Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  41. Newsweek, Nov. 1, 1943; World-Telegram, Oct. 20, 1943; Uta Hagen to her parents, quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 212; MW to May Whitty, Oct. 20, 1943, LC: Webster; interview with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982; V. Rogov, “Othello in the American Theatre,” translated from Literalura i Iskustvo, February 9, 1944, RA; multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. Accounts of what Webster said in her “speech” vary from a choked “thank you” (Webster, Daughter, p. 114) to (turning to Robeson), “Paul, we are all very proud of you tonight” (Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 1943). MW’s later memories of opening night (in Daughter, pp. 113–14) closely parallel the feelings she expressed at the time. As she wrote (Our Time, June 1944) about the opening-night ovation, “I have never, in any theatre in the world, heard a tribute so whole-hearted, so tremendous, so deeply moving.…”

  42. New York Daily Mirror, Journal-American, World-Telegram—all Oct. 20, 1943.

  43. Lewis Nichols in The New York Times, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; John Chapman in the New York Daily News, Oct. 20, 24, 1943; Wilella Waldorf in the New York Post, Oct. 20, 1943; Ward Morehouse in the New York Sun, Oct. 20, 1943. Waldorf, Chapman, and Morehouse expressed the three reservations about Robeson. The critics especially admired the punchy quality of Webster’s staging—her rich melodramatic sensibility, so suited, they felt, to the play’s central tone (see especially Wilella Waldorf’s review, Oct. 20, 1943). Lewis Nichols in the Times and Howard Barnes in the Tribune both registered some minor reservations about the production, but Nichols called it “the best interpretation of ‘Othello’ to be seen here in a good many years,” and Barnes called Webster’s rendering “a triumphant handling of the tragedy.” Sanford Meisner (phone interview, April 12, 1985) thought “the good performance in that production was José Ferrer.” Uta Hagen agrees: “… probably the finest Iago that ever was”; in her opinion Ferrer couldn’t then or ever sustain the quality of his performance: “He hates long runs.… It got more and more tricks, and outer gimmicks, or vocalizations,” but “initially … he was sensational.… He was the only actor on stage.… I know I wasn’t good.… It was shape without content—borrowed outer form, conventional and traditional in the worst sense. Everyone whose opinion I really respected did not like me as Desdemona—‘nice quality but conventional’” (interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982).

  44. Kronenberger, PM, Oct. 20, 1943; Gibbs, The New Yorker, Oct. 30, 1943; Young, The New Republic, vol. 109, pp. 621–62; Speaight (SOS, p. 231); Marshall (The Nation, vol. 157, pp. 507–8. Writing much later, George Jean Nathan appended to a column of his the only entirely negative (and irreducibly succinct) verdict Othello got; his one-line notice read: “One of the very few virtues of Margaret Webster’s production of Othello is that it contains no ballet” (Nathan, “Such Stuff as Dreams Aren’t Made On,” American Mercury, May 1945). The Robesons had met Nathan at least once, back in 1925, at a party given by the Knopfs. In her diary Essie had described Nathan as “the nicest little spic and span fellow.” Time echoed exactly the views expressed by the other weekly critics: “Robeson did not bring to the part poetry and drama so much as sculpture and organ music. He was not so much Othello as a great and terrible presence” (Nov. 1, 1943).

  45. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; phone interview with Sanford Meisner, April 12, 1985. Earle Hyman, who in 1953 was to be the next black actor to portray Othello in New York, had a very different view. He saw Robeson’s performance ten times and pronounced it “magnificent.” Hyman further recalls that in 1953 Robeson came backstage to congratulate him on his performance (aware that Robeson was in the audience that night, Hyman froze and gave, in his view, one of his worst shows). A photographer backstage wanted to take a picture of Hyman and Robeson together, but Robeson, at the time widely denounced for his “Communist leanings,” waved the photographer away: “No, don’t do that. It won’t do this young man any good” (Sterner interview with Hyman).

  “Impressive emptiness” is, curiously, precisely the defining quality F. R. Leavis and subsequent critics have seen in the character of Othello. That interpretation of the role began with T. S. Eliot’s essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927) and was then elaborated by Leavis in “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” The Common Pursuit (Salem House Publications, 1984). Leavis refers to Othello as “self-centered and self-regarding,” far more interested in his own “heroic self-dramatization” than in Desdemona; he sees his life in operatic terms and is given to stentorian speechifying about it. I am grateful to Seymour Kleinberg for introducing me to this interpretation—one that Olivier took as his own in both his stage and film versions of the role. Robeson never saw Olivier’s version, but when Freda Diamond described it to him he expressed disbelief that so great an actor would lend himself to so “distorted” a version of the role (multiple interviews with Freda Diamond).

