Long before her recent death at 92, Lena Horne had become a recluse, living alone with her memories. She had been a star for many years, or at least the symbol of what should have been a star if the planets were favorably arrayed, which they were not. As we all should be able to see, Negroes do not necessarily need to be talented today in order to "get over," but in Horne's time, superior talent could soften the blows but not stop them from coming.

By the time she was 65, Horne was able to joke with Johnny Carson about the absurdity of this country's color mess. Time had not altered her beauty, her memory or her mind. Being a star has always had as much--if not more--to do with advertising than talent, and in keeping with the overstatement expected from Hollywood, much was expected when Horne became the first black woman signed to a long-term contract with a major studio. (A contract that specified that she would never play a maid.)

But Horne neither got what she expected nor what "should" have been possible for her. Those who achieve that elusive level of recognition--stardom--become somehow more and/or less than human. Lena Horne did not escape this. The loneliness of stardom is intensified or made more complex by the presence of a skin color that cannot be mistaken for white. This can increase the sentimental element when any Negro star from long ago is mentioned or eulogized. But sentimentality tends to dehumanize: The good are far too sweet, the bad leave the feeling of spiritual indigestion.

So Lena Horne is sentimentalized and, now, eulogized. But the reality is most of time in the spotlight added up to little more than grand career disappointments. Her wings were clipped by color prejudice almost before she grew them. The show business world in which women choose to make their livings by being looked at and listened to was not always kind to Lena Horne. Her early life was somewhat rough. But some things made her professional life easier--at first. She learned that her face was considered attractive, her long hair was thought an asset and she could chirp as well as dance. She slid into the big time through the career opportunity of being one of the "high-brown" women who were the only ones chosen for Harlem's Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway led bands but no Negroes were allowed in as customers, unless they were famous like Jack Johnson, who had once owned the club but sold it to the gangsters in charge during its heyday.

As another good-looking colored girl who was not too dark to be blocked by the racist conventions of her time, Horne was part of the continuum of 19th-century minstrel tradition. On the minstrel stage, Negro women who were considered attractive were always light-skinned; their beauty ended up being immortalized--and lampooned--on that stage, where the "wench," "high yeller gal" or "prima donna" was always played by white men in light-tan makeup.