Paul Robeson (15 page)

While the sittings were still in progress, Paul and Tony would sometimes take a break by going off to see an art exhibit together. Tony became something of a guide to Paul in the unfamiliar areas of painting and sculpture, making distinctions that were new for him between work that was “modernist,” “realist,” or (the term Salemmé preferred for his own art) “classical contemporary.” He found Paul “a quick study”—in art and in everything. According to Essie, Paul, on his side, “always remembered those afternoons in the cool quiet galleries. Pictures began to mean something to him.” He absorbed additional ideas from the many artists and critics who periodically dropped by Tony's studio—like the sculptor Arthur
Lee, who had just won the Widener Medal, or the painter Niles Spencer, or Monroe Wheeler (future curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and his lover, the writer Glenway Wescott.
⁴

Before long, the Salemmés and the Robesons began to socialize. Betty Salemmé and Essie became friendly, but Tony never grew close to Essie, continuing to find her too much “on guard” for congeniality—she had “no light touch, no give and take. You didn't become fond of Essie. You became fond of Paul. You got to love Paul.” Yet Tony, at least in retrospect, was somewhat sympathetic to Essie's wariness: “Paul was adored by all the women he ever met. Women absolutely swooned over Paul. Paul was pursued, and sometimes caught. You'd have to be a saint not to fool around with a few women who absolutely adored you. And Paul was a saint, in a way. He was never boastful. He was never a show-off. If a woman made it possible for him to go to bed with her, you never heard anything about it. You only—you had to see it. If you didn't, you'd never know it.”
⁵

Salemmé did see it, and did know it: not only did Paul and Niles Spencer's wife become lovers for a time, but so did Paul and Betty Salemmé. Tony and Betty (who was a famed beauty) had always agreed on an unconventional marriage—indeed, another of her lovers had bought Tony his studio. The couple's close friend Monroe Wheeler sixty years later described Betty Salemmé's enthusiasm for Paul as “boundless,” and Wheeler came to share her view, growing “terribly fond” of Paul (on the other hand, he was put off by Essie's “extreme ambition”).
⁶

While recognizing that Paul would never be confined to a monogamous union, Tony Salemmé nonetheless believed he could not have found a more suitable wife than Essie. “Paul spent money easily, he wasn't penny-pinching, and money went right through him. And so Essie had all the difficulty. She was almost motherly toward him. She fed him. She defended him. He needed Essie to protect him, to sign papers and to call up somebody and make a loan or something like that. Essie didn't make him famous. She merely did some of his business … and she was very patient, because she must have guessed that he was attractive to a lot of women. So that was a lot for Essie to bear, wasn't it? She had her dignity. She didn't want to fuss about it enough to lose face. And Paul appreciated Essie. He wasn't going to give her up. He was very smart. He knew people and knew values. And he had a steadiness in himself, which was automatic. He wasn't flighty. I don't think he'd be secure with another woman. He was secure with Essie. That was where he was smart.”
⁷

Paul and Essie took their new white friends up to Harlem and introduced them to their new friends among black movers and shakers. During the summer of 1924, the Robesons became friendly with Gladys and Walter White (the zesty, charming NAACP officer), who were themselves moving to the center of an interracial network of artists, cultural brokers, partygoers, and political activists. Also part of that circle were Grace Nail
Johnson and her husband, James Weldon Johnson, lawyer, songwriter, editor, diplomat, cultural critic, educator—and the NAACP's executive secretary. Johnson held patriotic and integrationist views that put him at odds with the separatist black leader Marcus Garvey and his followers, and also with some of the attitudes of W. E. B. Du Bois, who placed more emphasis than Johnson did on the need to cherish what was unique in black life (rather than assimilate into white culture).
⁸

Robeson would in later years move strongly in the direction of Du Bois, but in the twenties he found the sentiments of James Weldon Johnson congenial. Interviewed by the
Herald Tribune
in July 1924, Robeson told the reporter that he didn't “in the least minimize what I am up against as a negro,” but nonetheless stressed opportunities rather than obstacles:

I may be a bit optimistic, but I think if I'm a good enough actor … I can go pretty far. All actors are limited by their physique. A slender five-footer can't play a giant; a buxom heavyweight lady can't play an ingenue. Well, I've got limitations, too—size and color. Same limitations as other actors have, plus …

For the present, Robeson believed,

I can do no better than to do my own work and develop myself to [the] best of my ability.… If I do become a first-rate actor, it will do more toward giving people a slant on the so-called Negro problem than any amount of propaganda and argument.

