Paul Robeson (107 page)

In early September, Paul and Essie were brought home from their respective hospitals within days of each other, Essie dying, Paul uncertainly involved with life. She lay upstairs in bed; he, brooding and melancholy, passed unpredictably from room to room. Frankie Lee Sims, their old friend from California, and Marie Bowden, a union secretary, moved into Jumel to take care of them. Paul, Jr., and Marilyn shuttled between a physically shattered mother still keenly alert and an emotionally disconnected father seemingly indifferent to anyone's struggle for survival, including his own. Paul's inability to connect was not markedly different, except in style, from the separate solitudes into which Essie and Paul, Jr., were locked as well. Essie was unreconciled to finding herself in a situation at last that she could not somehow “manage.” Paul, Jr., still bitterly blamed both her and Dr. Kline for having taken the “wrong” step, thereby bringing on his father's collapse, protracting his anger through an obsessive insistence that somehow catastrophe could have been avoided.

By early October, Big Paul seemed headed further downhill. Agitated and restless, he continued to roam the apartment anxiously. On the evening of October 15 Paul, Jr., noticed that his pacing had narrowed to the hall leading to the front door, and he told Frankie Sims to keep an eye on his father while he went upstairs for a bath. Frankie had to attend to another chore momentarily, and Paul, Jr., sitting in the tub, heard the front
door slam. When he raced downstairs with a towel around him, he discovered his father was gone. He dressed quickly and dashed outside to search the neighborhood. No Paul. It began to rain lightly. He phoned Lloyd Brown, who lived nearby and owned a car, and together the two men searched in a wider perimeter. No Paul. They called friends, just in case he had stopped off at somebody's house. No one had seen him. By midnight, frantic, they phoned the police to report Paul missing. The police, in turn, put out a missing persons bulletin. Early the following morning an anonymous phone-caller to the Wadsworth Avenue station house reported that while walking his dog he had come upon a man lying in a clump of bushes near Highbridge Park, a few blocks from Jumel Terrace. Conscious but incoherent (fortunately it had been a warm night), Paul was taken to the Vanderbilt Clinic at nearby Presbyterian Hospital, treated for facial lacerations and a bruised right hip and ankle, and then transferred to University Hospital. When Paul, Jr., Lloyd Brown, and Essie (who somehow managed to get out of bed) arrived, Big Paul told them he had no recollection of leaving the house, or of anything else: “What happened to me?” he kept repeating, “What happened to me?” A spokesman for the Vanderbilt Clinic told the press Robeson had been mugged, but after the police reported no evidence of assault, Essie issued a formal statement saying her husband had been ill and occasionally suffered from loss of balance and dizzy spells. Released from University Hospital several days later, he was taken by Paul, Jr., to Marian's house in Philadelphia.
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Essie's symptoms, in the meantime, had intensified. Beset with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, she was readmitted to Beth Israel by Perlmutter on November 23. The cancer had metastasized throughout her body. By the first week in December she was having trouble breathing, but despite severe discomfort continued to see visitors, including Freda Diamond and Helen Rosen. On December 12 she was put on the critical list. That day a friend from the UN arrived with an armful of holly, “thinking it wise to begin celebrating the Holidays a bit early. Essie smiled with her eyes, but she could no longer speak.” At five-thirty the following morning, two days before her seventieth birthday, she died—her unquiet, tenacious spirit stilled. Paul, Jr., went down to Philadelphia to bring his father the news. Big Paul signed the death certificate and, without saying a word, turned away. The funeral was private, with only Paul, Jr., Marilyn, and their two children, Susan and David, present. Paul Sr. did not attend.
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CHAPTER 26

Final Years

(1966–1976)

