HORNES OF PLENTY

Gail Lumet Buckley’s embarkation on the story of “The Hornes: An American Family” began when her grandfather died and her mother, singer Lena Horne, asked her to put his trunk in storage in a basement. Opening it, she found an astonishing trove of photographs, letters, clippings, an 1884 letter from Benjamin Harrison, a 1910 Tammany election ballot.

“I started putting everything in chronological order,” Buckley, 48, said the other day. “It all unfolded like a detective story--here is what was happening in 1875, there’s what went on in 1895. And then to read black American history, as I did extensively, and put that in on top of it; this was an exciting experience.”

In telling the “Roots”-like story of “The Hornes” (Alfred A. Knopf; $18.95), Buckley makes it clear “they were all stars to me. My mother just happens to be the star that everybody knows.”

Although Lena, 69, and the author are the focal points throughout two-thirds of the story, Buckley has much more to relate than a dual biography. This profusely illustrated family history tells us more about Lena Horne--by examining her heritage--than was revealed in either of Lena’s autobiographies, which were too cautious and were published too early in her career (in 1950 and 1965).

What might have happened if Horne, who had already “disgraced her family” by going into show business, had just been mildly successful, not very famous, and just an average show business person? Would she have been accepted by her family?

“I think,” Buckley replied, “that she would have been the black sheep of the family, and would have given it up and retired back to the bosom of the black bourgeoisie. If she hadn’t sensed her own ability as strongly as she did, she might have remained longer with my father and become another bored, unhappy housewife. She was too fastidious to remain just another chorus girl.”

A somewhat startling response, yet typical of the frankness shown by Buckley as she toyed with her lunch in a Beverly Hills hotel and talked about the members of her family that form the basis for her literary voyage of self-discovery.

Because Lena broke up with her first husband, Louis Jones, when Gail was a baby, and because Gail was raised with Lena, while her brother, Ted, lived with Jones (Ted died of a kidney disease at age 30), she was able to learn firsthand some of the traumas in Lena Horne’s life: specifically, a domineering mother who steered Lena at age 16 into the chorus line at the Cotton Club.

“Suppose her mother hadn’t taken her, and she’d been raised in Brooklyn by her grandmother, who would never have allowed her to go on the stage? By now my mother would be a retired schoolteacher,” Buckley said.

“I don’t understand these ‘Mommie Dearest’ books, although I think Christina Crawford probably had an ax to grind. My grandmother was a very neurotic woman, yet Lena didn’t want to see her that way. Being one step removed, I felt much more loyal to my mother, who was loyal to her mother in turn.”

Other aspects of Lena’s life and career that were underplayed or ignored in the Lena Horne books are dealt with frankly by Buckley. There was, for example, the celebrated contretemps when Ethel Waters, clearly jealous of Horne’s youth and beauty, resented working with her on the 1942 all-black musical, “Cabin in the Sky.” At one point, Buckley recounts, “She flew into a semi-coherent diatribe that began with attacks on Lena and wound up with a vilification of ‘Hollywood Jews’. . . . Lena and Ethel never spoke again. And Ethel--because of her vocal anti-Semitism--was a very long time between pictures.”

Buckley also reveals that for a while in 1941 Lena had a secret boyfriend, the then-married Joe Louis.

“I felt enough time had gone by to talk about these things; besides, both of those characters (Waters and Louis) are no longer with us. When I gave mother the manuscript I told her I’d cut anything she wanted me to, and she said she wouldn’t cut a word.”

Asked to comment on the book, Lena said in a seperate interview Wednesday, “I’m very proud of Gail. She did a job of brilliant research and I’m not saying that just because she’s my daughter. She had a fine education and this book has brought it all to fruition. It’s very honest--there are things in it that she and I couldn’t say to each other.

“Of course, my dad and I were the black sheep of the family. I just hope we didn’t do the house slaves too much disgrace.”

Like her mother, Buckley has spent her adult life among rich, glamorous, privileged people. She grew up to consider her stepfather, Lennie Hayton, “as much of a parent as my real father, Louis. Lennie was indulgent, devoted, fatherly and fun.” She was with Lena and Lennie in Hollywood and Europe; she went to Radcliffe, worked as a volunteer on the Kennedy campaign, took a job with Life magazine, and for 14 years was married to film director Sidney Lumet. Either of her daughters (Amy, 21 and Jenny, 19) could make Lena Horne a great-grandmother in the next few years.

