Kiev was struck above all by Robeson’s great sadness. He felt “unappreciated,” anguished at not having received recognition from the current generation of black activists as one of the civil-rights movement’s forerunners. Robeson “never gave a speech about it,” Kiev says, but he had the clear impression from incidental remarks that he suffered a great deal from not having had his contribution acknowledged. Kiev saw Robeson as an “innocent” in the best sense, a man not naïve but “pure”; his motivational spring was “compassion, not ego,” and therefore he felt devastated when others, less “purely” motivated, cast him aside; he was a man “fundamentally puzzled” at how his humane instincts and vision had run aground. Kiev was saying what Du Bois had said earlier: “The only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great faith in human beings.”32
The injury had been compounded by the loss of his audience. Robeson’s temperament centrally craved contact with other people—even as it intermittently craved solitude and concealment—and his success in reaching out over the years through words and songs had built up in him an almost automatic dependence on human responsiveness. But in place of the sanctifying affirmation he had grown used to from his audiences had come, from his government, castigating banishment. He had been marked and isolated—classically punished with ostracism from the beloved community. The wonder to Kiev was not that Robeson broke down under the punishment, but that he had not broken down sooner.33
Yet his physical deterioration, in Kiev’s view, was not wholly due to psychological causes. Robeson, he believes, suffered from “a combination of depression and some underlying organicity … some kind of underlying cerebral arteriosclerosis.” But it might be said that everyone has some sort of “underlying organicity,” some “biochemical imbalance” or potentially malignant physical condition—and that these do not commonly manifest themselves without extrinsic triggering events, “nonorganic” in nature. In short, had Robeson not been harassed and excluded, a “bipolar depressive” disorder or arteriosclerotic degeneration might have claimed him anyway; but they might not have, either, or might have done so only at a much later point in his life, merging softly, leniently, into the aging process itself. Kiev, in any case, decided there was no treatment for Robeson’s organic condition; for the depression he believed the so-called tricyclic drugs (Elavil, Tofranil, etc.) were likely to produce the most relief, and he was pleased that during the two months he saw Robeson, his patient did become “more communicative and cheerful.”34
Now it was Essie’s turn on the grimly alternating cycle. Seized with terrible pain, she was hospitalized at Beth Israel, and a series of cobalt treatments began. To general astonishment, Paul himself took Essie to the hospital. Yet, despite that show of strength, Paul, Jr., feared his father would do poorly if left alone at Jumel Terrace and suggested to the doctors that he take him down to Marian’s in Philadelphia. Perlmutter told Paul, Jr., he was behaving like a mother hen. So, as a substitute, Paul, Jr., went up to Jumel each evening to cook dinner for his father. Four days after Essie’s hospitalization, he arrived at Jumel to find ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an unmistakable sign (since Paul, Sr., rarely smoked) of his father’s growing unease; he decided to enlist Helen Rosen’s help. She drove in from Katonah to collect Paul and took him back up to her house, a spot he had always loved.35
By the middle of the day, with Paul seemingly in revived spirits, Helen decided to have a swim, and asked if he wanted to walk down to the pond with her. He said yes; Helen had her dip and then came up and sat on the grass with him. Suddenly Paul got up and walked over to the twelve-foot-high dam, which had steps going down into the pond. He put his foot on the top step, looked over at Helen, and with “a devilish laugh” (as Helen recalls it) put his foot down on the next step. Helen knew she had to do something; Paul could not swim. Trying to stay calm, she walked casually over to him and joined in his laughter. “What are you going to do,” she said, smiling, “get your shoes all wet, and that nice suit? Come on off of there.” She took his arm and he let her lead him back to the grass. She acted as “natural” as she could, got him back to the house, made him his usual hamburger, and then—because Sam was away—went in and called Paul, Jr.36
