Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Back in New York, Paul and Essie had a farewell meal with Jimmy Light and the McGhees (who left for England two weeks before them to begin preliminary work on Jones), had dinner with the Brouns and Walter Whites, and spent one of their last evenings with the Van Vechtens: Fania gave Essie some felt flowers she’d brought back from Paris, and Carlo gave them a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. Up until the eleventh hour before departure, Minnie sewed for Essie and Paul posed for Salemmé. The day before sailing, Paul and Essie raced around to the Victor Company to pick up an advance of $725 for his four (double-sided) completed records, and to Pond’s to get paid for the Provincetown and Spring Lake concerts.45

  August 5 dawned to a steady rain. Last-minute confusion with trunks and taxis made everybody nervous, and their two cabs got inadvertently separated; Ma Goode, “like a trooper,” made it down alone with the big trunk and somehow got it on the deck of the Berengaria. They made the boat by ten minutes, but then, waiting for the tide, it delayed pulling out for an hour. Minnie, the Salemmés, Walter White, Larry Brown, and a half-dozen other friends waved them off. Five telegrams and letters arrived. Mrs. Guy Currier sent a steamer basket. The stateroom was beautiful. The dining room was beautiful. The food was wonderful. Even the waiter was wonderful. They were off—jubilantly.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Launching of a Career

  (1925–1927)

  “I was determined,” Essie wrote home to Carlo and Fania, “to find a nice cozy place to put my Baby in so he could be free to do his best work.” Accompanied by Bert McGhee, she scouted London for three days trying to find a suitable flat. Everything she looked at was either dirty, lovely sans toilet, or lovely with toilet but no bath (“just funny tin bath tubs—like our foot tubs—only round!”). She finally found the ideal flat at 12 Glebe Place in Chelsea—the two upper floors of a three-story house, “beautifully furnished in the most exquisite taste,” with “fireplaces in all the rooms, geyser bath, electricity, and telephone by the bed,” complete with maid service—and all for four guineas. When she took Paul to see it, the landlord “looked at Paul hard,” and Essie began to fear there would be “difficulty about us being colored.” But if the landlord was upset, he kept it to himself, and Paul and Essie moved in the next day. Jimmy Light and the McGhees insisted “there will be no prejudice” in England. “Here’s hoping,” Essie wrote in her diary.1

  Compared with the United States, the Robesons did find England “warm and friendly and unprejudiced.” While they were rehearsing Jones in Greenwich Village, “the nearest and only place” Robeson could get a decent meal had been up at Penn Station; “the next nearest place was in Harlem.” According to Sue Jenkins, Jimmy Light’s first wife, “In spite of Greenwich Village’s reputation for being so advanced and radical,” and in spite of his growing celebrity, Robeson had had difficulty finding a restaurant that would serve him, “so Jimmy and I fed him at our place.” In London there were dozens of attractive restaurants near the theater, and none ever raised the issue of race; “the Robesons thoroughly appreciated the fact,” Essie wrote, “that here in London they could, as respectable human beings, dine at any public place.” They were comparatively free from other humiliations as well. White theaters in New York would sell only balcony seats to blacks, white hotels refused them accommodations, and when Paul and Larry had tried to buy Pullman reservations they were told that only end seats (those over the wheels) were available—the task of buying tickets thereby devolving on the light-skinned Essie.2

  Still, they (Essie more than Paul) continued from London to take a rather upbeat view of prospects back in the States, too. Perhaps because their own social life had cut across racial lines, and because the hothouse environment of the “Renaissance” had bred optimism, Essie chose to believe that white people were beginning to discover that “the Negro is merely a human being like themselves” and predicted that “prejudice will grow less and less.” Unlike Paul, she even argued—in a variation of “blaming the victim”—that “segregation has to some extent been brought about by Negroes themselves,” because, like all other ethnic groups, they preferred to congregate with their own; because those few blacks who directly profited from segregation (such as politicians with increased patronage to dispense) imposed it on the rest; and because the average citizen in a black community “could not and would not make a stand against segregation, preferring to shift the burden to the better known members of the race, like petitioning black artists to make the strictly symbolic gesture of not performing before segregated audiences.” Whatever the causes and cures of the American malady, the Robesons were grateful for the respite of London.3

