Paul Robeson (39 page)

The concert tour went according to plan. In February and March, Robeson sang seventeen times in the English provinces, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. He drew large crowds everywhere, despite the economic depression and even though he essentially sang his old program, making few additions to his repertory from that body of world folk music to which he had recently felt drawn. Perhaps he recognized that his ability to hold a popular audience hinged to some extent on the familiarity of his offerings. In any case, the warm welcome reassured him that his recent political outspokenness had not cost him his audience. After two standing-room-only concerts in Belfast and Dublin, Essie wrote her mother, “Everybody tells him he mustn't say this, and he mustn't say that, or the public will be angry with him and desert him. Well, see how they desert him.”
¹⁸

The critics, recognizing that he had become a popular idol in Britain,
tended to applaud the charm of his personality, his modesty, deep feeling, simplicity, and sincerity of manner—rather than to belabor technical points of musicianship. Where they did, the advice offered was contradictory. Some of the critics continued to express the hope that Robeson would expand his repertory; others chided him for the songs he had already added, finding them unsuited to his “Negro” voice. Robeson paid the press scant attention. The distorted newspaper accounts of his trip to Russia had taught him to discount the accuracy of their coverage. “They have twisted what I say about the Soviet Union around so badly that now I give them written statements,” he told a reporter from
Soviet Russia Today
.
¹⁹

The three-performance tryout of
Basalik
(step two of Robeson's agenda) faltered at the Arts Theatre Club. The play's strong ideological appeal to Robeson was not buttressed by much artistry. Basalik, chief of an African country bordering on a British protectorate, carries off the British governor's wife as a hostage—treating her subsequent sexual advances with royal disdain—in a successful effort to extract a promise that his people will be left in peace. The formula of the Noble Savage dictated that Robeson, as Basalik, would do little more than stand around in regal silhouette, making majestic, monosyllabic noises. The critics handled him sympathetically, commiserating with his inability to find a vehicle suitable to both his gifts and his political integrity, but they gave no encouragement to any notion of extending the play's run beyond three performances.
²⁰

The following month, May 1935, Robeson appeared in the play
Stevedore
, directed by André Van Gyseghem (who had directed the London production of
All God's Chillun
in 1933).
Stevedore
had had a considerable success the year before in New York at the Theatre Union (a group which had come together to stage plays with working-class content and at inexpensive box-office prices): Brooks Atkinson had hailed it in the
Times
as “a swift and exciting drama of a race riot seasoned with class propaganda.” In London the play was performed mostly with nonprofessional actors; Mrs. Marcus Garvey and George Padmore (the influential West Indian Marxist) helped recruit black cast members from various social strata, ranging from medical students to African seamen recently departed from their tribal villages. Robeson's old friend John Payne supervised the singing in the play, and Larry Brown appeared in the supporting role of Sam Oxley. The script exemplified Robeson's hope of fostering socially useful art. It tells the story of Lonnie Thompson, a black worker falsely accused of raping a white woman, who eludes a lynch mob, rallies his fellow blacks, wins the support of a group of white union members, and routs the rampaging mob—though Thompson himself is shot dead. Frankly propagandistic, the play combined the theme of the oppression of American blacks
with a message of hope: the ability of a confederation of like-minded workers of every race and creed to unite against injustice.
²¹

The play's good intentions were embedded in a melodramatic structure that lent it a certain vigor, but at the cost of complexity. As James Agate complained in the
Sunday Times
, the play “presents an ungraded picture of the virtuous savage and his vile oppressor,” useless as a contribution toward solving a social problem because “its simplistic stereotypes did not match up with real life.” Some of the other critics were more impressed with the play than Agate was, but almost all (including Agate) applauded Robeson's performance. Given the handicaps of an obvious script and an overcharged production, the consensus was that his “extraordinarily vivid and arresting personality” had been shown to advantage. Nancy Cunard, who had been skeptical of Robeson's intentions, not only liked the play (“extremely valuable in the racial-social question—it is straight from the shoulder”) but also wrote in
The Crisis
that Robeson “is much more real than in such other parts as ‘Othello' (which does not suit him).”
²²

