Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Protest over the concert, however, emerged within the black community. A local music teacher wrote to the Call expressing her feelings of “humiliation” as a black at Robeson’s confining his program to “slave songs” and omitting “classical” selections, which could have demonstrated a more advanced “musical technique.” Her letter set off a lively debate in the columns of the Call, which continued into three issues, producing a few additional denunciations of Robeson for “commercializing our backwardness” by devoting his repertory exclusively to Sorrow Songs, but in general leaning toward the opinion that it was time for blacks to end their enslavement to white cultural standards and—like Robeson—to champion the artistic heritage of their own people.52

  When Paul returned to New York in February 1927, Essie told him that she was pregnant. She later wrote that he “received the news with mixed feelings” and ascribed his ambivalence to concern for her health. When she had earlier broached the subject of having a child, he had said that, “since a child had not just happened … perhaps it was best to leave well enough alone.” Now that Essie had taken the decision into her own hands and presented Paul with a fait accompli, he accepted it, though with a residue of resentment. Essie, by her own account, “grew fat and sparkling, her cheeks flushed with good health and her eyes shining with happiness and eagerness.” Six months into the pregnancy she was so large that (as she wrote Van Vechten) “I am not sure whether the person answering to Essie is me or not.” With an “immense” baby on the way, she added, “Poor Angel will have to put his shoulder to the wheel.”53

  He did. He signed with Walter K. Varney, the white impresario who had managed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, for a year’s concert tour in Europe with Larry Brown, to begin in October 1927. That would put Paul out of the country when Essie was due to give birth, but she strongly urged the contract on him. She even took it upon herself to write to various people, including Frank Harris, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, urging them to attend the inaugural concert in Paris on October 29—and asking them to invite their friends. In the summer preceding his departure, Paul and Essie took a cottage for the month of August at Oak Bluffs, the black bourgeois watering hole on Martha’s Vineyard, with Paul concertizing locally. “I have a great tan,” he wrote Van Vechten, “am really so much darker—I’m still visible under a strong light.” At the last minute he had a telegram from the Theatre Guild offering him the part of Crown in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s play Porgy, which was due to open on Broadway in October 1927, but to his regret he had to turn it down because of the European tour. That same summer, his old friend William Patterson joined a picket line in Boston to protest the imminent execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a protest that enlisted a number of others who later became Robeson’s friends—Ella Reeve Bloor (“Mother Bloor”), John Howard Lawson, Mike Gold, Rose Baron, and Vito Marcantonio. The event proved a milestone in Patterson’s political pilgrimage, and he began to talk to Paul increasingly about Communism and the Soviet Union. For now, “it went in one ear and out the other.” Robeson’s political milestones still lay ahead.54

  The impending birth of their baby drew the Robesons somewhat closer. From on board the S.S. Majestic on his way to Europe, Paul wrote Essie with a fullness of affection that had recently been missing from their relationship: “So hard to leave you sweet. Seems as tho you are me.… You’ll never know how marvelous I think you are. Of course I love you more than I love my very self. I just almost melt away with happiness when I think of the beautiful days we have before us. I love you darling with all my soul.… So many thanks darling for all you have done for me—for my career—for my better understanding of myself—for your patience and care and devoted love. And know that whatever I achieve shall have been due in great part to your unselfish interest and devotion.”55

  His appreciation of Essie was genuine—but so was his anticipation of meeting in Paris a young woman named Freda Diamond, of whom he had become enamored. They had first met in 1923 at a party for the Chauve Souris, the Russian musical-theater troupe. Paul was stepping into an elevator as the beautiful seventeen-year-old Freda was stepping out of it, accompanied by her sister and mother (the formidable Ida Diamond, a friend of Emma Goldman). Even as a teen-ager, Freda Diamond was a striking presence. She was tall, with dramatic, deep-set eyes—a classic Russian-Jewish beauty—with the forceful, gregarious nature to match. Paul told Essie to continue to their next appointment, while he retraced his steps to the party and danced all night with Freda. Thus began a relationship that lasted, in its many manifestations, and despite the multiplicity of his romantic and sexual encounters, for many years. Despite the conventional demeanor he still chose to show the world, Robeson, emotionally, was already defying official culture, refusing to narrow down his behavior to fit the monogamous norm—to love only one woman forever (or, indeed, even one at a time).56