Marian Robeson Forsythe, a retired schoolteacher, widowed in 1958, was seventy-one years old in 1965 and lived in a comfortable, unpretentious house on Walnut Street in Philadelphia with her daughter Paulina. Withdrawn since childhood, Paulina was a silent presence in the house, a responsibility of, rather than a companion to, her mother. Marian took on the second responsibility of Paul without a murmur of protest; she had always worshiped her younger brother, and the two had always felt entirely comfortable, if not intimate, with each other.
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Marian was an intensely private person with deep nurturing instincts; she saw it as her duty and privilege to protect Paul from unwanted intrusion and believed that with enough loving care he could be nursed back to health; she was the last in a long line of women willing to devote their energies to him. Since Marian lived on limited means, she accepted a small monthly sum for Paul's keep from Lee Lurie (who on Rockmore's death had taken over as Paul's attorney and financial manager), but no amount of money could have bought such total devotion and uncompromising optimism. Seeing Robeson a month after Essie's death, Lee Lurie was only willing to say, “Paul is doing better, but it is pretty rough.” Marian, more sanguine, reported he was “fine” and had thoroughly enjoyed two theater outings, to see
Carousel
and
The Sound of Music
in their Philadelphia revivals.
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There were others, including Helen and Sam Rosen, who occasionally allowed themselves a spell of optimism about the possibility of Paul's eventual recovery, but his son believes to this day that his father's second stay in Gracie Square Hospital in August 1965 was decisive for the course
of his illness thereafter, that the toxic reaction to unwarranted drug treatment had produced organic brain damage, which made any real hope for improvement chimerical. “My father was never the same after Gracie Square,” Paul, Jr., still says. “Every once in a while he'd have a good day, but basically he wasn't there.” Yet Paul, Jr., and Marilyn, no less than sister Marian, did everything they could to coax a more positive outcome.

On the assumption—Big Paul did not ask—that he would rather live in New York than Philadelphia, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn decided to bring him back from Marian's and arranged to move into Jumel Terrace with him, along with their two children, in February 1966. Perhaps having an uneasy sense from the outset that the arrangement would not work, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn held on to their old apartment. Though Big Paul was not visibly mourning Essie, he was reluctant to leave the house. Once in a great while he would go to dinner at the homes of old friends, but, as Jim Aronson remembers one such evening (at Vita and Ed Barsky's), Paul stayed “very much removed; it was very difficult to pull him into the conversation.” With Paul, Jr.'s help, he did manage to attend one public event—a benefit dinner for SNCC in March 1966. Seated, at the family's request, at an inconspicuous table, he was nonetheless given a big ovation by the crowd. John Lewis came over to his table and said, “Paul, this all started from you.” James Forman, chairman of SNCC, paid tribute to him in his speech and wrote him afterward to say, “We all know of your part in the struggle for Freedom and it was a great privilege to be able to tell you how much you mean to all of us.” “It's fine finally for a prophet to be honored in his own country,” an admirer later wrote Robeson. Still, by the end of the evening, Big Paul was “laid out” with exhaustion.
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Occasionally other requests came in for an appearance, a statement, a sign of approbation. He was asked to attend testimonial dinners for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the historian Herbert Aptheker, his old comrade William L. Patterson (on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday); he was invited to the Rutgers New York Bicentennial dinner-dance at the Hilton, to be one of three subjects (along with Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael) for a documentary film on American politics, to accept an award from the Czechoslovak Ambassador for having promoted “friendship and co-operation with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic”; he was asked by A. Philip Randolph to join him as a sponsor in the campaign of the Committee of Conscience against apartheid in South Africa. To each, Paul, Jr., fulfilling a function Essie had performed for decades, replied that his father's health made it impossible for him to meet the request. The FBI, which continued to receive desultory reports from its agents about Robeson, got the same message from the field: “the subject was seriously ill.”
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Anna Louise Strong, the eighty-year-old radical firebrand, then residing in China, was one of many refusing to believe that the oaken warrior they had earlier known could have any organic disorder, or at least not one
that couldn't be set to rights. “I personally have always felt,” Strong wrote Steve Fritchman, “that Paul's trouble had a deep psycho-somatic cause in the shock and trauma he suffered from the Sino-Soviet split [of 1957].… Paul had a very deep love and devotion both for the USSR and for China's revolution and … consequently the split must have been especially hard for him, since his devotions have always been through passionate allegiance rather than through theory.” He must come to Peking, she urged—with the simplistic vigor that had always been part of her charm, and her limitation. She had “made inquiries”; Paul would be “extremely welcome,” surrounded by love, soon made well again.
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Caught between the needs of a dependent father and the demands of growing children, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn began to feel the strain. But Paul, Jr., was unwilling to accept defeat; if the experiment at Jumel had failed, perhaps in another setting they might all be able to live together. He took Big Paul back to Marian's in Philadelphia temporarily in the late spring of 1966, while he and Marilyn set about finding and then refurbishing an apartment that might meet all their needs. A spacious place on West Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan seemed to fit the bill, and they spent the summer of 1966 renovating it so that Big Paul would have a separate suite of rooms within the larger space of the apartment. In the fall of 1966 he was again collected from Philadelphia to make another effort at togetherness in New York.

