Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The debt to Kahn was still unpaid by December 1930, and his lawyer, Bruce Bromley, finally served Robeson with a summons. The following month, when in New York, Robeson conferred with Bromley and (so Bromley wrote Kahn) “expressed surprise and regret” that previous notices had been ignored and no payments made, stating that “his wife had concealed these facts from him and had told him that she was attending to the indebtedness and making periodical payments on account.” He purportedly told Bromley that “he had learned for the first time upon his arrival in New York that his wife had spent all his income and incurred additional indebtedness besides.” The two men quickly arrived at an oral agreement whereby Robeson agreed to turn over one-half of the net proceeds of each of his concerts, beginning immediately, until the indebtedness was erased. A year later, hearing that Kahn was coming to London on a visit, Essie invited him to a home-cooked meal for just the two of them: “I should like you to hear the end of the story, which would be better told than written.” Pleading prior engagements, Kahn declined.28

  Following his success in Show Boat, Robeson signed on for Lionel Powell’s prestigious Celebrity Concert Tour (his other clients included Kreisler, McCormack, Chaliapin, and Paderewski), received concert offers from various places on the Continent, and again started negotiating (again unsuccessfully) for a motion picture in the States. After nearly a year of singing “Ol’ Man River,” Robeson was “bored to death with it” and “kicking up his heels with glee” at the prospect of a change. He had been taking three voice lessons and three French lessons a week, along with coaching in singing German (which included learning the role of Sarastro in The Magic Flute), and was eager to put what he had learned into practice. “There should be a big harvest to be reaped when the show closes,” Essie predicted.29

  The harvest came in immediately. Show Boat closed early in March 1929, and by the end of that month Robeson and Brown were singing concerts at Harrowgate and Bournemouth for a hundred pounds each (Paul, Larry, and Essie going thirds, their new arrangement—marking a rise in pay from 20 percent for Essie). Most of April was spent testing the unfamiliar waters of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. In all three cities the public and critical response were so enthusiastic that second concerts in each had to be scheduled immediately—and they, too, sold out. The American Minister in Prague not only came to the concert, but also invited the Robesons to tea the next day at the legation. They especially appreciated the gesture because the American Ambassador to England had pointedly omitted them from his yearly Fourth of July party—though he invited nearly every prominent white American in London, and though Robeson’s immense popularity exceeded theirs. Robeson was pleased, too, when the director of the National Theater in Prague invited him to perform The Emperor Jones there in a production planned for the following year.30

  In Budapest, Robeson was struck by the affinity between the spirituals and Slavonic and Gypsy folk songs; it was the beginning of a keen interest he would develop in charting universal patterns in the folk music of different nationalities. When, a few months later, a reporter asked him how he accounted for the fact that the African people “have an almost instinctive flair for music,” Robeson responded with an explanation that linked up the African experience to a universalized view of oppression: “… this faculty was born in sorrow.… I think that slavery, its anguish and separation—and all the longings it brought—gave it birth. The nearest to it is to be found in Russia, and you know about their serf sorrows. The Russian has the same rhythmic quality—but not the melodic beauty of the African. It is an emotional product, developed, I think, through suffering.” While in Central Europe, Robeson also saw something of the poverty of the masses and the plight of the Jews—concerns that would heighten in the years that lay immediately ahead.31

  Returning to London, Robeson sold out the Albert Hall—the largest crowd ever assembled there except for Kreisler—and swamped the critics. In the tour of English cities that immediately followed, his new manager, Lionel Powell, negotiated the extraordinary fee of 70 percent of the box-office gross (10 percent going to Powell). Essie, in the meantime, had gotten an offer of her own. The London office of Doubleday and Doran Publishing Company approached her to write a book for them “on Paul and the Negro”—a project she had had in mind for some time—offering an advance of a thousand pounds. Essie completed a first draft early in 1929. Miss Moody at Doubleday’s found it “so fascinating” (Essie reported to Otto Kahn) that “she read it straight thru without stopping”; but Moody felt that at a mere twenty-five thousand words the manuscript was only half as long as it should be—though she assured Essie that, if she couldn’t lengthen it, Doubleday would accept it anyway, using “very thick pages and wide margins” to fill it out. Essie chose to go back to work on it.32

