Paul Robeson (10 page)

He hesitated, but Essie had begun “to set her mind and heart” on encouraging Paul to explore his singing and acting skills further, with a serious eye toward a career in theater as an alternative, or at the least a supplement, to law. She had sat in on every rehearsal of
Taboo
, carefully going over her performance notes with him, buying them tickets to more and more New York shows, and herself becoming convinced that his race would be less of a hindrance to a distinguished career in the theater than in the law, where at best he was likely to end up, after years of struggle, with “a small political job” or “a good and remunerative practice.” Neither prospect, she decided, would be sufficient reward for her husband's extraordinary gifts. Essie was ambitious for something far more spectacular than mere security.
²⁶

The young black singer Harold Browning further helped to nudge Robeson toward a career in the theater. Browning was a member and the manager of The Four Harmony Kings, a black quartet then playing in the Broadway smash
Shuffle Along
, the epochal musical that had opened in the summer of 1921—the first entirely black production since the memorable early-twentieth-century contributions by Will Marion Cook, Bob Cole, Bert Williams, and George Walker. When the bass singer of the Harmony Kings unexpectedly left, the quartet's job in
Shuffle Along
was put in jeopardy. A chance encounter on the street between Harold Browning and Robeson, who had just closed in
Taboo
and finished his second-year law-school exams, led to Robeson's being hired as the bass replacement. After one day of rehearsal, he joined the cast of
Shuffle Along
.
²⁷

His debut performance got off to a shaky start. Jauntily balancing his smart new straw hat and cane, preoccupied with the excitement of the night, Paul tripped over a board while bending to get through the narrow door leading onstage—and nearly fell. Essie, sitting in the audience, “closed her eyes in horror,” fearing Paul had stumbled onstage with such
force that he had knocked down the three other quartet members “like ninepins.” When she opened her eyes, all four were smilingly erect and singing lustily—Paul's trained body had instantly recovered itself. Eubie Blake, the show's composer and conductor, later recalled that for an instant he feared the huge new “King” was going to fall right into the orchestra pit. “That boy will bear watching,” Eubie said; “anybody who can nearly fall like that and come up with a million-dollar smile has got
some
personality!” For toppers, Paul's solo rendition of “Old Black Joe” brought down the house. With the omens so auspicious, he decided to accept Hoytie Wiborg's offer to go to England with
Taboo
.
²⁸

But first he took the occasion of a recital in Washington, D.C., to pay a visit to Gerry Neale at Howard University. According to Gerry's recollection many years later, Paul's visit was unexpected. A call came into the women's dormitory saying a guest was waiting to see her in the reception room. It was Paul. “I was glad to see him. We talked about where his career was going and about what I was doing.” To her surprise, he returned the next day. “I somehow shortened the conversation and would not let it get personal.” The following evening a friend persuaded Gerry to go to a YWCA dance. “Who was there as big as life but Paul … and we danced and talked and danced and talked. He said he believed Essie wanted him to be happy and he was sure she would give him a divorce if I would promise to marry him. I mustered the strength and resolve to say to him that he must go back and work hard to make his marriage work. We said goodbye again.”
²⁹

Paul still wasn't ready to give up, even though Gerry told him she was seriously dating Harry Bledsoe and even though her beau made it clear, when he heard of Robeson's visit to the campus, that “he would be no part of an eternal triangle.” In 1924, after graduating from Howard, Gerry and Bledsoe did marry, although, like Essie and Paul earlier, they kept it a secret. Bledsoe went to Detroit to complete his last year of law school, and Gerry went to Bordentown, New Jersey, to teach in the Industrial and Training School. During that year, Paul came to give a concert at the school, and Gerry attended. They talked briefly at the reception, not having seen each other since his visit to Howard. The next day, after assuming Paul had returned to New York, Gerry got a call from the principal's wife asking her to come to their home. Paul was there. When the two were left alone, they “talked and talked” and Gerry again said “he must make his marriage work.” Unnerved at his persistence, she decided it was time to send out a formal wedding announcement—and included Paul and Essie on the list. “He wrote me a heartbreak letter saying, How could I do this to him? Why had I not waited?” By now—if not earlier—Essie was aware of Paul's continuing involvement. When their paths twice crossed with Gerry, at a party and a dance in December
1924, Essie confided to her diary that Paul had been “too attentive” to Gerry, “vamping her before my very eyes”—“Paul not loyal to me for first time.” Thereafter—whether because of Essie's feelings or her intervention is unknown—the involvement did finally cool. Once in a great while in later years, Paul and Gerry renewed contact, their passion by then having distilled into cordiality.
³⁰

