Margaret Webster agreed with Robeson’s insistence on an Othello of unambiguous racial identity. Only with “a great man,” she wrote, “a man of simplicity and strength [who] also was a black man” playing the role, could an audience believe he could command Venice’s armies while remaining a stranger in its midst; only then could the sources of Iago’s hatred and the extent of Desdemona’s courage be adequately measured; only then could the depth of Othello’s vulnerability and resentment, his wary susceptibility to tales of the betrayal of his honor, be fully laid bare.35
Webster hired the great stage designer Robert Edmond Jones—who had designed the last previous Othello on Broadway, in 1937, and had known the Robesons since their days together at the Provincetown Play-house in the 1920s—to do sets and costumes. She essentially retained her staging ideas from the Brattle production, but in the interim had further streamlined the script. On his side, Robeson prepared for the role by growing a beard and trimming his weight back down to 230. His fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week salary was a fraction of what he earned singing concerts (two thousand to twenty-five hundred a night), and the demands of the role were greater. He was later to say that playing Othello took the equivalent energy of three concerts; only Emperor Jones, twenty years before, had involved a comparable effort.36
He concentrated particularly during rehearsals on bringing more fluidity to his physical movements—an added challenge in a small playing space that heightened the static impression created by his large build. He also worked hard at overcoming his self-acknowledged tendency “to be too loud, too big,” worked to bring his voice down to the level where he could get the full tonal value out of it and “to be constantly careful not to make my lines too musical, not to sing my lines, but to SPEAK them MUSICALLY.” At the end of a day’s rehearsal he typically needed ten to twelve hours’ sleep to recuperate, and when not rehearsing he stayed close to his book-filled apartment in New York (rarely going up to Enfield), reading, studying languages (at the moment he was plugging away at Chinese), and spending long hours listening to his huge record collection.37
For four and a half weeks prior to the October 19 Broadway opening, the company tried the show out on the road, first in New Haven on September 11 for one week, then in Boston for two weeks, and finally in Philadelphia (“… we eat and drink like pigs,” Uta Hagen wrote her parents, “talk until all hours, get up around twelve or one in the afternoon”). Although the three-city tour brought in an exceptionally high gross of $103,000, its progress was not one of unalloyed triumph. Some of the out-of-town critics showered the production with superlatives, but an equal number (and the better-known ones) registered more reservations than had greeted the Brattle tryout of the previous year. In Boston, the best-known theater town, the respected critics Elinor Hughes and Elliott Norton turned in sharply divergent verdicts, representing the generally split decision of their colleagues.38
Hughes served up praise for all hands, but above all lauded Robeson, for a performance that had “deepened and simplified since last summer” and was now wholly convincing; his “tremendous magnetism, splendid size and bearing, rich voice,” and powerful emotional conviction successfully conveyed—for the first time in Hughes’s long experience—a believable hero: “At last the tragedy becomes inevitable, not arbitrary.” Elliott Norton turned in a directly contradictory verdict. Aside from a few “breathtaking” moments (for which he mostly credited Uta Hagen), Norton thought the production unconvincing. And for the worst of it he blamed Robeson himself: “His acting does not fulfill the promise of that tentative week at Cambridge.” When Robeson could call on his own experience, Norton felt, he “walks with the great men of the stage”; when he could not, he fell back on strained tricks, vocalizing and declaiming to merely “artificial” effect. Anyone familiar with the vagaries of theater reviewing in the daily press knows that disparate judgments are commonplace, that what passes for considered critical opinion is as likely the product of an ill-digested dinner, rushed deadlines, or the psychological safety of reiterating a prior view. Still, the divided out-of-town verdict necessarily heightened the company’s anxiety as opening night on Broadway finally drew near. “We’re getting ourselves keyed up,” Uta Hagen wrote to her father. “Hold your thumbs.”39
