Paul Robeson (106 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Robe
son'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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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