Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Hardly. Paul confided his unhappiness over the cast changes to Freda Diamond. There simply wasn’t the same magic, he complained, that he had previously felt when performing with Uta and Joe, and he wished there was some way Bob Rockmore could manage to overcome the contractual stumbling blocks to their continuing. Freda told him to do it himself—he was a lawyer, he didn’t need Rockmore’s intercession. Why didn’t he just get on a train to Ossining (where the Ferrers had a house) and work things out directly with Uta and Joe? Freda says that Paul took her advice, went up to Ossining that same evening, and settled it.16

  After smoothing over terms with Uta and Joe, Robeson laid down the law to the Theatre Guild. Flexing the combined muscle provided by his star status and his contractual rights, he declared his refusal to continue unless the Ferrers were rehired. His adamance infuriated Margaret Webster. “Against his inarticulate but immoveable resolve, pleas, arguments, threats, reason broke in vain,” she reported to her mother. “No Ferrers no Robeson, no Robeson no show. And I, as usual, left to straighten it out.” She did, negotiating to buy out Schnabel’s contract (Robeson agreed to pay half of the four thousand dollars), soothing the cast’s alarm over the escalating rumors, persuading the Ferrers to forgo equal billing with Robeson in exchange for being “prominently featured in all display advertising,” and having their salary demands met fully. All the while, she wrote her mother, she behaved “as if I loved them and didn’t want to pitch them off the balcony into 52nd St.”—in order to “get a show out of that big, black jelly-fish and those two conceited little asses and make us all happy and bursting with harmony and enthusiasm!” Robeson later succeeded in getting the Ferrers costar billing as well—in smaller type than his own name, but featured above the title. That, in turn, engendered renewed rage in Webster; she felt, with some justification, that costar status did not accurately reflect the comparative drawing power of the Ferrers as measured against Robeson’s and was, in the bargain, an insult to her own worth as an actress (she had again cast herself as Emilia). To which Robeson responded—at least so Webster reported—that she “had ‘got’ plenty out of it as the producer-director and in effect took the attitude that if [she] didn’t want to be billed below Uta but would prefer to leave the cast that was all right too!!” Webster’s indignation may have been fed by having previously miscalculated Robeson’s temperament. She now recognized, belatedly, that “This sweet, unassuming, dear, big bear of a man could crush us all.” It would seem, she wrote her mother in icy fury, “I have not been playing Svengali to his Trilby, but Frankenstein to his monster.” Expressions of high dudgeon in the theater, particularly during the tension of a rehearsal period, rarely survive as final verdicts. Passions rise and fall, and antagonism quickly transmutes into felicitation when a project culminates in success. To that end all hands now bent their efforts.17

  At Robeson’s insistence, a six-week rehearsal period was scheduled—in contrast to the two weeks allotted the cast before the Brattle tryout the preceding year. The praise of the Boston critics in 1942 had seemed to him excessive, even unwarranted. He, more than anyone, acknowledged—indeed, tended to exaggerate—the inadequacies of his tryout performance. He had not yet gotten to the bottom of his role, and he knew it. “It’s not right,” he told Uta Hagen; “I don’t have it.” Forty years later, Hagen admiringly recalls his attitude. “He had judgment about himself that was astonishing,” she said. “He didn’t fall for praise—other people’s accolades never went to his head.” Along with an “enormous capacity for self-evaluation” went unusual modesty about the work. He was determined to get it right, was determined to acquire the needed additional technique to rid his performance of the traces of self-consciousness, tonal monotony, and deliberateness some of the critics had pointed to. He was angry that he had been denied the needed coaching in the past, that he had had directors regard him as a great “natural” talent—the soulful primitive—who should not be tampered with for fear of destroying his instincts, diluting his force.18

  Surveying his past experience as an actor, he told one interviewer that at the Provincetown Playhouse during the 1920s, “no one told me anything. They didn’t want any ‘actor’s tricks.’ So I was the former college athlete, playing on muscle.” Growing up in the oratorical tradition of the black church, he had, naturally enough, turned to declamation when in doubt. Throughout the 1930s, “directors assumed that I knew what I was doing, when the fact was that I had no technique at all. They no more questioned my ‘technique’ than they would that of a Hindu dancer.” It was an attitude characteristic of the time: the art of the Negro was pure, instinctive, unique, and would be spoiled if any effort was made to guide or train it.19

