Paul Robeson (42 page)

Wherever they went, everyone seemed to have heard about “Robeson,” and when the ship landed at Cape Town the newspaper reporters crowded around to insist (as Essie wrote Paul) “you were assuming leadership—world leadership of Negroes, and were now beginning to do something constructive about it. What measures were you taking to lead your people? Was I here to start your campaign? And so on.” Essie tried to be cautious and diplomatic in her answers. “I said you were young and healthy and entirely normal and not particularly spiritual, and that you were naturally interested in the Negro everywhere. We are Negroes ourselves and as Negroes, are interested in our people, and in conditions which affect our people.” The white paper, Cape Town
Argus
, translated that into “My husband has never been interested in politics.… He holds no fanciful ideas about Africa for the Africans.… He is not yet 40 and has no romantic ideas about devoting his time and energies to his people.” The African trip, Essie wrote after she had returned,

was one of those grand dreams come true. It is certainly the most interesting thing I have done, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity. Its quite a different world and I think every Negro who can, should go and look & listen and learn. We have a grand heritage from Africa, as a race, and it is shameful that we are not interested in it, and almost wholly ignorant of it.
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Paul and Ma Goode returned from their respective trips to the U.S.S.R. equally full of praise for the life they had found there. Paul had stayed for a few days with friends on film location at a collective farm and had had an “idyllic” time, “astonished” at how well informed the village children were about “the American Negro problem”—and how free of racial prejudice. That had been precisely Ma Goode's impression, and Paul now made the final decision that she and Pauli would go to live there at the end of the year. Peggy and Eugene Dennis (a leading figure in the
Communist Party, U.S.A.), who had left their older son, Tim, in school in Moscow and then been denied permission to take him out, warned the Robesons to leave Pauli with maximum publicity. They did exactly that: Paul announced widely to the press that they had decided to educate their son in the Soviet Union so that he would not have to undergo the discrimination his father had faced growing up in the United States.
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On his return from the Soviet Union, Paul went to work immediately on
King Solomon's Mines
. It was one of those no-expenses-spared productions—twenty-seven thousand natives in “authentic” animal skins! grass huts! erupting volcanoes!!—and replete with a corresponding number of stereotypes and anachronisms. Based on Rider Haggard's novel, the film tells the story of Umbopa (Robeson), servant to the white man, who ultimately reveals his true identity as an African chief, regains his throne, saves the lives of his treasure-seeking white friends (Cedric Hardwicke, Roland Young), and sings his way into the inspirational sunset. Robeson sang beautifully, but the music was composed and placed with fatuous disregard for authenticity, succeeding only in confirming the cinema's inability fully to use the range of his gifts and to respect his dignity. The black New York
Amsterdam News
expressed its gratitude that the film “at least doesn't reek with the imperialistic theory of British superiority” (most viewers today find that reek palpable), but the black Pittsburgh
Courier
was wholly negative: Robeson “is made to sing childish lyrics to dreary tunes in the most unlikely circumstances.”
⁵⁴

His luck did not improve with his next film venture,
Big Fella
, which followed almost immediately and involved essentially the same team that had put together
Song of Freedom:
J. Elder Wills as director and Elizabeth Welch as costar. Welch, in retrospect, remains puzzled as to why Robeson agreed to do the film: her guess is that he accepted the poor script—based on Claude McKay's
Banjo
—out of a sense of obligation to Hammer-British Lion Productions for having given him the opportunity to do
Song of Freedom
. Possibly, too, he wanted to have a crack at a lighter role; he had told a reporter two years before that he wanted to try his hand at a comic part—as long as it was not some shuffling stereotype. It may also be that Essie applied a bit of leverage: she was eager to play the role of the café proprietress, which the producers offered her (they also cast Larry Brown in a secondary part), and she hugely enjoyed being in the film. “I spoke some French & wore false hair à la Pompadour!” she wrote a friend. “Larry was magnificent. Paul was
very pleased
with my work, and so was the Director.”
⁵⁵

