The Harlem Renaissance and the Spirituals
(1924–1925)
Antonio Salemmé, a promising young Italian-American sculptor, was at work in his Washington Square studio in Greenwich Village one day when a friend dropped by to tell him he had to see “this black actor” doing Emperor Jones at a theater only two blocks away. Tony went to a performance the next day. “It was just a little basement theater,” he remembered many years later. “And for the first time I see this Paul Robeson, sweating, running away from the drums.… I was terribly impressed. I thought, ‘My God, this guy is not only a great actor but he’s beautiful.’ I mean, I saw a statue. All I could think of was a statue.”1
Salemmé went backstage after the performance, asked Robeson if he would pose for him—and offered him 25 percent of the sale price if he sold the statue. Robeson “was very businesslike, because he needed money” (when Tony later met Essie, he found her “twice as businesslike”—“hard-boiled, absolutely adamant and independent. Drove a hard bargain and didn’t make friends”). Robeson said he’d change clothes and go around to Salemmé’s studio for coffee with him and his wife, Betty Hardy. “He arrived as if he’d been there a hundred times before. You could see he was collegiate, perfectly dressed, and you could never guess that he’d been sweating, doing Emperor Jones less than an hour before. He had this presence, which was both dignified and disarming at the same time. He was very much himself, a very strong presence, but not a presence that would embarrass you or that would make you nervous. He made you feel at home. He himself was at home. That’s the point. He had no need to impress, and if he was impressed with you, he didn’t show it, didn’t make any fuss over it. You knew you had met somebody unusual. There was no mannerism of any sort. Absolute authenticity. He spoke slowly, and he took his time about everything. He never looked at his watch. Paul had this air of not going anywhere, and yet he traveled very fast. That’s one hell of a trick to pull off.… He was a born gentleman … deeply a man of good will.”2
Before the first visit was over, the two men had agreed to begin work immediately, and Paul came to pose for two hours nearly every day for months. Tony placed him in a standing position, with his hands upraised (“He has wonderful spiritual qualities.… His hands upraised [represent his] great healing qualities”). “Now, all right, Paul,” Tony would say, “just think of ‘Deep River.’” Paul would slowly raise his arms, lost in concentration, and then would start to sing. The voice was so beautiful, Tony didn’t know whether to work or just to listen. His first impression held—Paul was a man of dignity, patience, and humor, a “self-contained man, highly evolved, a beautifully clear person, withdrawn in the true sense but without being moody. If there was nothing to say, he wouldn’t say anything.”
The intermittent sittings ultimately spread over a two-year period due to Paul’s other commitments. When the larger-than-life-size statue was completed in 1926, its “spiritual” qualities were not widely appreciated, though Salemmé considered the work “the highest achievement of my art.” Philanthropist Otto Kahn came to his studio and sent him a check for five hundred dollars—but did not make an offer for the statue. Ruth Hale (Mrs. Heywood Broun) dropped by and thought the statue so beautiful she cried. The official art world was less enamored. The nude figure stood for a year in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and in 1930 the Sculptors’ Committee of the Philadelphia Art Alliance asked Salemmé to submit it for exhibition. He did—and all hell broke loose. Some worried souls on the executive committee of the Alliance were filled with alarm at the prospect of a naked black man going on public display; the statue was recrated and returned to Salemmé along with a letter explaining that it could not be exhibited because “the colored problem seems to be unusually great in Philadelphia.” Asked by the press to comment, Salemmé said, “We sculptors don’t sell many statues in Philadelphia.” Asked by the Alliance to submit another work in place of the Robeson figure, he sent a plaster Venus.3
While the sittings were still in progress, Paul and Tony would sometimes take a break by going off to see an art exhibit together. Tony became something of a guide to Paul in the unfamiliar areas of painting and sculpture, making distinctions that were new for him between work that was “modernist,” “realist,” or (the term Salemmé preferred for his own art) “classical contemporary.” He found Paul “a quick study”—in art and in everything. According to Essie, Paul, on his side, “always remembered those afternoons in the cool quiet galleries. Pictures began to mean something to him.” He absorbed additional ideas from the many artists and critics who periodically dropped by Tony’s studio—like the sculptor Arthur Lee, who had just won the Widener Medal, or the painter Niles Spencer, or Monroe Wheeler (future curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and his lover, the writer Glenway Wescott.4
Before long, the Salemmés and the Robesons began to socialize. Betty Salemmé and Essie became friendly, but Tony never grew close to Essie, continuing to find her too much “on guard” for congeniality—she had “no light touch, no give and take. You didn’t become fond of Essie. You became fond of Paul. You got to love Paul.” Yet Tony, at least in retrospect, was somewhat sympathetic to Essie’s wariness: “Paul was adored by all the women he ever met. Women absolutely swooned over Paul. Paul was pursued, and sometimes caught. You’d have to be a saint not to fool around with a few women who absolutely adored you. And Paul was a saint, in a way. He was never boastful. He was never a show-off. If a woman made it possible for him to go to bed with her, you never heard anything about it. You only—you had to see it. If you didn’t, you’d never know it.”5
Salemmé did see it, and did know it: not only did Paul and Niles Spencer’s wife become lovers for a time, but so did Paul and Betty Salemmé. Tony and Betty (who was a famed beauty) had always agreed on an unconventional marriage—indeed, another of her lovers had bought Tony his studio. The couple’s close friend Monroe Wheeler sixty years later described Betty Salemmé’s enthusiasm for Paul as “boundless,” and Wheeler came to share her view, growing “terribly fond” of Paul (on the other hand, he was put off by Essie’s “extreme ambition”).6
