From Paris the Robesons went to Villefranche on the Riviera. They were immediately taken in tow by Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, whom they had met in New York at the Salemmés. Both were still in their twenties. Wescott had already gained a reputation as a writer with his first novel, The Apple of the Eye, and his lover, Monroe Wheeler (who as a fledgling publisher had printed a book of Wescott’s poetry), would later become a highly regarded art curator and critic. Traveling as they did in artistic circles, the Robesons always knew gay men and lesbian women, and counted a fair number among their friends. Paul especially was (in the words of one intimate) “never moralistic or judgmental on that subject but rather wholly accepting,” and Monroe Wheeler recalls that when a “fashionable New York dressmaker offered Paul a lot of money to sleep with him,” Paul turned the man down with polite disinterest. Essie, in fact, unlike Paul, occasionally showed a bit of superior disdain, once referring to Elsa Maxwell as that “great ugly Lesbian” (adding that she gave “marvelous parties”), and another time reporting having met “a lot of fairies and degenerates” at a cocktail party given by Lady Duff Gordon. But more typically Essie, too, enjoyed the company of gay people. In 1931 she went three times to hear the “down-and-dirty” Gladys Bentley during her engagement at the Clam House, thought her “grand,” and wrote the Van Vechtens that she, Essie, would “never be the same.” She was also sometime companion and confidante to several gay men, and once expressed disapproving surprise on hearing that one of them preferred to hide his passionate involvement with another man rather than risk being ruined in business and ostracized by French society.19
Wheeler and Wescott had a villa in the hills above Villefranche, an unspoiled half-Italian, half-French village situated near Nice. They booked the Robesons into the famed Welcome Hotel (sometime home in 1925 to Cocteau), where the window and balconies of the Robesons’ room directly faced the sea in front and the French Alps on the side. They read, wrote letters, ate on the balcony, and during the day strolled along the shore in the sun. Within a week, Paul’s congestion began to thaw and Essie’s self-described “nervous tension” to ease. It is “the most enchanting spot in the world—so far as we know,” Essie wrote Carlo and Fania, “and Paul and I are as happy as can be.”20
Wescott and Wheeler lived in Villefranche most of the year and had a large circle of friends. Soon after the Robesons’ arrival, Wescott invited them to an elegant dinner (three wines plus champagne) with an opium-smoking friend of Cocteau’s, the Count de Maleissy, and his wife (“he descended from Joan of Arc,” Essie wrote in her diary, “one of the six oldest titles in France, and she a celebrated mistress of everybody, and very difficult with a dreadful inferiority complex”)—plus the Count Louis Gautier-Vignal (“His is a papal title”). Paul sang a few songs, and everyone “simply went crazy about him.” The Robesons subsequently invited the de Maleissys over to their place on the occasion of a visit from the young writers G. B. Stern and Rebecca West—whom they had met in London and New York, respectively.21
Sixty years later Rebecca West’s recollection of the Robesons (perhaps retrospectively colored by her Cold War political stand—she, having moved to right of center, thought Robeson “naïve” for remaining on the left) was at odds with that of Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein, since she distinctly preferred Essie to Paul. Rebecca West described the Robeson of 1925 as having “a proclivity of not getting on with the job.… He was too much of a musician to join in with the [political] movements, and too little of a musician to go on with his music.” She liked him—he “had such beautiful manners” and was “very sweet”—but liked Essie more. Essie struck Rebecca West as admirably outgoing and lively—she liked parties, “had a great faculty for happiness,” and was “very amusing.” Monroe Wheeler, oppositely, felt Essie “never got into the spirit” of the festivities; Paul didn’t have to be asked twice to sing, but Essie “was very covetous of his voice and didn’t like him to give it away.” Taking Essie’s side, Rebecca West emphasized that it was “very, very hard on her” to have to push Paul all the time, “to bully Paul to keep appointments,” and it lent her “a sort of sharpness, a sort of brightness, that offended people”—she was “quick,” she “would never think twice before answering.” But if she hadn’t pushed, Paul “wouldn’t have got anywhere so quickly.” Rebecca West and Essie were to see more of each other in London over the next few years.22