  Paul became enchanted with Mama Diamond as well as her daughter, and was closely drawn into the circle of this deeply political family (at age twelve, Freda herself was on the street passing out leaflets against conscription). The circle also included Ida Diamond’s sister, Bess Davidoff, her husband, Henry (a schoolteacher who often discussed music with Paul), and their daughter Amy, whom Paul adored (when she died in her early twenties, he was devastated). On occasion in the twenties, Mama Diamond would chide Paul for not being sufficiently committed to politics. One evening (around 1928), Mama Diamond met Paul on the street in front of their building on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village in order to escort him up in the elevator personally. She later explained that the new doorman had suggested that her black guest would have to go up in the service elevator and she had stationed herself on the sidewalk to prevent such an indignity. Paul thanked her, but added that her gesture really hadn’t been necessary, since he had learned, as an artist, not to let such incidents bother him. Mama Diamond lit into him—“We expect plumbers to have political consciousness, why not artists?” It was a view Paul would shortly come to share.57

  CHAPTER 7

  Show Boat

  (1927–1929)

  Gertrude Stein had a bad cold and, being “a little afraid of the inside of a Paris theatre,” she missed Robeson’s inaugural concert at the Salle Gaveau on October 29. Almost everyone else from the American colony, white and black, showed up: Roland Hayes, Caterina Jarboro, Alberta Hunter, Johnny Hudgins, Mrs. Cole Porter, Ludwig Lewisohn, Naomi Bercovici, Michael Strange, and Sylvia Beach—along with James Joyce and some of Paris’s own notables, Georges Auric and Baroness Erlanger. Freda Diamond’s Aunt Bess and Bess’s daughter Amy—soon to become part of Paul’s extended family—also turned out for the concert. Although the program had only been routinely advertised, the audience filled the fifteen hundred available seats as well as standing room, and another five hundred were turned away. The enthusiastic crowd called Robeson back at the end of each section of his program of twenty spiritual and secular songs and at the close of the concert gave him an immense ovation, a full half-hour of applause and encores. It was, Alberta Hunter wrote in her diary, “a triumphant success.” The critics, like the audience, showered him with praise (“un baryton magnifique”; “L’ensemble n’en fut pas moins fort agréable”; “… y fit valoir la belle qualité d’un timbre naturellement générevx”); several of the English-speaking critics present who had heard him on earlier occasions commented on the marked improvement in the range and quality of his voice and on the “poise and ease” of his manner.1

  Robeson himself wasn’t pleased. He had come down with a severe cold, and had been in bed for the four days preceding the performance. Yet the reception was so favorable that Varney immediately scheduled a second concert, and this time Robeson agreed with the critics, telegraphing Essie, “Tremendous success. Marvelous critiques. Everything grand.” Gertrude’s cold was better, too, and she not only attended the second concert but rhapsodized to Paul about the unique quality of his voice. “She had identified him with herself,” Essie quoted Paul as saying, “i
n the unaesthetics—says Paul does with his voice what she does with words—unbroken continuity, etc.”2

  Essie gave birth to a son, christened Paul Robeson, Jr., on November 2, 1927. She had a difficult time with secondary complications, but once again concealed her health problems from Paul. He remained in Europe to continue his concert engagements—and his relationship with Freda Diamond, traveling alone on her first trip to Europe (in those days an unusual act of daring for a young woman). During the four years he had known her, Freda had grown into a confident, fiery, sometimes imperious young woman; after graduating from the Women’s Art School at Cooper Union, she was now embarked on additional study in architecture and decorative design and headed toward an influential career as a designer of home furnishings. A radiant, high-spirited twenty-one-year-old, she was Robeson’s constant companion in Paris, and was with him when news arrived of Paul, Jr.’s birth. Though Paul expressed minimal enthusiasm for the event to Freda, she urged him to return immediately to New York—and, by the time she left for Italy the next day, thought she had persuaded him.3

