Paul Robeson (18 page)

Essie immediately got off a judiciously worded letter to Kahn. “My husband, Paul Robeson,” she wrote, “is at the brink of what we hope will prove to be a very remarkable career. If you could see your way clear to act as his patron and back him for two years, we would surely try to make you never regret it in any way—in fact we would earnestly try to make you feel very proud to have helped him.” Essie outlined Paul's immediate prospects—
The Emperor Jones
in London, the contracts with James Pond and Victor records, the one-third interest in Salemmé's statue—and, offering these as security, asked Kahn for a five-thousand-dollar loan. The money, she wrote, would be used for four purposes: to clear up their widely scattered debts (fifteen hundred dollars), to send Larry Brown south while they were in London “so he can collect new songs, compose new songs, and study Negro music, so we will have our material all ready when we begin our concert tour,” to publish and copyright all the songs Larry had already composed and arranged (fifteen hundred dollars), and “to be able to live until August” and “study voice all he can” (five hundred dollars). Given the prospects that lay immediately ahead, Essie argued, they “could easily repay the loan at the end of two years,” and, to demonstrate their “enormous possibilities,” she suggested that Kahn allow her husband and Larry Brown to sing and talk with him at any convenient time, perhaps “at the home of our mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, or at any place you might designate.”
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Kahn forwarded the letter to Van Vechten, with an appended note: “I know that you are much interested in Paul Robeson.” In response, Van Vechten urged Kahn to see Robeson. Kahn knew that Van Vechten's recommendations were not automatic: on another occasion he had urged Kahn to turn down a writer's appeal for financial help with the tart comment “There are altogether too many people in Harlem with ‘mouths full o' gimme, hands full o' much obliged'”—an attitude that “should be discouraged.” Kahn arranged to have his private yacht, the
Oheka
, waiting at the foot of the East 23rd Street dock on June 28 to pick up the Robesons, the Van Vechtens, and Larry Brown and bring them to the Kahn estate at Cold Spring Harbor.
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Because of bad weather, a closed car was substituted for the yacht (and Donald Angus substituted for Fania), but otherwise the day went off without a hitch. Robeson and Brown performed for the Kahns and their half-dozen assembled guests; Kahn provided a tour of the grounds, and, after a long, private talk with Paul and Essie about Paul's career, announced that he had decided to give him the requested loan. The very next day, Kahn sent a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to be secured by a pledge of the Robesons' five-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy and his contracts with Pond and Sir Alfred Butt in England; in a covering note Kahn assured them of “the pleasure it gave me to see you both yesterday and of my great and appreciative enjoyment of Mr. Robeson's singing.” Essie immediately
provided Kahn with the stipulated collateral, thanked him for his generosity—“It has all happened so quickly that we are still stunned by our good fortune”—conveyed Paul's offer to sing for the Kahns “at any time you wish him to do so—without charge,” opened (with Van Vechten's help) a checking account at the Harlem branch of the Corn Exchange Bank, and requested from Kahn, and got, the second installment of twenty-five hundred dollars. Van Vechten counseled Essie henceforth to write all her business letters on a typewriter and to patronize a clipping bureau, while apologizing for “beginning to sound like a grandpa, always offering advice. Remember that it is the advice of a friend. Reject it when it does not meet your approval. The friendship will remain.” In a postscript he added: “I have it in mind to write a letter to Mr. Kahn telling [him] that I have suggested to you—quite unnecessarily, as the idea had already occurred to you—that you keep silent in regard to his kindness at lunch as far as Harlem was concerned—for the present, to prevent his office from being deluged with indigent coloured folk. Further, that in case any such appealed to him, he should feel free to call me up and consult me. Further, I would say frankly that Paul Robeson is the only person, white or black, whom I know at present in which I could make this special plea.”
