The Apex of Fame
(1944–1945)
J. Edgar Hoover was among the few Americans unimpressed with Robeson’s triumph in Othello. The director had already received numerous reports from FBI agents in the field that Robeson had: lent his name to a dinner at the Hotel Commodore in New York “celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Red Army”; included in a concert several songs originally “sung by Loyalist soldiers during the Spanish Civil War”; made “a speech pertaining to the common man”; been seen in the company of “a wealthy woman [Louise Bransten] extremely active in Communist Party Front organizations”; “pointed out the similarity of the Russian serfs prior to the 1860s and the Negro of the United States”; recorded “the new Soviet National Anthem.” By 1943 J. Edgar Hoover was quite prepared to believe the opinion of his agents that Robeson “is a confidant of high officials of the Party” and “is undoubtedly 100% Communist.”1
Hoover aside, letters of congratulation poured into Robeson’s dressing room, awards multiplied, requests for personal appearances avalanched. “I take pride in your reflected glory,” wrote William L. Dawson, the black Congressman from Illinois, as the box-office line for Othello stretched in double file out to Broadway and the advance sale within two weeks of opening night climbed to an astronomical (for Shakespeare) hundred thousand dollars. Old friends joined in the chorus of praise. Walter White wrote Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, “It is one of the most inspiring and perfectly balanced performances I have ever seen,” and added that “the playing of a Moor by a Negro actor” “has given [blacks] … hope that race prejudice is not as insurmountable an obstacle as it sometimes appears to be.” Even Van Vechten, recently estranged, wrote Essie to say, “Paul’s success is terrific. I think it will turn into a record for a Shakespeare run, judging by the advance sale.” Noel Coward, who had been out of touch for some time, sent a telegram inviting the Robesons to a cocktail party. W. E. B. Du Bois requested a photograph of Robeson in costume for publication in the journal Phylon.2
Among the major honors that came Robeson’s way in the immediate aftermath of Othello, and from a host of different constituencies, were the Abraham Lincoln Medal for notable services in human relations, election (along with Sumner Welles and Max Lerner) to the editorial board of The American Scholar, a testimonial dinner tendered by the national black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, the First Annual Award of Kneseth Israel, the Donaldson Award for “outstanding achievement in the theater,” a citation from the National Negro Museum “for courage and devotion to the ideal upon which American democracy was founded,” the Page One Award from the New York Newspaper Guild (for his “distinguished performance in Othello”), and election (along with twenty-one others) to the Chicago Defender’s Honor Roll of 1943 for having “contributed most to mutual goodwill and understanding” in the battle against racial prejudice. He was also the subject of an article in The American Magazine entitled “America’s No. 1 Negro” and the recipient (only the tenth in twenty years) of the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for the best diction in the American theater. Willa Cather, Samuel S. McClure, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Theodore Dreiser were honored at that same AAAS ceremony—“a really dreary demonstration,” Dreiser wrote H. L. Mencken afterward; “the best bit of the whole show was Paul Robeson—an outstanding personality who in my judgement dwarfed all the others.”3
His acceptance of honorary membership in a number of CIO-affiliated unions produced some fallout. The Tribune reported Robeson saying during an interview that the CIO “is by far the most progressive section of the labor movement. It goes on record as giving Negroes equal opportunity for jobs and upgrading.… On the other hand … there is great discrimination in A.F. of L. unions.” It was not an attitude AFL President William Green appreciated. He remarked at the AFL convention that Robeson and others were hindering the Federation’s efforts to organize black workers by throwing their weight behind “a rival labor body.” When Robeson continued to accept memberships in CIO unions and to encourage black workers to enlist in its ranks, the AFL accelerated its attack on him. The Central Trades and Labor Council, the ruling body of the AFL, demanded he either resign his honorary membership in two CIO unions (the Longshoremen and the Municipal Workers) or face expulsion from Actors’ Equity Association, an AFL affiliate. When Robeson refused, Equity declined to press charges.4
Along with honors came appeals—would Robeson sit for a portrait, read a script, listen to a song, contribute an essay, issue a statement, sign a petition, meet a delegation, join a rally, support a strike, protest an outrage, declare, decry, affirm, affiliate—polite requests and peremptory demands combining to create an unmanageable deluge. Robeson’s inclination was too often to say yes, and even with Yergan and Rockmore running interference, he sometimes took on more than his energy could accommodate, leading to temporary exhaustion and retreat. After a whirlwind of political appearances in behalf of Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944, he told Yergan, “… I must have been somewhere every five minutes.… [It] just murdered me.… Of course it was worth it, you know, for the elections.…”5
As it was, he managed—while playing seven performances of Othello a week—to put in a nearly nonstop string of appearances, lending his voice time and again against fascism, racism, and colonialism, and constantly reiterating the same themes: the first requirement for realizing a democratic America was to win the war against fascism; the best hope for blacks lay in an alliance with progressive (CIO) forces in the labor movement; the continued denial of full rights to black Americans was “the argument of fascism”—the exaltation of a “Master Race”; the fact that blacks continued to be “hurt and resentful” was “for good and sufficient reasons”; the remedy was for blacks everywhere to continue to demand the abolition of the poll tax, the end of segregation, the right of equal access to upgraded jobs; the Soviet Union had already provided a concrete example to the world of how racial prejudice could be eradicated within a single generation; the right of African peoples to self-government had to be high on the agenda of the postwar world, necessitating a worldwide coalition of progressive-minded people to combat the “new imperialists” who were using the argument of caution in dismantling the colonial systems as a blind for maintaining the status quo. Given the continuing bigotry, the seemingly endless blasting of hopes, Robeson marveled over and over again at the patience and patriotism of his own people: “They may not be allowed to vote in some places—but they buy bonds. They cannot get jobs in a lot of places—but they salvage paper and metal and fats. They are confronted, in far too many places, with the raucous, Hitleresque howl of ‘white supremacy’—but they are giving their blood and sweat for red, white and blue supremacy.”6
Of Robeson’s public efforts, his participation in the campaign to desegregate major-league baseball brought him special satisfaction. The pressure created by the long-standing arguments of the Negro Publishers Association and other groups for the desegregation of baseball was heightened in 1943 when Peter V. Cacchione, Brooklyn’s Communist councilman, introduced a desegregation resolution. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the high commissioner of baseball, agreed to let eight black newspapermen and Robeson attend the annual meeting of the club owners in December 1943 and plead their case. Rumors spread that Landis was preparing to recommend that the owners immediately sign black players, but Landis had avoided the issue before, allowing the negative arguments of Larry McPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to carry the day.
Robeson took along to the meeting two friends, William Patterson and the Chicago-based Ishmael Flory (who was executive secretary of the left-wing Negro People’s Assembly and managing editor of its newspaper, The New World)—but both were kept cooling their heels in the anteroom. Robeson, however, was allowed to address the club owners. “I come here as an American and former athlete,” he told them. “I come because I feel this problem deeply.” For twenty minutes he used his own history to make an impassioned appeal, citing his earlier experience in college football and his current performance as Othello as arguments against the assumption that racial disturbance automatically follows desegregation. When Robeson finished, the owners applauded him vigorously but did not ask questions. Speaking to the press later, Landis reiterated for the record his previous position that no law, written or unwritten, existed to prevent blacks from participating in organized baseball—again tossing the issue back into the laps of the owners, who were not prepared, for the moment, to move. Still, a step in that direction had been taken: for the first time the owners had listened in person to the pleas of black representatives—and applauded them. As the New York Amsterdam News put it, the meeting “had a cleansing, if not wearing, effect.” Although the color barrier in baseball was wobbling, it would not fall until two years later, when Branch Rickey would ease Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers’ squad. Four years after that, Jackie Robinson was to take the stand in Washington before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and disparage Paul Robeson to the country.7
Robeson’s efforts in behalf of Ben Davis, Jr., were more immediately successful. Davis, a Communist, decided to run for a City Council seat in a campaign marked by a black alliance with progressive labor; this was precisely the coalition Robeson had been urging, and he enthusiastically lent support to the campaign. At the Golden Gate Ballroom two weeks before the election, he performed a scene from Othello in an all-star Victory Rally organized by Teddy Wilson, the pianist and band leader, at which an ecumenical range of black performers—Coleman Hawkins, Hazel Scott, Billie Holiday, Pearl Primus, Mary Lou Williams, and Ella Fitzgerald—contributed their talents. On election night, bedlam broke loose in the Harlem Lincoln-Douglass Club when the official count confirmed a Davis victory, and Robeson joined the celebrants at Smalls’ Paradise, happily partying away the night. (In thanking Robeson for his help in the campaign, Teddy Wilson wrote him, “You have endeared yourself more than ever in the hearts of our people.”) Davis’s victory marked a point of considerable recovery for the CP’s Harlem Section from the loss of support following the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. As early as the preceding April, Ben Davis had reported cheerfully that the Harlem Section “is beginning to break records. We have doubled our membership (securing 400 new members in three months).” With the Harlem CP back up to Popular Front levels and Ben Davis’s victory symbolizing the Party’s renewed ability to forge alliances with influential Harlem trade-unionists and intellectuals, there was reason for Davis and Robeson to believe (in Davis’s words), “We’ve just begun.” An FBI informant reported soon after Davis’s victory that Robeson would run for Congress on an independent ticket in 1944, but there is no evidence he had any impulse in that direction.8
Life was not all hardworking politics and performing. During the forties Robeson was a regular at Café Society, where he would often drop by after the evening performance of Othello, often with a group of friends. It had been opened in 1938 by Barney Josephson as the first mainstream nightclub in a white area to cater to a mixed-race audience (earlier “Black and Tan” cabarets had been in black neighborhoods), and soon became a gathering spot for the left. Café Society also pioneered in offering a career boost to a host of performers—including Lena Home, Hazel Scott, Josh White, Jimmy Savo, Pearl Primus, and Zero Mostel. But even as Robeson enjoyed himself, he was aware of the fledgling performers struggling in front of the Café Society microphone against the double obstacle of stage fright and noise from the boisterous clientele. Lena Home remembers well his soothing encouragement; Pearl Primus recalls how he came up to dance with her in order to calm her jitters; and Sarah Vaughan, about to be drowned out by the din of clinking glasses and laughter, was rescued when Robeson stood up in the audience and silenced the crowd with a polite “Ladies and gentlemen, quiet, please! I came to hear the young lady sing.” Even in Café Society there were occasional racial incidents. Barney Josephson remembers the night an out-of-town couple, seeing Robeson dancing with a white woman, called Josephson over to the table to protest. He told them that if they didn’t like it they could leave. They did. Uta Hagen remembers that one particularly ugly incident caused Paul to “really lose his cool” in public for the only time she could remember. A white Southerner at another table—“drunk as a skunk”—called out to Paul that his name was also Robeson and said, “Your daddy was probably one of my daddy’s slaves. You probably belong to me.” According to Uta, “Paul jumped up and started shouting, ‘You Bastard!’” and Barney Josephson, who was very fond of Paul, intervened.9
The affection Robeson inspired, the extent of endearment felt for him, was made clear in a mammoth celebration of his forty-sixth birthday on April 16, 1944, which also commemorated the anniversary of the Council on African Affairs. Under the auspices of the Council, twelve thousand showed up at the Armory at Thirty-fourth Street and Park Avenue—four thousand were turned away for lack of space—for five hours of entertainment and tribute. The list of performers was a veritable who’s who from stage, film, music, and radio—including Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Jimmy Durante, Mary Lou Williams, and Duke Ellington. Dozens of letters and telegrams poured in from various walks of life and from around the world: Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, Sidney Hillman (president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers), Edward G. Robinson, Earl Browder, Babe Ruth, Eugene Ormandy, Vito Marcantonio, Pearl S. Buck, Andrei Gromyko, W. C. Handy, Harry Bridges for the Longshoremen’s Union, Canada Lee, Walter Damrosch, Oscar Hammerstein II, André Maurois, Rockwell Kent, Charles Boyer, Theodore Dreiser, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Thomas W. Lamont, Lillian Hellman, and, from the playwright Marc Connelly, perhaps the most memorably eloquent message: “I suppose by that dreary instrument, the calendar, it can be contended that you are the contemporary of your friends. But by more important standards of time measurement, you really represent a highly desirable tomorrow which, by some lucky accident, we are privileged to appreciate today.”10
Mary McLeod Bethune, in her message, hailed Robeson as “the tallest tree in our forest,” and Joseph Curran, Max Yergan, Ben Davis, Jr., the author Donald Ogden Stewart, and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, president of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, were among those who spoke at the celebration itself. Robeson responded briefly, his voice choked, tears on his cheeks—“Save your voice, Paul!” someone in the crowd yelled—calling for unity among the world’s progressives, paying tribute to the African masses, and emphasizing the need to win self-determination for colonial peoples.11
As the crowd joined an all-black soldiers’ chorus in singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Paul,” Army Intelligence agents scanned the audience for familiar faces and forwarded a detailed report, which was shared with the FBI. The agent covering the rear floor observed the arrival of Raissa and Earl Browder, and noted that “Browder, who did not speak, was seated in a front row and was observed placing his arm around Zero Mostel in a very friendly fashion.” The government agents also noted that they had been unable to locate Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Roy Wilkins, or “other leading figures in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the Urban League” in the crowd, and that no mention was made of their names during the course of the celebration. The significance, according to the intelligence report, was that “a rift may be developing among the Negro leaders due to possible rivalry between Robeson, Powell, and A. Philip Randolph for the national leadership of the American Negro”—and the report added, portentously, that Robeson was not scheduled to participate in a forthcoming gathering to present A. Philip Randolph with an award. The intelligence reports exaggerated a “rift”—that was still a few years off—but did accurately spot a growing unwillingness on the part of established black leaders to associate with “Communist sympathizers.”12
Three months after the birthday celebration, Othello ended its Broadway run in preparation for a national tour. At the time of the show’s closing, it was still playing to standees, had taken in nearly a million dollars at the box office, and had set an all-time Broadway record for a Shakespearean production with 296 performances. After a two-month vacation, the show embarked on a thirty-six-week coast-to-coast tour of the United States and Canada, beginning in Trenton, New Jersey, in September 1944 and ultimately taking the company to forty-five cities in seventeen states, covering nearly fifteen thousand railroad miles. The tour proved a personal as well as a professional milestone: on it Robeson and Uta Hagen intensified a love affair that had begun during the New York production.13
The striking young actress was an appealing combination of innocence and high spirits, of ebullient humor and serious purpose. Her European background (in Germany, her mother was an opera singer, her father a distinguished academic) gave her a bedrock of traditional values, which played off in easy tandem against the enthusiastic ardor acquired during an American girlhood; she was a woman simultaneously passionate, proper, and strong-willed. Hagen had not initially thought of Robeson romantically or sexually—“I thought of him as a fabulous older friend,” she later recalled. Then one night they were standing in the wings waiting for an entrance and joking together. Suddenly, with total boldness and confidence, Robeson “took his enormous hand—costume and all—and put it between my legs. I thought, What happened to me?! It was being assaulted in the most phenomenal way, and I thought, What the hell, and I got unbelievably excited. I was flying! Afterwards I looked at him with totally different eyes. He suddenly became a sex object.” In retrospect Hagen is convinced that her initial lack of sexual interest in him had been a challenge; pursued all his life by white women, Robeson by his mid-forties found indifference a stimulant. Up to this point in her life, Hagen had seen herself as utterly conventional; sex and love for her were inseparable, and the idea of a spontaneous sexual response to someone, let alone an extramarital affair, had seemed entirely foreign.14
As Paul and Uta began to spend more time together, and as rumors of their liaison spread, Joe Ferrer, according to Uta, seemed indifferent. He was himself seeing a member of the Othello touring company, and he seemed to Uta “unbelievably happy to pass me off onto Paul.” Joe proved altogether cooperative, and even took to whistling outside a closed door to avoid surprising the couple. He would later claim not to have known of the affair initially, but both Uta and Paul believed he was well aware of it from the beginning.
When in New York, the Ferrers continued to live together, and Robeson continued to stay at the home of Freda Diamond and Barry Baruch. Since Uta and Paul sometimes rendezvoused there, the idea never crossed Uta’s mind that he and Freda were themselves involved (though he did talk to her often about how much he had loved Yolande Jackson). “I was naïve enough to think,” Uta said years later, “that this only happened if one was deeply in love. In other words, that it was a consequential relationship. That it was just ‘a fling’ never occurred to me. To just ‘do it’ for fun, I’d never done in my life. I had no idea he was doing anything with Freda. I had no idea he was doing anything with anybody!” When she finally realized that Paul and Freda were lovers as well as friends, she confronted Paul. He not only acknowledged the truth but expressed surprise that Uta had not known. He also agreed to stop seeing Freda—which he did not do. Uta moved him into her house, maneuvering Joe Ferrer into issuing the invitation on the pretext that Paul had had a fight with Barry and Freda and could no longer live with them.
Paul had not, up to that point, ever mentioned marriage to Uta—on that score he had been scrupulous. He did tell her that he “despised” Essie, that he never saw her except from necessity (Uta met her only three or four times in the two years she and Paul were together), and he constantly denigrated her, mocking what he saw as her pretentions, expressing scorn, for example, for the white-pillared “Southern mansion” at Enfield in which she took such pride. Uta was persuaded that he “loathed Essie,” but sometimes wondered whether his unaccented negativism wasn’t partly calculated for her benefit. It may have been. On occasion he certainly did loathe Essie—and she him, a condition not unknown even to the most devoted pair-bonders (which Paul and Essie were not). But residual affection, intertwined with dependency, could sometimes resurface as well. He was still capable of sending off a loving note to her as late as 1942, while preparing Othello: “Love me—Hug me often. I adore you—Love you.”15
But, whether he did indeed “loathe” Essie, Paul made it clear that he would never leave her, and particularly not for a white woman; he knew that the outcry against him in the black community would be too great, destroying his effectiveness as a public figure. Although this was true enough, Uta got the additional sense that Essie had come to serve Paul over the years as a convenient cover: he could sleep around freely while using his “unbreakable” ties to her as a plausible device for avoiding any binding commitment to a new partner. And he did sleep around, as Uta gradually came to realize: “He had many, many that I know of personally. There was a girl in every port. When we went around to these homes on the tour I had the feeling that every hostess we went to he’d had a thing with. I think there were many, many, many women.” But, he told Uta, there were relatively few black women (and they tended to be light-skinned)—though perhaps, too, there were not quite so few as he suggested.16
All this dawned on Uta slowly—these were all the “questions I had after I grew away from him.” During most of their two years together, “I loved him so much that I kind of passed it off,” persuaded that their importance to each other was profound, of a different order from his frequent flings. And Paul encouraged that view; though he avoided any serious discussion of marriage, he would sometimes talk passionately, romantically, of “running off together—to Russia maybe, to anywhere.” Uta later came to realize that he was uninterested in committing himself permanently to any one woman—“I wanted to marry Yo [Yolande Jackson],” she quoted him as saying many times; “she’s the only woman I ever wanted to marry”; he talked about Yolande “continuously, with tenderness, with enormous respect, with nostalgia”—and told Uta that she and Yolande were a lot alike. Uta tried not to prod him into agreeing to a permanent arrangement he did not authentically want, tried to stay satisfied with the apparent intensity of his devotion.