  She had not. Instead of returning home, and oblivious to Essie’s actual condition, Paul sent her a series of letters over the next few weeks that presumed her full recovery from the delivery and expressed deep feeling for her. “You see,” he wrote, “I really have grown in these two months of separation to love you with a love that seems unbelievable to me. Nothing matters but you—I don’t matter—the world doesn’t matter and I’m so anxious to see you to show you a new love—a new sweet heart—a new husband—just like the old one but so much sweeter—kinder—more love—more considerate.”4

  He also used his letters to explore career options. He didn’t want to stay in Europe for the full year originally planned, and doubted, in any case, whether a profitable tour could be made to stretch that long. Europe was all very well for prestige, as a place that would “appreciate my art—but the money is home. They’ll come and rave over our program once or twice—but they really don’t get the words—the songs are simple—I do them simply—and they feel well—if he can sing so grandly (like Chaliapin) I should do the things he does—Boris Godunov etc. They say I’m almost wasted upon simple music—no matter how much they enjoy it. So I can’t make money doing what I am—I’m sure. I can only attract the concert audience and most discriminating of that. And there aren’t enough places to go to. [Roland] Hayes went to Italy for concerts and lost money. He had to cancel his Russian trip.” In order to “attain very substantial success financially I’ll need other songs—some in the language of the country or classics that they know.… There is no money here at usual stuff. The only hope is Opera.…”5

  Only two years before, Robeson had been quoted in the press as saying, “I will not go into opera, where I would probably become one of hundreds of mediocre singers, but I will concentrate on negro music, which has never been properly handled. I may sing a little opera in the morning but only in the bathroom.” Though he would periodically be tempted, as he was now, by the prospects of opera, Robeson never moved seriously in that direction. For one thing, his voice, despite its extraordinary warmth and richness, had limited range (in the thirties he sang well down to bottom F, and his high range went to D above middle C—an E-flat range generally; by the fifties he had shifted down about a half-tone)—and this meant that few bass roles in the operatic repertoire would have been comfortable for him. Even if he had been more interested in an opera career than he was, the conservatism of the Metropolitan Opera management in these years would have forestalled it. When Ernst Křenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up the Band) was performed at the Met in 1928, the story of the promiscuous amours of a black jazz leader (which had caused rioting at its Munich opening) was altered so that the leading character did not necessarily have to be black, and then, to confuse matters further, a blackface white singer sang the title role. In a public statement protesting those alterations, James Weldon Johnson noted, “We have in this country colored singers who could masterfully sing that role. I need only name Jules Bledsoe and Paul Robeson.” By 1933 the Metropolitan management had progressed to the point where, in producing Louis Gruenberg’s opera Emperor Jones, it allowed a few minor parts to be played by blacks and confirmed in the program that the leading character had also been written as a black—but again bypassed Robeson for the role and gave it to Lawrence Tibbett to perform in blackface.6

  Writing Essie from Europe about his newfound conviction that he must broaden his career, Paul concluded that this was “just what you have believed all along but what you have been sensible enough to let me find out myself.” Before getting “so excited about my ‘art’ etc. I must be the complete artist. There are so many things I would have done to make us money if I had not been afraid of my ‘art’. Black Boy—Vaudeville—Picture houses—pictures—Show Boat—Hammerstein, etc.… and it really hasn’t been so much ‘art’ as thinking what people would say—which of course is silly.” From now on, he resolved, he would “turn things over” to Essie—“trust in you and your judgment wholly.… You know how to value me—my dignity etc. But we must have money.” “I’m in Europe only because you knew I wanted to come.… It was so beautiful of you to let me go at the time of your childbirth. I’ll never forget that.…” But work in Europe, Paul had now decided, could be confined to a few months in the spring and fall, and the rest of the time “ought to be in America.” The money, after all, was in America.7

