Lena Horne, whose signature song was Stormy Weather, was remembered at her funeral 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, screenwriter Jenny Lumet, told hundreds of mourners at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan yesterday.
They included fellow entertainers Chita Rivera, Diahann Carroll, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson and Vanessa Williams.
"I've tried to sum her up and I can't sum her up," said Ms Lumet, daughter of 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 on 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 mixed-race couple.
For years, Horne entertained white audiences with her impressive musical range, from blues and jazz to such Rodgers and Hart songs as The Lady Is a Tramp and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. But she was often not allowed to socialise with whites, especially in the segregated South.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once told an interviewer. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed."
Horne plunged into activism after 1945, when she performed at a US Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting in front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
Ageing members of the so-called Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black Second World War pilots who broke racial barriers, attended the funeral.
Among them was Roscoe Brown, who commanded an Air Force squadron and now directs the Centre for Urban Education Policy at the City University of New York.
"This wonderful, beautiful lady, Lena Horne, came to visit us," he told mourners. "She sang, she talked with us and she made us all her boyfriends."
The men took her picture "and put it on our barracks, on our planes, and she became our pin-up girl", he said.
Horne's funeral was held in the Upper East Side church where she brought her family each Easter for years.
The former pastor, the Rev Walter Modrys, recalled in his eulogy how shy the seemingly bold performer really was in private. But on stage she shifted into her "performance mode", he said.
Ms Lumet recalled being "a small child loved by this woman".
"Her beauty was so deep you could swim in it," with hands "like orchids or lilies" that were graced by "all these gold bracelets so she'd jingle like a cat when she walked, so if I was in her stuff, you always knew if she was coming 'cause of all her ... her bling!".