Paul Robeson (46 page)

Robeson ignored the detractors. In his very next public statement, in September, soon after returning to London from his provincial tour, he further consolidated his populist image. In more forceful terms than ever before, he told the press about his disenchantment with commercial filmmaking. “I am tired of playing Stepin Fetchit comics and savages with leopard skin and spear,” he told one reporter. The film industry had refused to give him the kind of roles he wanted to play—the life of the black composer Coleridge-Taylor, say, or a film based on the Joe Louis story. As a result he was determined, he said, to try to make pictures independently—at the time he still hoped to do a film with Eisenstein—or to get a picture off the ground based on the life of Oliver Law, the black American soldier who had died in Spain. It was not an unrealistic path: documentary films had recently come into prominence, and such talented film personalities as Robert Flaherty, Paul Muni, and Leslie Howard had washed their hands of the film industry proper and gone their independent ways.
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Meanwhile, he agreed to sing as many as three shows daily in a few of the popular cinema palaces—Gaumont State, the Trocadero, the Elephant and Castle. He was willing to work harder and at reduced fees—eighteen performances at one of the giant cinema houses brought him a salary equivalent to the fee for one performance on the Celebrity Concert series at Queen's Hall—in order to reach the people he now considered to be his “natural” audience, and at a price they could afford. But Robeson could never be a “pop” singer in the Frank Sinatra mode, and whenever he tried to stretch his voice and repertoire in that direction he invariably stumbled. Essie wisely counseled him to return to what he did best, the spirituals, and he quickly heeded her advice.
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Simultaneously, Robeson maintained a hectic pace of political appearances, lending his name and presence to a plethora of organizations and events—the Spanish Aid Committee, Food for Republican Spain Campaign, the National Memorial Fund (for the British members of the Brigade), the Labour and Trade Union Movement, the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, the League for the Boycott of Aggressor Nations, the Coloured Film Artists' Association, the Society for Cultural Relations, and, in December 1938, the Welsh National Memorial Meeting at Mountain Ash, to commemorate those “men of the International Brigade from Wales who gave their lives in defence of Democracy in Spain.”
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The Mountain Ash meeting in Wales held special meaning for him. Ten years earlier, a much less political but nonetheless instinctively egalitarian Robeson had impulsively joined a group of Welsh miners
demonstrating in London when he ran into them while coming out of a posh affair dressed in a dinner jacket. In the years since, his identification with the Welsh had grown—with their ethnic insistence, their strength of character, their political radicalism. His strong bonds with the people of the Rhondda Valley would endure for the rest of his life, and the film he was soon to make about the Welsh miners,
The Proud Valley
, would always be the one in which he took the most pleasure. In 1938 at Mountain Ash, seven thousand people gathered to commemorate the thirty-three men from Wales who had died in Spain. Veterans of the International Brigade marched behind the flags of Wales and Republican Spain onto a platform filled with one hundred black men, women, and children from Cardiff, as well as a group of orphaned Basque children. The speakers included the Dean of Chichester and Arthur Horner, president of the South Wales Miners' Federation, who introduced Robeson to the audience as “a great champion of the rights of the oppressed people to whom he belongs.” Robeson sang, recited two poems Langston Hughes had composed in Spain, and told the audience, “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for Spain but for me and the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here.” The audience gave him a standing ovation.
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Robeson had next planned a trip to Australia for a recital tour, but it had to be called off because of the uncertainty of the political situation in Europe. In April 1939, though, he and Larry Brown did manage a brief Scandinavian trip, performing in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, where enthusiastic crowds turned the concerts into anti-Nazi demonstrations. Then, in May, Robeson sailed for a two-month stay in the States, perhaps at the prompting of his lawyer, Robert Rockmore—increasingly his confidant and business manager—who felt concerned that he “has been away so long that I am afraid that he may lose his so-called American audience, which, as you know, at best is a very fickle one.” Robeson had wanted to make a trip to New York anyway to discuss with Oscar Hammerstein II the possibility of doing the play
John Henry
, and while there he agreed to do some concert engagements and also to appear in what turned out to be a well-received week-long revival of
The Emperor Jones
(directed by Gig McGhee) at the Ridgeway Theater in White Plains.
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Soon after arriving in New York, he told the
Sunday Worker
that,

Having helped on many fronts, I feel that it is now time for me to return to the place of my origin—to those roots which, though imbedded in Negro life, are essentially American and are so regarded by the people of most other countries.… It is my business not only to tell the guy with the whip hand to go easy on my people,… but also to teach my people—all the oppressed people—how to prevent that whip hand from being used against them.

Robeson was besieged by requests for additional interviews and public appearances, but hid out at the McGhees' apartment. No one could find him—and everyone seemed to be trying. Alexander Woollcott wanted to take him to lunch, Max Yergan wanted to discuss a pending conference on Africa, NBC wanted to discuss the possibility of radio dates, and Walter White wanted him to speak at the thirtieth annual conference of the NAACP. What
Robeson
wanted was to conserve his energy and call his own shots. “Nobody can find you,” Essie wrote in consternation from London—which was precisely how Paul had planned it. But his inaccessibility did ruffle some feelings. Carl Van Vechten was so put out over Paul's failure to contact him that Essie had to write a lengthy apology, diplomatically claiming that Paul “feels terrible” about “the mess he made of things while he was in America.”
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He did not. And Carlo knew he did not. “There is no word from Paul that
HE
is sorry,” Van Vechten wrote his wife, Fania, “It's pretty obvious that Paul doesn't want to see
us
very much, or
most
of his old friends.” “There is only one thing to do,” Carlo decided, “and that is refrain from flattering them by letting them think we are
MAD
.” Two days later, still smarting despite his resolution not to, Carlo returned to the subject in another letter to Fania,

The point about Paul is that he only wants to talk about himself and how he's improving and how he is working on new songs and he can't talk to his old friends that way because they've heard this story so long: so he hunts up new ones to listen.… There is no earthly use in going into all this because it is a matter of indifference whether we see him or not.… If they want to call up and come round in the fall, why let them. I don't think they will bother us much. Essie's whole idea is to keep us from getting sore, because she knows that would do Paul harm, but the other people he has treated like this will do him more harm.

