Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  “Paul [is] working out splendidly,” Essie was soon writing in her diary; indeed, he quickened not only to his new stage role but to the new offstage round of theater talk and theater people as well. Paul (according to Essie) “would listen eagerly for hours, for days, for weeks” to O’Neill’s recounting of past ventures and adventures, and Jimmy Light’s direction provided another kind of illumination for him. Unlike Paul’s previous directors, Light didn’t tell him what to do or how to do it; “He merely sat quietly in the auditorium and let him feel his way; he often helped him, of course. When Paul had trouble with a speech Jimmy would sit down on a soap-box beside him on the empty stage, and they would analyse the speech thought by thought, word by word … [Paul] working out his own natural movements and gestures with Jimmy’s watchful help. ‘I can’t tell you what to do,’” Jimmy said, in the true Stanislavskian spirit, “‘but I can help you find what’s best for you.’”34

  Essie, who sat in on nearly every rehearsal, was gratified by the way Paul’s talent flowered under Light’s direction. She was always able to assess her husband’s abilities with remarkable candor and objectivity. On the plus side she put his “intelligence, friendliness (sympathy) and beautiful organ voice”; on the negative, awkwardness in moving his six-foot-two-inch frame around a small stage “without seeming to mince” and a lack of technique—timing, pace, “how to pause for effect.” Jimmy Light knew how to highlight Paul’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses. “Let yourself go, Paul,” he’d call out. “Don’t hold yourself in; you look as though you’re afraid to move.” “I am,” Paul would answer. “I’m so big I feel if I take a few steps I’ll be off this tiny stage.” “Then just take two steps,” Light replied, “but make them fit you. You must have complete freedom and control over your body and your voice, if you are to control your audience.”35

  Part of learning how to control his body was learning how to be comfortable wearing costumes. Millia Davenport, a young costumer with the Playhouse, remembers the day Jimmy Light brought Paul into her shop. He was wearing old pants, cut off, but Millia, on sight, “knew him to be the most beautiful man I would ever see.” Being “a tough little babe,” she “did not faint,” but Jimmy Light mistook Millia’s stunned hesitation for an unwillingness on her part “to touch Paul because he was black” (Paul did not misunderstand; he “very well knew how I was responding to him and I was a cute little trick to whom he was responding in kind”). Light snatched away the tape measure in order to do the job himself. After an embarrassed pause, all came right—at least about the costume. “If I have never had a black lover,” Millia concluded some sixty years later, “it’s because I saw Paul first.” But at the time she decided not to join the “other P.P. women [who] were practically tearing his pants off. My life had been based on never having anything to do with another woman’s husband in a world full of unattached men. I did not much like Essie, but I left Paul alone and good friends we did become.” Malcolm Cowley claims that not all the Players shared Millia’s scruples. Among others, Nilla Cook, Jig Cook’s daughter, “then a buxom sixteen and a juvenile delinquent” (so Cowley describes her with high good humor), airily announced to Cowley “that she had seduced Paul,” and he “believed her.”36

  Surrounded by assorted temptations and pressures, Robeson did his best to concentrate on the acting job at hand. He knew full well that the role of Brutus Jones—to be followed within ten days by the world premiere of Chillun—was a spectacular opportunity, and for a black actor an all but unimaginable one. Prior to Gilpin’s debut in Jones in 1920, black actors performing before white audiences had been confined to the comfortable (for whites) and crippling (for blacks) stereotypes of song-and-dance routines. The few straightforward dramas that had appeared about Afro-American life had—like Ridgely Torrence’s trilogy of plays—been the work of white playwrights of limited talent and constricted vision (although, before the twenties were out, a few promising plays by blacks had surfaced, notably Garland Anderson’s Appearances in 1925 and Wallace Thurman’s Harlem in 1929). A lot was riding on Paul Robeson—and on Eugene O’Neill.37

  The first dress rehearsal, on May 4, did not go well. “Paul wasn’t as good as he has been,” Essie wrote in her diary, “still nervous,” but—she added confidently—“will work out fine.” Her prediction proved accurate. The second dress, next day, went “marvelously”—“Paul easy and natural”—and the opening, on the following night, went better still. The first-nighters, with Gilpin’s powerful performance as Brutus Jones in 1920 still fresh in their minds, responded coolly to the early scenes, but by the final curtain (according to Essie’s diary) the “applause and stomping and whistling [were] deafening,” with Paul called out for five bows.38

