LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOR MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS IN LIBRARIES
ARC |
Amistad Research Center, Tulane University |
BLUC |
Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley |
CHS |
Chicago Historical Society |
CML |
Countway Medical Library, Harvard University |
CU |
Columbia University |
DSMC |
DuSable Museum for Black History and Culture, Chicago |
FDR |
FDR Library, Hyde Park, New York |
IISH |
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam |
KWF |
Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York |
LC |
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. |
MSRC |
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University |
NYPL/Ms. Div. |
New York Public Library, Manuscript Division |
NYPL/Schm |
New York Public Library, Schomburg Collection |
NUL |
Northwestern University Library |
PHS |
Presbyterian Historical Society |
PR Archiv, GDR |
Paul Robeson Archiv, East Berlin |
PU |
Princeton University Library |
RA |
Robeson Archives, Howard University |
RUA |
Special Collections, Rutgers University Library |
SIU |
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale |
SL |
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe |
SSC |
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College |
SU |
Syracuse University |
UCLA |
University of Southern California, Special Collections |
U.Mass. |
University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
UM |
Labadie Collection, University of Michigan |
UT |
Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas |
Yale |
Beinecke Library, Yale University |
1. It would serve no useful purpose to list the voluminous literature on race for this period—expecially since August Meier and Elliott Rudwick’s excellent From Plantation to Ghetto (Hill and Wang, 1970) summarizes the pertinent evidence and sources. For an updating, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (Oxford, 1983).
2. WDR obituary in the Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918 (year of degrees). The classmate (and subsequent relative by marriage) was Nathan F. Mossell. His comment on Lincoln University is in his ms. autobiography (which also includes part of his correspondence), generously loaned to me by a descendant, Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham. She also gave me a number of other documents of special value in reconstructing the history of the Robeson family; these are too scattered and numerous to list in full. Besides the Cunningham documents, I have found of special value, despite its distortions, Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson, Negro (Gollancz, 1930), hereafter ER, PR, Negro; Robeson’s own autobiography, Here I Stand (Beacon Press, 1970), hereafter PR, Stand; the Jacob C. White and Bustill-Bowser-Asbury ms. collections at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, hereafter MSRC; Anna Bustill Smith, “The Bustill Family,” Journal of Negro History, Oct. 1925; and the collection of ms. letters given me by Paulina Forsythe, daughter of Marian Robeson Forsythe (Paul’s sister).
3. Gertrude Bustill edited the Women’s Department of the New York Age and the Indianapolis World, worked for Philadelphia’s most influential newspapers, the Inquirer, the Press, and the Times, and was active in a wide variety of women’s and public service organizations in the black community (they are detailed in Twenty 19th Century Black Women, a publication of the National Archives for Black Women’s History and the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum). Her book, The Afro-American Woman (George S. Ferguson Co., 1894) surveys the accomplishments of black women, giving due attention to the social conditions that limited their options; it contains as well some “advanced” views on the plight of women in general.
Anna Bustill Smith (cited in note 2) was yet another noteworthy member of the Bustill clan. Cousin to Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, Paul’s mother, she published “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey” in 1913, recently rescued from oblivion by the Princeton History Project (see Fred Ferretti, “Black History in Princeton,” The New York Times, March 5, 1978), which reprinted it in Princeton Recolleclor, vol. III, no. 5 (Winter 1977), with a biographical sketch of Anna Bustill Smith by Gledhill Cameron. Anna Smith’s father, Joseph Cassey Bustill, the grandson of Cyrus Bustill, is credited by Cameron with being the youngest member of the Underground Railroad, and her mother, Sarah Humphrew, a Chippewa Indian, with being the first black graduate of the Girls’ Normal School in Philadelphia. Paul Robeson personally knew both Gertrude Bustill Mossell and Anna Bustill Smith; all three of them gave speeches at the Eighth Annual Re-Union of the descendants of the Bustill family, June 21, 1918 (the invitation and program are in the Robeson Archives—henceforth RA).
The ms. autobiography (courtesy of Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham) of Gertrude Bustill’s husband, Nathan F. Mossell, gives a detailed account of his own noteworthy career. Having surmounted the color bar to medical training, in 1895 he founded with other black doctors what became the famed Mercy-Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia (its history is recounted in Elliott M. Rudwick, “A Brief History of Mercy-Douglass,” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 20 [1951], and also in the hospital’s Annual Reports, given to me by Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham). Mossell remained active in the protest against racial injustice throughout his long life. His ms. papers contain a large number of speeches, letters, and petitions that attest to his activism, including correspondence with William Jennings Bryan about racial “amalgamation” and protests about racial issues to both the Presidents Roosevelt.
4. Gertrude Cunningham documents; PR, ms. notes (written May 2, 1956), RA (rocks; militancy; Laddie); PR, Stand, pp. 12–13, 21–22; interview with Marian Liggins (Ben’s daughter), Nov. 21, 1982; interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985 (Reeve); multiple interviews with Helen Rosen (recalls PR saying Reeve had ended on Skid Row). Since blacks were not permitted in the Princeton high school, William had to travel to Trenton to get an education (PR, Stand, p. 10; Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987). Alexander (“Ting”) Taylor is the source for William’s being called “schoolboy”; Taylor (b. 1891), and his family lived opposite the Robesons on Greene Street (interview with Taylor, Aug. 11, 1987). Emma Epps (b. 1900), also a neighbor, believes Reeve became a mortician in Washington, D.C., before going to Detroit (interview with Epps, Aug. 11, 1987). Both Taylor and Epps confirm that Reeve always stood up for his rights (“Wouldn’t take nothing from nobody,” in Taylor’s words). Paul Robeson, Jr. (henceforth PR, Jr.), is the source for Reeve’s being part owner of a hotel, but denies that there is any truth to the rumor that he died on Skid Row (PR, Jr., ms. comments). In a heated speech in 1949, PR referred to Reeve’s answering “each insult with blows that sent would-be slave masters crashing to the stone sidewalks, even though jail was his constant reward” (press release, Council on African Affairs [hereafter CAA], June 19, 1949).
5. Princeton Press, March 26, 1906 (size of black population). Both Taylor and Epps stressed to me (interviews, Aug. 11, 1987) the cohesiveness that existed in Princeton’s black community in the early decades of the century, and also the “large number” of black-owned businesses and property. PR, Stand, pp. 10–11; Pearl Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire” (twelve-page interview for Bradley’s M.A. thesis), RA (NC contingent); Anita Sterner interviews with Bishop Clinton Hoggard and J. Douglas Brown (PR contemporaries) for 1978 BBC program on PR, tapes courtesy of Sterner (hereafter “Sterner interviews”). PR’s later remarks on Princeton are from a June 19, 1949, CAA press release summarizing a speech he had given, and also a handwritten ms. reminiscing about his youth (in ER’s hand), RA. In later life PR often referred with special fondness to his Aunt Huldah (e.g., Freedom, April 1952); according to Epps (interview, Aug. 11, 1987), Huldah Robeson was married to Rev. Robeson’s brother Ben (a second brother, John, apparently also lived in Princeton). PR’s childhood playmates included Bessie and Christine Moore, whose mother was white and whose father made considerable money running a cleaning establishment for Princeton students and also a boardinghouse; Christine Moore (later Howell, who lived until 1972) remained close friends with Marian Robeson Forsythe through the years. (I’m grateful to her daughter, Paulina Forsythe, for sharing with me Christine Moore Howell’s letters).
6. Rev. Robeson had had a brief pastorate in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., before being called to Witherspoon (obituary, Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918). Anna Bustill Smith, “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey”; Sterner interview with Hoggard; Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918. Blacks had originally been listed in the rolls of the First Presbyterian Church and had successfully resisted efforts to set them apart until 1846, when the First Presbyterian Church of Color was organized; its name was changed in 1848 to Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church (Arthur Link, First Presbyterian Church of Princeton [Princeton University Press, 1967], pp. 32–36; V. Lansing Collins, Princeton, Past and Present [Princeton University Press, 1945]; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton 1746–1896 [Princeton University Press, 1946]).
7. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Jan. 30, June 26, Sept. 19, 1900, The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS); Trenton Times, June 28, Sept. 20 (“eloquent”), 1900; Princeton Press, Sept. 22, 1900 (“misfit”).
8. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Sept. 24, 1900, PHS; Daily State Gazette (Trenton), Sept. 25, 1900; Princeton Press, Sept. 29, 1900.
9. Sterner interview with Hoggard; Grace Doman Willis to Marian Robeson Forsythe, Feb. 21, 1976 (“did it to his father”), courtesy Paulina Forsythe. One false rumor that circulated about Rev. Robeson’s forced departure centered on “mischief with one of the girls in his congregation.” Alexander Woollcott printed that rumor in his New York World column for May 20, 1928, adding, “Years later, they tell me, a divinity student, who had helped to bring the accusation, confessed that it had been an invention fabricated by someone who wanted to occupy that pulpit himself.” In a second article, Woollcott referred to “some skulduggery on the part of two scheming divinity students” as being responsible for Rev. Robeson’s ouster (Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, July 1933; conceivably Woollcott’s source was Paul, since the two were friendly at the time).
10. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Oct. 17, Nov. 12, PHS; Princeton Press, Nov. 10, 1900 (Seminary meeting).
11. Princeton Press, Feb. 2, 1901. The six-hundred-dollar salary is an estimate based on a report in the Princeton Press, June 30, 1906, that the salary of the pastor of Witherspoon Church had, after a recent increase, reached seven hundred dollars. The statement issued by the Church Session of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian (printed in the Princeton Press, Feb. 16, 1901) makes no reference at all to a dispute, merely commending Rev. Robeson for his eloquence as a speaker and for his continuing efforts for “social and moral reform and Christian union.” The records of the Witherspoon Street Church might contain additional information about the reasons for Rev. Robeson’s departure, but in response to my inquiry the church archivists reported that they could not locate the records for the period in question. One hopes those records are only temporarily mislaid.
12. Interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982. The fullest account of Louisa Robeson’s death is in ER, PR, Negro, pp. 23–24, but additional information about her is in PR, Stand, pp. 14–17, 21–22, and Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA, subsequently reprinted as “My Brother—Paul Robeson—An Appraisal,” with a “Comment” by Bishop W. J. Walls, in The Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Oct. 1954, and as appendix A to PR, Stand.
13. The “intimates” quoted are Helen Rosen and Clara Rockmore, in multiple interviews with each. The recollection of his mother’s funeral is in PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA. John H. Johnson, whose mother, Harriet Howard, was a good friend of Louisa Bustill Robeson, described her, in one of the few accounts that are even secondhand, as “a beautiful woman … in all ways a most admirable person.” (Johnson to PR, June 5, 1975, courtesy Paulina Forsythe). The Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, referred to her as a “poetess.” Emma Epps (interview Aug. 11, 1987) described her as “very brilliant,” “a beautiful person—most of us never got over it.”
14. Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987 (preaching); Princeton Packet, Jan. 2, 30, 1904; Sergeant, “A Portrait of Paul Robeson,” The New Republic, March 3, 1926 (dignity); PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956 (ashes). In the latter source, PR also wrote that his brothers Reed and Bill would help their father out as coachmen, driving the Princeton students “to earn a few quarters”; but the work, PR added, was “often hazardous—Many of the students being from the deep south and imbued with Platonic ideas of the ‘Elite’ and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon over African—and especially if the wine had flowed in abundance.” The original ms. version of Marie Seton’s Paul Robeson (Dennis Dobson, 1958) contains PR’s handwritten comments and deletions in the margins (ms. courtesy Seton—hereafter “Seton Ms.”). In the ms. Seton made two separate references to the Bustills’ doing “nothing to aid Maria Louisa’s dark children” after her death, seeking Paul out “only after he became a famous man”—“he was too black to be accepted as one of them.…” Seton based her book primarily on talks with Robeson himself, but when he went over her ms. he cut out the references cited above, and they do not appear in the printed version. Further evidence of the Bustill attitude is in an FBI report which quotes Robeson as saying that “his mother’s family looked down on his father’s people” (FBI Main 100-12304-7), and in a World Telegram interview with him (Oct. 5, 1935). Paul’s identification with his father’s family was so strong that at times he may have exaggerated the extent of his actual contact with them. In a 1948 speech, for example (the tape is in RA), he mentions in passing that “I was in the South a lot as a boy.” In point of fact, he was not. Apparently his mother did take him on a visit to North Carolina when he was an infant (PR, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom, April 1952), but that was the only time he spent there. Yet his 1948 claim may well represent, in a symbolic sense, how deeply he felt attached in spirit to his North Carolina roots (and may also reflect the Southern “feel” of Princeton).
15. Rev. Robeson was formally “dismissed” by the Presbytery of New Brunswick to the A.M.E. Zion New Jersey Conference in April 1906 and appointed two months later by the bishop to A.M.E. Zion in Westfield (Princeton Press, April 28, June 1906). PR later wrote that his father “reluctantly moved on from Calvinism to the Church of John Wesley” (PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA—also the source for laying first bricks). Somerville Courier-News, April 20, 1973 (Sam Woldin, Arthur Van Fleet, and Donald M. Pearsall’s recollections of PR, including the years in Westfield); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge (a Somerville classmate), Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Hoggard and Brown, plus her tape marked “Discussion at Old People’s Meeting in Princeton”; PR, Stand, pp. 12–15; New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926 (overnights); Seton Ms. (church sisters; most of this section does not appear in Seton’s printed version); The New Yorker profile of PR, “King of Harlem,” Sept. 24, 1928 (sewing buttons, etc.). The comment about “a nice, open-hearted boy” is from Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1930, in which he reviews ER, PR, Negro, and recounts his own talks about PR with his neighbors in Westfield (where Hughes was living in 1930). PR’s comment on qualified white acceptance in Westfield is from the ms. of his column in the first (Dec. 1950) issue of Freedom, PR Coll., New York Public Library, Schomburg Collection (hereafter NYPL/Schm). In the same ms. he recalls sometimes taking meals in “one of the few colored restaurants” in town, “rushing from school to get my favorite dish and my nickname, a ‘thousand on a plate.’”
16. Scattered information on Reverend Robeson’s activities as pastor in Somerville are in the Unionist-Gazette (Somerville) for Jan. 23, Feb. 20, April 17, May 1, 1913, April 30, 1914, Jan. 7, April 29, May 13, 20, June 24, July 1, 1915; they include references to his hosting and attending church conferences, welcoming the Colored Boy Scouts for a concert held at St. Thomas, and a successful carnival to raise money for church expenses; two of the news items (Jan. 23, 1913 and April 1, 1915) refer to two week-long revivals and “religious awakening” at St. Thomas during which “many were reclaimed.” The obituary in the local paper when Rev. Robeson died reported that, “During the first three years of his pastorate a debt of $1,600 on the parsonage was liquidated” (the Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918). Condolence letter from “Lawrence” to PR, May 20, 1918 (devoted), RA; PR, Stand, p. 9. Ben Robeson was appointed to his first pastorate in the A.M.E. Zion Church, Bayonne, N.J., in 1914. His thirteen months of overseas service as a chaplain in World War I left him, in his daughter’s opinion, with jangled nerves thereafter, despite a calm exterior. He was appointed to Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in 1936 and remained its pastor until his death in 1963. He married Frances Cline in 1915 and they had three daughters, Marian Liggins, Vivian Reynolds, and Bennie Ryan (program for Memorial Service, Dec. 5, 1963; Philadelphia Tribune, Sept. 22, 1962; interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982). The version quoted in the text about Rev. Robeson’s fall is from Seton, Robeson, p. 18—a variant of the anecdote is published in PR, Stand, p. 9; yet a third version is in an undated thirteen-page ms. speech by Geraldine (Maimie) Neale Bledsoe, PR’s girlfriend during his undergraduate years, recounting the story as she had heard it from Paul (ms. courtesy Bledsoe). H. A. Murray was one friend who heard PR’s imitation of his father in the twenties; Murray thought it “too good for words” and prevailed on PR to give a repeat performance at the bedside of ailing playwright Ned Sheldon (interview with Murray, Feb. 6, 1985).
17. PR, “From My Father’s Parsonage,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929 (inflexion). In Stand, p. 13, PR wrote that his father “never” talked about his years as a slave. I have substituted “rarely” for “never” on the basis of PR’s own testimony at other points in his life—for example, in interviews he gave to the Messenger, Oct. 1924, and to the Methodist Times (London), Jan. 3, 1929. The Methodist Times interview and Stand, pp. 11–13, along with Jerome Beatty, “America’s No. 1 Negro,” The American, May 1944, are the sources for the quotations, except for the one about “trek for Freedom,” which is from Maimie Bledsoe to me (April 4, 1985) and as repeated by her in a twenty-one-page speech (the ms. of which she sent me) that she delivered in the 1970s about Robeson. The Woldins gave Rev. Robeson a plot of ground in their backyard on which to grow vegetables, since his own soil was not suitable (Sam Woldin, ms. reminiscences, RA).
18. PR, Stand, p. 9.
19. Interview with Oscar Brown, Sr., July 2, 1986; Joseph H. Nelson to me, Dec. 14, 1982, with his ms. enclosure, “Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World,” dated Feb. 1981 (“beautiful voice”). Brown emphasized to me that on the whole he and the rest of the black staff were well treated at the hotel. In his autobiography, By a Thread (Vantage Press, 1983), p. 25, Brown writes, “Most of the boys were able to get a suit out of their summer work.” Fritz Pollard is mentioned in PR’s “Memory Book” for “Summer 1916,” RA. In her diary for Dec. 30, 1924, ER mentions seeing “dear old Oscar Brown” (RA).
20. Somerset Messenger, June 29, 1911 (Jamison graduation).
21. PR, Stand, pp. 17–18. Unlike Paul, his wife, Essie Robeson, later seems to have equated the town’s surface acceptance with equality. In her 1930 book on her husband, Paul Robeson, Negro, she exaggerates community acceptance, painting a near-cloudless picture of race relations in Somerville (e.g., “He played with the sons and daughters of the most cultured white people in the town.… Apparently no one thought about the mixing, and certainly no one resented it.… He himself never thought about it” (ER, PR, Negro, pp. 30–31). Paul deeply disliked ER’s book (see pp. 139–40).
22. Interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Frank Barnes and Leslie Kershaw, 1977. Barnes told Sterner that Winston Douglas later became principal of a school—“to me a more satisfying life than Paul.… He [Robeson] could have done more had he remained in maybe the teaching profession.” See also the interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976.
23. Interviews with Ericson, Barnes, Kershaw; “refined, clean-minded, wholesome” is a phrase from ER, PR, Negro, p. 31; J. Douglas Brown, three-page typed reminiscence of PR at Somerville High, dated April 4, 1976 (hereafter Brown, “Somerville”), in the Special Collections of the Rutgers University Library (hereafter RUA). When PR returned to Somerville in 1926 to give a concert, ER wrote in her diary, “So many people, colored and white, came backstage afterwards to welcome Paul back. Paul remembered all about their sons and daughters, and what they were doing, etc., and tickling the people to death” (ER Diary, Jan. 14, 1926, RA).
24. PR, Stand, p. 17; Brown, “Somerville” (Caesar), RUA; Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 19, 26, 1914 (“coarse … censure”).
25. Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 11, March 4, April 1, 1915 (“Water Cure”); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Kershaw, Barnes, Brown; Brown, “Somerville,” RUA; Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …” in Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 27, 1924, for which PR supplied the basic data (Jennings to PR, Feb. 27, 1924). The Sunday Times, June 15, 1924, and the Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1972 (reminiscences of five PR contemporaries) also have references to the “Water Cure,” but the fullest account, one that draws on the recollections of Anna Miller, is in the Sunday Times, April 1, 1934. The Unionist-Gazette, April 18, 1915, does list PR as part of the senior class trip to Washington; perhaps, finally, he did not go (as his classmates’ accounts listed above attest), but this contradiction in the evidence remains unresolved.
26. PR, Stand, p. 19; Kershaw interview in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976 (Vosseller); Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA.
27. In an interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976, he claimed (with what I would guess is only marginal plausibility, given PR’s restraint) not only that the High Bridge principal called PR “big nigger” but also that it caused Paul “to vent his anger for the only time” Kershaw could remember: “He grabbed the principal by the back of the coat and pants and marched him out in front of the stands,” finally restrained from doing him further injury by three or four of his fellow players. In Stand, pp. 20–21, PR recounts the racial bigotry of the supervising principal of the Somerville system, Dr. Ackerman. It’s possible Kershaw, keen to defend Somerville’s reputation, transposed that hostility to the neighboring principal in High Bridge.
28. Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 15, 1924 (teacher), April 1, 1934 (place); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; PR, Stand, pp. 19–20. Several of his male contemporaries, however, recalled that their families had “entertained and dined” him in their homes (as interviewed in the Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1973).
29. PR, Stand, p. 20. The 1924 article on PR (Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …,” Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 15, 1924) contains some interviews and reminiscences by PR’s contemporaries at Somerville High, which provide additional confirmation both of the “subtle” racism to which he was subjected and of the “affable” way he reacted to it. One woman quoted in the article, for example, compared him favorably with the other black student, Winston Douglas, who was characterized as “bossy”: “Paul isn’t a bit. He’s not nearly so good looking … but Paul is so exceptionally nice. I never really think of him as black—do you?” Paul is also referred to in the article as “appreciative”—“he can understand the white point of view as well as he can the black. He belongs to the human race first of all.”
30. Pearson’s Weekly (London), Oct. 20, 1934 (“manner of man”); “awful rough” is from public remarks PR made in Australia in 1960, tape courtesy of Lloyd Davies. The quotes about “in comparison to most Negroes” and “intense fury” are from the ms. of Seton’s Robeson; they were cut from the printed version at PR’s own insistence. According to Seton, he asked her to delete “additional examples of hurtful acts of discrimination” because “he suffered less than virtually all black people” (Seton to Geoffrey Baines, Nov. 30, 1978, courtesy Seton).
31. As pieced together from the following five interviews, the first four conducted by Sterner: Barnes, Brown, Hoggard, Kershaw, Ericson (with me, Nov. 7, 1983); and also from the reminiscences by Woldin, Van Fleet, and Pearsall in the Somerville Courier-News, April 20, 1973, and from the interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976 (books home).
