He was given a battery of tests. Initially there was some worry about a possible heart condition, but finally his low blood-pressure readings and continuing dizziness were ascribed to an “acute state of exhaustion.” The doctors insisted on a total rest for a minimum of ten days, probably longer, which precluded the trip to India. Paul turned “mulish,” Essie reported home, but the doctors, seconded by Essie, finally managed to persuade him that the changes in climate and water, “not to say anything about the enormous strain of another National Welcome,” would affect his health for the worse. On January 14 Essie herself began therapy, having radium inserted into the mouth of her uterus, requiring that she lie still for twenty-four hours after each treatment. For the first two days of hospitalization, she had gone up in the elevator to visit Paul; now, when she was prostrate, he came down and watched television with her (including the sessions of the Twenty-first Party Congress). On the days she was allowed up, Essie worked away at her typewriter—eventually turning out no fewer than ten articles during her hospital stay.27
Next came the problem of what to do about Othello, scheduled to begin rehearsing at Stratford in mid-February. Robeson had had reservations about playing the role from the beginning, apprehensive that after so long an absence from the stage he would fail to measure up to what was being widely billed as a “historic” event and the “jewel in the crown of his career.” As bouts of dizziness continued in the hospital, Essie reminded him that Othello demanded “sudden, vigorous brave moves and strides” and insisted it was “madness” for him to undertake the part. Paul finally agreed to cancel, and Essie so notified Glen Byam Shaw, who at first tried to recast the role but then cabled Robeson begging him to reconsider (“I implore you Paul to help me or [the] Stratford season will be ruined”). He promised to adjust rehearsal and performance schedules in such a way as to minimize all strain on him.28
By then Paul was feeling considerably better, and getting restless. On February 5 he left the hospital for a month’s stay at Barveekha Sanatorium, the plush rest home for government officials and distinguished foreign visitors, while Essie stayed behind for continuing radium treatments followed by a gamma-ray series as an additional precaution. At Barveekha, ice skating and a careful diet further increased Paul’s zest (though failing actually to reduce his weight). Mulling over Shaw’s offer, he began to view it as an opportunity to get back into harness on terms that would minimize risk to his reputation. He would be able to concentrate—with due advance warning to colleagues and the press—on the vocal aspects of the role, the aspects he felt most comfortable with, and to minimize the physical movement, with which he did not. With the burden now “on other shoulders, not his,” as Essie explained it, the essential responsibility would be “with them, and they will be very grateful if he just appears.” Paul wired Glen Byam Shaw his acceptance. Shaw was ecstatic; he even promised that special light costumes would be designed so that Paul would not “have to carry a lot of weight.” Paul now looked forward to the engagement, “not with dread, as before, but with anticipation and interest.”29
On March 9 Robeson left Barveekha for London. “I think everything will be fine,” Essie wrote Sam and Helen Rosen, “if he just doesn’t beat his brains out with the extra curricular activities.” Always eager to spare him whether he wished it or not, Essie put off telling him until the last minute that she would have to stay behind in the Kremlin Hospital; the doctors were pleased with the results of the radium and gamma treatments, but wanted her to complete the series before joining Paul in Stratford later in the month. Met at the London airport by reporters—who noted his weight loss and thought he looked older than his years—Robeson took the occasion to say that he thought his performance as Othello would now have to be a “muted” one, and to thank the able team of Soviet doctors who had looked after him and the many well-wishers who had sent encouraging messages. He added good-humoredly that “many people seemed to be more worried” about the effect of the illness “on my voice than about me,” and apparently “wouldn’t have minded if I had to crawl back from Moscow on crutches, just as long as I can still sing.” Essie, writing privately to Paul, Jr., struck a less wry and more overtly angry note: “I mean to begin to preserve the Robesons first, and then do what I can for everybody else. If that’s not political maturity, then write me down as an INFANT, period. Everybody else nearly got us killed once, and I say NEVER NO MORE. Which does not mean I am signing off, but it does mean I’m cautious, as from now.… People!!! I’m thoroughly disgusted. Not even an ‘if you are well enough,’ or ‘if you are not tired,’ merely please, please, please, you owe it to the cause, etc. And there are about ten causes. Sheer disgusting exploitation.”30