The nine months on tour with Othello were, from Uta’s perspective, particularly “wonderful.” Joe Ferrer carried off his side of the arrangement with contented aplomb, sharing like a true comrade in the tense adventures of a racially mixed traveling company. And the adventures were many.
Although there was a steady flow of hate mail, no actual performance was disrupted—no catcalls, no titters, no incidents. But outside the theater the story was different. Early on in the tour, the tone was set for much of what followed. In Boston, the Ferrers went out one night with a classmate of Joe’s from Princeton who was then a vice-president of the Statler chain. Complimenting him on the liberality of Statler hotels in admitting people of all races, they expressed puzzlement over their inability to get served in a Statler restaurant when they were with Paul. “You can go into any restaurant you want,” their friend replied. “Here’s what will happen. You’ll ask for dinner, and if the dining room is empty, you’ll be told there are no tables. If you complain, you will wait. Finally they will seat you. Next to the kitchen. Then you will wait forty-five minutes for a menu. Then you will wait forty-five minutes for your first course. And it will be burnt. And before long you will leave, and you won’t come back again.” His tone, as Hagen remembers it, was utterly matter-of-fact. But, as she soon learned, racism in Boston did not always wear a bland face. One day she and Paul were descending in the hotel elevator, her arm linked through his, when the door opened and a woman got on, took one look at them, and actually spat in Uta’s face—“It was so unexpected that I didn’t do anything about it, and neither did Paul.”17
Soon after, the company manager announced that he was canceling an upcoming stop in Indianapolis. He had been unable to get Paul a hotel reservation, and complaints were being made there about desegregating the theater. Paul had a clause in his contract barring any performance in a Jim Crow house, so the Indianapolis engagement had come to seem like more of a hassle than it was worth. Paul intervened; he told the company manager to forget about the hotel—it was more important that Indianapolis see the play. Then a mixup with plane tickets raised a new obstacle. After the rest of the company had gone ahead from Dayton to Indianapolis, the Ferrers and Robeson found themselves still in Dayton with only two available seats on the flight out. Joe volunteered to take the train, but Paul insisted that he stay behind—it would be unwise for him to travel alone to Indianapolis with a white woman. Paul won the argument, but the Ferrers felt nervous about leaving him. Dayton was not a hospitable town for blacks—Paul had told them about a racial incident when he had last been in Dayton, some twenty-five years earlier, playing professional football—and, besides, the only available transportation for him to Indianapolis turned out to be a 4:00 a.m. bus.18
The next morning the Ferrers sat around the bus depot in Indianapolis anxiously awaiting Paul’s arrival. When the bus finally did pull in, the exhausted trio went off to a hotel where desegregated facilities had finally been found—except that Paul’s room turned out to be nonexistent: the hotel had put him into a back office, hastily assembling a dresser, a fan, and a cot. Joe told the desk clerk that the room was unacceptable—which set the clerk to grinning with pleasure: “Then Mr. Robeson will not be staying here?” Paul immediately accepted the room. After a few hours’ sleep, all three moved out to stay with friends of Paul’s, but they did so with a flourish: the Ferrers gave Paul their key, announcing to the desk clerk that “Mr. Robeson is taking our room.” None of them slept in it again, but once a day Paul would arrive at the hotel, check in, use the toilet, wash his hands, come out again—and return to his friends. Occasionally racism took a comical turn. In Sacramento, after yet another snarl with room reservations had finally been cleared up, the bellboy, who had been pleasant and sympathetic, came in to where Joe, Paul, and Uta had been waiting, looked at their luggage, and said, “I beg pardon. How would you like me to segregate the luggage?” “Son-of-a-bitch,” Paul said, as the three of them broke up with laughter, “now they’re doing it to the luggage.”19
When the tour reached Montreal, Uta was startled at how respectfully people treated Paul, and the difference it made in him—“It was like somebody took the weights off his shoulders; he was like an open, free, normal human being, without having to prove himself, without being ‘charming.’ He just was.” But tension did not entirely subside. One night at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, panic developed onstage when it suddenly seemed that part of the audience had risen from its seats and was moving toward them—not to commit mayhem, it turned out, but to escape from smoke, which was seeping into the theater from a faulty furnace. In Winnipeg, Canadian hospitality reached its apogee: after they missed a connection, the mayor arranged for the royal railway car to be attached to a troop train passing through, and they sailed across the continent in high style—only to “regain our racial tensions in Seattle.”
Uta was intrigued by the way Paul handled the race issue. He seldom lost his temper, and in public almost never. Faced with bigotry in a social situation, he would alternately turn on the charm or the “old jigaboo stuff”—enjoying the spectacle of confusion on the perplexed white faces unable to decided if Robeson was putting them on or putting them down. “He had eighteen roles that he played on different occasions, totally aware of what he was doing,” of the impression he was creating, doubling Uta up with silent laughter at his expert performances. He could play a variety of roles among blacks, too. When the company performed in Cleveland, they were entertained by the wealthy black community—“unbelievable snobs,” in Uta’s opinion—and Paul alerted her in advance to watch how he handled them; he played their own game, as if he were one of them, but later mocked their pretensions. (“It was certainly never boring,” Uta added.) On the other hand, at a postperformance party in Indianapolis at the home of Ted Cable, with attorneys Charles Chandler, Henry J. Richardson, Jr. (later an attorney for the NAACP), and (in Richardson’s words) “other satellites of intellect and culture,” Paul became genuinely absorbed in the conversation, sitting around until the early hours of the morning talking “in a communitive social session … [about] the fundamentals of our social order.…”20
Robeson’s need to test himself, to rise to the challenge of dislike or disdain, to win over everybody through charm, sometimes became compulsive. For example, the Ferrers had a black woman from the South named Frances working for them who, on first hearing Robeson was coming to dinner, slammed the door and retreated to her bedroom. When finally coaxed out, she refused to cook or serve during Robeson’s visit: “We niggers don’t wait on each other!” Good as her word, Frances stayed in her room the whole time Robeson was there, and Uta cooked the dinner. Subsequently, on a train trip to Boston, Frances was part of the traveling group that included Paul, the Ferrers, and their baby daughter, Letty. When they reached the station stop, Paul walked up to Frances, took her bag and Letty’s toys, and carried them down onto the platform. “It had become his cause to win her around,” Uta believed, and he succeeded: “Frances was hooked. By the time we left Boston, he was her idol!”
Uta was hooked, too. The more time she spent with Paul, the more deeply she fell in love. She idolized him without idealizing him. He was “brilliant and exciting—but no saint, that’s for sure.” At times he could be “unbelievably selfish,” “insanely possessive,” downright “cruel.” At one low ebb, frightened and guilty about her own infidelity, depressed that her relationship with Paul was not going anywhere, missing her daughter on the road and wanting another child, Uta briefly reunited with Joe and became pregnant. According to Uta, Paul “went insane,” got very drunk, and in a room in Seattle hit her—which, in her view, contributed to her eventual miscarriage. Afterward, she says, he wept with remorse and begged Uta to understand that he had lost his head because he loved her so much and couldn’t bear the thought that she might be carrying another man’s child. (Perhaps he “went insane,” too, because being told of a pregnancy might have brought to mind Essie’s announcement in 1921—or at least the fear of being “trapped” into marriage.) Uta forgave him, but not without wondering whether he did accept full responsibility for his behavior or was using the excuse of “passion” as a rationalization. It was not the kind of question, she decided, that Paul was likely to ask himself. For all his unorthodox ways, he was a “traditional male” in his expectations of his mate—she was supposed to be there for him: “He wouldn’t have said it, but if I was going to be with him, that would have been my life.”
It was a decision that Uta at the time was perfectly willing to make. She realizes in retrospect that she would “never have had my own life” if she had stayed with Paul, but nonetheless, not being conventionally ambitious, she would “definitely” have “gone anywhere and done anything” to be with him, would have been willing “to follow him around.” She had never known a more enchanting man, for all his faults. “There was nothing smug or arrogant or know-it-all” about him. He had an insatiable curiosity and a scholar’s passion for knowledge, and lost all interest in mere one-upsmanship when any true discourse was possible; if he enjoyed charming people, he preferred convincing them (and in Uta’s words, he “was as persuasive as a Jesuit.”) He and Uta would spend hours together reading Pushkin and Chekhov, listening to music, studying the etymology of language, his “wonderful ear for sound” and his ardor combining to make those times magical for her. When he didn’t know something, he “was always the first to acknowledge it, dying of curiosity to find out more”; she found his open eagerness “unbelievably endearing.” And, always, he made you feel that “you were the center of his mind and his imagination.” He had the “remarkable ability to concentrate on you at the seeming expense of everybody around,” confirming the fantasy that no one else mattered, or mattered nearly so much. “That was his power.”
At Chicago, the last stop on the tour, Essie came out from New York with Bob and Clara Rockmore to see the opening and to celebrate Paul’s forty-seventh birthday. It was not a happy occasion. News of President Roosevelt’s death came during the Chicago run. The cast dedicated a performance to his memory, and Robeson made a curtain speech that night that, according to Studs Terkel, moved many to tears; the President’s death, Robeson predicted, would alter things, and not for the better, for many years to come. Until Chicago, the production had been receiving brilliant reviews; Uta thought Paul was better on tour than he had been on Broadway, working more internally, less for outer form. But in Chicago the show was off—perhaps because of distress over Roosevelt’s death—and the critics were merely lukewarm. Essie’s indignation focused on the offstage show.21
She had only agreed to go to Chicago, she later wrote Paul, at Bob Rockmore’s suggestion: “He thought Freda might be there [she was not], and I would be a bulwark.” But on arrival Essie found herself first put in “a travelling salesman’s bedroom” in the Sherman Hotel and then shifted to “a back apartment with a fire-escape, from which I was robbed,” while Bob and Clara had “a lovely corner suite” and Paul was “elegantly housed in the penthouse apartment with Joe and Uta.” Taking the high ground, she admonished Paul for the damage to his own public image: “Your white lawyer and his wife were elegantly housed. Your colored wife was put in first one dump, and then another. What do you think the hotel personnel thought of that one? I was embarrassed for you, Honey, because that sort of thing is beneath you. The few dollars you saved weren’t worth the loss of general dignity, nor the personal insult to me.” Henceforth, she wrote Paul, she would reserve—and pay for—her own room. She would also make “a careful note” of the fact that Paul had not invited her to Chicago, that she therefore “had no right to be there at all, at all,” and would “never make that mistake again.” Perhaps, she concluded, “I’m unduly sensitive. I doubt it. Could be I take my dignity, and your dignity, too seriously. I doubt it, but could be. Anyway, that’s the way I am.” She shared a private laugh about his dignity with Larry Brown: “I love the new title for the Boss. His Moorship. That’s very good.”22
Essie was feeling her worth. Over the previous two years she had been holed up in Enfield, eschewing the glamorous life she had previously clamored for, in order to attempt, once again, to make an independent career for herself. It had not been an easy time. Paul, Jr. (as he was now known), had gone off to study engineering as an undergraduate at Cornell, and she had been left alone at Enfield with her aging and ever-more-querulous mother. Within a few years, Ma Goode would become increasingly delusional, and Essie would have to put her into a nursing home in Massachusetts, but even now, as she wrote her son, “She is proving more and more difficult.… No, she hasn’t cracked up, but is just ‘more so’ of everything she was, if you know what I mean.” Nonetheless, Essie found enough leftover energy to make a major effort in her own behalf and to turn out a considerable body of work. Late in 1943 she had enrolled in the Hartford Seminary Foundation (where Paul’s Rutgers classmate Malcolm S. Pitt was dean) as a candidate for a Ph.D. in anthropology, attending classes on Africa, India, and China three days a week (“You are a born academician,” Van Vechten wrote her). By the end of 1944 she had not only completed her doctoral thesis, but was also revising Goodbye Uncle Tom, the play she had labored over intermittently for ten years (and earlier called Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and reworking the notes she’d taken during her trip to Africa in 1936 for publication as a book.23
For a time she had high hopes her play would finally find a producer, her spirits soaring each time a favorable reading suggested a possible production—but none materialized. Her book on Africa had quite a different outcome. When she finished the manuscript (initially called African Material, then changed to its publication title, African Journey) she sent it around widely for comment—including a copy to Earl Browder. “I would not like—however inadvertently”—she wrote Browder in a covering note, “to say anything about my favorite subjects (Africa, and the Color Problems) which would in any way contradict what we all believe.” She asked him to let her know “privately, not for quotation in any way, what you think about its possible implications or repercussions.” Browder read the manuscript immediately, found it “not only interesting, but sound,” and advised her to publish it. “What a grand relief,” she wrote back—and included for his further scrutiny her doctoral dissertation and the script of her play (“I know this is a terrific nerve on my part … [but] I feel you are interested in these problems, and would not like me to make any mistakes in my handling of them”). Published in August 1945, African Journey (illustrated with photographs Essie herself had taken) was well received by the critics and quickly sold out its first printing. Reading The New York Times’ review (“an extremely attractive and natural book”) in an airport, Paul called Essie and told her he’d “got the thrill of his life” from the review; “He’s a Sweetie-Pie,” Essie commented to the Van Vechtens.24
