> What exactly was your scholarly work about? The Show Boat story?

You mean *Show Boat?* Yes, amongst other things. I worked on how
different perceptions of Horne's racial identity affected her career
in Hollywood. Various attempts have been made to define Horne's
racial makeup. She was regularly called all sorts of names by those
who insisted on assigning her a racial identity that would define her
screen roles: high yaller, sepia talent, pale-skinned, bronze beauty,
chocolate cream chanteuse, dusky star, exquisite black bird,
honey-hued songstress, sepia Eleanor Powell, café au lait (and Negro)
Hedy Lamar and even Ethiopian, Polynesian, and West Indian.
Ironically, these criteria were insufficient to put Horne in "her"
place in Hollywood, particularly when the issue of class figured into
the equation. She was either too dark to be white or too light to be
black, she was too straight haired, she was too sophisticated --
coming from one of the most prominent African-American families of
Brooklyn. She would not play maids on the screen and she did not sing
like an African-American was "supposed" to. Finally, she married a
European-American man -- MGM's arranger and music director Lennie
Hayton. Specifically, and as a case study, I examined the musical
number "Brazilian Boogie," from the film *Broadway Rhythm,* directed
by Roy del Ruth for MGM in 1944. In this song Horne impersonates half
a Latin American and half a North American chanteuse.
>
> My second question is how you even got to Lena's secretary. How?

I am a scholar and a researcher! It's my job. Also, Horne got an
honorary Ph.D. from Yale while I was there. I delivered her
graduation pictures to her in person. Not that it made a difference,
by the way.
I wrote a short piece for this occasion. I will be glad to send it to you.

> When was this?

1997.
A note to the folks who claimed that Horne should have empowered
herself to get better roles in Hollywood, the way Halle Berry does.
Although Horne had a clause in her contract that specifically stated
that she would not play domestics or jungle natives (the first
African-American ever to do that, the year was 1942), she ended up
playing a chanteuse draped around a pillar with no speaking lines. So
that the racist distributors in the South would easily excise her
musical numbers from the film without compromising its narrative
continuity. Horne herself explains all this in *That's Entertainment
III.* If Halle Berry can be the executive producer of *The Dorothy
Dandridge Story* is because Lena was there first.

Gloria Monti

--
"growing old is a crime"
*last tango in paris*