  Charles Gilpin was in the audience that night, and afterward, in the dressing room, he and O’Neill quarreled. It was not the first time. During his long run in the role (204 performances), Gilpin had outraged O’Neill by tampering with the script, sometimes substituting “Negro” or “colored man” for O’Neill’s frequent use of “nigger.” Gilpin had been venting a long-accumulated fury. Though a brilliantly gifted actor, in the ten years preceding his 1920 opening in Jones he had been forced to take menial jobs as barber, porter, and elevator operator. Once more out of work following his triumph in Jones, he returned to his marginal existence, tried to make a living as a chicken farmer, and died of alcoholism in 1930 at age fifty-one. “I am really a race man,” Gilpin told a New York Drama League dinner honoring him in 1921 (a dinner nearly canceled because of racist objections to it within the League—until O’Neill and others furiously protested); “I am a Negro and proud of being one, proud of the progress the Negroes have made in the time and with the opportunity they have had. And I don’t want the public to think anything different.”39

  O’Neill had been furious with Gilpin for his unpredictable behavior during the first run of Jones and had threatened to fire him. “I’ve stood for more from him than from all the white actors I’ve ever known—simply because he was colored!” O’Neill wrote his friend Mike Gold in July 1923 in outrage; “Gilpin lived under the assumption that no one could be got to play his part and took advantage accordingly.” But O’Neill had decided then and there not to use Gilpin in any revival or in the planned London production. He had, he wrote Gold, “corralled another Negro to do it”—Robeson, that is—“a young fellow with considerable experience, wonderful presence and voice, full of ambition and a damn fine man personally with real brains—not a ‘ham’! … He’ll be bigger than Gilpin was even at the start.”40

  The details of Gilpin and O’Neill’s quarrel in the dressing room on the night of Robeson’s opening in Jones are not known, but a reporter did overhear a “tense exchange of pleasantries” between the two men, followed by Gilpin saying dismissively, and “with a good deal of fervor,” that Robeson was “a hard worker. He has studied intensively.” As Gilpin was leaving the theater, one of the Provincetowners invited him for a drink. Gilpin said no: “I feel kind of low. I created the role of the Emperor. That role belongs to me. That Irishman, he just wrote the play.”41

  Privately, O’Neill agreed that Gilpin had been better in the role than Robeson was. While Essie was writing in her diary on the night of the opening, “O’Neill and Mrs. O’Neill, James Light and everybody seemed thrilled with Paul’s performance,” O’Neill was writing in his diary: “The Emperor Jones opens with Robeson. Big success but Robeson not as good as Gilpin except in last part.” And in later years O’Neill told an interviewer, “As I look back now on all my work, I can honestly say there was only one actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in mind. That actor was Charles Gilpin.…” Director Jimmy Light, moreover, agreed with O’Neill about the comparative merits of the two actors: “Robeson did the later scenes fine, after the Emperor is in the jungle, but he couldn’t do that first scene, that took Charlie. Charlie knew all about that kind of 135th Street humor.” Robeson, for his part, modestly wrote six months later, “I
recall how marvelously it was played by Mr. Gilpin some years back. And the greatest praise I could have received was the expression of some that my performance was in some ways comparable to Mr. Gilpin’s.”42

  But if, in the end, O’Neill preferred Gilpin’s performance to Robeson’s, many of the critics gave the palm to Robeson. The Times called him “singularly fine”; the World said his acting “was quite up to that which won Mr. Gilpin high praise”; and the review in the Tribune, flecked with racist patronization, declared, “Physically this full-blooded negro fitted the role better than Gilpin.… He sounded the bottom rock depths of terror.… He brings a full measure of understanding to the childlike volatility of his race.…”43

  The second-string reviews were at least as good. The critic in the Evening Graphic announced that “Robeson portrays the part ideally”; the Evening Post waxed eloquent over his “large and powerful voice—one rich in shadings and emotion, an organ that should play an important part in whatever success comes to the young negro actor”; and the Telegram and Evening Mail pronounced him “as fine an actor as there is on the American stage today.” The out-of-town reviewers hailed his performance with superlatives ranging from a mere “magnificent” to the declaration that it had been “the kind of evening in the theater that you remember all your life.”44