This one, too, proved short-lived. In Marilyn's words, “Life very much centered around Big Paul and his needs.… He was almost wholly gathered up into himself.” He had always taken for granted that others would provide for his practical daily needs—but now he could no longer reward them with warmth and charm. He stayed very much to himself in the private little wing Paul, Jr., and Marilyn had constructed for him within the larger apartment, but was not notably more present when he joined the rest of the family. Marian, up from Philadelphia for a visit, was “shocked” that he had become “so withdrawn he couldn't understand what I was saying.” “I'll never understand what happened,” she wrote Lee Lurie. “He was in fine condition when he left here with Paul Jr. to go to New York.” She strongly suggested he once more come and live with her. Dr. Alvin I. Goldfarb, a Mt. Sinai geriatric psychiatrist, concurred: since he was not “impressed by any organic component to the illness,” Goldfarb believed “Mr. Robeson's condition can be controlled” and “he will ultimately be responsive to therapeutic efforts”—but advised that “at present residence with his sister … is indicated.” Paul, Jr., acknowledged that the experiment in living together had failed, and only a few months after it had begun, Paul was back with Marian in Philadelphia, this time to remain.
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Just a little vain about her own superior nurturing skills, Marian was immediately reporting back to New York that Paul “is getting better.… He is eating and sleeping well and most of the time relaxed. He is
talking a little, understands what you say and answers your questions though not initiating conversation.” Marian secured part-time help (Lee Lurie sent seventy-five dollars a week to cover all expenses), took Paul around with her to the bank to open an account, went with him to his new doctor and had a piano-teacher friend of hers come in on a regular basis to try to rekindle his interest (“I think it will help him with his speech and get him to talking again,” Marian wrote Lee Lurie). She was confident that “Paul is well taken care of and has very little to annoy him.” By the spring of 1967 she was reporting that he had been taking walks in the neighborhood and had “really enjoyed” an outing to see the film
The Taming of the Shrew.
“Weather permitting,” she expected to “really have him stepping out” before long. In August 1967 the house at Jumel Terrace was sold for a little under eighteen thousand dollars.
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Paul now settled down to the life of a cherished—and haunted—invalid. His every need was attended to with devoted alacrity, his every momentary sign of vivacity greeted with hope and applause—yet the gigantic figure remained a shadow behind the arras, obscurely brooding on the perplexing continuation of his own days. Word arrived late in 1967 that
Who's Who in American History
had finally deigned to include his biography and that a student group at Rutgers had pressed the university, after fifty years of omission, to submit his nomination to the National Football Hall of Fame. Told the news, Robeson smiled and shrugged.
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In December 1967 he was admitted to University Hospital in Philadelphia. The
Evening Bulletin
reported that he was suffering from “a skin ailment.” The FBI's informants were closer to the mark, reporting that he “had been very ill and has been inaccessible to anyone for the last couple of months.” Yet, only a few weeks after that, Peggy Middleton, on a trip to the United States, impulsively put in a phone call to Paul at Marian's house and “He sounded so like himself that I became tongue-tied.” It was one of those occasional “good days” that continued unaccountably to occur.
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