Paul Robeson (102 page)

The birthday hurdle over—if not quite cleared—Essie promptly turned to the next task: replying to spreading reports that Paul had become disillusioned with the U.S.S.R. In its fullest form, the rumor had appeared in January 1963 as a two-part article purported to have been written by Robeson himself in a fly-by-night sheet called
The National Insider
. The style of the articles wasn't remotely close to Robeson's own, and the content was almost comically foreign to his actual history (“… at times I have been a Socialist and a Fascist.… [My father's sermons] were really powerful,
but none of them appealed to the intellect. Most of the congregation didn't really have any intellect to begin with”). Yet, as farfetched as the articles were, and as disreputable as the publication in which they appeared was, the section in which Robeson purportedly rejected Soviet-style Communism (though not the dream of a classless society) was reprinted in
Le Figaro
and then picked up elsewhere. It therefore required rebuttal.
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Essie drafted a reply and sent it off for comment and correction to Paul, Jr., Ben Davis, D. N. Pritt, Lloyd Brown, Harry Francis (and through him John Gollan, head of the CP in Great Britain), Carlton Goodlett of the peace movement, and Alexander Soldatov, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain. She made revisions according to their suggestions—particularly Pritt's—and got off a strong statement, under her own name, denouncing the articles as “pure fabrication” and declaring that “None of us has seen any indication that ‘he has changed his political views' in any way, as has been alleged in the articles. On the contrary, there has been no interruption in his warm friendship and close contact with our Soviet and Socialist friends.” (In a letter to Cedric Belfrage, Peggy Middleton provided a private gloss on that view: “… so far as I know Paul has never repudiated the SU, but I can well believe he said something angry and incoherent that got misconstrued. Essie says that he does.”) The Associated Negro Press issued a release based on Essie's statement, and for the moment the matter died, neither the original allegations nor the denial receiving widespread circulation. (Several months later, Essie released a further statement in Paul's name calling talk of his recantation “completely absurd”;
Time
announced that “The phrasing sounded suspiciously Eslandic.”)
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By then, Essie had become fierce about press intrusions. She “still treats the whole thing [the illness] as confidential,” Peggy Middleton wrote Cedric Belfrage in bemusement. And Essie herself wrote Mikhail Kotov in the U.S.S.R. that the press had become a “serious worry” to her. She was not merely being her usual overprotective self, for at one point in late 1962 reporters had actually come out to the Priory to try to get a statement from Paul about Castro; the authorities at the institution had effectively blocked access, and Paul himself had had no idea a press hunt for him had been on. But now, in mid-1963, with more than two years having passed since his collapse in Moscow, the newspapers (according to Essie) had decided to renew their efforts “to smoke Paul out, interview him, and see exactly what was what.” Their only real interest, she felt, was in whether he had changed his political views, and she “determined
NOT
to permit” a question that “would so infuriate him, and offend him … I dare not risk his cursing them out.” In the summer of 1963, however, a confrontation with the press appeared imminent when Essie decided to make a shift in Paul's medical treatment.
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Peggy Middleton—according to her account—had been protesting for some time against Paul's ECT treatments at “a rich man's hideout where,”
she felt, “the emphasis was on the social situation and not on general health.” Her constant needling, in combination with the growing length of Paul's stay at the Priory and the uncertainty of his progress, lay the groundwork for doubt that an unexpected arrival further activated. Claire (“Micki”) Hurwitt, wife of the New York surgeon Elliott Hurwitt and herself trained in psychiatric nursing, had known Paul a little from Progressive Party days, and when she arrived with her two small children in England, she dropped off an introductory note from Helen Rosen at the Connaught Square flat. Essie invited Micki up for tea and took an immediate liking to her (as did Micki to Essie), finding her combination of left-wing and medical credentials irresistible. When Essie told her about the course of Paul's treatment at the Priory, Micki expressed surprise at the large number of shock treatments—by then a documented fifty-four—confessing an instinctual distrust of ECT. Essie suggested she come out to the Priory and have a look at Paul directly.
