Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  But three months later the same racist specter rose up in the theater world itself—and this time in New York. With no trouble, light-skinned Essie picked up the orchestra tickets for Bridge of the Lamb that Jimmy Light had left for them at the box office at the Henry Miller Theater. But, after Paul arrived at the theater and they tried to go to their seats, they were directed instead back to the box office; the man at the booth looked at Paul and asked him—as he handed him tickets for the balcony—if he “understood.” Paul said no, he didn’t. They refused the balcony seats and left. The managing director of the theater sent Paul a letter of apology, saying it was “a matter of great personal distress” that such a thing had happened and asking him to understand that it had been “merely the stupid operation of a general policy.” It was precisely the “general policy” that Paul would come increasingly to protest as he grew less and less comfortable with the individual exceptions made to it—when “mere stupidity” did not intervene—for those few blacks considered sufficiently cultivated or famous.36

  His New York friends provided some balm. After a well-received benefit concert at Town Hall for a Lower East Side settlement house, Van Vechten gave a party that outshone all but his most spectacular. Sybil Colefax (the English decorator and socialite), who had specifically asked to meet Paul, was the centerpiece, but the sparkling satellites included a sizable theater contingent—Lenore Ulric, Louis Calhern, Rita Romilly, Sidney Blackmer, and Katharine Cornell (Essie found her “very much like she is on the stage, ugly but beautifully spiritual”)—along with the Walter Whites, the James Weldon Johnsons, and Rebecca West. Carlo had evidently intended the party as a pick-me-up for the Robesons; in inviting them he’d written, “… remember that you aren’t the only ones that have terrible experiences.… This is a strange country.” Paul’s trust in Carlo on racial matters during the twenties (later to diminish) is exemplified in his reaction to Van Vechten’s controversial novel, Nigger Heaven. Many black figures—including Du Bois, Walter White, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke—strongly disapproved of the book, but soon after its publication, Robeson telegraphed Carlo: “Nigger Heaven amazing in its absolute understanding and deep sympathy. Thanks for such a book. Anxious to talk to you about it.”37

  The worst experience of Robeson’s youthful career lay just ahead, at a concert in Boston in March 1926. The city was Larry Brown’s hometown, had been the scene of some of Roland Hayes’s most memorable concerts, and was known for the coolness of its audiences and critics. Robeson was anxious to perform well there. But a few days before the concert he came down with one of his frequent colds, which did not improve when, on arriving at their mid-range hotel, they were told that it didn’t take blacks as guests. Their next try, the Copley Plaza, one of the city’s fanciest hotels, received them “with every courtesy.” (Boston Brahmins had long prided themselves on their tolerance—toward blacks, that is, not Jews or Irish.) Although Paul went straight to bed and stayed there the whole next day, when he got up that evening to dress for the concert he still felt so poorly that he suggested canceling the performance. Larry and Essie persuaded him to give it a try. He did manage to complete the program, but, as Essie wrote, “It was simply awful, his rich lovely voice was tight and hard and unrecognizable.” The audience seemed “embarrassed,” but “something of Paul’s tenseness and deep sincerity got over to them,” and the critics next day were compassionate (“Mr. Robeson’s voice is a baritone of not a large range. It is a rich voice, but … it is almost harsh at its lower edges, and the fact that its owner was suffering last evening from a cold made the fact more obvious still. Such imperfections, however, seem of minor consequence.”)38

  Paul’s confidence was shaken. After a two-year roll of breakneck momentum and unvarying acclaim, he was not used to setbacks. He wondered how other singers dealt with the difficulties of travel and compensated for the toll exacted by nerves and colds (not to mention racism). On Essie’s recommendation, he consulted with Teresa Armitage, who had taught music in the Chicago high schools while Essie was a student there. Armitage agreed that Paul had a remarkable voice and recommended that he work with Frantz Proschowsky, a well-known vocal coach. Progress—especially in learning “how to make the most of his low tones”—was at first exhilarating, but Paul soon began to feel that he was marking time, switched to another coach briefly, and then decided to study with Armitage herself. He also consulted a medical specialist, who said his nose and throat were inflamed and treated him for a growth on his vocal cords. Within a month, there was a marked improvement, and in gratitude Robeson went to sing for the doctor’s family.39