  That, however, presented problems with Larry Brown, who might not want to return. If that was so, their partnership, in Paul’s judgment, ought to be broken up. “I’m a little fed up with having my career handicapped by being tied up with that of another person.… If my career can’t be built up and maintained by spirituals there is no need in having Larry as a load and carrying him, making every move of mine considering him.” If Larry’s choice was to stay in Europe and continue with Varney as manager, he couldn’t reasonably object to Paul’s leaving—“with you in your present condition.” By this time, early December, Essie’s condition had worsened; Paul was still ignorant of it, but he did feel some vague concern at having received a letter from her mother (of whom he was never very fond) and not from her. Ma Goode had included a description of the baby, and Paul responded somewhat perfunctorily that the baby sounded “grand”; “Won’t I be glad to see him.” And to see Essie. “I shant touch you,” he promised, “until you are completely well. I can get along and seeing you will be so much.”8

  He was to see her, and his son, sooner than he expected. Six weeks after giving birth, Essie developed a breast abscess and a severe case of phlebitis. Over her daughter’s objection, Ma Goode finally decided to cable Paul the truth. He immediately wired back, “Darling Coming at once. Wait for me,” and booked passage, arriving home in New York the day after Christmas. This time, however, his mere presence was not enough to rally Essie. Recovery proved slow and discouraging. Paul reported to Gertrude Stein that, although the baby was a “wonder”—“much more fun than I ever thought a small baby could be”—Essie had had “a bad time” (but then added, “For any people beside yourself, Essie was just about ready to ‘leave this world.’ Otherwise my mgr. and Mr. Brown would be very upset. Thanks”). Essie wasn’t allowed out of bed until early January, still with a drainage tube in her breast and limping so severely from phlebitis that the doctor warned that her leg might be permanently game. Paul wanted to take her south for a few months to recover her strength, but their money had all but run out. He hoped a nibble from Hollywood would turn into a firm offer, and Essie’s doctor endorsed the prospect of California sunshine for his patient. But for the moment plans remained up in the air, and Paul wired Larry Brown, “Essie recovery operation very slowly. Unable return Europe indefinitely. Make your own plans.” Essie, though still recuperating, picked up pen and paper to write to Varney and to reestablish ties with Larry Brown; she was soon back in full swing as Paul’s manager.9

  The California movie deal failed to mat
erialize—the producers couldn’t find a “suitable” property for Robeson—so, early in March 1928, he agreed to replace Jules Bledsoe as Crown (the role he had been asked to originate) in the successful run of the DuBose and Dorothy Heywood musical play, Porgy. He took the role for five hundred dollars per week, Robeson wrote to Larry Brown, “to keep from starving,” but it didn’t suit him; he had to strain to sing above the full chorus night after night—“My voice would not stand it as I knew it wouldn’t.” According to his brother Ben, “the raucous shoutings of the play had not only shattered his voice but his nerves.” A nick-in-time offer from Florenz Ziegfeld made it possible for Robeson to leave the show six weeks after opening in it. Ziegfeld asked him to sing the part of Joe in the London company of Show Boat—which had been a runaway hit in New York—due to open in early May under the personal supervision of Sir Alfred Butt. He would only have to sing one song—“Ol’ Man River”—yet, since it would run through the show in three separate refrains, Butt expected Robeson’s appearance to generate considerable press coverage. The role would save his voice even while providing him with maximum publicity. Robeson jumped at the chance. The plan was for Essie, who by April had regained her health, to join him in Europe in May, leaving the baby Paul with Ma Goode.10

  Essie wrote separately to Larry to help smooth the way. She told him that the part in Show Boat was “a ridiculously easy one.… It wouldn’t tax [Paul’s] voice as much as a rehearsal,” and predicted that if the show “is a hit, as it surely will be, and Paul is the favorite, you and he may easily and speedily become the vogue in London and clean up” doing concerts on Sunday nights, when there were no performances of the play, and private engagements late on any other night. “There is the situation. It seems grand to me.” She added, by way of further inducement, “You will have a fit when you hear Paul sing. He has done two months work with Miss Armitage, and he is just too bad.”11