EchoVib

When screenwriter Jenny Lumet thinks of her maternal grandmother, singer and civil rights activist Lena Horne, she remembers that she used to eat Snickers with a fork and knife.

It was part of what made her ladylike and sophisticated, Lumet recalled to TODAY for a Women's History Month series on the granddaughters of influential women. But more uniquely, her sense of humor was "bone dry." As a young woman, Lumet, now 54, once complained to her grandmother, who lived in New York City, about a bad boyfriend and asked, "Grandma, do men ever change?" Horne responded, "No," and left the room to make herself a sandwich.

"We were very close," Lumet laughed. "We had a great time."

Horne, born in 1917 in New York City's Brooklyn borough, was the first Black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio, MGM, and she achieved international fame, even performing for the queen of England in 1964. In her teens, she started singing in New York City's Cotton Club, which had a strictly white audience, and she went on to have a Tony-winning one-woman show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," on Broadway in the '80s.

"She insisted on a level of sophistication in the 1940s and '50s that was not allowed to people of color, a lyrical interpretation, complex arrangements," Lumet said. One of her favorite songs of her grandmother's is "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing," which Lumet said was written for Horne by close friend and composer Billy Strayhorn.

Horne also attended the March on Washington and entertained the troops during World War II, famously refusing to sing for segregated audiences. But she didn't talk about her activism much with her family, Lumet recalled.

"I knew her first as a grandma before I understood her as an activist, and that was not something that she necessarily brought home," she explained. "(I'm) pretty sure she would have liked if the women of the movement had had a bigger voice in the March on Washington.

These moments that you think, 'Wow, this is history,' it was just her life."

“These moments that you think, ‘Wow, this is history,’ it was just her life.”

While Lumet, who's developing a limited series for Showtime about Horne, has "great pride" in her grandmother's work, she added, "All this extraordinary stuff, it doesn't necessarily exist around the dinner table." Horne had two children — a son, Teddy Jones, and a daughter, journalist Gail Lumet Buckley, who had Lumet with famed director Sidney Lumet — as well as six grandkids.

In the 1940s, Horne became the first African American to tour with an all-white band, led by saxophonist Charlie Barnet, according to the Kennedy Center. Lumet recalled that after Horne left hotels, staff would sometimes burn the sheets.

"She sang where we (were) not supposed to sing. She sang on television, she sang next to Caucasian (people)," Lumet said.

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