  When Van Vechten reappeared in London in June, Essie showed him the new draft, saying she would “thoroughly appreciate anything you care to tell me about it—even if it’s bad news.” It was. Van Vechten laconically wrote Alfred Knopf that he had “read Essie’s mss. about Paul and have advised her to do some more work on it,” but—a tribute to the honesty of their friendship—to Essie herself he said directly that he thought she had put too much of herself into it. Essie agreed with Carlo’s judgment: “I re-read the ‘book’, thinking about what you said about it, and I must confess darling that I blushed for shame at my terrific and unconscious conceit and boasting. I would have been embarassed [sic] to death if it had got out as is! … This time I shall try to think how outsiders will take what I write. You are a lamb to help me so much. Really Carlo, you seem to be cast permanently into the role of our Guardian Angel!” The revised biography would appear the following year, Essie’s self-reportage cut back considerably, but with enough patronizing commentary on Paul remaining in the book to anger him—and to contribute to another, this time sharper rupture in their relationship.33

  For a time it again seemed Robeson might do a motion picture. He signed a contract with Charles Rogers (of the producing firm Asner and Rogers) to begin shooting a film in the States on July 15, 1929. The play Black Boy, Julia Peterkin’s Black April, and Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, In Abraham’s Bosom, were among the properties considered, but, as Essie—implying some element of bigotry—explained to the Van Vechtens, “the producer couldn’t get a story which the distributors would accept!” (Nor could Robeson collect a cent on the contract.) The cancellation of the film unsettled his plans to move smoothly into a two-month concert tour of the States. As a filler, Essie tried “to persuade the British talkie people to do a picture with Paul,” and the London film columnist Nerina Shute helped her, publishing an article about Robeson’s eagerness to make a film under English auspices and his inability to find a satisfactory script. But again nothing suitable was forthcoming (and at the same time, the play Edgar Wallace had been working on for him failed to materialize).34

  Robeson occupied his time prior to his departure for the States in the fall of 1929 with studying languages, taking voice lessons, doing an occasional concert in the vicinity—and getting teeth extracted (giving him the appearance, in Essie’s opinion, of a “scraggly boy,” and giving hope that draining an old abscess in his mouth would put an end to his numerous bouts of nose and throat trouble; it did not). He also began to learn the role of Othello.35

  It had long been in the back of Robeson’s mind that he would someday like to play Othello. After his success in Show Boat, the idea entered other minds as well. In the end it was the actor-producer Maurice Browne and his wife, the director Ellen (“Nellie”) Van Volkenburg, who put together a production. The couple had founded the Repertory Company in Seattle and the Little Theatre in Chicago, and Browne had recently had a huge success producing R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End. The profits from that venture were so great that he became a partner in the purchase of the Globe and Queens theaters. The press reported that Browne had been able to offer Robeson a contract calling for a three-figure weekly salary—“said to equal t
he largest ever paid in London to an actor in a ‘straight’ part—though well below the £1,000 a week understood to be commanded by a musical comedy star like Jack Buchanan.” Rehearsals were scheduled to begin after Robeson’s return from his 1929 American tour, with an opening planned for London in the spring of 1930, followed by a production in the States. “We are really very excited about it,” Essie wrote right after Paul formally signed the contract—“Paul is already working on the part.”36

  One month after the press announced with fanfare that Robeson would be playing Othello, it headlined a quite different story about him: he and his wife had been refused service, explicitly as blacks, at the Savoy Grill, the posh watering hole of the supposedly color-blind upper classes. Robeson told reporters he had had nothing to do with making the incident public—“No one was more surprised to see it published than I. I did not agitate the matter and intended to ignore it. Several evenings after the incident I was with an English friend and the question of social barriers in the United States came up. She said that such a thing could not happen to me over here. I realized that it had happened only a few nights before. She was so amazed she took it up with the London papers.” (That friend was apparently Sybil Colefax.) In a letter he released to the press, Robeson gave his own detailed version of the Savoy incident:

  I thought that there was little [prejudice against blacks in London] or none but an experience my wife and I had recently has made me change my mind and to wonder, unhappily, whether or not things may become almost as bad for us here as they are in America.