While recognizing that Paul would never be confined to a monogamous union, Tony Salemmé nonetheless believed he could not have found a more suitable wife than Essie. “Paul spent money easily, he wasn’t penny-pinching, and money went right through him. And so Essie had all the difficulty. She was almost motherly toward him. She fed him. She defended him. He needed Essie to protect him, to sign papers and to call up somebody and make a loan or something like that. Essie didn’t make him famous. She merely did some of his business … and she was very patient, because she must have guessed that he was attractive to a lot of women. So that was a lot for Essie to bear, wasn’t it? She had her dignity. She didn’t want to fuss about it enough to lose face. And Paul appreciated Essie. He wasn’t going to give her up. He was very smart. He knew people and knew values. And he had a steadiness in himself, which was automatic. He wasn’t flighty. I don’t think he’d be secure with another woman. He was secure with Essie. That was where he was smart.”7
Paul and Essie took their new white friends up to Harlem and introduced them to their new friends among black movers and shakers. During the summer of 1924, the Robesons became friendly with Gladys and Walter White (the zesty, charming NAACP officer), who were themselves moving to the center of an interracial network of artists, cultural brokers, partygoers, and political activists. Also part of that circle were Grace Nail Johnson and her husband, James Weldon Johnson, lawyer, songwriter, editor, diplomat, cultural critic, educator—and the NAACP’s executive secretary. Johnson held patriotic and integrationist views that put him at odds with the separatist black leader Marcus Garvey and his followers, and also with some of the attitudes of W. E. B. Du Bois, who placed more emphasis than Johnson did on the need to cherish what was unique in black life (rather than assimilate into white culture).8
Robeson would in later years move strongly in the direction of Du Bois, but in the twenties he found the sentiments of James Weldon Johnson congenial. Interviewed by the Herald Tribune in July 1924, Robeson told the reporter that he didn’t “in the least minimize what I am up against as a negro,” but nonetheless stressed opportunities rather than obstacles:
I may be a bit optimistic, but I think if I’m a good enough actor … I can go pretty far. All actors are limited by their physique. A slender five-footer can’t play a giant; a buxom heavyweight lady can’t play an ingenue. Well, I’ve got limitations, too—size and color. Same limitations as other actors have, plus …
For the present, Robeson believed,
I can do no better than to do my own work and develop myself to [the] best of my ability.… If I do become a first-rate actor, it will do more toward giving people a slant on the so-called Negro problem than any amount of propaganda and argument.
The Tribune, of course, was a white-run paper addressed to a white readership, and it might be assumed that Robeson tailored and toned down his views accordingly. Yet he sounded at least as moderate and optimistic when discussing his opinions with a leading black publication—A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s Messenger. On the subject of racial barriers, Robeson was quoted in The Messenger as saying, “What are the opportunities? Just what I will make them … I honestly feel that my future depends mostly upon myself.” And in an interview he gave the following year, he is quoted as saying:
The stories my old dad used to tell me [about slavery] are vivid in my memory; but—well, those bad times are over. What we have got to do is to go forward. There is still too much wild talk about the colour question; some of it wounds me deeply, but I don’t let myself get morbid about it. I conserve my energies for my work as an actor. I realize that art can bridge the gulf between the white and black races.…9
In stressing art as a solvent for racism, Robeson was articulating a characteristic position of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals: racial advance would come primarily through individual artistic achievement, not as the result of political pressure and polemics. As he emphasized in his interview with The Messenger, “it is by proving our artistic capacity that we will be best recognized … it is through art we are going to come into our own.” To the minimal extent he was political at all in these years, he looked to individual cultural achievement—not organized, collective action—as the likeliest channel for the advance of the race. As he told The Messenger, “So today Roland Hayes is infinitely more a racial asset than many who ‘talk’ at great length.” (Even Du Bois, who in the twenties was already growing disenchanted with the ideology of art and moving toward the vehicle of direct political protest, continued to sound this common renaissance note of cultural elitism, continued to stress the central role a “talented tenth” would play in advancing the fortunes of the race.) Yet unlike many renaissance figures, Robeson referred at least once in the twenties (as he often would ten years later) to “the culture of ancient Africa” as being, alongside contemporary black achievements, part of the proof of the “artistic stature” of black people—as indeed “above all things” something “we boast of.”10
Moreover, if he had decided not to “get morbid” about racial slurs, he did not deny that he had felt deeply wounded by them. He even occasionally acknowledged their toll to his white friends. Tony Salemmé recalls that Paul would “sometimes arrive looking depressed.” When Tony asked him what was wrong, Paul would quietly answer, “Oh,… I went to see an old friend of mine uptown, and I had to take the freight elevator.” Once in a while in the telling Paul would get “a little angry,” but he had long since learned to keep a lid on his feelings, especially in front of whites, and especially since Salemmé glibly counseled him to take “a philosophical attitude,” to “recognize” that little could be done at the moment about racial prejudice.11
The Robesons’ friendship with the Whites and the Johnsons soon deepened. On one of their evenings together, White confided that his new novel about racism in a Southern town, Fire in the Flint, might be filmed, and if so he wanted Paul in the leading role. Soon after, he sent them a copy. Ma Goode read it first and pronounced it “wonderful.” Essie came home the following week to find Paul “crying and cursing over Walter’s book … a supreme compliment, for Paul never cries except when deeply moved. He says the book is very fine and also thrilling.” Many literary contemporaries, including Sinclair Lewis, agreed, and Carl Van Vechten, the white writer who was rapidly becoming a spur and spokesman for the black literary renaissance, immediately asked Alfred Knopf, White’s publisher, for an introduction to the writer. After the two men spent several hours together, Van Vechten wrote a friend that Walter White “speaks French and talks about Debussy and Marcel Proust in an offhand way. An entirely new kind of Negro to me.” White reported to the Robesons that Van Vechten and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, “both feel the novel will make a marvelous play, and suggested Paul would be the ideal man to cast as the hero.” “Things look interesting,” Essie wrote in her diary.12
