Havin' Herself a Time

By CHARLES MICHENER

Among jazz divas, Billie Holiday had the pain, Ella Fitzgerald the purity, Sarah Vaughan the sass. And Lena Horne? She had the ice. With her cut-diamond beauty and panther smile, her drop-dead elegance and dry-martini voice, she was always dazzling while staying just out of reach.

In 1981, though, Horne heated up when she brought Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music to Broadway. In that autobiographical show, she vented her rage over her years as a white man's sex symbol and a victim of Hollywood racism, and proved that in her 60s she was more electrifying than ever. Now, at 76, Horne is back with her most ambitious recording in years, and it's a stunner. The lady has soul, and it's no longer on ice. We'll Be Together Again is a collection of 16 songs written by composers ranging from Duke Ellington to Kris Kristofferson. The record is really a tribute to one particular composer, though. The liner notes call the album "a prayer -- a private, sacred promise to a lost love." That love is for Horne's great friend Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's composing partner, who died in 1967.

Sitting in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, long past lunchtime, Horne looks $ exquisitely beautiful under a big straw hat, without a line to mar her fine- boned face. She speaks of the album's inspiration in a voice whose honeyed drawl seems to have all the Old South in it. "I met Billy Strayhorn in 1942," she says, "in Los Angeles at an Ellington show called Jump for Joy. I was MGM's token black starlet, getting no parts, and a divorced mother of two. Billy was homosexual, but I fell in love. He was the thoughtful side of Ellington, and he saw how lonely I was in Hollywood. I'd never wanted to be in show business; I'd wanted to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to read books, learn music, see the world. Billy opened these things up to me. I was so angry when he died."

Despite those feelings, there's nothing solemn about Horne's "prayer." The album begins playfully with Maybe, a Strayhorn rarity written for Horne, and she gives it an easy swing that belies its hard-won wisdom ("Love is a shoestring/ Any way you tie it, it may become undone ...") Next comes Something to Live For, the great Strayhorn-Ellington ballad about having it all without having love, which Horne suffuses with trembling vulnerability. She's raucous and tough on another worldly Strayhorn number, Love Like This Can't Last. And with beautiful enunciation, she finds the quiet essence of Strayhorn's somewhat precious A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.

It took a while before Horne could make this record. After her Broadway show, she discovered she needed a pacemaker and found she had less energy. "At the same time," she says, "I went through this delayed reaction to the deaths ((a few years earlier)) of my father and my son and my husband, Lenny Hayton, a fine man I met when he was music arranger at MGM. For about nine years I went underground."

Then George Wein, director of the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City, asked Horne to do a Strayhorn evening, and she agreed. "I thought, 'Well, Billy was my great friend,' and I've only had about four friends because I don't trust anybody. It's probably because as a child I got farmed out a lot, all over the South." After weeks of anxious rehearsals, Horne hit the stage of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center last year and received a standing ovation. Prodded by a record producer, she returned to the studio.

At times there is too much fuss in the arrangements, and the set includes one clinker -- a souped-up duet with Johnny Mathis on Day Follows Day in which it's obvious the two singers recorded in separate studios. But with a half- | spoken rendition of Sondheim's Old Friend, Horne demonstrates why she may be unrivaled at creating a character in a song. Horne seems rhythmically more daring than she used to be, toying with the beat in Havin' Myself a Time with an assurance that reveals how much she owes to Billie Holiday, the singer who made the song famous. In her eighth decade, this still formidable legend has chosen a style that's deeper than dazzle -- something that seems to say, "Why don't you pull up a chair, honey, and just listen."

There is little left of the sultry vocal finish Horne possessed back in the '40s and '50s. Today her voice reveals its grain, like fine old furniture. Nevertheless she can still sustain with silky ease a long-lined ballad like the album's dreamy title song or the touching finale, My Buddy. How has Horne kept her voice in such good shape? She laughs. "You mean through the postnasal drip? I don't sing in the shower, and I never vocalize -- it's too embarrassing. I only sing when I have to do a job. Then, to prepare, I go into the dining room and see how loud I can yell without pain."

How loud is that? She shakes her head, bares those perfect teeth and says, "Pretty loud, honey."