Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  21. The Columbia class dinner is described in the New Brunswick Daily Home News, Feb. 25, 1921, and is included here somewhat out of chronological order. ER’s remark about “ourselves” is from ER ms. “Introduction to I Want You to Know” (July 1961, RA). There is intermittent correspondence from ER to Louis and Corinne Wright (including a letter of condolence to Corinne on Louis’s death in 1952) in CML: Wright.

  22. This account of the impetus behind the production of Simon is from Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …,” Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 15, 1924, an article for which Robeson himself apparently provided the basic data (Kenneth Q. Jennings, of the Sunday Times staff, to PR, Feb. 27, 1924, RA); and from Percy N. Stone’s interview with PR in the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926 (“dragged him in”).

  Torrence, who was white and well regarded at the time as a lyric poet, had caused a considerable sensation with the original production on Broadway of Three Plays for a Negro Theater (of which Simon was one) in April 1917. James Weldon Johnson hailed the opening as “the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American theater.… The stereotyped traditions regarding the Negro’s histrionic limitations were smashed” (Black Manhattan [Atheneum reissue, 1977], p. 175). Johnson emphasized that Torrence had gotten his way in insisting on a black cast. For additional details see Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson (Chicago University Press, 1973), pp. 302–4, and Edith J. R. Issacs, The Negro in the American Theatre (Theatre Arts, 1947), pp. 54–60. For more information on the Amateur Players, see Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 179.

  23. Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara and Gerald (Times Books, 1982). In a newspaper interview three years later, Robeson said, “I was broke at the time and it was far better than working in the Post Office for a month or so” (World, May 3, 1925). My reference to “several whites” is deliberately vague. Essie (Ms. Auto., RA), specifically names them as Robert Edmond Jones and Emilie (Mrs. Norman) Hapgood, respectively the set designer (he later designed the 1943–44 Othello) and producer of the 1917 Broadway version of Simon, and Kenneth Macgowan, who in 1923 would join the Provincetown Players. Recent commentators have gone on to elaborate (as Essie did not) the consequences of their attendance. David Levering Lewis, for example (in his otherwise fine book When Harlem Was in Vogue), has them, in 1920, dashing backstage after the curtain “to offer him the lead in something called The Emperor Jones,” which Robeson (as Seton further advances the tale in Paul Robeson, p. 23) turned down: “I went home, forgot about the theatre, and went back next morning to Law School as if nothing had happened.” Thanks to O’Neill’s biographer, Louis Sheaffer, who generously put certain unpublished manuscript materials in my hands, I do have some peripheral confirmation of the Emperor Jones offer to Robeson, but, like Sheaffer, have concluded it rests on uncertain memories (Sheaffer to me, Sept. 29, 1982, July 28, 1986) and is finally not persuasive. The materials in question are recollections by Jasper Deeter and Cleon Throckmorton, two Provincetown Players stalwarts, as given to Sheaffer in interviews.

  Deeter, who played Smithers in the 1920 Jones production, told Sheaffer that he did approach Robeson about doing the lead role, but “Robeson stood up with self-aware dignity: ‘You may know this kind of person, and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person; but I don’t.” Although such an exchange may have taken place, most likely it was in regard to the 1924 revival, since Deeter refers to Robeson as having been recommended to him (by Crisis magazine, not by fellow Provincetowners) as currently “the best Negro actor”—and in 1920 he was not so regarded.

  The second testimony comes from Cleon Throckmorton, who designed the sets for both the 1920 and 1924 productions of Jones. He told Sheaffer that the following dialogue ensued when they approached Robeson in 1920: “We’d like you to be in a play by Eugene O’Neill.” “Never heard of him.” “Well, we think he’s America’s coming playwright and we think The Emperor Jones is a fine play.” “What sort of part is it?” “A railroad porter from a lowly background becomes emperor of a tropic island and then, under terror, slips back.” “Good day, gentlemen. I think you know more about that sort of life than I would.” This dialogue—pompous, rude, and surly—sounds wholly uncharacteristic of Robeson and throws the reliability of the entire testimony into question.

  As Sheaffer wrote me (July 28, 1986), “Regardless of what Deeter and Throckmorton told me, I now feel most doubtful that Robeson was ever considered to play Jones in its first production. What stage experience did he have then? None. It seems absurd that anyone in the Village group would think for a moment of entrusting such an all-important part to a total novice.” I concur with Sheaffer’s judgment. He added, though, that since both men “recall something about Robeson standing on his dignity when offered the part, there may be something to it, but exactly what?”

