I have deep associations with a photograph that I keep visible on a shelf in my office at home, integrated into family and personal mementos. It’s a publicity shot of a glamorous Lena Horne, signed “To Tony – with good wishes.” I’ve kept it in the same funky plastic frame that I bought when I came to Berkeley from England in 1963. Aside from being star-struck, why do I keep this memento so close to me?
Lena Horne gave a concert in Manchester in the 1950s when I was a teenager and avid autograph collector. My elegant uncle Bertie – named Bertie, not Bertram, never Bert – asked her to sign the photograph for me. He was something of a stage-door Johnny who served as an informal host for visiting entertainers, no doubt in part as a way to have no-strings sex. Married with children and closeted in devoted secrecy when it was illegal to be gay in England, Bertie had to avoid snitches in the city’s underground clubs and keep a straight face in country suburbia, a few blocks from my home. He was no Oscar Wilde: he kept his personal life private, even after his sexuality was decriminalized, even after his divorce.
Many years later, I learned how Lena Horne was picked by music industry moguls to be one of the first cross-over stars, selected because of her light color and great voice, in that order. By the 1950s she was Hollywood famous, though never in a leading role. She got “tired,” she said, “of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song.” For taking public stands against segregation and racism, she was blacklisted by the Right and feted by the Movement. She sang with Paul Robeson. She appeared with Medgar Evers at a rally in Jackson, Mississippi, a few days before he was assassinated. Her Wikipedia entry credits her as a civil rights activist, as well as a singer, dancer, and actor.
Later in life, Horne talked candidly about the stress of performing as the chosen one and what it took to reconcile her professional and personal lives with her political convictions. After she died in 2010, I clipped an obituary from the New York Times and stuck it behind the photograph. “My identity is very clear to me now,” she said late in her career. “I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become.”
As far as I know, Bertie never talked candidly about what it had been like for him to move back and forth between his respectable and shadowy worlds. “Sitting in my flat alone I seem to have a life consisting of looking back,” he wrote me by email soon after he made his century. But he wasn’t telling.
Admitted to hospital with pneumonia and lung cancer a few days ago, he remained stylish to the end. Asked what treatment options he preferred, he replied: "No pain and a game of bridge please.”
The photograph of Lena Horne in its cheap frame stays in my sights because it reminds me of my oblivious teen years, of my uncle leading a double life, even when he wasn’t forced to do so, and of a visionary who risked her good fortune so that future young Lenas and Berties can assert their place in the world.
Lena Horne 1917-2010 Bertie Daniels, 1921 - 2021