A Carefully Crafted Look at ‘Lena Horne’

“My life has been about surviving,” Lena Horne says. “Along the way I also became an artist.”

She is precisely right about that. At 79, Horne is not only a survivor with incredible presence and a well-tuned sense of self, she also continues to be a gifted and articulate performer. Her thoughtful commentary is a key element in “Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice,” the first installment in the 11th season of PBS’ “American Masters” biography series.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” she adds. “One in which music became first my refuge and then my salvation.”

And producer-director Susan Lacy’s carefully crafted biography details how that process took place, mixing old photographs, film clips from Horne’s movie and television appearances and interviews with Ossie Davis, Bobby Short and daughter Gail Buckley as well as--most significantly--Horne’s own pithy observations.

Her passage, from the beginning, was filled with dualities. Shunted from one home to another as a child, she rarely had the experience of unstinting family support. Yet she was marked as a star almost from the time of her youthful dancing days at the Cotton Club in 1930s. In Hollywood, she became the first African American female to become a glamorous presence in mainstream pictures, yet her numbers were usually done in a fashion that allowed them to be deleted from distribution in the then-Jim Crow South.

Often critically praised, she was--in her early years--often rejected by African American character actors distressed by her refusal to play the traditional stereotypical roles assigned to black performers at that time. Further problems arose when she was blacklisted as a Communist subversive during the McCarthy years of the early 1950s, and an even greater tempest was set loose when she married Lennie Hayton, a white composer and arranger.

But, as the biography shows via superb clips from her performances, Horne prevailed. Leaving Hollywood, she established herself as one of the finest nightclub/cabaret artists; her “Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria” became RCA Victor’s largest-selling album by a female vocalist.

Her mastery of this form is dramatically evident in a stunning excerpt from her 1981 Broadway show, “The Lady and Her Music.” In it, Horne sings a passionate, heart-rending reading of “Yesterday, When I Was Young” that is both the centerpiece of the biography and its defining moment.

But it remains for Horne, still elegant with her fabulous cheekbones and graying hair, to provide the final annotation to her remarkable life:

“My identity is very clear to me now,” she says. “I’m a black woman. I’m not alone. I’m free. . . . I’m me. And I’m like nobody else.”

* “Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.