With the April 7 opening less than a month away, Robeson went straight to Stratford to begin rehearsals. He was accompanied by Joseph (“Andy”) Andrews, who since the early days in England had served him both as valet and friend. At Stratford, Robeson moved into a suite of spare rooms in a large converted farmhouse in Shottery, on the outskirts of town. It was owned by Mrs. Whitfield, described by her son-in-law Andrew Faulds (an actor who later became a Labour Party member from Stratford) as “a very old-fashioned sort of English lady, conservative with a small ‘c’ and totally unaware politically.” Unexpectedly—to her family—she became “devoted to Paul,” enamored of his “extraordinary courtesy and good manners”; she developed immense “respect for this man, and she had had no knowledge of him, either as an artist or a politician.” When Robeson was not rehearsing, he lived as a member of the Whitfield clan, wandering into Mrs. Whitfield’s sitting room for a chat, relaxing in the garden with Faulds and his wife and the two other Whitfield daughters, Mary and Thisbe. When Faulds talked politics with Robeson, he got the sense of, “well, ‘melancholy’ is the only word, of disappointment, of profound disappointment in how things had happened in the world … an immense awareness of the intractable bloody problems of the world at large.” But “the overall feel of Paul in Stratford was of personal happiness.” Among other things, he had a brief affair during these months, which he remembered with great tenderness. Robeson was, in several ways, enjoying a restoration.31
The twenty-seven-year-old director, Tony Richardson, had won instant fame for his vivid, brisk staging of John Osborne’s path-breaking play, Look Back in Anger. In turning his hand to Othello, Richardson cast in a contemporary spirit, choosing Osborne’s wife, Mary Ure, to play Desdemona, and the American actor Sam Wanamaker for Iago, but he interpreted the text conservatively. Ignoring the revisionist and iconoclastic views of the critic F. R. Leavis that Othello is the story of a self-dramatizing narcissist, Richardson settled instead for the traditional view of Othello as the Noble Moor brought down by the machinations of an alien world. This romantic Moor—steadfast, dignified, honorable, put-upon, loving—is almost certainly the only kind of Othello Robeson had any interest in playing, or could play. And it was in the mainstream tradition of recent Stratford Othellos—of Godfrey Tearle in 1948, Anthony Quayle in 1954, and also the portrayals of Richard Burton and John Neville in alternating performances of Othello and Iago at the Old Vic in 1956. Not until 1964, at the National Theatre of Great Britain, would Laurence Olivier attempt a “Leavis” Othello—and triumph.
Since Robeson was the kind of actor who majestically played an aspect of himself and could not (like an Olivier) inhabit a variety of characters foreign to his being, Tony Richardson was obliged to tailor his conception of Othello to his lead player. The logical path—if the goal was consistency—would have been to opt for a production style consonant with Robeson’s own. Instead, Richardson mounted a production basically at odds with his star’s gravity and reserve, filling the stage with flashy special effects that called maximum attention to his own lively powers of invention—rock-and-roll drumbeats, Great Danes dashing across the footlights, a deathbed scene enacted on an elevated platform. Moreover, he allowed Sam Wanamaker to play Iago with the Midwestern twang and strut of a slick confidence man, and Mar
y Ure to portray Desdemona as if she were acting in an Arnold Wesker kitchen-sink drama. (The supporting cast included a remarkable number of future stars: Albert Finney as Cassio, Roy Dotrice as the second Montano officer, Zoe Caldwell as Bianca, and—lost in a crowd of anonymous Venetian Citizens—Diana Rigg and Vanessa Redgrave.) All this made for moments of immense vivacity—but at the expense of emotional coherence, and with the additional danger of making Robeson, with his sonorous tones and serious demeanor, look like an anachronism.
