STORMY WEATHER


The fabulous Lena

Lena Horne was a really fabulous star. Forthright and fearless in her statements and views – she was blacklisted for a time – as well as in her delivery of a number, she was the equal of any of the great twentieth-century purveyors of what is sometimes called the standard repertoire. She could croon a smoochy ballad or suffer through a torch song with the best of them, but she was at her finest, to my mind, in one of those driving numbers that brought out the tigress in her. If you want to thrill to an example of pure dynamism, you can hardly do better than to seek our her cha-cha version of Barton Lane and Yip Harburg’s ‘Old Devil Moon’, a sometime ballad that she tears into as though her life depended on it. I have around a dozen versions of this number in my collection, including by such superb interpreters as Margaret Whiting, Barbara Cook and Carmen McRae, but Lena has them all beat, even the divine Judy Garland.

Her performance as the good witch Glinda in the movie version of the all-black musical The Wiz, based on The Wizard of Oz, is an astonishing mixture of vamp and camp. It suggests that she didn’t think much of the show and did it merely as a favour to its director, Sidney Lumet, who was her son-in-law. But there was a fine line between her detached disdain of material and her playing with mannerisms. She could always turn a glittering phrase: hear what she does to “Chanel no 5” in a not very distinguished song by Duke Ellington and John Latouche, ‘Tomorrow Mountain’; or the way she bites off the words that end in consonants in Noël Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’, one of its most haunting renditions.

She could be really outrageous, could Lena. When she won a Tony award in 1981 for her one-woman show on Broadway, she caressed the phallic statuette with mock lasciviousness on network television, delighting women about town and her substantial gay following while no doubt prompting a slew of white supremacists to declare that, like her numbers in movies of the 1940s, her appearances should again be censored (though of course the films of her youth were butchered simply because she was of mixed race).

David and I saw her at the Palladium in the early 1980s. We sat in the front row and we were glad we did because, once she’d spotted us, she played the rest of her set straight to us. At one point, when in reminiscent mode, she waved an elegant fingernail towards us, gave us a piercing look and drawled “ask your grandma”. What a classy dame she was. Bless her.

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Can’t get enough of the present domestic political shenanigans. Of course a lot of guff gets aired. Now that Brown’s time is formally limited, Tories and others start to manufacture outrage that a Lib-Lab coalition, were that to be the upshot, would be led by a second successive PM who “hasn’t been elected”. But we don’t have a presidential system, despite appearances to the contrary. Prime ministers aren’t elected, governments are. And whereas Brown was immediately attacked for “clinging on”, the Tories will now attack him for standing down and therefore making their own chances of getting into government more remote. Damned if he do and damned if he don’t.


Clegg: "it's really doing my head in, man"

Moreover it would be “a coalition of the losers”, they say; but nobody won, that’s why we’re in this situation. Then politicians are apt to talk about “the message that the electorate sent to us” and the notion that the nation voted for a hung parliament. No one voted for a hung parliament; that option wasn’t on the ballot paper. There is no doubt that most of us voted for the party we thought best represented us. Some voted according to notions of tactics. But nobody voted for stalemate.

Of course, there are Tories, especially in the press, who believe that Cameron should be crowned at once as Emperor Bokassa but he wouldn’t survive as absolute monarch, or even as leader of a so-called confidence-and-supply administration, if he couldn’t command a majority for his programme in the Commons. Indeed, everyone talks about the need for “stable government”, but I can’t see how, on the arithmetic of the election result, any arrangement in parliament can possibly expect to last for four or more years. There will be another election, if not this year, certainly before the end of next. It will be conducted with a different leader of the Labour Party. All the commentators thought they knew the result of the 2010 election as long as two-and-a-half years ago. But nobody can begin to guess what the result of the next election will be, nor when it will be held and certainly not what the background mood music will be at the time.

Clegg, it begins to seem, may have played a really brilliant game, much of it out of the sight of the media and without the knowledge of Cameron’s negotiating team. Already he has screwed much more out of the Tories than Cameron’s “big, open and comprehensive offer”. The Tories have conceded a referendum on proportional representation without any guarantee that the party will put up with it, now or when such a referendum comes. Labour has now offered immediate legislation to change the electoral system. Many more of Clegg’s party incline to go with Labour than with the Tories and the biggest stumbling black for Clegg himself – Brown – has fallen on his sword. Cameron will have to make a better offer yet, just to keep in the bridge game. I can’t wait for the next rubber.