32. The largest amount of material on Robeson’s high-school athletic career is in the Unionist-Gazette (Somerville); for baseball, the issues of May 12, 1913, April 16, May 28, 1914, May 13, 20, 1915; for track, May 28, 1914; for football, Oct. 23 (Phillipsburg), Nov. 6 (Bound Brook) 1913. Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1973 (“rough bunch”); Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930 (Rev. Robeson). Brown writes about the Phillipsburg game, “The local toughs urged their players to get Paul. The rest of us protected him on every play” (“Somerville,” RUA). Donald M. Pearsall, who knew PR in Westfield, recalls that he played on the high-school baseball team while he was still in the seventh grade (as interviewed in the Courier-News [Bridgewater, N.J.], April 20, 1973). PR was also “athletic editor” of the Valkyrie, the student paper (Unionist-Gazette, June 17. 1915).
33. Phone interview with Frederick K. Shield, Nov. 8, 1983.
34. PR, Stand, pp. 25–26; Brown, “Somerville,” RUA; Shield interview, Nov. 8, 1983. Shield’s retrospective enthusiasm for PR’s performance led him, in our interview, to remember that PR had been awarded first prize. That memory is contradicted not only by PR’s own account in Stand, but also in the contemporary newspaper account (Unionist-Gazette, April 29, 1915). Shield may have been remembering the preliminary round to choose Somerville’s contestant—which PR did win—but for that contest Shield is not listed in the paper as having been a judge (Unionist-Gazette, April 22, 1915). Additional information on debating events in which PR took part is in the Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 4, 11, (literacy test), 18, March 11, 1915.
35. PR, Stand, pp. 24–25; Sunday Times, New Brunswick, April 1, 1934 (Anna Miller). The Class of 1915 closing ceremonials—Banquet, Class Day Exercises, and Commencement—are described in the Unionist-Gazette, May 13, June 17, 24, July 15, 1915. PR played the role of a gypsy in the Exercises and at commencement recited “a splendid oratorical analysis” of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist martyr.
36. Profile of PR, “King of Harlem”; PR, “Notes: 1936,” RA (“idealist”). He had been brought up “more like an English schoolboy than an American one,” he once remarked (Seton Ms., courtesy Seton).
CHAPTER 2 RUTGERS COLLEGE (1915–1918)
1. Interview with Davenport’s widow and son, Sadie Davenport Shelton and Robert Davenport, March 26, 1985 (PR, Jr., participating).
2. The team measurements are recorded on a piece of paper in RA.
3. PR interview with Robert Van Gelder, “Robeson Remembers,” The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1944.
4. Van Gelder interview, The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1944; New Yorker profile, Sept. 24, 1928; Sterner interview with Kershaw.
5. Sterner interview with Rendall. White’s comments are in “‘Robey’ at Rutgers,” Rutgers Daily Targum, April 10, 1973), an article by Ronald Dean Brown containing interviews with PR’s classmates. Earl Reed Silvers, Rutgers Alumni Monthly, Nov. 1930, p. 44. Silvers also wrote to James M. Nelson, associate editor of The American Magazine (April 3, 1944), protesting the accuracy of “the recurring appearance in newspapers and magazines of the story to the effect that Paul’s teammates attempted deliberately to injure him during his first weeks as a member of the squad.”
6. Interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983.
7. Interview with Angus Cameron, July 15, 1986 (orange crates); Mason’s version was told to me by his daughter Jan Mason in a phone interview, March 5, 1985; Nash’s comment is in the Rutgers Daily Targum, April 10, 1973. Additional confirmation has come to me from William E. Mutch, Rutgers 1920 (interview Feb. 25, 1987), and from Bernard Forer, who later taught with Alfred Neuschafer, a guard on the Rutgers team, and reports that Neuschafer told stories about the varsity’s “conspiring” to pound Robeson “unmercifully” (Forer to me, Aug. 12, 1982). See also Forer’s account in the Rutgers Alumni News, Spring 1988, p. 21.
8. New Brunswick Sunday Home News, Oct. 16, 1965 (Burke); this episode is also recounted in Larry Pitt, Football at Rutgers, 1869–1969 (Rutgers, 1972). Five years after graduating, Paul and Essie had dinner with Sanford (ER Diary, Feb. 7, 1924, RA), and when a special memorial meeting was held honoring Sanford’s induction into the football Hall of Fame, Robeson sent his greetings (the message is in RA). Sanford, Jr., also recounted (interview, April 12, 1983) how his father championed PR to the extent of physically threatening train conductors and hotel managers who refused accommodations to PR when the team was traveling, but I’ve found no outside confirmation of those events. According to Sanford, Jr., Robeson was “very conscious of his social strata,” as demonstrated by the fact that, when he found himself on the same ship with the Sanfords on returning from Europe once in the twenties, he chose to eat in his stateroom rather than “embarrass” the Sanfords by coming into the dining room and possibly being seated at their table (interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983).
9. According to the account based on interviews with contemporaries in the Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, PR got his first break as a freshman as a result of Budge Garrett’s being hurt in one of the early games of the season. A large collection of newspaper clippings, ranging from the Rutgers Targum to the national press, chronicling PR’s athletic career in detail, is in RA; they are too numerous to cite. George Daley of the New York World (Nov. 28, 1917) is the sportswriter quoted above; Walter Camp’s comment is in Collier’s Weekly, Jan. 4, 1919. PR’s compiled athletic record is in J. C. Hilliard to PR, April 25, 1923, RA. PR’s “Memory Book” (RA) contains the references to St. Christopher. PR later reminisced warmly about “St. C,” which he referred to as “the boy’s club of St. Philips Parish” in Freedom, Nov. 1951. Seven years after graduating from Rutgers, PR is quoted as saying that, after the first two years of playing football, “the games lost much of their pleasure for me. It became too much a case of thinking that winning the game was its only object.… Instead of playing for the love of it you then were playing only to win” (Boston Evening Globe, March 13, 1926). William E. Mutch was on the baseball team with PR and remembers that the coach, “General” Frank Cox, always took the room with Robeson when the team had to sleep away from the campus on an overnight (interview with Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987).
10. Interviews with Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983, and Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987 (“nigger”). Storck’s comments are as reported to me by his daughter, Dorothy D. Storck (phone interview, May 5, 1987). Storck entered Rutgers in 1916 and was later an All-American from West Point.
11. Interview with Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987 (Kilpatrick); Boston Traveler, Aug. 14, 1942 (quitting).
12. The Carr letter, June 6, 1919, is in RUA. It has been reprinted by George Fishman in Freedomways, Summer 1969, and by Peter Mazzei, “James Dickson Carr: First Black Graduate of Rutgers College,” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, vol. XLVII, no. 2, Dec. 1985. The Mazzei article contains additional details of Carr’s career at Rutgers and also reprints Pres. Demarest’s brief and evasive reply to Carr’s letter of protest.
13. Boston Traveler, Aug. 14, 1942; New York Tribune, Nov. 4, 1917; Cincinnati Post, Oct. 25, 1929; undated [1944?] clipping from a Westfield, N.J., paper, RA.
14. Targum, Dec. 19, 1917, Rutgers Athletic News, Oct. 4, 1969 (p.12), L. L. Arms writing in the New York Tribune (as quoted in the Scarlet Letter, 1919, p. 165 (“Othello”), The Sun, Nov. 25, 1917.
15. The comments on PR’s gentleness are by Rudolph Illey (Rutgers ’20), who also described PR as “a loner,” and Robert E. Galbraith (Rutgers ’24); they are part of a collection of reminiscences about PR in RUA.
16. A list of PR’s course grades is in RA. His worst grade, a D in Physics Lab, was given him by Prof. Mayne Mason, who nonetheless referred to him as “extremely bright” (interview with Jan Mason, March 5, 1985). Among his teachers, PR had particularly fondness for Dr. Charles H. Whitman, a professor of English who took him to New York to see his first Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice (Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire,” 1944, RA). In a later newspaper interview (Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 8, 1930), Whitman said he encouraged PR to become an educator “among the people of his own race.” After graduation, Robeson returned to speak at Whitman’s contemporary drama class.
The ms. of Seton’s Robeson (courtesy Seton) contains several sentences about the glee club that were subsequently cut from the printed version; one of them reads, “These rules were that no Negro student would be welcome because there were white girls present,” but Robeson crossed out the words following “welcome” and wrote in instead “to social events. Not social equality. Please.”
The same pattern of social discrimination is apparent in PR’s room assignments. The Rutgers College Catalogues (RUA) list him as living alone in Winants Hall during both his freshman and sophomore years—though only a few single rooms are available in Winants, and upperclassmen traditionally have preference on them. In his junior year PR was assigned a room with Robert Davenport, the only other black student at Rutgers, and Leon Harold Smith, a white freshman described in these words in his yearbook: “… even he claims he’s really stupid.” In his senior year PR was put in a room with another white freshman, Herbert Lewis Miskend from Brooklyn. There is no certain evidence that PR accepted these room assignments; several fragmented references suggest that he lived at least part of the time with black families off-campus. According to J. Douglas Brown and Clinton Hoggard, PR did at first live in a campus dormitory, but then stayed with the Cummings family in New Brunswick (Sterner interviews with Brown, Hoggard). Confirmation that PR did live in Winants is in a set of ms. reminiscences by undergraduates who knew him at Rutgers (in RUA), one of whom (Charles T. Dieffenbach, ’22) recalls living in the room just below Paul’s—“will always remember his booming ‘Pipe down, freshmen!’ aimed at the three of us more than a few times.” William E. Mutch, a year behind PR at Rutgers, remembers Robeson’s room in Winants as being on the ground floor and essentially bare except for desk, bed, and chair. Mutch distinctly recalls Davenport as Robeson’s roommate, but doesn’t remember any white student living with them. Additionally, Mutch remembers that PR would participate in “sings” on the steps of Winants or outside of the Beta Theta Phi fraternity house—though no fraternity at Rutgers would admit a black to membership inside the house. According to Mutch, PR’s performance of “Gopher Dust” at the “sings” became so popular that whenever he appeared the shout “Gopher Dust!” would go up (interview, Feb. 25, 1987). In the Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, an unidentified man who played varsity football with PR is quoted as saying that, during the steak suppers the team would be treated to after a game, PR “used to sing his own little Negro songs” between courses, and also “college songs and the popular tunes of the day,” and before the games he “came over to the fraternity house often … and sang.”
17. Rev. Robeson “stinted and got help from influential people” (Seton Ms.). Among the latter, apparently, was Lena Home’s grandmother Cora Home (as told in 1983 to the Washington Post drama critic David Richards, who kindly passed the information on to me). Audreen Buffalo’s interview with Lena Home (Essence, May 1985) repeats that same story. Lena Home’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, claims that Cora Home “helped Paul apply for the scholarship he won at Rutgers” (The Homes: An American Family [Knopf, 1986], p. 50). According to Sanford, Jr. (interview, April 12, 1983), PR may also have gotten some money from a group of “gentlemen underwriters,” a syndicate of Rutgers alumni formed to ensure that their alma mater “became a major football power”; the practice of paying college players was then legal and commonplace, and Sanford, Jr., feels certain that PR received some assistance; one fifty-dollar letter of credit for PR, signed by a John P. Wall of New Brunswick, is described in Faulk to Wall, June 24, 1919, RUA.
18. The Philoclean episode is in Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of Paulina Forsythe. “A thing apart” is from ms. of PR’s column in Freedom, Dec. 1950 (PR Coll., New York Public Library, Manuscript Division, henceforth NYPL/Ms. Div.).
19. Storck’s recollections are as reported to me by his daughter Dorothy D. Storck (phone interview, May 5, 1987); Charles N. Prickett to PR, Dec. 8, 1969, RA (“watching”).
20. Geraldine (Maimie) Neale Bledsoe, mss. of three unpublished talks about PR, undated (1970s), courtesy of Bledsoe. For more detail on these mss., see note 26.
21. New Brunswick Daily Home News, June 5, 1919; Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Paul Robeson, All-American (New Republic, 1976), p. 20. PR’s thesis is printed in Philip S. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks (Citadel, 1978), pp. 53–62.
22. Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930 (Demarest).
23. PR’s valedictory speech is in RA and was also printed in full in the Rutgers Targum, June 1919; Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of Paulina Forsythe (audience standing).
24. In my reading of PR’s valedictory speech, I find Sterling Stuckey’s characterization of it as showing “an essentially nationalist stand” off the mark. (Stuckey, “‘I Want To Be African’: Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice,” The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1976). At the other extreme, Harold Cruse has argued that Robeson never developed a nationalist perspective (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [Morrow, 1967]). Stuckey and Cruse have tangled extensively over this question in print, but since the controversy focuses on the 1930s, the bulk of my discussion of the issues will be found in the chapters on those years. Suffice it to say here that in my view both men, though coming at the question from opposite perspectives, adopt a static analysis, failing to detect the developmental aspect of Robeson’s thought, and failing also to make a crucially needed distinction between the public words Robeson spoke as a young man to white or mixed audiences and the private words he spoke (and the inner emotions he felt) with black friends—a distinction I have tried to draw in this chapter. For the Stuckey-Cruse controversy, see also Stuckey, “The Cultural Philosophy of Paul Robeson,” Freedomways, First Quarter 1971; Cruse, “A Review of the Paul Robeson Controversy,” First World, vol.2, no.3, 1979; and Stuckey, “On Cultural Nihilism,” ms. copy, RA.
25. Interview with Sadie Goode Davenport Shelton and her son Robert Davenport, March 26, 1985 (PR, Jr., participating); interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983. Sadie Goode only met PR and the “Trenton crowd” a few times; her husband was closer to them. After graduation, Davenport went to teach at Slater (Winston-Salem) and then in Texas, but kept in occasional touch with PR. Though he died young (1939), before PR became a controversial figure, Davenport was, according to his widow, always quick to defend him against slurs of any kind. When Davenport died, PR was unable to attend the funeral, but was moved enough to ask his brother Rev. Ben Robeson to represent him. As late as 1952, when in the New Jersey area, PR stopped by to say hello to Sadie Davenport’s father, a Montclair chauffeur on whose porch PR had sometimes slept as an undergraduate if he missed connections back to New Brunswick (he slept on the porch, not inside, because “it was late and he didn’t want to disturb anyone in the house”). In PR’s “College Scrapbook” (RA), Davvy wrote, “‘In you I see more and more the qualities of my ideal’—Selected. Oh! Boy!”
26. The Neale quotations which follow to the end of this chapter are taken from some eight to ten letters from her to me, three of which (July 17, Aug. 6, 1983, April 14, 1985) are lengthy memoirs totaling about fifty pages. She also kindly sent me six unpublished speeches that she delivered over the years about PR, which I also quote from in this and subsequent paragraphs. Since this batch of materials is privately held, I will not attempt precise citations here; suffice it to say that all quotations in this section are drawn from the private collection—unless otherwise noted. In PR’s fragmentary “College Scrapbook” and “Memory and Fellowship Book” (RA), there is one definite mention of “Gerry” and three other probable references to her.
27. “Wish my family in Freehold had not discarded mine,” Gerry Neale Bledsoe wrote me (July 7, 1983) in regard to their exchange of letters. Neither side of the correspondence exists in RA, either. The 1919 baseball game had also marked the very last time PR would play in any athletic event for Rutgers. As the newspaper accounts in RA make clear, he played “in wonderful style,” and Rutgers won the game 5–1. A jubilant PR told Gerry, who attended the game, that he was “thrilled” to have beaten “Proud Princeton,” which “up to that time had never played a team with a black player on it” (unpublished Bledsoe speech).
28. The “English friend” is Leonora (“Pat”) Gregory (now Stitt). She co-wrote several of PR’s articles (including the well-known “Primitives”) in the thirties. She has described the composition and ramifications of the articles in a series of letters to me (for more, see note 43, p. 625). PR was so pleased with the articles that he and Gregory began discussing the possibility of doing a book together, a project interrupted by PR’s 1939 return to the States. The book did reach the stage of a written “draft plan,” which Stitt kindly shared with me. The quotations about adolescence and college are taken from this “draft plan.”
29. This account is taken from two of the dozen letters previously cited from Gerry Neale Bledsoe to me, those of Aug. 6, 1983, and April 14, 1985. PR and Gerry Neale possibly met through the well-to-do Moore family; the two daughters, Bessie and Christine, had become Gerry’s closest friends, and Bessie was a classmate at Teachers Normal. There are letters from Christine Moore to Paul’s sister, Marian, right up to CM’s death in 1972 (letters courtesy of Paulina Forsythe).
30. Bledsoe’s version of these events, as described in letters to me, has been confirmed by Sadie Davenport Shelton (interview, March 26, 1985—“Gerry turned him down”).
31. The “class prophecy” is in the Rutgers Targum, June 1919, which in an accompanying editorial expressed the hope, “May Rutgers never forget this noble son.…” Evidence of Paul’s “deputizing” for his father is in the Somerset Messenger, Nov. 1, 1916, where he is recorded as delivering the “response” after welcoming addresses at a district missionary convention held at St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion. PR’s flirtation with the ministry is described in an article and an interview from the twenties: PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929; interview with Rev. Robertson Ballard, Methodist Times, Jan. 3, 1929; Charlotte Himber, Famous in Their Twenties (YMCA, 1942), p. 98 for “zeal” (as told to Himber by Ben Robeson).
CHAPTER 3 COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE (1919–1921)
1. For these and other details on the condition of the black masses, see the convenient summary in ch. 1 of Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, vol. I, The Depression Decade (Oxford, 1978).
2. Ms. of PR’s column for the first (Dec. 1950) issue of Freedom, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm. (Streeter’s). The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from an unpublished autobiographical account, of roughly thirty-five thousand words, by Eslanda Goode Robeson in RA. The ms. was meant to be part of her 1930 book, Paul Robeson, Negro, but only a segment of the section dealing with 1922–28 ever appeared in print (hereafter Ms. Auto.)
3. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (D.C. riot).
4. Interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with May Chinn. Chinn may have first met Robeson when they performed together; a program from July 1919 in the RA lists Chinn, Robeson, and Rudolph Fisher as appearing on a “public presentation of music and speeches featuring outstanding young Negro collegians”; Robeson repeated his speech on the “New Idealism,” May Chinn accompanied on some songs, and Fisher spoke on “The Emancipation of Science.”
Details of Fisher’s life are in The Negro History Bulletin, vol. II (Dec. 1938), p. 19. For current, highly favorable assessments of his work, see jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 210, and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Knopf, 1981), p. 229. Additional information on May Chinn is in George Davis, “A Healing Hand in Harlem,” New York Times Magazine, April 22, 1979.
5. Interview with Frances Quiett Challenger, Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with Chinn.
6. Ibid.
7. Interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983 (tuition). Gene Sumner, a cousin of ER’s friend Minnie Sumner and in 1917 manager of Lincoln University’s football team, apparently was responsible for first inviting Robeson to Lincoln: “Hard pressed for a coach (World War I had drained off so much) Paul came down on my invitation and spent two days from Rutgers, where he was a star, teaching the boys ‘big league’ football.” In 1919, Paul came “for a concert at a church … and he spent his two nights with me” (handwritten reminiscences by Gene Sumner are in the collections of the DuSable Museum for Black History and Culture, hereafter DSMC). The James Mayo (“Ink”) Williams quotes are from an interview with him by Studs Terkel in 1969 done as part of a roundtable discussion of Robeson with prominent blacks in the Chicago area (Margaret Burroughs, Judge Sidney Jones, Etta Moten Barnett, Earl Dickerson, “Ink” Williams, Charles V. Hamilton), recorded as a seventy-second birthday tribute to him. It was first played on WFMT Chicago on May 8, 1970, then later rebroadcast. I’m grateful to Terkel for letting me copy the tape. A friend of Frank Nied’s quotes him as saying, “Robeson is a gentleman—than which there isn’t … Also that Paul was amazingly game, refusing to quit when he was hurt, and that no amount of the terrific ganging naturally administered by the white (Nordic?) professionals could make him lose his head” (quoted in Nat Lewers to Alexander Woollcott, Nov. 29, 1933, RA). The account of Robeson’s professional football career is compiled from newspaper clippings in RA. In her Ms. Auto., ER refers to the “big money” he was paid in pro ball. For more on PR and Thorpe, see note 11, p. 584. Robeson stayed in peripheral contact with Fritz Pollard through the years. As late as 1933, ER recorded in her diary, “Saw Fritz Pollard, of all people, and we talked old times over” (ER Diary, Feb. 22, 1933, RA). Pollard’s quote about Akron is from an interview The New York Times did with him in 1978, as quoted in his obituary (Times, May 31, 1986).
8. Interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. Because of the overall accuracy of the rest of his testimony and the specific detail (usually a sign of veracity) with which he described this episode, I’ve accepted Murray’s account, although he was ninety-three years old at the time of our interview (yet entirely lucid as well as witty, I should add)—and although ER has left variant versions of her initial meeting with her future husband. In one newspaper interview (New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 6, 1938), she recalled first seeing him one day as she was going into DeVann’s popular restaurant; in another (Birmingham Post, May 7, 1959), she recalled first meeting him “at a party in Harlem.” In her Ms. Auto, in RA, she recalls being first introduced to him—casually—when both were strolling with friends down Seventh Avenue in the summer of 1919. “Her alert mind,” she writes, “marked him, and stored him away. She saw him frequently that summer at parties, dances, tennis matches, and in the dining room of the Y.W.C.A., where all the young people congregated for meals; but she did not do more than to idly note that she must inquire about this young man. He seemed so universally popular.…” Possibly ER asked Dr. Murray to introduce her to his patient, having already “marked him out.” (One such combined version of their meeting, though with almost all the significant details askew, can be found in Shirley Graham, Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World [Julian Wenner, 1946], pp. 119–20.) Among the other claimants to having introduced the couple, Judge Raymond Pace Alexander insists he did so when the two were guests of his at a picnic on a Hudson River Line steamer (Alexander to SALUTE committee, March 14, 1973, RA). Murray and the Robesons stayed marginally in touch over the years. ER wrote in her diary on Jan. 17, 1926 (RA), “Went to a party at Harry Murray’s … and had a beautiful time.… Harry Murray and his wife are as sweet as ever.” As late as 1957, they sent him an affectionately inscribed Christmas card (the card courtesy of Eugene Taylor, archivist to H. A. Murray; also Murray to PR, 1925?, ER to Murray, Aug. 12, 1942, RA).
9. In reconstructing the history of the Cardozo family, I’ve relied chiefly on two ms. sources: a twenty-page handwritten account (apparently set down for her daughter’s edification) by Eslanda Cardozo Goode (“Ma” Goode, mother to Eslanda Goode Robeson); and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s lengthy Ms. Auto. Both documents are in RA and are in general accord (but some of the variances are an illuminating index of their respective personalities), with Eslanda Goode Robeson’s account the fuller one, combining her mother’s version with additional source material. Unless otherwise cited, the family background described in the following pages is taken from these two mss. (with a few details filled in from printed sources, especially Euline W. Brock, “Thomas W. Cardozo: Fallible Black Reconstruction Leader,” The Journal of Southern History, May 1981).
