

All of which risks our losing sight of the two women really on my mind, the queens of France and MGM.  You can see Shearer's excellent work en route to the scaffold here, but it's best to turn off the execrable music.  The woman she's portraying certainly could never have dreamed how very wrong things would go in her once-charmed life, nor that her death and those of her family would set a dark pattern for so many to follow: her nephew (several times removed), Maximilian of Mexico; the Romanovs in their Ekaterinberg basement; the boy-king of Iraq and his family.  Shearer, of course, kept her head (although, in the end, not her mind), but lost her career. 

Both, I suppose, might be seen in different ways as object lessons of what happens to vain, silly women who suddenly find themselves defenseless after a lifetime of cosseting, but that seems unduly harsh to both.  How much nicer to remember the pretty girl, actress and archduchess alike, setting out on a great adventure that brought her, for a while at least, to the top...

* But oh, you say, what about The Women?  Well, it certainly was an A, even an A+, but it's an ensemble epic, by no means a star vehicle, and by no means a typical Shearer outing.  Actually, it should have been the picture that reinvented her, but after that there are just three pale copies of her earlier triumphs, over and out.  The Women is a treasure, but for Mrs. Thalberg, a dead end.

Trailer Trash: Ease on Down

Here's a picture that had it all: big stars, a hit Broadway show, infinite reservoirs of goodwill from the source material, and a hip disco sound.

Unfortunately, in having it all, it also had all you can think of go wrong - Sid & Marty Krofft-calibre costumes; a cheesy neo-Metropolis design scheme; busy, pointless numbers full of flailing extras; terrible stop-motion animation; and rear-projections that wouldn't have passed muster in a Poverty Row programmer.

Still, it also had Lena Horne, and the only on-screen pairing of Motown's two greatest stars, and if nothing else it entirely sums up, good and bad, the times that made it.

This week it seems to mark the end of a certain road, or one not taken. Imagine if it had been a hit, with both its stars then leading a revival of the musical genre that rolled on for a half-dozen years or so - maybe Miss Ross in a neo-Lady in the Dark, or Jackson paired up with someone like Irene Cara for a string of song-and-dancers. Well, didn't happen; the same year brought us Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and a musical drought that even the success of Grease couldn't stem.

On the other hand, its failure freed Jackson up for Off the Wall - and everything else that happened after. Maybe it really is a shame it flopped.

The Many Friends of Lena Horne

Everybody loves Lena! And why not?

She's stunning, but not so much that she pulls focus entirely from - I'm guessing on the timeline here - Mrs. Warner;

She's equally at home tossing one back with Tony...

...or kindly leading a guest who may already have had enough to the nearest exit.

She's happy leaning on a guest (bonus points for anyone who can explain why Shirley showed up in a T-shirt, velour housedress, blazer, and pearls - maybe it's one of those reincarnation things?)...

...or herself providing a suprisingly strong knee on which to perch.

God knows she's more patient than I, not batting an eye at being nearly swept aside by Lucy's furs -

Or having her audience distracted when a pal stops by in an outfit only marginally more comprehensible than Shirley's.

And, like all genuine divas, she bursts into living color when at least she meets a true peer. Title this one "when goddesses embrace."

I like knowing that Lena is still with us, albeit quietly, her days of entwined cocktails and evicting junkies, perhaps to her relief, behind her. She's the real deal.

Adiós, Amigo

The world is down another leading man; Ricardo Montalbán, king of the rolling Rs and urbane affability, has headed toward that Very Special Love Boat Two-Parter in the sky.

Before he became a television staple (and check out his IMDb listing - that man worked!) he was of course a bona fide movie star - seen here in the obligatory Paramount wardrobe session with Edith Head. He had the kind of aura that could lead one to believe he actually did wear an evening suit to a costume fitting.

I've rarely seen him look more engaging than here, though, hands clasping the waist of the delectable Lena Horne during the Broadway run of Jamaica, the 1957 Harold Arlen musical in which they starred.

He seems to have been a thoroughly decent person, a hardworking actor, and he even survived more than a half-century of being Loretta Young's brother-in-law, which can't have been a picnic.

Tipsy Trio

Non-teetotallers Ava, Stevie, Lena pose for a candid.

Something tells me that this is not the beginning of the evening.

Perfection

Why not slow down for a moment today and consider the glory of Lena Horne?

She sings "Moon River" as if she were just thinking of it, glorious in Louise Brooks wig, pencil sheath, and just a pearl or two.