CHAPTER 4

Provincetown Playhouse

(1922–1924)

Paul sailed for England in July 1922 aboard the S.S.
Homeric
. The tentative plan was for him to test the waters and, if the temperature seemed inviting, to send for Essie; if not, to return to the States and rejoin The Harmony Kings; and in either case to return in the fall to complete his last year in law school. On the eve of his departure, Essie took ill and her doctor said an immediate operation for adhesions from an old appendectomy was needed. She kept the news from Paul, not wanting to “worry him to death” and “spoil his work and his trip.” At the pier Essie gaily bade him goodbye, postdated twenty-one letters to him, arranged for friends to mail them off at intervals, sent him a cheery cable at sea—and checked herself into Presbyterian Hospital.
¹

The operation went well, but her recovery did not. She developed a variety of postoperative complications, including phlebitis, and was kept in the hospital. Her vitality and courage ebbed in tandem, bolstered only by the arrival of Paul's frequent letters, filled with cheerful news of his experiences—and repeated expressions of his love. The letters are suffused with such extravagant expressions of tenderness (“Sweet I often think of how barren my life would have been had I never seen you”; “I've just been kissing your picture”; “I marvel, Darling, at the strength of our love”; “If ever two were one
we
are,” etc.) that we would have to revise our understanding of the ordinary workings of the human psyche in order to believe that the sentiments were wholly counterfeit or that he harbored any substantial doubts about the course of his marriage or any serious grievances about having been “tricked” into it.
²

Paul's letters also revealed considerable preoccupation with the uncertain
course of his career and the likely reception of the play (renamed
Voodoo
by Mrs. Campbell). On first arriving, he was all exuberance—he thought the countryside beautiful, Mrs. Campbell “a really wonderful woman and a marvelous actress” who had “cut the play up” in such a way as to make his part “much better,” Miss Wiborg immensely “nice,” prospects for the play bright, and his own future so promising that he felt sure he “must stay somehow,” and that Essie must come over to join him.
³

Rehearsals got off to a promising start. From the beginning Mrs. Campbell told him that he “was a good actor” and showed her confidence (as well as the frantic nature of her schedule—she was performing
Hedda Gabler
and rehearsing
Voodoo
simultaneously) by making Paul “one of the directors practically.” He didn't think the English cast was on the whole as strong as the American, except for Mrs. Campbell, who was “one thousand times better than Miss Wycherly” and “
really rules
,” being “far better” as a director “in knowing what she wants” than Augustin Duncan had been for the New York production. Early on the play seemed to be “shaping up fine,” with firm plans to open at Blackpool, followed by Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool—and, as consummation, London in August. Robeson could hardly wait. “I guess we'll hit,” he wrote Essie confidently. “I'm really supposed to knock 'em dead.”
⁴

He didn't—though he fared better than the production as a whole. The opening in Blackpool proved a disappointment. Perhaps, along with the strained melodrama of the plot, the startling sight of the glamorous Mrs. Campbell, now aged fifty-seven and dressed for her
Voodoo
role as a Louisiana grandmother in braids and crinoline, had something to do with the mixed reception. Paul gamely sent Essie an understated account of the Blackpool performance: “To be truthful things are none too rosy.” By Edinburgh, the next stop, he confessed to outright uncertainty about the play's chances: “Really darling I don't know what to do. These folks want to go to London but are not sure.” He reported that the state of the theater in general, and the prospects for a black performer in particular, were “not as pictured.” The English theater “seems in as bad a state as those in N.Y. or worse.… Vaudeville pays better here than the
legitimate
.” The tale “about Negroes making money here,” he added, “is bosh.” Paul had learned that Will Marion Cook, the pioneering ragtime composer with several successful Broadway credits (including the pathbreaking
Clorindy
), was “wandering around Europe,” and his ex-wife, the brilliant singer-actress Abbie Mitchell, “is in Vienna and there's no money there.”
⁵