In January 1925 the Robesons themselves met Van Vechten and his petite, vivacious wife (whom Van Vechten always referred to as “Marinoff”) for the first time at the Whites’, where the other guests included the Johnsons; Julius (“Jules”) Bledsoe, the young black baritone; James Weldon Johnson’s brother J. Rosamond Johnson, the musician and singer; and George Gershwin, who played Rhapsody in Blue and some of his songs for the group. It was a “wonderful time,” Essie wrote in her diary—the first of many with the Van Vechtens and their gifted circle. Van Vechten’s genius, disputed in all else, is unchallenged in his role as host; pink-faced and white-maned, exotically gowned in a cerise-and-gold mandarin robe—resembling, in the words of one frequent guest, “the Dowager Empress of China gone slightly berserk”—Van Vechten would pass happily from guest to guest, assuring them that he felt blessed by their talented presence. A shrewd estimate of Van Vechten comes from Lincoln Kirstein, who first met him in 1926: “Carl was a dandy.… He understood elegance, a contemporary elegance, in a way no American before him conceived it.… Carl saw the fantastic in the ordinary, discovered the natural flair, verbal brilliance, humor and pathos in the so-called ‘ordinary’ life of Harlem. He was of the tribe of Beau Brummel, of Byron, of Baudelaire, and of Ronald Firbank.… Carl adored cats. To me, he always seemed to be an enormous, blond kitty; sometimes he purred; he could scratch. Sometimes he just blinked like a cat whose mysteries and opinions are privately wise. Like a cat, he preferred the cream of life.… He did not mind being stroked.…”13
Two weeks after their initial meeting, the Robesons were back at the Van Vechtens’ for another party; this one again included Gershwin, Alfred Knopf, the Johnsons, the Whites, Jules Bledsoe—and also Otto Kahn and dancer Adele Astaire (whom Essie described as having “the friendliest grin and is so sweet and loveable”). Van Vechten wrote a friend that “seven Negroes were present” at the party, “all of them interesting one way or another,” and that Robeson “singing spirituals is really a thrilling experience.…” The glamorous gatherings alternated between the homes of the Van Vechtens and the Whites, interspersed with somewhat more sedate teas at the James Weldon Johnsons’. Before long the Van Vechtens became the chummily familiar “Carlo and Fania” (she is “quite the sweetest thing I know,” Essie wrote in her diary, adding in praise that both the Van Vechtens “seemed devoted” to Ella, their maid). Van Vechten reported to his friend Gertrude Stein, “I have passed practically my whole winter in company with Negroes and have succeeded in getting into most of the important sets.… One of my best friends, Paul Robeson … is a great actor and when he sings spirituals he is as great as Chaliapin. I want you to meet him.”14
Essie carefully noted in her diary the star-studded lists of guests she and Paul now met regularly on their round of parties. At the Van Vechtens’, Theodore Dreiser told Paul he had seen The Emperor Jones six times, and took him aside for a long talk. At the Whites’, the panoply of glamour included Sherwood Anderson, Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, Prince Kojo Touvalou Houenou of Dahomey (nephew of the deposed King and a graduate in law and medicine from the Sorbonne, active in publicizing French colonial injustices—Essie found him “a typical African in appearance, but charming and cultured and interesting”), Roland Hayes, the novelist Jessie Fauset, René Maran (the French West Indian author of Batouala who had won the Goncourt Prize in 1921), the poet Witter Bynner (“tall and clumsy and very friendly. I never saw anything quite so funny and froglike as he attempts to do the tango with Gladys [White], and his attempts at the ‘Charleston’”), Louise Brooks (she “was very late and I couldn’t wait for her, but … Paul said she was very conceited and impossible”), and the red-haired singer Nora Holt (Ray), half Scottish, half Negro, known for her dalliances. (“Her trail is strewn with bones,” Van Vechten wrote H. L. Mencken, “many of them no longer hard”). Essie “couldn’t bear her,” called her “a red hot mama,” and announced that “If she ever went after Paul I’d eat her alive, and I meant it, and they know I did.”15
Sometimes a group would go from a party to catch a midnight show at a Harlem hot spot like Club Alabam’ or to dance to Fletcher Henderson’s big band, the Rainbow Orchestra. The covey of celebrities among whom the Robesons now found themselves was further filled out by introductions to the likes of George Jean Nathan, Laurence Stallings, and Mark and Carl Van Doren at Blanche and Alfred Knopf’s home, and to Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen at the James Weldon Johnsons’. Paul agreed to sing at a reception given to celebrate Cullen’s graduation from NYU—as he sometimes also did at parties—but despite that, Essie, never one to pull punches, found the NYU affair “a fearful bore.” Occasionally she even found one of the parties distasteful. The “little gathering” put together by Eric Waldron, the young black short-story writer who was a staff member on Opportunity, struck Essie as “a beastly bore—some little insignificant talkative Negroes” (the evening was redeemed only by a quick stop-off at Gladys and Walter White’s house en route to the gathering for a fashionable smoke).16
Between the rounds of parties with their new acquaintances, Paul and Essie somehow found the time and energy to maintain ties to old pals like Bud Fisher and Minnie Sumner (who remained Essie’s closest friend, as well as chief seamstress). The Robesons also kept up with friends they had made among the Provincetown Players, especially Jimmy Light, and occasionally Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill. Essie was particularly fond of Agnes (whom O’Neill divorced a few years later)—“I surely find her more sweet, unaffected and charming every time I see her.”17