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Now that money was no longer a pressing problem, the Robesons moved toward their European trip with assurance. Essie spent the exuberant final few weeks before sailing in shopping and making arrangements, while Paul prepared for a batch of concerts under James Pond's new management. Essie loved to shop but also to find discounts, and went along with Bert McGhee to the Little Jack Horner Thrift Shop to outfit herself with a green beaded gown, a black satin evening wrap, a negligee, and a rose dinner dress—all “wonderful bargains,” “cheap as dirt”; she had them cleaned and took them to Minnie Sumner for alterations. Paul was indifferent to clothes—to most things material—but Essie took him off to Rogers Peet for made-to-order shirts, to Wallach's for a steamer cap and ties, and to Racitis for a suit.
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Pond arranged for half a dozen concert engagements in the month before departure. Paul and Larry gave two in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where the Cabots “were especially nice” to them—though one of the other socialites annoyed Essie: “She was so stupid, had never heard of O'Neill nor the
Emperor Jones
, and wanted Paul to tell her the plot of
Jones!
” Paul and Essie managed one quiet day together in New York—dinner at the Automat, a stroll down Broadway, a bad movie—and then left for two more concerts in Provincetown, on Cape Cod (both sold out), and a final one at Spring Lake (Paul, rarely punctual, made the train by a second, giving Essie “hysterics,” but “the ocean breezes,” she wrote Carlo, calmed their nerves). So did a visit with “Shag” Taylor, whom they stopped off to see in Boston after the Provincetown concerts. Taylor, a black graduate of Harvard, ran a famous drugstore on Tremont Street, where he dispensed
support and advice to several generations of black students in the area. Shag hired a car, drove them all through Cambridge, and “as usual gave us Boston and the store.”
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Back in New York, Paul and Essie had a farewell meal with Jimmy Light and the McGhees (who left for England two weeks before them to begin preliminary work on
Jones
), had dinner with the Brouns and Walter Whites, and spent one of their last evenings with the Van Vechtens: Fania gave Essie some felt flowers she'd brought back from Paris, and Carlo gave them a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. Up until the eleventh hour before departure, Minnie sewed for Essie and Paul posed for Salemmé. The day before sailing, Paul and Essie raced around to the Victor Company to pick up an advance of $725 for his four (double-sided) completed records, and to Pond's to get paid for the Provincetown and Spring Lake concerts.
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August 5 dawned to a steady rain. Last-minute confusion with trunks and taxis made everybody nervous, and their two cabs got inadvertently separated; Ma Goode, “like a trooper,” made it down alone with the big trunk and somehow got it on the deck of the
Berengaria
. They made the boat by ten minutes, but then, waiting for the tide, it delayed pulling out for an hour. Minnie, the Salemmés, Walter White, Larry Brown, and a half-dozen other friends waved them off. Five telegrams and letters arrived. Mrs. Guy Currier sent a steamer basket. The stateroom was beautiful. The dining room was beautiful. The food was wonderful. Even the waiter was wonderful. They were off—jubilantly.