Paul was uncertain whether to send for Essie (not having learned yet that she was confined to a hospital bed). He missed her terribly and couldn't bear the idea of being “away from my little girl much longer,” but this supposedly laid-back, impractical young man cautioned that they “can't be foolish,” must not “take any wild chances.” He repeatedly directed Essie to “keep in touch with” Harold Browning and The Harmony
Kings (“If I see things are not breaking I'll get right back with them”), and to find out whether
Shuffle Along
would be coming to London, as rumored (he was sure they'd want him, with “Mrs. Campbell's leading man” tacked on to his name). Should
Voodoo
and all other options fail to pan out, he would head straight back to the States and to law school. “We want to be safe,” he wrote her. To that end, he thought he'd perhaps do best to “get down to Law. The sooner I build up, the sooner we'll be on easy street.” Even time spent with the quartet and
Shuffle Along
might, in light of those goals, “be wasted and will hold us back.” On the other hand, even if he decided to go straight into the law, perhaps it might be better to stay in England and study at Oxford for a year, thereby enhancing subsequent job prospects. The number of possible options and their equal uncertainty “worries me sick.” He urged Essie to think things over “carefully from every angle”—“You'll know what to do.… You always know.”

But Essie, of course, was in the hospital, and her premailed letters, though arriving with routine frequency, never answered Paul's questions or commented on his news. Their obliqueness puzzled him, but for the first few weeks did not overly arouse his suspicion. To relax between performances and bouts of worry over the future, he tried to get about a little. He had taken to England immediately (within a week of landing, he felt he was “getting to be a real Englishman”), and did some standard touring. He also went to the theater frequently (Sir Charles Hawtrey in
Captain Applejack
was “not as good as Eddinger,” but Norma Talmadge's movie
Ghosts of Yesterday
warranted an enthusiastic full-page plot summary to Essie). He also took in the tennis matches between Scotland and Sweden (“I enjoyed the atmosphere. Very collegiate you know”). Otherwise, he seems to have made few social contacts, though one proved all-important. In London, Robeson lived for a few days in an extra room in the flat of the black American singer John Payne. (Payne had come to Europe years before with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and had stayed on to become “Dean” of blacks in London.) Living in the other extra room was a third black musician, twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence Brown, a gentle, charming man of effervescent humor who had come to Europe to accompany Roland Hayes and had stayed to study and also to work on a volume of transcriptions he had arranged of hitherto unknown spirituals. One night at Payne's, Robeson sang a few songs “just for fun,” and thirty years later Larry Brown recalled that he “knew at once that it was possible for him to become a great singer.” Remembering Robeson's marvelous voice, he later sent him the published volume of spirituals; ultimately he would become Robeson's musical collaborator and friend.
⁶

But generally of an evening, so Paul reported to Essie, he stayed home reading (“I like to read good novels of strong love and dream of you”). He reassured her (she had apparently asked) that he was
not
spending any of his time “slumming”: he had “too much to think of” and found “no joy
in ‘slumming' any more” (thereby confirming that he once had). “Dolly [Paul's nickname for Essie] doesn't like and neither do I.” She was “not to worry”—about either women or “drugs.” “No woman living can make me forget my little wife even for a moment.” He promised “always will I remain the noble and fine ‘boy' that my little girl has made me.… There can be no temptation of any kind.” In what may have been an oblique reference to Gerry, Paul reassured Essie that “I have restrained myself all these years in all ways—I've never loved darling until I loved you. All other was mere fancy.” Indeed, he reported, “The people in the company have me down as a little prudish,” and although he tried “to be nice to all,” it could be “so hard”—“I find myself very irritable at times—then I catch myself and be nice like my Dolly would have me.” When he got a bad cold—frequent colds were to trouble him all his life—he especially missed Essie: “How I need you to look after me. Yes, Darling, you are the one to spoil me, because I love you.” “Sweet,” he wrote her on another occasion, “you've spoiled me terribly. I feel absolutely helpless without you. I cried for you when I was sick. If only I could have rested my head on Dolly's breast!”
⁷