  Though the evidence remains contradictory, it suggests, on balance, that if Robeson was considered at all for the first production of Jones, it was only by some lower-echelon Provincetowners, which is not the same as asserting—as others have—that an actual offer was made to him. What finally persuaded me that some marginal soundings might have taken place is the number of times Robeson himself makes reference to such an event in various interviews he gave over the years. He even went so far as to include a reference to it in the program notes for his Nov. 1929 Carnegie Hall recital (RA). Especially persuasive in this regard is the detailed (and otherwise uncommonly accurate) interview with Percy N. Stone printed in the New York Herald Tribune on Oct. 17, 1926 (the fact that it appeared in the widely read Tribune further suggests Robeson would have taken the utmost care to present his prior history accurately). In regard to the 1920 Jones, the Stone interview reads as follows: “From way down in the village came eager scouts when the little shows [Simon the Cyrenian] were put on. They saw Robeson perform and when Emperor Jones was booked for the Provincetown Theater, up ran one of the attachés of that place with the script. He did not show O’Neill’s play to Robeson; he sat down and read it through to him. At that time Robeson was quite sensitive about the Negro question. It was his first year in New York and the problems he faced made him race conscious. As the play was read, Robeson got madder and madder until, when that final line was reached, he wanted to throw the man out of the window. Instead, he just refused the part, much as he needed the money.” (Yet another persuasive piece of testimony to the same effect is Robeson’s article “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun, London, Jan. 13, 1929.)

  What we do know for certain is that Macgowan, for one, did see Robeson in Taboo and did like him “tremendously” (Macgowan to PR, Dec. 21, 1923, RA). And in Mina Higgins’s 1924 article, “Paul Robeson,” she states that not only were Macgowan and Emilie Hapgood in the audience, but Eugene O’Neill as well. O’Neill was sufficiently impressed, says Higgins, to offer Robeson a reading for the role of “Brutus Jones,” but Robeson turned it down, since at that time he was thinking “of nothing but perfecting himself in his chosen profession” of law. Emilie Hapgood and her husband, Norman, were friends of Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s, which is another link in this network of friendships perhaps responsible for Robeson’s progression of theatrical roles. (See Margot Peters, Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Knopf, 1984), p. 300; Michael D. Marcaccio, The Hapgoods [University Press of Virginia, 1977], p.25.)

  24. Benchley, Life, April 20, 1922; Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown (Russell and Russell, 1931, reissued 1972) (Gilpin); Woollcott, The New York Times, April 20, 1922; Anatol I. Schlosser, “Paul Robeson: His Career in the Theater, in Motion Pictures, and on the Concert Stage,” doctoral thesis, New York University, 1970 (hereafter Schlosser). Some of the other critics were kinder to Wycherly and even more so to Robeson. Charles Darnton thought his playing had “something of the Gilpin power,” and Burns Mantle felt all “the colored players” gave “veristic and technically artistic characterizations.” Several singled out Fannie Belle de Knight for praise; she,
like Robeson, was to perform the play in England—and to “pester” Robeson with unwanted attentions (see his letters to ER, summer 1922, RA). There is considerable correspondence from Woollcott to the Robesons throughout the thirties in RA, and in her diary (Dec. 22, 1932, RA) Essie described him as “the most entertaining man I ever met.”

  25. Margot Peters, Mrs. Pat, p. 381 (friendship with Hoy tie Wiborg).

  26. ER, Ms. Auto., RA. In RA there is one whole notebook (1920s) headed “Essie’s notes on theater and cinema from professional standpoint,” which attests to the rigor and diligence with which she pursued her goal. The notebook consists entirely of her handwritten comments on costumes, production, lighting, etc., copied out of source books, apparently as an aid for Paul.

  27. For more on Shuffle Along in particular and black theater history in general, see the previously cited books by Edith J. R. Isaacs, James Weldon Johnson, David Levering Lewis, and Jervis Anderson, plus Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and “The Messenger,” 1917–1928 (Greenwood, 1975).