While on the Riviera, the Robesons also met Frank Harris, the Irish-American writer whose erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves, was currently (1922–27) appearing in four volumes in Germany, and who lived at Cimiez, just outside of Nice. Emma Goldman was a good friend of Harris’s (she had helped to promote his book The Bomb, about the Haymarket anarchists) and had asked him to get in touch with the Robesons when they arrived in the south of France. “He is a nice old man,” Essie wrote in her diary, “with the filthiest mouth I ever heard—always talking about your behind and pleasure and breast and filth.… He talked dirt all the time till finally we were bored stiff.” Harris accompanied them when they went to visit the Jamaican writer Claude McKay and the radical journalist Max Eastman.23
Harris had helped to launch McKay as a writer, and Max Eastman had appointed him associate editor of The Liberator. But until recently McKay had been out of touch with Harris and for a while had been alienated from Eastman (when he and his sister Crystal withdrew from The Liberator in 1921, after a more militant brand of Marxists took control of the magazine, McKay had left, too, gone to Russia for six months—and come back thoroughly repelled by Communism). With the publication of Harlem Shadows in 1922, McKay had leapt to the front ranks of black poets. But his blunt denunciation of American and English racism—and of white patrons and black patronees—had led him to take up temporary residence in France, where both his health and his finances had suffered. On reading in the newspaper that Robeson was vacationing in the area, McKay wrote to introduce himself as a friend of Walter White’s, and to invite him to Nice on the evening he expected a visit from Max Eastman and his wife, Eliena Krylenko.24
To McKay’s annoyance, Essie, not Paul, answered his letter, accepting the invitation for both of them—“because they just couldn’t breathe without each other,” McKay commented dryly. In the autobiography he published a dozen years later, McKay describes the visit from the Robesons and Frank Harris as “piquant.” Eastman and Harris “detested each other,” and on arrival Harris immediately started needling Eastman about his book Since Lenin Died, and his “naivete” in ever having thought Lenin or other Bolsheviks gods. McKay got out a bottle of wine, and Harris, after announcing he was on the wagon, proceeded to drink most of it. He then recounted an anecdote by acting out the woman’s role on Paul; according to McKay, Essie took him aside and whispered that Harris “was so realistic that I felt afraid for my husband.”25
Essie saw the visit with less sarcastic eyes. We “dined and spent a marvelous evening with dear Claude McKay and the Max Eastmans,” she wrote Countee Cullen, and recorded in her diary that she “found Max Eastman one of the most fascinating men I’ve ever known” and thought Claude McKay “so sweet—a charming naïve West Indian lad, with beauty all through him.” Naïve was one thing McKay was not, and his charm, as Essie was shortly to learn, was irregularly exerted. After the Robesons had him over to Villefranche for dinner with the Eastmans, she revised her judgment in stark haste. McKay, she now wrote in her diary, is “a disgusting, black monkey chaser. Was bitterly disappointed in his loudness, commonness and absolute lack of taste, and overwhelming sex conversation.” Several days later, after meeting him twice more, she went still further: McKay “is an illbred, horrid nigger, wholly out of place in good society.” Such furious distaste was not simply about manners.26
In his recent book, Negroes in America, McKay had argued that “powerful Jewish syndicates” controlled the American theater. He contended that their baneful influence, in combination with the failure of the genteel black bourgeoisie to respond to any full an
d honest portrayal of black life, had reduced black artists to limning stereotypes. Resuming this argument with Essie by mail, he conceded that she had debated well—“you made big holes in my argument”—but not well enough. He berated her for having shown a “surprisingly reactionary” point of view in their discussion of the position of the black artist in the United States and chastised her for talking as if “Paul’s or Roland Hayes’ success” could be taken “as typical of America’s attitude to the Negro’s artistic struggles.” “Negro artists have always gained a finer welcome and appreciation in Europe, and especially England, than in the United States,” McKay insisted, and “all the serious-thinking Negro intelligentsia” agreed that it was deplorable that New York had failed to support a black art theater. He did not blame whites entirely for that failure: “Negroes are also to blame because, perhaps, we have not, as the Jews have had, the proportionate cultural background to support and appreciate such a thing. Nevertheless the fact remains that a fine steady appreciation of Negro artistic endeavor in America has always been lacking.”27