10. All the quotes continue to be from the two mss. previously cited (Ma Goode’s twenty-page account and ER’s lengthy Ms. Auto.), but the swimming anecdote is from ER Diary, Nov. 23, 1941, RA.
11. Interview with Aminda Badeau (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985; “girl scientist” is from ER, Ms. Auto.; the analysis of her job derives from my interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. I haven’t been able to verify Essie’s claim to have been the first black of either gender on staff. By her own account (ER Diary, Nov. 4, 1931, RA) she once referred to “all the colored girls I had known at P and S [Physicians and Surgeons: Presbyterian] … and colored men”—though she didn’t specify in what capacity they’d been there. Whether she was first or fifth, of course, her accomplishments remain considerable—the only point at issue is the extent to which she felt it necessary to embroider on an already considerable achievement. Near the end of her life, Essie herself referred to having worked at Presbyterian “at its most progressive stage” (ER to Helen Rosen, Oct. 15, 1963, courtesy Rosen).
12. Interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe (the well-known psychoanalyst who edited the Psychoanalytic Review, was on the Presbyterian staff, and had a number of theatrical and literary patients including at various times Robert Edward Jones and Eugene O’Neill) thought well enough of Essie to remain her personal friend (ER Diary, Feb. 16, 1933, RA). She listed Jelliffe as one of her six referees when applying for a Guggenheim in 1931 (the application form is in RA).
13. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.
14. ER, Ms. Auto., RA. Before meeting Paul, Essie had seriously dated Oscar Brown, Sr., who had worked with Paul at Narragansett Pier (interview with Oscar Brown, Sr., July 2, 1986); see pp. 11–12.
15. When Essie finally did become pregnant, she had to undergo corrective surgery in order to conceive. This by itself, however, proves nothing about what Essie did or did not tell Paul in 1921. Even if she had told him that she was pregnant, she herself may have been legitimately mistaken or misinformed.
In one letter (undated, July 1922, RA) Paul does say, “How happy I am that in choosing, I chose right. My Sweet helped me to choose and I’ll be grateful to her always”—implying that Essie had to some extent forced his hand. But not, it would seem, to any significant extent, for in another letter (Aug. 10, 1922, RA) he harks back to “a year ago. I was in heaven. Just a-wooing my Dolly [his nickname for ER] and saying ‘She must be mine for life’”—a year ago meaning just prior to their marriage. A third reference, moreover (PR to ER, Aug. 23, 1922, RA), bears directly and importantly on the suggestion that Essie forced him into marriage by falsely claiming to be pregnant: “Yes, sweet, I do hope we may be able to have a child. For your sake most of all—you do love them so. But you remember, sweet—when we married—I knew that perhaps it might not be our lot—no child can ever mean as much as my Dolly—And if there is any danger to be undergone beyond the normal—never.” This suggests Essie told him at the time of their marriage either that she might not be able to get pregnant—or that she was pregnant and had to abort for health reasons. One piece of evidence suggesting the latter interpretation comes from Essie’s diary for March 4, 1931 (RA). In it she wrote: “I am off for New York today, on the Olympic. I’ve got to do a ‘job’ and I think Dr. West, who did my other one more than 10 years ago, is the best bet. And also Presbyterian will be close to hand if anything goes wrong.” The “job” does sound like an abortion (or a curettage—see p. 150) and “10 years ago” would be 1921, the year Paul and Essie married. Further evidence of a pre-marital pregnancy comes from Freda Diamond (in multiple interviews). In later years Paul told Freda that Essie had come to him in 1921 with the claim that she had become pregnant but had aborted after a doctor warned her that she would be at high risk in giving birth (and had produced some sort of “proof” that she had actually had the abortion); according to this version, Paul remained skeptical but, out of his sense of “honor” at having made Essie pregnant, decided to marry her. Moreover, the possibility of deception on Essie’s part can’t be discounted because, by her own account, she was determined to marry Paul and by almost all other accounts was in active pursuit of what she wanted. Finally, the specific question of an actual versus a faked pregnancy may be insignificant, since it comes down to trying to prove or disprove a matter of degree: Essie was willing to deceive to get her way; the particular strategy she hit upon for that purpose becomes a secondary issue.
16. Frankie did not see Paul again for more than twenty years, until she went backstage at Othello on Broadway. “He kissed me, he hugged me, and he was very glad to see me.” That was the last time they met (interview with Frances Quiett Challenger, Dec. 7, 1983).
17. This account (including the quotations) is taken from letters from Gerry Neale Bledsoe to me, July 7, 1983; April 14, 1985. Commenting on Essie’s protectiveness, Langston Hughes recalled that “Harlem wits have a story about a great public ball after one of Paul’s concerts, where she went around the hall closing all the windows so ‘her baby’ wouldn’t catch cold! Then she took him home—on time!” (Hughes in New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1930.)
18. The quotations in this and subsequent paragraphs describing the marriage are from ER, Ms. Auto., RA. However, the quote from Essie’s relative on p. 42 is from the transcript of an interview with Margaret Cardozo Holmes in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe. Hattie Boiling remained a loyal friend of Essie’s, once writing her appreciatively, “… your promises are as true as gold” (HB to ER, Oct. 6, 1934, RA). Hattie’s husband, William (“Buddy”), had apparently known Paul since 1912—so at least, he stated on a June 27, 1922, passport affidavit (FBI NY 100-25857).
19. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (International Publishers, 1971), pp. 53–58. A description of living arrangements in Striver’s Row is in Patterson, but in Essie’s account she lists her address as 225 Seventh Avenue, which is not Striver’s Row. Minnie’s sister Sadie also remained a lifelong friend of Essie’s. Patterson spells Minnie’s last name “Summer,” Essie as “Sumner,” which is correct. Patterson (p. 53) describes Essie at the time as having “lively and searching” eyes and being, unlike Minnie, “deeply concerned with social problems,” “acutely aware of the racial issue”; judging from other evidence, Patterson’s judgment was ex post facto, a description of Essie’s political awareness as a middle-aged woman. One of the “fourths” for cards was Gene Sumner, Minnie’s cousin (handwritten recollections, DSMC).
20. According to later FBI sources, Essie “attempted unsuccessfully in 1918 to enter Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons” (FBI Main 100-12304-11). May Chinn claims that she left her job at the Presbyterian lab in Sept. 1920 to study medicine at Columbia but “had several small illnesses during the first year and stayed away one day longer than they allow you.” They “gave her the chance of repeating the year,” but she decided not to, having by then met Paul (Sterner interview with Chinn). Essie’s salary at Presbyterian is listed on her Guggenheim Fellowship application of 1931 (RA). The announcement card and the marriage license are in RA. According to Ben Robeson’s daughter, Marian Liggins, Paul wrote to his older brother asking for permission to marry Essie, “and Daddy wrote back giving him all the reasons why he thought he should not marry her” (interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982). Robeson’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded at Cornell in 1906. Its members have included Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.
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).
12. DAB, suppl. I, vol. II (Scribners, 1944), pp. 457–58. Additional information on Kahn’s generosity to black artists is in Lewis, Harlem in Vogue.
13. PR to Kahn, March [Feb.?] 13, 1923; Kahn to PR, March 12, 1923, William Seymour Theatre Coll., Kahn Papers, Princeton University (hereafter PU: Kahn).
14. This, incidentally, throws further doubt on the theory that O’Neill himself had offered to read Robeson for Emperor Jones back in 1920 (see note 23, p. 580). Nothing in Robeson’s letters to Kahn or in Duncan’s letter to O’Neill refers to any prior contact—which surely would have been mentioned if it had in fact occurred. Duncan to O’Neill, Feb. 23, 1923, RA; Duncan to PR, May 10, 1924, RA (in which he thanks Robeson for having credited him in a recent letter—not, so far as I know, extant). On still another occasion, Duncan notified Robeson that a new play was about to be produced with “a very unusual Negro part in it” and suggested he drop by to see him about it (Duncan to PR, Sept. 14, 1923, RA).
15. For classmates and professors, see William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man: The Early Years (Random House, 1974), pp. 138–39. Interview with Martin Popper, Jan. 17, 1987 (Stone); Columbia University Oral History interview (by Tom Hogan, 1971) with Charles Ascher, CU. PR’s academic record in law school is in CU, Law Archives. Interview with Edith Tiger, June 17, 1985, for the view that Robeson never took to law; the same view is expressed by Woollcott in While Rome Burns, pp. 127–28.
16. Essie’s remark is in PR, Negro, p. 70; his brother Ben’s comments are from his ms. “My Brother Paul” (1934), RA; Tammany Hall is from Seton, Robeson, p. 26. Once, when Essie was teasing Paul about his inactivity, their close friend and physician, Louis Wright, told her that Paul “was the most intelligently lazy man he had ever known.”
17. This account of Robeson’s law-firm tenure is taken from the following sources: ER, PR, Negro, pp. 70–72; ER, Ms. Auto., RA; interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983; phone interview with S. A. Russell, July 31, 1982. Russell got to know Robeson through the writer Philip Van Doren Stern, also a Rutgers alumnus and the brother-in-law of Freda Diamond, later one of Robeson’s intimates. Russell was recounting to me the version of his law-firm experience that Robeson gave him at a dinner party in the mid-1950s. The information on Stotesbury comes from the files on him at RUA.
18. ER, PR, Negro, p. 72; PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929. Sounding a “proper-young-man” (rather than a racial) note, which he perhaps calculated to appeal to the British, Robeson is quoted as telling a newspaper reporter two years later, “I have studied law, but law in New York is not a dignified profession as it is in London: it is too mixed up with politics” (Star, Sept. 11, 1925). Still later Robeson said, “I could never be a Supreme Court judge; on the stage there was only the sky to hold me back” (Time, Nov. 1, 1943).
19. Macgowan to PR, Dec. 19, 21, 1923, RA. An undated note from O’Neill to PR in RA, which from internal evidence seems to have been written in Nov. 1923, suggests—if I’ve correctly dated it—they were in touch shortly before Macgowan contacted him about reading the new play. O’Neill’s letter refers to Hopkins (Arthur Hopkins, the Broadway producer, who presented some of O’Neill’s plays in London) as having been “extremely favorably impressed by your talk with him,” advised “you will like being associated with him I know,” and reported that Hopkins “agreed with me before he left that ‘Jones’ would be best to follow ‘A.C.’ [Anna Christie] if it could be so arranged with Cockran over there” (in the spring of 1923, Hopkins had opened Anna Christie, to a positive reception in London); O’Neill promised to let Robeson know “whatever information I get.” In other words, it seems PR had been contacted no later than Nov. 1923 about doing Jones (in London, apparently) and then in Dec. was asked by Macgowan to have a look at the new Chillun script as well.
Interview with Bess Rockmore (Eitingon), March 30, 1982.
20. For background on the Provincetown Players, see Sheaffer, O’Neill, Son and Artist (Little, Brown: 1973), and the still-useful book by two Provincetowners, Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown.
21. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, pp. 101–2, for details on redoing the theater; Sheaffer, O’Neill, 123, for the Mercury; ER, Ms. Auto., RA, for “profoundly impressed”; ER Diary, Jan. 8, 1924, RA (Spook).
22. ER Diary, Jan. 21 (record company), Feb. 1, 21, March 3 (Ethiopian), Feb. 10 (YWCA), Jan. 23 (St. Christopher), April 13 (Du Bois), April 10 (Broun), Feb. 10, 19, 26 (NAACP), Jan. 20, 26, 30, Feb. 4, 9, 10 (Greeks), Feb. 18, April 25 (Anderson), Jan. 3 (Hayes), Jan. 4 (Changeling), April 11 (Cyrano)—all 1924, RA. Apparently there were two nibbles from record companies at the same time; ER, in her diary for Jan. 21, mentions an appointment with the Brunswick Co., and in RA there is a letter to PR from J. Mayo Williams of the Chicago Music Publishing Co. (Feb. 7, 1924, RA). Williams mentioned that he got PR’s address from Fritz Pollard, his old football buddy. Nothing seems to have come of this contact immediately, though there was additional correspondence the following year (Williams to ER, March 14, 1925, RA). Robeson had heard Du Bois for the first time in 1918 at a banquet for Assistant District Attorney F. Q. Morton at Terrace Garden. “Fine speeches,” he wrote in his notebook (“School and Social Functions,” RA), “A real insight into political life of New York City.”
23. Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 192; Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 135; Anderson, This Was Harlem, p. 112; Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United Slates (Duffield and Co., 1930), pp. 130–32; The New York Times, May 7, 1924. Gilpin had opened in the role of the preacher in the revival of Roseanne; PR subsequently replaced him. For more on the Lafayette Theater, see Sister M. Francesca Thompson, O.S.F., “The Lafayette Players, 1917–1932,” in Errol Hill, ed., The Theater of Black Americans (Prentice-Hall 1980), vol. II, pp. 13–32. For more on Theophilus Lewis, see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Theophilus Lewis and the Theater of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, essays edited with a memoir by Arna Bontemps (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1972); another version of the essay is in Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair.
24. Philadelphia Record, April 1, 1924.
25. There is reason to believe that Helen MacKellar was originally offered the part of Ella but withdrew when she learned she would be playing opposite Robeson (Evening Star [Washington, D.C.], Feb. 22, 1924; Syracuse Herald, July 14, 1929; PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun [London], Jan. 13, 1929).
26. Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 193–94; Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 547–57; Sheaffer, op. cit., pp. 134–40; Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, pp. 107–13; the newspaper clippings are in RA.
27. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 22, 1924; New York World, May 18, 1924.
28. Extended portions of O’Neill’s statement are printed in Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, and Sheaffer; a shorter version is in Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown.
29. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 141.
30. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, p. 108 (press-clipping bill); Sheaffer, op. cit., p. 140 (Light quote); Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, p. 552 (bomb).
31. Sheaffer, O’Neill, pp. 137–38, 140; ER, Ms. Auto., RA.
32. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.
33. Ibid.
34. ER Diary, April 28, 1924, RA; ER, PR, Negro, p. 75.
35. ER, PR Negro, p. 75; undated (early 1930s?) two-page handwritten manuscript in RA, simply titled “Paul, Theatre.”
36. Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982; Malcolm Cowley to me, Nov. 5, 1982.
37. For more on the precursors of “black theater” and especially on the pivotal role played by Alain Locke and the Krigwa Little Theater Movement, see Abiodum Jeyifous, “Black Critics on Black Theater in America,” The Drama Review, vol. 18 (Sept. 1974), pp. 37–39.
38. ER Diary, May 4, 5, 6, 1924, RA; Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 140 (cool response). According to Sheaffer’s sources (p. 141), at the opening night party held at set designer Cleon Throckmorton’s apartment, O’Neill spent most of the evening playing the tom-tom that had been used in the play. At one point during the party, Robeson, Throckmorton, and Light took their shirts off to compare physiques, a tourney O’Neill joined at his wife’s urging.
39. ER Diary, May 6, 1924, RA (quarrel); Brawley, Negro in Literature, pp. 130–31; Sheaffer, O’Neill, pp. 32–36 (League).
40. Telegram and Mail, May 7, 1924 (O’Neill/Gilpin); O’Neill to Mike Gold, July 1923, courtesy of Louis Sheaffer (see note 42).
41. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 37.
42. ER Diary, May 6, 1924, RA. O’Neill’s letter to Mike Gold July 1923, and the entries from his “work diary” were kindly sent to me by Louis Sheaffer, whose splendid biography of O’Neill has been indispensable in my reconstruction of Robeson’s opening night (see Sheaffer, O’Neill, especially pp. 32–37). Jimmy Light’s opinion was given in an interview with Sheaffer, who passed its contents on to me. Opportunity, Dec. 1924, pp. 368–70 (PR on Gilpin). O’Neill did use Gilpin in Jones again. Over the next few years, the Provincetowners periodically revived the play, usually with Robeson, but in 1926 with Gilpin again assuming the lead. Apparently he continued to change lines in 1926 as he had in 1920. Essie and Paul went to see his performance twice, and Essie expressed “shock” in her diary at Gilpin’s “sacrilege and blasphemy” in rewriting lines—and at his generally “ordinary” performance (ER Diary, Feb. 24, March 1, 1926, RA). Despite his preference for Gilpin, O’Neill’s admiration for Robeson’s talent was keen. In 1925, on the flyleaf of a presentation copy to the Robesons of the collected edition of his plays, O’Neill wrote: “In gratitude to Paul Robeson in whose interpretation of ‘Brutus Jones’ I have found the most complete satisfaction an author can get—that of seeing his creation borne into flesh and blood! And in whose creation of ‘Jim Harris’ in my ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings’ I found not only complete fidelity to my intent under trying circumstances but, beyond that, true understanding and racial integrity. Again with gratitude and friendship” (the presentation copy is in RA; Essie referred to the inscribed volume as “one of the Robesons’ most valued possessions” [ER, Ms. Auto., RA]). For additional commentary on Jones as a play, and the contrasting strengths Robeson and Gilpin brought to it, see John Henry Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Southern Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 108–10; Arnold Goldman, “The Culture of the Provincetown Players,” American Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (1978), pp. 291–310; and Dr. Nick Aaron Ford’s denunciation of the play (The Afro-American, April 23, 1955) as merely another stereotype: Brutus Jones, “the superstitious dupe, egotistical braggart, razor-toting crapshooter.”
43. The New York Times, New York World, New York Herald Tribune—all May 7, 1924.
44. New York Evening Graphic, Dec. 16, 1924; New York Evening Post, May 7, 1924; New York Telegram and Evening Mail, May 7, 1924; Dallas Herald, June 1924 (“magnificent”); Cleveland News, May 18, 1924 (“all your life”).
45. ER Diary, May 11, 12, 1924, RA.
46. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 142.
47. Interview with PR, Star (London), Dec. 28, 1929 (“shots”); O’Neill, “Work Diary,” May 15, 1924 (courtesy of Sheaffer); ER ms., “Paul, Theater,” undated (probably early 1930s), RA; ER Diary, May 15, 1924, RA. Clara Alexander Weiss, of the Provincetown Players’ office staff, told Louis Sheaffer that everyone was so relieved when Chillun went off without violence that the party afterward was “particularly jubilant,” and Robeson sang spirituals and other songs “for hours” (interview courtesy of Sheaffer).
48. New York World, May 16, 1924 (Broun); New York Sun, May 16, 1924 (Woollcott); The Nation, June 4, 1924 (Lewisohn); New York Daily News, May 17, 1924 (Mantle); New York World, June 21, 1924 (Stallings). The casting of two of the secondary roles in Chillun was noteworthy. Dora Cole (no longer Dora Cole Norman), who had been responsible for urging Robeson into the theater in her production of Simon (see p. 43), played the role of Hattie, sister to Jim Harris (the Robeson role), and the fine black actor Frank Wilson, who had earlier appeared in O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid and would later star, with great success, in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom and in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, played the role of Joe. Both Cole and Wilson received excellent notices in Chillun.
49. Essie, interestingly, proudly reprinted Nathan’s review in PR, Negro (pp. 76–77) without taking any issue with its sentiments.
50. Krutch, The Nation, Oct. 26, 1927.
51. The “peeps” of white dissent included Arthur Pollock, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who found Robeson “a sad disappointment”—an earnest, hardworking amateur and nothing more; Burns Mantle, who in a second column on the play, noted “the awkwardness of the amateur” in Robeson’s performance; and Percy Hammond in the Times, who was caustic about the play, and referred to Robeson as “a dignified and handsome negro of the earnest type.”
The Afro-American, May 23, 1924; Chicago Defender, May 24, 1924; the clipping of Pickens’s newspaper column, undated, is in RA. Sheaffer (O’Neill, p. 138) cites two additional negative comments from black leaders: Rev. A. Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (and father of the Congressman) called the play “harmful because it intimates that we are desirous of marrying white women,” and Rev. J. W. Brown of A.M.E. Zion Church felt the play would do his people “only harm.” But both these comments were made to—and perhaps distorted by—Hearst’s American (March 15, 1924), which had been doing its best for months to stir up trouble. Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 195–96, also deplored the play as “shifting the question from that of a colored man living with a white wife to that of a man living with a crazy woman,” claiming it had “failed to please coloured people.” In regard to Emperor Jones, Langston Hughes wrote an account (quoted in Jeyifous, “Black Critics,” p. 42) of a somewhat later production of that play in Harlem that the audience “hounded with laughter”; it “wanted none of The Emperor Jones”—“that was the end of The Emperor Jones on 135th Street.”
52. The playbill, with Du Bois’s comments, is in RA.
53. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.
54. Opportunity, Dec. 1924, pp. 368–70. The magazine had a peak circulation of ten thousand, about 40 percent of it white. In an interview the following year, when he was playing Jones in London, Robeson told a newspaper interviewer: “O’Neill has got what no other playwright has—that is, the true, authentic negro psychology. He has read the negro soul, and has felt the negro’s racial tragedy” (Reynold’s Illustrated News, Sept. 20, 1925).
55. Duncan to PR, May 10, 1924, RA. By Aug., Mayor Hylan had lifted his ban against children’s playing in Chillun. In mid-Sept., Dorothy Peterson replaced Mary Blair, and Essie thought she “did very well” (Diary, Sept. 15, 1924). Peterson (whose father, Jerome Bowers Peterson, had founded the black paper, New York Age) remained a long-time friend of the Robesons. During the summer, Robeson gave two open-air performances of Jones in the Mariarden Theater, Peterboro, N.H., where it was well received (newspaper clippings, RA).
56. ER Diary, Aug. 15, 1924, RA. The salary total is in a receipt to PR in RA, signed “M. Eleanor Fitzgerald”—the manager of the Playhouse. Some sketchy evidence suggests that Robeson was offered the position of assistant district attorney of New York some time before 1925, but turned the offer down (program notes for his Dec. 17, 1924, Rutgers concert, RUA).
CHAPTER 5 THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE SPIRITUALS (1924–1925)
1. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Salemmé had been born in 1891, in Gaeta, Italy. He came to the U.S. at the age of eleven and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with George L. Noyes (a pupil of Monet’s) and later with William Paxton, the neoclassicist.
2. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Essie later worked out the formal agreement with Betty Salemmé, whereby Tony got two-thirds and Paul one-third of the sale price. Betty had suggested a fifty-fifty split, but Essie decided that was too generous: “Tony had had a great deal of experience and training, and should therefore get more than Paul, who had the beautiful body and gave his time” (ER Diary, May 14, 1925, RA).
3. Newspaper editorialists, North and South, had a field day chastising Philadelphia. If such action had been taken by a Southern city, a North Carolinian wrote, “It would have been condemned as just another manifestation of Southern nigger hate,” and the New York World suggested that “Perhaps the average Pennsylvanian, secretly a little ashamed of the civic and political record of his State, becomes a bit hysterical at the thought that some one may conceive the notion of a statue of Pennsylvania in the nude. That would be appalling. There are some people and some States that need all the concealment possible.” The Brooklyn Museum put the statue on display for a few months, cataloguing it as Negro Spiritual. The French showed it in the Salon des Tuileries, and the jury for the Art Institute of Chicago initially awarded the statue a prize but then, not wishing to over-emphasize the representation of a “colored man,” demoted it to honorable mention. The Union League Club of New York invited Salemmé to exhibit the statue but then decided not to show it, out of deference to “the ladies.” Salemmé dutifully applied a plaster figleaf as a poultice but that, too, failed to please and the statue was removed. When Dr. George F. Kunz, chairman of the club’s art committee, was asked if the statue had been ruled out on racial grounds, he replied indignantly that the question was absurd: “Do you know of any other club that employs all Negro waiters and servants?” he asked (Time, Dec. l, 1930; Express, Jan. 4, 11, 1980; Sunday Bulletin, Feb. 8, 1976). The statue thereafter disappeared, never to be recovered. Philadelphia’s racial problem was not solved. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983; interview with Salemmé, Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 20, 1926 (highest achievement); ER to Otto Kahn, Aug. 21, 1925, PU: Kahn; ER Diary, Aug. 4, 1925, RA (Ruth Hale); New York Herald Tribune, May 23, 25, 1930; Raleigh, North Carolina, News Observer, May 24, 1930; New York Evening World, May 23, 1930. According to Salemmé (unpublished ms.), Leonor Loree, president of the D & H Railroad, at one point planned to buy the statue with Otto Kahn and donate it to Rutgers. Loree agreed to Salemmé’s price of $18,000 for the sculpture in bronze, but the sale fell through when the Rutgers Board of Trustees decided that Robeson was too young to be honored with a statue. Salemmé later (1927) made a head of Robeson, which still exists (he shipped the head, in bronze, to Robeson in London for exhibition and sales—asking $700–1,250 per head (Antonio Salemmé to ER, March 24, 1930, RA). When I interviewed Salemmé in 1983, he was—at age ninety-three—back to work on a new version of the life-size statue.
4. ER, PR, Negro, pp. 82–87; ER Diary, Sept. 23, 1924, RA (Arthur Lee); interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. Rebecca West, for one, thought Salemmé was a “very bad influence” on Robeson. She met them both in the midtwenties in New York through Walter White and decided Paul was “basically lazy,” unwilling to become “a dedicated musical worker”—for which she in part blamed Salemmé’s influence (interview with Rebecca West, Sept. 1, 1982).
5. Interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983.
6. Interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. John Hammond (interview, Aug. 8, 1985) is the source for PR and Betty Spencer’s being lovers.
7. ER Diary, May 20, June 28, Nov. 12, Dec. 29, 1924, RA; interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983. I’ve strung Salemmé’s remarks together, omitting some of the pauses and ellipses in our conversation; but I’ve neither invented any words nor rearranged them in a way that would change their essential emphasis and meaning.
8. Among the large number of works on these and other renaissance figures, I’ve found the following especially useful (along with Levy, James Weldon Johnson; Huggins, Renaissance; Lewis, Harlem in Vogue; Johnson, Black Manhattan; and Anderson, This Was Harlem): Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (University of Oklahoma, 1968); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (Viking, 1933); Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston (University of Illinois, 1977); Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (Dutton, 1951); Emily Clark, Innocence Abroad (Knopf, 1931); Edward G. Leuders, Carl Van Vechten (Twayne, 1955); Blanche Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (Dodd, Mead, 1966).
9. New York Herald Tribune, July 6, 1924; Messenger, Oct. 1924, p. 32; undated clipping [late 1925], RA (“morbid”).
10. Messenger, Oct. 1924, p. 32; Journal News (Ithaca, N.Y.), April 23, 1926; Evening Globe, March 13, 1926. Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, pp. 192–93, plus his fine discussion, passim, of cultural elitism (see especially pp. 108–15, 157–62, 211–19).
11. Once in a great while, Salemmé did hear Paul sound a more bitter, less resigned note—and when he did was quick to blame it on the baneful influence of Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, the well-known psychoanalyst whom Paul and Essie had met at Presbyterian Hospital (see note 12, p. 578), and especially on his Southern-born wife, Bea, who in Salemmé’s view “was very pro-Negro” and had “a chip on her shoulder.” She “wanted to help Paul, and she used … to sort of goad him into rebelling. She brought out the bitterness in him, and I told her she shouldn’t do that, but she did” (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983). Ten years later Essie was still in touch with the Jelliffes; she mentions dining with Bea Jelliffe in her diary for Feb. 16, 1933 (RA). During our interview Salemmé referred approvingly at one point to Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, as another example of a black artist he had known who eschewed bitterness, but he showed no awareness of the actual depth of anger in her book. After Robeson became more political and more outspoken on racial questions, he let his friendship with Salemmé dissolve; when Salemmé was in Europe on a Guggenheim in 1934, Robeson failed to show up for a scheduled appointment and never got in touch to explain. Salemmé suspected that politics was at issue, but nonetheless resented Robeson’s way of breaking off (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983).
12. ER Diary, July 27, Aug. 26, 29, 1924, RA; CVV to Edna Kenton (Aug. 1924), Bruce Kellner, Letters of Carl Van Vechten (Yale, 1987), p. 69 (hereafter Kellner, Letters CVV).
13. ER Diary, Jan. 3, 1925, RA; Langner, Magic Curtain, p. 1964 (“Empress”); Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, pp. 180–89. Walter White had also been responsible for introducing Van Vechten to James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, “and ever so many more” (Carl Van Vechten to Alfred Knopf, Dec. 19, 1962, Knopf Papers, Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas (henceforth UT: Knopf). The Walter Whites and the Knopfs had “drifted completely away from each other” (in Alfred Knopf’s words) by the late forties (Knopf to Van Vechten, Sept. 22, 1948, UT: Knopf). Lincoln Kirstein’s analysis of Van Vechten is from a five-page typed description of him headed “For Fania: December 23, 1964,” written by Kirstein on the occasion of Van Vechten’s death. The manuscript is in UT: Knopf and continues, in part: “I met Carl first in the Spring of 1926 at an evening-party in Muriel Draper’s old stable-loft on East Fortieth Street. He was wearing a red fireman’s shirt. I was a freshman introduced into New York’s High Bohemia, so it seemed perfectly natural that at Muriel Draper’s one would meet, along with Mr. Gurdgieff [sic], Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, Paul Robeson or Mary Garden, a fireman.… Carl made Harlem real to me; it was not the tragic Harlem we now know. It was a Harlem far more secret, parochial, more remote, less dangerous, at least seemingly, and in our ways of thought more Parisian.…”
14. ER Diary, Jan. 17, Feb. 13 (Fania), 1925, RA; CVV to Scott Cunningham (circa Jan. 1925); CVV to Gertrude Stein, June 30, 1925, Kellner, Letters CVV, pp. 74, 80.
15. ER Diary, Aug. 17, 1924 (Touvalou; Maran), Jan. 27, 1925 (Bynner), Feb. 12, 1925 (Anderson), March 25, 1925 (Brouns), April 5, 1925 (Dreiser), April 21, 1925 (Brooks), June 8, 17, 1925 (Nora Holt), RA; CVV to Mencken (circa 1925), Kellner, Letters CVV, p. 87. The Robesons saw Prince Touvalou several more times during the following month. He spent two afternoons in their apartment; during one they “had lots of fun explaining our American slang to him. He has a marvelous sense of humour” (ER Diary, Sept. 12, 1924, RA). On the second visit, the Prince told Essie she ought to study for the stage—she had “such an expressive face and such a mischievous manner.” “We’ll see,” Essie wrote expectantly in her diary—and told Paul the Prince wanted to “write something African” for him, since voodooism had “originated in Dahomey, his home, and he knew so many stories about it” (Sept. 16, 1924). The very next day, they bumped into Touvalou when they went backstage after seeing Chocolate Dandies to chat with its creators, Sissle and Blake (Sept. 17, 1924). There is a touching reminiscense of Robeson by Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale’s son, Heywood Hale Broun, in his memoir Whose Little Boy Are You? (St. Martin’s, 1983), pp. 55–57, in which he describes Paul as “the greatest container for love and affection” he had ever met: “After you had spoken with him for a few minutes you realized that he was finding your wonderful hidden qualities, and after a few more meetings you were trying to think of ways to tell him how much he meant to you.” In the early thirties, Robeson was involved, along with Walter White and Zora Neale Hurston, in an opera based on Maran’s Batouala, to be conducted by Leopold Stokowski (White to PR, May 31, 1932). Stokowski also approached Robeson about appearing with the Philadelphia Orchestra (Schang to PR, March 11, 1933). After the outbreak of World War II, Robeson lent his efforts to helping Maran and his wife get emergency visitors’ visas to the U.S. (PR to Jane Sherman of Exiled Writer Committee, Oct. 18, 1940; Rockmore to Walter White, Oct. 18, 1940; Sherman to PR, Oct. 23, 1940—all NAACP Papers, LC).
16. ER Diary, Nov. 5, 24, 28, Dec. 2, 24 (Henderson), 1924; Jan. 4 (Toomer), Jan. 30 (Alabam’), March 11, 27, 29, April 10, June 10 (Cullen reception)—all 1925, RA. Johnson, Along This Way, pp. 378–81. Additional examples of PR singing at friends’ parties is in FM to CVV, Jan. 1, 14, 1927, CW Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div. The Robesons and Countee Cullen stayed in intermittent but peripheral contact. When Cullen came to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he wrote Paul asking if it would be possible for him to arrange “a few reading and lecture engagements” to help “take care of my expenses,” and reporting that his father and Harold Jackman (the West Indian man-about-town rumored to be Countee’s lover), who had gone backstage in London after seeing a performance of Jones, “came back to Paris with glowing reports of your London success” (CC to PR, Sept. 5, 1928, RA). In 1940, Cullen tried to interest Paul in appearing in a play of his, but Essie responded, in one of her “brisker” notes, that she thought the first part “real, natural, moving in spots,” but the second “nagging, whining, uninteresting and depressing” (Cullen to ER, Feb. 5, 1940, RA; ER to Cullen, April 10, 1940, Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center [henceforth ARC: Cullen]). In a cryptic, handwritten note, n.d. (1956?) in his Music Notes, RA, PR refers to Cullen as “perhaps … closer than Langston [Hughes] to African bards.” The Robesons and Eric Waldron maintained some limited contact. When Waldron published an article, “Growth of the Negro Theater,” in Opportunity (Oct. 1925), Essie complimented him on it; Waldron replied that he appreciated her praise but he considered the article “a pot-boiler” and some time hoped “to have the poise and restraint and the power to say what I have in mind to say about goings on in the Negro Theater” (Waldron to ER, Nov. 15, 1925, RA).
17. ER Diary, Aug. 28 (Minnie Sumner), Sept. 12 (Agnes Boulton), 26, 27 (Fischer), Nov. 4, 16, 1924, April 27, May 8, 10, 22, July 3, 21, Aug. 11, Sept. 11—all 1925, RA. They also saw something of May Chinn; when The Emperor Jones opened yet once more, this time for a brief run at a Broadway house, they took Chinn to the packed last showing in the old theater (ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1924, RA).
18. ER Diary, May 15, 20, June 14, 22, 28, July 10 (O’Neill), 29, Aug. 23, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 1924, and May 12, 30, 1925, RA. Isaac Don Levine records another “memorable night in 1925” when he, O’Neill, and Robeson went on a tour of Harlem. Levine had recently returned from the Soviet Union, and he claims O’Neill and Robeson “plied” him with questions about “the dramatic struggle for power then taking place in the Kremlin” (Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness to History [Hawthorn Books, 1973], pp. 84–89). Gig McGhee had played Smithers opposite Robeson in the Peterborough, N.H., showing of Jones. On May 4, 1925, Essie and Paul had a party at their place for about thirty of the Provincetowners; the Walter Whites, the James Weldon Johnsons, Zora Neale Hurston, and a Mrs. Carson were, she noted, “the only colored guests.”
19. ER Diary, Sept. 12, 28 (McGhees’ apartment), Nov. 4 (Glencairn), 11 (Desire), 1924, Feb. 6 (Patience), March 21 (Throckmorton), May 19, June 3 (Elms), 18, July 13, 25, 1925, RA.
20. ER Diary, Feb. 12, 1924, RA; article on Bercovicis in New York Evening Journal, April 8, 1925; interview with the Bercovicis’ two daughters, Rada and Mirel, July 7, 1985. In his book, It’s the Gypsy in Me, Konrad Bercovici says that he and his wife Naomi were introduced to PR for the first time backstage after a performance of Emperor Jones, by director Jimmy Light. For background information on the family, I’m grateful to Rada and Mirel Bercovici for a variety of materials they shared with me. They credit their father with having originally suggested the use of a nonstop tom-tom beat in The Emperor Jones. In It’s the Gypsy in Me (p. 194), Konrad Bercovici recalls that when the Robesons first came to dinner “the colored maid shed her apron, declared that she wouldn’t ‘serve no “Niggers,”’” and left. When Paul came to see them again, “the colored elevator man refused to take him up.” Following those insults, “the agent of the house informed us that the other tenants threatened to cancel their leases unless I ceased having colored men go up in the same elevator with them.” At that point the Bercovicis bought the townhouse at 81st Street and Riverside Drive.
21. Interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985; ER Diary, Sept. 27, Dec. 28, 1924, Jan. 17, Feb. 1 (Zuloaga; Gorky), Feb. 5, 26, March 1, 6, April 12, 20, May 8, June 2, 9, 16, 20, 21, 1925, RA. Robeson often sang to the children of his friends, sometimes giving them private concerts. From some dozen people (including Peggy Dennis, Cedric Belfrage, and Rose Perry) I have heard near-duplicate tales of Robeson’s singing to their mesmerized offspring.
Rada and Mirel Bercovici (interview of July 7, 1985) cast doubt on the accuracy of a few details in Essie’s diary. In regard to that diary, I’ve come to the overall conclusion that Essie is given to exaggeration and dramatic highlighting (though almost never to outright invention) and especially in one area—when recording the doings of “glamorous” people and events as they intersected with the Robesons’ own lives. Rada and Mirel Bercovici characterize her as more attracted to the “high life” than Paul (she tended to “costume things a bit,” as Rada put it) and was (in Mirel’s words) “posthumously conscious”—meaning she was self-consciously aware of posterity’s evaluations, and not likely to scribble away in a diary with entire spontaneity. She may have kept a diary in the first place in order to glamorize her life retrospectively. It’s significant, in this regard, that she started her diary only in January 1924—just as Paul was being catapulted to fame. Still, Essie’s pridefulness only occasionally comes across as wildly overblown; on the whole her diary remains a reliable, valuable resource.
22. ER Diary, Feb. 2 (“honor”); March 26 (Junior Banquet), 1925; Dec. 17 (Rutgers concert; Gilpin), 1924; NAACP and Nazarene appearances from newspaper clippings in RA; Mary White Ovington to PR, Jan. 19, 1927, RA. The professor to whom ER made her remark (which is in the Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 8, 1930) was Charles H. Whitman; for more on Whitman and PR, see note 16, pp. 573–74. The Jones revival moved—again for a brief run—to the Punch and Judy Theater on Broadway in mid-Jan. 1925.
23. ER Diary, Aug. 25, Oct. 17 (Burleigh), Nov. 1, 2, 1924 (Copley), Dec. 12, 1924, Jan. 12, 1925, for other concerts; Mrs. C. C. Pell to PR, Oct. 15, 1924, RA; ER Diary, Dec. 6, 1924 (Pells), RA.
24. ER Diary, Oct. 17, 1924 (Micheaux), Jan. 27, 28, 30, 1925 (Hayes), RA; Variety, Nov. 26, 1924 (Russell); Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1975), has more detail on Micheaux’s career. The film critic J. Hoberman has called Micheaux’s God’s Step Children (1938) an account of self-directed racism “as profound and powerful an embodiment of American racial pathology as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or John Ford’s The Searchers and as amazing a movie as either of them”; according to Hoberman, God’s Step Children was “temporarily forced out of circulation by the Harlem chapter of the Communist Party” (Village Voice, June 12, 1984). In her diary for Nov. 3, 1924, RA, Essie wrote, “Micheaux made storm scene out on Corona today. What with the wind machine, fire hose, etc., it was the most realistic thing I ever saw.” The day before Hayes appeared backstage at Jones, Paul had journeyed to Philadelphia to hear Hayes at the Academy of Music; and two days after Hayes’s visit, Paul and Essie again returned the compliment by attending Hayes’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as soloist with the Boston Symphony (Essie thought it “very fine” but “didn’t like the robust things he did”).
25. ER Diary, Sept. 24, Oct. 2, 20, Nov. 12, 20, 22, 24, 1924 (Germany); Dec. 7 (Reiss), 8, (Bartholomew), 24; Jan. 23, 18, 1925 (Madden); Dec. 1, 8, and passim, 1925 (Dwight portrait); April 25, 1925 (radio), Jan. 28 (Hampden), Feb. 19, 22, March 4, 10—all 1925, RA. Marshall Bartholomew to PR, Dec. 24, 1924, RA.
26. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, March 20, 24, 1925, RA; Seton, “Lawrence Brown” (“pondering”). Larry Brown’s father had also been born a slave. The contracts are in RA. Carl Van Vechten to ER, n.d. (1925), RA; ER to CW, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. The black singer Taylor Gordon is among those rumored to have been Van Vechten’s lover. A collection of nude photographs Van Vechten took of black men is in Yale: Van Vechten.
27. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.
28. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (Brown “guided”). For a fine background discussion of the spirituals, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford, 1977), pp.30–55 (and for the ambivalence some educated blacks felt toward the spirituals, pp. 167–69).
29. ER Diary, March 27, 29, 1925, RA; ER, Ms. Auto., RA; Van Vechten to PR, March 30, 1925, RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (children; Brown “guided”).
30. Heywood Hale Broun, Whose Little Boy, p. 56; Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982.
31. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, April 19, 1925, RA; Frank B. Lenz, “When Robeson Sings,” Association Men, July 1927 (sixteen songs and encores); PR to Van Vechten, postmarked Oct. 21, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten (“unselfish interest”). Monroe Wheeler gave it as his opinion that Van Vechten and Donald Angus were lovers (interview with Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985). The program for the concert is in RA. It was repeated twice more—on May 3, in the same Greenwich Village theater, and on May 17, in the 48th Street Theater. Three drafts of a blurb Van Vechten wrote for the second concert are in Yale: Van Vechten; in it he hailed Robeson and Brown for having restored “the spirit of the original primitive interpretation to these Spirituals … which apparently no other public singer has hitherto entertained.…”
32. Van Vechten, draft of a blurb for the second concert (“wistful,” etc.), Yale: Van Vechten; New York World, April 20, 1925 (“infinite”); New York Evening Post, April 20, 1925 (“luscious”); The New York Times, April 20, 1925 (“conviction”); Edgar G. Brown in New York News, April 25, 1925 (Caruso); Du Bois to PR and Larry Brown, May 4, 1925, U. Mass.: Du Bois. (Du Bois attended the second concert.) Essie, Paul, and Larry wrote and thanked both Walter White and Van Vechten: “Your untiring work in our interest certainly brought very tangible results” (April 25, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). White, who went along with them when they made their first test record for Victor (ER Diary, April 21, 1925) two days after the concert, wrote back (April 28, 1925, RA): “I have never in my life been so pleased—and moved—as I was by your joint letter of thanks.… You can always count on me to the limit. The best of all thanks and the thing that’ll make me most happy will be an overwhelming success which will come and which the three of you so richly deserve.” PR had in fact given several earlier concerts devoted mostly to Afro-American music. Accompanied by Louis Hooper, he performed such a program on Nov. 2, 1924, in Boston, to warm praise from the reviewers (Boston Transcript and Boston Post, both Nov. 3, 1924), and again (still accompanied by Hooper) at Rutgers on Dec. 17, 1924, and at the Highland Park Reformed Church on Jan. 9, 1925 (the latter two programs are in RUA).
33. Interview with Percy N. Stone in New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926. The remark linking Hayes and PR is in the New Orleans Item, an article by Hudson Grunewald on Edna Thomas (a friend of Robeson’s) lauding her, in contrast to the two men, as a purveyor of the real thing. Sandburg’s remarks are in the Chicago News, Sept. 29, 1926.
34. Carl Van Vechten to ER, Oct. 9, Nov. 19, 1925, RA; ER to Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, Oct. 8, 20, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to James Weldon Johnson, Nov. 1, 1925 (“pore”), Yale: Johnson. In his Oct. 9 letter, Van Vechten reported that H. T. Burleigh, the black composer and arranger of some of the songs Paul and Larry had used, “is in a frightful stew and does not hesitate to show it. Meeting Larry and Rosamond on the street he abused them roundly, saying that neither of them knew anything about Spirituals or even music itself and that the book was a botch.… He threatened to talk to certain critics and promised them bad notices. ‘If you knew anything about Brahms and Debussy,’ he added, ‘your harmonizations would be far different.’” In his Nov. 19 letter, Van Vechten reported that “Bledsoe recently sang to a half-full listless house. He will not put his very real personality into his concerts and he sings Spirituals worse than any one I know.”
35. New York World, May 3, 1925 (“anything more”); James B. Pond to PR, May 29, 1925 (two separate letters), RA; ER Diary, May 4, 23, 26, 1925, RA. The contracts with Victor are in the RA. ER Diary, April 21, July 16, 27, 30, Aug. 4, 1925 (recordings); May 11 (Vanity Fair); May 7, 11, 21, June 1 (Alda); May 3 (Equity); May 25 (Jewish Committee); June 19 (St. Philip’s), 1925, RA. At the private program sung for Mrs. W. Murray Crane and her guests, Essie seemed inordinately pleased that they “were all asked into the drawing room and introduced to everybody” (ER Diary, May 11, 1925, RA). The photo of Robeson appeared in the July 1925 issue of Vanity Fair. In the issue of Feb. 1926, Van Vechten, in his article “Moanin’ wid a Sword in Ma Han’,” wrote: “Paul Robeson is a great artist.… I say great advisedly, for to hear him sing Negro music is an experience allied to hearing Chaliapin sing Russian folksongs.”
