Lena Horne remembered at funeral

? Lena Horne, whose signature song was “Stormy Weather,” was remembered at her funeral on Friday as a shy girl from Brooklyn who fought racism for decades to emerge as a world-class singer and social activist.

“She was so many ideas existing all at the same time in the same space and they were all conflicting and they were all true,” her granddaughter, Jenny Lumet, told hundreds of mourners at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan.

They included fellow entertainers Chita Rivera, Diahann Carroll, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson and Jinji Nicole.

“I’ve tried to sum her up and I can’t sum her up,” said Lumet, daughter of the late director Sidney Lumet. “To sum something up means it’s over — and I think that she’s not over and that she’s quite infinite.”

Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was one of the first black performers hired to sing with Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in the early 1940s, playing the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. When she signed with MGM, she was one of the rare black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.

In 1943, MGM lent Horne to 20th Century Fox to play the lead role in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit — reflecting the ups and downs of her life, which included a second marriage to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish musician working for MGM with whom she shared the social pressures of being an interracial couple.