Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Fania Marinoff stopped off to see Essie on a trip to London and reported back to Carlo that she had found her, Ma Goode, and Pauli “in a very large Flat very comfortably ensconsed,” and “in a high state of excitement about Paul.” Essie told Fania that she would give him a divorce, and without naming a corespondent (“she wants to give him everything he wants”), but predicted he was “going to have a horrible time” and claimed to feel “terribly sorry for him.” When Essie left the room for a time to try on for Fania the “dernier cri” clothes she had bought in Paris to “knock Paul cold,” Ma Goode told Fania that “Essie was forced into giving Paul the divorce, he had not sent her any money for three months, and that she [the mother] and the baby were almost arrested in the Tyrol for the hotel bill. Paul said no divorce no money, et voila; then she said yes and cabled for money for clothes.” Fania concluded that although Essie was acting “very gay and frank and free about the whole situation,” “au fond, it’s really slaying her.” Writing in her diary after Fania had left, Essie gloried in the purported news Fania had brought that Paul had been “depressed and unhappy” in New York and in Fania’s prediction that “divorce will make a great and unfortunate difference in his whole career.” Writing herself to Carlo a few days later, Essie reiterated the view “I hear on all sides that he is very depressed”:

  When he gets his divorce he may get himself together. I hope he does, poor lamb.… But it seems impossible to please him. I hemmed and hawed, and put off the evil day (divorce) as long as I could, hoping something would happen, but he insisted that he MUST have his freedom, and that I just HAD to give it to him, so I felt I must.10

  Judging from the one letter Paul wrote to Essie over the summer, his mood was not depressed at all, but upbeat. In going public about his possible marriage to a white woman, he had dared the press to do its worst—and had apparently gotten away with it short of a major backlash. Not only was Show Boat proving a triumph for him on Broadway, but a condensed version broadcast over WABC was also acclaimed. His alma mater, Rutgers, awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree at its annual commencement in June, and he particularly savored the irony of being cited along with the president of Princeton—the university that had barred its gates to blacks. In July he gave a concert at Lewisohn Stadium with the Philharmonic under Albert Coates that was received rapturously: his voice “is marked by an individual beauty of timbre that sets it apart from the other voices one hears,” wrote the World-Telegram’s respected critic Pitts Sanborn. “This country is really mine,” Paul wrote Essie. “And strange I like it again and deeply. After all—this audience understands the Negro in a way impossible for Europeans. Looks as though I’ll have to leave, but I am enjoying it all.…”11

  He was seeing very “little of the old crowd,” feeling somewhat self-conscious with them, but reported to Essie, “I am still adored in Harlem. They still don’t quite understand me”—perhaps because of the perplexing barrage of publicity that reported, almost simultaneously, his titled romances, his performing a benefit for the Harlem branch of the Children’s Aid Society, and his attending (in line with his developing interest in Russia) a talk on that country by Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. Instead of the old crowd, he saw more of Bess and Bob Rockmore; the latter had produced him in The Hairy Ape and would soon become his lawyer. But, Paul wrote to Essie, he had no “new flames”—“Guess I’m really in love this time.… Think I’m knocked cold.” He also reassured her that he was “really being energetic”—“My French is coming fine—my Russian is unbelievable—and I’m also working at German and Spanish.… I have just received your play,” he added, “and will read it. Hope it gets placed. I really think you’re bound to hit sooner or later. You have such fine understanding of the theatre, and I surely believe you’ll strike and hard. So pleased to hear of your doings.… You are charming, you know, and different—more power to you.… I would often love to see you and talk to you. Many problems could bear that common-sense approach of yours. I do remain esoteric at times. Very Russian, I guess.… Do know I shall do all I can in this settlement business. I want to be fair, but I don’t want to be unreasonable to myself. While working here—swell, but if I transfer my activities to the continent the going will be tough.… Remarriage will change things here.”12