He and Marilyn drove straight up to Katonah. Both Perlmutter and Kline were out of town on vacation, but Paul, Jr., managed to reach Ari Kiev, still covering for Kline. He advised them to bring Paul back to New York immediately so he could have a look at him. After seeing him in the office, Kiev decided that he belonged in the hospital and readmitted Robeson to Gracie Square. Paul offered no resistance; his attitude was compliant—“I’ll do whatever you think best.” On the day of admission, August 7, 1965, Kiev wrote on Robeson’s chart: “… depression, suicidal thoughts and agitation in setting of wife’s admission to hospital.” Kiev added the antidepressant Niamid and a second tranquilizer (Phenergan) to Robeson’s medications.37
For a few days he held his own, with no basic change in symptoms. The staff noted his reluctance to talk or leave his room but when they questioned him directly found him generally coherent and responsive. Dr. Kline dropped by once and Dr. Kiev daily, noting on the third day, “Depression seems less.” The following day, August 10, Essie was operated on at Beth Israel and “invasive carcinoma” was discovered everywhere. Her doctors told Paul, Jr., that she probably had only a few months to live. Visiting his father that same day, Paul, Jr., was apparently so persuasively reassuring about Essie that even an attending physician wrote on Robeson’s chart, “… his wife’s surgery was successful. This was a hysterectomy for a carcinoma which was limited to the endometrium.” But Paul himself “wasn’t much cheered” by his son’s report, according to the notes made on his chart by the special-duty nurse.38
The following evening, August 11, Robeson became, in the words of his private nurse, “dispirited and very apprehensive,” and she decided to ask the doctors on duty to check him. Several of them had a look, and the least alarmed reported elevated blood pressure and some “muttering”; one resident suggested that Robeson’s multiple medications were the possible, though unlikely, culprit, and another described him as “almost catatonic,” sitting “rather rigidly,” smiling “rather inappropriately”—“in general considerably more depressed than on admission.” The next morning Robeson continued to be uncommunicative, “muttering and only rarely expressing himself in an intelligible way,” and still “smiling inappropriately on occasion.” Dr. Kiev was contacted and discussed the case with Dr. Perlmutter. That same afternoon, August 12, Kiev wrote on Robeson’s chart, “Will continue drug regimen as before.” But because the symptoms had still not abated by evening, and Kiev was hoping to make Robeson more comfortable, he started him on ten milligrams of Valium four times a day, and the following morning on a small dose of Thorazine.39
Paul, Jr., noted these developments with mounting alarm. On each daily visit his father seemed worse—“drugged, nodding like a junkie.” He was not specifically aware at the time that the doctors had added Valium and Thorazine. Investigating later, he was told the Thorazine had been for “restraint”; but since Big Paul was not at the time showing manic, unruly symptoms, the question has always remained in his son’s mind: “restraint from what??” His suspicions, then and since, were further fed by one of the special-duty nurses, who strongly implied, without explicitly saying so, that his father was being overmedicated and that Paul, Jr., should “do something.” He did. Enraged, he created a scene in the hospital; it brought the residents running, but their hospital doublespeak failed to soothe his nerves—or dull his intuition that his father was in deep trouble.40
When Big Paul’s condition continued to deteriorate—by the afternoon of August 16 his temperature had shot up to 103, and his nurses reported that he was “muttering to himself and perspiring profusely” and had started “making a speech on social conditions, with a very anxious expression on his face”—Paul, Jr., put in a desperate call to Sam Rosen. Sam in turn managed to reach Perlmutter, who was v
acationing in the country. Perlmutter declined to return to New York and told Sam to contact Dr. Richard Nachtigall, the physician covering for him. Nachtigall hurried to the hospital, with Sam close behind. They found Robeson “stuporous,” “muttering incoherently, not responding to verbal stimuli.” Nachtigall ordered a battery of tests, including a spinal tap, blood cultures, and chest X-rays, started him on intravenous fluid with antibiotics, put him on the critical list, and wrote in his report that he suspected pneumonia, possibly induced by phenothiazine toxicity—dehydration due to drugs. Dr. Kline was notified; he dropped by two days later. Dr. Perlmutter did not come in.41