  46. Interview with James Earl Jones, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 1982.

  47. Fredi Washington, The People’s Voice, Oct. 23, 1943. For other accounts in the black press, all stressing the racial issue, see the Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 30, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 30, 1943; the Chicago Defender, Oct. 30, 1943 (far more sanguine than Fredi Washington in its reference to the effect of Robeson’s Othello in “sweeping aside” “whatever silly racial prejudices New Yorkers may have had in the past”). Along with Howard Barnes in the Tribune, the only other white reviewer to make any reference at all to the cultural aspect of race, to which Robeson had directed his efforts, was the anonymous critic for Cue magazine, and in that instance the reference was compromised by the description of a “primitive” Othello being “bewildered by the effete products of 16th century Venetian civilization” (Oct. 30. 1943).

  Though Robeson’s Othello was never made into a film, it was recorded. Nobody, however, was happy with the results. Margaret Webster and the Theatre Guild were outraged at Robeson and José Ferrer for agreeing to a recording contract without consulting the producers, but “decided it would be wisest to acquiesce rather than imperil the tour by a fight with Paul.” Webster took some consolation in the fact that “The records were not good,” but regretted that they would “be considered a fair representation of the production” (Daughter, p. 117). Uta Hagen, to this day, thinks the recording so bad that “I can’t hear it—I just find it embarrassing.” As Hagen remembers it, the recording sessions had been done “with great care” over an extended six-week period, but, “having played it, there was a sense of compensating for what couldn’t be seen … a kind of deliberate overemphasis on every line that to me is agonizing” (interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982). To my contemporary ear, Webster and Hagen’s judgment is sound, though perhaps exaggerated.

  Three years later Fredi Washington took the lead in a public campaign to persuade Robeson to accept the role of the insurrectionary leader Denmark Vesey in Dorothy Heyward’s play about him, Set My People Free. Washington wrote two “Open Letters” to him in The People’s Voice (June 1, Aug. 17, 1946). She was joined by the columnist Earl Conrad (Chicago Defender, July 6, 1946), and the Afro-American publisher, Carl Murphy, who wrote directly to Robeson, asking him to consider the role (Murphy to PR, June 12, 1946, ARC: Fredi Washington). Judging from an FBI phone tap (March 9, 1946), Rockmore strongly discouraged Robeson’s initially favorable response to the script (see p. 230).

  CHAPTER 14 THE APEX OF FAME (1944–1945)

  1. FBI 100-6393-1A 181 (Red Army); FBI 100-26603-1271, p. 3 (Loyalist); FBI 100-28715-150, p. 24 (common man); FBI New York 100-25857-1875 Referral Doc. #18 (wealthy woman); FBI 100-7518-699 (serfs); FBI 100-47315-2573, p. 36 (Anthem); FBI 100-47315-2252 (high officials); FBI 100-28715-150 (100%).

  2. Dawson to PR, Nov. 23, 1943, RA; Uta Hagen to her parents, Oct. 25, 1943, as quoted in Spector, “Hagen,” p. 213 (advance sale); CVV to ER, Nov. 22, 1943, RA; White to Langner, Nov. 24, 1943, Yale: Theatre Guild; Coward to PR, Dec. 31, 1942, RA;
Du Bois to PR, Jan. 5, 1944, U. Mass.: Du Bois (Phylon). Among some of the other noteworthy letters of congratulation were those from Clarence Cameron White to PR, Oct. 27, 1943, Arthur Judson (president of Columbia Concerts) to PR, Nov. 23, 1943, and Franklin P. Adams, Feb. 2, 1944—all in RA.

  3. The New York Times, Oct. 29, 1944; New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, 1944 (Scholar); Associated Negro Press, May 20, 1944 (Gold Medal). The Donaldson Awards were set up by Billboard and were arrived at by a poll of theater people, including actors, critics, stagehands, producers, and technicians. Robeson won in the category “Outstanding lead performance (actor)”—José Ferrer and Elliott Nugent were the runners-up (PM, July 5, 1944). Dreiser to Mencken, June 28, 1944, in Thomas P. Riggio, ed., Dreiser-Mencken Letters (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), vol. II, p. 713. PR was a guest of Dreiser’s in California in 1944–45 and in the latter year Dreiser suggested he do an interview with PR about his views on how to advance the black race (Dreiser to PR, Feb. 15, 1945, Riggio, ed., Dreiser Letters). According to a third party, Dreiser himself “disclaimed godhood, though he thought Paul Robeson might qualify” (Ish-Kishor to W. A. Swanberg, as quoted in Swanberg, Dreiser [Scribner’s, 1965], p. 418.

  4. ILWU Dispatcher, Nov. 19, 1943; New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 7, 8, 12, June 8, 1944; World-Telegram, Oct. 13, 1943; The New York Times, Jan. 19, 1944 (equity). In 1944 Robeson was made an honorary member of the Fur and Leather Workers union at its biennial convention (Daily Worker, May 17, 1944).