  Robeson had not been immune to that attitude himself. Throughout the early 1930s he had spoken fervently of the need for Africans to keep their cultural heritage unsullied, to stand apart from the contaminating influences of the West, to eschew imitation. But that was not quite the whole story, either. Robeson sometimes deliberately cultivated the image of a “natural actor who had been deprived of technical training.” He did so, typically, to cover all bases; he let others think he was stumbling through his roles on instinct as a hedge against being judged by standards he himself, with almost knee-jerk modesty, felt unable to meet; should he be found wanting when measured against those standards, he could fall back on his “noble-savage” disguise. In regard to his singing, too, he sometimes adapted this same double-edged defensive posture, on the one hand studying lieder diligently, on the other allowing the view to take hold that “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho” marked the outer limit of his range. In truth, Robeson had considerable training over the course of his life both as actor and singer—more at least than he was always ready to acknowledge—and, had he determined to, he could have had still more.20

  With the Broadway opening looming, he did turn for help to Margaret Webster. And she did try to provide it. But Webster was accustomed to giving actors line readings; she conceived of the craft of acting as the process of shaping outer form. Her strong points, as a fellow director has said, “were picturing, pacing and energizing a show”—entertainment values, with theatricality stressed over poetry, the well-composed stage composition stressed over the well understood. Typically she would tell an actor where to stand and how to speak—hows, not whys—trusting that her own understanding was a sufficient guide for the others. She was willing to discuss the meaning of a line in a one-on-one huddle—but would then announce her conclusion: “What the old boy meant by that was …” When the meaning seemed transparent to her and an actor’s hesitations incomprehensible, she would simply command impatiently, “Well, just look at what Shakespeare says.” Webster’s skill and intelligence were of a high order, and consequently her line readings were rich. But the external process she encouraged was antithetical to Robeson’s need to move away from outer effect and vocalization.21

  Early in rehearsals Webster concluded that Robeson “lacks the quality of real rage.” Of his anger over racism, she said, “he could not bring it onto the stage with him; he could not recapture it.…” In her view, he “was at his best in the gentle passages” and wooed Desdemona “with tenderness and loving humor.” But he “never matched at all” the frenzy and passion the role called for in the later scenes, substituting instead the speech of the pulpit, “sonorous and preachy,” with admixtures of “the slight artificiality of an opera singer.” Robeson acknowledged that he had trouble unearthing his rage on demand—he had been brought up, as a survival tactic, to keep it carefully interred.22

  Webster, in turn, acknowledged that, if Robeson lacked the “emotional and nervous concentration which Othello required,” the fault may have been her own. “Had I been more of a ‘Method’ director,” she was later to write, “perhaps I should have been better … about releasing the pent-up emotions in Paul”—thus granting that the essential problem was not Robeson’s lack of emotional resources but his inadequate technique for uncovering and utilizing t
hem. Webster, by her own admission, turned to “tricks to help him—speed above everything; if he slowed down, he was lost.” She gave him accelerated line readings, and she tried to “mask his heaviness of movement by having him stay still, while the other actors moved around him.” “My job,” she wrote, “is to jockey him into some approximation of Othello, and then make a kind of frame round him which will hold the play together. It’s very difficult—like pushing a truck up-hill—yet sometimes when he catches fire (from me) he goes careening off at eighty miles an hour and leaves all the rest of us standing. But he’s so undependable.” His performances showed “immense variation”: “Sometimes they are filled with his own personal quality; sometimes they are an empty house with nobody home.”23

  In short, Webster superimposed surface effects, and what Robeson most needed and wanted was inner exploration. Her formalistic gifts and perceptions came out like prose essays, the content impressive and difficult for an actor to dispute—but equally difficult to translate into performance skills. Webster didn’t purposefully withhold her help—she gave it in the only way she knew how. It was not, for Robeson, a fruitful way. “I don’t think she ever helped Paul with anything,” is Uta Hagen’s opinion. “Margaret Webster was a brilliant woman,” but she “belonged in a university.”24