  A few days ago a friend of mine … invited my wife and myself to … the Savoy grill room at midnight for a drink and a chat.…

  On arriving the waiter, who knows me, informed me that he was sorry he could not allow me to enter the dining room. I was astonished and asked him why.… I thought there must be some mistake. Both my wife and I had dined at the Savoy and in the grill room many times as guests.

  I sent for the manager, who came and informed me that I could not enter the grill room because I was a negro, and the management did not permit negroes to enter the rooms any longer.…

  The episode created a stir, and Africans and West Indians living in London called a protest meeting at the Friends’ House. Only a month before, Robeson himself had told a reporter that “The colour problem exists only with illiterate English people.” But at the protest meeting, the Labour M.P. James Marley (later Lord Marley) and others recounted numerous recent discriminatory actions against people of color—including the inability to find accommodations for two West Indians invited to the country to lecture on art and literature; the repeated barring of Robert S. Abbott, editor and publisher of the Chicago Defender, from hotels in London; and the many separate instances when blacks—some of them scholars, solicitors, QCs—were asked to leave dance halls. As for well-known entertainers, Marley said—and he cited Robeson’s old group The Harmony Kings as a case in point—they were usually allowed “to stay at first-class hotels, but they stayed there as members of the staff who assisted at entertainments and not as guests.” (At exactly this time, the Chinese film star Anna May Wong—a friend of Robeson’s—was forbidden by the British censors to kiss an Englishman in a film.)37

  Marley announced that he would raise the matter in the House of Commons, and to that end wrote to Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister. Although MacDonald had been part of a group of Labour MPs who the previous year had entertained Robeson in the Commons, he straddled the issue, announcing, “It is not in accordance with our British hotel practice, but I cannot think of any way in which the Government can intervene.” Other Robeson acquaintances were less ambivalent: one of them telegraphed MacDonald to urge he take action, and Lord Beaver-brook’s Evening Standard published an article by the novelist Richard Hughes wondering aloud whether the change in London’s attitude on the race question was due to “that general Americanization of our capital which so many lugubrious and true-blue patriots seem to find on every side.” Hughes called on the leading London restaurateurs to declare their position on the issue of race. Some did, but the response was not reassuring: the managers of the Grosvenor and the Waldorf were unwilling to express an opinion, the manager of the Mayfair announced that, “as in the past, I shall rely solely on my own judgement,” and the Savoy Grill itself professed an inability to trace the original incident, while refusing to confirm or deny reports that it would henceforth adopt a “Jim Crow” policy.38

  In an exclusive interview with the black newspaper the New York State Contender, Robeson said that he, too, believed “the influence of American race prejudice was responsible for the affront.” That explanation was widely seconded, and not merely by Englishmen eager to shift the blame. When the New York Journal asked several prominent Harlem leaders for their reactions, George W. Harris (a former alderman) said, “The American negrophobia has spread to European shores,” and Edward A. Johnson (a former assemblyman) claimed that blame for the incident “rested on the shoulders of white American tourists,” who within the last few years had been arriving in increasing numbers in England. But, as London’s New Leader reminded its readers, “It is no new thing for coloured men and women to be treated in this way in the centre of London”—the sense that discrimination was something new resulted from the shock of seeing it extended to embrace a “cultivated, sensitive spirit” like Robeson.39