  With one day off after the opening of Jones, Robeson was back in rehearsal for Chillun on May 8—while continuing to play Jones in the evenings. (On May 13 Jones closed its limited run—to reopen on May 19 and again on June 2 for two additional week-long runs as an alternate offering to Chillun.) A scant five days after the Jones opening, Chillun was in dress rehearsal, with various Harlem bigwigs—such as James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP—there in person to catch the latest black performing sensation. Essie reported in her diary that the premiere of Chillun would be pushed up to May 15 because Mary Blair, Paul’s costar, “seems quite disturbed about Paul’s success in ‘Jones,’ and is forcing an early opening.…”45

  Just as that finally seemed imminent, and only hours before the curtain was due to rise on the premiere, Mayor Hylan’s office announced that it was rejecting the Provincetown’s application—legally necessary in those days but hitherto routinely granted—for permission to employ child actors in the first scene of Chillun (which depicted white and black children unself-consciously playing together). No explanation was given—indeed, none was possible: that same week Kreutzer Sonata opened on Broadway with a child of seven in it, while the youngsters in Chillun ranged in age from eleven to seventeen.46

  If Mayor Hylan’s announcement was calculated to prevent the play from opening—rather than serving as a last-minute sop to its racist critics—then it failed. The curtain rose that night on a tense, crowded audience. “When I went on to the stage,” Robeson later said, “I half expected to hear shots from the stalls.” Police ringed the theater in anticipation of disorder—and some steelworker friends of the cast guarded the dressing rooms (not least, from possible violence by the police). As the lights dimmed, Jimmy Light stepped in front of the curtain to announce that, due to the mayor’s ban, the opening scene could not be performed—and then proceeded to read it aloud instead. That hurdle cleared, the performance proceeded without incident. In his diary that night, O’Neill wrote that the opening “went over well—none of the expected trouble.” And Essie, who under advice had taken an alternate route with Paul to the theater, decided in retrospect that “the average New Yorker, interested in the Experimental Theatre, would have gone to see that play and taken it in stride, had it not been for the deliberate furor created by the press.” She noted with satisfaction in her diary that the “audience seemed gripped, moved and tense” and “at any opportunity was generous with applause.”47

  The critics, however, were less so. Most of them were cool to the play, though Robeson’s personal reviews were splendid, adding still further to his suddenly enhanced stature. Heywood Broun in the World found the play “very tiresome because Eugene O’Neill has no more than outlined his problem [of miscegenation] before he sidesteps it”—the white woman who marries the black student turns out to be suffering from low self-esteem and, ultimately, madness, rather than from a courageous love that is colorblind—but “Caucasian superiority does suffer a little, because Paul Robeson is a far finer actor than any white member of the cast.” Alexander Woollcott in the Sun felt the play failed to “come to life truly and vividly on the stage,” even though Robeson had “superbly embodied and fully comprehended” the role of the student. Robert Benchley announced that Robeson “had taken his place with Charles Gilpin as one of the artists to whom his race may point with pride”; Ludwig Lewisohn pronounced him “a superb actor”; Burns Mantle praised his “dramatically effective” performance; and Laurence Stallings, heaping tribute upon tribute, called him “a genius,” “a great actor,” a performer who had done “as fine a thing as has been done in the Broadway year.”48

  In American Mercury, George Jean Nathan wrote that Robeson, “with relatively little experience and with no training to speak of, is one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive, and convincing actors that I have looked at and listened to in almost twenty years of professional theatergoing.” Why? Because “the Negro is a born actor.” Nathan doubted that Robeson understood at all how he created the “beautiful” effects he did with his voice, hands, and “somewhat ungainly body.” His acting was “instinctual.” His performance in Chillun had “all the unrestrained and terrible sincerity of which the white actor, save on rare occasions, is by virtue of his shellac of civilization just a trifle ashamed.” It was “not acting as John Barrymore knows acting” but, rather, “something that is just over the borderland of acting, and just this side of the borderland of life and reality.” Nathan may have been accurately describing the special power of Robeson’s stage presence, but was giving him no conscious credit for creating it. He dismissed the idea that part of Robeson’s power as an actor derived from his being an educated and intelligent man. No, educated instincts—understanding a role—had nothing to do with it. It was Robeson’s race that made him a “natural-born actor.” In light of condescending praise like this, it becomes easier to understand why, even after Robeson sought further technical training, he would tend to underplay that fact, emphasizing instead—as Nathan had—that he was an untrained “natural.”49