  Paul arrived back in England in September 1932 thinking divorce proceedings were well along and his new life with Yolande soon to begin. All did seem to be on an amicable footing with Essie. She wrote Harold Jackman, the West Indian man-about-town, that “Paul and I are great friends, and I think we like each other much better now than we ever did.… There isn’t any unpleasantness. In fact, Paul is now reading my play, with a view to acting the leading role. Isn’t life funny? … It’s grand fun. To be free, and young enough still to use that freedom.” Her particular pals were the gay couple William Plomer and Tony Butts, Michael Harrison and his sister Vi, and the black playwright Garland Anderson. She had a brief flirtation with Helmut Teichner, a young German Jew, until she decided he was “really tiresome and noisy.” One evening at Butts and Plomer’s house in Kensington, she met Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Essie wrote in her diary, “talked most of the evening with Leonard Woolf about the Negro, and he talked about Africa, and I enjoyed it immensely.” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “… Mrs. Paul Robeson, negroid, vivacious, supple, talking like a woman on the stage: chiefly to L. about negroes.”13

  Essie was not as reconciled to the “new, free life,” however, as her public face suggested. Rita Romilly, an actress friend who had crossed on the ship with Paul, brought her news of his finances, which unsettled her surface calm. He had been complaining to Essie about money problems (“Financially of course I’m still struggling”), and, with Bob Rockmore beginning to take over as Paul’s business manager, Essie no longer had a detailed accounting of his income. But now, through Rita Romilly, Essie learned that Paul’s starting salary in Show Boat had been fifteen hundred dollars a week (later cut to nine hundred)—a staggering sum in a Depression year—and that he had turned down a radio contract from “Maxwell House Coffee Hour” for another fifteen hundred dollars a week. “And he has been beefing about paying me $100 a week, and $500 a quarter,” Essie huffed in her diary, “and all this summer I have had to cable at least once for every allowance I have had, and I have never received it on time!” She also knew that he had loaned Jimmy Light five hundred dollars, had given money to his sister and brother, Marian and Ben, and had sent Yolande two thousand dollars toward their expenses in the south of France, where they were intending to live for a year. Essie, who in Paris recently had had fashionable fittings at Pacquin’s and Lanvin’s, immediately called her lawyer, canceled the divorce, and instituted a suit for separate maintenance. “[I’ll] see him in hell before I divorce him,” she fumed in her diary, “unless he gives me my allowance a year in advance, and a contract for 20% of his gross. I was so angry I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it all. The swine!”14

  She had a greater surprise coming. Ten days later Paul told her he would not be marrying Yolande after all. The choice was not his. He had left Show Boat prematurely (after only three months) and turned down various opportunities in the States (including that “Maxwell House Coffee Hour”) in order to return to Yolande, to live with her in France for a year, and to marry in December—only to have her abruptly call the whole thing off. Under pressure from friends and family—her father, Tiger Jackson, was thought by some to have had a strong aversion to people of color—she “lost her nerve” and (according to Essie), deciding that “it would be too risky an experiment to give up all her friends and stupid, social life to marry Paul,” failed to arrive at the appointed place to rendezvous with him. Within a month a public announcement appeared of her engagement to Prince Chervachidze, a Russian aristocrat living in France.15

  Paul was devastated. Her journalist friend Marie Seton believes he “came very close to killing himself.” He tried, however, to keep up a good publi
c front, managing in October to carry out his contractual obligation to appear at the Palladium. And even privately, as time passed, he did his considerable best to blur, or at least transmogrify, the nature of the breakup. He told Freda Diamond that he had realized the match was a mistake after Yolande had made amorous advances to him in the back of a chauffeur-driven car and had pooh-poohed his embarrassment at the chauffeur’s presence—as if to say that mere drivers didn’t matter, didn’t really exist as human beings. Her attitude had brought him up short, had reminded him of the way his own people were treated in the South—which is to say, not as people at all. Fifteen years later, in a revised version in which the entire English upper class had been substituted for Yolande, Robeson told an Australian friend that the chauffeur incident (sitting “with Lady So-and-so” in her car) had made him realize for the first time “the affinity between working men and women the world over, that, black and white, we all had a great deal in common.” In any case, Paul told Essie to stop divorce proceedings and began to spend time with her and Pauli at the Buckingham Street flat. “I liked the apartment,” he wistfully told a journalist friend. Before the year’s end, Essie had begun to plan, yet again, for “the beginning of a new life together.”16