  While Paul rehearsed, Essie toured—indefatigably, as was her style. She methodically attended the London theater “to get a good idea of just what succeeds.” She loved Noel Coward’s Hay Fever but disliked his Fallen Angels (Tallulah Bankhead “just pranced back and forth over the stage”), found The Beggar’s Opera faintly boring, Chariot’s Revue faintly amusing, thought the modern-dress Hamlet a fascinating exercise, and Ruth Draper so wonderful as to warrant a second visit to the theater. But comedies of manner in the Freddie Lonsdale mode, about the minor peccadilloes of the upper class, dominated the English stage of the 1920s, and Essie concluded that theater in London “can’t touch New York. These fancy, perfect drawing room nothings can’t compare with our virile plays.”4

  The Robesons’ socializing, with a few notable exceptions, was largely confined to people they knew from back home—Jimmy Light, the McGhees, “Fitzi” Fitzgerald (the Provincetown’s manager), Estelle Healy (the first wife of Lawrence Langner), and—reaching still further back—Paul’s old friend, the singer Johnny Payne. Among their new acquaintances, they especially enjoyed Turner Layton and Tandy Johnstone, the black performers who were currently the rage of London, and went to the Coliseum twice to see them (“It did our hearts good” to hear the galley stamp and whistle its approval, Essie wrote Carlo and Fania).5

  Their particular new favorite was Emma Goldman. The redoubtable Emma, now aged fifty-six and having already suffered deportation from the United States and disillusionment with what she had seen firsthand of the Russian Revolution, was currently speaking out wherever possible in London against the Bolshevik imprisonment of her anarchist comrades. She and the Robesons initially met through Fitzi, her longtime friend, and they took to one another at once. Of that first meeting, Essie wrote in her diary that Emma “was fascinating—a middle aged Jewess—with a fine mind—but starved for love.” In the autobiography she published six years later, Emma, too, recorded her first impressions: “Essie was a delightful person, and Paul fascinated everyone.… Nothing I had been told about his singing adequately expressed the moving quality of his voice. Paul was also a lovable personality, entirely free from the self-importance of the star and as natural as a child.” With time, Emma became still more glowing about Paul. In the thirties, after their friendship had further ripened, she wrote her intimate friend, Alexander Berkman, “The more I know the man the greater and finer I find him,” and in another letter said, “I would not change him for the whole miserable trash in the South. Not only because of his art but because of his splendid fine character, his understanding and his large outlook on life. Frankly, I know few of our A. [American] friends among whites quite as humane and large as Paul.”6

  Within two weeks of their first meeting, Emma invited the Robesons to dinner, and thereafter they frequently exchanged visits. They took her to see Chaplin in The Gold Rush; she cooked them a roast goose, gave them her books (and Berkman’s) to read, talked about her “disheartening” experiences in Russia and her loneliness in London. “She has a crush on Paul,” Essie wrote to Carlo and Fania, “and we like her very much. I like to hear her talk, and tho I often violently disagree with what she says, still it’s rather thrilling to hear her—she’s so earnest.” Carlo agreed, writing back that Emma is “a wonderful woman whom I admire very much.” When The Emperor Jones bowed at the Ambassad
ors on September 10, Emma was part of the opening-night audience, and she went back to see Robeson perform a second time.7

  Along with Emma in the opening-night audience for Jones was a glamorous segment of London life—Arnold Bennett, Gladys Cooper, St. John Ervine, Ashley Dukes, Godfrey Tearle, Rose Macauley, Lawrence Langner, and his current wife, Armina Marshall. When the curtain fell, Paul was called back a dozen times, finally forcing him to make a speech. “The audience stood up and cheered and shouted,” Essie reported to Otto Kahn—shrewdly including a set of clippings from the London press—and described his performance (and Essie was objective about such matters) as “the finest” she had ever seen him give, despite a dispirited dress rehearsal the night before. She also reported to Kahn that a purchase of “the very thinnest pure wool underclothing” at Jaeger’s was providing Paul with maximum protection against catching cold. Kahn sent back “cordial congratulations” on “what must have been a veritable triumph,” adding his pleasure on learning “that Mr. Jaeger is shielding you and your husband against the vicissitudes of the English climate.…”8