  Hagen herself was not able at the time to offer him anything more. She was still in her early twenties and in retrospect feels that she began to learn about acting for the first time only after she met Harold Clurman in 1948. At the time of the Othello production, “I thought I knew more and was better than Paul—and he encouraged me to think so—but I wasn’t.” Robeson did turn to her for coaching, but she says, “I wasn’t equipped to teach anybody” then and wouldn’t have known whom to recommend for training. Prior to the late forties, “training” usually meant the American Academy of Dramatic Arts or the Royal Academy—“terrible then and terrible now,” in Hagen’s judgment. Otherwise there were only limited options available to actors: pre-eminently, Sanford Meisner, Erwin Piscator, and Herbert Berghof at the Neighborhood Playhouse (in 1947 the Actors Studio was founded). For established actors to seek further training was not then a common phenomenon; once a performer had been “recognized,” the product tended to be considered finished—signed, sealed, and approved.25

  By all accounts, Robeson got along beautifully with his fellow actors; the cast became “like a family,” and rehearsals were marked by warmth and mutual respect. Robeson knew everybody’s name, even the spear-carriers with no lines or only the obligatory “What ho!” John Gerstadt, a youthful cast member who served as general factotum—making lightning changes for his roles as messenger, servant, and Cypriot—marveled at Robeson’s ability to make him—and everyone—feel “special,” to convey focused concern for him.26

  Gerstadt never felt that Robeson’s attentiveness was calculated or compulsive—the star doing a noblesse oblige turn to elicit kudos for egalitarian virtue or to create a patina of backstage solidarity. Robeson’s friendliness was not overemphatic or in any way suspect. He made no special point of asking cast members to call him “Paul”; his easy accessibility made that, in time, seem natural—though this was still a period in the American theater when stars were addressed as Mr. Paul Muni, Mrs. Priestly Morrison, or Miss Katharine Cornell. Nor did Robeson seal himself off in the star’s traditional isolation, to be fussed over by dressers, fawned over by fans. (Gerstadt remembers that Robeson showed up one day to play on the cast softball team in Central Park—producing a storm of mock protest from the opposing team: “This is for cast members only! That man’s obviously a ringer! You’re not Paul Robeson!” “If I’m not Paul Robeson,” he called back, “I learned all those lines for nothing.” The Othello team won the game 24–3.) Robeson kept his dressing room at the theater open, except when he was onstage or making a change. The cast was otherwise welcome to hang out there, a gesture the nonfeatured players particularly appreciated, since the play was housed in the Shubert Theater, a musical house whose communal dressing rooms were quite a distance from the stage—a distance that could barely be covered before the next entrance cue.27

  Gerstadt, still in his teens and “full of outrage at the world’s injustice,” remembers bursting in on Robeson with regularity to share his latest breathless enthusiasm. One day he appeared in Robeson’s dressing room to announce his fury over the continuing segregation of black troops in the armed forces—and his solution. “Wouldn’t this be a terrific time to say the hell with your army, your navy, we’re not going to fight if the Negro isn’t treated better!—Wow! what a perfect time!” Didn’t Robeson agree? “No,” Robeson responded gently, “no, I don’t, John. First things first, Hitler first.” Robeson “didn’t go on about it,” Gerstadt recalls. He never went on about it, James Monks, another young cast member, adds. He would neither initiate political topics nor, if they did come up, indulge in political harangue; he would give his opinion, but not attempt to overpower in argument or to convert. “He didn’t put you down because you differed with his opinion”; his characteristic comment would be along the lines of “Well, that’s possible, but have you considered the alternative argument that …”28

  “Powerfully cool” is how one associate from those years describes him. Robeson’s benign, shrewdly calibrated forbearance contributed to the unheated way the company was able to approach the “black-white” issues within the play itself. No one recalls any semblance of self-consciousness about race—whether among members of the company themselves or in regard to the potential controversy for an audience in a black Othello’s playing opposite a white Desdemona. “I don’t recall anyone saying ‘we might get in trouble here, do we dare?’” Gerstadt says, no attempt to evade or deliberately to titillate.29