36. ER Diary, May 10 (Chaliapin); May 1, 2 (Hurston); June 8 (Savage), 1925, RA. Claire and Hubert Delany, the lawyer, were also part of the Robesons’ party at the Opportunity dinner. Essie and A’Lelia Walker were more than acquaintances, less than friends; they occasionally corresponded, and in the twenties occasionally played bridge together (ER to Walker, April 8 [1930], courtesy of A’Lelia P. Bundles). Chaliapin’s daughter, Marfa Hudson Davies, later wrote Robeson to tell him “how much my father in turn admired you” (Davies to PR, Oct. 8, 1960, RA). Hurston’s views on black spirituals are in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 54–55. Hemenway (pp. 54, 184–85) quotes from a comment Hurston made in 1934 specifically on Robeson as a singer of spirituals: “‘Robeson sings Negro songs better than most, because, thank God, he lacks musical education. But we have a cathead man in Florida who can sing so that if you heard him you wouldn’t want to hear Hayes or Robeson. He hasn’t the voice of either one. It’s the effect.’“ In 1933, at Rollins College, Hurston produced a successful concert that implemented her view of the proper uses of folk art. Though the evidence is limited, it’s possible to argue that Robeson’s views on the spirituals in fact coincided with Hurston’s. On the occasion of the Hampton Singers’ performing in England, Robeson is quoted as telling a reporter that they would demonstrate “how Negro spirituals should be sung. I cannot possibly interpret them properly … when I sing them as solos. It is not recognized in Europe that singing spirituals is a social act, a group affair, in which there must be both the solo and the chorus. There are many spirituals such as ‘Go Down, Moses’ which I absolutely refuse to sing alone, for it is nothing without the rolling refrain, ‘Let my people go’” (The New York Times, April 26, 1930).
37. New York World, April 30, 1925 (the New York Sun also carried an article about the incident on April 30); ER Diary, Feb. 18 (Algonquin); April 28, 29, 1925, RA. Fifteen years later Robeson was involved in a second incident with the Dutch Treat Club. The New York World-Telegram reported (Jan. 20, 1940) that he had failed to appear for an engagement at the club and had “deliberately” not notified it—retrospective retaliation for his mistreatment in 1925. Essie wrote to the club denying that his action had been deliberate, but the possibility nonetheless remains. (Ray Vir Den, vice-president of Dutch Treat, to ER, Jan. 25, 1940, enclosing copy of his letter of protest to Roy W. Howard, president of World-Telegram, also dated Jan. 25, 1940, RA).
38. “Ned” Sheldon was also famed for the remarkable serenity of spirit with which he dealt with his illness, continuing to receive friends in the confines of his apartment—among them many of Robeson’s previous theatrical associates, Emilie Hapgood, Hoytie Wiborg, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (and, back in 1922, at the behest of H. A. Murray, Robeson himself—see note 16, p. 570). ER Diary, June 12, 1925; Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 205–6. Charles MacArthur later apologized to Robeson for some of the language used in the play—like “tarbaby,” “musta’d colored snake charmer,” and “real nigger style” (Jhan Robbins, Front Page Marriage: Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur [Putnam’s Sons, 1982], p. 37). At the time Robeson told an interviewer, “There is a wealth of material in the Negro’s past,” and he feared “the stereotyped format of plays that will imitate ‘Lulu Belle’ and even the play he now appears in”—meaning Black Boy (Wilmington, Delaware, Press, Oct. 4, 1926). Though Robeson turned down the role in Lulu Belle and had let his disapproval of its stereotypes be known, Essie records a pleasant evening spent with Ned Sheldon six months after the play opened: “Dined with Edward Sheldon.… He is fascinating. The dinner was delicious. Paul sang for Sheldon, and read some scenes from ‘Emperor Jones’ and ‘All God’s Chillun.’ We stayed three hours, and enjoyed every minute of it” (ER Diary, Aug. 5, 1926, RA).
39. ER Diary, June 17, 1925, RA; Van Vechten to Blanche Knopf, June 30, 1925, UT: Knopf. Van Vechten to Ettie Stettheimer, June 18, 1925, NYPL Ms. Div.: Van Vechten; “I want to raise $5,000 (or at least $3,000)—not for myself!—as a loan, to be repaid with interest in one or two years for an extremely worthy cause.… I might add, however, that it is not for starving Belgian babies, but would constitute you a patron of the arts!” In his catalogue for this NYPL collection (p. 37), Van Vechten later wrote, “The request for money was in behalf of Paul Robeson. I secured the full amount for him from Otto Kahn.”
40. ER to Otto Kahn, no date but filed June 22, 1925, PU: Kahn.
41. Van Vechten to Kahn, Sept. 9, 1925 (“‘gimme’”); Kahn to Van Vechten, June 19, 25, 1925, PU: Kahn.
42. ER Diary, June 28, 1925, RA; Kahn to ER, June 29, 1925; two letters, ER to Kahn, filed July 3 and July 30, 1925—all in PU: Kahn; Van Vechten to ER, July 1, 1925, RA. If Van Vechten did write the suggested letter to Kahn, it is not in PU: Kahn. In a draft legal agreement (RA), Robeson agreed to start repaying the loan by Jan. 1, 1926—two thousand dollars during the first year, three thousand during the second.
43. ER Diary, July 13, Aug. 2, 4, 1925, RA.
44. ER Diary, July 4–6 (Peterborough), July 15 (quiet), July 18–19, July 21–24 (Provincetown), Aug. 3 (Spring Lake), 1925, RA; ER postcards to Carl Van Vechten, July 6, 19, 24, Aug. 4 (plus one undated), 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. Rita Romilly, “Concerning a Singer and an Actress,” New Age, Sept. 10, 1925. ER Diary, July 24, 1925 (Taylor)—also March 15, 1926, RA for another visit to him.
45. ER Diary, July 3, 13, 19, 26, Aug. 2, 4, 1925, RA. Van Vechten was currently trying to persuade Alfred Knopf to publish Stein’s Three Lives. Knopf wrote Van Vechten (May 18, 1925, UT: Knopf) that he was “entirely willing” to publish her book “if you feel sufficiently strongly about it but there is no use my trying to read this lady for I simply can’t in my present mood at any rate, get through more than fifty to a hundred pages.”
CHAPTER 6 THE LAUNCHING OF A CAREER (1925–1927)
1. ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Aug. 13, 14, 15, 1925, RA.
2. Louis Sheaffer interview with Sue Jenkins (courtesy of Sheaffer); ER, Ms. Auto., RA; Ruth C. McCreary to me, June 11, 1982 (restaurant discrimination). When performing in Black Boy on Broadway in 1926, Robeson and Horace Live-right (producer of the show) attempted to lunch at the Café des Beaux Arts in New York City, but were turned away at the door (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 17, 1926). Robeson had even had trouble getting his teeth fixed. After several dentists had refused to take him as a patient, Lewis Dicksteen (contacted by an artist friend in Greenwich Village) agreed to treat him. In gratitude, Robeson sent the Dicksteen family free tickets to Emperor Jones. (The incident was related by Lewis Dicksteen’s son, the Queens Democratic committeeman Abbott Dicksteen, to Jules Cohen, who passed it on to me.)
3. ER, Ms. Auto., RA. ER’s views on race in this period are further set forth in PR, Negro, pp. 52–63.
4. ER to CVV and FM, Oct. 8, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Aug. 13, 14, 17, 20, 24–27, Sept. 1, 4, 15, 28, Oct. 10, 1925, RA. ER took a brief side trip to Paris with Bert McGhee and reported to the Van Vechtens on her theater adventures there. She singled out Racquel Meller as “a great artist,” deplored the Follies Bergère (except for Benglia), and thought the show at the Casino de Paris “terrible” (ER to CW and FM, Aug. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). She expands on her Paris impressions in her diary for Aug. 24–27, 1925, and later wrote a set piece about the trip (Jan. 29, 1931, RA).
5. Essie was intrigued with John Payne’s home (“the electric light Buddha in his drawing room is weird and beautiful”), but disliked a recital of his that she and Paul heard (“His Negro songs were his worst. He got a sort of Charleston rhythm into them, that was jazzy and terrible”) (ER Diary, Sept. 19, Oct. 2, 1925, RA). ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten.
6. ER Diary, Aug. 22, 1925, RA; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (Knopf, 1931; Dover reissue, 1970), vol. II, p. 980; EG to Alexander Berkman, Feb. 5, 1933, Feb. 28, 1936, Berkman Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (courtesy of Paul Avrich), hereafter IISH.
7. ER Diary, Aug. 22, Sept. 5, 10, 13, 23, 25, Oct. 5, 15, 1925, RA; ER, PR, Negro, p. 93 (“disheartening”); ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; CW to ER, Sept. 27, 1925, RA. In another letter to the Van Vechtens (Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten), Essie wrote that Emma “is another real person to add to our short list. We see her very often and like her more and more.”
8. ER Diary, Sept. 10, 1925, RA; ER to Otto Kahn, Sept. 17, 1925; Kahn to ER, Sept. 29, 1925, PU: Kahn.
9. Statesman, Review, and Africa are Sept. 19; Weekly, Sept. 26; Tatler, Sept. 30, 1925. A dozen other reviews were raves. The sole negative seems to have been from the American correspondent from Billboard (Sept. 19, Oct. 31, 1925), who found Robeson merely “talented.” Robeson, retrospectively, agreed: “I knew nothing about the technique of acting” (Seton, PR, p. 40). ER Diary, Sept. 23, 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten (“Star”).
10. The effects of the tom-tom came in for considerable discussion (e.g., Cicely Hamilton in Time and Tide, Sept. 25, 1925). The negative comments on Light’s production are in G.K.’s Weekly, Sept. 26, 1925, and The Saturday Review, Sept. 19, 1925. Seton, quoting from an interview with Jimmy Light, refers in her book (PR, p. 38) to the African members of the cast being dockworkers and some of them “illiterate.” In the ms. of her book, Robeson had crossed out “illiterate” and substituted “uneducated in English language.” Curiously, the printed version retains “illiterate,” though in most other cases Seton adopted Robeson’s corrections. Negative comments on the play are from the Daily Sketch, Sept. 11, 1925; the Birmingham Post, Sept. 12, 1925; Vogue, early Oct. 1925; The Outlook, Oct. 3, 1925; and The New Statesman, Sept. 19, 1925. ER to Countee Cullen, Nov. 22, 1925, ARC: Cullen.
11. ER to CW and FM, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Otto Kahn, Oct. 9, 1925, PU: Kahn; ER to J. W. Johnson, Nov. 1, 1925, Yale: Johnson; ER Diary, Oct. 17, 1925, RA (closing). The comments about “a negro play” are from the Birmingham Post, Sept. 12, 1925, and The Gentlewoman, Sept. 26, 1925. Alan Bott, in The Sphere, Sept. 19, 1925, is the one reviewer to discuss “the tragedy of the negro.”
12. ER Diary, Oct. 14, 15, 18, 19 (Aldridge), 20 (Quilter), 24, (Campbell), 26, 30 (Eastman), 30 (Taylor), 1925, RA; Jessie Coleridge-Taylor to ER, Oct. 13, 1925; Athene Seyler to ER, Oct. 9, 1925, RA. PR probably met Quilter through Larry Brown, who had earlier become his friend. There are several letters from Quilter and three from Miss Ira Aldridge from this period in RA (“magnificent,” etc., is from the Aldridge letters). In the Ira Aldridge Collection, Northwestern University Library (henceforth NUL: Aldridge), there are two letters from Paul to Miss Aldridge and one (signed in Paul’s name) from Essie. In Essie’s letter to Aldridge (Oct. 19, 1925) she asked for a copy of “Summer is de Lovin’ Time,” which Aldridge had played for them that afternoon, for possible use in concerts and recording. Sixty years later Athene Seyler recalled “one intimate conversation” with Essie: “I asked her if there was any real difference between black people and white, as I felt one could talk to her freely on any topic and would respect her opinion. She replied that there was no essential difference at all—but that black men found white women irresistible. This was said quite impersonally but with perhaps a hint of wistfulness” (Athene Seyler to me, Jan. 1, 1983).
13. ER Diary, Aug. 9, Sept. 30, Oct. 6, 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Aug. 10, Sept. 7, Oct. 8, 11, 20, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten.
14. ER to Otto Kahn, Oct. 9, 1925 (“very tired”), PU: Kahn. She was explaining “all this” and their plans for a recuperative vacation, Essie wrote Kahn, “because I don’t want you to think we are being extravagant. I do hope you will approve of my plans.” He did, writing back to assure her that it was “quite right” to take a rest before returning to America and expressing the view that, although the play was closing prematurely, “the main purpose of your European adventure has been fully achieved, and its effects ought to be of lasting value” (Otto Kahn to ER, Nov. 4, 1925, PU: Kahn). Otto Kahn is “awfully nice,” Essie wrote to Carl and Fania (Oct. 11, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). ER Diary, Aug. 28–29, Nov. 2–8 (Paris), Nov. 7 (Matisse), 8 (Beach tea), 1925, RA; ER to CW and FM, Sept. 7, Nov. 16 (Beach, Matisse), 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Otto Kahn, Nov. 17, 1925, PU: Kahn. Sylvia Beach to her mother, Oct. 30, Nov. 10, 1925, PU: Beach. Robeson’s visit to Sylvia Beach was duly noted in “Latin Quarter Notes” for Nov. 13, Dec. 11, 1925, in the Paris Tribune (Hugh Ford, ed., The Left Bank Revisited: Selections from the Paris “Tribune” 1917–1934 [Penn State University Press, 1972], p. 103). The Tribune also quoted Robert Schirmer as announcing that “in all likelihood” he would issue “an edition of spirituals as interpreted by Robeson.” Essie may have met Beach earlier, when she and Bert McGhee dropped into her bookstore on an excursion to Paris, to purchase a paperbound copy of Ulysses for Paul. It had cost her sixty francs (three dollars), and she had smuggled it back to London “between my bath towel and my douche bag—I figured no gentleman would rummage thru these 2 articles—not even a customs man”; they hadn’t, and Paul had been “tickled to death” with the gift (ER Diary, Aug. 28–29, 1925; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 7, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten).
15. ER to Gertrude Stein, two undated notes (Oct. 1925) referring to the enclosed letter of introduction and the date for the tea, Yale: Stein. CW to GS, June 30, July 10, Aug. 1, 1925, printed in Edward Burns, The Gertrude Stein-Carl Van Vechten Letters: 1913–1946, 2 vols. (Columbia University, 1986), originally a 6-vol. dissertation at CUNY.
16. Stein to CW, Nov. 9, 1925, Aug. 11, 1927, printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Vintage, 1933, 1960), pp. 237–38 (spirituals; Southern woman); in her memoir, Alice B. Toklas supplies her own version of the initial meeting with the Robesons and the encounter with the Southern woman, both very close to Stein’s recollections (What Is Remembered [Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963], pp. 117–18). In the same passage of the Autobiography cited above, somewhat repeating what she had privately written to Van Vechten in 1925, and prefiguring what Ralph Ellison was to say about “invisibility,” Stein “concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the african is not primitive, but he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen.”
17. Stein to CVV, Oct. 26, 1927 (“ideal companion”); CVV to GS, Jan. 8, 1928 (“adores you”), printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV. Essie did write Stein a note from the Riviera to say they were “happily settled,” that “Paul’s nose and throat have already cleared up,” that they didn’t like Nice (“Atlantic City-ish … a sort of toy place”), and that Paul joined her “in thanking you again for that delightful afternoon at your house in Paris” (ER to GS, Nov. 22, 1925, Yale: Stein). Stein had invited the painter Marsden Hartley to the party for the Robesons, but he’d been out of town; he later wrote to tell her that he had met the Robesons and had found him “a most attractive person” (Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein [Knopf, 1953], p. 183; Gallup also reprints CVV’s letter of introduction on p. 179).
18. ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 16, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; Bricktop describes the sensation Baker created in her memoir, Bricktop, written with James Haskins (Athenaeum, 1983), pp. 107–8. Though Essie refers to her as “Josephine,” I’ve found no evidence that they were personally acquainted at this point—though they were later (see note 8, p. 754).
19. ER Diary, Jan. 26, Feb. 9, 18, June 3 (Maxwell), 5 (French society), July 4 (“degenerates”), Sept. 27, 1932, Feb. 24, 1933, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 20, 1931 (Bentley), Yale: Van Vechten; interviews with Helen Rosen and Monroe Wheeler. Rebecca West, on the other hand, recalls Robeson’s being “very much upset” when a man tried to pick him up in Germany (interview with me, Sept. 1, 1982). Essie’s occasional ambivalence is reflected further in her reference to girls at school who fell in love with other girls “with alarming frequency” (ms. of her essay “Divorce,” RA), although she has two young men in one of her unpublished plays discuss homosexuality with insouciance (“Leave Them Alone …,” ms., RA). For discussion of the unsubstantiated rumors that Robeson himself was bisexual, see note 15, p. 631.
20. ER Diary, Nov. 10, 11, 12, 1925, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 16, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten; interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. An interview with Glenway Wescott (“Remembering Cocteau”) by Jerry Rosco is reprinted from Sequoia in The Body Politic, July 1986.
21. Interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985; ER Diary, Nov. 12, 16–19, 1925, RA; ER to Countee Cullen, November 22, 1925, ARC: Cullen. The Robesons also spent an afternoon with the opera star Mary Garden (ER Diary, Nov. 15, 1925, RA). Wheeler told me (interview, Nov. 12, 1985) that he had been with Robeson in New York when a restaurant refused him service, but felt Robeson had grown “used to” rebuffs and had no anger about them; indeed, according to Wheeler, Robeson spoke only in the “kindliest” terms of his treatment at Rutgers. Wheeler, like so many others, was here mistaking Robeson’s decision to keep a calm and modest face about racial slurs for an inner indifference to them. It is not insignificant that Robeson chose never to discuss racial questions with Wheeler. Wheeler and Wescott fell out of touch with the Robesons subsequently, but a charming letter exists from Wescott to PR (undated, but 1927, RA) in which, having heard him in recital for the first time, he wrote to say, “… when I think of America as a place of poetry, it is your intonation I hear—when I think of art we must have in the future—beyond all this fear and muddle—it is your musicianship I compare it with.” G. B. Stern (1890–1973) is best known for her “The Rakonitz Chronicle,” of which the first, The Matriarch, had in 1924 just been published.
22. Interviews with Rebecca West, Sept. 1, 1982; Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. For additional details, of uncertain reliability, about the visit from G. B. Stern and Rebecca West, see ER, PR, Negro, 102–3 (in which she records a much more favorable opinion of Paul by Rebecca West). For later expressions of friendship, see Rebecca West to ER, June 18, 1929, Sept. 25, 1933, RW to ER and PR, Dec. 30, 1932, RA, ER to CVV and FM, postmark June 11, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten. In another letter to the Van Vechtens (Dec. 25, 1932, RA), Essie recounts unexpectedly running into Rebecca West in Brussels and crossing with her to London: “Seems much kinder and gentler than of old. Maybe its because she’s happy.” Essie recorded the same opinion in her diary: “Rebecca seems to have changed since her marriage—not so sarcastic and bitter; she seems more mellow, and friendly, less catty.” In adding, “I actually liked her,” Essie suggests their friendship had not been as pronounced as Rebecca West later remembered it. At the time, West publicly wrote in far more favorable terms about Robeson than she spoke in private many years later (in the New York American, April 25, 1933, she described his performance in Chillun as “thrilling,” and in While Rome Burns, p. 131, Woollcott quotes from a letter he received from Rebecca West soon after she saw Chillun: “Both were monstrously superb. I couldn’t have believed Paul could rise to such heights of poetry.… He seems to be just beginning”).
23. Frank Harris to PR, Oct. 21, 1925; Frank Harris to ER, “Friday 1925,” RA.
24. ER Diary, Nov. 21, 1925, RA; St. Clair Drake, Introduction to the 1970 reissue of McKay’s A Long Way from Home (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970; original ed., Lee Furman Inc., 1937) for biographical information on McKay; see also the excellent discussion in Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, especially pp. 50–58. The fullest account of McKay, with a detailed reconstruction of his relationship with Eastman, is Wayne Foley Cooper, “Stranger and Pilgrim: The Life of Claude McKay, 1890–1948,” Ph.D. thesis, Rutgers, 1982 (since published as Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance [LSU, 1987]). McKay’s letter to PR, undated (“Monday”), is in RA.
25. McKay, Long Way, pp. 266–67.
26. Cooper, McKay, pp. 438–40 (in thesis); ER Diary, Nov. 21, 28, Dec. 1, 3, 1925, RA. ER to Countee Cullen, Nov. 22, 1925, ARC: Cullen. In her printed version (PR, Negro, p. 100) of the meetings with McKay, Essie is blandly true to her initial rather than her revised impression of him: she merely refers to the “eager talk and laughter” that characterized their time together.
27. Claude McKay to “Eslanda,” no date (probably written between December 4 and 9, 1925, since he refers in the letter to “Thursday night’s talk” and it was a Thursday—December 3—when their meeting had taken place), RA.
28. McKay to ER, no date (December 4–9, 1925), RA.
29. McKay to PR, Dec. 14, 1925 (with a postscript written Jan. 14), RA; interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. In his autobiography (Long Way, pp. 267–68) McKay makes some additional nasty remarks about Essie.
30. ER Diary, Dec. 13, 14, 15, 1925, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 6, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. Before leaving Nice, the Robesons had one last dinner party of note: with the black actor and director Rex Ingram, who had recently opened his own studio outside Nice (and given work to Claude McKay as an extra and a reader). Ingram took them to his studio (MGM) and to his villa, where he “played lovely Egyptian records for us” (ER Diary, Nov. 27, RA). The next day, through “Rex Ingram Productions” at MGM, Ingram sent them some “African music” (H. Lachman to PR, Nov. 28, 1925, RA).