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Micki did not like what she saw. As soon as she walked into Paul's room, she was overwhelmed by the smell of paraldehyde, a “knockout” drug she associated with only the most desperate and uncontrollable psychiatric cases. A nurse at one point beckoned Micki aside and showed her Paul's medication chart; Micki was horrified at the number and high dosage of drugs he was getting every day—“enough to kill a horse,” she told Essie. “Get him out of there,” she said. Her husband arrived from New York several weeks later and agreed with her estimate. Peggy Middleton had recently spent a day at the famed Buch Clinic in East Berlin and had been particularly impressed with Dr. Alfred Katzenstein, an American-trained clinical psychologist who had served with the U.S. Army during World War II and had experience dealing with survivors of the concentration camps. Essie flew over to Berlin to have a look around, was impressed with what she saw, and made preliminary arrangements for a September 1 consultation for Paul, if he was willing.
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Initially he was not. Then he said he would go, but only if he could go at once. Franz and Diana Loesser, who several years before had initiated the Robeson passport campaign in Manchester and now lived in the GDR, were enlisted to make quick arrangements. A flight on Polish Airways was booked for its regular nonstop Sunday flight to East Berlin on August 25. Somehow the British press got wind of the plans, and several reporters congregated outside the Connaught Square flat and rang Essie's phone at all hours of the day and night. Peggy Middleton advised a statement to the papers, but Essie felt “there was always the chance that he would refuse to go at the last minute” and feared most of all that if Paul himself was accosted, he might break down. Determined to avoid the press, she hit on an elaborate set of ruses worthy of Agatha Christie.
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Late Saturday night, Peggy Middleton, Diana Loesser, and other friends collected eleven pieces of baggage from the Robeson flat and
deposited them at Paddington Station. Sunday morning, the
Telegraph
hit the stands with an article reporting that Robeson, who had “broken with Moscow,” was about to be spirited behind the Iron Curtain to keep him silent, and that his wife was denying all access to him in the interim. “Paul is no longer a public figure,” the
Telegraph
quoted her as saying over the phone, “He is not in the public domain.” The article set the press to salivating, and a horde of reporters now moved into Connaught Square. Essie was ready for them.
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While Harry Francis got Paul out of the Priory—on the floor of a car under the noses of reporters waiting at both entrances—Essie concocted a scheme for getting herself out of Connaught Square. She enlisted Micki Hurwitt and another friend, Nick Price; Nick collected Micki in his car and parked it near the Robesons' flat. Micki got out, casually strolled past the reporters, rang the Robesons' doorbell, and was admitted, Essie having been watching from the window. Essie gave her the key to the flat, a piece of hand luggage, and her big traveling purse; with Essie's two overcoats draped over her arm, Micki went back out into the street, trying to appear elegantly calm. When she'd gotten a block away, one of the reporters ran after her and asked if she was Mrs. Robeson; Micki gave him “a withering stare” and he backed off.
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On returning to the car, she gave Nick Price the apartment key, and he in turn went up to the flat, casually letting himself in as if he lived in the building. Essie gave him the rest of the hand luggage, draped Paul's overcoats over his arm, and arranged to meet him and Micki at the Lancaster Gate underground stop. Nick got back to the car without incident, but when Essie prepared to leave the flat herself, she discovered she'd sent off all her money in the handbag with Micki. But her luck held. Though it was a Sunday in the summer, she found one neighbor at home and borrowed ten shillings. Taking a deep breath, she then stepped out of the building, a plastic cover over her hair, a pile of letters in her mouth for posting at the corner (
Punch
later had a good time with the letters, recommending them to its readers as the latest word in ingenious disguise). No one recognized her; a heavy rain and her lack of luggage helped. She made it safely to the Marble Arch underground and within minutes met Nick and Micki at Lancaster Gate. Nick had already picked up the heavy baggage from Paddington.