Citing the careers of the black actors Williams and Walker—their “great show ended in vaudeville”—and the failure of Shuffle Along to get a road-company production because the Shuberts’ manager said “he could not present colored chorus girls to the American public,” McKay sought to demonstrate to Essie “how mistaken your point of view is.” He reiterated his argument that black artists would “most certainly have developed better” outside the United States, and expressed surprise that she had not learned from Paul’s connection with the Provincetown Players “of the difficulties of finer artistic success in America.” If Essie still remained unaware of the “radical fight” the Provincetowners had to make to keep alive, McKay sardonically suggested that she “ask Miss Fitzgerald [Fitzi, the manager] when you get back to tell you about it all!” Then he twisted the knife a bit deeper still: “Many Negroes,” he wrote—not just Essie, was the implication—“do not understand the interest of those radical artistic groups [like the Provincetowners] in their own struggles, because the Negroes’ outlook is essentially racial and introspective and not universal and original.… So I can quite sympathize with your point of view though it remains unconvincing.” McKay closed on a halfhearted note of reconciliation: “It is not necessary to remain a carping sorehead. We are all as Negroes glad of the general new interest in the creative work of Negroes,” but, he added, “let us not ignore our historical perspective nor present facts.” He was writing to her at length, he explained, because “I am afraid you might have been shocked by my line of argument. My interest in life is universal and curious but intellectually I never deviate from principles and I am always as frank open and intransigent with white people as I am with colored.”28
McKay wrote a separate, shorter note to Paul, quite different in tone. He assured Paul he would “long remember the interesting and informative talk I had with you” and offhandedly apologized if his own remarks had created “an unpleasant situation”—that had been “farthest from my thoughts.” McKay was making a clear separation between Paul and Essie, and Essie knew it. She decided to curtail contact. When Paul returned late one afternoon from a trip to Nice with Monroe Wheeler, Essie greeted them with the news that they had crossed with McKay, who had come in from Nice to visit Paul. Sixty years later Wheeler said, “To this day I can remember Paul’s expression when she told him this—he was absolutely crushed that she hadn’t kept McKay, that she had sent him back to Nice.” After dinner, at 10:00 p.m., Paul went out on his own to look for McKay. Though he had no address for him, he took the tramway into Nice and began a search in the cafés McKay was known to frequent. Eventually he found him, and they talked until the early hours of the morning. By then the tramway had stopped running, and Paul walked the five miles back to Villefranche. “He was so pleased,” according to Wheeler, “to have set things right with McKay.”29
In mid-December the Robesons returned to Paris, where they joined up with the Bercovicis, recently arrived from the States. Daughters Rada and Mirel threw fits of delight at the sight of Paul, and after a three-day reunion, including a birthday party for Essie, the Robesons sailed on the S.S. Majestic for New York. “Paul and I are terrifically excited now about coming home,” Essie wrote Carlo and Fania a week before leaving Europe. “Paul is sunburned a beautiful ebony, and I am a nice chocolate color. And we feel as tho we could take the world apart, see how it ticks, and put it together again.” Paul’s voice, she wrote, had never sounded better—“its enormous and round and soft and mellow. Just you wait till you hear your beloved ‘Lil David!’” Essie also confided that during their leisure time on the Riviera she’d written a book for a “Negro musical play.… The idea has been with me some time—ever since I’ve been going to Negro shows and disapproving of them.” It was “just a simple story … nothing at all high brow or intellectual about it all,” but Paul had read the script “and thinks it very good!”; Essie cautioned the Van Vechtens not to breathe a word about it—“I want to know what you think of it first.”30