Big Fella
tells the story of Banjo, a dockside worker and an itinerant balladeer (justification for having Robeson burst yet again into song), who locates a lost boy, sees him unwillingly returned to his home, is called in by the boy's family to help rear him, but ends up preferring the easygoing life of the docks. The scriptwriters did, under pressure from Robeson,
make it clear that Banjo was “a steady, trustworthy sort of fellow,” who worked for a living and did not participate in the “roguery” of the dockside life. They also voluntarily agreed to change the film's title from
Banjo
to
Big Fella
to avoid leading “the audience to expect a sort of ‘Uncle Sambo' of the cotton plantations.” Robeson was thus enabled to make a racial statement about an ordinary but admirable black man, functioning well in a contemporary, European setting. But, that virtue aside, the picture had little to recommend it.
⁵⁶

Between the completion of
Big Fella
and the immediate onset of yet another film project,
Jericho
, Robeson managed a month's trip to the U.S.S.R. He gave a four-city (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa) concert tour, and he and Essie helped settle Ma Goode and Pauli in for a nearly two-year stay. The concerts were well received—Essie described the audiences as “marvellous … wildly appreciative. I have never heard Paul & Larry better.” The English language Moscow
Daily News
hailed his December 16 concert in the Large Hall of the Conservatory as “brilliant”—precisely because Robeson “is a ‘mass singer', simple, natural and human.” His friend Eisenstein, reviewing the concert in
Workers' Moscow
, congratulated Robeson on the “pure Russian” of his “hello” and “thank you” to the audience, regretted that no translations were provided for the English-language songs, and commented on how Robeson's “every gesture conveyed irony toward his formal dress, to which he had been condemned by world concert conventions.” Pauli entered a Soviet Model School, with Stalin's daughter and Molotov's son among his schoolmates, and he took at once to the kindliness of his Russian teachers and to (in Essie's report home) “the complete lack of colour consciousness among the students.” On New Year's Eve the family gathered together in Moscow—Ma Goode, Pauli, Paul, Essie, Essie's brothers, John and Frank, Larry Brown, and William Patterson. They had “a high old time”; three days later Essie felt “still full of vodka, caviar, champagne and Russian cigarette smoke.”
⁵⁷

In contrast to the economically depressed West, Essie sent back a glowing report of a U.S.S.R. with “thousands of well stocked shops.… Everyone well fed & warmly dressed. Books everywhere, outrageously cheap & everyone reads.” Six months earlier, referring to his prior trip to the Soviet Union, Robeson had told Ben Davis, Jr. (the black American Communist who was to become a Robeson intimate), that everywhere he went he had found “plenty of food,” that he had made a point of visiting workers' homes and “they all live in healthful surroundings”—would that “the Negroes in Harlem and the South had such places to stay in.” Apparently the Robesons had still heard nothing, or chose not to credit the few rumors that might have come their way, about Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture, a policy that produced widespread famine, cost millions
of lives (hitting the “national minority” population in Kazakhstan especially hard), and in the case of the Ukraine was deliberately designed by Stalin to crush the notion of an autonomous culture.
⁵⁸

In mid-January the Robesons left Pauli and Ma Goode “happily settled” in the Hotel National, and returned to London. Essie and Paul had only a four-day layover there before they had to leave for Egypt to film exteriors for
Jericho
. The shooting lasted a month. They stayed just outside Cairo and wandered its streets between takes, struck at the extreme contrasts in wealth and poverty, at European chic side by side with ancient tradition. “Cairo is a wonderful place,” Robeson told an interviewer; “it is such a queer mix.” In a letter to the Van Vechtens, Essie expressed fascination “that the Egyptians are pure coloured folks, science notwithstanding”—“we can find a double in Harlem for everyone we've seen here. It's great fun to see an enormously rich country like this, where the coloured folks are the bosses!” She reported, too, that “Paul is in fine form—bigger, sweeter, dearer than ever, interested in his work, interested in me, interested in Pauli, and all is very very well.”
⁵⁹

Along with liking Cairo, Robeson enjoyed working on the film itself. “It's the best part I have ever had for a picture,” he told one reporter. To another he revealed that he had “become very interested in Egyptian films” and expected to make one soon with Om Kalsoun, the noted Egyptian singer, as his female lead. The
Jericho
experience also confirmed Robeson in his fondness for cinema as a vehicle for his voice. He felt he could use it in a “perfectly natural” way while filmmaking, without having to strain for volume and projection, as he sometimes had to onstage or in concert; “I can sing best when I'm natural. I don't like posing or raising my voice or strutting about.”
⁶⁰