  28. ER, Ms. Auto; in PR’s recollection, given to a newspaper reporter three years later, he had remained disconcerted a bit longer: “I was so nervous that for the first two songs my voice was absolutely gone” (World, May 5, 1925). Interview (PR, Jr., participating) with Eubie Blake, March 12, 1982 (he was then ninety-nine years old). Blake recalled having met Robeson before he entered the Shuffle Along cast—when he heard his “wonderful” voice singing in Strep (John) Payne’s apartment in Harlem. Blake also remembered that Robeson always called him “Hubert” (his full name was James Hubert Blake), though nobody else did; Blake felt it “was a mark of respect” to have been called by his real name rather than his nickname. He remembered Robeson fondly as being “the same all the time”—success “didn’t change him. That’s the great thing.… His head never got swollen.… He was a master gentleman.” The Harmony Kings continued as a group at least into the early thirties, and with considerable success (The Kent and Sussex Courier, May 17, 1929, and the Dundee Evening Telegraph, March 5, 1930). In 1932, PR referred to The Harmony Kings “at present enjoying a sensational European success” (PR, “Notes: 1932,” RA).

  29. In placing this meeting in the spring of 1921 I’m following the chronology of Gerry Neale Bledsoe herself, as outlined to me in a series of letters, having decided (through outside verification of other portions of her testimony) that she is a scrupulous, reliable witness. Even she, however, has expressed some uncertainty (in a letter to me of July 7, 1983) about the precise dating of this episode: “It was late in my first year at Howard or possibly into my second year there.” But even if the visit from Robeson took place six months later than the spring of 1921, its meaning and importance—as a gauge of his tenacity, as a comment on his marriage—remain the same.

  30. ER Diary, Dec. 26, 30, 1924, Jan. 1, 1925, RA. Gerry and her husband had a happy marriage and distinguished joint careers working in the labor movement and for civil rights. Bledsoe became prominent in Democratic Party circles in Michigan, and when the American Bar Association refused to admit blacks, he helped to found the National Bar Association. Some of Gerry Bledsoe’s public activities during World War II are described in Dominic Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit (Temple University Press, 1984), pp. 46, 83, 133. Her many organizational activities culminated in election to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1983.

  After 1924, Paul and Gerry apparently didn’t see each other again for many years (Gerry caught a performance of The Emperor Jones in 1925 but did not go backstage), until the late forties, when he made several public appearances in Detroit and spent time with the Bledsoes in their home. Gerry and her husband made a point of going to his Detroit concerts (she served on the Nelly Watts Concert Series sponsoring committee for some of them) as a public act of support at a time when he was being criticized for his involvement in Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign and again in the 1950s, when he was being widely denounced as a Communist. On one Detroit visit, Robeson spent a few days at the University of Michigan and took Gerry Bledsoe’s daughter, Geraldine, a first-year student at the university, as his companion to many of the events. Both mother and daughter visited him in Philadelphia during the 1970s (see note 25, p.763).

  Gerry’s later recollections of Essie are less cordial. In the mid-forties, Dorothy Roosevelt, sister-in-law to Eleanor and a friend of Gerry’s, invited her and half a dozen other women to a small dinner for Essie. Gerry describes the event: “I was taken aback when Essie brought up the subject of Paul and me and said that she had taken him away from me. One of my friends shot back in not a very gentle voice: That’s not the way I heard it! I said nothing. I was a little embarrassed for Essie.” Later, at the University of Michigan, Gerry’s daughter, Geraldine, went up to speak to Essie. “She turned away. Geraldine was stunned”—knowing nothing at the time of her mother’s previous involvement with Paul. (These quotations are taken from the dozen letters from Gerry Bledsoe to me.)

  CHAPTER 4 PROVINCETOWN PLAYHOUSE (1922–1924)

  1. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; R. R. Roberts to PR, April 10, 1973 (Homeric), courtesy of Forsythe.

  2. The quotations are from two of his undated (but definitely July 1922) letters to ER, RA. Essie’s letters to him are not extant, but Paul quotes from one in a letter of his own and it leaves no doubt that Essie was as impassioned as he: “I love you Dubby [his nickname was “Dubby,” hers “Dolly”] Darling—across the sea—across the Land—if you go to the end of the earth—my love will follow my precious and bless him and keep him the angel husband he is to me” (quoted in PR to ER, Aug. 2, 1922, RA).

  3. PR to ER, undated (week of July 17, 1922), RA.

  4. The quotations in this and subsequent paragraphs describing Robeson’s stay in England are pieced together from his twenty-two letters to ER (RA). Since the quotes are so scattered, I won’t attempt to link each one to a given letter.

  5. Peters, Mrs. Pat, p. 381, says the opening was a disaster, with the audience pelting the stage with oranges, scattering the cast, but I’ve found no corroboration for that in the Blackpool newspaper reviews.

