The Duke Is Tops

Ralph Cooper and Lena Horne, 1938, Million Dollar Productions: a Harlem producer shelves his own career to launch a singer. Horne's first feature, billed as Helena Horne. Race-film circuit, a backstage picture that treats the Apollo as a world. Cooper, the Copper-Colored Cupid of the Apollo, directed with a sense of the room. It is not Hollywood's Harlem. It is a Black company making a star vehicle for a woman Hollywood would later pretend to have discovered.