The critics, an old-fashioned lot on the whole, voted for tradition, praising Robeson and decrying the gimmicky production that had threatened to swamp him. A few—including the prestigious Times and Manchester Guardian reviewers—lumped production and star together, dismissing the entire evening as a tricky failure; several others expressed concern that the subtleties of the verse continued—as in his 1930 performance of the role—to elude Robeson, declamation too often displacing feeling. But the critical majority succumbed to the authority of his stage presence, and congratulated him for having risen above the circumstances of the production. W. A. Darlington, dean of the London critics, ranked Robeson’s Othello among the best he had ever seen, the News Chronicle hailed it as “superb,” and even Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, which for years had conducted a political vendetta against him, praised his “strong and stately” portrayal (though suggesting it was a triumph of “presence not acting”).32
Robeson was more than pleased; he was grateful. Given the obstacles of an uncongenial production, a recent illness, and the many years that had elapsed since his last appearance in a play, he felt lucky to have extracted some power from the role. It was doubtless with real relief that he told a reporter from the London Daily Mirror, “I am overwhelmed by the reception I have been given.” He was gratified, too, at the public response. The play immediately sold out its seven-month run, and long lines formed nightly in the hope of last-minute tickets. On opening night itself, the audience gave him an ecstatic fifteen curtain calls (Sam Wanamaker pushed Robeson forward and led the cast in applauding him). Essie, who arrived in Stratford at the end of March in good time for the opening, wrote Freda Diamond that it had been a “terrific personal triumph.” Helen Rosen, who had also arrived for the opening (the Rosens and Robesons had intended to rendezvous in India in January), found him undismayed by the few negatives: “He had never claimed that he was a great actor,” she recalls, and had always tended to agree with critics who pointed to his incomplete technical mastery. Peggy Ashcroft, too, was on Robeson’s side. Disappointed with what she saw in 1959, she put the blame in equal parts on “a production that did not suit his particular genius,” on a “technique that had not developed,” and on the fact that he was “surrounded by actors of a more modern style.”33
Once the hectic first few weeks were over, Robeson settled into a more relaxed stride. His schedule called for four, then three, then two performances a week for the rest of the play’s seven-month run, leaving him considerable free time for interim engagements. Requests came thick and fast, and at almost every performance friends and admirers crowded backstage to offer good wishes. Essie alternated with Andy in deciding who got through the net; among those who made it were Du Bois and Shirley Graham, Bob and Clara Rockmore, the lawyer Milton Friedman, Oginga Odinga of Kenya, Peter Abrahams of South Africa, Joshua Nkomo of Rhodesia, Reverend and Mrs. Stephen Fritchman (the left-wing minister who had hosted two of Robeson’s 1957 concerts in California). In late May, Sam Rosen arrived from the United States to join Helen for a few days; in July, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn brought their two children over. Robeson lived in the village several days a week, but Essie increasingly stayed in London, at their Connaught Square apartment. She was having trouble getting her strength back and needed rest; besides, she and Paul were not getting along well—the FBI even picked up a rumor that the couple would soon formally separate.34
Between performances of the play, he pursued an active schedule, though “he tires greatly” (Essie wrote the Soviet filmmaker Katanian) and occasionally had to cancel an engagement because of exhaustion. Only two weeks after opening night, he joined Peggy Ashcroft, along with various foreign diplomats and the company of actors, in a procession through the town of Stratford to commemorate Shakespeare’s birthday. Ashcroft remembers that twenty or thirty young people suddenly broke from the curb on the pavement to join Robeson in the procession—“following him as if he were the Pied Piper.” She thought that “in the year of the Sharpeville Massacre” in South Africa, they saw in Robeson, even though he “was no longer a household name, the symbol of black and oppressed people with whom they were in sympathy.… It was very moving.” But on the train ride together back to London, Ashcroft found him “withdrawn and sad.” Possibly the reaction of the young reminded him of the civil-rights struggle going on back home, which was proceeding without him and which he yearned to join.35