  Nathan’s views were hardly unique at the time. Joseph Wood Krutch, also a highly regarded critic, expressed much the same racial interpretation of acting in a 1927 article in the Nation. “Ecstasy,” he wrote, was the black’s—and the black actor’s—“natural state”; his “instinctive sense for participation in an emotion larger than his comprehension” gave him “a gift for drama in a form more primitive as well as, perhaps, more purely dramatic than that of our conventional stage.” Indeed, the Negro actor “is good only when some utter abandonment is to be portrayed. He may move awkwardly, almost uncomprehendingly, through level scenes … but he leaps with an effortless joy into a crisis and surrenders himself to joy, to terror, or to grief, as to a native element.”50

  In making these distinctions, both Krutch and Nathan saw themselves as champions of the black race, endowing it with attractive innate qualities. This “liberal” attitude had its roots in the nineteenth-century view that blacks—like women—were naturally endowed with childlike emotionalism and a “superior” capacity for affection, personal loyalty, and joy. This deadly confusion between biology and social learning could, by easy re-emphasis, yield a value judgment about innate black “childishness” that served as a perpetually self-justifying rationale for proscription and separation.

  Though there was scarcely a peep of dissent in the white press about Robeson’s performance in Chillun, some black reaction both to him and to the play was less favorable. A. B. Budd in The Afro-American described Chillun as “a hard play to sit through. To see a big, respectable and cultured character as the slave of a slim, depraved and silly white woman isn’t
the kind of enjoyment calculated to make up a good evening’s entertainment.” Will Anthony Madden in the Chicago Defender praised Robeson and even praised O’Neill for having provided “the Negro the opportunity to show that he is an actor,” but he denounced both Chillun and Jones as “genius productions of subtleness of the most insidious and damaging kind.” That indictment was elaborated by William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP (and dean of Baltimore’s Morgan College). Pickens argued that the subliminal theme of Chillun was a case against racial mixing: in showing how a black boy and a white girl first met in a mixed public school and later fell in love, with disastrous consequences, the play pointed a “dangerous” negative moral—“the Ku Klux would pay to have just such a play as this put on.” Nor did Pickens spare Robeson. “Some colored people in it? Oh, that’s nothing. Colored people are no better than white people. You can hire SOME of them to do anything that the law allows, if you have money enough.”51

  Other black commentators took issue with this negative judgment—pre-eminently W. E. B. Du Bois, who chided his fellow blacks for being “tremendously sensitive”—understandably, he acknowledged, since previous portraits of black life had been merely the “occasion for an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast.” But Chillun, Du Bois argued, was something different and better—human and credible—and O’Neill deserved applause for “bursting through.”52

  Perhaps taking her cue from Du Bois—whose comments had appeared in the playbill for Chillun—but at any rate sharing his opinion, Essie argued that “Mr. Negro-With-a-Chip-On-His-Shoulder,” intent on emphasizing the negative implications in Chillun of a black from a good family’s marrying a “white trollop,” ought instead to concentrate on “the important thing”—“that he marries a white girl at all”; “O’Neill has dared to make the Negro fine and chivalrous and ambitious, and the white girl weak and pathetic by contrast.” Essie insisted that all blacks “ought to be glad and proud” that Paul had demonstrated to whites that “Negro life is interesting and colorful” and forced them to “see that a Negro can act.” She believed that, because of Paul’s breakthrough performance, henceforth “plays will be written for us” and black actors “will find themselves on Broadway instead of at the Lafayette.” But Paul was less sanguine and far more affected than Essie by the hostile response to Chillun from a portion of the black intelligentsia. When his gloom continued, Essie tried to amuse him “by comparing articles in the white press which said the play was an insult to the white race, with articles in the Negro press which said it was an insult to the Negro race.”53