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The Life Of Lena Horne
Atria
July 2009
On Sale: June 23, 2009
608 pages
ISBN: 0743271432
EAN: 9780743271431
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
At long last, the first serious
biography of entertainment legend Lena Horne -- the
celebrated star of film, stage, and music who became one of
the first African-American icons. At the 74th annual
Academy Awards in 2002, Halle Berry thanked Lena Horne for
paving the way for her to become the first black recipient
of a Best Actress Oscar. Though limited, mostly to guest
singing appearances in splashy Hollywood musicals, "the
beautiful Lena Horne," as she was often called, became a
pioneering star for African Americans in the 1940s and
fifties. Now James Gavin, author of Deep in a Dream: The
Long Night of Chet Baker, draws on a wealth of unmined
material and hundreds of interviews -- one of them with
Horne herself -- to give us the defining portrait of an
American icon. Gavin has gotten closer than any other
writer to the celebrity who has lived in reclusion since
1998. Incorporating insights from the likes of Ruby Dee,
Tony Bennett, Diahann Carroll, Arthur Laurents, and several
of Horne's fellow chorines from Harlem's Cotton Club,
Stormy Weather offers a fascinating portrait of a
complex, even tragic Horne -- a stunning talent who inspired
such giants of showbiz as Barbra Streisand, Eartha Kitt, and
Aretha Franklin, but whose frustrations with racism, and
with tumultuous, root-less childhood, left wounds too deep
to heal. The woman who emerged was as angry as she was
luminous. From the Cotton Club's glory days and the back
lots of Hollywood's biggest studios to the glitzy but
bigoted hotels of Las Vegas's heyday, this behind-the-scenes
look at an American icon is as much a story of the limits of
the American dream as it is a masterful, ground-breaking
biography.
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