Paul Robeson (11 page)

At Glasgow, their third stop, the play seemed to fare better, and Paul's spirits soared again. Mrs. Campbell had continued to praise his abilities and to encourage him to make a career in the theater. And once she had discovered the beauty of his singing voice, she kept urging him—in keeping with his role as a minstrel and in apparent desperation to call attention
away
from the play—to “sing a lot and long—more—more.” By the time they arrived in Glasgow, “the consensus of opinion,” Paul wrote Essie, was “that the most enjoyable feature of the show is my singing.” (“… particularly good was Mr. Paul Robson [sic] as the minstrel Jim,” wrote one critic. He “sang and acted splendidly … a magnificent voice, his singing has undoubtedly much to do with the success ‘Voodoo' achieved last night.”) At the curtain call, Mrs. Campbell—who “is very unselfish”—pushed him forward (“It's your show—not mine”) to “a perceptible outburst of applause.” When Mrs. Pat told him she thought he was “a real artist and off-hand suggested I would make a marvelous Othello,” he bought a copy of Shakespeare's plays, again started to mull over the possibilities of trying out his luck a while longer in London and having Essie come over to join him: “So anxious for you to see me and criticise. Know you can help me—I feel awkward in certain new positions. I want you, and you only to help me.”
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But within a matter of days he had to re-evaluate his prospects yet again. Mrs. Campbell, it turned out, wasn't happy playing second fiddle after all. One critic had opened his review by saying, “Mrs. Patrick Campbell is not the dominating personality in ‘Voodoo'”—though he did go on to praise her. “She feels the play is more mine than hers,” Paul noted, and with him getting “most of the glory,” she quickly lost interest in taking the
play to London (indeed, Paul reported, she still had not bothered to master her lines). When Mrs. Campbell finally cabled Hoy tie Wiborg that she could not continue in the play, Wiborg cabled back, “Your chicken hearted cable just received.” “This cable addressed to me!” Mrs. Campbell stormed, having gotten neither good notices nor any salary for her “gesture of friendship.” “Hoytie's play,” she concluded, “was an ugly business.” With Mrs. Campbell defecting, Paul felt “at sea” once more (“I can't trust this bunch here”), even while continuing to feel in his gut that he wanted a year in London, to “start on our little one,” to study law, to give “the London people a chance to hear me.” What did Essie think? he kept writing. What should they do? As her letters continued to seem maddeningly, puzzlingly indifferent, Paul's concern increased. Finally he telegraphed, “All my questions unanswered. Worried. Is anything wrong. All love, Paul.”
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By then Essie had been in the hospital for over a month, and her considerable courage had faltered. She decided to cable Paul the truth. Receiving the news, he was “taken absolutely off-guard” and “cried and cried as tho my heart would break—You know how it is when you've passed thru a terrible strain and when its all over—you break down.… It is as if I had been at your bedside and saw you come to and go back—and finally safe. I couldn't pull myself together.” He was horrified at the thought that she'd gone through the crisis without him and gently chided her for sometimes being “too plucky.” He felt like taking the first boat back, but Essie counseled him to remain, thinking she might still make it over. “Rather against my better judgment,” he agreed to stay on, but in short order his mounting anxiety about Essie, in combination with the decision to close
Voodoo
before it reached London, put him back on board the S.S.
Homeric
, bound for home. On landing in New York, he went straight from the dock to the hospital. The receptionist, alerted to expect him, greeted him as he entered with “Oh, you're Mr. Goode; I'll take you right up!” Paul rushed into Essie's room and embraced her. “She could only pat his head and laugh and cry,” she later wrote, while he whispered “so many sweet things that she felt her heart would burst with happiness.” For the next week he barely left her side, except for meals and to sleep. “His very presence, his beautiful sweet strength and love, made it seem absurd for her to be ill.” She improved rapidly, and in two more weeks Paul took her home.

In October, Essie was still too ill to return to work, but by late November 1922 they were able to resume occasional socializing, including serving as “guests of honor” at a Harlem affair fancy enough to make the society columns (“Mrs. Robeson wore a flame colored chiffon with brilliants.… Fully two hundred and fifty guests were gowned in evening clothes. A dance followed the reception on the third floor. Just a little past 12 o'clock there was a musicale. With Mr. Eube [sic] Blake of the ‘Shuffle Along' company at the piano, Mr. Paule [sic] Robeson, Mr. Harold Browning, Mr.