CHAPTER 6

The Launching of a Career

(1925–1927)

“I was determined,” Essie wrote home to Carlo and Fania, “to find a nice cozy place to put my Baby in so he could be free to do his best work.” Accompanied by Bert McGhee, she scouted London for three days trying to find a suitable flat. Everything she looked at was either dirty, lovely
sans
toilet, or lovely with toilet but no bath (“just funny tin bath tubs—like our foot tubs—only round!”). She finally found the ideal flat at 12 Glebe Place in Chelsea—the two upper floors of a three-story house, “beautifully furnished in the most exquisite taste,” with “fireplaces in all the rooms, geyser bath, electricity, and telephone by the bed,” complete with maid service—and all for four guineas. When she took Paul to see it, the landlord “looked at Paul hard,” and Essie began to fear there would be “difficulty about us being colored.” But if the landlord was upset, he kept it to himself, and Paul and Essie moved in the next day. Jimmy Light and the McGhees insisted “there will be no prejudice” in England. “Here's hoping,” Essie wrote in her diary.
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Compared with the United States, the Robesons did find England “warm and friendly and unprejudiced.” While they were rehearsing
Jones
in Greenwich Village, “the nearest and only place” Robeson could get a decent meal had been up at Penn Station; “the next nearest place was in Harlem.” According to Sue Jenkins, Jimmy Light's first wife, “In spite of Greenwich Village's reputation for being so advanced and radical,” and in spite of his growing celebrity, Robeson had had difficulty finding a restaurant that would serve him, “so Jimmy and I fed him at our place.” In London there were dozens of attractive restaurants near the theater, and none ever raised the issue of race; “the Robesons thoroughly appreciated
the fact,” Essie wrote, “that here in London they could, as respectable human beings, dine at any public place.” They were comparatively free from other humiliations as well. White theaters in New York would sell only balcony seats to blacks, white hotels refused them accommodations, and when Paul and Larry had tried to buy Pullman reservations they were told that only end seats (those over the wheels) were available—the task of buying tickets thereby devolving on the light-skinned Essie.
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Still, they (Essie more than Paul) continued from London to take a rather upbeat view of prospects back in the States, too. Perhaps because their own social life had cut across racial lines, and because the hothouse environment of the “Renaissance” had bred optimism, Essie chose to believe that white people were beginning to discover that “the Negro is merely a human being like themselves” and predicted that “prejudice will grow less and less.” Unlike Paul, she even argued—in a variation of “blaming the victim”—that “segregation has to some extent been brought about by Negroes themselves,” because, like all other ethnic groups, they preferred to congregate with their own; because those few blacks who directly profited from segregation (such as politicians with increased patronage to dispense) imposed it on the rest; and because the average citizen in a black community “could not and would not make a stand against segregation, preferring to shift the burden to the better known members of the race, like petitioning black artists to make the strictly symbolic gesture of not performing before segregated audiences.” Whatever the causes and cures of the American malady, the Robesons were grateful for the respite of London.
³

While Paul rehearsed, Essie toured—indefatigably, as was her style. She methodically attended the London theater “to get a good idea of just what succeeds.” She loved Noel Coward's
Hay Fever
but disliked his
Fallen Angels
(Tallulah Bankhead “just pranced back and forth over the stage”), found
The Beggar's Opera
faintly boring,
Chariot's Revue
faintly amusing, thought the modern-dress
Hamlet
a fascinating exercise, and Ruth Draper so wonderful as to warrant a second visit to the theater. But comedies of manner in the Freddie Lonsdale mode, about the minor peccadilloes of the upper class, dominated the English stage of the 1920s, and Essie concluded that theater in London “can't touch New York. These fancy, perfect drawing room nothings can't compare with our virile plays.”
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The Robesons' socializing, with a few notable exceptions, was largely confined to people they knew from back home—Jimmy Light, the McGhees, “Fitzi” Fitzgerald (the Provincetown's manager), Estelle Healy (the first wife of Lawrence Langner), and—reaching still further back—Paul's old friend, the singer Johnny Payne. Among their new acquaintances, they especially enjoyed Turner Layton and Tandy Johnstone, the black performers who were currently the rage of London, and went to the
Coliseum twice to see them (“It did our hearts good” to hear the galley stamp and whistle its approval, Essie wrote Carlo and Fania).
⁵

Their particular new favorite was Emma Goldman. The redoubtable Emma, now aged fifty-six and having already suffered deportation from the United States and disillusionment with what she had seen firsthand of the Russian Revolution, was currently speaking out wherever possible in London against the Bolshevik imprisonment of her anarchist comrades. She and the Robesons initially met through Fitzi, her longtime friend, and they took to one another at once. Of that first meeting, Essie wrote in her diary that Emma “was fascinating—a middle aged Jewess—with a fine mind—but starved for love.” In the autobiography she published six years later, Emma, too, recorded her first impressions: “Essie was a delightful person, and Paul fascinated everyone.… Nothing I had been told about his singing adequately expressed the moving quality of his voice. Paul was also a lovable personality, entirely free from the self-importance of the star and as natural as a child.” With time, Emma became still more glowing about Paul. In the thirties, after their friendship had further ripened, she wrote her intimate friend, Alexander Berkman, “The more I know the man the greater and finer I find him,” and in another letter said, “I would not change him for the whole miserable trash in the South. Not only because of his art but because of his splendid fine character, his understanding and his large outlook on life. Frankly, I know few of our A. [American] friends among whites quite as humane and large as Paul.”
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