  Robeson’s stunning personal reviews brought reporters flocking to the flat—by three o’clock the next afternoon, he had given six interviews. The New Statesman called his performance “magnificent,” The Times “superb,” The Tatler “singularly fine,” The Saturday Review “gigantic,” G.K.’s Weekly “wonderful,” and West Africa “a tour de force.” The theater promptly put Paul’s name up in lights on the huge electric sign at Cambridge Circus. “Prettiest thing in London!” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens—“He’s an honest to God Star now.”9

  But neither play nor production fared as well as Paul. The incessant beating of the tom-tom onstage produced nervous laughter on opening night, apparently fraying some delicate British nerves, while the small space (and perhaps the unfamiliar English-African cast) apparently cramped Jimmy Light’s directorial skills (more than one critic found his staging “only moderately effective”). The majority of reviewers did hail the play (“a work of gigantic range, both actual and symbolic,” Ivor Brown wrote in The Saturday Review), but a minority registered strong doubts about the repetitive “series of anti-climaxes” and O’Neill’s tendency toward melodramatic monologue. Ordinarily a set of reviews so heavily weighted on the positive side would draw a strong public response, but Jones failed to catch on with an English audience. “They really did not like the play at all,” Essie wrote Countee Cullen, although “they did seem wild about Paul and his acting, and said so.”10

  Essie probably put her finger on the failure: “London doesn’t want red meat on the table,” she wrote Carlo and Fania; “the London audience likes its elegant applesauce on the stage—it does not like to have its neck wrung unless there’s sex in the works.” To Otto Kahn she characterized the audience as having been “almost exclusively the intelligentsia and the society people—and of course they don’t support a play indefinitely.” (The play was “too gloomy” for the general public, she wrote James Weldon Johnson.) But perhaps, too, the fact that Jones was “a negro play” worked against it. “The sight of a half-naked wretch gradually becoming more demented leaves an English audience cold,” one critic commented. Another claimed, “To us, as a people, the negro is unknown.” That attitude of bland indifference may have been more characteristic of the attitude of the English intelligentsia than the committed egalitarianism Essie attributed to it; only a single reviewer was inspired by the play to make any comment at all on the questions it raised about the plight of blacks in the United States. Despite hopes for a long run, The Emperor Jones closed on October 17, after five weeks, Robeson again getting a prolonged personal ovation.11

  The Robesons liked London so much they lingered on for two weeks after the play closed. Paul’s spreading fame produced a new batch of invitations, and now they had the free time to accept them. The social calendar got jammed once more. They dined with the composer Sir Roger Quilter, the actress Athene Seyler and her guest Hugh Walpole; took tea with the radical American journalist Crystal Eastman and her husband; visited with the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (whose cantata Hiawatha had impressed the London critics); went to the Russian ballet and to a rugby game; saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell at the King’s Theatre and for dinner afterward (“She looked the typical, up to the minute whore house proprietress,” Essie wrote in her diary, “but was lovely to us”); spent one afternoon with Miss Amanda Ira Aldridge, second daughter of the great black actor Ira Aldridge (she had written to express her appreciation of Paul’s “magnificent performance” and had presented him with the earrings her father had worn on stage as Othello, expressing the hope he would one day wear them when he, too, played the role).12

  Paul began vocal training with the well-known coach Flora Arnold. Essie described herself as “very jealous of Paul’s style and his simplicity of singing” and ready to “fight anybody who tries to make him ‘technical,’” but she felt Miss Arnold gave him “just what he needs—and I think when he finishes with her he will have complete confidence in himself.” In addition, Essie had begun to cultivate some ambitions of her own. She confided to Van Vechten that she had “quite settled one thing in my mind definitely—as soon as I get home I’m going to make a try to get into the movies—isn’t that funny? Of course I shall keep Paul’s mark first always. I suppose I’ll never get over that! We talked about that particular weakness—or was it strength—on my part one night—remember? Well, anyway … I’ve always longed to act in the movies.” She took to wearing her hair “back and a little kinky—something like Nora Ray wears hers.” Paul, she reported, thought it looked “interestingly African!,” and in combination with long earrings and deep colors it made her feel “much taller and much smarter.” Carlo sent back his encouragement: “I’m awfully excited about your movie ambitions. I don’t see why you shouldn’t realize them.”13