Because the play did not draw enough of an audience to extend its run, Robeson's plans for doing both
Basalik
and
Stevedore
in repertory for six months in the provinces had to be canceled. He continued, though, to get a variety of attractive offers. Soon after
Stevedore
closed, the German director G. W. Pabst offered Robeson the leading role of Mephisto in a film adaptation of Gounod's
Faust
. “This picture will be in no sense a Hollywood picture,” Pabst wrote him, but, rather, “an attempt to make [an] artistic product of the highest kind.” To that end, he had asked George Antheil to arrange the score and Fritz Reiner, director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to conduct it. Antheil, who knew Robeson, also wrote to urge him to accept the role (“I am sure that it will be a great production”). But he decided to pass on the offer, shying away from European opera, which he felt ill-suited to his voice and unsympathetic to his temperament. Pabst let him know that he thought he'd made a mistake—“I am sure we could have done a marvelous thing together.” The previous year Robeson had turned down an opera closer to his vocal and personal needs—Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess
. Gershwin had offered Robeson the part of Porgy and told him he was “bearing in mind Paul's voice in writing it.” But, despite additional pleading from DuBose Heyward, who was doing the libretto, Robeson decided against the role.
²³

He also declined an offer of quite another sort that came to him from a group of students at Edinburgh University. They wanted to nominate him for the Lord Rectorship, an honorary position decided upon by student election and involving no obligation other than a speech at investiture. It was, one of the students wrote him, “a gesture toward yourself and toward your race which for its national and international importance,
ought to be encouraged.” Robeson declined with “grateful thanks,” saying that he expected to be spending a great deal of time abroad during the next three years, “some of it in Africa and some in Asia.”
²⁴

He did accept two other offers: to portray Toussaint L'Ouverture in a stage play by the radical Trinidadian C. L. R. James, then residing in London, and to re-create his role of Joe (for a forty-thousand-dollar salary) in the film version of
Show Boat
. Having been unable to combine socially significant work with commercial success, he temporarily split them apart: the Toussaint play would satisfy his political needs,
Show Boat
his financial ones. (He had hoped that by now Sergei Eisenstein would have succeeded in pushing through their proposal to do a film on Haiti together, but Eisenstein's letters contained no encouragement.)
Show Boat
was first up. At the end of September 1935, the Robesons left for Hollywood.
²⁵

They stopped on the way in Pittsfield, Massachusetts to see Pauli. He had remained under the tutelage of his grandmother, to whom the Robesons sent eighty pounds a month. Ma Goode's own theories on childraising included the peculiar notion that touching or cuddling a child was tantamount to spoiling him. Essie attempted at least indirect supervision through long letters—of instruction to her mother and of exhortation to Pauli (Paul occasionally appended for his son a brief “Hello Fellow!” note, and at one point wrote him, “… I love you very, very much and I'm making a New Year's resolution that I'll see a great deal of my boy the next year and all years thereafter”). Essie commented to her mother at length about everything from Pauli's schooling to his wet bathing suits. She wanted Pauli brought up, she wrote, in the same way she had been:

to feel perfectly at home and at ease, in any company … to consider myself a pretty swell human being, and to look for human beings everywhere, in any walk of life … to open up my mind and to think with it … to do impossible things … to be as good as I could … never … to think I am being looked down upon. I unconsciously feel I'm top dog. That's the reason I am at home in any society. I want Paul to have that. It saves a lot of hurt feelings, imaginary slights, etc.
²⁶

To Pauli, Essie tried to convey egalitarian values she wasn't always able to live up to in her own life, cautioning him against snobbism in any form, and encouraging an effort at self-assertion she herself had never needed. She did not want him deferring to any authority, including that of parent or teacher, or ever obeying without question (“if and when he comes under my control,” she wrote her mother, “[I] will teach him to question everything and everybody”; she wanted him “to speak up for his rights”). She especially did not want Pauli internalizing any disparagements
thrown at him as a black child. Hearing that a classmate had called him a “nigger,” Essie wrote him a long letter about the importance of being proud of his color:

