Paul Robeson (118 page)

52.
The playbill, with Du Bois's comments, is in RA.

53.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

54.
Opportunity
, Dec. 1924, pp. 368–70. The magazine had a peak circulation of ten thousand, about 40 percent of it white. In an interview the following year, when he was playing
Jones
in London, Robeson told a newspaper interviewer: “O'Neill has got what no other playwright has—that is, the true, authentic negro psychology. He has read the negro soul, and has felt the negro's racial tragedy” (
Reynold's Illustrated News
, Sept. 20, 1925).

55.
Duncan to PR, May 10, 1924, RA. By Aug., Mayor Hylan had lifted his ban against children's playing in
Chillun.
In mid-Sept., Dorothy Peterson replaced Mary Blair, and Essie thought she “did very well” (Diary, Sept. 15, 1924). Peterson (whose father, Jerome Bowers Peterson, had founded the black paper,
New York Age
) remained a long-time friend of the Robesons. During the summer, Robeson gave two open-air performances of
Jones
in the Mariarden Theater, Peterboro, N.H., where it was well received (newspaper clippings, RA).

56.
ER Diary, Aug. 15, 1924, RA. The salary total is in a receipt to PR in RA, signed “M. Eleanor Fitzgerald”—the manager of the Playhouse. Some sketchy
evidence suggests that Robeson was offered the position of assistant district attorney of New York some time before 1925, but turned the offer down (program notes for his Dec. 17, 1924, Rutgers concert, RUA).

CHAPTER
5
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE SPIRITUALS
(1924–1925)

1.
Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Salemmé had been born in 1891, in Gaeta, Italy. He came to the U.S. at the age of eleven and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with George L. Noyes (a pupil of Monet's) and later with William Paxton, the neoclassicist.

2.
Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Essie later worked out the formal agreement with Betty Salemmé, whereby Tony got two-thirds and Paul one-third of the sale price. Betty had suggested a fifty-fifty split, but Essie decided that was too generous: “Tony had had a great deal of experience and training, and should therefore get more than Paul, who had the beautiful body and gave his time” (ER Diary, May 14, 1925, RA).

3.
Newspaper editorialists, North and South, had a field day chastising Philadelphia. If such action had been taken by a Southern city, a North Carolinian wrote, “It would have been condemned as just another manifestation of Southern nigger hate,” and the New York
World
suggested that “Perhaps the average Pennsylvanian, secretly a little ashamed of the civic and political record of his State, becomes a bit hysterical at the thought that some one may conceive the notion of a statue of Pennsylvania in the nude. That would be appalling. There are some people and some States that need all the concealment possible.” The Brooklyn Museum put the statue on display for a few months, cataloguing it as
Negro Spiritual
. The French showed it in the Salon des Tuileries, and the jury for the Art Institute of Chicago initially awarded the statue a prize but then, not wishing to over-emphasize the representation of a “colored man,” demoted it to honorable mention. The Union League Club of New York invited Salemmé to exhibit the statue but then decided not to show it, out of deference to “the ladies.” Salemmé dutifully applied a plaster figleaf as a poultice but that, too, failed to please and the statue was removed. When Dr. George F. Kunz, chairman of the club's art committee, was asked if the statue had been ruled out on racial grounds, he replied indignantly that the question was absurd: “Do you know of any other club that employs all Negro waiters and servants?” he asked (
Time
, Dec. l, 1930;
Express
, Jan. 4, 11, 1980;
Sunday Bulletin
, Feb. 8, 1976). The statue thereafter disappeared, never to be recovered. Philadelphia's racial problem was not solved. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983; interview with Salemmé, Pittsburgh
Courier
, Nov. 20, 1926 (highest achievement); ER to Otto Kahn, Aug. 21, 1925, PU: Kahn; ER Diary, Aug. 4, 1925, RA (Ruth Hale); New York
Herald Tribune
, May 23, 25, 1930; Raleigh, North Carolina,
News Observer
, May 24, 1930; New York
Evening World
, May 23, 1930. According to Salemmé (unpublished ms.), Leonor Loree, president of the D & H Railroad, at one point planned to buy the statue with Otto Kahn and donate it to Rutgers. Loree agreed to Salemmé's price of $18,000 for the sculpture in bronze, but the sale fell through when the Rutgers Board of Trustees decided that Robeson was too young to be honored with a statue. Salemmé later (1927) made a head of Robeson, which still exists (he shipped the head, in bronze, to Robeson in London for exhibition and sales—asking $700–1,250 per head (Antonio Salemmé to ER, March 24, 1930, RA). When I interviewed Salemmé in 1983, he was—at age ninety-three—back to work on a new version of the life-size statue.