31. Sample reviews are in The New York Times, Jan. 13, 1926, the American, Sun, Tribune, Telegram, World, and Post—all Jan. 6, 1926; the Indianapolis Times Star and News—both Jan. 21, 1926; the Detroit News, Jan. 21, 29, Free Press and Evening Times—both Jan. 29; the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 23, 1926; and the Pittsburgh Gazette and Chronicle Telegraph—both Jan. 28, 1926.
32. The royalty statement (up to May 31, 1926) from Victor Talking Machine Co. is in RA. Hergesheimer’s reaction is in CVV to ER, Oct. 27, 1925, RA; Hughes to PR, Oct. 11, 1927, RA. A sample of the favorable reviews of the recording is in Record, March 31, 1926, and Singing, July 1927. Additional information on the success of the records is in ER to Otto Kahn, Nov. 17, 1925, PU: Kahn; and CVV to ER, Oct. 8, 1925, RA. The new recording session is described in ER Diary, Jan. 25, 1926, RA. Paul presented the first records to Carl, and Larry Brown dedicated his “L’il David”—CVV’s favorite—to him (ER to Fania Marinoff, postmarked June 26, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten).
33. ER Diary, Feb. 8 (“a lily”), 9–11, 1926, RA; ER to CVV and FM, postmarked Feb. 16, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten; all the newspaper reviews are from Feb. 11, 1926.
34. ER to CW and FM, postmarked Feb. 16, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten; Milwaukee Journal, Feb. 13, 1926; ER Diary, Feb. 12, 1926, RA.
35. ER Diary, Feb. 13, 14, 1926, RA; ER to CVV and FM, postmarked Feb. 16, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten.
36. Arthur Hornblow, Jr., to PR, May 27, 1926, RA.
37. ER Diary, Feb. 18, 1926, RA; The New York Times, Feb. 19, 1926; CVV to ER, Feb. 16, 1926, RA; PR telegram to CVV, Aug. 12, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten. PR repeated the compliment in public, telling a newspaper reporter soon after that he thought the novel “was excellently written and judicially presents life in Harlem” (Wilmington, Delaware, Press, Oct. 4, 1926).
38. ER Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, March 14, 1926, RA; Boston Transcript, March 15, 1926.
39. ER Diary, March 16–19, April 5, 6, 9, June 1, July 23, 1926, RA; ER Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, April 21, May 21, 1926, RA; John Devereux Kernan (son of the doctor of the same name) to me, June 6, 1982.
40. ER Diary, April 1, 15, 21, 29, 1926, RA. The DeMille film was announced in the press, with PR, Gilpin, and the Club Alabama star, Alma Smith, rumored for the leads (Variety, May 26, 1926).
41. ER Diary, April 6 (diet), 7 (play), 24–25 (play), 26 (hemorrhage), May 5 (doctor), 1926, Sept. 28, Oct. 8, 1925 (fainting); ER to CVV and FM, postmarked July 21, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten.
42. ER Diary, Aug. 17, Dec. 26, 28, 1925 (beau), Aug. 17, 1926, March 3–11, 1926 (separate vacations), RA. Essie may also have been hinting at an affair (and/or marital problems) when she wrote the Van Vechtens, “There’s so much I want to tell you” (postcard, postmarked Jan. 18, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten)—a line more or less repeated three months later (“Have some interesting things to tell you when we get home”: ER postcard to CVV, April 23, 1926, Yale: Van Vechten).
43. ER Diary, March 20, 21, 31 (Barnes), April 2 (Broun), 3 (Kreisler), 8 (Ulric; Knopf), 20 (Jolson), 21 (plays), May 1 (Opportunity), 2 (Mills), 3, 4, 5 (Broun), 1926, RA. Though Essie found Lulu Belle “wonderful,” Paul objected to its stereotypes (Wilmington, Delaware, Press, Oct. 4, 1926). Since Essie kept a diary and wrote voluminous letters—and Paul did neither—there is an inherent danger of assuming that the opinions Essie expressed were those of Paul as well; in the absence of material that can be directly ascribed to Paul, the danger cannot always be avoided, nor the discrepancies in their opinions charted. For a discussion of PR’s turning down Lulu Belle, see p. 83 and note 38, p. 595. Essie found A. C. Barnes “completely impossible,” though “dear” Eric Waldron came home with them and “a lovely chat” saved that particular day. A fair sample of why Essie found Barnes impossible is in the letter he wrote her the next day (April 1, 1926, RA), a high-flown, hectoring, and patronizing discourse on “the negro soul.” Robeson had wanted to give Frank Wilson’s “Sugar Cane” first prize and “Blood” second, but the other judges preferred John Matthews’s “Cruiter” for second prize (as had Essie), reducing “Blood” to third. They gave Zora Neale Hurston an honorable mention (New York Herald Tribune, May 2, 1926, New York World, May 9, 1926).
44. ER Diary, May 8, 23, 30, June 4–15, 1926, RA. Block to CVV, postmarked Aug. 4, 1926, NYPL: Van Vechten; Blanche Knopf to ER, n.d. (but March 1926); CVV to ER, June 24, 1926, RA. In late July, Paul went by himself to spend a weekend in Brewster, New York, with Fitzi and other Provincetowners (ER Diary, July 31, 1926, RA); Malcolm Cowley to me, Nov. 5, 1982; Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982; Slater Brown to me, postmarked Dec. 18, 1982. In her letter, Davenport recounted a sample set-to about money that she once overheard between Paul and Essie: “Essie took care of all money and doled out $5.00 a week to Paul. Once he begged and begged for more. Essie was obdurate. Finally Paul said: ‘Oh be all nigger—give me $10.00’”; variants of that same exchange have been told me by several others, and also dated variously.
45. Tully had been a prizefighter himself, and also a professional hobo; his Outside Looking In is based on hobo legends. Dazey, whose father had written the famous melodrama In Old Kentucky, had co-authored an earlier play, Peter Weston. The colorful lives of both men are detailed in a New York Times article for Oct. 10, 1926. Burns Mantle describes the unsuccessful search for an actress to play opposite Robeson in an article in the New York Daily News, Oct. 17, 1926. According to Fredi Washington, it was the producers’ idea to change her name, for reasons she never understood (phone interview, Feb. 22, 1987; Fredi Washington [Bell] to me, March 4, 1987). Etta Moten Barnett (phone interview, April 18, 1985) is the source for PR and Fredi Washington’s becoming “an item.”
46. Phoebe Gilkyson to CVV, Oct. 15, 1926 (“audience walked out”); ER to CVV and FM, postmarked Sept. 21,1926; Steichen to CVV, n.d., NYPL: Van Vechten; CW to Gertrude Stein, Sept. 30, 1926 (photos), printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV. In his opening night telegram to PR, Frank Dazey cabled, “I cannot tell you how fine you have been in every way about this play. Your acting has been an inspiration. Your very presence has given all the rest of us strength” (RA). In retrospect, Essie blamed the failure on the rewrites done during rehearsals, turning the script into “a rather ordinary popular play” (ER, Ms. Auto., RA). One of the three Wilmington reviews was in fact laudatory, and the other two mixed, with PR winning high praise from all three (Wilmington Morning News, Evening News, and Evening Journal—all Oct. 1, 1926. New York Telegraph, Oct. 2, 1926 (subplot). Mirror, Oct. 7, 1926 (police; subplot); Telegram, Oct. 9, 1926; Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 1926; Percy Hammond’s review is in the Herald Tribune, Oct. 7, 1926, Nathan’s in The American Mercury, Dec. 19, 1926. Nathan’s review was also contrary to the mainstream reaction in that he thought PR less than perfect; his performance was “picturesque” but “he permitted himself an occasional platform manner.…” Among the other leading reviewers, Brooks Atkinson (The New York Times, Oct. 7) found the play “cheap and meretricous,” and he, too, modulated his praise of PR (he “gradually settles down to a revealing portrait,” and, though “perhaps a trifle heavy in his meteoric, cloud-skimming role,” did distinguish himself through his “artlessness”—“His own personality crosses the footlights without dilution”). E. W. Osborn (Evening World, Oct. 7) thought the play “a piece of theatrical sounding brass,” and Time (Oct. 18) dismissed the “triteness” of the plot. More favorable evaluations (along with those by Hammond and Nathan) are in the Evening Graphic (Oct. 7) and the New York Sun (Oct. 7).
47. The reviews quoted on PR’s performance are: New York News, Oct. 7, 1926 (Mantle), Evening Graphic, Oct. 7 (“truly great”), New York American, Oct. (“Samsonic”), Morning Telegraph, Oct. 7, 1926. Life (Oct. 28, 1926) thought he was slow to warm up (whereas The New Yorker, Oct. 16, 1926, oppositely, thought that in the climactic scene he “does an utmost which is yet not sufficient”). Alexander Woollcott thought the play “raucous, vehement, cheap, yet not unentertaining,” but was one of those who welcomed Robeson’s “pushing it aside” while he sang and who thought he towered in stature above the proceedings (New York World, Oct. 7, 1926).
48. Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 6, 1926 (“child”); The Era (London), June 17, 1936 (PR’s view).
49. Wilmington Evening News, Oct. 4, 1926 (Haiti); New York Telegraph, Nov. 28, 1926 (Bosom); Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 207 (Bosom). Fania Marinoff thought only McClendon “any good”: “Bledsoe had a magnificent part. But he got worse and worse” (FM to CVV, Jan. 17, 1927, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.).
50. Variety, Feb. 2, 1927. The story of the Kansas City concert is in Roy Wilkins (with Tom Mathews), Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (Viking, 1982), pp. 71–72, and was confirmed to me in an interview with Aminda (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985. The same version is in Wilkins’s Oral History interview at Columbia University, done in 1962 by William Ingersoll.
51. Wilkins, Standing Fast, pp. 71–72; interview with Aminda (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985.
52. Call, Feb. 18, 25, March 4, 1927. As late as 1932 PR told an interviewer, “Some people expect me to take up Italian opera. In fact, in Philadelphia the people of my own race won’t come to hear me sing because I limit my programs to the Negro folk songs. They would pay to hear me sing opera but not the simple things” (New Bedford, Mass., Mercury, June 16, 1932).
53. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER to CVV, postmarked Aug. 14, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten.
54. The contract with Varney, dated “September 1927” (RA) had, compared with PR’s earlier contracts, rather stiff restrictions on his right to do outside performances of any kind. Apparently there had been a row with James Pond when Robeson decided to do Black Boy, and he had had to consult Arthur Garfield Hayes—precipitating a break with Pond and perhaps alerting Varney to the need for binding terms (ER Diary, Jan. 26, Feb. 1, 1926, RA). ER to Frank Harris, Oct. 12, 1927, UT; ER to Gertrude Stein (one note undated, the other dated Aug. 28, 1927), Yale: Stein; ER to James Joyce, Oct. 13, 1927, PU: Beach; ER postcard to CVV and FM, postmarked Sept. 5, 1927; PR to CVV, postmarked Aug. 18, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten; Patterson, Genocide, ch. 5; interview with Paul Robeson. Jr. (March 3, 1984), for “in one ear.”
55. PR to ER, Oct. 16, 1927, RA.
56. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond; also letters and telegrams courtesy of Diamond.
57. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. Years later PR inscribed in the copy of Here I Stand that he presented to Ida Diamond, “To dear, dear Mama Diamond, with much, much love and many, many thanks for your help and encouragement over the years” (copy courtesy of Freda Diamond). The elevator episode happened some time during the years 1928–30, when the Diamonds lived on 11th Street.
CHAPTER 7 Show Boat (1927–1929)
1. Stein to CVV, postmarked Oct. 26, 1927, printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV; Alberta Hunter diary, Oct 29, 1927, Hunter Papers, NYPL/Schm; La Presse, Nov. 1, 1927; Le Courrier Musical, Dec. 1927; Comoedia, Oct. 31, 1927; The New York Times, Oct. 30, 1927; New York Sun, Nov. 22, 1927; Baltimore American, Nov. 19, 1927; Daily Mail (London), Oct. 31, 1927.
2. On the ms. of Seton’s Robeson, PR wrote, “In Paris at first concert I had a severe cold and was a disappointment. The second concert was a tremendous success.” ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 11, 1927 (quotes telegram), Nov. 17, 1927 (Stein’s comment, as rephrased by Essie), Yale: Van Vechten. Robeson and Stein began to see each other with some frequency (PR to GS, two undated notes [but late 1927]), Yale: Stein.
3. PR to ER, Dec. 10, 12, 1927, RA; multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. According to Jean Blackwell Hutson, Essie’s friend Hilda Anderson was with her when Paul, Jr., was born and, according to Hutson, she and others tried frantically to locate Paul to tell him about the birth of his son (interview with Jean Blackwell Hutson, Sept. 21, 1983).
4. PR to ER, Dec. 10, 12, 1927, RA.
5. Ibid.
6. Montreal Gazette, Sept. 12, 1925 (singing in bathroom); New York Graphic, Jan. 19, 1929 (Johnson); The Afro-American, Feb. 11, 1933; New York Sun, June 16, 1932 (in which Karl K. Kitchen advocates Robeson over Tibbett). The New York Times panned the Křenek opera (April 15, 1928). Essie saw the production of Jones at the Metropolitan twice, describing it as “foul” and Tibbett as “strutting, and cocky, and absurd” (ER Diary, Feb. 8, 11, 1933, RA). Interview with Alan Bush, Sept. 3, 1982 (PR’s voice); Bush, a professor in the Royal Academy of Music from 1925 to 1978, knew Robeson in the thirties and worked with him in 1939 on the Festival of Music for the People. For an additional discussion of Robeson and opera, see pp. 120; 179; 193; 245; note 43, p. 615; note 22, p. 642.
7. PR to ER, Dec. 12, 1927, RA.
8. PR to ER, Dec. 12, 13, 1927, RA.
9. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; PR to Stein, n.d. (February 1928), Yale: Stein; ER to Larry Brown (hereafter LB), Jan. 8, 1928; PR telegram to LB, Jan. 8, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown. In late December, Essie described her health as “at present … about at zero” (ER to Lawrence Langner, Dec. 22, 1927, Yale: Johnson).
10. ER to LB, March 20, 1928; PR to LB, April 19, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown; Ben Robeson, “My Brother Paul” (1934), ms., RA; FM to CVV, Feb. 29, 1928 ($500), CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div. Two years later, Robeson told the English writer Ethel Mannin “He would like to have played the title role [of Porgy] but it was generally considered that he was too big to play a cripple” (Ethel Mannin, Confessions and Impressions [Jarrolds, 1931], p. 159).
In the comparative leisure time after Essie began to improve and before rehearsals for Porgy began, Robeson found time to sing at a birthday dinner for Oswald Garrison Villard, and to participate in a Provincetown Playhouse jubilee to celebrate its thirteenth birthday—and to try to raise money. He probably also went to Theodore Dreiser’s for one of the informal at-homes the writer started in 1928; in inviting Robeson to drop by, Dreiser wrote, “Mostly, these days, when I get tired writing—I put on one of your records—Mt. Zion or Witness or Water-boy—and let your sympathetic voice revive my failing spirits” (Dreiser to PR, March 5, 1928, RA). For more on Dreiser and PR, see notes 34 and 35, p. 652; p. 281; and note 3, p. 665.
The motion-picture nibble involved Frank Dazey, co-author of Black Boy, and his screenwriter wife, Agnes Christine Johnson, in conjunction with the producing team of Asner and Rogers. Dazey warned Robeson, apparently because of his known preference for “art” over “commerce” (see PR to ER, pp. 111–12), to concentrate on ensuring that his first film would be “sound commercially. An ‘artistic failure’ may be all right on the stage, but it helps no one in pictures” (Frank Dazey to PR, July 9, 1928, RA; also Agnes Christine Johnson to ER, June 6, 1928, RA).
11. ER to LB, March 20, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown.
12. PR to LB, April 10, 19, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown.
13. PR to Amanda Ira Aldridge, n.d. (April-May 1928), NUL: Aldridge. Empire News, May 6, 1928 (“feast”); Agate, Times, May 7, 1928. After seeing Paul and Essie together, Ethel Mannin made a comment similar to the sentiment Paul himself had expressed to Aldridge: Essie “gives the impression of managing him as she might a big child who cannot look after himself; and he gives the impression of complete childlike submission to her management” (Mannin, Confessions and Impressions, p. 160). Among the dozens of reviews, the most prestigious of those that expressed doubts about the show (but none about Robeson) include: Daily Sketch, Star, and the Evening Standard—all May 4, 1928—and Queen, May 19, 1928. John C. Payne, the European-based black singer who had known Robeson earlier (see p. 49; note 28, p. 582) and was to continue to play a role in his life (see p. 164), was hired as chorus master of Show Boat (John C. Payne, “Looking Back on My Life,” Negro, ed. Nancy Cunard [London, 1934; reissued in New York by Negro Universities Press, 1969]). Robeson often attended and sometimes sang at Payne’s open-house Sundays in London, a gathering place for European-based black artists.
Alberta Hunter has suggested (Sterner interview) that Robeson was “so powerful” in his role, “a little feeling of jealousy between the stars” developed, plus envy at the way “the carriage people would roll up and walk right up to Paul Robeson’s dressing room”—the tension, she suggested, contributed to the closing of the show. Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook (Alberta Hunter [McGraw-Hill, 1987], p. 102) quote Hunter as saying that the only time Robeson’s voice failed during the run of Show Boat was the night King George V and Queen Mary attended: “Paul started singing off-key and stayed off-key the whole night. Later he cried like a baby.” She also made this poignant comment on his voice: “There was something about [it] … that was most alarming. Sometimes when he’d hum to himself, he’d sound like a moan, like the resonance of a bell in the distance.”
14. New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 3, 1928; Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 6, 1928; Sketch, May 10, 1928; The New York Times, April 15, 1928. Though Robeson in 1928 did sing the lyrics as written—“Niggers all work on the Mississippi”—by the thirties he had changed “Niggers” to “Darkies” and then, by the time of the film Show Boat in 1935, had substituted “There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi; that’s the ol’ man that I’d like to be.” Freda Diamond says she suggested the change, “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’” (for its reception, see p. 214), but her second suggestion for a substitution in lyrics had some unintended results. When Robeson first sang “You show a little spunk” (substituted for “You get a little drunk”) in New York, it was greeted with tremendous applause—but in London with dead silence. Robeson later learned that to the English “spunk” means semen, and promptly changed the line again, substituting “grit” (multiple interviews with Freda Diamond). In regard to Robeson’s changes in his lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II is quoted as saying, “As the author of these words, I have no intention of changing them or permitting anyone else to change them. I further suggest that Paul write his own songs and leave mine alone” (New York Age, June 18, 1949). On the other hand, Dorothy Van Doren recalls Hammerstein’s deep human sympathy with Robeson: “Well,” she quotes Hammerstein as saying on television in response to a question about Robeson’s having “turned Communist,” “if I were a tall, handsome man, member of the All-American football team, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania [sic], a world-famous actor and concert singer, and if I couldn’t get a hotel room in Detroit, I don’t really know what I’d do” (Lakeville Journal, Aug. 1972).
15. ER to CVV, June 14, July 8, 1928, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, “May 1928,” RA; A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook (Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 235. Lady Ravensdale’s guests (as reported in the Daily Sketch, June 16, 1928) included the Duchess of Marlborough, Mrs. Samuel Courtauld, Mrs. Phipps (Lady Astor’s sister), and Lord Allington.
16. Philip Sassoon to PR, June 28, 1928; Barry O’Brien (Wallace’s agent) to PR, Aug. 13, 1928; Edgar Wallace to PR, Aug. 16, Nov. 12, 1928, RA; ER to CVV, June 14, July 8, 1928, Yale: Van Vechten. At the Prince of Wales’s party, the press reported that the King of Spain had been “enormously impressed” with Robeson’s singing, which was part of a general cabaret offered that evening (Sunday Dispatch, June 13, 1928). Robeson told a reporter (Star, Nov. 28, 1929) that he was “tremendously pleased at the prospect of starring in a Wallace play; he had thought The Squeaker “really splendid.” Except for the incidental wish expressed by two or three reviewers to hear Robeson in an expanded repertory (“It would be interesting to hear what the singer could do beyond the modest range of these Dixieland ditties” [Daily Mail, July 4, 1928], the notices of the Drury Lane concert were uniformly excellent. One stands out for raising the question “What is the secret of his mastery?” and for its provocative answer that the “trance” Robeson created in his listeners hinged on more than his greatness as an actor and a singer—“He is a great man, who creates the soul of a people in bondage and shows you its true kinship with the fettered soul of man. We became like little children as we surrendered to his magical genius” (James Douglas, in Daily Express, July 5, 1928).
17. ER Diary, “May 1928,” RA.
18. I’ve pieced together the story of Robeson’s Equity suspension from a combination of newspaper accounts and ms. sources. The latter will be cited in the notes that follow, but the newspaper accounts are too numerous, and I’ve drawn from them too piecemeal, to bear individual citations; suffice it to say that the most important are: New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 19, 1928; New York World, Sept. 5, 18, 25, October 4, 1928; Equity, Sept. 1928; London Times, Oct. 4, 1928; Variety, Oct. 17, 1928; and Star (London), Oct. 3, 1928.
19. ER to CVV, Aug. (?), NYPL/Ms. Div.: Van Vechten; quotes from the conference with Gillmore are in “The Tangled Affairs of Paul Robeson,” Equity, Sept. 1928; ER cable to PR, Aug. 26, 1928, RA.
20. PR, undated cable, RA; Equity, Sept. 1928. Langston Hughes may have played some role in the affair, judging from two oblique references in his letters to Van Vechten: “I may have to see Mrs. Reagan” (LH to CVV, Aug. 18, 1928); “I hope Mrs. Reagan really puts on a show” (LH to CW, postmarked Aug. 28, 1928)—both in the NYPL/Ms. Div.: Van Vechten. Hughes had been working on lyrics and sketches for a Reagan revue at least as early as 1926 (see Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes [Oxford, 1986], vol. I, especially pp. 133, 135, 154).
21. New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 19, 1928; Walter White to PR, Sept. 20, 1928, RA.
22. “Law Report,” Oct. 3, London Times, Oct. 4, 1928; the settlement papers are in RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 5, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten.
23. Ethel Mannin, Confessions and Impressions, p. 160.
24. Fred and Adele Astaire to “Mr. and Mrs. Robeson,” n.d. (1928), RA (the entire note reads: “We would love to come to your party”); Chicago Defender, Jan. 5, 1929; CVV to Stein, Nov. 27, 1928, printed in Burns, ed., Letters of GS and CVV; Walpole to ER, Nov. 27, 1928, RA; CVV to ER, Dec. 12, 1928, RA.