  Just as Robeson began to regain confidence in his voice, he had to deal with an acting disappointment. Early in the spring of 1926 the DeMille motion picture office approached him with an offer: “DeMille wants to do a Negro picture” and wanted him for the lead. Negotiations went forward rapidly, and on April 21 Robeson signed a contract to make a picture for DeMille that summer in California. A week later the deal fell through. DeMille decided he had to shoot the film in New York rather than Hollywood, which meant delaying until the fall—and thereby created an unresolvable conflict with Paul’s prior scheduling commitments. They were “so disappointed,” Essie wrote in her diary.40

  Essie had her own setbacks. She submitted the play she’d written on the Riviera to DeMille and, when Paul’s movie with that office came to nothing, sent it to the Shuberts, who told her they were looking for a dramatic piece about black life, not a musical. With characteristic pluck, Essie started on a new script, but the day after completing the first act, she had an unaccountable nose hemorrhage (six months earlier she had mysteriously fainted while attending the theater). Deciding she was “simply dead” from the strain of the concert tours, from trying (as she wrote the Van Vechtens) “to make the boys comfortable, look after everything, and literally sing with them (silently) on the concerts,” she took stock and declared “my color was bad, I was too fat, I was sluggish and generally uninteresting—even to myself.” (“I haven’t had time to pay attention to myself for 4 years—and I find I need it badly.”) She decided to devote the summer to staying “very busy with Essie.” She went on a strict diet (lamb chops and pineapple), shopped with Minnie Sumner for new clothes, and enrolled in a daily dance class with a Denishawn graduate. She also consulted a doctor for help in getting pregnant.41

  This flurry of self-improvement was not designed simply to repair the ravages of touring. Essie was feeling insecure in the marriage. On their fourth wedding anniversary, in August 1925, she had written in her diary, “We are so happy.” On their fifth, she tersely noted, “Spent it together”—implying they had considered spending it apart. In the retrospective opinion of several of the Robesons’ intimates, Paul had never been content in the marriage, but, if so, his tender letters to Essie during the first few years suggest that his discontent was neither sharp nor steady. By 1926 it was. As early as the preceding December, Essie had confided to her diary that she had thought of having an affair with an old beau, the physician Grant Lucas—but immediately gave up the idea when “Baby decided to admire me and be sweet to me, and everybody else looked like two cents.” But by March, Paul and Essie went off on separate vacations, he to Atlantic City and she to spend a few days with Minnie at A’Lelia Walker’s Villa Lewaro. The change seemed to do them both good: “Paul was home when I arrived—was so glad to see him,” Essie wrote in her diary. “He looks so well—clear eyes, etc. I’m sure the rest did him good.”42

  For the next few weeks they went to a round of social events together, with apparent pleasure, including a visit to the art collector A. C. Barnes in Pennsylvania, an evening spent with Claire and Hubert Delany (the lawyer and future judge), two at the Brouns (with Woollcott, William Rose Benet and Elinor Wylie, the Walter Whites, Mabel Normand, Harpo Marx, and Van Vechten’s newest favorite, the black singer Taylor Gordon); another with the Knopfs to meet the John Galsworthys (along with Fannie Hurst, H. L. Mencken, and Carlo); an Opportu
nity dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant (Paul, along with David Belasco, Montgomery Gregory, and Stark Young, served as judges for the playwriting prizes); excursions to catch Florence Mills at the Alhambra, to hear Galli-Curci sing, Kreisler play, Al Jolson entertain (“He just is the cheapest kind of music hall artist” was Essie’s opinion), and Lenore Ulric perform in the “wonderful” show Lulu Belle, which Robeson had earlier turned down.43