4.
ER,
PR, Negro
, pp. 82–87; ER Diary, Sept. 23, 1924, RA (Arthur Lee); interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. Rebecca West, for one, thought Salemmé was a “very bad influence” on Robeson. She met them both in the midtwenties
in New York through Walter White and decided Paul was “basically lazy,” unwilling to become “a dedicated musical worker”—for which she in part blamed Salemmé's influence (interview with Rebecca West, Sept. 1, 1982).

5.
Interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983.

6.
Interview with Monroe Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985. John Hammond (interview, Aug. 8, 1985) is the source for PR and Betty Spencer's being lovers.

7.
ER Diary, May 20, June 28, Nov. 12, Dec. 29, 1924, RA; interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983. I've strung Salemmé's remarks together, omitting some of the pauses and ellipses in our conversation; but I've neither invented any words nor rearranged them in a way that would change their essential emphasis and meaning.

8.
Among the large number of works on these and other renaissance figures, I've found the following especially useful (along with Levy,
James Weldon Johnson
; Huggins,
Renaissance;
Lewis,
Harlem in Vogue
; Johnson,
Black Manhattan
; and Anderson,
This Was Harlem):
Bruce Kellner,
Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades
(University of Oklahoma, 1968); James Weldon Johnson,
Along This Way
(Viking, 1933); Robert E. Hemenway,
Zora Neale Hurston
(University of Illinois, 1977); Lawrence Langner,
The Magic Curtain
(Dutton, 1951); Emily Clark,
Innocence Abroad
(Knopf, 1931); Edward G. Leuders,
Carl Van Vechten
(Twayne, 1955); Blanche Ferguson,
Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance
(Dodd, Mead, 1966).

9.
New York
Herald Tribune
, July 6, 1924;
Messenger
, Oct. 1924, p. 32; undated clipping [late 1925], RA (“morbid”).

10.
Messenger
, Oct. 1924, p. 32;
Journal News
(Ithaca, N.Y.), April 23, 1926;
Evening Globe
, March 13, 1926. Lewis,
Harlem in Vogue
, pp. 192–93, plus his fine discussion, passim, of cultural elitism (see especially pp. 108–15, 157–62, 211–19).

11.
Once in a great while, Salemmé did hear Paul sound a more bitter, less resigned note—and when he did was quick to blame it on the baneful influence of Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, the well-known psychoanalyst whom Paul and Essie had met at Presbyterian Hospital (see note 12, p. 578), and especially on his Southern-born wife, Bea, who in Salemmé's view “was very pro-Negro” and had “a chip on her shoulder.” She “wanted to help Paul, and she used … to sort of goad him into rebelling. She brought out the bitterness in him, and I told her she shouldn't do that, but she did” (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983). Ten years later Essie was still in touch with the Jelliffes; she mentions dining with Bea Jelliffe in her diary for Feb. 16, 1933 (RA). During our interview Salemmé referred approvingly at one point to Ethel Waters's autobiography,
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
, as another example of a black artist he had known who eschewed bitterness, but he showed no awareness of the actual depth of anger in her book. After Robeson became more political and more outspoken on racial questions, he let his friendship with Salemmé dissolve; when Salemmé was in Europe on a Guggenheim in 1934, Robeson failed to show up for a scheduled appointment and never got in touch to explain. Salemmé suspected that politics was at issue, but nonetheless resented Robeson's way of breaking off (interview with Salemmé, March 31, 1983).

12.
ER Diary, July 27, Aug. 26, 29, 1924, RA; CVV to Edna Kenton (Aug. 1924), Bruce Kellner,
Letters of Carl Van Vechten
(Yale, 1987), p. 69 (hereafter Kellner,
Letters CVV
).

13.
ER Diary, Jan. 3, 1925, RA; Langner,
Magic Curtain
, p. 1964 (“Empress”); Lewis,
Harlem in Vogue
, pp. 180–89. Walter White had also been responsible for introducing Van Vechten to James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, “and ever so many more” (Carl Van Vechten to Alfred Knopf, Dec. 19, 1962, Knopf Papers, Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas (henceforth UT: Knopf). The Walter Whites and the Knopfs had “drifted completely away from each other” (in Alfred Knopf's words) by the late forties (Knopf to Van Vechten, Sept. 22, 1948, UT: Knopf). Lincoln Kirstein's analysis of Van Vechten is from a five-page typed description of him headed “For Fania: December
23, 1964,” written by Kirstein on the occasion of Van Vechten's death. The manuscript is in UT: Knopf and continues, in part: “I met Carl first in the Spring of 1926 at an evening-party in Muriel Draper's old stable-loft on East Fortieth Street. He was wearing a red fireman's shirt. I was a freshman introduced into New York's High Bohemia, so it seemed perfectly natural that at Muriel Draper's one would meet, along with Mr. Gurdgieff [sic], Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, Paul Robeson or Mary Garden, a fireman.… Carl made Harlem real to me; it was not the tragic Harlem we now know. It was a Harlem far more secret, parochial, more remote, less dangerous, at least seemingly, and in our ways of thought more Parisian.…”

14.
ER Diary, Jan. 17, Feb. 13 (Fania), 1925, RA; CVV to Scott Cunningham (circa Jan. 1925); CVV to Gertrude Stein, June 30, 1925, Kellner,
Letters CVV
, pp. 74, 80.