  Two weeks later Paul, accompanied by Essie, embarked for his first full-scale American concert tour, under the management of F. C. Coppicus of the Metropolitan Music Bureau. Robeson rarely felt compelled to express himself in writing (though he had the devouring appetite of a scholar for the written words of others), yet while in the States he did keep a kind of shorthand diary for a few days. In it he mulled over the pros and cons of learning additional technique as an artist, remarking that “Water Boy,” his “best record,” was made “when I was untrained,” and he also wrote down his impressions on returning to his native land. They were not favorable. Attending the theater one night, he had a “strange feeling” sitting in the balcony—“I am almost afraid to purchase orchestra seats for fear of insult—when in England my being in the theatre is almost an event. Very curious. I do hate it all so at times. Everything rushes along—not a kind word anywhere. Everyone looking for his own—no sense of peace—calm—freedom as in London. I feel so oppressed and weighted down.” On top of everything else, American audiences struck him as “terribly crude,” attending for entertainment, not for “love of Theatre.”40

  Robeson’s inaugural American concert, at Carnegie Hall on November 5, 1929, did not fare well with the critics, but the large advance sale ensured a box-office success. He no longer felt that the critics were “of great importance” to him; besides, at his second Carnegie Hall concert, five days later, he sang superbly: “To my mind the best recital of my career. I sang evenly and with great variety of mood-color etc. I [did] so because I sang the songs and forgot my voice. The audience responded in great style.” And so, this time around, did the critics: “He has improved … enormously,” wrote The New Yorker. A thousand people were turned away, the ushers told Robeson no one had ever filled the hall twice in five days, and Lawrence Tibbett went backstage to tell him “he had never enjoyed a concert so much” in his life.41

  From there Robeson’s two-month tour across the continent turned into something like a triumphal procession. In Pittsburgh he was accorded “one of the greatest ovations ever given a visiting artist”; in Chicago called “the Chaliapin of the moment”; in Wisconsin hailed for “a truly sensational concert”; and on his sentimental return to Rutgers, fifteen hundred people turned out, the “largest crowd they ever had at a concert”—at the close giving “a college yell and cheer for ‘Robey.’” The music critic in Toronto epitomized the rhapsodic receptions everywhere:

  His voice has all the power of Chaliapin’s and practically the same range, but there the likeness ends. Paul Robeson’s voice is all honey and persuasion, yearning and searching,
and probing the heart of the listener in every tiniest phrase. A rich, generous, mellow, tender, booming voice that you think couldn’t say a bitter word or a biting sentence with a whole lifetime of practice.… A voice like his is worth waiting ten years to hear, and an art like his comes once in a generation.42

  In the face of such acclaim, Robeson continued to harbor a sense, not exactly of unworthiness, but, rather, of mystified awe. Well aware of the technical limitations of his voice, he was yet being received, and by an ever-widening circle of admirers, as the embodiment of vocal perfection. Except for a few minor disappointments and miscalculations, his reputation had spread with a velocity, and his triumphs had proceeded with a regularity, that defied the career pattern ordinarily associated with a profession—or, rather, several professions—in which accidents of luck, timing, and the volatility of popular and critical taste typically undercut any sustained artistic development (or even applause)—not to mention the additional barriers traditionally thrown up to the advance of any black artist. Faced with his unprecedented good fortune, Robeson chose to view it as profoundly mysterious, attributing the steady advance of his reputation not to the inevitable progress of a unique talent, or even to the willed doggedness of his wife, but to the incalculable workings of some higher power. This “I-am-a-mere-vessel” self-image gave Robeson at once a settled inner confidence and an appealing outer modesty. He rarely made public reference to any sense of “mission” and, among the few times he did, added a note of humor: “I don’t know what it is … that all my life has caused me to succeed whenever I appeared before the public far beyond what my experience, training or knowledge deserved.… I shall probably never know my guardian angel, and though once I sought him earnestly, now I don’t want to know him!”43