One night in July 1925 Gene O’Neill, accompanied by the Province-town actor-stage manager Harold (“Gig”) McGhee and his wife, Bert—who were to become lifelong friends of the Robesons—went up to Paul and Essie’s apartment on 127th Street for what turned into a marathon night of partying. It began with cocktails at the Robesons’, dinner at Craig’s (the popular hangout for Harlem literati), followed by a trip to see Johnny Nit dance at the Lincoln Theater. Then, to cool off from the hot night, it was back to the Robesons’ for more cocktails (“Gene talked a great deal”) and an hour of Paul singing (Gene “seemed to enjoy it so much”). Following that respite, they headed out again, this time to catch the midnight show of Eddie Rector’s band at the Lafayette. Then it was on to Small’s cabaret, where Gene and Essie danced together and Gene treated orchestra and waiters to drinks. He “was royal,” Essie wrote in her diary, apparently not knowing that up until that night O’Neill had been on the wagon for the few months preceding, and that his evening tour of Harlem would set him off on a new two-week binge. Essie paid Gene her supreme compliment—a “regular guy”—and at 5:30 a.m. the party moved on to the Vaudeville Comedy Club; since “there wasn’t much doing,” they didn’t go in, instead returning to the Robesons’ apartment after stopping off for ice cream on the way. Back home, Gene “talked by the hour—all about his thoughts on ‘Jones,’ on Paul, on London, himself, etc.—he is simply fascinating.” Among the fascinating things he said was that he had a new play in mind—about a “loveable gambler”—and also wanted to write “another play about the ‘Emperor Jones’ leading up to where ‘Emperor Jones’ starts in.” After breakfast, the party broke up at 9:00 a.m.18
By 1925 Bert and Gig McGhee began to figure prominently among the Robesons’ friends. Given the proximity of the McGhees’ apartment to the Provincetown Playhouse, the two couples would together catch the theater’s latest offering—they were especially delighted with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience—or socialize with fellow Provincetowners. One night they dropped into a party at the home of set designer Cleon Throckmorton, but the party was a bit too “wild” for Essie’s taste, and they didn’t stay long—she “was shocked to see Mrs. Throckmorton and a guest in as near no clothes as I’ve ever seen a woman in on or off stage.” When Jimmy Light directed S.S. Glencairn, a cycle of O’Neill sea plays, he had them down to the Provincetown to see it, and on opening night of Desire Under the Elms, Light had the O’Neills and Robesons to dinner before the premiere (Essie thought the play “marvelous, powerful, real”); the round of post-theater parties went on until 4:30 a.m. The Robesons had taken to the Village scene, and now that the McGhees were becoming intimates, they talked over the possibility of actually moving there, though nothing came of the idea.19
The Robesons were also becoming close friends with the Rumanian-Jewish-gypsy writer Konrad Bercovici and his common-law wife, Naomi, a painter and sculptor deeply involved as well in the Modern School movement. The two couples had met through Walter White, whom Bercovici had gotten to know while writing a series of articles for the World on the Ku Klux Klan (when the articles appeared, a bonfire was set on the Bercovici lawn). The Bercovicis’ place had become a gathering spot in New York City for artists and intellectuals: “We like simple, fine people with vision,” Naomi told a reporter. But their landlords and neighbors did not equate “fine” with “Negro,” and the Bercovicis, rather than give up their friends, had to move several times before finally settling at 95 Riverside Drive.20
The Bercovicis had their share of famous guests, and the Robesons met most of them—including Georges Enescu, the Rumanian violinist and composer, and Zuloaga, the Spanish painter, who told Essie he would rather paint her than the famously beautiful Gladys White. (Of course he would, the Bercovicis’ daughters, Rada and Mirel, remarked playfully many years later—“Essie was a Cardozo.”) Usually the Robesons would spend the evening alone with the Bercovicis and their children, Paul often singing to them. Their nineteen-year-old son, “the redoubtable Gorky,” might enliven an evening by raging against the falsity of modern life or, as on one night, by taking on the Provincetown Players as “a lot of poseurs.” The daughters do not remember Essie fondly—“cold and very aggressive”—but in Paul, according to Rada, “you sensed depth … a presence.… It was dark, vast, with shadows.” With Mirel, age seven in 1925, Paul developed special rapport: the two would go off to eat ice cream, ride the double-decker bus, and have “long conversations about life”; he made her feel that they “were on the same wavelength.”21
Paul continued to put in public appearances, perform an occasional concert, mull over suggested new projects, and meet with agents and entrepreneurs. But for a year following his Provincetown triumphs no single offer caught his full attention. The hiatus gave him time for making further professional contacts and for the creative idling characteristic of him. During the year’s “lull,” he spoke at the Rutgers Freshman Banquet in February 1925 (“It was quite an honor for them to want him,” Essie wrote in her diary), appeared as guest of honor at the Rutgers Junior Banquet at the Hotel Martinique in March, and sang at the NAACP’s annual conference in 1924 (although he occasionally put in a benefit appearance for the NAACP, he was not connected in any vital way to the organization; as late as 1927, he had not even met Mary White Ovington, chairman of the board). He also did some part-time football coaching at Rutgers for a few weeks in the fall of 1924, and gave a concert there in December. (Meeting one of Paul’s old professors, who commented on his modesty in the face of accelerating fame, Essie laughingly replied that Paul was still “just a big boy.”) Paul had opened in a brief revival of Jones at the Provincetown only two nights before the Rutgers concert, but they had let him go off to keep the engagement. “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, the company’s manager and mother confessor, engaged Gilpin to replace Paul for the night, and advertised his appearance; but (according to Essie) “Gilpin couldn’t learn the lines in time,” so the performance was canceled.22
Paul sang a few other concerts during these same months, both in public halls and at private parties in wealthy white homes. His most notable public appearance—his first formal concert, arranged by the socialite Mrs. Guy Currier—was in early November 1924, at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Paul and Essie were nervous about the outcome—even though Harry T. Burleigh, the distinguished black composer and arranger of spirituals, lent a hand in running over the music with Paul before the concert. It went well: the ballroom was packed, the applause generous. Paul’s private concert, and the reception following, at the Clarence C. Pell home at Westbury, Long Island, dazzled Essie: the Pell limousine met the train, the Pell home was “lovely,” and the Pell guests “delightfully appreciative” of Paul’s program of spirituals.23