The X-ray results and tests over the next several days confirmed double pneumonia and kidney blockage. Robeson was near death—his temperature had gone to 105 and neither the addition of Chloromycetin nor the application of an alcohol-and-ice-water sheet had made any difference. Sam Rosen and Nachtigall decided on the spot to transfer Robeson to the superior medical facilities at University Hospital. The decision saved his life. Described on admission as “acutely ill, tremulous,” Robeson’s initial course at University Hospital was “stormy,” but treatment with hypothermia for the high fever, and intravenous fluids for what had probably been a bacterial bronchopneumonia, produced gradual improvement, the fever subsiding, the symptomatic trauma retreating. Yet throughout Robeson’s time at University Hospital the doctors noted that “he retained elements of an organic mental syndrome” even as he became “more lucid mentally.” When they discharged him on September 9, after a three-week stay, they suggested as a final diagnosis “psychosis” with “toxic metabolic encephalopathy probably secondary to combined drug therapy.” The pneumonia, in other words, had been a transient (if nearly fatal) episode; though it was successfully resolved, Robeson nonetheless remained seriously ill.42
In early September, Paul and Essie were brought home from their respective hospitals within days of each other, Essie dying, Paul uncertainly involved with life. She lay upstairs in bed; he, brooding and melancholy, passed unpredictably from room to room. Frankie Lee Sims, their old friend from California, and Marie Bowden, a union secretary, moved into Jumel to take care of them. Paul, Jr., and Marilyn shuttled between a physically shattered mother still keenly alert and an emotionally disconnected father seemingly indifferent to anyone’s struggle for survival, including his own. Paul’s inability to connect was not markedly different, except in style, from the separate solitudes into which Essie and Paul, Jr., were locked as well. Essie was unreconciled to finding herself in a situation at last that she could not somehow “manage.” Paul, Jr., still bitterly blamed both her and Dr. Kline for having taken the “wrong” step, thereby bringing on his father’s collapse, protracting his anger through an obsessive insistence that somehow catastrophe could have been avoided.
By early October, Big Paul seemed headed further downhill. Agitated and restless, he continued to roam the apartment anxiously. On the evening of October 15 Paul, Jr., noticed that his pacing had narrowed to the hall leading to the front door, and he told Frankie Sims to keep an eye on his father while he went upstairs for a bath. Frankie had to attend to another chore momentarily, and Paul, Jr., sitting in the tub, heard the front door slam. When he raced downstairs with a towel around him, he discovered his father was gone. He dressed quickly and dashed outside to search the neighborhood. No Paul. It began to rain lightly. He phoned Lloyd Brown, who lived nearby and owned a car, and together the two men searched in a wider perimeter. No Paul. They called friends, just in case he had stopped off at somebody’s house. No one had seen him. By midnight, frantic, they phoned the police to report Paul missing. The police, in turn, put out a missing persons bulletin. Early the following morning an anonymous phone-caller to the Wadsworth Avenue station house reported that while walking his dog he had come upon a man lying in a clump of bushes near Highbridge Park, a few blocks from Jumel Terrace. Conscious but incoherent (fortunately it had been a warm night), Paul was taken to the Vanderbilt Clinic at nearby Presbyterian Hospital, treated for facial lacerations and a bruised right hip and ankle, and then transferred to University Hospital. When Paul, Jr., Lloyd Brown, and Essie (who somehow managed to get out of bed) arrived, Big Paul told them he had no recollection of leaving the house, or of anything else: “What happened to me?” he kept repeating, “What happened to me?” A spokesman for the Vanderbilt Clinic told the press Robeson had been mugged, but after the police reported no evidence of assault, Essie issued a formal statement saying her husband had been ill and occasionally suffered from loss of balance and dizzy spells. Released from University Hospital several days later, he was taken by Paul, Jr., to Marian’s house in Philadelphia.43
Essie’s symptoms, in the meantime, had intensified. Beset with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, she was readmitted to Beth Israel by Perlmutter on November 23. The cancer had metastasized throughout her body. By the first week in December she was having trouble breathing, but despite severe discomfort continued to see visitors, including Freda Diamond and Helen Rosen. On December 12 she was put on the critical list. That day a friend from the UN arrived with an armful of holly, “thinking it wise to begin celebrating the Holidays a bit early. Essie smiled with her eyes, but she could no longer speak.” At five-thirty the following morning, two days before her seventieth birthday, she died—her unquiet, tenacious spirit stilled. Paul, Jr., went down to Philadelphia to bring his father the news. Big Paul signed the death certificate and, without saying a word, turned away. The funeral was private, with only Paul, Jr., Marilyn, and their two children, Susan and David, present. Paul Sr. did not attend.44