  5. There are dozens of letters in RA requesting various favors from him. The log of PR’s conversation with Yergan on Nov. 23, 1944, as recorded by the FBI, is Main 100-12304-25. Even before the pressure created by the election, Robeson wrote Van Vechten, “I’ve been a little worn and rushing about doing benefits, etc.… The matinee days are so wearing” (postmarked May 24, 1944, Yale: Van Vechten).

  Robeson always kept a retreat to which he could repair when feeling overwhelmed, or simply in need of privacy. During his London years he had sometimes used producer Earl Dancer’s place (for more on Dancer, performer and nightclub owner, see Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, [Pyramid, 1967], especially pp. 172 ff.). In New York in the early forties, Jean Blackwell Hutson remembers that in order to locate him she had to “penetrate some personal hideaway of his own” (interview with Hutson, Sept. 21, 1983). For more on PR’s “retreats,” see note 19, p. 710.

  6. New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 17, 1943, April 4, 1944 (Africa); Daily Worker, Aug. 28, 1943; Chicago Defender, July 24, 1943; Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 25, 1943, Jan. 8, 1944 (hurt); PR speech, Jan. 2, 1944, radio station WEAF, several versions, RA; transcript of the radio program for the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee, May 19, 1944, RA (black resentment); telegram signed by Walter White and PR soliciting additional signatures to protest lack of funding appropriation for the FEPC, June 10, 1944, LC: NAACP; PR’s opening statement to the “Africa—New Perspectives” conference called by the Council on African Affairs, April 14, 1944 (Soviets; new imperialists), transcript in RA; the agenda and program for the CAA conference on Africa are in NYPL/Schm: NNC, as is the call for the Aug. 8, 1943, San Francisco Conference on Racial and National Unity in Wartime, at which PR spoke; transcript (RA) of broadcast interview, WHN, by William S. Gailmor with PR, April 1944, for the quote about black patriotism (the style is not PR’s but the sentiment is).

  Robeson also continued his activities in behalf of the war effort, appearing at bond rallies and participating in programs for the Office of War Information and the War Production Board (e.g., Silverman to PR, Feb. 3, 1944; Baren to PR, Feb. 15, 1944; Nelson to PR, June 7, 1944; Betz to PR, June 13, 1944; Smith to PR, Aug. 27, 1944—all RA). During the outbreak of race riots in Detroit, he sent a confidential memo to Roosevelt suggesting that “the tension is being fostered deliberately by anti-administration and anti-war elements” among white reactionaries (PR to Roosevelt, June 21, 1944; Jonathan Daniels to PR, June 27, 1944, RA).

  7. Interviews with Ishmael Flory, July 1–2, 1986; Daily Worker, Dec. 4, 1943; New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 11, 1943. On the career of Landis, see Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment; Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Random House, 1983), pp. 30–43. Ben Davis, Jr., records what seems to be a later (1945) meeting with the club owners and also notes that he and Robeson attended a small reception for Jackie Robinson after the Dodgers had signed him (Communist Councilman from Harlem [International, 1969], pp. 133–34).

  8. Daily Worker, Oct. 23, 1943, Nov. 11, 1943; Wilson to PR, Nov. 1, 1943, RA; Naison, Heyday, p. 313; Ben Davis, Jr., to ER, April 27, 1943, RA (“membership”); FBI Main 100-12304-13 (Robeson for Congress). According to Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, head of the “Black Mafia” and later a protector of Robeson’s “contributed heavily” to Davis’s campaign (interview with Johnson, March 5, 1985); for more on Bumpy Johnson and Robeson, see p. 312 and note 17, p. 695. Davis’s record as a city councilman is discussed in Edwin R. Lewison, Black Politics in New York City (Twayne Publishers, 1974), especially pp. 76–79. Davis moved actively against segregated housing, police brutality, and inadequate fire-department services in Harlem. He was also known for being available to his constituents.

  9. Interviews with Barney Josephson, March 23, 1982, April 2, 1985; In Person: Lena Horne, as told to Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss (Greenberg, 1950), pp. 180–85; Pearl Primus interview, The New York Times, March 18, 1979; metro-Newark!, Oct. 1979 (Vaughan). John Hammond recounts a similar incident in On Record (Summit, 1977), pp. 261–62. Interviews with Uta Hagen. Hagen also remembers one unhappy occasion when she and Paul went backstage to congratulate Billie Holiday after she had just given a “spectacular, totally controlled” performance—and found her crawling around on all fours, far gone on drugs.