Late in 1924 Essie concluded arrangements with the black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux for Paul to star opposite Julia Theresa Russell (Micheaux’s future sister-in-law) in the movie Body and Soul. Micheaux, a former Pullman porter, had begun making movies in 1917 and wrote, produced, and directed some thirty-five films, all independently made, all with black casts for black audiences. Essie was delighted to get contract terms from Micheaux that called for 3 percent of the gross after the first forty thousand dollars in receipts and a salary of one hundred dollars per week for three weeks. In this, his cinematic debut, Robeson carried off his double assignment as a fast-talking, pleasure-seeking, corrupt pastor and his utterly sincere, good-natured brother with equal assurance—projecting through both portraits a powerfully physical, charismatic film presence. Immediately afterward, in January 1925, Robeson reopened in The Emperor Jones for a limited run on Broadway. A new string of well-wishers trooped backstage to offer congratulations, including Roland Hayes, who “raved about the show.”24
Another visitor backstage was Richard J. Madden of the American Play Company, who was also O’Neill’s literary agent. He told Paul that Sir Alfred Butt, the English producer, had seen the show and was interested in negotiating for a London production. Essie was “thrilled” but cautious; only a few months before, she had followed up George Jean Nathan’s suggestion of a German production of Jones directed by Max Reinhardt, only to have the prospect fall through. Alfred Butt, however, to the Robesons’ delight, immediately opened detailed negotiations through Madden. Within a week of their initial contact, Madden and Essie had come to tentative terms that she rightly considered “splendid”—three hundred dollars a week, double ocean-liner passage over and back to Europe, six weeks’ guarantee, and 5 percent of the gross over one thousand dollars. Essie, understandably, was “dying to sign the contract,” but negotiations continued to spin out for a while longer. In the interim, Paul kept busy sitting for an oil portrait by Mabel Dwight and for a sketch by the Bavarian-born artist Winold Reiss, performing a scene from Jones on the radio, consulting Marshall Bartholomew and Paul Draper about vocal problems, and paying frequent visits with Essie to the concert halls and theaters (Essie found Walter Hampden’s Othello a “beastly bore”).25
By far the most significant professional development in these months was Paul’s reconnection with Lawrence Brown, whom he had met back in 1922 when in England playing Voodoo. Larry had already earned a considerable reputation as Roland Hayes’s accompanist and as a superlative arranger of spirituals. Arriving back in New York in March 1925, Larry found Paul “the same serious, quiet and pondering young man” he had known earlier and started going over to the Robesons’ apartment to sing and play for Paul. Within a few weeks, they decided to work together professionally, and drew up a formal contract that called for joint billing and divided up receipts equally, with 10 percent going to Essie as their agent. When Van Vechten first met Larry in 1925, he was bemused. “He does his best to avoid me,” Carlo complained to Essie; “everything considered, his antipathy for me is somewhat inexplicable.” Not really, Essie wrote back, not “when you think of his black and white complex—which is very strong.” Larry, unlike the Robesons, did not trust whites, or particularly enjoy their company. As a gay man, moreover, he may have had additional grounds for distrusting Van Vechten, who, it was widely rumored, had a special penchant for black men.26
Paul and Larry began to practice together nearly every day, “making wonderful progress” from the start, convincing Essie that “they are a perfect combination.” She had also become convinced, during her march through the concert halls, that Paul was the equal of the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin in dramatic power (though not in experience and confidence)—an opinion that annoyed Paul, who said she sounded like “a silly, adoring wife.” Not even Chaliapin, Essie persisted, had Paul’s indefinable power to “come out onto the stage and immediately enslave an audience before he had opened his mouth. None had his graciousness, his simplicity, his friendliness with an audience.” Given the uncertainty of theatrical employment, especially for a black actor, Essie began to cast about for a way for Paul to establish a separate career as a concert artist, so that he could alternate between the two professions as opportunities presented themselves, without being solely dependent on either.27
The way, she decided, was through the spirituals—those very songs she herself had earlier dismissed as “monotonous and uninteresting” before hearing Paul interpret them. (Paul, in turn, credited Larry Brown with having “guided me to the beauty of our own folk music and to the music of all other Peoples so like our own.”) Essie believed Paul’s regal, “typically Negro” physique, his “unspoiled Negro voice … full of over and undertones,” and its “peculiar husky coloring,” enabled him “through some deep racial instinct” to identify more completely with the spirituals than could other black singers of the day, whose overly cultivated technical training and repertoire of European art songs kept them at a distance from those “simple songs.” She believed Paul, on the other hand, could bring them to a large interracial audience and to the level of art. Avery Robinson, the white Southerner who had transcribed the Afro-American work song “Water Boy,” confirmed Essie’s judgment; hearing Paul sing that song, Robinson told him he was the only person who sang it exactly as the black chain gang had when he first heard it.28
The hoped-for opportunity opened up through Carl Van Vechten. Larry and Paul performed the spirituals at the Van Vechtens’ home one night, and (according to Essie) “Carlo was amazed and just begged for more and more songs,” raving “about Paul’s voice and Larry’s lovely arrangements of the songs.” Others at the Van Vechtens’ that night included Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, the actress Mary Ellis, and the Knopfs, and all expressed delight; Mary Ellis called Carlo the next day to say it had been “the most thrilling evening she had ever spent.” Carlo immediately offered his considerable help in arranging for a public concert. With that backing, Essie went straight to the Provincetowners. They gave her, free of charge, their Greenwich Village theater—its small space perfect for an intimate concert—and Stella Hanau and Katherine Gay, who did publicity for the Players, contributed their services as well, securing newspaper advertisements on credit and defraying the costs of printing circulars, posters, and tickets. Within a week of the evening at the Van Vechtens’, a concert date was announced for April 19, 1925. Larry Brown made up a program and coached Robeson “as if,” in Paul’s words, “we were children he was teaching” (and, he added, “we slept like children all week, not to catch a cold”). Carlo, with additional support from Walter White, personally talked up the concert and mailed out circulars to his friends. On April 18, the day before the recital, Heywood Broun devoted his column in the New York World to touting it.29