25. Kahn’s registered letter, Dec. 21, 1928, went astray and had to be traced; Otto Kahn to ER, Dec. 18, 1925 (lapse), ER to Kahn, Jan. 20, 1929, RA.
26. ER to Otto Kahn, Jan. 21, 1929, PU: Kahn.
27. Otto Kahn to ER, Feb. 1, June 15, 1929; ER to Kahn, Jan. 21, March 12, May 23, Oct. 7, 1929—all in PU: Kahn (as is a series of letters between the offices of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. and Metropolitan Life detailing the payment of Robeson’s life-insurance premium).
28. Bromley to Otto Kahn, Jan. 31, 1931; ER to Kahn, Dec. 21, 1931, PU: Kahn. Tony Salemmé told me he thought Kahn had been “very mean” in asking them to pay back the loan (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983).
29. ER to Otto Kahn, Jan. 21, 1929, PU: Kahn; ER to LB, Feb. 15, 1929, NYPL/Schm: Brown. When he first opened in Show Boat, Robeson had been worried, not about his own possible boredom but about how to keep the repetitive rendering of “Ol’ Man River” from becoming monotonous for the audience. When Essie arrived in May, she had helped him work out a “nice variety” of delivery (ER to CVV, June 14, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten).
30. ER to Larry Brown, March 6, 1929, NYPL/Schm: Brown; ER to Otto Kahn, May 23, 1929, PU: Kahn (Vienna, Prague). A full set of the Vienna, Prague, and Budapest reviews is in RA; the Vienna reviews frequently referred to him as the “Coloured Mitterwurzer”—an allusion to the famous Viennese interpreter of folk songs. The flavor of Robeson’s press reviews in Central Europe is accurately captured in the description Essie sent Kahn: “I am sure you would think I was exaggerating if I told you what the finest critics in the German, Austrian, Czech, Hungarian newspapers said about his production, the beauty of his voice, and his great artistry, so I would rather you read them yourself” (ER to Kahn, May 23, 1929, PU: Kahn).
31. PR interview with R. E. Knowles, Toronto Daily Star, Nov. 21, 1929 (African-Russian); Seton, Robeson, pp. 48–49 (poverty).
32. ER to Kahn, Jan. 21, 1929, PU: Kahn. PR told Ethel Mannin that the echo in the Albert Hall “worried him and when I asked him if he did not think it a dreadful, dreary place, he laughed and agreed” (Mannin, Confessions and Impressions, p. 159).
33. ER to CVV, postmarked June 4, 20, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten; CVV to ER, June 16, 1929, RA; CVV to Knopf, June 25, 1929, UT: Knopf. I have, as it turns out, inadvertently confirmed my agreement with CVV’s estimate of ER’s first draft by referring to it in these notes as “ER, Ms. Autobiography”—a form of citation I’ve decided to retain as illustrating my own view of it, though the ms. is in fact the first draft of her biography of PR. The contracts, along with considerable correspondence about editorial changes, are in RA. See pp. 139–40 for the effects the published book had on Robeson.
Van Vechten seems to have avoided making further comments on Essie’s ms. (ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 6, 1929, March 25, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten). After Alfred Knopf turned the book down, Essie decided not to bother Van Vechten again about trying to place it, sending it out herself to other publishers. She also decided not to pursue an offer Van Vechten had made to write a preface to the book (ER to Otto Kahn, May 23, 1929, PU: Kahn; ER to CVV and FM, March 25, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten). She instead asked Eugene O’Neill, who turned her down: “… I long ago, in self-defense, made an absolute rule to write no introductions under any circumstances.… I know you will understand” (O’Neill to ER, April 10, 1930, RA). The book appeared without an introduction. (Additional correspondence on the subject, especially between ER and her editor at Harper and Brothers, Eugene F. Saxton, is in RA.) In summarizing the twists and turns, Essie gracefully let Van Vechten off the hook: “But Carlo, my dear, it would take more than a book—or two books—to make me quarrel with you. My friends are my friends, no matter what they do—or don’t do” (ER to CVV and FM, March 25, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten).
34. The canceled film contract, dated Feb. 28, 1929, is in RA; Frank Dazey to PR (1929), RA; Louella O. Parsons’s syndicated column for June 17, 1929, Denver Post; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 5, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten; Nerina Shute, “Robeson Talkie Search,” The Film Weekly, vol. 2, no. 45 (Aug. 26, 1929). The British producer Herbert Wilcox was interested in making a film with Robeson and tried, among other possibilities, to get the rights to The Emperor Jones—but O’Neill refused to relinquish them. Avery Robinson was also involved with PR in trying to put together a film project (AR to PR, Sept. 19, 1929, RA).
35. ER to Otto Kahn, Oct. 7, 1929, PU: Kahn; ER to Larry Brown, March 15, 1929, NYPL/Schm: Brown (dentistry); Sir George Henschel to PR (scheduling voice lessons), Oct. 13, 1929, RA. During these months Essie supervised their move (in late March 1929) from St. Johns Wood to a house in Hampstead, priding herself on her ability to locate the best shops and the best prices (interview with Rebecca West, Sept. 1, 1982; interview with Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985).
36. Philip Merivale to PR, June 6, 1928 (Othello offer); Merivale to ER, June 22, 1928; Maurice Browne to PR, Feb. 14, 1929, RA; PR to Maurice Browne, Oct. 6, 1928, Browne and Van Volkenburg Papers, University of Michigan Labadie Collection (henceforth UM: Browne/Van Volkenburg). Browne had had the financial backing of Dorothy Straight and Leonard Elmhirst (the innovative couple who had founded Dartington Hall), and they were his partners in the theater purchases as well (Michael Young, The Elmhirsls of Darlington [Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1982], pp. 217–19; interview with Michael Straight, April 3, 1985). Daily News (London), Sept. 4, 1929 (contract); ER to Stella Hanau, Sept. 10, 1929, courtesy of Richard Hanau (“very excited”). “We all feel that it will be a great event,” Essie wrote to Kahn (ER to Kahn, Oct. 7, 1929, PU: Kahn). Ten years later Merivale again approached PR about an Othello production, with himself as Iago (Merivale to PR, Feb. 17, 1940, RA). Robeson told a reporter that Othello was “one role I have always wanted to play.… This may be because most of the Othellos I have seen, with blacked faces, have been unsatisfactory to me” (Lantern, Ohio State University, Dec. 13, 1929).
When The New York Times announced that Robeson’s portrayal of Othello would “probably” mark the first time a black had done the role, James Weldon Johnson wrote the Times to say the news came as a surprise to a group of American blacks who had “recently subscribed $1,000 to endow a memorial chair in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre” at Stratford to Ira Aldridge, who had played the role in London and on the Continent, with Edmund Kean (among others) playing Iago (JWJ to The Editor, Times, Sept. 6, 1929).
37. Interview with PR, Ceylon Morning Leader, Sept. 13, 1929 (“illiterate”); reports of the protest meeting, as well as PR’s letter, were widely printed in the English press; among the fullest accounts are: African World, Nov. 21, 1929; Man chester Guardian, Oct. 23, 1929; Liver pool Post, Oct. 30, 1929. Long accounts also appeared in the American press, including The New York Times (Nov. 17, 1929) and the Herald Tribune (Oct. 29, 1929), from which the quote from PR about “ignoring” the incident comes.
38. Seton, Robeson, pp. 50–52; The New York Times, Nov. 18, 1928 (PR visit to Commons), Oct. 24, 1929 (Hughes), Nov. 17, 1929 (other cases of discrimination; hotel reactions); Knoblock to PR, Oct. 22, 1929, RA. In Feb. 1929 the Robesons had been guests of the National Labour Club, Ltd., of which the Rt. Hon. J. Ramsay MacDonald was president (Fred O. Roberts to PR, Feb. 19, 1929, RA). The Robesons’ solicitor, Philip Cox, personally conducted an inquiry at the Savoy and reported to the Robesons that the manager of the Grill Room “denies having spoken to you at all and he says that so far as he is aware no one referred to a colour bar or to any restrictions whatsoever!” (Cox to PR, Nov. 8, 1929, RA.)
39. Contender, Oct. 28, 1929; New Leader, Oct. 25, 1929.
40. PR Diary, Nov. 8, 1929, RA.
41. PR Diary, Nov. 9, 10, 1929, RA. Among the unfavorable critical responses to his Nov. 5 Carnegie Hall concert, Pitts Sanborn (New York Telegram, Nov. 6, 1929) found “excessive reserve” in PR’s performance and suspected “there has been some unhappy tinkering with a naturally easy tone production”; Noel Straus (New York Evening World, Nov. 6, 1929) thought PR showed “a decided loss of bloom and power” and also denigrated the program as “too little differentiated in treatment”; Samuel Chotzinoff (New York World, Nov. 6, 1929), perhaps the most scholarly of the critics, based his objections on technical matters, on PR’s inability to vary his “tone color and musical artifice.” The far more favorable reception of the second (Nov. 10) Carnegie concert was exemplified by The New Yorker’s review (Nov. 16, 1929)—though The New Yorker’s critic sounded a cautionary note that was frequently heard: “… it is a pity for an artist of Mr. Robeson’s gifts and intelligence to appear only as an intoner of racial airs.” Among the few unfamiliar songs Robeson added to his repertoire was “Exhortation” by the black composer Will Marion Cook—but of all the numbers on the program, that one fared the worst with the critics; “… it has a hollow and artificial ring” was one representative comment (Detroit Evening Times, Dec. 7, 1929). “Exhortation” was again excoriated—this time by English critics—when Robeson performed it on his 1930 tour of the British Isles (Birmingham Post, March 9, 1930; Yorkshire Post, March 15, 1930).
42. Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 7, 1929; Chicago Herald and Examiner, Dec. 10, 1929; Rutgers concert program with ER’s handwritten comments (“college yell”); Toronto Musical Courier, Dec. 7, 1929.
43. Evening News (London), July 19, 1928.
44. PR Diary, Nov. 10, 12, 1929, RA. ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 6, 12, 26, 1929, Yale: Van Vechten. Among the highlights of the two months in the States were a reunion with many of the Provincetowners at a kind of vaudeville show (in which PR participated) to raise money to sustain their recent move to the Garrick Theatre (“Fitzi” to PR, Nov. 21,1929, RA; Arthur L. Cams to Otto Kahn, Nov. 25, 1929, PU: Kahn), and a midnight buffet supper at the Otto Kahns’ at which the guests danced till daybreak (Seattle Times, Dec. 14, 1929, report of the party).
CHAPTER 8 Othello (1930–1931)
1. “R.L.” to PR, Feb. 22, 1930, RA; Musical Courier, April 5, 1930 (Paris); interview with PR, Radio Times, April 18, 1930 (agreement about orchestra).
2. Manchester Guardian, March 17; Glasgow Herald, Feb. 18; Daily Express, March 11, 1930. Other papers registering complaints included the Eastbourne Gazette, July 24; The Times, Feb. 14; the Daily Telegraph, Feb. 17; the Bristol Evening Times, Feb. 26, all 1929; and the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, March 15, 1930. The single most scathing (and prestigious) negative came from Ernest Newman, who wrote in the Sunday Times (May 5, 1929) that the spirituals “mostly bore me almost to tears,” insisting their current vogue could be explained by “causes external to music qua music—a sentimental background of emotion derived from our nineteenth century religiosity, dim childhood memories of Uncle Tom and Topsy,” etc.—and took Robeson to task for exercising his gifts on such “wretched material.”
3. Interview with PR, Radio Times, April 18, 1930 (Slavs); ER Diary, Jan. 18, 21, 24, 1930, RA. Paul Bechert reported in the Musical Courier (March 15, 1930) that Robeson’s return to Vienna had been “a feast for all,” and that Robeson was given “a royal welcome.”
4. Musical Standard, March 22, 1930 (Polish musician); Glasgow Citizen, March 3, 1930 (Scottish); Observer, Feb. 16, 1930 (Dahomey; trip to Africa); Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, March 8, 1930 (talkie). While in Edinburgh, the Robesons saw Joe Washington, a young black from Brooklyn Paul knew, who was studying medicine at Edinburgh University (ER Diary, March 9, 1930, RA; also, Washington to PR, Jr., Jan. 26, 1976, RA).
5. By far the fullest account of the history and impact of Borderline is Anne Friedberg’s Ph.D. thesis, “Writing About Cinema: Close Up, 1927–1933,” New York University, Oct. 1983. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (Oxford University Press, 1977), has also been useful, as was my interview with the film historian Jay Leyda on May 26, 1985.
6. Friedberg, “Writing About Cinema”; Cripps, Slow Fade; R. H. (Robert Herring, one of the core group of Close-Up-Pool writers), “Filming with Paul Robeson,” Manchester Guardian, May 22, 1930.
7. Kenneth Macpherson to ER, Dec. 26, 1929 (scenario), Feb. 12, 1930 (acting); Macpherson to ER, March 16, 1930 (“not sustained”), RA.
8. ER Diary, March 20–29, 1930, RA. H. D.’s biographer, Barbara Guest, has identified as Robeson the character Saul Howard in “Two Americans,” a story H. D. wrote in 1930: “His least movement was so gracious, he didn’t have to think things out. Nevertheless with an astonishing analytical power, he did think.… He had a mind, a steadfast sort of burning, a thing that glowed like a whole red sunset or like a coal mine, it was steady, a steady sort of warmth and heat, yet all the time intellectual; he thought not as a man thinks. Paula Howard, his wife, thought more as white folks, consistently, being more than half white” (Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World [Doubleday, 1984], pp. 198–99).
9. ER to CVV and FM, March 16, 20, 27/8 (Montreux), 29, April 22, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten; Bryher to ER, May 26, 1930, RA. Gavin Arthur seems to have stood outside the general friendliness; Bryher thought him “rather lost and silly,” though “nice under all” (KM to PR and ER, n.d. [April/May 1930], RA). Herring, “Filming with Paul Robeson” (honey bees, etc.); Bryher, The Heart to Artemis (Harcourt, Brace, 1962), pp. 250, 262. The good feeling all around is exemplified in the subsequent letters they sent each other. “We missed you so much,” Bryher wrote Essie, and Macpherson wrote Paul, “… thanks for the great week, about which we still grow maudlin on the set, putting on Robeson discs, and pretending it’s him in person at the piano!” (Bryher to ER, April 7, 1930; Macpherson to PR, n.d. [April 1930], RA.) H. D. wrote Essie (n.d., RA), “We talk of you still just as if you left yesterday.”
10. In my own viewing of the film, I was struck by Essie’s strength and assuredness—and by her powerful gaze. Ultimately Bryher gave the acting palm in the film to Blanche Lewin, “a retiring gentlewoman from the British colony whom we called Mouse,” who in her opinion stole the show (Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, p. 262).
11. ER to A’Lelia Walker, April 8, 1930, courtesy of A’Lelia P. Bundles; ER to Eugene F. Saxton, n.d., RA (“Russian-German”); Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, p. 250 (Joyless Street); Bryher to ER, May 26, July 1 (“very enthusiastic”), 23 (“exhibition positives”), Aug. 31, 1930, RA; Macpherson to PR and ER, Aug. 9, 1930 (talkie), RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 3, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten; H. D. to ER, May (?) 1930 (“art”), RA. Initially Macpherson had planned to have a private showing of the completed film for press and friends, and Bryher wrote to Essie “wondering whether it would be possible—without involving great expense—to get a small Negro orchestra for the one performance?” (May 2, 1930, RA.)
12. H. D. to ER, Feb. 10, 1931, RA; Evening Standard, Oct. 20, 1930; Bioscope, Oct. 25, 1930.
13. ER to Light, Feb. 18, 1930; Light to ER, two undated letters (Feb.-March 1930), RA; The New York Times, May 25, 1930 (Trask); ER to CVV and FM, March 25, April 22, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. I am grateful to Christine Naumann of the Paul-Robeson-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, East Berlin, who during my research trip to the GDR sat with me to summarize and translate the 1930 Berlin reviews of Jones; the specific citations quoted from the Berlin critics come from Neue Berliner Zeitung, April 1, 1930, and Berliner Volkszeitung, March 31, 1930. O’Neill wrote Essie, “Jimmy told me Paul knocked them dead! I am tickled to death. I knew darn well he would” (O’Neill to ER, April 10, 1930, RA). Dr. Robert Klein, head of the Kuenstler Theater, gave a luncheon for the Robesons which the playwright Ferenc Molnár and his actress wife, Lili Darvas, attended; Molnár failed to pass Essie’s critical muster—“he’s an ass,” she wrote in her diary (April 1, 1930, RA), “conceited, abnormal, vulgar, a glutton,” though she found Darvas “lovely-looking, very distinguished, aristocratic, intelligent.”
14. ER to A’Lelia Walker, April 8, 1930, courtesy of A’Lelia P. Bundles: (Wooding); Daily Express, June 4, 1930 (“colour bar”); New York Herald Tribune, June 15, 1930 (gateway). The Daily Herald (Nov. 23, 1923) carried a shortened version of the Daily Gleaner interview (Oct. 31, 1932) headlined “Paul Robeson Looks for a Negro Mussolini.”
15. New York American (May 12, 1927) is among the newspapers that reported on PR’s ORT concert; the Jewish Tribune (July 22, 1927) is among the papers that printed a statement by PR linking the spirituals with Old Testament inspiration. Passing through Poland on their 1930 trip, the Robesons met an Austrian Jew who was a Rumanian subject; while serving for two years in the Rumanian Army, he told them, “they made him a servant, beat and kicked him, and … they are really terrible to the Jews.… Poor fellow” (ER Diary, Jan. 22, 1930, RA). For the plight of the Welsh miners, see Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (Macgibbon & Kee, 1960), pp. 103ff.
16. PR to Browne, Oct. 6, 1928, UM: Browne/Van Volkenburg (“afraid”); Browne, “My Production of Othello,” Everyman, May 15, 1930; Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament (Gollancz, 1955), p. 323 (itched); Daily Express, May 21, 1930. Hannen Swaffer, the influential Daily Express columnist, who knew Robeson personally, offered an intriguing anecdote about the reaction Paul and Essie had to Jew Süss:
“Paul Robeson and his wife had one of their little arguments.
“The only thing I found them disagreeing about, hitherto, was Marcus Garvey, the Negro spell-binder, who was in London not long ago. Paul believes in him. His wife does not.
“It was when they saw Jew Süss,’ however, that the other argument began. When they came out Mrs. Robeson said, ‘Now, don’t agree with me this time. I hope you do not think what I thought.’
“‘I thought that Peggy Ashcroft ought to play Desdemona,’ said Paul.
“‘That is what I thought,’ said his wife, ‘but I hoped you would not see it.’ That is how Peggy was chosen.”
Outside of this brief mention by Swaffer, there is no other evidence that I have found of PR’s having any interest in Marcus Garvey (see note 36, p. 623). Swaffer, of course, may have gotten it wrong. In her unflattering portrait of him, Ethel Mannin accuses him of being “savagely intolerant” toward blacks and, specifically, “patronising” toward Robeson (Confessions and Impressions, pp. 153–56). Interview with Dame Peggy Ashcroft (PR, Jr., participating), Sept. 9, 1982 (hereafter Ashcroft interview); and a four-page typewritten memoir of the production which Dame Peggy kindly prepared for me, Aug. 1984 (hereafter Ashcroft Memoir).
17. ER Diary, April 15, 16, 1930, RA; ER to Van Volkenburg, n.d. (May 1930), UM: Browne/Van Volkenburg.
18. Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984.
19. Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Daily Sketch, May 21, 1930 (kissing); The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1944 (“clumsy”). “This in itself made it more than a theatrical experience, it put the significance of race straight in front of me and I made my choice of where I stood” (Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984).
20. Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982.
21. Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984; ER Diary, May 13, 1930, RA.
22. Daily Telegraph, May 20, 1930 (skirt dance). Time and Tide, May 31, 1930 (spiritual); the “terrific row” was told by PR to Vernon Beste and described in a letter from Beste to Ann Soutter, May 14, 1985, courtesy of PR, Jr.
23. Agate, Sunday Times, May 25, 1930. The reviewer for West Africa (May 24, 1930) took particular exception to Robeson’s costume, pointing out that when he was finally allowed to wear the flowing white Moorish robes in the last scene, he not only looked but also sounded his best; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984 (Richardson); Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982 (costume).
24. ER Diary, May 19, 20, 1930, RA; The World (New York), May 21, 1930 (“started off”); Illustrated London News, May 31, 1930 (“little to recommend”); Truth, May 28, 1930 (Browne). Browne and Van Volkenburg were additionally drubbed in the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Telegraph—all May 20, 1930; The Saturday Review, May 24, 1930; Everyman, May 29, 1930; Time and Tide, May 31, 1930; and Sphere, May 31, 1930. Hannen Swaffer recorded a touching episode in his Variety column (June 4, 1930): “I think Paul performed a very kindly act the other night. He called to see me at my flat to ask me to say that the actor who played Cassio [Max Montesole] had been unfairly criticized by some of the critics, who did not know that his part had been cut on the afternoon of the performance, and that, indeed, he had been going out of his way for days to help Robeson, perhaps to the detriment of his own job.” Swaffer also reported that “One London editor walked out during Othello because there were Negroes around him in the stalls.”
25. Week-End Review, May 24, 1930 (“great”); Daily Mail, May 20, 1930 (“magnificent”); Evening News, May 20, 1930 (“remarkable”); News of the World, May 25, 1930 (“prosaic”); Daily News, May 20, 1930 (“disappointing”); Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1930 (“losing”); The New Statesman, May 24, 1930 (“kindly”); Reynolds News, May 25, 1930 (“great soldier”); Time and Tide, May 31, 1930 (“inferiority complex”); Country Life, May 31, 1930 (arrogance); The Lady, May 29, 1930 (“affinity”). Also The Taller, June 4, 1930: “the Moor was not an Ethiopian.” Two additional examples of laudatory reviews are the Daily Telegraph, May 20, 1930 (“a fine presence, a beautiful voice”) and The New Yorker, June 21, 1930 (“a great personal triumph for Paul Robeson”). As The New Yorker’s summary comment indicates, the New York press reported capsule versions of the London reviews and, surprisingly, leaned with inaccurate one-sidedness to the positive view of Robeson’s reception (e.g., Herald Tribune, May 21, 1930). Moreover, the American critics who attended the performance praised him more fully than did their English counterparts (e.g., G. W. Bishop, The New York Times, May 20, 1930; Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1930; Richard Watts, Jr., New York Herald Tribune, May 29, 1930). Pearson’s Weekly, April 5, 1930 (PR’s view of play). It’s possible that Pearson’s misrepresented PR’s views of the play. Either that, or his views soon evolved. In two subsequent statements he sounded less ambivalent. “There are very few Moors in Northern Africa without Ethiopian blood in their veins,” he told The Observer (May 18, 1930), and in a radio broadcast in June entitled “How It Feels for an American Negro to Play ‘Othello’ to an English Audience,” he asserted, “In Shakespeare’s time … there was no great distinction between the Moor and the brown or the black.… Surely most of the Moors have Ethiopian blood and come from Africa, and to Shakespeare’s mind he was called a blackamoor. Further than that, in Shakespeare’s own time and through the Restoration, notably by Garrick, the part was played by a black man” (as reported in the New York Herald Tribune, June 8, 1930).