We, too, were called “nigger” when we were young. But we didn't mind very much.… I honestly think that white people call us all niggers, because they are jealous of us. They only call us nigger, when we do something better than they do, or when they are angry.… All white people, or nearly all white people, have no colour at all. They are just white. Some of them have rosy cheeks, but that is all.… We think the colour is beautiful, and much more interesting than just plain uninteresting white.

Hearing that Pauli had called another boy a “sissy,” Essie chastised him for indulging in equally unjust name-calling: “There are a lot of very nice children who are not well and strong, and who cannot play games. It may not be their fault at all. I don't want you to hate them, and fight them. That is horrid.… I'd much rather you didn't hate anybody. Hating people makes you nasty, yourself. Don't hate him, don't fight him. If you don't like him, just leave him alone.” Along with the detailed comments on his behavior, she reassured Pauli that “It is a great sadness to us that we cannot have you with us to live,” promising that “some day, soon, I hope we will all settle down together.”
²⁷

The Robesons also stopped for a brief time in New York—to take in some theater, to see the Van Vechtens and other friends, and to confer with Oscar Hammerstein II about the
Show Boat
film. Then they headed out to the coast, stopping off in Chicago so that Essie could interview Joe Louis (who had recently defeated Max Baer) for a collection of “Negro portraits” she hoped to do as a book. “I found him charming, and very very simple and natural,” she wrote back to the Van Vechtens. “He only goes clam when you take him out of his field. He's as sweet as he can be, and crazy about the
RACE
.” What with Joe Louis's victory and the arrival of Robeson in Hollywood, Van Vechten predicted to Alfred Knopf that “there is going to be a great deal of talk again about Negroes this winter,” citing Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the premiere of Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess
as two additional reasons. By November the Robesons, along with Larry Brown, were settled in a “grand flat” in Pasadena, each of them in his or her own bedroom “so we can all live happily and comfortably, without getting under each other's heels,” lemon trees in the backyard, orange trees outside the kitchen window, and enormous poinsettias lining the walk from the street to the house. “Its all rather picture post cardy,” Essie wrote Hattie Boiling, “and you're never quite sure its real, but its lovely.”
²⁸

The filming proved a happy experience; the relationships were good all around (possibly excepting Allan Jones—“If you saw the Four Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera,” Essie wrote home, “you have seen our Ravenel, who is Allan Jones”). Robeson especially liked Helen Morgan, who played Julie, and was delighted with James Whale's direction. He felt he learned a great deal from Whale about how to work in front of a camera and how to use his vocal strengths to maximum advantage. He was in marvelous voice and spirits throughout the filming; when he finished singing “Ol' Man River” through the second time, the members of the orchestra applauded, and members of the technical crews frequently crowded the set to watch him (“We are proudest of the enthusiasm and interest of the property men and the electricians,” Essie wrote. “If you can interest them, you're good”).
²⁹

The shoot was condensed into a two-month period so Robeson could get back to London in time for rehearsals of C. L. R. James's play about Toussaint. Given
Show Boat
's cast of three thousand and the lavish production settings, that meant hectic scheduling; Whale shot nearly two hundred thousand feet of film in little more than six weeks. Essie had no trouble keeping busy on her own, spending much of her time wandering around the film sets and reporting back impressions to her friends (Carole Lombard—who was shooting
Spinster Dinner
with Preston Foster—is “a gorgeous bitch … and as unrestrained as the air”). Newly trained in anthropology, Essie regaled Hattie Boiling with the strange customs of the natives: “The former studio manager of Universal City made it a rule that the employees who punched a time clock had to get off the sidewalk when stars, or people who ‘Got screen credit' came along. They were just like the niggers of the place.”
³⁰