Partly as a result of Broun’s friendly press-agentry, “the word” (in the recollection of the Brouns’ son) “was all over smart New York that anyone who failed to hear this new young singer had missed out on the music event of the year.” By 7:30 p.m. on the night of the concert, even standing room had been sold out, and an excited crowd gathered on the sidewalk clamoring for seats. The capacity audience inside the theater exceeded the fire limit, and hundreds were turned away; part of the overflow stood in the wings offstage, where they could hear if not see the performance. The Provincetowners themselves turned out in a body, dressed, like much of the audience, in formal evening clothes. Paul and Larry were understandably nervous. Millia Davenport, the Provincetown costume designer, remembers that Paul—“the bravest man I ever knew”—stood in the wings “paralyzed with fright,” the back of his tuxedo “soaked through”; “with all my strength I [pushed him] onto the stage—to make history.”30
A roar of applause lasting three minutes greeted them and punctuated every one of the sixteen numbers thereafter. At the end of the concert, the reception was thunderous, with curtain calls and an additional sixteen encores following one after another until finally, exhausted and happy, Paul and Larry brought the evening to a close by having the houselights turned up. “Everybody was wildly hilarious,” Essie wrote in her diary, “and we are very, very happy.” The Robesons went off to the house of Donald Angus, an intimate friend of Van Vechten’s (and rumored to be his lover), to celebrate—along with Carlo and Fania, the James Weldon Johnsons, the Walter Whites, the Salemmés, and a half-dozen other friends. Robeson felt deeply indebted to Van Vechten; two years after the concert, on his way to perform in Europe, he wrote him, “Every time I appear in a strange capital I shall think of that first concert and your unselfish interest and thank you all over again. Because it was you who made me sing.”31
The next day the critics confirmed the event as a triumph—and for once were able to specify why. The concert marked the first time a black soloist—rather than a choral group, such as the remarkable Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had preceded Robeson by sixty years—had devoted an entire program to spirituals and secular songs. Earlier, artists like Roland Hayes had included one or two groups of Afro-American songs in a concert, but the music had been considered—by many blacks, too—as unsuited to a full evening’s presentation because of its supposed monotony. Yet, as arranged by Larry Brown (and, in one of the four sets, by H. T. Burleigh), the actual range of the songs proved a revelation, the “wistful resignation” of “By an’ By” or “Steal Away” alternating with the “joyously abandoned” “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho,” the “proud, tragic utterance” of “Go Down, Moses,” and the “sardonic, secular humor” of “Scandalize My Name.” As one critic remarked with astonishment, the emotional stretch of the material included “infinite pathos, infinite gaiety, a sort of desperate wildness and an occasional majesty.” Brown was praised for the skill of his arrangements, Robeson for the power of “a luscious, mellow bass-baritone” which lent the songs “an overwhelming inward conviction.” In summing up the general enthusiasm, one reviewer hailed Robeson as both “the embodiment of the aspirations of the New Negro” and as “destined to be the new American Caruso.” Du Bois sent Robeson and Brown a succinct note: “May I tell you how much I enjoyed the fine concert last night. It was very beautiful.”32
Occasionally a reviewer linked Robeson and Roland Hayes as both singing the spirituals with “parlor manners,” but far more typical was the way Carl Sandburg drew a distinction between the two: “Hayes imitates white culture and uses methods from the white man’s conservatories of music, so that when he sings a Negro spiritual the audience remarks, ‘What technic; what a remarkable musical education he must have had!’ When Paul Robeson sings spirituals, the remark is: ‘That is the real thing—he has kept the best of himself and not allowed the schools to take it away from him!’” Indeed, a number of critics commented on “the deep racial quality” Robeson manifested—on the combination of simplicity and emotional fervor he managed to convey. To the press, Robeson explained his affinity for the songs as a natural one going back to his childhood: he had “unconsciously absorbed the manner of singing spirituals as they should be sung” while participating in services, with a mostly rural Southern congregation, in his father’s church. In taking the songs to the concert stage, Robeson was reported as saying he did not have to force his interpretation. He just let his memory “carry him back to that little church where he had heard them sung so often.”33
Carl Van Vechten predicted that Paul’s success would inspire a rash of new performers singing the spirituals, and he advised Essie not to delay in planning a tour—“For the moment he has the field to himself and consequently will be well known before these and many others get started.” Van Vechten’s prediction proved accurate. Within six months, five new books relating to the spirituals appeared, most notably Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Spirituals, containing Rosamond’s arrangements of sixty-one spirituals and Weldon’s forty-page preface, which favorably commented on Robeson’s interpretations (both Paul and Essie thought the book “wonderful,” and Paul would “pore over it, humming”). In October, Rosamond Johnson and the tenor Taylor Gordon gave several concerts utilizing material from the Johnsons’ book, and the baritone Jules Bledsoe, too, included a group of spirituals in his Town Hall concert on October 17. (“This certainly is a spiritual winter,” Van Vechten commented.)34