On the day of the opening, veteran theatrical commentator Sam Zolotow led off his New York Times column by declaring that the Theatre Guild was launching its twenty-sixth season that evening with a production of Othello that the “theatrical pundits say has all the earmarks of a rare occasion in the annals of the Broadway stage.” The prediction was especially notable—and a gauge of the excited anticipation—for being made in a Broadway season that saw the premiere of Oklahoma!, Katharine Cornell and Raymond Massey in Lovers and Friends, Margaret Sullavan and Elliott Nugent in The Voice of the Turtle, and, during the same week Othello was due to open, saw the Frank Fay-Ethel Waters-Bert Wheeler vaudeville show Laugh Time move to the Ambassador. This wasn’t just another opening of just another show. Margaret Webster later wrote, “I have never been so paralytic with fright,” adding that “for the first time in the United States a Negro was playing one of the greatest parts ever written … and [the occasion] was trying to prove something other than itself.…”40
It did. When the curtain came down that night, the audience erupted into an ovation that (as Newsweek reported) “hadn’t been heard around those parts in many seasons. For twenty minutes, and half as many curtain calls, the applause and the bravos echoed from orchestra pit and gallery to give Forty-Fourth Street the news of something more than just another hit.” Burton Rascoe, theater critic for the World-Telegram, wrote in his column the next day, “Never in my life have I seen an audience sit so still, so tense, so under the spell of what was taking place on the stage as did the audience at the Shubert last night. And few times in my life have I witnessed so spontaneous a release of feelings in applause as that which occurred when the tragedy was ended.” “The ovation opening night was so tremendous we all cried like babies,” Hagen wrote to her parents. The next day Margaret Webster wrote her mother, “They yelled at us through a long succession of calls and fairly screamed at Paul and finally I had to make a speech to finish it up.… Then they cheered the roof off again. The notices are better than we are—it was just one of those nights. Magic happened—not so much to the performance which, as far as I could judge, was very good but not more so than it has been before, but to the audience, who just got drunk.” A Soviet journalist reported home that “many American writers and journalists” with whom he spoke “consider the 19th of October, 1943”—the day of the Othello premiere—as the moment when “the doors of the American theatre opened for the Negro people.” All hands adjourned to Freda Diamond’s house on Thirty-eighth Street for a gala party that night, the theatrical celebrants joined by Paul’s sister, Marian Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia, and his brother Reverend Ben Robeson and his family, who came down from Harlem.41
Contrary to myth, the New York critics were nearly as divided in their verdict as their Boston counterparts had been—though in New York the split was not among the daily reviewers, but between the dailies and the weeklies, with the former nearly all favorable, the latter variously mixed (the disparity perhaps best explained by the fact that the daily reviewers had seen what all agree was the magical first-night performance). The outright panegyrics came from the lesser daily critics—Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror (“the most absorbing” production of Othello “ever to command the attention of your drama reporter”), Robert Garland of the Journal-American (“in all my nights of attendance on the world of make-believe, there has been nothing to equal it”), and Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram (“one of the most memorable events in the history of the theater.… It is unbelievably magnificent”).42
The five other dailies (whose reputation for critical astuteness was collectively somewhat higher than the other three) were only a shade more subdued. Praise for Margaret Webster’s production was all but
unqualified; she was uniformly hailed for simultaneously satisfying the needs of Shakespeare and the needs of the modern stage—and for doing so with blazing, melodramatic theatricality. All five critics were nearly as positive in estimating the three principals, shading their preferences a bit for one over another and in entering this or that minor reservation about the work of the two also-rans. By a hair, praise for Robeson lagged behind that for Ferrer and Hagen. All five critics agreed that his performance was “memorable” and “towering,” but three of the five felt his “deep organ tones became a trifle monotonous,” the “anguish” coming out as strained declaration, or as “song.” The two major trade papers, Variety and Billboard, had comparable reactions, both lauding Robeson (“a great ‘Othello’”; “a tremendous performance”), both expressing reservations about his occasional tendency “to concentrate more on vocal tones than on acting,” to “expostulate rather ponderously in a monotone.”43