  Whether tactics or temperament played the larger role in Robeson’s posture of outward equanimity cannot be measured with assurance. This was, after all, an otherwise all-white cast in a nearly all-white profession, and Robeson, at age forty-five, had long since learned the likely limits and durability of white folks’ empathy. Robeson the man was not unlike Othello the character in the surface composure that overlay his interior passion and which, under duress, could give way to the warrior’s strength. As he would demonstrate before the decade of the forties was out, Robeson could give vehement public vent to his sense of grievance, but the event had to warrant the feelings; he picked his occasions for calm, and his occasions for anger. In regard to Othello, he kept his manner cool in order to avoid jeopardizing the broader impact he intended: to make of his portrayal a political statement beyond the purview of art—while preserving the integrity of his performance as art. “I like to feel,” Robeson told a newspaper reporter, “that my work has a farther reach than its artistic appeal. I consider art a social weapon.” And he told the black journalist P. L. Prattis, “Not simply for art’s sake do I try to excel in Othello, but more to prove the capacity of the people from whom I’ve sprung and of all such peoples, of whatever color, erroneously regarded as backward.” To Uta Hagen he said, “I do the singing and I do the acting because it helps me make a statement, gives me a platform to say what I believe.”30

  “Othello kills not in hate but in honor,” Robeson once said: “It wasn’t just the act of infidelity” that led Othello to take Desdemona’s life, “it was the destruction of himself as a human being, of his human dignity.” In a number of interviews Robeson gave while preparing the role, he expounded his view that Othello was a great—and persecuted—“Negro warrior,” and that his own responsibility was to convey the tale of a man who had managed to rise to a position of leadership in an alien culture—only to be destroyed by it. To make Othello’s jealousy believable—since “under ordinary circumstances” he could have dispelled it with a word to his wife—Robeson felt the foundation had to be laid early in the play by stressing the cultural as well as racial differences that set the Moor apart: his values as well as his appearance accounted for his distinctiveness.31

  Robeson, in
his own words, “listened carefully to directors and Shakespearean authorities, but in some cases their Othello didn’t think and act exactly as I believed a great Negro warrior would do, and in those cases I played it my way.” He made those decisions with great care. His own style in preparing a role always entailed close analysis and cautious unfolding. As a man of erudition, moreover, he approached Shakespearean scholarship with familiarity and respect—and was well aware that both academic and theatrical tradition provided weight for his own chosen interpretation.32

  For a century and a half after the play’s first presentation, Othello had been portrayed as black. Edmund Kean first broke with this tradition when he offered Drury Lane a coffee-colored version—one hailed by Coleridge as a most “pleasing probability.” So well did it please, that tawny half-castes thereafter streamed forth from the stage, with such luminaries as Henry Irving and Edwin Forrest playing a range of rainbow-tinted Othellos. (A Maryland woman in 1868 was so delighted with one of the lighter versions that she felt able definitely to declare, “We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello’s visage as an EBULLITION of fancy, a FREAK of imagination.… Othello was a WHITE man.”) From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, Othello had been popularly performed in the United States as an animated lecture on, alternately, the sin of jealousy, the evils of drink, or the perils of lust—as a Moral Dialogue on any number of questions, excluding only the question of race. A host of famed actors had offered the role in a host of hues—excluding only black.33

  But at least once notably before Robeson, and several more times passably, a black actor had played Othello as a black hero. The great Ira Aldridge first opened in the role in 1827 in Liverpool, with Charles Kean as his Iago. For four decades thereafter, Aldridge toured Othello to acclaim throughout Britain and the Continent, and in the 1860s was received with particular enthusiasm in Russia. Théophile Gautier was in St. Petersburg when Aldridge performed there in 1863. He had gone expecting an “energetic, disordered, fiery, rather barbaric” portrayal, but found a “quiet, reserved, classic, majestic” one—“Othello himself, as Shakespeare has created him, with eyes half-closed as if dazzled from the African sun, his nonchalant, oriental attitude, and that Negro free-and-easy air that no European can imitate.” Aldridge, Gautier reported, was the lion of the hour. The United States, however, did not believe in a black Othello. Aldridge never played the role in his native land.34