15.
ER Diary, Aug. 17, 1924 (Touvalou; Maran), Jan. 27, 1925 (Bynner), Feb. 12, 1925 (Anderson), March 25, 1925 (Brouns), April 5, 1925 (Dreiser), April 21, 1925 (Brooks), June 8, 17, 1925 (Nora Holt), RA; CVV to Mencken (circa 1925), Kellner,
Letters CVV
, p. 87. The Robesons saw Prince Touvalou several more times during the following month. He spent two afternoons in their apartment; during one they “had lots of fun explaining our American slang to him. He has a marvelous sense of humour” (ER Diary, Sept. 12, 1924, RA). On the second visit, the Prince told Essie she ought to study for the stage—she had “such an expressive face and such a mischievous manner.” “We'll see,” Essie wrote expectantly in her diary—and told Paul the Prince wanted to “write something African” for him, since voodooism had “originated in Dahomey, his home, and he knew so many stories about it” (Sept. 16, 1924). The very next day, they bumped into Touvalou when they went backstage after seeing
Chocolate Dandies
to chat with its creators, Sissle and Blake (Sept. 17, 1924). There is a touching reminiscense of Robeson by Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale's son, Heywood Hale Broun, in his memoir
Whose Little
Boy Are You?
(St. Martin's, 1983), pp. 55–57, in which he describes Paul as “the greatest container for love and affection” he had ever met: “After you had spoken with him for a few minutes you realized that he was finding your wonderful hidden qualities, and after a few more meetings you were trying to think of ways to tell him how much he meant to you.” In the early thirties, Robeson was involved, along with Walter White and Zora Neale Hurston, in an opera based on Maran's
Batouala
, to be conducted by Leopold Stokowski (White to PR, May 31, 1932). Stokowski also approached Robeson about appearing with the Philadelphia Orchestra (Schang to PR, March 11, 1933). After the outbreak of World War II, Robeson lent his efforts to helping Maran and his wife get emergency visitors' visas to the U.S. (PR to Jane Sherman of Exiled Writer Committee, Oct. 18, 1940; Rockmore to Walter White, Oct. 18, 1940; Sherman to PR, Oct. 23, 1940—all NAACP Papers, LC).

16.
ER Diary, Nov. 5, 24, 28, Dec. 2, 24 (Henderson), 1924; Jan. 4 (Toomer), Jan. 30 (Alabam'), March 11, 27, 29, April 10, June 10 (Cullen reception)—all 1925, RA. Johnson,
Along This Way
, pp. 378–81. Additional examples of PR singing at friends' parties is in FM to CVV, Jan. 1, 14, 1927, CW Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div. The Robesons and Countee Cullen stayed in intermittent but peripheral contact. When Cullen came to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he wrote Paul asking if it would be possible for him to arrange “a few reading and lecture engagements” to help “take care of my expenses,” and reporting that his father and Harold Jackman (the West Indian man-about-town rumored to be Countee's lover), who had gone backstage in London after seeing a performance of
Jones
, “came back to Paris with glowing reports of your London success” (CC to PR, Sept. 5, 1928, RA). In 1940, Cullen tried to interest Paul in appearing in a play of his, but Essie responded, in one of her “brisker” notes, that she thought the first part “real, natural, moving in spots,” but the second “nagging, whining, uninteresting and depressing” (Cullen to ER, Feb. 5, 1940, RA; ER to
Cullen, April 10, 1940, Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center [henceforth ARC: Cullen]). In a cryptic, handwritten note, n.d. (1956?) in his Music Notes, RA, PR refers to Cullen as “perhaps … closer than Langston [Hughes] to African bards.” The Robesons and Eric Waldron maintained some limited contact. When Waldron published an article, “Growth of the Negro Theater,” in
Opportunity
(Oct. 1925), Essie complimented him on it; Waldron replied that he appreciated her praise but he considered the article “a pot-boiler” and
some time
hoped “to have the poise and restraint and the power to say what I have in mind to say about goings on in the Negro Theater” (Waldron to ER, Nov. 15, 1925, RA).