  But the hectic round of events only briefly papered over the underlying tensions. In the beginning of May, Paul’s brother Ben (who had disliked Essie from the first) came for a visit, and he and Paul went out alone. Then Paul and Essie quarreled about money. He told her about a friend’s note for seventy-five dollars that he had assumed, an act that Essie took to be “a breach of faith” between them and which “so disgusted” her (she always thought Paul’s generosity bordered on irresponsibility) that she threatened to turn all their income over to him and let him try handling it himself (a sure recipe, she felt, for self-destruction). A week later they had still another fight. Essie ordered twin beds. Paul began to stay out nights and to drink (Harry Block, a Knopf editor, reported to Van Vechten after one party, “For anyone who is supposed to have had as little practice as Paul, I should say he drinks very well”). Stiff-upper-lipped Essie admitted to feeling “a bit lonely,” and turned increasingly to her mother and Minnie for support (she and Minnie also managed to stay drunk for a whole day). As Essie retreated inward, some of her new friends began to worry. “I haven’t seen you for ages,” Blanche Knopf wrote, and Carlo, too, expressed concern when Paul began to show up at their place without her. When Essie reassured him that she was only “taking care of Essie,” he cheerily wrote back, “We had begun to worry about your long absence, but if you’re getting thin and chic all at the same time, go to it, kid!”44

  The storm raged for two weeks. Then, on June 14, Essie wrote in her diary, “Paul returned today. Was so glad to see him. We sort of started life all over again. He is so sweet.” He soon became “Baby” and “Angel” once again. Yet Essie knew the reconciliation was fragile. Without consulting Paul, she decided it was time to have a baby.

  The immediate tension between them was further relieved by absorption in a new theatrical project. The publisher and producer Horace Live-right (who during the 1925–26 season had presented John Barrymore’s modern-dress Hamlet) signed him for the lead in Jim Tully and Frank Dazey’s new play, Black Boy, the story of the rise and fall of a black prizefighter, based roughly on the life of Jack Johnson. Rehearsals began in late August 1926, with the young cabaret performer Fredi Washington (whose name, for some reason, was changed to “Edith Warren” on the playbill just before opening night) cast as Robeson’s leading lady. She began rehearsals “in awe” of Robeson, but he was so “kind and helpful” she soon relaxed. According to the rumor mill, they became “an item.”45

  During tryouts it became clear that the play—full of gimmickry and whipped-up emotions, though decidedly not lifeless—was in trouble. A friend of Van Vechten’s who saw it in Wilmington reported to him that “half the audience walked out” on the night she saw it—possibly, though she did not say, because of the presence of police and vice reformers gathered in concern over Robeson’s appearance in the climactic scene wearing “the few clothes of the ring” and further exercised over a subplot in which Black Boy became involved with a white woman. As the show’s tryout progressed, it did seem to be coming together (it was “going ever so much better now,” Essie wrote Carlo and Fania two weeks before the scheduled Broadway opening). Edward Steichen took some remarkable photographs of Robeson for Vanity Fair (“my little tribute,” Steichen wrote Van Vechten), and a dazzling array of celebrities—among them Judith Anderson, Louis Wolheim, Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge, Lee Shubert, Fannie Hurst, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and the two boxers Harry Wills and Jack Sharkey—turned out for the New York opening on October 6 at the Comedy Theater. The reviews were mixed to negative (two of the critical heavies, George Jean Nathan and Percy Hammond, turned in the most favorable appraisals), and several were overtly racist. The Wall Street Journal’s critic opted for “humor”: Robeson “took his fighting amiably just as any colored man of friendly disposition would tackle any job to which was attached a consideration likely to provide pork chops or other dainties favored by those of African descent.” Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror wrote, “The authors have cheapened their portrait of the pugilist by introducing the problem of racial antagonism. In our opinion it is always in bad taste to introduce this unpleasant element.” Frank Vreeland in the New York Telegram went further: “It might as well be confessed by this writer that he is never wrung by great sympathy for negro tragedies or for the misfortunes of prizefighters who omitted brains in their makeup. As figures of fun, both colored folk and pugilists have always interested him, and viewed from that light, he doesn’t have to strain to appreciate them. But when they are portrayed as children of sorrow, then this fellow feeling for them oozes out almost imperceptibly.… After all, on the stage one’s interest in a character who is sorely beset is in proportion to the intelligence with which he can meet his troubles. And the average negro or prizefighter—note I said the average—can never appear sufficiently tragic in adversity to break my heart to the degree that makes a good play. There have doubtless been truly tragic negroes—one thinks of Toussaint L’Ouverture, for one—but they are not really representative of their rather happy-go-lucky race.”46