CHAPTER 26
Final Years
(1966–1976)
Marian Robeson Forsythe, a retired schoolteacher, widowed in 1958, was seventy-one years old in 1965 and lived in a comfortable, unpretentious house on Walnut Street in Philadelphia with her daughter Paulina. Withdrawn since childhood, Paulina was a silent presence in the house, a responsibility of, rather than a companion to, her mother. Marian took on the second responsibility of Paul without a murmur of protest; she had always worshiped her younger brother, and the two had always felt entirely comfortable, if not intimate, with each other.1
Marian was an intensely private person with deep nurturing instincts; she saw it as her duty and privilege to protect Paul from unwanted intrusion and believed that with enough loving care he could be nursed back to health; she was the last in a long line of women willing to devote their energies to him. Since Marian lived on limited means, she accepted a small monthly sum for Paul’s keep from Lee Lurie (who on Rockmore’s death had taken over as Paul’s attorney and financial manager), but no amount of money could have bought such total devotion and uncompromising optimism. Seeing Robeson a month after Essie’s death, Lee Lurie was only willing to say, “Paul is doing better, but it is pretty rough.” Marian, more sanguine, reported he was “fine” and had thoroughly enjoyed two theater outings, to see Carousel and The Sound of Music in their Philadelphia revivals.2
There were others, including Helen and Sam Rosen, who occasionally allowed themselves a spell of optimism about the possibility of Paul’s eventual recovery, but his son believes to this day that his father’s second stay in Gracie Square Hospital in August 1965 was decisive for the course of his illness thereafter, that the toxic reaction to unwarranted drug treatment had produced organic brain damage, which made any real hope for improvement chimerical. “My father was never the same after Gracie Square,” Paul, Jr., still says. “Every once in a while he’d have a good day, but basically he wasn’t there.” Yet Paul, Jr., and Marilyn, no less than sister Marian, did everything they could to coax a more positive outcome.
On the assumption—Big Paul did not ask—that he would rather live in New York than Philadelphia, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn decided to bring him back from Marian’s and arranged to move into Jumel Terrace with him, along with their two children, in February 1966. Perhaps having an uneasy sense from the outset that the arrangement would not work, Pau
l, Jr., and Marilyn held on to their old apartment. Though Big Paul was not visibly mourning Essie, he was reluctant to leave the house. Once in a great while he would go to dinner at the homes of old friends, but, as Jim Aronson remembers one such evening (at Vita and Ed Barsky’s), Paul stayed “very much removed; it was very difficult to pull him into the conversation.” With Paul, Jr.’s help, he did manage to attend one public event—a benefit dinner for SNCC in March 1966. Seated, at the family’s request, at an inconspicuous table, he was nonetheless given a big ovation by the crowd. John Lewis came over to his table and said, “Paul, this all started from you.” James Forman, chairman of SNCC, paid tribute to him in his speech and wrote him afterward to say, “We all know of your part in the struggle for Freedom and it was a great privilege to be able to tell you how much you mean to all of us.” “It’s fine finally for a prophet to be honored in his own country,” an admirer later wrote Robeson. Still, by the end of the evening, Big Paul was “laid out” with exhaustion.3
Occasionally other requests came in for an appearance, a statement, a sign of approbation. He was asked to attend testimonial dinners for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the historian Herbert Aptheker, his old comrade William L. Patterson (on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday); he was invited to the Rutgers New York Bicentennial dinner-dance at the Hilton, to be one of three subjects (along with Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael) for a documentary film on American politics, to accept an award from the Czechoslovak Ambassador for having promoted “friendship and co-operation with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic”; he was asked by A. Philip Randolph to join him as a sponsor in the campaign of the Committee of Conscience against apartheid in South Africa. To each, Paul, Jr., fulfilling a function Essie had performed for decades, replied that his father’s health made it impossible for him to meet the request. The FBI, which continued to receive desultory reports from its agents about Robeson, got the same message from the field: “the subject was seriously ill.”4
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