That same month, Robeson joined another old friend, the deported American Communist Claudia Jones, at the West Indian Caribbean Festival in London, and subsequently spoke in support of the West Indian Gazette, which she had helped to found (and even promised he was “going to do something for her paper).” With the weight of the Othello opening behind him, Robeson began to make other political appearances and pronouncements. In April he took part in the African Freedom Day concert sponsored by the Movement for Colonial Freedom. He told the rally, “The struggle is not one of individual people; it is a collective struggle,” and credited the Soviet Union—emphasizing his point “with a clenched fist,” according to the report from the U.S. Embassy to the Secretary of State—with being a positive force in the fight for African freedom. Only the Daily Worker on the left and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express on the right covered Robeson’s Africa Day appearance, each reporting in predictable style: the Express blasted him for abusing British hospitality by spending his day off taking part “in a rally whose object was to denounce the British Empire.”36
The Express was hardly mollified when, that same week, Robeson sang to a huge disarmament rally in Trafalgar Square—and followed that in June with yet another appearance at a tumultuous ban-the-H-bomb gathering. That same month he made a forty-eight-hour trip to Prague to attend the Congress of Socialist Culture, and in early August joined Paul, Jr., and Marilyn at the World Youth Festival in Vienna. The U.S. Embassy in London notified the State Department of Robeson’s Continental travels, and American legal attachés abroad alerted J. Edgar Hoover. U.S. press representatives were also present when he strode to the platform at the Youth Festival in Vienna on August 3 to be greeted by a roar of applause, a deluge of flowers, and, at the close, some “anti-Communist” catcalls from members of the American delegation, which were relayed back home on CBS television and reported in The New York Times.37
In his speech in Vienna, Robeson reflected on the disappointment many American blacks felt at the rising tide of white resistance to desegregation in the South, and on the fact that “eighteen million of us do not have full freedom.” But The New York Times chose to relegate that portion of his speech to a parenthetical clause and to focus instead on what it called his “general attack on his country’s foreign policy,” headlining its article “Robeson Sees Rise of Fascism in U.S.” The Times further reported that when delegates critical of his stand tried to question his views, they were “shouted down or ruled out of order by the Communists, who control the program.” It was not the sort of publicity likely to make Robeson seem (as he very much wished) a desirable comrade-in-arms to the black leaders of the civil-rights struggle; whether or not the Times was deliberately attempting to keep the “radical” Robeson distanced from the movement, it made a decided contribution to that end.38
Returning from the festival, Robeson used the few hours during a plane change in Budapest to give a speech and an interview to the Hungarian Telegraph Office. The gesture created a delicate situation, and on two counts: Robeson had publicly supported Soviet intervention during the Hungarian upris
ing of 1956; plus, his American passport was clearly stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Hungary.” By making himself visible in Budapest, he risked offending the people of one nation and the authorities of his own. He minimized the first danger by confining his remarks while in Budapest to generalities. Never once mentioning the U.S.S.R. by name, he instead spoke glowingly of his belief in Socialist Man and his personal feelings of affection for the Hungarian people. The second danger was not so successfully navigated. In defying the ban on travel to Hungary, Robeson had given the State Department an opportunity to invalidate his newly won passport—especially since he had alluded to an intention to go to China soon, also a forbidden travel area.39
Frances G. Knight, head of the Passport Division, sent an airgram to American posts in Budapest and elsewhere requesting additional information on what Robeson had said and what his prospective travel plans might be. The State Department directed the U.S. Embassy in London to contact Robeson for direct verification of whether he had visited Hungary and if so what he had said there. After the Embassy had sent him two registered letters, and after he had had a chance to confer with Bob Rockmore in the States and D. N. Pritt (who had been counsel to Jomo Kenyatta) in England, Robeson confirmed that it had indeed been his “privilege and deep pleasure” to find himself in Budapest on a regular stopover made by the Dutch KLM plane on which he had been traveling. He pointed out, by way of mitigation, that American athletes had recently competed in Hungary “in a very friendly atmosphere” and that American businessmen and artists had been in the country as well. Since Robeson had technically been in transit only, and since he had been “getting less and less publicity” of late, Frances Knight argued it should be kept that way, and the State Department decided to delay passport action against him until his intentions with regard to a trip to China were made clear. The State Department was about to play out yet another war of nerves.40
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