Chocolate Cream Chanteuse

Manhattan's quietly swank Savoy-Plaza Cafe Lounge was last week doing the biggest business in its history as a nightspot. Its Mondays had begun to look like Saturdays. No opulent floor show was packing in the customers. The attraction was the face and the shyly sultry singing of a milk-chocolate-colored Brooklyn girl, Lena Horne.

Unlike most Negro chanteuses, Lena Horne eschews the barrelhouse manner, claws no walls, conducts herself with the seductive reserve of a Hildegarde (TIME, March 13, 1939). But when Lena sings at dinner and supper, forks are halted in midcareer. Flashing one of the most magnificent sets of teeth visible outside a store, she seethes her songs with the air of a bashful volcano. As she reaches the end of Honeysuckle Rose ("When I'm takin' sips from your tasty lips, seems the honey fairly drips")* her audience is gasping.

Says Lena: "It frightens me a little, but I haven't got any voice. I don't know anything about music. I feel like the fellow who was dreaming: all he could say was 'Don't wake me up.'"

Daughter of a Negro actress named Edna Scotchron, 25-year-old Lena Horne was graduated from Brooklyn Girls' High School into a job as a chorus girl in an Ethel Waters show at Manhattan's Cotton Club. She was put in big time by a spell at Hollywood's Little Troc cabaret. Her first film appearance, a sequence in Panama Hattie, proved the high point of a dull show. She continued as Georgia Brown in the cinema version of Broadway's Cabin in the Sky, and is scheduled for M.G.M.'s Meet the People.

Lena Horne and her four-year-old daughter by an early, unsuccessful marriage occupy a five-room duplex apartment in Hollywood across the street from Humphrey Bogart's. In Manhattan Lena lives obscurely in a small room in Harlem's Theresa Hotel. Every day her aging mother makes the trip from Brooklyn to the Theresa to see that Lena eats properly and wears her rubbers.

* Reprinted by permission of copyright owners, Santly-Joy, Inc.

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