One of his costars in the film, Henry Wilcoxon, became friendly with the Robesons and often shared meals with them. He found Essie “very sharp … the kind of person you don't push around,” but he thought Paul an immensely appealing human being, at once modest and charismatic, having “a natural stage presence,” and conducting himself on the set like “a pro.” Robeson talked to Wilcoxon in a low-keyed way about the rising threat of fascism in Spain and gave him a book to read on socialism, offhandedly suggesting he have a look at it.
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The location shots for
Jericho
were made fifteen miles out in the desert at a studio site across the road from the Pyramids. One day Robeson, Wilcoxon, and Wallace Ford, another of the film's stars, inspected the Great Pyramid of Giza. With the help of a dragoman, they worked their way into the King's chamber at the geometric center of the pyramid, their path lit every hundred feet or so by a low-watt bulb. Inside the chamber they discovered “the most incredible echo” and Wilcoxon got the idea that Robeson should try singing. The first note “almost crumbled the place,”
as Wilcoxon remembers, and when Paul followed with a triad, “back came the most gigantic organ chord you have ever heard in your life. This was Paul Robeson plus!” Then, “without any cue from anybody Paul started to sing ‘Oh Isis und Osiris' from
The Magic Flute
.… When he finished and the last reverberation had gone away … I was crying, the dragoman was crying, Wally Ford, bless his heart, who was usually doing nothing but laugh, he was crying, and Paul was crying.… There were tears going down our faces. And we almost daren't breathe to break the spell of the thing.” Hardly saying a word, the three men drove back to Cairo.
⁶²

The good feeling carried over into the filming.
Jericho
, in the opinion of some, is one of Robeson's better pictures (which is not, to be sure, among the higher compliments one can pay to his career). The picture's story line, certainly, is the least conventional of his films. Jericho Jackson (Robeson) is a medical student drafted to serve in the army, who rescues some fellow soldiers from a torpedoed troop ship, then flees an unjust court martial to wander across North Africa until he marries the daughter of a Tuareg chieftain (played by the real-life Princess Kouka, discovered in the Sudan—and then cosmeticized), becomes leader of the tribe, and, after avoiding recapture by the white authorities, lives out his life as a benefactor of his people. Robeson, as always, was called upon in the film to break periodically into incongruous song and to behave with unswerving heroism, but in comparison with most of his other movie roles, the part of Jericho Jackson did enable him to move several steps away from the standard stereotype of servile childishness (even if it kept him firmly rooted in an alternate caricature of simplistic nobility). The press—perhaps still hankering after the servile stereotype—was lukewarm. In London the critics were polite. In New York (where the film played under the title
Dark Sands
) the response ranged more widely but not more enthusiastically: Bosley Crowther in the
Times
suggested that “out of respect to Paul Robeson and his magnificent baritone voice the less said about
Dark Sands
the better.” The film was not a commercial success.
⁶³

On returning to London from Cairo in the early spring of 1937, Robeson lent his support to various political causes. In April, he appeared in concert at the Victoria Palace to aid homeless women and children in Spain. In May, he contributed fifteen hundred dollars to forward the work of the International Committee on African Affairs (a new organization in New York headed by Max Yergan, who had recently housed Essie and Pauli on their visit to South Africa). Also in May, Paul and Essie returned to the Soviet Union for another visit.
⁶⁴

They stayed in Russia for most of the summer, the first long holiday they had ever taken. They found Pauli and Ma Goode “very well” (except that Pauli had developed an intestinal problem calling for a special nonfat diet, which necessitated finding them a flat with kitchen facilities for preparing
his special meals). Pauli had been promoted with honors; “He adores the children,” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, and Mama “loves Russia.” The National Theater of Uzbekistan was currently in Moscow and Paul and Essie took Pauli to the Uzbek folk-dance-and-song matinee; he was “thrilled to death” and “nearly danced in his seat.”
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