  Essie decided that Paul was “very tired,” that “the vocal and nervous strain of Jones has been great and the damp climate has taken a toll on his throat and chest,” and that he needed a prolonged rest in the south of France. The vacation did prove, in comparison with the social whirl of London, restful—though the six-week stay in France starred its own arresting cast of characters. With introductions from Van Vechten, Paul and Essie stopped for a week in Paris on their way to the Riviera. They called on Madame Matisse, who showed them the master’s watercolors “and some fascinating African wooden carved art”; Paul, in turn, sang, and reduced Madame Duthuit, Matisse’s daughter, to tears with his “Weepin’ Mary,” though she knew scarcely a word of English. Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, already counted the Robesons as friends and, “to do a little publicity” for Paul, threw a “port and sandwich” party for him. Among the guests and reporters gathered that day at the Rue de L’Odéon to hear Robeson sing were James Joyce and his wife, the composer George Antheil, the American music publisher Robert Schirmer, Lewis Galantiere, the head of the International Chamber of Commerce, and the Ernest Hemingways.14

  They also went to have tea with Gertrude Stein. Essie had dropped her a note a few weeks earlier, enclosing a letter of introduction from Van Vechten, which began, “This letter preludes the approach of two of the nicest people left in the world: Essie and Paul Robeson.” Van Vechten had already mentioned Paul in three earlier letters to Stein, describing him as “a great actor,” “a lamb of God,” and someone he liked “better than almost anyone I ever met.” “I think you will too and he will love you and you will like his wife just as much.”15

  On the latter count, Van Vechten may have misjudged. Essie made no entry in her diary for November 6—an atypical lapse, given her penchant for recording in detail her meetings with the rich or famous; on her part, Gertrude Stein failed to make a single reference to Essie in her follow-up account of the visit to Van Vechten. But, as Carl had predicted, Gertrude Stein and Paul did take to each other hugely. “There is no doubt about it Carl,” Stein wrote him, “you have awfully g
ood taste in friends.… Robeson is a dear and he sang for us and I had a long talk with him.” That talk, she reported to Carlo in another letter, revolved around “why you like niggers so much Robeson and I had a long talk about it it is not because they are primitive but because they have a narrow but a very long civilisation behind them. They have alright, their sophistication is complete and so beautifully finished and it is the only one that can resist the United States of America.” She did not, however, like hearing Robeson sing spirituals. “They do not belong to you,” she said to him, “any more than anything else, so why claim them.” On a later visit, “a very charming Southern woman” asked him where he was born. New Jersey, he said. Oh, not in the South? she responded—what a pity. “Not for me,” he answered. Robeson, Stein concluded, “knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a negro.”16

  Two years after their first meeting, on the occasion of another talk with Robeson, Stein described him to Van Vechten as “really a perfectly ideal companion, the last time I saw him it was only once and it was in a crowd of people. I liked him then but now after a quiet time alone with him we are really very good friends.… He did give charming pictures of you Carl, he does that awfully well makes the people he is talking about very really in front of you and it was nice having that done with you. Thanks for him.” Carlo, in turn, reported Robeson’s reaction to Stein: “he adores you.”17

  The Robesons also saw a few old friends, like Donald Angus, and took in the much-touted Revue Nègre. The Revue had been put together by the white producer Caroline Dudley Reagan, an American living in Paris, whom Essie disliked and who was to cause Paul considerable trouble within a few years. Essie reported to Carlo and Fania that the Revue was “rotten”—“that is … between us,” she wrote, “I hate to run down our own stuff.” Josephine Baker started out well—“the things she does with her body are amazing”—but she continued to do “the same stuff all evening, and by the end you are slightly bored,” especially since her voice couldn’t be heard above the orchestra. As for the touted “African scene,” the “idea is splendid, and it is all fine until Josephine does this ridiculously vulgar and totally uncalled for wiggling. It would be different if it fitted in anywhere, but it obviously [is] stuck in as an added attraction.” The Revue in fact marked Josephine Baker’s Paris debut—and made her, still a teenager, an overnight sensation.18