“I couldn’t possibly ask for anything more,” Robeson told a newspaper reporter. Yet more was to come—immediately and in profusion. The concert proved a watershed event in Robeson’s career; his reputation was propelled into a stratosphere of acclaim where it would remain for some two dozen years. There was an immediate demand for more concerts, and an immediate assault from concert bureaus eager to arrange them. The agent Howard Kropf wanted to take Paul over for exclusive management and offered as enticement a ten-thousand-dollar advance—astonishing for that day. But Paul and Larry decided instead to go with James B. Pond; his commission (45 percent) was high and he offered no advance, but they liked him personally and he guaranteed Paul time off to appear in plays. They also signed an exclusive one-year contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company for “not less than three double-faced records,” and in July began traveling out to Camden to record and do remakes. Paul found time, too, to sit for pictures for Vanity Fair; to perform, for fees ranging from $100 to $250, at private homes (at the famed Metropolitan Opera star Frances Alda’s, the bathtub was filled with cracked ice and champagne, and she served them lobster salad, sandwiches, cake, and liquor “with her own hands”); and to appear at select public events—at the annual Equity dinner, at the Jewish Women’s Committee at the Hotel Astor, and at the swank St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal, the wealthiest nonwhite church in the city (“the best type of colored people,” Essie called them). They were concerned in advance about how the St. Philip’s congregation would respond to mere “slave” songs, but the reception was enthusiastic.35
They also made time to keep up their social life. It ranged in appeal from an evening given by the sculptress Augusta Savage at Villa Lewaro, the mansion of the glamorous party giver A’Lelia Walker (Essie thought it “quite the most stupid party I’ve been to in a long time”) to Chaliapin’s farewell concert at the Met, after which the Robesons went backstage; Chaliapin patted Paul on the back, said he’d heard of him and wished him good luck. At an Opportunity dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant, Essie disapprovingly noted the presence in their party of Zora Neale Hurston, whom Essie liked “less and less the more I see of her.” She didn’t specify why, but perhaps Hurston had already articulated the position she later publicly demonstrated, that formal “concerts” of black spirituals, with fixed prosceniums and passive audiences in the tradition of European culture, were a disservice to and distortion of the original visceral, communal spirit of the folk from whom the songs had arisen.36
Within a month of the Greenwich Village concert, Robeson was honored jointly with Walter White at an Egelloc Club dinner and invited with Larry Brown to attend and sing at one of the periodic luncheons the Dutch Treat Club (a gathering of artists and authors) gave for celebrities, making them honorary members in the process. Robeson and Brown did the entertaining, but were not elected to membership—though the third guest that day, the British explorer Major Forbes-Leith, who had recently completed an eight-thousand-mile motor trip from England to India, was inducted. A front-page article in the World the next day revealed that the club’s membership had been split and that several were threatening to resign over the insult to Robeson and Brown. (Two months before, Robeson had been denied service at the Algonquin, even though his host had previously notified the management that Robeson would be coming as a guest.) The Dutch Treat’s president, George B. Mallon, admitted that it was the “almost invariable” custom to confer honorary membership on guests invited to lunch. He had not done so with Robeson and Brown, Mallon claimed, because he had heard rumors of opposition and didn’t want to risk embarrassing them with a less-than-unanimous response of “aye” from the membership. The night before the press storm broke, Essie had written in her diary that Paul and Larry had “had a wonderful time” at the Dutch Treat Club and had been “treated beautifully.” Possibly they hadn’t told her about the snub. Possibly they hadn’t considered it a snub: Paul told the World he had not felt “slighted” for the simple reason that he hadn’t known precisely what the Dutch Treat Club was—let alone the nature of its peculiar customs; he had thought he “was going down to sing some songs for some newspaper men.”37
Still waiting to hear whether plans for a London production of Jones would go through, Paul mulled over a few other theatrical offers that had come his way. The most tempting was from the producer David Belasco, who wanted Paul, Florence Mills, and Charles Gilpin as the leads in Edward Sheldon’s new play Lulu Belle, which he had co-authored with Charles MacArthur. A dozen years before, Sheldon’s Salvation Nell had made him a theatrical lion; he had since been immobilized by a painful case of degenerative arthritis, yet had continued to write plays (though of late with no great success). After mulling over Belasco’s offer, Paul decided to turn Lulu Belle down, concerned about its “stereotyped format.” The play, a melodrama about Harlem street life, opened in February 1926 with a huge cast, featuring the Robesons’ good friend Edna Thomas—and with both Leonore Ulric and Henry Hull (in the role that had been offered to Robeson) playing their parts in blackface (according to James Weldon Johnson, their makeup and dialect were “beyond detection”). Lulu Belle became a much-discussed hit, helping to propel additional swarms of whites into Harlem nightlife in search of “the real thing.”38
In June 1925 the London production of Jones was finally set, after some protracted negotiations in which O’Neill had held out for Robeson’s playing the lead over the original London producer’s choice of Charles Gilpin. Robeson was additionally delighted because his old friends Jimmy Light and Gig McGhee were, respectively, chosen to direct and stage-manage. The Robesons booked passage to sail in early August for a September opening at the Ambassadors Theatre. In the meantime, they tried to set their financial situation to rights: a glowing set of future prospects wouldn’t pay the accumulated bills at hand. They talked over the problem with Carl Van Vechten. He sounded out his friend, the writer Ettie Stettheimer, about the possibility of arranging a loan (Carlo assured Ettie that Paul was “one of the great artists, as great in his way as Nijinsky, Chaliapin, or Mary Garden. Please heed this!”), and suggested at the same time that Paul and Essie again approach Otto Kahn—and gave them some specific tips on how to proceed.39
Essie immediately got off a judiciously worded letter to Kahn. “My husband, Paul Robeson,” she wrote, “is at the brink of what we hope will prove to be a very remarkable career. If you could see your way clear to act as his patron and back him for two years, we would surely try to make you never regret it in any way—in fact we would earnestly try to make you feel very proud to have helped him.” Essie outlined Paul’s immediate prospects—The Emperor Jones in London, the contracts with James Pond and Victor records, the one-third interest in Salemmé’s statue—and, offering these as security, asked Kahn for a five-thousand-dollar loan. The money, she wrote, would be used for four purposes: to clear up their widely scattered debts (fifteen hundred dollars), to send Larry Brown south while they were in London “so he can collect new songs, compose new songs, and study Negro music, so we will have our material all ready when we begin our concert tour,” to publish and copyright all the songs Larry had already composed and arranged (fifteen hundred dollars), and “to be able to live until August” and “study voice all he can” (five hundred dollars). Given the prospects that lay immediately ahead, Essie argued, they “could easily repay the loan at the end of two years,” and, to demonstrate their “enormous possibilities,” she suggested that Kahn allow her husband and Larry Brown to sing and talk with him at any convenient time, perhaps “at the home of our mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, or at any place you might designate.”40