The
Tribune
, of course, was a white-run paper addressed to a white readership, and it might be assumed that Robeson tailored and toned down his views accordingly. Yet he sounded at least as moderate and optimistic when discussing his opinions with a leading black publication—A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen's
Messenger
. On the subject of racial barriers, Robeson was quoted in
The Messenger
as saying, “What are the opportunities? Just what I will make them … I honestly feel that my future depends mostly upon myself.” And in an interview he gave the following year, he is quoted as saying:

The stories my old dad used to tell me [about slavery] are vivid in my memory; but—well, those bad times are over. What we have got to do is to go forward. There is still too much wild talk about the colour question; some of it wounds me deeply, but I don't let myself get morbid about it. I conserve my energies for my work as an actor. I realize that art can bridge the gulf between the white and black races.…
⁹

In stressing art as a solvent for racism, Robeson was articulating a characteristic position of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals: racial advance would come primarily through individual artistic achievement, not as the result of political pressure and polemics. As he emphasized in his interview with
The Messenger
, “it is by proving our artistic capacity that we will be best recognized … it is through art we are going to come into our own.” To the minimal extent he was political at all in these years, he looked to individual cultural achievement—not organized, collective action—as the likeliest channel for the advance of the race. As he told
The Messenger
, “So today Roland Hayes is infinitely more a racial asset than many who ‘talk' at great length.” (Even Du Bois, who in the twenties was already growing disenchanted with the ideology of art and moving toward the vehicle of direct political protest, continued to sound this common renaissance note of cultural elitism, continued to stress the central role a “talented tenth” would play in advancing the fortunes of the race.) Yet unlike many renaissance figures, Robeson referred at least once in the twenties (as he often would ten years later) to “the culture of ancient Africa” as being, alongside contemporary black achievements, part of the proof of the “artistic stature” of black people—as indeed “above all things” something “we boast of.”
¹⁰

Moreover, if he had decided not to “get morbid” about racial slurs, he did not deny that he had felt deeply wounded by them. He even occasionally acknowledged their toll to his white friends. Tony Salemmé recalls that Paul would “sometimes arrive looking depressed.” When Tony asked him what was wrong, Paul would quietly answer, “Oh,… I went to see an old friend of mine uptown, and I had to take the freight elevator.” Once in a while in the telling Paul would get “a little angry,” but he had long since learned to keep a lid on his feelings, especially in front of whites, and especially since Salemmé glibly counseled him to take “a philosophical attitude,” to “recognize” that little could be done at the moment about racial prejudice.
¹¹

The Robesons' friendship with the Whites and the Johnsons soon deepened. On one of their evenings together, White confided that his new novel about racism in a Southern town,
Fire in the Flint
, might be filmed, and if so he wanted Paul in the leading role. Soon after, he sent them a copy. Ma Goode read it first and pronounced it “wonderful.” Essie came home the following week to find Paul “crying and cursing over Walter's book … a supreme compliment, for Paul never cries except when deeply moved. He says the book is very fine and also thrilling.” Many literary contemporaries, including Sinclair Lewis, agreed, and Carl Van Vechten, the white writer who was rapidly becoming a spur and spokesman for the black literary renaissance, immediately asked Alfred Knopf, White's publisher, for an introduction to the writer. After the two men spent several hours together, Van Vechten wrote a friend that Walter White “speaks
French and talks about Debussy and Marcel Proust in an offhand way. An entirely new kind of Negro to me.” White reported to the Robesons that Van Vechten and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, “both feel the novel will make a marvelous play, and suggested Paul would be the ideal man to cast as the hero.” “Things look interesting,” Essie wrote in her diary.
¹²