In reply, Fania, who shared her husband's distaste for being ignored, let go with an accumulated backlog of venom against Paul:

[He is] weak, selfish, indulgent, lazy—really if it were not for his meagre talent and his great charm he would be just the traditional “lowdown worthless nigger”—is in spite of himself thoroughly ashamed of his failure to function as a worthwhile and fine human being when he was on his own, without needing Essie to “remind him” and prod him along. I feel sorry for him in a way. But I think it's about time Essie “reminded” him that even
HE
can't treat his friends with large doses of indifference and neglect and expect to keep them.
We
understand him. Besides we don't give a dam [sic].
But his other American Buddies perhaps won't take his behavior so lightly. In any case, they will
talk
about it, and
HOW
we will keep silent; as you say, in the Fall it's
all
up to
them
. More and more I admire Essie.… He's utterly consumed with his own importance. Nobody else matters. I say to
HELL
with people like that!
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Paul, having established his own set of priorities, went about meeting them. One was to contact Angelo Herndon, the black Communist who had been arrested in Atlanta in 1932 for leading a biracial demonstration of the unemployed and been sentenced by an overtly racist trial judge to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. In 1935 the Communist Party—after the Supreme Court had refused to hear Herndon's appeal—had led a petition drive in his behalf that attracted “united-front” support from Communists and non-Communists alike, and had led in 1937 to the Court's narrowly overturning Herndon's conviction. Benjamin Davis Jr., the black Harvard graduate and the son of a wealthy Atlanta real-estate operator, had served in the 1932 trial as Herndon's attorney (and would himself later rise into the CPUSA hierarchy). Reading of the trial in the London papers, Robeson resolved “to learn how a man did that in the heart of Georgia.” He and Davis had at least met in the early twenties, but as he wrote him many years later, after the two men had long been close friends, “Your courageous example in the Herndon case was one of the most important influences in my life.” During his trip to New York, Robeson not only saw Ben Davis but also volunteered his services to Herndon in support of the Negro Youth Congress's current drive to place five hundred new black voters on the county list in Birmingham, Alabama. Herndon was unable to take up Robeson's offer to help raise money because, as he wrote him, “the people who would make such an affair a success” could not be contacted on short notice.
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While in New York, Robeson also scouted for suitable new properties. Prior to leaving London, he had turned down the lead in Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill's
Eneas Africanus
, reacting negatively to the patronizing story of an ex-slave's eight-year effort to locate his former plantation—and to the condescension of Anderson's covering letter, which referred to the slave as never having been “obliged or encouraged to make an ethical decision for himself” or having “to worry about” any “responsibilities.” Robeson had been more excited by a possible new play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (authors of
Porgy
and
Mamba's Daughters
) about the black insurrectionary Denmark Vesey; from London, Essie seconded his enthusiasm: “I like the Vesey conception because I feel it IS what you think and feel, and you could therefore go for it in a big way.”
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While in New York Robeson met with Langston Hughes and heard part of his blues opera,
De Organizer
, which Labor Stage planned to put on in the fall. He also checked out the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, affiliated with
the International Workers Order (the CP's fraternal society), whose first production, Langston Hughes's agitprop drama
Don't You Want to Be Free?
, had opened in 1938 and attracted an enthusiastic following in Harlem. Essie thought that play “ineffective” and “definitely amateur,” but she agreed that soundings made to Paul about plans (which never matured) for a Langston Hughes-Duke Ellington musical,
Cock o' the World
, were “very intriguing.” As Paul considered various prospects, Essie supported his determination not to accept a trifling role: “You are now too aware, too definite minded, too militant.… You couldn't do a small person, because you are too big, inside and out. Amusing, mischievous, rascally trifling—yes. But permanent inherent trifling—no.”
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The new project that finally crystallized carried no danger of being trifling. Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, announced in the spring of 1939 that he had persuaded Robeson to return to films. He would play the lead role in a fictionalized story about the life and plight of the Welsh miners, as told through the eyes of David Goliath, an unemployed American black who, through a series of plausible accidents, goes to work in the Welsh mines and becomes centrally involved in the miners' struggle for a better life. The youthful Pen Tennyson, hired as the film's director, told the press that Robeson would not be used as “a negro or a famous singer”; he would play the role of a penniless man who lands a job in the Welsh mines and shares the life of a poor Welsh family—“It is a real life story showing Robeson as a simple, likeable human being, who has to take the rough with the smooth, the same as all of us.” The prescription was ideally suited to Robeson's political vision. It remained to be seen whether good politics could be translated into good art.
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Shooting on
David Goliath
(the title was later changed to
The Proud Valley
) was due to begin in August. To trim off some pounds before going in front of the cameras, Robeson entered a “nature-cure” rest home as soon as he returned to London in July. His weight, as he reached age forty, had been gradually increasing until, in Essie's view, “all semblance of that grand figure has long since disappeared under bulk.” She had been pestering him to go on a diet, but he ignored her until friends in New York who hadn't seen him in years joked about how he had lost his figure and become “an Ox.” He stayed in the rest home—a mansion with 150 acres of grounds—for a full four weeks, subjecting himself to a repetitive round of electrical baths, massages, fasts, and colonic irrigations, and emerged “feeling like a million.”
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