Noble Sissle [Eubie Blake's partner] and Mr. Will Hann [one of The Harmony Kings] rendered musical selections. This was a big surprise and the guests enjoyed the innovation immensely”).
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But glamour did not pay the bills. Paul gave a few informal concerts, in the fall spent a few weeks at Rutgers assisting Coach Sanford, and in 1923 briefly secured an engagement in the chorus as part of Lew Leslie's
Plantation Revue
, starring Florence Mills (and later Cora Green). The revue was an attempt to cash in on the success with white audiences of the all-black
Shuffle Along;
it simulated a Southern plantation complete with a watermelon moon, an onstage “Aunt Jemima” flipping flapjacks—and Paul, decked out in straw hat, striped coveralls, and a gingham ascot. But with Paul due to start his last year in law school, money continued to be a problem (his salary in
Voodoo
had scarcely covered expenses, and he had had trouble collecting even that small sum). To help them get through the winter, he clerked in a post office and again accepted occasional pro-football engagements, but he didn't enjoy the sport the way he had in college. Two prizefight promoters from Chicago offered to train him as a challenger to Henry Wills and Jack Dempsey, but Paul turned them down. Still, the sportswriter Lawrence Perry, in his column “For the Game's Sake,” sent out a story, which was reprinted elsewhere, that Robeson had accepted the offer: he had been “forced to take some radical step,” Perry wrote, “whereby he may earn money for his wife and children,” since his law practice “has fallen short of paying office space.” Thinking the story might have originated with the Rutgers Alumni Office, Robeson immediately wrote to the graduate manager there: “The report of my fistic ambitions … was absolutely untrue and unfounded. That matters little. What matters much more is the statement as to my Law Practice.… I have not as yet even taken the State Exams, so I couldn't have practised.… A report like this can hurt me a great deal. When I settle down to my practice I don't expect to fail—and no few drawbacks at the beginning will discourage me.… I cannot see any credit to Rutgers in a prize fighting legal failure.” As regarded the report about his “family,” Robeson wrote, “I have no family—only a wife … and not such a helpless little body at that.” The Rutgers graduate manager forwarded Robeson's letter to Lawrence Perry and, in asking for a correction, remarked in a covering letter, “We really expect him to become a power among the Negro race in this Country, and believe that is his underlying ambition.” Perry immediately printed a retraction.
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Under the double impetus of needing funds and wanting theatrical contacts, Paul finally decided to appeal to the fabled largesse of Otto H. Kahn—“Otto the Magnificent, the Great Kahn,” Eugene O'Neill called him in 1924, in mock obeisance to the Provincetown Players' patron. Kahn's generosity was as deep as the range of his benefactions was broad. An immensely wealthy banker—he was head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., as well
as the chief financial adviser to Edward H. Harriman's vast transportation empire—Kahn became one of the great patrons of the arts in America. He bankrolled the Metropolitan Opera as well as the Provincetown Players, and he was known as a sympathetic supporter of black artists.
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It was in Kahn's capacity as a trustee of Rutgers, however, that Robeson formally appealed to him in a letter of March 13, 1923. “I am very anxious to get before any theatrical managers and playwrights, especially those who may possibly have Negro roles,” Robeson wrote, specifically citing Eugene O'Neill, whose play
The Emperor Jones
, starring Charles Gilpin, had created a sensation in 1920. Referring to his work in
Taboo
, Robeson cited the favorable reviews in both New York and England, enclosed two clippings, and mentioned that Augustin Duncan, Miss Margaret Wycherly, or Miss Wiborg “would be glad” to provide “some definite idea about what I can do.” He closed by requesting an interview with Kahn: “I know that you are a power both in theatrical and musical circles and I am hoping that you will be kind enough to use your influence in getting me a hearing.” Kahn's reply was perfunctory, though not unfriendly. He promised to keep Robeson's request in mind and invited him to come by his office “any day during business hours,” but regretted that “just at present I do not know of any suitable opportunity.” A year and a half later, Essie was to approach Kahn with a second appeal.
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At the same time Robeson wrote to Kahn, he asked Augustin Duncan, who had directed him in
Taboo
, to approach Eugene O'Neill directly in his behalf. “If you have a Negro part to cast,” a complying Duncan wrote O'Neill, “you will find that Mr. Robeson has in my opinion very unusual and extraordinary ability as an actor and most admirable qualities as a student and a man.” It would be nearly a year before this avenue, too, opened up; when it did, Robeson was quick to credit Duncan's role in creating an opportunity for him with the Provincetown Players.