In January 1925 the Robesons themselves met Van Vechten and his petite, vivacious wife (whom Van Vechten always referred to as “Marinoff”) for the first time at the Whites', where the other guests included the Johnsons; Julius (“Jules”) Bledsoe, the young black baritone; James Weldon Johnson's brother J. Rosamond Johnson, the musician and singer; and George Gershwin, who played
Rhapsody in Blue
and some of his songs for the group. It was a “wonderful time,” Essie wrote in her diary—the first of many with the Van Vechtens and their gifted circle. Van Vechten's genius, disputed in all else, is unchallenged in his role as host; pink-faced and white-maned, exotically gowned in a cerise-and-gold mandarin robe—resembling, in the words of one frequent guest, “the Dowager Empress of China gone slightly berserk”—Van Vechten would pass happily from guest to guest, assuring them that he felt blessed by their talented presence. A shrewd estimate of Van Vechten comes from Lincoln Kirstein, who first met him in 1926: “Carl was a dandy.… He understood elegance, a contemporary elegance, in a way no American before him conceived it.… Carl saw the fantastic in the ordinary, discovered the natural flair, verbal brilliance, humor and pathos in the so-called ‘ordinary' life of Harlem. He was of the tribe of Beau Brummel, of Byron, of Baudelaire, and of Ronald Firbank.… Carl adored cats. To me, he always seemed to be an enormous, blond kitty; sometimes he purred; he could scratch. Sometimes he just blinked like a cat whose mysteries and opinions are privately wise. Like a cat, he preferred the cream of life.… He did not mind being stroked.…”
¹³

Two weeks after their initial meeting, the Robesons were back at the Van Vechtens' for another party; this one again included Gershwin, Alfred Knopf, the Johnsons, the Whites, Jules Bledsoe—and also Otto Kahn and dancer Adele Astaire (whom Essie described as having “the friendliest grin and is so sweet and loveable”). Van Vechten wrote a friend that “seven Negroes were present” at the party, “all of them interesting one way or another,” and that Robeson “singing spirituals is really a thrilling experience.…” The glamorous gatherings alternated between the homes of the Van Vechtens and the Whites, interspersed with somewhat more sedate teas at the James Weldon Johnsons'. Before long the Van Vechtens became the chummily familiar “Carlo and Fania” (she is “quite the sweetest thing I know,” Essie wrote in her diary, adding in praise that both the Van Vechtens “seemed devoted” to Ella, their maid). Van Vechten reported to his friend Gertrude Stein, “I have passed practically my whole winter in company with Negroes and have succeeded in getting into most of the
important
sets.
… One of my best friends, Paul Robeson … is a great actor and when he sings spirituals he is as great as Chaliapin. I want you to meet him.”
¹⁴

Essie carefully noted in her diary the star-studded lists of guests she and Paul now met regularly on their round of parties. At the Van Vechtens', Theodore Dreiser told Paul he had seen
The Emperor Jones
six times, and took him aside for a long talk. At the Whites', the panoply of glamour included Sherwood Anderson, Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, Prince Kojo Touvalou Houenou of Dahomey (nephew of the deposed King and a graduate in law and medicine from the Sorbonne, active in publicizing French colonial injustices—Essie found him “a typical African in appearance, but charming and cultured and interesting”), Roland Hayes, the novelist Jessie Fauset, René Maran (the French West Indian author of
Batouala
who had won the Goncourt Prize in 1921), the poet Witter Bynner (“tall and clumsy and very friendly. I never saw anything quite so funny and froglike as he attempts to do the tango with Gladys [White], and his attempts at the ‘Charleston'”), Louise Brooks (she “was very late and I couldn't wait for her, but … Paul said she was very conceited and impossible”), and the red-haired singer Nora Holt (Ray), half Scottish, half Negro, known for her dalliances. (“Her trail is strewn with bones,” Van Vechten wrote H. L. Mencken, “many of them no longer hard”). Essie “couldn't bear her,” called her “a red hot mama,” and announced that “If she ever went after Paul I'd eat her alive, and I meant it, and they know I did.”
¹⁵