She was thrilled at the book’s reception and at the follow-up requests for public appearances, and made no bones about her excitement. “Quite frankly,” she wrote Larry Brown, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,” and thanked him for “having been my loyal fan for lo these many years. And especially because you always encouraged me when I was down, and nobody paid me any mind.” To the Van Vechtens she reported that even Ma Goode had taken to deferring to her “with incredible respect.” Adding still further to Essie’s sense of worth was the active role she began to play locally in politics. Speaking widely in the Connecticut area on race relations, she proved highly effective, and quick, sharp, and forthright in spontaneous question-and-answer exchanges with her audiences. After hearing Essie speak on one occasion, a close friend of Larry Brown’s wrote him, “Mrs. Robeson was a tremendous hit here. The only lecturer able to hold students in their seats during the entire lecture series. She was terrific. And stunning. Improved 100% in appearance.” In 1945 the National Council of Negro Women selected her as “one of twelve outstanding women in American life.” Bob Rockmore had a different view of Essie’s accomplishments, speculating archly in a letter to Larry Brown as to whether Paul had conferred with Essie about “competing” with her as a public lecturer and whether having two rival speakers “within one hearth” might “disturb the family harmony. (Ha ha).” Rockmore’s patronization of Essie further fed her well-established dislike of him.25
In the 1944 presidential campaign, Paul and Essie had both stumped for Roosevelt, Paul on the national level, Essie on the state one. On radio station WHK on election eve, Paul had praised the President as one who “rightly believes the rights of man more important than the rights of private property.” On election day, Essie had written Earl Browder, “I’ve just come home from casting my straight Democratic vote, and feel very elegant indeed.” In both her pre- and postelection appearances she expressed political views closer to those of Paul than had earlier been the case. In “The Negro and Democracy,” one of her standard talks, she praised the lack of discrimination in CIO unions like the National Maritime Union, characterized the Soviet Union as having “solved” (“thoroughly, completely and very successfully”) the minority problem, and in strong terms decried the continuing prejudice against blacks in the United States; she even expressed the view—an advanced one for the mid-forties—that only “legislation and force will settle this thing.” When Essie wrote Ben Davis, Jr., about a “practical plan” she and Pearl Buck had started to work on for federal guarantees of civil rights, he responded that her activity “was confirmation of my long-held view of your capacity to make independent contributions to the people’s movement in this country.” And when she subsequently sent Davis some unspecified “information … in regard to Paul,” he replied, “It seems a confirmation of your course of action. Don’t be provoked into deviating from that course, for every sort of provocation is bound to rise. It is the penalty for being the wife of a great man—one of the great men of the day. And he is fortunate to have such a strong and realistic mate.”26
That cryptic exchange almost certainly referred to one, or several, of Paul’s concurrent affairs. The Communist Party apparently advised Robeson at several different points in his life—the word carried through Ben Davis, Jr.—that it felt his divorce from a black woman to marry a white one would be a mistake, that it would inflame his black constituency, alienate his white one, decrease his prestige and political clout. As a close friend, Davis probably knew the usual course of Paul’s love affairs at least as well as Essie did, and realized that, since Paul’s breakup with Yolande in the early thirties, he had not again seriously contemplated divorce and remarriage, preferring his freedom to a binding relationship, however lonely that freedom sometimes made him. But just in case Paul might once more be tempted to remarry, Davis probably thought it wise to confirm Essie in her already well-settled intention to rise above Paul’s affairs, to pursue an independent course—and to remain married to him. It was a strategy she had adhered to from the mid-thirties on, though now and then, under special provocation (such as when given “inferior” accommodations in Chicago), she would take to lecturing Paul about her entitlement and the danger of his compromising his public image.27
For the time being, that public image continued to shine brightly, the luster further enhanced in 1945 by two additional honors: Howard University conferred on him an honorary degree, and the NAACP awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal. Established in 1914 by the late Joel Spingam, then chairman of the NAACP board, the medal was presented annually “to the man or woman of African descent and American citizenship, who shall have made the highest achievement during the preceding year or years in any honorable field of human endeavor.” The Spingarn Medal carried more prestige in the black community than any other award, and in winning it in 1945 Robeson edged out Channing H. Tobias (New Deal official and member of the NAACP board of trustees) and Joe Louis. The participating members of the nominating committee—A. Philip Randolph, Dr. John Haynes Holmes, and Judge William H. Hastie—had split in a close vote: two first places and one second to Robeson, one first and two seconds to Tobias, and three third places to Joe Louis. Because of the near-tie, the absent members of the nominating committee were polled, and Robeson emerged the winner. When his name was presented to the full board, it was approved—though, in the memory of one of its members, the record producer John H. Hammond, there was some expression of dissent. Because of Robeson’s commitment to Othello—the tour ended late in May 1945, but the show had then reopened in New York for a three-week run at the City Center—he would be unable to accept the Spingarn Medal until October. That occasion would prove a political milestone for him.28