The Styrous® Viewfinder: 06/01/2026

June 30, 2026

Lena Horn & The Cotton Club

Lena Horn - 1947

photographer unknown

Today is the birthday of one of the Great Entertainers in the Pantheon of Gods, Mrs. Lena Horn, who got her start at the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving on to Hollywood and Broadway.

She was a groundbreaking Black American performer who advocated for civil rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums.

Lena Horn was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to Edwin and Edna Horne on June 30, 1917. She belonged to the well-educated upper stratum of Black New Yorkers at the time. She lived the first five years of her life in a brownstone on Macon Street.

Her father, a one-time owner of a hotel and restaurant, was a gambler who left the family when Lena was three years old and moved to an upper-middle-class African-American community in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron, was an actress with a Black theater troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was from modern Senegal. Horne was raised mainly by her paternal grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. From 1923 to 1927 she lived in a scattered and confusing whirl.

In 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in Harlem (New York City), which at this time featured some black performers but a whites-only audience. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party in 1935. A few years later, she joined the Noble Sissle Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Café Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Lena Horn - 1947

photo by Carl Van Vechten

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather (1943) based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, for 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. That same year she appeared in Cabin in the Sky with an entirely African-American cast. She was not featured in a leading role because of her ethnicity and the fact that her films were required to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storytelling. One number from Cabin in the Sky was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing Ain't It the Truth while taking a bubble bath.

During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of Black servicemen." Because the US Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she staged her show for a mixed audience of Black US soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the Black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the Black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in attempts to pass anti-lynching laws. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in attempts to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965 mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965

She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism.

She left Hollywood and headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. From the fifties to the sixties, she appeared in Kraft Music Hall, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, he Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Sanford and Son, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, The Bell Telephone Hour, The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace and The Andy Williams Show.

She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music (link below), which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway.

Lena Horne died of congestive heart failure at age 92 on May 9, 2010. Her funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York, where she had been a member. Thousands gathered and attendees included Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, Lauren Bacall, Robert Osborne, Audra McDonald and Vanessa Williams. Her remains were cremated.

Viewfinder links:

Lauren Bacall

Charlie Barnet

Harry Belafonte

Tony Bennett

Cab Calloway

Diahann Carroll

The Cotton Club

Vic Damone

Lena Horn

Peggy Lee

Tom Lehrer

Audra McDonald

Liza Minnelli

Jessye Norman

Robert Osborne

Leontyne Price

Chita Rivera

Dinah Shore

Cicely Tyson

Leslie Uggams

Dionne Warwick

Vanessa Williams

Net links:

YouTube links:

Duke is Tops (aka Bronze Venus) 1938 Full Movie

Panama Hattie ~

Berry Me Not with The Berry Brothers

It's the Sping with Lena Horn

Just One od Those Things with Lena Horn

Movie Trailer

Lena Horne ~ Ain't It the Truth

Styrous® ~ Tuesday, June 30, 2026

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date & photographer unknown

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Lena Horn & the Cotton Club

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June 28, 2026

Mel Brooks ~ Man of Many Dreams

Mel Brooks

photo: HBO

Today is the birthday of American actor, filmmaker, comedian, songwriter, and playwright Melvin James Brooks (né Kaminsky) better known as just plain Mel Brooks. But there is nothing plain about this guy! He has a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 28 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

Brooks was born on a tenement kitchen table on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn to Katie (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky. He grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 when Brooks was two years old. He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face."

He was a small, sickly boy, who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size. At age nine, he saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else, but instead wanted to go into show business.

Brooks studied drums under jazz musician Buddy Rich, who had also grown up in Williamsburg and earned money as a musician from age 14. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, used his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky.

In early 1944 in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test. He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting. In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army. Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic and radio operator training. In December 1944, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. Of his experience there, Brooks noted:

"Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier."

Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany. Brooks was tasked with land-mine location; defusing was done by a specialist. Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing the American-Jewish singer Al Jolson hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!)" into a bullhorn.

After the war, Brooks's mother secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills", where he started working in various Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist.

In 1959, Brooks and Carl Reiner improvised and eventually developed the idea of the 2000-year-old man who had witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They began performing the 2000 Year Old Man act on The Steve Allen Show. Their performances led to the release of the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks that sold over a million copies in 1961.^[ It eventually became a comedy record album which ended up in my collection (link below).

Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical All American, which debuted on Broadway in 1962. He wrote the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. It starred Ray Bolger as a southern science professor at a large university. During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry. For several years, Brooks toyed with a bizarre and unconventional idea about a musical comedy of Adolf Hitler. He explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script. He eventually found two producers to fund it, Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier, and made his first feature film, The Producers (1968). The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. The Producers became a smash underground hit, first on the nationwide college circuit, then in revivals and on home video. It premiered to a limited audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1967, before achieving a wide release in 1968.

Brooks, along with his collaborator Thomas Meehan, later adapted it into a musical, which was hugely successful on Broadway and received an unprecedented 12 Tony awards. In 2000, Roger Ebert included The Producers in his canon of Great Movies, and remembered being in an elevator with Brooks and Anne Bancroft shortly after the movie was released: "A woman got on the elevator, recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady', he said, 'it rose below vulgarity.'"