Within a month of Robeson’s return to the States, James Pond’s concert bureau had arranged for a series of bookings. Paul and Larry performed eight times in January 1926 (with Essie along as manager), including major concerts in New York, Detroit, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. The inaugural concert, in New York on January 6, got a strongly favorable response, the critics commending the conviction and simplicity of Robeson’s singing and the ingenuity of Larry Brown’s accompaniment (and also expressing delight at his pleasing light tenor when he joined Robeson in duets). The response in the other cities was equally enthusiastic—though one fatuous reviewer in Indianapolis complained that Robeson “fails to turn ‘wild’ upon an audience that uncontrolled spiritual something.”31
Simultaneous with the success of the first mini-tour came the acclaimed release of Robeson’s first recordings. Issued both in the United States and England late in 1925, his four double-sided records sold a highly respectable fifty-five thousand copies within four months (the bestseller of the four was “Joshua Fit de Battle” and “Bye and Bye”), bringing Robeson, whose contract was based on a royalty percentage, nearly twelve hundred dollars. The records were well received artistically, too. While Robeson was still in Europe, Van Vechten reported to him that he had taken the new releases along on a weekend visit to the writer Joseph Hergesheimer and with the first one had a roomful of people in tears. In late January 1926, Robeson went back to Camden to make a new batch of recordings for the Victor Company. When they reached Langston Hughes, upon their release later in the year, he wrote Paul to say, “The great truth and beauty of your art struck me as never before one night this summer down in Georgia when a little group of us played your records for hours there in the very atmosphere from which your songs came.”32
The second round of concerts, in February 1926, did not go as well as the first. The initial stop on the tour, after a twenty-nine-hour ride on what Paul called “a lily” train, was the huge Orchestra Hall in Chicago. Only a small audience had gathered, essentially a turnout of personal friends. Essie blamed the lack of sales on Pond’s failure to advertise but reported back to the Van Vechtens that the disappointment fired Paul up—he “just got mad and opened up his lungs and Sang!”—“sang better than he ever sang in his life,” with the audience shouting for encores, some of the critics remaining to shout along with them. The reviews were unanimously, spectacularly favorable—a rarity for the Chicago critics. “The finest of all Negro voices and one of the most beautiful in the world,” wrote the Chicago Herald-Examiner; the Evening American praised Robeson for his “ideal diction”; the Evening Post marveled at his ability to reach “an elemental something that sets the heart strings vibrating”; and the Daily Tribune hailed his voice as “something to grow rhapsodic about.”33
At the next stop, Milwaukee, Pond had leased a sports arena that held ten thousand people—and had then sold the concert to “The Booker T. Washing
ton Social and Community Center,” a black lodging house for the blind with about twenty residents. Those “poor ignorant people,” as Essie described them, “hadn’t advertised, and only our friends (mostly white) made up the audience!” The house was enthusiastic and the reviews decent, but Essie wrote angrily in her diary that “small-towners are not our audience. Callow, silly, ignorant poseurs—not for us.”34
The third stop, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was unredeemed by either a good audience (the receipts totalled $37.18), a good critical reception, or even a good concert (Essie, never one to pull punches, called it “rotten”). Racial indignities completed the humiliation. Arriving in a snowstorm, the Robesons and Larry Brown went, as prearranged, to the Northland Hotel, only to have the manager inform them that the hotel didn’t take blacks. After a phone call to the concert manager, and considerable argument, the hotel partly relented: they were given rooms on the first floor—to prevent them from being seen on the elevator—and told to use the side staircase, to eat in their rooms, and to make themselves “as inconspicuous as possible.” The next day, on their way back to Chicago, “some flappers” got on the train at Milwaukee, “stopped and gazed at us in amazement,” Essie recorded in her diary, and said in a loud, shocked voice, “Niggers!” “We all got so tickled, we got to giggling and just couldn’t stop.” Laughter was one way to deal with the indignity; the previous night there had been no laughter, and it had taken some time for Larry and Paul to quiet down “from their fury.” “It’s a hell of a life!” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens. “Thank God for the theater.”35
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