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They made it to the Priory in twenty minutes. If they had been daring, Paul had been lionhearted. After being removed from the Priory, he had remained in the hands of Harry Francis and the “British left” (Hurwitt's phrase) in a car parked in the nearby woods, awaiting the rendezvous with Essie. He had not been in the best of shape recently, but somehow held together—“He had all kinds of guts,” was Hurwitt's laconic summary. After speeding to the airport, they found the director of the Polish airways waiting for them, apprehensive at the lateness of the hour. Having cleverly
directed the press to the VIP lounge, he quickly led the Robesons and Hurwitt through the regular gate onto the first-class section of the plane. The three other passengers in the compartment paid them no attention. Within minutes the plane took off, and they settled back with a sigh of relief. Essie, laughing, handed Paul the
Telegraph
article about his pending “abduction.”
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At that moment, a pleasant-looking young man got up from his seat, came over to the Robesons, smiled, and handed Paul his card. Paul smiled back, read the card, scowled, and handed it to Essie. Printed on the card was “John Osman, Foreign Correspondent for the
London Daily Telegraph
.” (Reuters News Agency, they later learned, had planted a reporter in tourist class as well.) Essie jumped up and insisted Osman return to his own seat, eventually forcefully accompanying him, expressing her indignation that the British press would harass a sick man (“The thing I resented most,” she later wrote Marie Seton, “was that it was so
American
at its worst, and this I did not expect from the British. Well, we live and learn”). To make sure Osman would stay in his seat, Essie parked herself next to him and talked him right into Berlin.
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To her surprise, he “seemed nice” and had been to Africa, so, as Berlin came into view, she agreed to let him ask Paul two and only two brief questions: What did he think of the
Sunday Telegraph
story, and what did he think of the recent March on Washington? Paul had been monosyllabic up to that point, but he somehow, remarkably, summoned up the energy to answer, and did so eloquently. He said the
Telegraph
article was vicious and, worse, wishful thinking—not having been able to establish that he had changed his political views, and disappointed that he was voluntarily returning to a socialist country, the press had decided to make a mystery of it. As for the March on Washington, Robeson called it “a turning point,” said he was proud of the black strength and unity it showed—and sent his congratulations. Osman tried to continue the interview, but Essie cut him off. In his article in the
Telegraph
the next day, Osman described Essie as “a formidable ‘protector'” who had threatened him with judo at one point. He accurately printed Paul's replies to his two questions and described him as looking “haggard and worn. His features were thin and his stooping gait bore little resemblance to his public image.”
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The doctors at the Buch Clinic thought so, too. Dr. Katzenstein found him “completely without initiative,” his depressive moods “very low,” his ups “not high enough to be called manic”—the reverse of his breakdown in 1956. The doctors immediately took him off all sedation (though adding Librium subsequently) and expressed considerable doubt—even anger—about the “high” amounts of barbiturates and ECT that had been given him. “I don't think anyone would have argued with ten or twelve ECT treatments,” Dr. Katzenstein said more than twenty years later, but fifty-four such treatments was not only “very unusual” but “a very doubtful
procedure unless immediately followed by psychotherapy.” He believed fifty-four shocks could theoretically produce “considerable changes within the brain”; though in fact he found no such evidence, he felt that at the least they had shaken Robeson's confidence—“just the process of being grabbed and hit, you lose the sense of being in control of your own life.” Katzenstein freely acknowledges, however, that “here in the GDR we generally consider British psychiatry to be superior to ours.” Indeed, the literature on ECT since the early sixties does not as a whole support Katzenstein's views. For quick alleviation of
acute
depressive symptoms (as in Robeson's case), ECT remains the preferred initial treatment. But disagreement does still exist about whether improvement from ECT is temporary and can or should be built upon with additional courses, and also about the extent to which psychotherapy can prove a useful adjunct for those who are severely disoriented. A successful outcome in the treatment of mental illness seems centrally to depend on careful adjustments tailored to the individual needs of the patient at hand. Such adjustments require intuitive skills of the highest order. Which is to say, one part of medical care, perhaps the greatest part, is an art. Robeson was not fortunate enough to have been treated by artists.
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