  Notices for Robeson himself ranged from good to ecstatic. “He towers high above the play,” wrote Burns Mantle, sounding a theme reiterated by most of the other critics. Several expressed gratitude that the script called for Robeson to sing twice, allowing welcome relief from having to listen to the authors’ words. The worst said about Robeson was that he started slowly; the best outdid even a press agent’s vocabulary of superlatives: “A truly great actor”; “A figure of tremendous, Samsonic force”; a performance “perhaps greater than his performance in ‘The Emperor Jones,’ and that is superlative praise.”47

  But the widely read black paper the Pittsburgh Courier regretted that a Broadway show had, yet again, presented a portrait of the Negro as an “ignorant, perverse child … [by whites who] evidently know … extraordinarily little of the psychology of Aframericans [sic].” Robeson himself, a decade later, after his politics had matured, outlined the play’s deficiencies as a portrait of black life: “The negro couldn’t say in it all that he really lived and felt. Why, the white people in the audience would never stand for it. Even if you were to write a negro play that is truthful and intellectually honest, the audiences, in America at least, would never listen to it.”48

  The play drew poorly and closed within a few weeks, sending Robeson back to the concert circuit. He continued to search for appropriate stage roles, but their scarcity confined him, for the next year and a half, to singing. He told one newspaper interviewer that he dreamed “of a great play about Haiti, a play about Negroes, written by a Negro, and acted by Negroes … of a moving drama that will have none of the themes that offer targets for race supremacy advocates.” But as he evaluated the serviceability of a given script for meeting such high purposes, Robeson’s vision could occasionally be compromised by his desire for commercial success, and further distorted by the sanguine Harlem Renaissance lens through which he viewed his art. When he was offered Paul Green’s new play, In Abraham’s Bosom, late in 1926, he turned it down, fearing it was too negative thematically and too risky commercially: “… there’s hardly a note of hope in it. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be popular and I can’t afford to be going into plays that are foredoomed to fail.” The play was indeed somber, but so were many aspects of black life. James Weldon Johnson thought the script “closer and truer to actual Negro life” and more deeply probing of it “than any drama of the kind that had yet been produced.” Starring Rose McClendon, Abbie Mitchell, Frank Wilson, and Jules Bledsoe, In Abraham’s Bosom went on to win the 1927 Pulitzer Prize.49
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br />   In January 1927, two months after Black Boy closed, Robeson and Brown set out on another singing tour, this time going as far as Kansas and Ohio. The stop in Kansas City proved unexpectedly eventful. Roy Wilkins, a young black reporter for the thriving weekly the Kansas City Call (and later head of the NAACP), was part of a small local group that had organized a black concert company. Robeson was the first performer they had sought to engage, but his standard fee had seemed beyond their means. At the time—according to figures published in Variety—Robeson’s guarantee for a one-night performance in cities with a population of three hundred thousand was $1,250; in this he ranked twentieth in a listing that put John McCormack at the top ($5,000) and Roland Hayes, the only other black artist to make the list, in the middle ($3,200). That fee was more than the Kansas City group could afford, but, because the organizing group was made up of amateurs with little working capital, Robeson agreed to appear for $750.50

  Wilkins and friends made arrangements to hold the concert in the Grand Avenue Temple, a large white church in downtown Kansas City. The leading newspaper, the Star, agreed to carry an advance notice of the Robeson concert—but without an accompanying picture, for as a matter of policy it did not print photographs of blacks. Since this was coupled with the announcement—again contrary to local custom—that no separate section would be reserved at the concert for whites, advance sales went poorly and the box office threatened to fall short of Robeson’s guaranteed fee. The organizers feared he might refuse to perform, but he reassured Wilkins: “Don’t worry.… I will sing for my people.” The concert proved a success—“White folks,” Wilkins later wrote, “decided they couldn’t stay away.” Kansas City saw one of the largest integrated audiences to date, and Robeson got his guarantee, with $300 to spare.51