R.I.P. THE LOVELY LENA HORNE DIES AT AGE 92!

Lena Horne epitomized hot and she epitomized cool.

As an actress, she might be the most elegant vision that much of America never saw. For many years Hollywood didn't think the country was ready for a black leading lady, even one whose elegance and beauty could take an audience's breath away.

As a singer, she was in her mid-60s before her one-woman tour de force on Broadway in 1981-82 showed everyone in the city and the world just what she could do with a song.

Horne, who died Sunday in New York Presbyterian Hospital at the age of 92, lit up the sky from the moment in 1932 when she took her first steps in the Cotton Club chorus line. The sky just had a lot of clouds in it for a lot of years.

She began singing in the mid-1930s, with a voice that was powerful and warm yet somehow wistful. It would take her years to really understand her songs, she later said, but the voice was always there.

The movies came next. Her tall-and-tan glamour and flashing brown eyes, not to mention a smile that could melt the polar icecap, turned her into the kind of screen goddess who would, in the phrase of the day, make a bulldog jump the fence.

But even though she also went on to star in nightclubs and on Broadway, it would take almost half a century before America would fully embrace Lena Horne - because throughout her prime performing years, neither Hollywood nor the music business was ready to give a "colored girl" a full fair shot in the mainstream.

She breached the barrier occasionally, winning a Tony nomination for her starring role in the 1957 Broadway show "Jamaica" with Ossie Davis. But Hollywood would rarely let her act at all, instead limiting her to musical "inserts." Producers would darken her skin with a special makeup called "Egyptian Dark," put her in a beautiful outfit and have her sing a song that could be snipped out of the print that was sent to Southern theaters, where some of the owners said their patrons didn't cotton to race-mixing on the screen.

"I was like a butterfly pinned to a pillar," Horne would later say, but she had little choice. When she pressed hard in 1951 for the role of the tragic Julie in the film remake of "Show Boat," MGM decided it was too risky to have a black actress play a black character and instead cast Ava Gardner.

"I had things in my life that helped me fight off the bitterness," Horne said in a 1982 interview. "But I didn't really enjoy my career until I was 50. I always felt like an outsider."

Born in Brooklyn in 1917 to parents who would soon divorce, Horne was raised by her grandmother for the first years of her life. When she was 19 she married Louis Jones, and they had two children, Gail and Teddy, before divorcing in 1944. Gail would become a well-known author as Gail Lumet Buckley, while Teddy died in 1970 of kidney failure.

While Horne in later years said she had stopped defining her career by the obstacles she faced and fought, there always remained considerable speculation what level of star she would have become without those obstacles. That speculation was reinforced by the universal embrace she received for her Broadway show, "The Lady and Her Music."

"The Lady and Her Music" was a concert whose songs also told the singer's story. She included two versions of her signature song, "Stormy Weather" - one the way she sang it when she was in her 20s, the other as she now sang it in her 60s. "I Got A Name" reminded her of her father, she said, and she started singing "Yesterday When I Was Young" after her close friend Hazel Scott died. The show sold out for 14 months and won her every award this side of Super Bowl MVP.

"The reason they never let Lena Horne star in the movies was pretty obvious," said the late Gregory Hines around that time. "She would have blown all the other ‘stars' away."

Her two most-remembered roles came in two all-black musicals made during World War II: "Stormy Weather" and "Cabin in the Sky." In "Stormy Weather," she sang the title song and played the improbable lady friend of an aging Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In "Cabin" she played the devil, leaving no question how a man could be lured from a life of goodness to the kind of mischief her eyes were suggesting.

Both were relatively low-budget productions with spectacular song-and-dance: the music of Horne, Fats Waller and Ethel Waters, the feet of Robinson, John Bubbles and the Nicholas Brothers. Horne said four decades later that she was proud of them, adding that "Even though most people seem to like ‘Stormy' better, I was always a little more fond of ‘Cabin'."

Still, those films didn't thaw mainstream Hollywood's cold shoulder, and that roadblock was a major reason Horne spent much of her career on the singing circuit, in theaters and nightclubs. While she was occasionally called a jazz or blues singer there, she brushed aside those labels for the more broad-reaching category of "popular."

"I never sang ‘Stormy Weather' as a blues," she said in 1982, simply because she came up in the big band singing for the pop audience of the day. The bands with which she performed included Artie Shaw and Teddy Wilson, though she would later say one of her favorite musical gigs was her first, with Charlie Barnet.

Unfortunately, working with the white Barnet band in the early ‘40s came at a debilitating cost. When the band would go into a restaurant for a meal after a gig, they were often told the "colored girl" would have to eat in the back with the help. Barnet would leave when this happened, Horne said, but eventually it became so wearing that she started making excuses not to go into restaurants at all, waiting until the musicians had left and trying to find a place that would sell her a sandwich.

When she left Barnet she took a club gig at Café Society, where she became more of a song stylist and started meeting fellow artists and activists like Paul Robeson. She became a more outspoken public activist herself during those years and that didn't help her career, either, since Robeson and anyone associated with him were treated as if they were radioactive. But she said in 1982 that she never considered pulling back.

"I joined the causes I would have joined if I weren't a public person," she said, and clearly "The Lady and Her Music" took some of its richness from the tug-of-war between the pure songs she loved and a hard world she came to distrust.