Kahn forwarded the letter to Van Vechten, with an appended note: “I know that you are much interested in Paul Robeson.” In response, Van Vechten urged Kahn to see Robeson. Kahn knew that Van Vechten’s recommendations were not automatic: on another occasion he had urged Kahn to turn down a writer’s appeal for financial help with the tart comment “There are altogether too many people in Harlem with ‘mouths full o’ gimme, hands full o’ much obliged’”—an attitude that “should be discouraged.” Kahn arranged to have his private yacht, the Oheka, waiting at the foot of the East 23rd Street dock on June 28 to pick up the Robesons, the Van Vechtens, and Larry Brown and bring them to the Kahn estate at Cold Spring Harbor.41
Because of bad weather, a closed car was substituted for the yacht (and Donald Angus substituted for Fania), but otherwise the day went off without a hitch. Robeson and Brown performed for the Kahns and their half-dozen assembled guests; Kahn provided a tour of the grounds, and, after a long, private talk with Paul and Essie about Paul’s career, announced that he had decided to give him the requested loan. The very next day, Kahn sent a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to be secured by a pledge of the Robesons’ five-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy and his contracts with Pond and Sir Alfred Butt in England; in a covering note Kahn assured them of “the pleasure it gave me to see you both yesterday and of my great and appreciative enjoyment of Mr. Robeson’s singing.” Essie immediately provided Kahn with the stipulated collateral, thanked him for his generosity—“It has all happened so quickly that we are still stunned by our good fortune”—conveyed Paul’s offer to sing for the Kahns “at any time you wish him to do so—without charge,” opened (with Van Vechten’s help) a checking account at the Harlem branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, and requested from Kahn, and got, the second installment of twenty-five hundred dollars. Van Vechten counseled Essie henceforth to write all her business letters on a typewriter and to patronize a clipping bureau, while apologizing for “beginning to sound like a grandpa, always offering advice. Remember that it is the advice of a friend. Reject it when it does not meet your approval. The friendship will remain.” In a postscript he added: “I have it in mind to write a letter to Mr. Kahn telling [him] that I have suggested to you—quite unnecessarily, as the idea had already occurred to you—that you keep silent in regard to his kindness at lunch as far as Harlem was concerned—for the present, to prevent his office from being deluged with indigent coloured folk. Further, that in case any such appealed to him, he should feel free to call me up and consult me. Further, I would say frankly that Paul Robeson is the only person, white or black, whom I know at present in which I could make this special plea.”42
Now that money was no longer a pressing problem, the Robesons moved toward their European trip with assurance. Essie spent the exuberant final few weeks before sailing in shopping and making arrangements, while Paul prepared for a batch of concerts under James Pond’s new management. Essie loved to shop but also to find discounts, and went along with Bert McGhee to the Little Jack Horner Thrift Shop to outfit herself with a green beaded gown, a black satin evening wrap, a negligee, and a rose dinner dress—all “wonderful bargains,” “cheap as dirt”; she had them cleaned and took them to Minnie Sumner for alterations. Paul was indifferent to clothes—to most things material—but Essie took him off to Rogers Peet for made-to-order shirts, to Wallach’s for a steamer cap and ties, and to Racitis for a suit.43
Pond arranged for half a dozen concert engagements in the month before departure. Paul and Larry gave two in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where the Cabots “were especially nice” to them—though one of the other socialites annoyed Essie: “She was so stupid, had never heard of O’Neill nor the Emperor Jones, and wanted Paul to tell her the plot of Jones!” Paul and Essie managed one quiet day together in New York—dinner at the Automat, a stroll down Broadway, a bad movie—and then left for two more concerts in Provincetown, on Cape Cod (both sold out), and a final one at Spring Lake (Paul, rarely punctual, made the train by a second, giving Essie “hysterics,” but “the ocean breezes,” she wrote Carlo, calmed their nerves). So did a visit with “Shag” Taylor, whom they stopped off to see in Boston after the Provincetown concerts. Taylor, a black graduate of Harvard, ran a famous drugstore on Tremont Street, where he dispensed support and advice to several generations of black students in the area. Shag hired a car, drove them all through Cambridge, and “as usual gave us Boston and the store.”44
Back in New York, Paul and Essie had a farewell meal with Jimmy Light and the McGhees (who left for England two weeks before them to begin preliminary work on Jones), had dinner with the Brouns and Walter Whites, and spent one of their last evenings with the Van Vechtens: Fania gave Essie some felt flowers she’d brought back from Paris, and Carlo gave them a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. Up until the eleventh hour before departure, Minnie sewed for Essie and Paul posed for Salemmé. The day before sailing, Paul and Essie raced around to the Victor Company to pick up an advance of $725 for his four (double-sided) completed records, and to Pond’s to get paid for the Provincetown and Spring Lake concerts.45
August 5 dawned to a steady rain. Last-minute confusion with trunks and taxis made everybody nervous, and their two cabs got inadvertently separated; Ma Goode, “like a trooper,” made it down alone with the big trunk and somehow got it on the deck of the Berengaria. They made the boat by ten minutes, but then, waiting for the tide, it delayed pulling out for an hour. Minnie, the Salemmés, Walter White, Larry Brown, and a half-dozen other friends waved them off. Five telegrams and letters arrived. Mrs. Guy Currier sent a steamer basket. The stateroom was beautiful. The dining room was beautiful. The food was wonderful. Even the waiter was wonderful. They were off—jubilantly.