The weeklies, priding themselves on printing more considered judgments than were possible in the deadline-ridden daily press, weighed in with less glowing accounts. They included five of the most respected critics of the day: Stark Young (The New Republic), Louis Kronenberger (PM), Wolcott Gibbs (The New Yorker), Margaret Marshall (The Nation), and the Shakespeare specialist Robert Speaight. Of the five, Kronenberger was the most enthusiastic about Robeson’s performance. He credited him with a “magnificent presence,” in bearing, in voice, in manner fully conveying Othello’s heroic dimensions; yet he regretted Robeson’s “tendency to confuse solemnity with grandeur” and felt that ultimately his success hinged on being “a great personality” rather than a great actor. The other weekly critics were somewhat less impressed. Gibbs lamented that Robeson sometimes employed his “majestic voice” for “meaningless organ effects” (though he doubted if “this matters very much. His reading is admirably clear … and he is ideal pictorially”). Stark Young found him “moving and intense” but lacking in an undefined quality he called “tragic style.” Speaight complained that Robeson’s voice had not been trained for the Bard’s verse, Marshall that his “monumental and inert” body was not the supple instrument of a trained actor.44
Robeson’s own costar concurs. In Hagen’s retrospective estimate, Robeson’s “humanity onstage is what made him a tremendous success as Othello; everyone melted at his personality, even though it came through a rather vocal, verbal, conventional, ordinary shape of a performance—the human presence was so big that they went for it anyway.” Adding his estimate, the acting coach Sanford Meisner recalls Robeson as “impressive physically” onstage, his voice “beautiful and rich.” But, in Meisner’s view, Robeson “couldn’t act the demands of the part, only recite them—very eloquently, like a good reciter, but not emotionally alive.” Impressive as a man in life, as an actor Robeson conveyed to Meisner merely “impressive emptiness.”45
But many whites and almost all blacks would have regarded such measurements as possibly inaccurate and certainly insignificant when placed against the overriding importance of Robeson’s Othello as a racial event of the first magnitude. Many years later James Earl Jones, about to attempt the role himself, paid tribute to the importance of Robeson’s performance (which Jones had seen): “… it was essentially a message he gave out: ‘Don’t play me cheap. Don’t anybody play me cheap.’ And he reached way beyond arrogance … way beyond that. Just by his presence, he commanded that nobody play him cheap. And that was astounding to see in 1943.”46
Most of the black press hailed the production as a milestone in race relations, but almost none of the white press did—although one or two referred to Robeson’s blackness as an asset in heightening the play’s plausibility, and one or two others latched on to the production’s success as a happy gauge of the country’s progress toward racial equality. It was left to Robeson’s old costar Fredi Washington (who for lack of decent roles was currently serving as theatrical editor for the Harlem paper The People’s Voice) to sound a somewhat different note. She interviewed Robeson backstage before the opening and lauded him in her review for having taken “onto the stage his ideals, beliefs and hopes,” for having created “a great social document.” But she stopped short of hailing the event as a tribute to American democracy. It was only possible to hope, she wrote, that “the dynasties of the far-reaching picture world will become adult enough to shoulder their full democratic responsibilities” and to make a film of Othello “for all the small-minded unjust elements of our country … to see, digest and become enriched thereby.” That hope would not be realized. Robeson had been in demand for a decade to portray black stereotypes in film, but he would never be given the chance to portray Othello.47
CHAPTER 14
The Apex of Fame
(1944–1945)
J. Edgar Hoover was among the few Americans unimpressed with Robeson’s triumph in Othello. The director had already received numerous reports from FBI agents in the field that Robeson had: lent his name to a dinner at the Hotel Commodore in New York “celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Red Army”; included in a concert several songs originally “sung by Loyalist soldiers during the Spanish Civil War”; made “a speech pertaining to the common man”; been seen in the company of “a wealthy woman [Louise Bransten] extremely active in Communist Party Front organizations”; “pointed out the similarity of the Russian serfs prior to the 1860s and the Negro of the United States”; recorded “the new Soviet National Anthem.” By 1943 J. Edgar Hoover was quite prepared to believe the opinion of his agents that Robeson “is a confidant of high officials of the Party” and “is undoubtedly 100% Communist.”1
