New York Apartment Owned by Lena Horne Hits Market for $825,000

John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images; realtor.com

When songstress Lena Horne arrived in Manhattan in the early 1980s from Hollywood to perform her one-woman Broadway show, “The Lady and Her Music,” she decided she was going to return to her hometown for good. She began to look for a place to buy.

Her friend, the model and socialite Jane Holzer, better known as “Baby Jane” for her role as Andy Warhol’s muse, proposed Ms. Horne move into her building, a co-op in the Lenox Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side called the Volney. The former hotel, with its limestone facade and canopied entrance, was built in the 1920s and had been home to notable artists and writers, including Dorothy Parker.

Ms. Horne had faced challenges finding a home in the past, when many Manhattan co-ops weren’t welcoming to African-Americans. In an interview, singer Harry Belafonte said he had previously rented a penthouse apartment to Ms. Horne in the 1960s at a building he purchased at 300 West End Avenue. He had purchased the entire building and turned it into coops because the previous landlord wouldn’t allow African-Americans to live there, he said.

Ms. Horne ultimately bought a fifth-floor apartment at the Volney—and eventually four others. She combined the first unit with an adjacent one to create one apartment with a large living room, dining room and two bedrooms, according to Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Ms. Horne later bought another unit to use as an exercise room and then one as a guest suite and extra wardrobe space for her many evening gowns. A fifth unit became a private office, where her secretary worked.

Ms. Horne died in 2010, and two of her fifth-floor apartments were sold for a combined $1.1 million in 2014. Now, Ms. Buckley is selling the last of her mother’s add-on apartments—the one used as an office—for $825,000, according to her real-estate agent, Tamer Howard of Douglas Elliman, who is listing the property in association with Kevin Dees of the Agency in Los Angeles. The for-sale unit has one bedroom and one bathroom.

The bedroom in the for-sale unit.

Alex Fradkin for The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Buckley, an 80-year-old nonfiction author, is keeping the main apartment, where she lives with her husband, journalist Kevin Buckley.

Although Ms. Buckley never lived in the main apartment with her mother, she recalled Ms. Horne’s distinct tastes and lifestyle. “Her bedroom was always red. She loved red,” Ms. Buckley said, noting her mother’s rouge-flecked wallpaper. “She slept late. She would go to bed about 3 a.m. when she was working and then wake up at 3 p.m. in the afternoon and have a big steak or something.”

Ms. Horne’s furniture was often imported from Europe and included statement pieces, such as a small Louis Vuitton trunk with SS France ocean-liner stickers inscribed with her married name, Lena Horne Hayton. Ms. Buckley said her mother and her second husband, the composer Lennie Hayton, had married in Europe in 1947 because, at the time, interracial marriages were still illegal in California. They kept their marriage a secret for several years and always traveled aboard French ships to Europe because they didn’t discriminate.

Ms. Horne’s two children, Ms. Buckley and her brother, Teddy Jones, who died in 1970, were from her first marriage to Louis Jordan Jones, of Pittsburgh.

“That marriage lasted three years because my father had a high-stakes bridge habit and a girlfriend he never got rid of,” Ms. Buckley said.

The trunk, and many other personal items of Ms. Horne, were sold at the auction, with the trunk fetching more than $8,000. Ms. Buckley held onto some items, which are on display in her apartment, such as a bust of her mother by Peter Lambda.

Ms. Horne, born in 1917, spent her early years in a townhouse in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “There were two townhouses on the street when she was born,” Ms. Buckley said.

Ms. Horne relocated to California in the 1940s to headline a new nightclub on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, and was quickly scouted by producers at the movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She appeared in movies and musicals, such as “Cabin in the Sky” in 1943. She wasn’t typically cast in leading roles and rarely interacted with other actors on screen so that her appearances could be cut out for audiences in the segregated South.

Ms. Horne was relieved to return to New York and loved her home at the Volney, a short stroll to her favorite Fifth Avenue stores, her daughter said. “She would walk down to Bergdorf’s,” she added. “People sometimes would recognize her and just smile, and she loved that. She loved that it was New York and people didn’t make a fuss.”

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