Stormy Weather: 'The Life of Lena Horne

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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Title of ebook: Stormy Weather: 'The Life of Lena Horne
ISBN: 9781439164259
parent-ISBN: 9780743271431
Publisher: Atria Books
Pages: 608
Published: 06-2009
Released online for download: 06-23-2009
Author of eBook: Gavin, James

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Stormy Weather

The Life of Lena Horne
CHAPTER 1

LORRAINE GERARD, the wife of a bebop pianist named Vinnie Gerard, was nearing eighty in 2005, but time had not dimmed a particular memory from her Depression-era childhood. She grew up in Canarsie, a bayside neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Her family took her for weekend fun to the shore, where buskers entertained for coins on a well-known pier.

In 1933, Lorraine got her first glimpse of a lovely, waiflike teenager whose name, she heard, was Lena Horne. "Every Saturday and Sunday she used to sing and dance on the beach for pennies," Lorraine recalled. "She appeared to be extremely poor. I thought she had the ugliest legs, and I wasn't the only one that thought that. Scrawny, you know? Her dresses were skimpy-looking; you could tell that she was in need." Lorraine's family never spoke to the girl, but she earned their sympathy, and they tossed some change her way.

Her household needed all the help it could get. Lena's mother was a jobless and sickly actress; her Cuban stepfather was unemployed, too. Th ey could barely pay the rent on their small Brooklyn ... read full excerpt from: Stormy Weather: 'The Life of Lena Horne ebook

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