  Robeson told friends ever after that he had deeply loved Yolande. What he did not tell them is that for another twenty years at least they stayed in contact, however irregularly, with Larry Brown and the European-based singer John Payne as the go-betweens. A dozen letters have come to light from Payne to Brown, and a half-dozen from Yolande herself to Brown, spanning the years 1932–50, which reveal some sort (on Yolande’s part, at least) of continuing attachment. “She is not well,” Payne wrote Larry Brown as late as 1950, “and loves Paul.…” Soon after that, Payne reported that she was “greaving [sic] herself to death over Paul.” Yolande herself wrote Payne, “I am weary unto death, John. What keeps me alive is my love for Paul, my respect for my father, and the life-lines like you—and Larry.”17

  When writing directly to Larry Brown, Yolande was more explicit still, making it virtually certain that she and Paul had not merely stayed in contact, but may have seen each other more than once. “After P. left,” she wrote Brown in the summer of 1949 from Monte Carlo, where she was staying with friends, “I lost my mental balance, I think.… The cynicism of P. is the thing that has broken me temporarily—and I feel like someone whose legs are badly amputated. It takes time to learn how to walk again.” In two additional letters from the same period, she thanked Larry Brown for having been “so loyal a friend to me in every way for many years” and expressed her envy that Larry had “been beside him as the years developed, and no matter how hard the going, could gradually adapt yourself to the vast change. I have had to try to do that in a very few short stolen hours.” But Yolande assured Larry that she was “being patient and forcing no issues,” even though the situation was “eating into my soul.” Still, she added, it was “worth any pain—because as far as I am concerned—Paul is Paul. The Alpha and Omega. Therefore if I do not hear from him for long stretches, perhaps you could write occasionally. I would not feel so alone then.” In an undated note, probably from the same period, she begged Larry to telephone her—“I have no one else who would understand how hard the road is—but I have got to accept it, Larry—so even a few minutes on the phone without ‘My Lord’ knowing—would help enormously. Oh God, Larry—his rules are hard.”18

  Bob Rockmore was apparently the only other person who knew about the continuing contact between Yolande and Paul. On April 22, 1950, she wrote Rockmore an acid little letter that, in its familiar references, confirms both his awareness and her bittersweet attachment to Paul: “Is it against the Protocol to ask whether our mutual friend makes records still—or has he retired to the bosom of his family—or more exhausting still, has taken himself a Female who is prepared to be ‘everything’ to him? It is so dull not knowing. Dear Bob—how annoying this must all be for you. But to be a lawyer and a friend is always a little trying.… I miss the laughter we had together over many subjects, still.… I could of course write to him as a fan for an up-to-date photograph signed ‘Yours truly,’ but as they say in Lancashire, ‘Eeh, ah ’avent got the energy, Luv’!”19

  Yolande told her old friend Rupert Hart-Davis that “she had had a son by Paul, whom she called Little Paul. She said he had been brought up in Switzerland, where he died in childhood.” Hart-Davis didn’t believe the story, “for Yolande lived as much in fantasy as in real life, and this may have been an unfulfilled wish of hers.” In any case, the remainder of her life was, according to Hart-Davis, “chaotic.” Her marriage to Chervachidze fell apart and—judging from the few traces of her later life that remain—she led an “unstable and racketing” existence, living in a variety of places, holding down, briefly, a variety of jobs. In a 1950 letter to Larry Brown she wrote, “Life is a lonely affair for me now, and always will be.” In 1953, living again in Monte Carlo, she wrote Rupert Hart-Davis, “slowly I am finding that a small quotient of happiness can still be gained in this rather curious world.” Yet a mere three weeks later she wrote him again to say, “depression has seized me by the throat,” and to thank him for never having let her down—“& so many people have!” “Perhaps,” she added sadly, “something will happen one day.… I’m so tired of fighting & putting on my clothes as if it were chain armour—I want to lean on somebody! Not always to be the prop. Fundamentally, I am so very tired.” Thereafter the historical record on Yolande Jackson is blank.20

