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By Verena Dobnik, Associated Press Writer

      NEW YORK (AP) - Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and
actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white
audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway
superstardom, has died. She was 92.

      Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to
hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other
details.

      Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often
overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the
underlying reason for her success.

      "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people
could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the
worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was
or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."


      In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to
sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana
nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.


      In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the
role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy
Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and
her signature piece.

      On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne
was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz
to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady
Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."

      In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in
1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the
incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva
dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."

      But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation
of racism.

      "I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my
people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. ...
It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New
York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian
Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who
Changed America."

      While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky,"
in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in
musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South
without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red
Skelton comedy; "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in
1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in
1946.

      "Metro's cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great
singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.


      Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of
self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and
therefore can't hurt," she once said.

      Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil
rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode
a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular
music.


      Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her
Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer
used two renditions - one straight and the other gut-wrenching - of
"Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual
odyssey of her five-decade career.


      A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was
"ageless ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like
glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her."

      When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best
actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy
Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every
nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this
door tonight has been opened."


      Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed
slave, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family
in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote
in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among
their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a
black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.


      Dropping out of school at age 16 to support her ailing mother,
Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem
night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele
white.

      She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra,
billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she
joined Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940.

      A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the
Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.

      Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to
"pass" in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor
even developed an "Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the
budding actress while she was at MGM.

      But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of
Film Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the
studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.


      "I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that
Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

      Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the
Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism
until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German
prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers
were consigned to the rear.

      That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

      She got involved in various social and political organizations
and - along with her friendship with Paul Robeson - got her name
onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.

      By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in
the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who
made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963
joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin
Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also
spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader,
Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.


      It was also in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography,
"Lena," with author Richard Schickel.

      The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a
fresh burst of artistry.

      She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man,
in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and
England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce
in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.


      In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin
recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a
white man, she replied: "To get even with him."

      Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970
and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing
to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them,
comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the
stage, with results that surprised her.

      "I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she
said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to
live."

      And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

      "I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because
being black made me understand."
      

Gallery

Arts and Culture

Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and
actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white
audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway
superstardom, has died. She was 92.

Barrier-breaking jazz star Lena Horne dies at 92

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