26. Daily Express, June 4, 1930 (liberating); ER Diary, May 20, 1930, RA; ER to CVV and FM, May 29, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. CVV to ER, June 22, 1930, RA (“Paul’s performance is still with us”); CVV to Knopf, June 27, 1930, UT: Knopf; CVV to Johnson, June 21, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Essie had gotten hold of a pair of opening-night tickets for the Van Vechtens—“All London is trying to buy them”—but they couldn’t get over in time (ER to CVV and FM, March 25, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten). Du Bois to ER, July 10, 1930, RA.
Roger Quilter congratulated PR on his “great achievement” (Quilter to PR, June 22, 1930, RA). Aldous Huxley wrote that, after seeing his “beautiful and illuminating performance,” he often found himself thinking back on it “with the most profound satisfaction” (Huxley to PR, July 5, 1930, RA). The writer William Plomer was so moved by his “splendid Othello, in spite of the handicap of bad costume and lighting,” that he was “hardly in a fit state” to come backstage (Plomer to PR, May 21, 1930, RA). The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was a bit more backhanded in his compliment—“Shakespeare is stilted and hard to believe but you got more out of your part than any actor whom I have seen” (Stefansson to PR, July 6, 1930; RA)—and Bryher was downright truculent: “I see no reason for acting Shakespeare now. Still I forgot these very strong views whenever I was listening to Othello last week and they only emerged into consciousness during the other sections of the play. I hope this is a road to your working in plays linked to modern consciousness.” Bryher also reported in her letter that she had “had a severe shock over Bantu.” She had begun studying the language but had found it “far worse than Chinese.… No wonder Negro Music has evolved such wonderful forms. If you have nine declensions and they are all differentiated by TONES what else is to be expected? I am abandoning sadly all attempts at Bantu” (Bryer to PR, May 26, 1930, RA).
In retrospect at least, Peggy Ashcroft was one of the enthusiasts of Robeson’s performance. Given the fact that he “had to endure great difficulties,” she feels “his performance was indeed very, very memorable” (Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982). “He was a natural and instinctive actor, with imagination, passion and absolute sincerity, and those factors made up for what he lacked in technique” (Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984).
27. Browne, Too Late to Lament, p. 323; Time and Tide, June 7, 1930; Morning Post, June 18, 1930 (salary); ER to CVV and FM, May 29, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Othello drew large audiences on its brief tour, due in part to reduced prices (Sunday Express, Oct. 13, 1930). ER Diary, May 13, June 3, 1930 (Harris), RA; The New York Times, June 8, 1930 (Harris); The Film Weekly (England), June 7, 1930 (film). A telegram from Walter White to PR in RA, March 25, 1930, apparently at the behest of Harris, conveyed the offer, adding, “Miss Carrington, who coached Barrymore, to coach in Diction.” Noel Sullivan, the wealthy San Franciscan liberal who was a sometime patron to Langston Hughes and who Robeson and Larry Brown had stayed with during their 1931 cross-country stop-over in San Francisco, was apparently also involved in efforts to bring Robeson’s Othello to the U.S. (PR telegrams to Sullivan, Feb. 14, March 13, April 14, 1931, Noel Sullivan Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [henceforth BLUC]).
28. The New York Times, May 22, 1930; Times Enterprise (Thomasville, Ga.), May 27, 1930; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; interview with PR in the Leeds Mercury, Nov. 21, 1930: “In New York one is quite safe, but touring the country one visits spots where shooting is a common practice.”
29. ER Diary, June 10, July 7, 1930, RA; ER to CVV and FM, July 8, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Apparently there was also talk of filming Othello, but Robeson turned Browne down on that score. “He feels,” Essie wrote Browne, “as I do, that a film will be made forever, and all its faults will mock us in the future, and so he must be careful.… He says his performance must be much better than it is now for a permanent record, and I think perhaps he is right” (ER to Browne, June 28, 1930, UM: Brown/Van Volkenburg). For a more positive view of Browne, see Maurice Evans, All This … and Evans Too! (University of South Carolina Press, 1987); in reference to the 1930 Othello, Evans merely comments, “the less said about that the better” (p. 43).
30. PR to Ellen Van Volkenburg, n.d. (June/July 1930), UM: Browne/Van Volkenburg; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982.
31. ER Diary, June 12, 30, July 2–9, RA; ER to PR, pencil draft (Nov. 1931), RA.
32. Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul Robeson, Negro (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1930 [published in the United States by Harper and Brothers]). The dedication of the book reads “For Our Son.” William Soskin’s review, the New York Evening Post, June 25, 1930 (“bitter”); also W. Keith in The Star, May 20, 1930; and The Observer, March 23, 1930. Rose C. Field in The New York Times (July 13, 1930) wrote that “In the light of literature, this book will not cast lengthy shadows but as a homely picture of a colorful individual it has much to recommend it.” Langston Hughes in the New York Herald Tribune (June 29, 1930) spent most of his review recounting recollections of Robeson and then ended simply by saying, “Mrs. Robeson has written a chatty, informing and naïvely intimate book that couldn’t have been bettered by the best press agent.”
33. ER, PR, Negro, pp. 132–34. The omitted phrase is in “Changes in Manuscript” sent by ER to her publishers. The woman friend was identified in the English version as “Martha Sampson,” and in the American version as “Marion Griffith”—but was in fact Martha Gruening, sister of Ernest Gruening (later Senator from Alaska). The name changes came about because Gruening, having originally agreed to be quoted, subsequently decided the section put her in an indelicate light, denied the authenticity of the account, and threatened legal action if necessary. To avoid that, Essie substituted the pseudonyms. The dispute is summarized in ER to Saxton, May 8, 1930, RA.
34. ER Diary, Sept. 1, 1930 (discovery of letter), “October, 1930” (“bitch”), RA; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984. According to Marie Seton (in a letter to me, Nov. 23, 1982), when Essie discovered that Paul had given Ashcroft a piece of jewelry, “she went straight out and bought herself (charging it to P) a far more expensive jewelry item.” On three different occasions Essie had expressed her admiration for Ashcroft to the Van Vechtens (ER to CVV and FM, March 25, April 22, May 29, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten). Within six months of discovering the letter, and having had a chance to recover her equilibrium, Essie sent Ashcroft a good-luck telegram for a theatrical opening, and Ashcroft responded with a thank-you note expressing the hope that “I may come & see you one day” (Ashcroft to ER, March 7, 1931, RA). When she subsequently met Essie a few times during the mid-thirties, Essie was gracious to her—and Ashcroft was shocked to hear from me of the bitter things Essie had recorded about her at the time in her diary. When Ashcroft later saw PR in the 1950s and 1960s, their meetings were cordial and warm (see pp. 478–79, 507).
35. ER Diary, “October, 1930,” RA. When a newspaper reporter asked Robeson what would happen if his vocation came into conflict with his “duty to his family,” Robeson is quoted as replying, “Then my family must suffer.” “That’s rather hard saying,” the reporter replied. “It is,” Robeson said. “But it’s the truth. The artist gives joy to hundreds of thousands, perhaps to millions. He consoles, he inspires. He must consider his responsibilities to this multitude rather than to those few” (Daily Herald, July 11, 1930).
PR opened his one-man show at the Savoy in late Aug. 1930, with Max Montesole playing the Cockney role in Jones. It was not well received by most of the critics; they complained that the first act of Jones did not successfully stand alone (The Star, Aug. 26, 1930; Everyman, Sept. 4, 1930; Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 31, 1930), that a “modernist” London theater like the Savoy was an inappropriately “sophisticated” setting for the spirituals (The Times, Aug. 26, 1930), and that Robeson did not sing lieder well (Evening Standard, Aug. 26, 1930). During the ten-week tour of the provinces that followed the Savoy opening, Robeson attempted considerable experimentation with the format. He dropped the lieder, added some Stephen Foster songs, tried substituting a one-act play by Stanley Houghton, Fancy Free, and, toward the end of the tour, seems to have turned to a full-scale vaudeville format, including a ventriloquist, “feats of strength by the Three Cressos,” an impressionist, and a dancing sequence by Marinek and Constance. None of these experiments met with much favor, though the reviews of the tour were somewhat better than those at the Savoy (Birmingham Post, Oct. 21; Birmingham Mail, Oct. 21; Sheffield Independent, Oct. 28, 1930; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 2, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten).
36. PR to ER, Sept. 29, 1930, RA.
37. ER Diary, “October, 1930,” RA.
38. The evidence for Yolande being a sometime actress is from Rupert Hart-Davis to me, June 6, 7, 1987, and in John Payne to Larry Brown, June 3, 1945 (NYPL/Schm: Brown): reporting on a visit from Yolande, Payne wrote, “She looks very well, has been with the ‘Erisa’ Concert party doing Shakespears [sic] plays.…” Ironically, Ashcroft first met Robeson through Yolande’s brother, Richard (a barrister who was later with Scotland Yard and was knighted in 1963)—he and Ashcroft’s husband, Rupert Hart-Davis, were good friends. She only met Yolande once and had no clear impression of her (Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984; Ashcroft to me, Nov. 10, 1987). The one time Fania Marinoff met Yolande Jackson, she described her as “very lovely” (FM to CVV, July 18, 1932, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.). Essie’s prior knowledge of the affair with Yolande is evident in a cryptic reference in her diary on the day she found the Ashcroft letter: “Found a letter from Peggy at the flat. Exactly like the one from Yolande last year.… I dare not think of it till I get away from here—my nerves are too far gone” (ER Diary, Sept. 1, 1930, RA). Alberta Hunter’s description is in an interview with Sterner; Rebecca West’s comments are in an interview with me, Sept. 1, 1982. Marie Seton, in our interviews of Aug./Sept. 1982, added a few details. Seton met Yolande once or twice in the early thirties; she found her uncommunicative and politically conservative, Seton’s point of contact with Yolande was Gwen Hammond, a Canadian whose father was proprietor of the Fortnightly Review and who had acted in a play with Yolande. Hammond’s impression “was that Paul was really profoundly in love with Yolande.”
39. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982 (“great love”); ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1930, RA; ER to Grace Nail Johnson (Mrs. James Weldon), Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Johnson. The breakdown must have been immediate; as early as Sept. 8, 1930, Essie wrote to Harold Jackman, “I have been very ill with a nervous breakdown” (Yale: Johnson).
40. The Robesons had first met Noel Coward in 1926, when they went back stage after seeing his play The Vortex: “The play was trash,” Essie wrote in her diary, “but he emanated a sweetness and personality right over the footlights” (ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1926, RA). ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Judging from the half-dozen letters from Jean Forbes-Robertson to the Robesons, they had a polite, rather distant friendship. Forbes-Robertson later married André Van Gyseghem, who within a few years was to be Robeson’s director.
41. ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1930, RA.
42. ER Ms. Auto., RA (“Frederick Douglass”); interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983. Bricktop, in her autobiography, claims that at the urging of C. B. Cochran, the English theatrical producer, she told Paul that he would be “ruined if he’d married that white Englishwoman”; “I don’t know if I influenced him or not,” she writes, but a few years later Essie told her, “Bricky, thanks so much. You saved my life” (Bricktop, pp. 128–29). For more on Bricktop, see note 4, p. 618.
43. At a showing of the film Hallelujah, Essie decided to let the “very attractive Frenchman” who happened to sit next to her caress her hand and then place it on his thigh until, breathing heavily, he had an orgasm. “I thought I would see just what these nudging men do,” Essie wrote in her diary—“It was remarkable.” ER Diary, Dec. 28, 1930–Jan. 25, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, postcard, Jan. 26, 1931; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 4, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten (illnesses). The night before Paul left for the States, he and Essie went to see Josephine Baker at the Casino de Paris. “She is as beautiful as ever,” Essie wrote in her diary (Dec. 20, 1930, RA), “beautiful body, but is doing the same things she did five years ago. [For more on Baker and the Robesons, see p. 93 and note 8, p. 754]. The show was cheap dirty and stupid, and we were profoundly bored. We could only sit through half the show.” While Essie was in Paris, Clarence Cameron White, director of the School of Music at Hampton Institute, played her parts of his opera about Haiti, Owanga. Two years later, White wrote to Robeson about the possibility of his playing the role of Dessalines in the opera, offering to rewrite it “to suit your voice” (C. C. White to PR, Oct. 10, 1932, RA). Shortly before, Essie had heard the score of Owanga played and thought it “marvellous, thrilling, and wonderful rhythm” (ER Diary, Sept. 27, 1932, RA).
44. CVV to ER, Jan. 12, 1931, RA (Carnegie); ER to LB, March 7, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown. Judging from the programs in RA, PR added the following “art songs” (as the press called them) to his repertory: Beethoven’s “Die Ehre Gottes,” Mozart’s “O Isis,” Schumann’s “Two Grenadiers” and “What Care I Now,” Purcell’s “Passing By,” Borodin’s “A Dissonance,” and Gretchaninov’s “The Captive.”
45. “R. W.” [Roy Wilkins], “Talking It Over,” Kansas City Call, Feb. 13, 1931; Wilkins, Standing Fast, p. 104 (“bumpers”) PR to ER, Jan. 27, 1931, RA. Earlier, Robeson had also complained to Ethel Mannin that interviewers “get it all wrong” when he talked to them (Mannin, Confessions, pp. 158–59). The promoters of the Kansas City concert found themselves short of Robeson’s guaranteed fee of two thousand dollars per concert. Robeson, not wanting to disappoint the audience, finally insisted on singing (Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 21, 1931). Robeson stayed with the Fairfax family in Kansas City, who often played host to visiting black artists (since hotels wouldn’t take them). He took time to listen to a talented young woman, Etta Moten, sing for him in the Fairfax living room and encouraged her to continue with her career (she later toured for years in the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess, and became the wife of Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press). Comparing vocal ranges with Etta Moten, he said to her, “I only have an octave, but it’s the right octave” (phone interview with Etta Moten Barnett, April 18, 1985).
46. ER Diary, Dec. 15, 1930, RA (birthday). There are several short notes from Coward to ER in RA, none revelatory.
47. PR to ER, Jan. 27, 1931, RA; CVV to ER, Jan. 12, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Feb. 4, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten.
48. Harlem Home Journal, April 11, 1931; ER Diary, March 4–April 14, 1931, RA. In her diary Essie refers to possibly having a gynecological procedure performed in New York (for the pertinent entry, see note 15, pp. 578–79). In regard to her friendship with Noel Coward, Essie wrote, “We had begun back in December in London, when I was all upset with Paul. Noel Coward had been marvelous to me, had come often to the flat to talk with me, dine with me, and I had been out with him.… When Paul finished his tour of the provinces and came into town, Noel invited him to the theatre with me and out to supper afterwards. We had a lovely talk, and Paul was impressed” (ER Diary, April 18, 1931, RA). After 1931, Essie’s friendship with Coward cooled, but she did go backstage after seeing Design for Living in New York in 1933 and recorded that she and Coward had “a nice chat” (ER Diary, Feb. 13, 1933). I have found no evidence of a sexual affair. Graham Payn, Coward’s longtime lover and the editor of his diaries, which start in the 1940s, has gone through the earlier material and recalls no reference to Essie Robeson (phone interview with Payn, Sept. 3, 1982). Nonetheless, the oblique reference in PR’s letter (Jan. 27, 1931, RA) leaves the matter in doubt.
49. ER Diary, April 15, 1931, RA; ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 20, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Grace and James Weldon Johnson, April 18, 1931, Yale: Johnson.
50. Era (London), May 27, 1931 (rehearsals); ER Diary, May 10, 1931, RA. O’Neill first had the idea of PR’s doing Yank (Light to ER, n.d.; O’Neill to ER, April 10, 1930, RA) and was enthusiastic enough about it to make sure the Gate Theatre in London, which had done an earlier production of the play, did not revive it at a time and in a manner that might conflict with Robeson’s production (O’Neill to Bright, June 12, 1930, UCLA: Bright).
51. A mixed review for Robeson appeared in New Age, May 21, 1931, and the two negatives were in The Lady (never a fan of Robeson’s), May 21, 1930, and the Sun Dispatch, May 17, 1930: “Cannot Paul Robeson control that lovely voice of his? If he uses it as abandonedly in the future as he did on Monday night, it means that every part he takes will seem like the tragedy of an opera singer, who has missed his vocation, rather than the author’s conception of any other human character.” The Graphic comment on his physique is in May 23, 1931. The many negatives for the play include The Times, May 12, 1930; the Daily Express, May 12, 1930; Stage, May 14, 1930; News-Chronicle, May 12, 1930; Star, May 12, 1930 (“splendidly vital”; “racial consciousness”); also on the racial dimension, Daily Express, May 12, 1931; Morning Post, May 12, 1931; Star, May 12, 1931; Reynolds News, May 17, 1931; Sunday Times, May 17, 1930 (“expressionism”); ER Diary, May 11, 1931, RA.
52. ER to CVV and FM, May 23, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten.
53. Ethel A. Gardner to LB, May 21, 27, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown; ER Diary, May 15, July 27, 30 (Gambs), 1931, RA; Daily Herald, May 22, 1931 (no acting); Daily Express, May 11, 1931 (repertory theater); The Observer, May 10, 1931 (Africa, Russia). An editorial in the Evening Standard (May 22, 1931) expressed concern over Robeson’s announced plans to sing Russian music: “Something more than mere voice or even the greatest artistry is required. For to sing a gypsy song one must be able to interpret the longings and desires of a highly complex, if somewhat savage, nation.”
54. ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA. In her Guggenheim application (RA), Essie described her purposes in going to Africa as a wish to study “the relation between the modern American Negro and the African, and to learn [to] how great an extent our original racial characteristics have been submerged by western culture and transplantation. I hope to find material for a Negro-African play and novel.”
55. ER to LB, March 7, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown.
56. ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 6, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten (PR’s concerts); ER to Grace Nail Johnson, Sept. 6, 1931, JWJ Papers, Yale (Africa); ER Diary, June 11 (hemorrhage), June 15 (nursing home), Aug. 19 (ill), 1931, RA; PR to Dr. Lowinger, Aug. 5, 1931, RA. Essie described living arrangements in Kitzbühel, and also Pauli’s governess, in detail in ER to Noel Sullivan, Sept. 29, 1931, BLUC. Essie left for Austria on Aug. 7. Judging from the full schedule she maintained between Aug. 5 and 7, it seems unlikely she had an abortion while still in London. After entering the sanatorium in Austria, she wrote in her diary (Aug. 19, 1931), “They know what its all about!”—implying, though not specifying, an abortion. One suggestion that she and Paul slept together is in her diary, June 17, 1931, which reads, “Paul came to dinner, and we had a very pleasant afternoon. He remained all night, and we had a delightful talk about many things.” She saw Michael Harrison with particular frequency (ER Diary, June 2, 11, 18, 21, July 25, Aug. 5, 1931, RA).
PR’s occasional concerts during these months did not meet with notable favor, though he did some further experimenting—including readings from the “Uncle Remus” stories, using local trios to perform instrumental music, adding a few Russian songs, and continuing to sing some lieder. In regard to the latter, The Observer’s critic (Oct. 4, 1931) commented: “Sterner control over rhythm is needed in these more formal songs. The improvisatory method of the spiritual is not stable enough to give them complete expression.” On the other hand, Ethel A. Gardner sent Larry Brown encouraging reports of the tour—good houses, with Paul “improving all the time” (EG to LB, July 14, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown; also June 18, 30, July 6, 21, 28, Aug. 14, 25, Sept. 8, 15, 21, Oct. 1, 6, 12, 23, 27, 1931). Gardner made some new records with Robeson (including “Daniel”) and accompanied him during six radio broadcasts, arranging some new songs for him.
57. PR to ER, Aug. 27, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 6, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, “September 1931,” RA; ER to Grace Nail Johnson, Sept. 6, 1931, Yale: Johnson.
58. PR to Freda Diamond, Sept. 7, 1931, courtesy Diamond; ER Diary, Oct. 5, 7 (divorce), 28 (Ashcroft), 1931, RA.
59. ER Diary, Nov. 8 (“strangely”), 10 (“degenerating”), 1931, RA.; EG to LB, Oct. 10, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown (cancellation). Robeson gave the Albert Hall concert a month later, but it was not well received. The Daily Sketch (Dec. 14, 1931) complained that he seemed “in difficulty with his upper notes,” and The Times (Dec. 14, 1931) felt “Mr. Robeson’s voice was not in its best condition.” (EG to LB, Oct. 10, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown).
60. ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA.
61. Robeson had employed Andy at least as early as 1930 (ER Diary, “October, 1930,” RA). They probably met through Larry Brown; in any case, the Andy-Larry Brown friendship predated the Andy-Robeson one (Andrews to Helen Rosen, May 15, 1967, courtesy of Rosen). Helen Rosen confirms that Essie “hated” Andy and strongly suspected that he arranged many of Robeson’s assignations (multiple interviews with Rosen). For more on Andy, see pp. 476, 496.
62. ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931 RA. Edwina Mountbatten’s biographer records that she was “extremely fond” of “Hutch” (Leslie Hutchinson) and gave him “a gold cigarette case engraved with her name and a loving message, and it would have been extraordinary for Leslie Hutchinson not to show this with some pride to his friends” (Richard Hough, Edwina, Countess Mounlbatten of Burma [Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983], p. 125).
63. ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA.
64. Ibid.
65. ER Diary, Nov. 29, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 20, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten.
66. ER Diary, Dec. 5, 8, 10, 23, 29, 30, 1931, RA. For Uncle Tom’s Cabin she tried to enlist Larry Brown as composer, and hoped to interest Jerome Kern and Ziegfeld (ER to LB, March 7, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown).