Attempted Renewal
(1964–1965)
Three Port Authority policemen ran interference through the reporters as Essie on one side and Paul, Jr., on the other escorted Paul to a waiting car. As newsmen tried to throw questions at him, Robeson smiled away in benign silence. Only twice did he respond. When a television reporter stuck a microphone in his face, Robeson whispered that he had nothing to say for now but might “later on.” Asked by another reporter if he was going to take part in the civil-rights movement, he said, “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.” As the repetitive question “Are you disillusioned with Communism?” continued to resound, Essie jumped in to say, “No, he thinks it’s terrific—he always has and he always will” (thereby further feeding rumors that her function was to muzzle him).1
A “Muted Return,” headlined the New York Post. “Native Son Robeson Back Without a Song,” chorused the Daily News. The conservative black New York Amsterdam News referred to Robeson in its lead sentence as “apparently disillusioned” and predicted he faced a congressional probe into his politics and a snubbing from black civil-rights organizations. Dorothy Kilgallen reported in her syndicated column that she had “received hundreds of letters protesting the fact that he was allowed to return”; she herself favored it as “a propaganda victory for our way of life.” Congressman William S. Mailliard protested Robeson’s return directly to the FBI; the Bureau replied that as a citizen he was entitled to come home. This did not mean that J. Edgar Hoover was ready to give up his pursuit of Robeson: he instructed the New York Office of the FBI to “ascertain the extent of his activities.” The office wired Hoover that, “not being certain” of Robeson’s attitude toward Communism, it “is not making any recommendation for an interview by newsmen upon his arrival back in the US”—an open declaration that it would and could manipulate the press. The New York Times featured Robeson’s return on the front page, described him as “much thinner and not his old vociferous self,” accounted for his illness as due to “a reported circulatory problem,” and reported that his “comfortable income” was still secure. To a separate profile piece the Times affixed the headline “Disillusioned Native Son.”2
Such polite indirection did not suit the purposes of the Herald Tribune, which opted for a frontal attack. In a lead editorial, the conservative paper—having never played any role itself in the civil-rights struggle—blasted Robeson for having “run away” when “the going got rough.” “He abandoned the battle, as well as his country, to indulge a juvenile’s taste for Marxist idealism, leaving it to others to stay at home to fight the war for civil rights.… Now that the back of the opposition to civil rights has been broken, Robeson returns anxious to jump on the bandwagon.… [He] always has and always will be a juvenile, with a big voice but a small mind … [and] would be more of a hindrance than a help to the civil-rights movement. His countrymen have proved that they can manage without him.” The attack could hardly have been phrased in a more hurtful way, fueling Robeson’s own nightmare fears that he had lost touch with the black struggle and that his earlier contributions to it would be forgotten or distorted.3
But not everyone had forgotten or felt malevolent toward him. As one indignant letter-writer to the Tribune put it, “Robeson jumping on the bandwagon now? Hell, man, he built that wagon—that’s John Henry himself you’re insulting.” In the Pittsburgh Courier, J. A. Rogers protested the Tribune’s “rough going-over,” accusing it of “sheer ignorance of the influence for good Robeson’s career and accomplishments have had on the race situation here.” And when W. E. B. Du Bois died at age ninety-five in Accra and Essie made her first public appearance, two months after arriving home, at a Carnegie Hall tribute to him, she got a standing ovation that lasted for minutes, clearly in the nature of a warm welcome home both for herself and for Paul.4
He himself could do little to respond to those who falsified his past accomplishments and gloated over his present disability. Having minimal energy and fearful of another relapse, he was unable to give interviews, let alone face the barrage of a formal press conference. Dr. Morris Perlmutter, once again taking over as Robeson’s physician (he had treated him in 1955–56), found him on arrival “emaciated … not very communicative, and … having severe insomnia. His appetite was quite poor and he complained of marked fatigue.” Perlmutter put him on Elavil and Librium and at bedtime chloral hydrate to induce sleep. He advised Robeson to remain quietly at home for the time being.5
“Home” alternated between his sister Marian’s in Philadelphia and the house at Jumel Terrace in Harlem that he shared with Essie. Marian provided the deeper level of comfort, though he did feel secure at Jumel, with its privacy and its considerate neighbors. “Paul roams freely from floor to floor,” Essie wrote Harold Davison in England, “retires any moment, bounces up and around as he feels like.” To make Paul more comfortable still, Freda Diamond sent over a reclining chair; Ben Davis and Lloyd Brown dropped by to visit; and Paul, Jr., arrived most mornings, bringing his work (translating technical journals), thus freeing Essie to resume her job as a United Nations correspondent several days a week. Paul, Jr., arranged to take him to see a matinee showing at a neighborhood theater of Sidney Poitier’s film Lilies of the Field. “It went off beautifully,” Essie reported, “with no strain or worry, and just enjoyment, and feeling that this could be done more often!!” Their grandchildren were a source of particular delight: Essie (“Nana,” as David and Susan called her) was a doting and effusive grandmother, describing the children to friends as “so gay and healthy and normal and busy and interested and interesting.” “Grandpa Paul,” in his contrasting style, took pleasure in being around the children, but (in Marilyn’s words) “was more of an observer.”6
Early in March, some two months after returning, Big Paul ventured out to the apartment of his old friends John Abt (the lawyer) and Jessica Smith (the editor of New World Review) for a quiet dinner. It turned out to be less quiet than expected, yet Paul managed to hold his own. John Abt began “a terrific discussion” (in Essie’s words) by saying he had been disappointed in the Carnegie Hall tribute to Du Bois because only Lorraine Hansberry among the speakers had mentioned that he had joined the Communist Party. Having given one of the speeches at the tribute, Essie felt a bit aggrieved at Abt’s criticism until the others assured her that anything more would have been inappropriate for that meeting. Besides, she wrote George Murphy, “Just between you and me, we should not brag too much about his joining. It was a fine gesture, and wonderful. But it was at the end, and then he left. So, easy does it, record it with due respect and justice, but we should not BRAG.”7
Though fully aware of her advancing cancer, the irrepressible Essie was on the move again. She made up a “plan-of-action,” a list of things “To Do” and “Not To Do” for the rest of her life, “so as not to waste what I had left but use it to best advantage.” Following the success of her initial appearance at the Du Bois tribute, she agreed to take part in a panel at the American Institute for Marxist Studies organized by the historian Herbert Aptheker, to speak at the annual National Guardian luncheon, and then to embark on a two-week lecture tour to the West Coast. While she was away, Paul managed to take himself by train to Marian’s house in Philadelphia. By June he was feeling improved enough to go with Paul, Jr., to a baseball game, and Dr. Perlmutter noted with satisfaction that he was sleeping and eating better and had steadily put on weight. “The results so far have exceeded my best expectations,” Perlmutter wrote Robeson’s previous doctors in the U.S.S.R., England, and the GDR. “He is again the Paul Robeson with a lively interest in life, people, and the world around him.”8
Perlmutter’s own case records show a somewhat less euphoric result, but Robeson had indubitably improved. By mid-June he had put on thirty pounds and was near his normal weight of 250. “Paul is so much better,” Essie wrote a friend, “but he still says and feels he isn’t,” and still fretted that “people will not understand his idleness.” Perlmutter felt confident enough to reduce the medication, cutting out two Elavil and one Librium a day. Robeson’s energy level rose; he was less lethargic, more interested in his surroundings, better able to watch and enjoy television. He began to talk for the first time about possible activity, cautiously considering some limited public appearance. “He is now PLANNING, no less,” Essie wrote the Rosens. “On a low level, but never mind.”9
The right opportunity, though a sad one, came at the end of August. Ben Davis, Jr., died of pancreatic cancer on August 22 at age sixty. The loss of his great friend and comrade was compounded by the recent death of Du Bois, and the passing of his beloved brother Ben the previous year while he was incapacitated in Europe and unable to return home for the funeral. In making the effort to attend Ben Davis’s memorial, Robeson was saying goodbye to his brother and to Dr. Du Bois as well. He managed to say a few words, writing them out himself and delivering them without any hesitation or stumbling. A throng was waiting on the sidewalk outside when the two hundred mourners emerged from the chapel. Catching sight of Robeson’s still-towering figure, the crowd surged toward him; people called his name in admiration, reached over to pat him on the back or squeeze his arm. For a few moments he seemed trapped in the sea of well-wishers, and the police were unable to clear a path to him. But he finally edged his way to the curb and got into a cab—apparently none the worse, despite the sorrow and tension of the occasion.10
Indeed, he felt so encouraged that a few days after the funeral he issued his first public statement since returning home, directing his words exclusively to the black press. In it he spoke of his recovering health but said for the time being he would be unable to resume public life. He wanted it known, however, that “I am, of course, deeply involved with the great upsurge of our people. Like all of you, my heart has been filled with admiration for the many thousands of Negro Freedom Fighters and their white associates”—he had never veered from the vision of an integrated struggle, and world—“who are waging the battle for civil rights throughout the country, and especially in the South.” He took pride in pointing out that, when he had written in Here I Stand in 1958 that “the time is now,” some people had thought “that perhaps my watch was fast (and maybe it was a little), but most of us seem to be running on the same time—now.” He was also pleased that the call he had sounded in the book for unified action and mass militancy among blacks was no longer deemed “too radical.” Most black people, he felt, had finally come to agree with his 1949 Paris statement calling upon them to eschew foreign wars and to conserve their strength for the struggle at home, a struggle that black artists as a matter of course had now joined—though in his day he had been told to sing, not talk. “It is good to see all these transformations.”11
Emboldened, Robeson was willing for the first time to cast a wary eye on a writing project that he had previously dismissed out-of-hand as beyond his capacity. Three publishing firms had asked him to write some sort—any sort—of memoir, and offered him contracts. For a time (in Essie’s words) Paul was “absolutely adamant about being unable and unwilling to undertake this.…” But as he improved, Essie put out some documents and clippings from her voluminous files for him to read if he felt up to it, and before long he was browsing through them, asking questions to refresh his memory. He agreed to let his old friend Earl Robinson (composer of “Ballad for Americans”) bring a young Macmillan editor named Alan Rinzler over to the house. Rinzler, though white, was on the steering committee of SNCC and a devoted admirer of Robeson’s. He was shocked at the condition in which he found him. Instead of the vigorous, charismatic figure he had grown up admiring, he found a man who “seemed very faint and hesitant, as if brain-damaged. Both his speech and movement were slow.… He looked weak and frail. He seemed like he was eighty. I was stunned by his appearance.” Essie, on the other hand, struck Rinzler as charming and vigorous, deeply considerate of Paul—and definitely in favor of Paul’s writing the book. They talked for three hours. Rinzler offered a guarantee that the publisher would do no “doctoring” of the text and encouraged him to try “some conversations” with Lloyd Brown, his co-author on Here I Stand, as a way of generating a manuscript. Paul promised to think about the possibility further. “We were all surprised and delighted, and I think Paul surprised himself,” Essie wrote a friend.12
In October, during Robeson’s monthly office visit, Perlmutter found him “a little more restless,” but made no changes in his medications and no effort to discourage the light activity he’d begun. In November, perhaps overeager to capitalize on these limited gains, Robeson attended a U.S.S.R. reception at the United Nations, a National Council for American-Soviet Friendship celebration at Carnegie Hall, and a seventieth-birthday fete for John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten—all within a week’s time. He got a tumultuous reception at each of the events. At the Soviet affair people kept coming up to him in disbelief, wanting to see for themselves if he was really there. At the Carnegie Hall occasion he got a standing ovation that lasted for a full five minutes when he put in a surprise appearance, telling the crowd how very good it felt to be there and how “very gratifying to see the remarkable growth and development on many levels” in the Soviet Union, a remark that may have struck some as curious, since the admired reformer Khrushchev had recently resigned under pressure. At Lawson’s birthday party Robeson gave a short speech in praise of the “dean of the Hollywood Ten,” which led Lawson later to write him that “words cannot express” the joy he had felt at Robeson’s presence.13
That round of activity temporarily slowed him. Essie wrote a friend that Paul “is thoroughly exhausted.… Although he is very happy that he has been able to do it all … the effort tires him because he does pay close attention to what everyone says to him, and so many people speak to him.” “Essie says ‘he’s depressed,’” Perlmutter recorded in his notes when he saw Robeson at the end of November, and he prescribed a repeat dose of medicine if he awakened at night. Even so, Robeson managed to begin work on a brief reminiscence of Du Bois for the militant new black magazine Freedomways. When the celebratory issue containing Robeson’s short article appeared in March, he not only attended the Freedomways party to celebrate publication but also chose the occasion to sing in public (“Jacob’s Ladder”) for the first time in nearly four years; he was given a standing ovation. At the beginning of the new year, 1965, there were two more deaths of prominent left-wing figures—the black Communist leader Claudia Jones at age forty-nine, and the gifted playwright Lorraine Hans-berry, who had worked with Robeson on the newspaper Freedom, of cancer at thirty-four. These poignant losses called out Robeson’s reserves of strength, and he decided to respond to both publicly. Against the continuing processional of death, he continued to test his ability to rejoin life.14
Claudia Jones had died at her home in London—having been deported from the United States under the Smith Act some years before—and Robeson made a tape recording for her funeral. On it he spoke of her as “one of the victims of the dreadful McCarthy period” and rejoiced that after her deportation she had found her place in London’s West Indian community helping to found and develop the West Indian Gazette. At Hansberry’s funeral, Robeson not only appeared personally—despite a blizzard—but also delivered a eulogy. Speaking in a voice the Times called “still compelling … his eyes cast downward, his hands moving restlessly,” he paid tribute to Hansberry’s “feeling and knowledge of the history of our people … remarkable in one so young,” and, as if encouraging himself to heed the advice, reminded the crowd that she “bids us to keep our heads high and to hold on to our strength and power—to soar like the Eagle in the air.”15
At the Hansberry funeral, Malcolm X let it be known through an intermediary that he would like to meet Robeson. A little more than a year before, Malcolm had praised Robeson’s “brilliant stand” in questioning as early as 1949 “the intelligence of colored people fighting to defend a country that treated them with such open contempt and bestial brutality.” Paul, Jr., talked to Malcolm at the back of the funeral parlor and then relayed the invitation to his father. Robeson felt no affinity for the religious austerity of the mainstream Shiite Black Muslim movement and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, nor for their emphasis on separation from whites, the confinement of women, and the importance of black entrepreneurship. But toward Malcolm personally he felt high regard, especially after Malcolm had begun to sound an internationalist note following his seminal journey to Mecca. Still, it was decided to delay a meeting between the two men until a less stressful moment. A month later Malcolm was assassinated.16
With the approach of Robeson’s sixty-seventh birthday, the editors of Freedomways asked if they could use the occasion to stage a “salute” to him, which might simultaneously be a moneymaker for the magazine. Given Robeson’s improved condition (he had been going regularly on extended visits to his sister Marian’s in Philadelphia, sometimes on his own), he gave Freedomways the go-ahead. Not everyone invited responded with enthusiasm. Some of those who sent regrets, like Coleman Young and John Howard Lawson, clearly did lament their schedule conflicts. But Roy Wilkins’s cold reply to the request that he serve as a sponsor of the event (he had “overextended” himself, he wrote, and NAACP projects now required his undivided attention) was matched only by David Susskind’s outright hostility: “My only reaction is that you must be joking—and what a bad joke it is.”17
However, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Earl Dickerson, Dizzie Gillespie, John Coltrane, Paule Marshall, Linus Pauling, Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger, and I. F. Stone were among the sixty illustrious sponsors who did offer their names. More than two thousand people flocked to the ballroom of the Americana Hotel on the night of April 22, to be entertained during the four-hour celebration by Morris Carnovsky, Diana Sands, Roscoe Lee Browne, Howard da Silva, M. B. Olatunji, and Billy Taylor. The crowd was predominantly white and middle-aged, but made up in warmth what it lacked in diversity. John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, had been invited as a keynoter (the black activist lawyer Hope R. Stevens was the other) in the hope that he would serve as a symbolic bridge between Robeson and the new generation of black activists, but it turned out Lewis “knew so little” about Robeson that he turned to his fellow SNCC member Alan Rinzler, the editor who had been trying to coax Robeson into doing a memoir, to write his speech for him. Rinzler gave Lewis a “series of notes” and was “then appalled when Lewis read it word for word.” Still, the words rang out with comradely flair—“We of SNCC are Paul Robeson’s spiritual children. We too have rejected gradualism and moderation. We are also being accused of radicalism, of communist infiltration”—and they gladdened Robeson’s spirit. When Bob Moses, a legendary SNCC leader, also showed up for the event and personally paid his respects to Robeson, it was possible to believe that generational continuity—and a sense of indebtedness—was as much fact as reverie.18
When Robeson himself took the platform, the crowd, uncertain whether he would speak, greeted him with a near-pandemonium of cheers, waves, and tears. Deeply moved, he thanked the artists “who have taken time out from their busy lives to come here this evening.” Then, sticking closely to his prepared text, his voice firm and resonant, he sounded once again the themes that had been central to his life: art as the reflection of “a common Humanity”; the “great variety,” in combination with “the universality,” of human experience—its unity, “the one-ness of many of the people in our contemporary world”; the importance of letting people “decide for themselves” between the contending systems of social organization—and his personal pleasure that so many of the “newly emancipated nations of Asia and Africa” were moving in the direction of a socialist arrangement; the importance of the FREEDOM NOW struggle for the liberation of black people in the United States—and as an arena for finding and building “a living connection—deeper and stronger—between the Negro people and the great masses of white Americans, who are indeed our natural allies in the struggle for democracy.”19
“A lot of love went towards him”; “a memorable occasion”; an “inspiring” night—almost everyone at the event found it “thrilling.” The notable exception was the Liberator, one of the prominent organs of the new black militants. “Those who attended to welcome home a leader found themselves paying respects to a legend,” the Liberator’s columnist impatiently reported. “Even Robeson’s own speech at the end of the evening was a disappointment in this respect.” Yet the Liberator—apparently knowing nothing of Robeson’s recent incapacity—did not entirely dismiss what it graciously acknowledged to be his leadership potential. In Here I Stand, the Liberator wrote, Robeson “foresaw and dealt with many of the problems which have come to a head since then”—the struggle for civil rights as a minimal necessity, not a maximum fulfillment; the moral right of the black community, threatened in life and property, to defend itself; the need for blacks to wrest control of their lives—and their movement—from white domination; the insistence that black leaders be single-mindedly dedicated to their own people’s welfare. Yes, the Liberator solemnly concluded, the new generation of black activists had “the right and duty” to ask a man of Robeson’s proven stature and insight to rejoin them “in battle.” Robeson probably never saw the Liberator’s comments, but if he got wind of them he might have found solace for the impudence and forgetfulness of the young in remembering a letter Azikiwe of Nigeria had sent him nearly ten years earlier. Sensing that his own reign as national liberator and hero was coming to an end, Azikiwe had philosophically written, “Although we have spent a greater part of our fortune and our lives in the struggle, the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin are now in the vanguard to reap where they have not sown. The result is a conflict of interest between those we had stimulated all these years to look forward to a new day and those who have arisen from among them to lead them to a Canaan of our dreams.”20
The Freedomways event had gone off so well that it was decided to proceed with plans for a trip to California, with Essie accompanying Paul and—so it seemed in the planning, anyway—with careful protective measures to safeguard his health. The decision was made over Paul, Jr.’s strenuous objection, for he was convinced that his father was not up to the trip. Alice Childress also begged Essie to cancel plans for California. Childress had attended the event at the Americana, had seen “the sweat just popping out” on Paul’s face, the hands trembling. But Essie told her, “He can’t stay out of sight. He’s a public figure. People want to know, where is Paul Robeson. We have to do it.”21
The trip started out well enough. At Kennedy Airport in New York they got the red-carpet treatment because, as Essie wrote the Rosens, “the head Negro porter recognized Paul and went straight to the top guy and alerted him. He was having no nonsense about HIS idea of a VIP. And so the seats were cleared for us to have no immediate neighbors, and we were very comfortable.” At the Los Angeles airport they were met by Steve Fritchman as well as Chuck Moseley and Homer Sadler, two black left-wing activists assigned as bodyguards (“I have never seen such security,” Essie wrote home; “I at once was taught how to use a 15 repeater rifle, and found it easy and great fun”). Moseley and Sadler also kept guns hidden under the quilt on the car seat, but, unlike earlier years, there was no incident of any kind involving Paul’s personal safety. The Robesons went directly to the home of their old friend Frankie Lee Sims of the National Negro Labor Council, with whom they were staying in the black community of Watts, and rested all the remainder of that day and the following day until time for a celebration in their honor at Fritchman’s First Unitarian Church. Robeson was interviewed at the church by a friendly reporter from the Los Angeles Times whom Fritchman had okayed in advance (and, indeed, the sympathetic story was headlined “Robeson Cherishes His U.S. Heritage”), and then had dinner privately with Fritchman and church officials before joining the packed festivities. After Martha Schlamme performed a group of songs and a church choir sang, Paul himself was introduced to the gathering. He gave essentially the same speech he had at the Americana, but also sang without accompaniment a Hebridean song and “Jacob’s Ladder,” and at the close recited in Yiddish two verses from the song of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. “This is the first time,” he told the adoring crowd, “I’m sort of playing around much with the singing, but I guess the voice is still around somewhere.” Essie thought it sounded better than that—“full, complete with overtones, and under very firm control.” He “seems to feel very experimental,” she wrote home to the family. “He wants to try things. I am keeping clear watch, so no one can push him, and that he gets rest.”22
Indeed, she guarded him so closely, screening out friends and strangers alike, that she aroused resentment at the time and suspicion since. According to Dorothy Healey, CP people “could not talk to him, see him, or have any kind of communication with him.… We were told that he was very sick.” Rose Perry confirms that she and Pettis got an unexpected call from Essie enlisting their help. “I don’t want the Party coming near him,” she remembers Essie saying, and “If they call I’m going to tell them that you’re arranging his meetings.” Yet local Party leader Bill Taylor did have access to him, and when the top Party leader Gus Hall came through California he, too, was allowed to drop by; that alone aroused factional jealousy. When some old friends who were not Party people also found themselves barred, the resentment escalated into a conspiratorial view of Essie’s intentions. Geri Branton, active in the civil-rights struggle and instrumental in arranging Robeson’s previous appearances in California in 1958, found herself stopped at the door by Essie and not even invited to participate in the event at Fritchman’s church. It seemed logical to assume that Essie was lending herself—and, through her control over his schedule, Paul—to some partisan maneuver; rumors flew that she was taking orders from the Gus Hall wing of the Party or even (having “turned”) from the FBI. But logic, as is often the case, was not truth. A dying woman, always overzealous by temperament and especially when contending for undisputed control over Paul, had simply overstepped a few boundaries here, failed to flatter a few egos there.23
The frequency as well as the nature of Paul’s appearances further fed antagonism toward Essie. Paul, Jr., for one, became irate when he discovered—belatedly—what he felt to be the irresponsibly hectic and overcrowded schedule Essie had subjected his father to. After Paul’s appearance in Fritchman’s church, it seemed to Paul, Jr., that one engagement was allowed to spill directly into the next. On one day, a morning breakfast in the black community was followed by a packed meeting at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, in turn followed by an evening gathering at the home of a black physician in the Compton area. At all three events Robeson spoke, albeit briefly, and at one he sang. The remaining week in Los Angeles was more leisurely, but at least one meeting and usually two were scheduled for every day—gatherings in black homes, a fund-raiser for People’s World, a meeting with a group of black businessmen who were starting a credit union—and at nearly every stop Paul spoke and occasionally sang a song or two.24
Arriving in San Francisco on May 24, the Robesons were met by the left-wing figure Mary Helen Jones and whisked away for rest to the Marin County home of Ruby Silverstone, a white liberal. When Paul, Jr., later heard of the arrangements, he became furious at Essie, claiming that the sprawling “estate” in the wealthy, protected white enclave where Silver-stone lived was designed to remind his father of nothing so much as the grounds of the Priory sanatorium—and on top of that was devoid of the welcoming warmth he would have found from old friends in the area like Lee and Revels Cayton, who had expected to be contacted but somehow never were. But in fact Ruby Silverstone was very much a known quantity to Robeson, and her purported “estate” was nothing more than a modest two-bedroom house. She had first met Robeson in the early forties; Robeson had stayed with her for a few nights during the Othello tour, and again when he had been out on the Coast in the late forties; they had many friends in common, including the Caytons, Louise Bransten, and Vivian and Vincent Hallinan.25
When Paul and Essie arrived to stay with Silverstone in 1965, she gave him her own bedroom and Essie slept in the dressing room just off it. Silverstone also made it clear that all casual callers would be barred from her house and that as far as she was concerned Paul should appear as much or as little as made him feel comfortable. But by that time trouble was already brewing. Paul “began to wake up, day after day, TIRED,” Essie reported home, and she herself came down with severe back pain, which a local doctor diagnosed as “either kidney or bladder”—at least that was all Essie was willing to tell; Paul showed alarm at her being incapacitated and she had to keep up a good front for him. Somehow they both managed to show up for a Du Bois Club fund-raising dinner organized by the Hallinans, their associates from Progressive Party days, and two days later they let their old friend John Pittman, foreign affairs editor of People’s World, collect them for lunch at his house.26
But that was it. By the time June 4 rolled around—the evening of a long-planned and elaborately organized Salute to Paul Robeson at the Jack Tar Hotel—both Essie and Paul were incapacitated beyond the point where mere will power could continue to stand in for health, and had to forgo the event. They had intended to stay in the area for at least another ten days, but gave up the struggle and flew home to New York. Paul felt he had “let the folks down,” and once home, he quickly slid into depression: moody, uncommunicative, uninterested in food or people or events, he sat lethargically around the house in pajamas.27
On the evening of June 10 Essie came upon Paul “holding a scissors to his chest”; he managed to inflict a superficial wound before she could control the situation “with difficulty.” Later that same day Paul, Jr., walked into the bedroom and found his father, his face blank with terror, holding a double-edged razor blade in his hand. “Put it down,” Paul, Jr., said quietly; not getting any response, he took it from him. After settling him back down, Paul, Jr., went around the house hiding other sharp objects, but he and Essie realized Paul could not safely be kept at home. Perlmutter, Barsky, and Sam Rosen, who came up to the house in response to their emergency call, agreed with them. The decision was made to admit Paul immediately to Gracie Square psychiatric hospital, under the supervision of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, the psychopharmacologist whom Perlmutter called into the case. Kline had helped to develop the drugs reserpine and marsalid, winning the Lasker Award for the latter accomplishment—though another clinician later successfully challenged his claim as primary researcher. Kline was additionally controversial in the eyes of some of his fellow professionals because of his penchant for emphasizing drugs to the near-exclusion of psychotherapy, and for his assembly-line treatment of patients.28
Robeson was admitted to Gracie Square on June 11, 1965, under the pseudonym Frank Robertson. Because of the suicide attempt, he was given special nurses around the clock and separated from the other patients. The admitting physician recorded Robeson’s general health as “satisfactory” and, despite his “recurrent depression,” found him “polite” and responding to questions with “appropriate affect” and coherence, though “little spontaneity.” His nurses the first few days described him as pleasant but noncommunicative; “at times he mutters to himself and prefers to sit in a chair most of the day.” But three days after his admission, another staff doctor found him “cooperative and friendly. Speech was coherent and relevant, memory was not impaired. No delusions or hallucinations were elicited,” though he did admit “to feelings of depression as well as occasional feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts.” By then, June 14, Dr. Kline had been in to check on Robeson’s progress—Kline did not believe in seeing patients often—and decided that he was “definitely improved.” Still, he made no substantive changes in medication, even though Perlmutter, after examining Robeson on the day he was admitted, wrote on his chart, “He will need more potent anti-depressant medication now.…” Dr. Kline, contrary to his general reputation, was proving to be a restraining influence. That is, for the time being.29
Robeson continued to make progress; he asked for reading materials from home, and his appetite and sleep improved—though his nurses fretted at his continuing refusal to leave his room, his occasional “confusion” (packing up his suitcase one night, he said “the car was waiting”), his reluctance, alternately, to take his pajamas off during the day or to put them on at night. But the momentum toward becoming more alert, cheerful, and talkative continued, and on July 1, three weeks after his admission, the doctors decided to let him go home.30
Kline was away for most of the summer, and a young psychiatrist who shared an office with him, Ari Kiev, temporarily took over Robeson’s case. Thirty-two years old at the time, Kiev had recently returned from a year’s residency at the Maudsley, a psychiatric teaching hospital in London (Brian Ackner, Robeson’s physician at the Priory, was one of the attendings at Maudsley). Robeson would (in his son’s words) “go stiff as a board” in the presence of the mellifluous, silver-haired Dr. Kline, but he liked Ari Kiev. Over the next two months he agreed to go to Kiev’s office, accompanied by Paul, Jr., perhaps six to eight times in all, for a kind of “monitoring” psychotherapy, primarily a check on how he was reacting to the drug treatment, not the kind of intensive psychotherapy that Dr. Katzenstein at the Buch Clinic had considered necessary.31
Kiev was struck above all by Robeson’s great sadness. He felt “unappreciated,” anguished at not having received recognition from the current generation of black activists as one of the civil-rights movement’s forerunners. Robeson “never gave a speech about it,” Kiev says, but he had the clear impression from incidental remarks that he suffered a great deal from not having had his contribution acknowledged. Kiev saw Robeson as an “innocent” in the best sense, a man not naïve but “pure”; his motivational spring was “compassion, not ego,” and therefore he felt devastated when others, less “purely” motivated, cast him aside; he was a man “fundamentally puzzled” at how his humane instincts and vision had run aground. Kiev was saying what Du Bois had said earlier: “The only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great faith in human beings.”32
The injury had been compounded by the loss of his audience. Robeson’s temperament centrally craved contact with other people—even as it intermittently craved solitude and concealment—and his success in reaching out over the years through words and songs had built up in him an almost automatic dependence on human responsiveness. But in place of the sanctifying affirmation he had grown used to from his audiences had come, from his government, castigating banishment. He had been marked and isolated—classically punished with ostracism from the beloved community. The wonder to Kiev was not that Robeson broke down under the punishment, but that he had not broken down sooner.33
Yet his physical deterioration, in Kiev’s view, was not wholly due to psychological causes. Robeson, he believes, suffered from “a combination of depression and some underlying organicity … some kind of underlying cerebral arteriosclerosis.” But it might be said that everyone has some sort of “underlying organicity,” some “biochemical imbalance” or potentially malignant physical condition—and that these do not commonly manifest themselves without extrinsic triggering events, “nonorganic” in nature. In short, had Robeson not been harassed and excluded, a “bipolar depressive” disorder or arteriosclerotic degeneration might have claimed him anyway; but they might not have, either, or might have done so only at a much later point in his life, merging softly, leniently, into the aging process itself. Kiev, in any case, decided there was no treatment for Robeson’s organic condition; for the depression he believed the so-called tricyclic drugs (Elavil, Tofranil, etc.) were likely to produce the most relief, and he was pleased that during the two months he saw Robeson, his patient did become “more communicative and cheerful.”34
Now it was Essie’s turn on the grimly alternating cycle. Seized with terrible pain, she was hospitalized at Beth Israel, and a series of cobalt treatments began. To general astonishment, Paul himself took Essie to the hospital. Yet, despite that show of strength, Paul, Jr., feared his father would do poorly if left alone at Jumel Terrace and suggested to the doctors that he take him down to Marian’s in Philadelphia. Perlmutter told Paul, Jr., he was behaving like a mother hen. So, as a substitute, Paul, Jr., went up to Jumel each evening to cook dinner for his father. Four days after Essie’s hospitalization, he arrived at Jumel to find ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an unmistakable sign (since Paul, Sr., rarely smoked) of his father’s growing unease; he decided to enlist Helen Rosen’s help. She drove in from Katonah to collect Paul and took him back up to her house, a spot he had always loved.35
By the middle of the day, with Paul seemingly in revived spirits, Helen decided to have a swim, and asked if he wanted to walk down to the pond with her. He said yes; Helen had her dip and then came up and sat on the grass with him. Suddenly Paul got up and walked over to the twelve-foot-high dam, which had steps going down into the pond. He put his foot on the top step, looked over at Helen, and with “a devilish laugh” (as Helen recalls it) put his foot down on the next step. Helen knew she had to do something; Paul could not swim. Trying to stay calm, she walked casually over to him and joined in his laughter. “What are you going to do,” she said, smiling, “get your shoes all wet, and that nice suit? Come on off of there.” She took his arm and he let her lead him back to the grass. She acted as “natural” as she could, got him back to the house, made him his usual hamburger, and then—because Sam was away—went in and called Paul, Jr.36
He and Marilyn drove straight up to Katonah. Both Perlmutter and Kline were out of town on vacation, but Paul, Jr., managed to reach Ari Kiev, still covering for Kline. He advised them to bring Paul back to New York immediately so he could have a look at him. After seeing him in the office, Kiev decided that he belonged in the hospital and readmitted Robeson to Gracie Square. Paul offered no resistance; his attitude was compliant—“I’ll do whatever you think best.” On the day of admission, August 7, 1965, Kiev wrote on Robeson’s chart: “… depression, suicidal thoughts and agitation in setting of wife’s admission to hospital.” Kiev added the antidepressant Niamid and a second tranquilizer (Phenergan) to Robeson’s medications.37
For a few days he held his own, with no basic change in symptoms. The staff noted his reluctance to talk or leave his room but when they questioned him directly found him generally coherent and responsive. Dr. Kline dropped by once and Dr. Kiev daily, noting on the third day, “Depression seems less.” The following day, August 10, Essie was operated on at Beth Israel and “invasive carcinoma” was discovered everywhere. Her doctors told Paul, Jr., that she probably had only a few months to live. Visiting his father that same day, Paul, Jr., was apparently so persuasively reassuring about Essie that even an attending physician wrote on Robeson’s chart, “… his wife’s surgery was successful. This was a hysterectomy for a carcinoma which was limited to the endometrium.” But Paul himself “wasn’t much cheered” by his son’s report, according to the notes made on his chart by the special-duty nurse.38
The following evening, August 11, Robeson became, in the words of his private nurse, “dispirited and very apprehensive,” and she decided to ask the doctors on duty to check him. Several of them had a look, and the least alarmed reported elevated blood pressure and some “muttering”; one resident suggested that Robeson’s multiple medications were the possible, though unlikely, culprit, and another described him as “almost catatonic,” sitting “rather rigidly,” smiling “rather inappropriately”—“in general considerably more depressed than on admission.” The next morning Robeson continued to be uncommunicative, “muttering and only rarely expressing himself in an intelligible way,” and still “smiling inappropriately on occasion.” Dr. Kiev was contacted and discussed the case with Dr. Perlmutter. That same afternoon, August 12, Kiev wrote on Robeson’s chart, “Will continue drug regimen as before.” But because the symptoms had still not abated by evening, and Kiev was hoping to make Robeson more comfortable, he started him on ten milligrams of Valium four times a day, and the following morning on a small dose of Thorazine.39
Paul, Jr., noted these developments with mounting alarm. On each daily visit his father seemed worse—“drugged, nodding like a junkie.” He was not specifically aware at the time that the doctors had added Valium and Thorazine. Investigating later, he was told the Thorazine had been for “restraint”; but since Big Paul was not at the time showing manic, unruly symptoms, the question has always remained in his son’s mind: “restraint from what??” His suspicions, then and since, were further fed by one of the special-duty nurses, who strongly implied, without explicitly saying so, that his father was being overmedicated and that Paul, Jr., should “do something.” He did. Enraged, he created a scene in the hospital; it brought the residents running, but their hospital doublespeak failed to soothe his nerves—or dull his intuition that his father was in deep trouble.40
When Big Paul’s condition continued to deteriorate—by the afternoon of August 16 his temperature had shot up to 103, and his nurses reported that he was “muttering to himself and perspiring profusely” and had started “making a speech on social conditions, with a very anxious expression on his face”—Paul, Jr., put in a desperate call to Sam Rosen. Sam in turn managed to reach Perlmutter, who was vacationing in the country. Perlmutter declined to return to New York and told Sam to contact Dr. Richard Nachtigall, the physician covering for him. Nachtigall hurried to the hospital, with Sam close behind. They found Robeson “stuporous,” “muttering incoherently, not responding to verbal stimuli.” Nachtigall ordered a battery of tests, including a spinal tap, blood cultures, and chest X-rays, started him on intravenous fluid with antibiotics, put him on the critical list, and wrote in his report that he suspected pneumonia, possibly induced by phenothiazine toxicity—dehydration due to drugs. Dr. Kline was notified; he dropped by two days later. Dr. Perlmutter did not come in.41
The X-ray results and tests over the next several days confirmed double pneumonia and kidney blockage. Robeson was near death—his temperature had gone to 105 and neither the addition of Chloromycetin nor the application of an alcohol-and-ice-water sheet had made any difference. Sam Rosen and Nachtigall decided on the spot to transfer Robeson to the superior medical facilities at University Hospital. The decision saved his life. Described on admission as “acutely ill, tremulous,” Robeson’s initial course at University Hospital was “stormy,” but treatment with hypothermia for the high fever, and intravenous fluids for what had probably been a bacterial bronchopneumonia, produced gradual improvement, the fever subsiding, the symptomatic trauma retreating. Yet throughout Robeson’s time at University Hospital the doctors noted that “he retained elements of an organic mental syndrome” even as he became “more lucid mentally.” When they discharged him on September 9, after a three-week stay, they suggested as a final diagnosis “psychosis” with “toxic metabolic encephalopathy probably secondary to combined drug therapy.” The pneumonia, in other words, had been a transient (if nearly fatal) episode; though it was successfully resolved, Robeson nonetheless remained seriously ill.42
In early September, Paul and Essie were brought home from their respective hospitals within days of each other, Essie dying, Paul uncertainly involved with life. She lay upstairs in bed; he, brooding and melancholy, passed unpredictably from room to room. Frankie Lee Sims, their old friend from California, and Marie Bowden, a union secretary, moved into Jumel to take care of them. Paul, Jr., and Marilyn shuttled between a physically shattered mother still keenly alert and an emotionally disconnected father seemingly indifferent to anyone’s struggle for survival, including his own. Paul’s inability to connect was not markedly different, except in style, from the separate solitudes into which Essie and Paul, Jr., were locked as well. Essie was unreconciled to finding herself in a situation at last that she could not somehow “manage.” Paul, Jr., still bitterly blamed both her and Dr. Kline for having taken the “wrong” step, thereby bringing on his father’s collapse, protracting his anger through an obsessive insistence that somehow catastrophe could have been avoided.
By early October, Big Paul seemed headed further downhill. Agitated and restless, he continued to roam the apartment anxiously. On the evening of October 15 Paul, Jr., noticed that his pacing had narrowed to the hall leading to the front door, and he told Frankie Sims to keep an eye on his father while he went upstairs for a bath. Frankie had to attend to another chore momentarily, and Paul, Jr., sitting in the tub, heard the front door slam. When he raced downstairs with a towel around him, he discovered his father was gone. He dressed quickly and dashed outside to search the neighborhood. No Paul. It began to rain lightly. He phoned Lloyd Brown, who lived nearby and owned a car, and together the two men searched in a wider perimeter. No Paul. They called friends, just in case he had stopped off at somebody’s house. No one had seen him. By midnight, frantic, they phoned the police to report Paul missing. The police, in turn, put out a missing persons bulletin. Early the following morning an anonymous phone-caller to the Wadsworth Avenue station house reported that while walking his dog he had come upon a man lying in a clump of bushes near Highbridge Park, a few blocks from Jumel Terrace. Conscious but incoherent (fortunately it had been a warm night), Paul was taken to the Vanderbilt Clinic at nearby Presbyterian Hospital, treated for facial lacerations and a bruised right hip and ankle, and then transferred to University Hospital. When Paul, Jr., Lloyd Brown, and Essie (who somehow managed to get out of bed) arrived, Big Paul told them he had no recollection of leaving the house, or of anything else: “What happened to me?” he kept repeating, “What happened to me?” A spokesman for the Vanderbilt Clinic told the press Robeson had been mugged, but after the police reported no evidence of assault, Essie issued a formal statement saying her husband had been ill and occasionally suffered from loss of balance and dizzy spells. Released from University Hospital several days later, he was taken by Paul, Jr., to Marian’s house in Philadelphia.43
Essie’s symptoms, in the meantime, had intensified. Beset with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, she was readmitted to Beth Israel by Perlmutter on November 23. The cancer had metastasized throughout her body. By the first week in December she was having trouble breathing, but despite severe discomfort continued to see visitors, including Freda Diamond and Helen Rosen. On December 12 she was put on the critical list. That day a friend from the UN arrived with an armful of holly, “thinking it wise to begin celebrating the Holidays a bit early. Essie smiled with her eyes, but she could no longer speak.” At five-thirty the following morning, two days before her seventieth birthday, she died—her unquiet, tenacious spirit stilled. Paul, Jr., went down to Philadelphia to bring his father the news. Big Paul signed the death certificate and, without saying a word, turned away. The funeral was private, with only Paul, Jr., Marilyn, and their two children, Susan and David, present. Paul Sr. did not attend.44