Paul Robeson (122 page)

46.
Phoebe Gilkyson to CVV, Oct. 15, 1926 (“audience walked out”); ER to
CVV and FM, postmarked Sept. 21,1926; Steichen to CVV, n.d., NYPL: Van Vechten; CW to Gertrude Stein, Sept. 30, 1926 (photos), printed in Burns, ed.,
Letters of GS and CVV
. In his opening night telegram to PR, Frank Dazey cabled, “I cannot tell you how fine you have been in every way about this play. Your acting has been an inspiration. Your very presence has given all the rest of us strength” (RA). In retrospect, Essie blamed the failure on the rewrites done during rehearsals, turning the script into “a rather ordinary popular play” (ER, Ms. Auto., RA). One of the three Wilmington reviews was in fact laudatory, and the other two mixed, with PR winning high praise from all three (Wilmington
Morning News, Evening News
, and
Evening Journal
—all Oct. 1, 1926. New York
Telegraph
, Oct. 2, 1926 (subplot).
Mirror
, Oct. 7, 1926 (police; subplot);
Telegram
, Oct. 9, 1926;
Wall Street Journal
, Oct. 8, 1926; Percy Hammond's review is in the
Herald Tribune
, Oct. 7, 1926, Nathan's in
The American Mercury
, Dec. 19, 1926. Nathan's review was also contrary to the mainstream reaction in that he thought PR less than perfect; his performance was “picturesque” but “he permitted himself an occasional platform manner.…” Among the other leading reviewers, Brooks Atkinson (
The New York Times
, Oct. 7) found the play “cheap and meretricous,” and he, too, modulated his praise of PR (he “gradually settles down to a revealing portrait,” and, though “perhaps a trifle heavy in his meteoric, cloud-skimming role,” did distinguish himself through his “artlessness”—“His own personality crosses the footlights without dilution”). E. W. Osborn (
Evening World
, Oct. 7) thought the play “a piece of theatrical sounding brass,” and
Time
(Oct. 18) dismissed the “triteness” of the plot. More favorable evaluations (along with those by Hammond and Nathan) are in the
Evening Graphic
(Oct. 7) and the New York
Sun
(Oct. 7).

47.
The reviews quoted on PR's performance are: New York
News
, Oct. 7, 1926 (Mantle),
Evening Graphic
, Oct. 7 (“truly great”), New York
American
, Oct. (“Samsonic”),
Morning Telegraph
, Oct. 7, 1926.
Life
(Oct. 28, 1926) thought he was slow to warm up (whereas
The New Yorker
, Oct. 16, 1926, oppositely, thought that in the climactic scene he “does an utmost which is yet not sufficient”). Alexander Woollcott thought the play “raucous, vehement, cheap, yet not unentertaining,” but was one of those who welcomed Robeson's “pushing it aside” while he sang and who thought he towered in stature above the proceedings (
New York World
, Oct. 7, 1926).

48.
Pittsburgh
Courier
, Nov. 6, 1926 (“child”);
The Era
(London), June 17, 1936 (PR's view).

49.
Wilmington
Evening News
, Oct. 4, 1926 (Haiti); New York
Telegraph
, Nov. 28, 1926 (
Bosom
); Johnson,
Black Manhattan
, p. 207 (
Bosom
). Fania Marinoff thought only McClendon “any good”: “Bledsoe had a magnificent part. But he got worse and worse” (FM to CVV, Jan. 17, 1927, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.).

50.
Variety
, Feb. 2, 1927. The story of the Kansas City concert is in Roy Wilkins (with Tom Mathews),
Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins
(Viking, 1982), pp. 71–72, and was confirmed to me in an interview with Aminda (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985. The same version is in Wilkins's Oral History interview at Columbia University, done in 1962 by William Ingersoll.

51.
Wilkins,
Standing Fast
, pp. 71–72; interview with Aminda (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985.

52.
Call
, Feb. 18, 25, March 4, 1927. As late as 1932 PR told an interviewer, “Some people expect me to take up Italian opera. In fact, in Philadelphia the people of my own race won't come to hear me sing because I limit my programs to the Negro folk songs. They would pay to hear me sing opera but not the simple things” (New Bedford, Mass.,
Mercury
, June 16, 1932).

53.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER to CVV, postmarked Aug. 14, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten.