  At the end of January 1933, Paul went into rehearsal for a London production of All God’s Chillun, and Essie sailed for New York. (“I had thought of economizing, and taking second class,” she wrote Larry Brown, “but decided against it, as I’m getting too old now to change my habits.” She had just turned thirty-six and felt “happier than I have ever been in my life,” convinced that she and Paul “understand each other now.” She also felt secure in her determination to create a separate career for herself. Both her play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her novel, Black Progress, had been turned down by producers and publishers, but, never one to let grass grow under her feet, Essie rechanneled her ambition into acting. While in the States, she intended to investigate the possibility of enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and perhaps as well in Professor George Pierce Baker’s famed course in playwriting at Yale. “It’s a grand prospect,” she wrote in her diary; “I feel as though I shall really be fulfilled, at last. Paul has been sweet through it all, sharing my enthusiasm; advising and helping. I’ve never seen him so sweet, so understanding, so attractive. I think now I can be happy with him, for the rest of my life.”21

  Essie was not merely indulging a private fantasy. On his own terms—which did not include sexual fidelity or Essie’s control over his business affairs—Paul did seem willing to reconstitute some semblance of their marriage. The shock of Yolande’s desertion had been profound, the more so perhaps for replaying the childhood trauma of his mother’s abrupt death. He would never again actually propose marriage to any of the women he became involved with, though to the more significant among them he would sometimes suggest that external circumstances alone—political and career considerations—prevented him from making a formal, public commitment to them, much to his own regret. For now, the stormy three-year courtship of Yolande still fresh, Paul was content to retreat to a facsimile of domesticity and, above all, to recommit himself to his work. “Am terribly happy at No. 19 [Buckingham Street—their flat],” he jotted down in a few notes to himself at the end of December 1932:

  Henceforth, all my energies will go into my work.… Unquestionably, Russian songs are right … most right for me.… As for languages—Russian—basic; German-French for pictures; Spanish; Dutch (as bridge to German); Hungarian along with Turkish (as bridge to Hebrew). Send for all records at home, then Swedish. I feel so ambitious. Want to work all day at something.…

  He told a reporter from the Manchester Guardian that his immediate plans i
ncluded acting in a play by the Hungarian playwright Lengyel, filming The Emperor Jones, studying Russian literature, finding theatrical vehicles that would allow him to play such famous blacks as Pushkin, Dumas, Hannibal, Menelik, Chaka, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, and starting a repertory company in a little theater to alternate Shakespeare, O’Neill, and contemporary plays.22

  First up on his ambitious new agenda was All God’s Chillun. Robeson referred to the role of Jim Harris, the gentle, sympathetic black law student in Chillun, as “still my favorite part,” and the London production proved one of his happiest experiences in the theater. He was blessed with a brilliant young costar, Flora Robson, as Ella and a talented director, André Van Gyseghem, a pro-Soviet activist involved with the working-class Unity Theatre. Chillun was staged at another laboratory theater, the Embassy. To the surprise and delight of Van Gyseghem and Ronald Adam, manager of the Embassy, Robeson agreed to a salary of ten pounds for the run. As a further gesture of commitment, he personally wrote a check for one hundred pounds when an unexpected demand from O’Neill’s agent for an advance in royalties threatened to sink the Embassy’s tiny budget and derail the production.23

  In their later recollections of the rehearsal period, Van Gyseghem’s and Flora Robson’s memories coincide. Both found Robeson entirely approachable, considerate of others, open to direction. “He was not up on a throne but a real human person that you could contact,” Van Gyseghem recalls. Even so, Flora Robson felt at first a little shy of him, afraid that Ella’s racist lines would offend him. But after the first week of rehearsals he had put her at ease. She, superbly trained and a brilliant technician, believed that Paul acted from instinct—he either “felt” a role or couldn’t perform it—and thereafter she followed Stanislavski’s precept that all acting hinges on giving and receiving, and never took her eyes off him while playing. The result was a conflagration of emotion, “something so fantastic,” according to Van Gyseghem, “that at times I felt, in those rehearsals, that I ought not to be there. They were stripping themselves so naked, emotionally.” Though in his view Paul was “not a finished actor,” Paul’s technical deficiencies—awkward body movement, a tendency to declaim—themselves fed into the role of the uncertain, desperately sincere Jim Harris, heightening the impact of the performance. The London critics agreed. They gave the edge to Flora Robson, but their praise for Robeson was nearly as unanimous, and the combination of the two was widely hailed as (in the words of The Observer’s reviewer, Ivor Brown) “a perfect dramatic partnership.” Chillun drew enough attention to extend its run for a week at the Piccadilly, but because Robeson had a commitment to film The Emperor Jones in the United States, the play had to close after two months.24