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With no immediate prospects in the theater, Robeson applied himself to finishing up his law degree. Harold Medina and John Bassett Moore (the international law expert) were among his professors, and William O. Douglas and Thomas E. Dewey among his classmates—but it was Dean Harlan Fiske Stone who caught his imagination, and later in life it was only Stone's name that could conjure up what limited affection Robeson felt for his law-school days. He had, as always, made friends easily, been well liked by his classmates, and been commandeered to play on assorted law-school athletic teams. And, for a time, he did well enough academically to seem a possible candidate for the
Law Review;
its editor-in-chief, Charles Ascher, in later years drew a retrospective sigh of relief that Robeson's broken tenure at the school had made him ineligible—“I had at the time several Southerners on my board, and I could see I would have a bit of a fight to get Paul on.” But in fact Robeson's lack of enthusiasm for the study of law
was ultimately reflected in his compiling a mediocre academic record—in the final count, twenty-four of his course grades (a full two-thirds) were C's.
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After receiving his degree in late February 1923, he let himself drift for a bit, not actively seeking a job. This worried Essie. “Lolling about” offended her style of brisk efficiency. She mistrusted introspection as a form of malingering, a self-indulgent substitute for action—which to her was a cure for thought rather than, as for Paul, the product of it. Essie was never sure anything would happen unless she went out there and
made
it happen. Paul, more secure in his sense of mission, of ultimate purpose, could afford to wait—a reflection of confidence, not (as Essie was prone to call it) “laziness.” Characteristically, she mistook surface appearances for the entire truth, equating Paul's outer behavior with his inner attitude and missing, in her overattentiveness to words, the underlying message of his feelings. With someone as interior as Paul, this could result in fatal misunderstanding—in confusing equanimity with idling.

His brother Ben, more cogently, realized that Paul had a habit of moving by “inner revelation,” had the ability to wait confidently until he felt his path had been illuminated and then “in a moment” to sense it and to “seize upon it with zest.” Until then he was as “stubborn as a mule. He simply does nothing. He will go for months just hanging on—temptation after temptation to violate his orders to wait may come, but he lingers. To the unspiritual soul this is laziness, hardheadedness, the height of folly. To him it is life, and peace and joy. He will tell you that all of the battles of his life have been and are waged at this center.” Following this intuitive process, Paul deflected a political-job offer from Tammany Hall, sensing it would bind him to the wrong kind of loyalties. By June, after three months of biding his time, he bent his instincts a bit and accepted work in a law office. “There are times,” his brother Ben wrote, in a veiled, disapproving allusion to Essie's influence, “when for the sake of peace he is hurried into things.”
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The offer came from Louis William Stotesbury, a Rutgers alumnus (class of 1890) and trustee and, at one point in his career, adjutant general for the state of New York, who had frequently lent a helping hand to the school's graduating athletes. Still, the offer to Robeson was special: he would be the only black in the Stotesbury and Miner law office, secretarial staff included—and in a country where even the handful of Afro-American banks and insurance companies were loath to hire lawyers of their own race. The firm specialized in estates and was currently involved in litigation over Jay Gould's will; Stotesbury assigned Robeson the job of preparing a brief for it.
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He worked away diligently (indeed, when the Gould case came to trial, his brief was used) but not comfortably. His color (along with his prepossessing physique) made him a conspicuous presence in the office, and it
was commented on, in unfriendly asides, from the first. After a few weeks, the covert mistreatment blossomed into open ugliness: when Robeson buzzed for a stenographer to take down a memorandum of law, she refused—“I never take dictation from a nigger,” she purportedly said, and walked out. Robeson took the matter to Stotesbury, who genuinely commiserated. The two men discussed the situation frankly and fully. Stotesbury expressed admiration for Robeson's abilities but told him straight out that his prospects for a career in law were limited: the firm's wealthy white clients were unlikely ever to agree to let him try a case before a judge, for fear his race would prove a detriment. Stotesbury said he might be willing to consider opening a Harlem branch of the office and put Robeson in charge of it, but Paul decided instead to resign. The profession of law, never that inviting, now seemed a decided dead end. (A decade later, after more reflection, Robeson concluded he could never have entered “any profession where the highest prizes were from the start denied to me.”) He never took the bar exam, never again practiced as a lawyer. He told Essie that, once more, he would “wait a little.… Something will turn up.” He had decided on a stubborn retreat to instinct, to hold himself inactive in the presence of things that did not interest him, to await an intuitive signal that some worthwhile opportunity was at hand.
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