  6. Marie Seton, “Lawrence Brown: Musician Who Honors Music,” Freedom, April 1952 (first meeting at Payne’s).

  7. In perhaps another reference to Gerry, he wrote, “I could never have loved any other woman as I love you. Never. Love like mine could not have been given to two persons” (RA).

  8. The newspaper clippings are in RA. Several of the British reviews had racial overtones. One said the play “gave one an idea of the horrible rites practiced by negro tribes in the heart of the jungle”; another valued it for insight into “coon humour” and a third saw the soppy, denigrating melodrama as “a brilliant study in the psychology of the negro.”

  9. Peters, Mrs. Pat, p. 381 (Wiborg).

  10. This quote is from one of two unidentified, undated (but, from internal evidence, definitely Nov. 1922) newspaper clippings in RA.

  11. The fact that Robeson assisted Sanford in the fall of 1923 is established in the reminiscences of Jules A. Kaiser and in PR to William P. Garrison, Jan. 16, 1923 (both in RUA). A newspaper photograph of the Revue cast is in RA. Details on the Plantation Revue are from Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1890–1930 (Greenwood, 1981), p. 254. In the very first entry of the diary Essie began to keep at this time (Jan. 1, 1924, RA) she wrote, “Paul had to learn to sing at the Plantations, but came [home?] each morning about 1 a.m.” Paul must have been part of the revue while Mills was still in it, for he later wrote, “I donned some overalls and a straw hat and warbled ‘LilGal’ to a Chorine.… How thrilling it was to listen to Florence Mills sing nightly—‘Down Among the Sleepy Hills of Tennessee.’ … The only columnist who spotted me in those days was S. Jay Kaufmann then on the Telegram” (PR “Notes: 1932,” RA). When Mills died of appendicitis in 1927, Paul wrote Essie, “I weep every time I think of it. It really is heartbreaking” (PR to ER, Dec. 12, 13,
1927, RA). He is quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that, next to Bessie Smith, he considered Florence Mills “the greatest Negro artist he has ever heard” (Daily Herald, London, May 4, 1935). As for Bessie Smith, late in life, the writer Laura Riding wrote Robeson to reminisce about “how we talked of Bessie Smith, and you demonstrated her moving presence when she sang to people!” (Riding to PR, May 9, 1972, RA.) Riding and her lover, Robert Graves, got to know the Robesons somewhat in London in 1928–29.

  New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926 (post-office clerk job). Perry’s New York Herald Tribune column had been reprinted in the Daily Home News (New Brunswick) Jan. 8, 1923. PR to William P. Garrison (graduate manager), Jan. 16, 1923; Garrison to PR, Jan. 18, 1923; Garrison to Perry, Jan. 23, 1923, are all in RUA. (PR to Garrison was printed in the Rutgers Alumni Monthly, Feb. 1923). Additional newspaper reprints of Perry’s column are in RA, along with a personal letter of regret from Perry to PR. The “prizefighting episode” may not have been so clear-cut as my description of it suggests. In the ms. of Seton’s Robeson she writes that he “sought [italics mine] the advice of the sports writer, Lawrence Perry” about the prizefighting offer, and “it was Perry’s opinion that Robeson could never become a leader of the Negro people if he was associated with prizefighting,” a view that tied in with Robeson’s own. These lines were cut from the printed version of Seton’s biography, perhaps at Robeson’s request—since they imply that he was uncertain enough about the offer to have sought Perry’s advice, and that the consultation between the two men might have been the source for Perry’s original column suggesting that Robeson was interested in it; in the same way, Perry’s subsequent denial may have been made specifically at Robeson’s request. Alexander Woollcott confirms Robeson’s aversion to the prizefighting offer, and offers an explanation for what brought it about. According to Woollcott, in one of Robeson’s professional football games, playing for the Milwaukee Badgers against Jim Thorpe’s Oorang Indians (see note 7, p. 577). he got into a nasty fight with Thorpe while defending himself (so Woollcott tells it) from an eye-gouging: “… the story of his quality as a fighter spread over the country before nightfall. Drooping fight promoters were galvanized into sudden action. Within a week, more than a million dollars had been confidentially pledged to back him as the prospective heavyweight champion of the world” (Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns [Grosset and Dunlap, 1934], p. 127). Many years later the dean for student affairs at MIT wrote PR to say, “Unless I am making up memories, I recall that at my boarding school one day, by sheer chance, I found myself sitting next to a guest, Gene Tunney.… I recall his saying that the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world could be, if he wanted it, a young man named Paul Robeson” (William Speer to PR, Sept. 24, 1972, courtesy of Paulina Forsythe).