Letters From Bobby

Singer/Actress Lena Horne celebrates her 91st birthday today. What an icon she is to me. It’s hard to believe now that Hollywood studio heads did not know what to do with her back in the 1940s. Maybe it isn’t. She was elegant, classy, talented — and she challenged with humiliating images of Blacks that Hollywood was presenting back in that day. She didn’t play domestics of low, if any, education. She held to her glamour and sophistication. She refused to let MGM execs try to pass her off as Brazilian to make her more appealing to the mainstream.

At 20th Century Fox, she got to star in an all-Black 1943 musical called Stormy Weather. She sang the title tune. One of the greatest joys in my life is that I got to see her sing that song onstage decades later. She was, in a word, triumphant. Happy birthday, Ms. Horne. Thank you for the hard work that helped opened doors for folks like me.

I will miss him a lot. I interviewed him once and he was one of the most charming and gentle men I’d ever met. God called the absolutely brilliant comedian George Carlin to Heaven. He leaves us with Carrot Top and Dane Cook.

Discuss.

In his autobiography, Fred Astaire wrote that Cyd Charisse was “…a terrific dancer, a wonderful partner. She has precision plus — beautiful dynamite, I call it.” They did two films together — The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings.

Cyd Charisse passed away in Los Angeles at age 86. In her 80s, she was still elegant, lovely, stylish and charming. She was a class act. Very few women in film back in the classic Hollywood studio days or now dance or can even walk as gorgeously as she did. At the end of this evening’s news cast, Charlie Gibson remembered Charisse with an atypical yet totally imaginative move for a network news program — he presented an extended clip from one of her iconic numbers with Fred Astaire. It was from “The Girl Hunt Ballet” in The Band Wagon — the section in which her vamp character shows up in that knock out red dress that shows off her mile-long legs.

I sent an email to ABC News with an idea for Good Morning, America. Deep In My Heart, a 1950s MGM musical bio, recently came out on DVD. Cyd Charisse guests stars in one number called “One Alone.” It’s a very sensuous, passionate number. Her singing is dubbed but that dancing is undeniably, breathtakingly hers. Cyd’s partner in it was James Mitchell. He may not be a famous dancer like her other partners, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, but millions of ABC viewers know James Mitchell. He went on to become Palmer Cortland, Sr. on ABC’s All My Children. I bet a lot of that daytime drama’s fans didn’t even know he danced. Watch it. It makes “Dancing With The Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” look lame. Let’s see if GMA uses my idea.

Cyd Charisse — thanks for the dance.