  10. The many letters and telegrams are in RA, including a letter from Lillian Hellman (April 7, 1944) that she sent out to solicit greetings. In declining to serve as a sponsor for the event, Eleanor Roosevelt described Robeson as a man “whom I greatly admire” but added, “I wonder however, if your group would not be better off without my name this year when everything I do brings the cause criticism?” (Roosevelt to Yergan, March 3, 1944, FDR.) After seeing Othello, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Joseph Lash, “Robeson is moving in it because the lines might be said by him today!” She added, however, that “the character is never quite convincing and all of a piece … to me” (as quoted in Joseph Lash, A World of Love [Doubleday, 1984], p. 84).

  11. The New York Times, April 17, 1944; Daily Worker, April 10, 18, 1944; PM, April 17, 1944. The following year Robeson in turn paid his respects at the celebration for Mary McLeod Bethune’s seventieth birthday (New York Amsterdam News, July 19, 1945).

  12. Department of the Army, File No. 100-25857-63. PR had sent Roosevelt a letter protesting a deportation order issued against Raissa Browder (Daily Worker, Dec. 14, 1943); the FBI was aware of the letter.

  13. Theresa Helburn (Theatre Guild) to PR, June 30, 1944 (closing), Yale: Theatre Guild. The previous record-holders for Shakespeare on Broadway had been a tie at 157 performances each for Jane Cowl in Romeo and Juliet in 1923 and Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar in 1937.

  14. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984. All Hagen quotations hereafter in this section, unless other sources are cited, are from my interviews with her.

  15. PR to ER, Aug. 29, 1941, n.d. (1942), RA.

  16. Sadie Davenport Shelton, who knew PR back in his undergraduate days, recalls, “He always liked light-skinned women” (interview, March 26, 1985, PR, Jr., participating). Skin color, of course, was not the sole variable in determining his preference. Sustained attraction for him seems to have hinged on a woman’s being forceful, tough-minded, motherly, and loyal—an indomitable earth mother.

  17. Spector, “Hagen” (hate mail). Robeson later remarked that in Cincinnati he felt the climate was especially tense and in the performance that night “I was careful how close I got to Desdemona” (remark on
“A Closer Look,” aired in 1979).

  18. Langston Hughes, for one, roundly applauded Robeson’s refusal to play segregated houses, contrasting his attitude, in print, with Bill Robinson’s: when Robinson’s Hot Mikado hit segregated Washington, D.C. (a town Robeson refused to play), and blacks were denied admittance to the theater, Robinson “defended himself by saying that he was making $2,500 a week out of it. And he went right on playing” (Hughes, Chicago Defender, July 22, 1944, reprinted in Negro Digest, Sept. 1944).

  19. Another moment of hilarity had come while the show was still playing on Broadway. In saying his line “Since these arms of mine had seven years pith,” Robeson accidentally said “piss” instead of “pith.” Hagen, who had just turned upstage, shook with laughter, and they collapsed all over again later when Robeson added, “How would you feel if you’d been pissing for seven years?” (Sterner interview with James Monk.)

  20. Richardson to PR, April 6, 1973, courtesy of Paulina Forsythe. Richardson had been elected to the state legislature in Indiana in 1932, during the height of KKK influence, and later won the first public-housing desegregation case (Indianapolis Recorder, Dec. 16, 1972). According to Earl Dickerson, a post-performance party in Chicago lasted until 6:00 a.m., with Etta Moten Barnett singing and Duke Ellington playing the piano (1969 tape, courtesy of Terkel; interview with Dickerson, July 2, 1986).

  21. Interview with Studs Terkel, June 30, 1986. The pertinent Chicago reviews are: Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago Sun, Chicago Herald-American, Chicago Times—all April 11, 1945—and Chicago Sun and Chicago Herald-American, April 15, 1945. A large batch of other tour reviews are in RA. Though Hagen thought PR’s performance on the tour was better, it was on the political platform that she felt he was without peer—his marvelous voice, his personal magnetism, and his profound conviction blending to produce “remarkable impact.” During Othello’s six-week engagement in Chicago, Robeson made a number of political appearances. He was featured at United Nations Day (sponsored by the United Packinghouse Workers/CIO), attended a membership meeting of the United Auto Workers/CIO (Local 453 made him an honorary member), sang and spoke at a meeting sponsored by American Youth for Democracy, at a large event organized by the Chicago Council on African Affairs, at two synagogues, and at a hundred-dollar-a-couple dinner to benefit the Abraham Lincoln School (of which William Patterson was assistant director). Robeson sat for a portrait by Edward Biberman while in Los Angeles on tour and Biberman has provided a vivid account of Robeson’s hectic schedule: “… we were never alone. He would always make several appointments here for the time that he was posing. Earl Robinson would be sitting at this piano banging away a new tune that he wanted Paul to hear, and somebody would be reading a script, and somebody else would be interviewing him” (Emily Corey interview with Biberman in 1977 for UCLA: Special Collections; Biberman to me, July 31, 1982).