Hoover aside, letters of congratulation poured into Robeson’s dressing room, awards multiplied, requests for personal appearances avalanched. “I take pride in your reflected glory,” wrote William L. Dawson, the black Congressman from Illinois, as the box-office line for Othello stretched in double file out to Broadway and the advance sale within two weeks of opening night climbed to an astronomical (for Shakespeare) hundred thousand dollars. Old friends joined in the chorus of praise. Walter White wrote Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, “It is one of the most inspiring and perfectly balanced performances I have ever seen,” and added that “the playing of a Moor by a Negro actor” “has given [blacks] … hope that race prejudice is not as insurmountable an obstacle as it sometimes appears to be.” Even Van Vechten, recently estranged, wrote Essie to say, “Paul’s success is terrific. I think it will turn into a record for a Shakespeare run, judging by the advance sale.” Noel Coward, who had been out of touch for some time, sent a telegram inviting the Robesons to a cocktail party. W. E. B. Du Bois requested a photograph of Robeson in costume for publication in the journal Phylon.2
Among the major honors that came Robeson’s way in the immediate aftermath of Othello, and from a host of different constituencies, were the Abraham Lincoln Medal for notable services in human relations, election (along with Sumner Welles and Max Lerner) to the editorial board of The American Scholar, a testimonial dinner tendered by the national black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, the First Annual Award of Kneseth Israel, the Donaldson Award for “outstanding achievement in the theater,” a citation from the National Negro Museum “for courage and devotion to the ideal upon which American democracy was founded,” the Page One Award from the New York Newspaper Guild (for his “distinguished performance in Othello”), and election (along with twenty-one others) to the Chicago Defender’s Honor Roll of 1943 for having “contributed most to mutual goodwill and understanding” in the battle against racial prejudice. He was also the subject of an article in The American Magazine entitled “America’s No. 1 Negro” and the recipient (only the tenth in twenty years) of the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for the best diction in the American theater. Willa Cather, Samuel S. McClure, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Theodore Dreiser were honored at that same AAAS ceremony—“a really dreary demonstration,” Dreiser wrote H. L. Mencken afterward; “the best bit of the whole show
was Paul Robeson—an outstanding personality who in my judgement dwarfed all the others.”3
His acceptance of honorary membership in a number of CIO-affiliated unions produced some fallout. The Tribune reported Robeson saying during an interview that the CIO “is by far the most progressive section of the labor movement. It goes on record as giving Negroes equal opportunity for jobs and upgrading.… On the other hand … there is great discrimination in A.F. of L. unions.” It was not an attitude AFL President William Green appreciated. He remarked at the AFL convention that Robeson and others were hindering the Federation’s efforts to organize black workers by throwing their weight behind “a rival labor body.” When Robeson continued to accept memberships in CIO unions and to encourage black workers to enlist in its ranks, the AFL accelerated its attack on him. The Central Trades and Labor Council, the ruling body of the AFL, demanded he either resign his honorary membership in two CIO unions (the Longshoremen and the Municipal Workers) or face expulsion from Actors’ Equity Association, an AFL affiliate. When Robeson refused, Equity declined to press charges.4
Along with honors came appeals—would Robeson sit for a portrait, read a script, listen to a song, contribute an essay, issue a statement, sign a petition, meet a delegation, join a rally, support a strike, protest an outrage, declare, decry, affirm, affiliate—polite requests and peremptory demands combining to create an unmanageable deluge. Robeson’s inclination was too often to say yes, and even with Yergan and Rockmore running interference, he sometimes took on more than his energy could accommodate, leading to temporary exhaustion and retreat. After a whirlwind of political appearances in behalf of Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944, he told Yergan, “… I must have been somewhere every five minutes.… [It] just murdered me.… Of course it was worth it, you know, for the elections.…”5
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