54.
The contract with Varney, dated “September 1927” (RA) had, compared with PR's earlier contracts, rather stiff restrictions on his right to do outside performances of any kind. Apparently there had been a row with James Pond when Robeson decided to do
Black Boy
, and he
had had to consult Arthur Garfield Hayes—precipitating a break with Pond and perhaps alerting Varney to the need for binding terms (ER Diary, Jan. 26, Feb. 1, 1926, RA). ER to Frank Harris, Oct. 12, 1927, UT; ER to Gertrude Stein (one note undated, the other dated Aug. 28, 1927), Yale: Stein; ER to James Joyce, Oct. 13, 1927, PU: Beach; ER postcard to CVV and FM, postmarked Sept. 5, 1927; PR to CVV, postmarked Aug. 18, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten; Patterson,
Genocide
, ch. 5; interview with Paul Robeson. Jr. (March 3, 1984), for “in one ear.”

55.
PR to ER, Oct. 16, 1927, RA.

56.
Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond; also letters and telegrams courtesy of Diamond.

57.
Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. Years later PR inscribed in the copy of
Here I Stand
that he presented to Ida Diamond, “To dear, dear Mama Diamond, with much, much love and many, many thanks for your help and encouragement over the years” (copy courtesy of Freda Diamond). The elevator episode happened some time during the years 1928–30, when the Diamonds lived on 11th Street.

CHAPTER 7
Show Boat (1927–1929)

1.
Stein to CVV, postmarked Oct. 26, 1927, printed in Burns, ed.,
Letters of GS and CVV
; Alberta Hunter diary, Oct 29, 1927, Hunter Papers, NYPL/Schm;
La Presse
, Nov. 1, 1927;
Le Courrier Musical
, Dec. 1927;
Comoedia
, Oct. 31, 1927;
The New York Times
, Oct. 30, 1927; New York
Sun
, Nov. 22, 1927; Baltimore
American
, Nov. 19, 1927;
Daily Mail
(London), Oct. 31, 1927.

2.
On the ms. of Seton's
Robeson
, PR wrote, “In Paris at first concert I had a severe cold and was a disappointment. The second concert was a tremendous success.” ER to CVV and FM, Nov. 11, 1927 (quotes telegram), Nov. 17, 1927 (Stein's comment, as rephrased by Essie), Yale: Van Vechten. Robeson and Stein began to see each other with some frequency (PR to GS, two undated notes [but late 1927]), Yale: Stein.

3.
PR to ER, Dec. 10, 12, 1927, RA; multiple interviews with Freda Diamond. According to Jean Blackwell Hutson, Essie's friend Hilda Anderson was with her when Paul, Jr., was born and, according to Hutson, she and others tried frantically to locate Paul to tell him about the birth of his son (interview with Jean Blackwell Hutson, Sept. 21, 1983).

4.
PR to ER, Dec. 10, 12, 1927, RA.

5.
Ibid.

6.
Montreal
Gazette
, Sept. 12, 1925 (singing in bathroom); New York
Graphic
, Jan. 19, 1929 (Johnson);
The Afro-American
, Feb. 11, 1933; New York
Sun
, June 16, 1932 (in which Karl K. Kitchen advocates Robeson over Tibbett).
The New York Times
panned the Křenek opera (April 15, 1928). Essie saw the production of
Jones
at the Metropolitan twice, describing it as “foul” and Tibbett as “strutting, and cocky, and absurd” (ER Diary, Feb. 8, 11, 1933, RA). Interview with Alan Bush, Sept. 3, 1982 (PR's voice); Bush, a professor in the Royal Academy of Music from 1925 to 1978, knew Robeson in the thirties and worked with him in 1939 on the Festival of Music for the People. For an additional discussion of Robeson and opera, see pp. 120; 179; 193; 245; note 43, p. 615; note 22, p. 642.

7.
PR to ER, Dec. 12, 1927, RA.

8.
PR to ER, Dec. 12, 13, 1927, RA.

9.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA; PR to Stein, n.d. (February 1928), Yale: Stein; ER to Larry Brown (hereafter LB), Jan. 8, 1928; PR telegram to LB, Jan. 8, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown. In late December, Essie described her health as “at present … about at zero” (ER to Lawrence Langner, Dec. 22, 1927, Yale: Johnson).

10.
ER to LB, March 20, 1928; PR to LB, April 19, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown; Ben Robeson, “My Brother Paul” (1934), ms., RA; FM to CVV, Feb. 29, 1928 ($500), CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div. Two years later, Robeson told the English writer Ethel Mannin “He would like to have played the title role [of Porgy] but it was generally considered that he was
too big to play a cripple” (Ethel Mannin,
Confessions and Impressions
[Jarrolds, 1931], p. 159).