Again, like her mother, Buckley had to stop and look hard at her life and values. Lena’s self-rediscovery followed the social turbulence of the 1960s. “Her remarriage, as well as her post-war politics, caused her to reexamine the bourgeois life style. She found it shallow and frivolous . . . black Babbittry.”

Buckley’s turning point was dealt with only glancingly in the book. “The editors cut it out, saying rightly that it was not part of this story; it belonged in a different book. The fact that I had a religious conversion. I became a sort of born-again Catholic. For some bizarre reason the Catholic church is ahead of everyone else in terms of social justice, though not on the subject of women, nor on sexuality.

“Sidney and I were not on the same wavelength, religiously or politically. I became a different person, and we had nothing in common. At 40, when I got a divorce, I had become committed to a different sort of value system than that of the movies. Then I met Kevin Buckley, who has exactly the same ideas as mine. He had lost his faith, as all good Catholics do. When he found it again he went to do a story at Lourdes--he’s an editor and journalist--and after he came back we talked and found an incredible community of ideas.”

Gail Buckley’s own writing career began by accident. In fact, for a moment it seemed she might follow her mother on the stage; she won the best acting prize at the 1957 Yale Drama Festival in Moliere’s “School for Wives.” She shrugs it off:

“I wouldn’t have been a good actress. I have a small talent for comedy, that’s all, and I wasn’t ambitious. In fact, my secret fantasy is to be the kind of person whose name everyone knows, but whose face is unfamiliar--and who has lots of money and a wonderful life. That to me would be the greatest form of celebrity--like the people who do the American Express ads.”

Published last month, “The Hornes” reveals how, searching through her grandfather’s trunk, Buckley found photos of, and stories about, everyone back to her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Sinai Reynolds, born in Maryland in 1777 (her mother probably came here from Senegal), who in 1859 purchased her own freedom and that of her four slave children; and Moses Calhoun, Buckley’s great-great-grandfather, who during the short-lived freedom of the post-Civil War decade became a restaurateur with a staff of five, and a prominent member of Atlanta’s black middle class.

Calhoun’s daughters were Lena, a statuesque beauty who went to Fisk University in Tennessee, and Cora, a college graduate from Atlanta University in 1881 when few women of any race were college graduates. Cora married Edwin Horn (he later added an “e” to the name), a schoolmaster and magazine editor, and an alternate delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention in 1884.

By the turn of the century the Hornes had moved to Brooklyn. During the dark years of the segregationist Woodrow Wilson presidency they were active in the recently formed National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Hornes’ son, Teddy, married Edna Scottron, among whose family were several pillars of the black Brooklyn community. Teddy’s and Edna’s daughter Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, now Lena Horne Jones Hayton.

Through the generations, most of the Calhouns and Hornes were stable, reasonably well-to-do people whose lives were the counterpart of those lived by middle-class whites; but with the reimposition of segregation they became politically frustrated.

“My great-grandfather, Edwin Horn, could have made a fine President,” says Buckley. “He started out an idealistic young Republican, but ended up an embittered old Tammany man.

“Paul Robeson had a similar experience; he was such a charismatic figure that if he hadn’t been black, he too could have become President. It’s amazing what he achieved in the face of everything he had to go through. His life was a tragedy of American racism.”

Lena Horne, Buckley recalls, knew Robeson well, admired him and was strongly influenced by him. “She was politicized early, to a degree, by Paul, and also by Barney Josephson, the owner of Cafe Society, who told her not to sing songs like ‘Sleepy Time Down South,’ which glorified stereotypes.”

Stereotypes are still with us, Buckley adds, pointing with annoyance to a recent review in Time magazine of her book, implying that “inside every black princess, an empress of the blues is struggling to come out . . . like Bessie Smith.” Buckley, who has in her about as much of Bessie Smith as Barbara Walters has of Ethel Merman, calls this “Ridiculous, stereotypical nonsense.”

Succinctly, she sums up the change in her famous mother, who was brought up never to say “ain’t” but later had no hesitation in using double negatives and “y’all” both onstage and off.

“Something happens to the third generation of any group. The first generation of the black bourgeoisie were the uplifters. Second came the cultural generation--suddenly there was the Harlem renaissance, the great artists of the ‘20s and ‘30s. The third generation was black Babbittry, in the sense that it had settled into what could have been the middle class of any color.

“My mother, however, reached the point where she had no more use for black debutante balls than she had for white debutante balls. She reacted against cocktail parties, playing bridge, that sort of thing.

“She’s still politicized, still has her convictions, but I think she lost some idealistic illusions along the way, as a lot of us do. I’m still not disillusioned, though; I’m still a feisty radical, and I expect to stay that way.”