In the comparative leisure time after Essie began to improve and before rehearsals for
Porgy
began, Robeson found time to sing at a birthday dinner for Oswald Garrison Villard, and to participate in a Provincetown Playhouse jubilee to celebrate its thirteenth birthday—and to try to raise money. He probably also went to Theodore Dreiser's for one of the informal at-homes the writer started in 1928; in inviting Robeson to drop by, Dreiser wrote, “Mostly, these days, when I get tired writing—I put on one of your records—Mt. Zion or Witness or Water-boy—and let your sympathetic voice revive my failing spirits” (Dreiser to PR, March 5, 1928, RA). For more on Dreiser and PR, see notes 34 and 35, p. 652; p. 281; and note 3, p. 665.

The motion-picture nibble involved Frank Dazey, co-author of
Black Boy
, and his screenwriter wife, Agnes Christine Johnson, in conjunction with the producing team of Asner and Rogers. Dazey warned Robeson, apparently because of his known preference for “art” over “commerce” (see PR to ER, pp. 111–12), to concentrate on ensuring that his first film would be “sound commercially. An ‘artistic failure' may be all right on the stage, but it helps no one in pictures” (Frank Dazey to PR, July 9, 1928, RA; also Agnes Christine Johnson to ER, June 6, 1928, RA).

11.
ER to LB, March 20, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

12.
PR to LB, April 10, 19, 1928, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

13.
PR to Amanda Ira Aldridge, n.d. (April-May 1928), NUL: Aldridge.
Empire News
, May 6, 1928 (“feast”); Agate,
Times
, May 7, 1928. After seeing Paul and Essie together, Ethel Mannin made a comment similar to the sentiment Paul himself had expressed to Aldridge: Essie “gives the impression of managing him as she might a big child who cannot look after himself; and he gives the impression of complete childlike submission to her management” (Mannin,
Confessions and Impressions
, p. 160). Among the dozens of reviews, the most prestigious of those that expressed doubts about the show (but none about Robeson) include:
Daily Sketch, Star
, and the
Evening Standard
—all May 4, 1928—and
Queen
, May 19, 1928. John C. Payne, the European-based black singer who had known Robeson earlier (see p. 49; note 28, p. 582) and was to continue to play a role in his life (see p. 164), was hired as chorus master of
Show Boat
(John C. Payne, “Looking Back on My Life,”
Negro
, ed. Nancy Cunard [London, 1934; reissued in New York by Negro Universities Press, 1969]). Robeson often attended and sometimes sang at Payne's open-house Sundays in London, a gathering place for European-based black artists.

Alberta Hunter has suggested (Sterner interview) that Robeson was “so powerful” in his role, “a little feeling of jealousy between the stars” developed, plus envy at the way “the carriage people would roll up and walk right up to Paul Robeson's dressing room”—the tension, she suggested, contributed to the closing of the show. Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook (
Alberta Hunter
[McGraw-Hill, 1987], p. 102) quote Hunter as saying that the only time Robeson's voice failed during the run of
Show Boat
was the night King George V and Queen Mary attended: “Paul started singing off-key and stayed off-key the whole night. Later he cried like a baby.” She also made this poignant comment on his voice: “There was something about [it] … that was most alarming. Sometimes when he'd hum to himself, he'd sound like a moan, like the resonance of a bell in the distance.”

14.
New York
Amsterdam News
, Oct. 3, 1928; Pittsburgh
Courier
, Oct. 6, 1928;
Sketch
, May 10, 1928;
The New York Times
, April 15, 1928. Though Robeson in 1928 did sing the lyrics as written—“Niggers all work on the Mississippi”—by the thirties he had changed “Niggers” to “Darkies” and then, by the time of the film
Show Boat
in 1935, had substituted “There's an ol' man called the Mississippi; that's the ol' man that I'd like to be.” Freda Diamond says she suggested the change, “I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'” to “I must keep fightin' until I'm dyin'” (for its reception, see p. 214), but her second
suggestion for a substitution in lyrics had some unintended results. When Robeson first sang “You show a little spunk” (substituted for “You get a little drunk”) in New York, it was greeted with tremendous applause—but in London with dead silence. Robeson later learned that to the English “spunk” means semen, and promptly changed the line again, substituting “grit” (multiple interviews with Freda Diamond). In regard to Robeson's changes in his lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II is quoted as saying, “As the author of these words, I have no intention of changing them or permitting anyone else to change them. I further suggest that Paul write his own songs and leave mine alone” (New York
Age
, June 18, 1949). On the other hand, Dorothy Van Doren recalls Hammerstein's deep human sympathy with Robeson: “Well,” she quotes Hammerstein as saying on television in response to a question about Robeson's having “turned Communist,” “if I were a tall, handsome man, member of the All-American football team, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania [sic], a world-famous actor and concert singer, and if I couldn't get a hotel room in Detroit, I don't really know what I'd do” (Lakeville
Journal
, Aug. 1972).