Paul Robeson (53 page)

Tales of Manhattan
did not seriously compromise Robeson's image in the black community: even if he had not patiently explained his reasons for accepting the role and freely confessed to his error, blacks knew that the odds against a black man's making his way necessarily made him something less than a free agent. In the face of those odds, many blacks in the comparatively optimistic, patriotic climate of the early forties were heartened by any evidence that one of their own could still come through,
yielding to the momentary comfort of tokenism even as they (and Robeson) decried its inadequacy. To the minimal extent that Robeson's image had been tarnished by his appearance in
Tales
, this would be forgotten and then some in the wake of the new project he embarked on in the summer of 1942—an American production of
Othello
, a triumph that would mark the apogee of his career.
⁶⁵

CHAPTER 13

The Broadway
Othello

(1942–1943)

Margaret Webster, the Shakespearean director, had seen Robeson's youthful 1930 performance of
Othello
in London. “Frankly,” she told an interviewer fifteen years later, “I hadn't thought he was very good. But he said to me that he himself didn't think he was very good and that now he had studied and restudied the role and he thought he was ready to play it.” Early in 1942 Webster and Robeson decided to work together, but every New York management Webster approached was afraid of a production in which a black man made love to and murdered a white woman. “Everyone was scared,” Webster later wrote; “a few fell back on the scholastic argument … that Othello was a Moor, not a Negro, or expressed doubts about Robeson's technical equipment as an actor. But mostly they were just plain scared of the issues which the production would raise.”
¹

Rather than give up the idea entirely, they turned to the summer-theater route, themselves offering to assemble the cast and pay all freight costs in exchange for a tryout. Most of the summer leasers turned out to be as cautious as the Broadway managements, but two finally came forward who were not: John Huntington of the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, and the team of Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner of the McCarter Theater in Princeton (the town where Robeson had been born). The contracts called for an opening at the Brattle and then a brief run at the McCarter. Only a two-week rehearsal period was allotted, one week in New York for the principals, the second in Cambridge, where the principals would be joined by pickup members of the Brattle Theater's own company in the secondary roles.
²

Webster, who had had a considerable career as an actress, decided to
play Emilia herself; ordinarily she avoided taking on the dual function of actress and director—though it was more widely done at that time than today—but she did so now to simplify the tight rehearsal schedule. Two crucial roles remained to be cast: Desdemona and Iago. At the urging of her close friend Eva Le Gallienne, Webster offered the parts to the husband-and-wife acting pair, Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. Both had had recent successes, Ferrer in
Charley's Aunt
and Hagen as Nina in the Lunt's 1938 star-studded production of
The Sea Gull
(in which Webster herself had played Masha). Though they were already hailed as rising stars, Ferrer had never played Shakespeare and Hagen was still in her early twenties and comparatively inexperienced. Webster's judgment, seconded by Robeson, was to go with them.
³

The company worked ten hours a day, ardor matched by anxiety. “Robeson is going to be
very
bad,” Hagen wrote her father, “but he's an angel.” Webster agreed with Hagen's estimate of Robeson's acting but not of his beatitude, deciding early on that he was “difficult to direct,” a “special problem.” His ability to “seize on an idea like lightning,” she believed, was due to his energy and intelligence, not to his acting craft. “Not only has he no technique,” she wrote, “which
he
knows, but no conception of ‘impersonation'. He can only do it if he can get a kind of electric motor going inside himself and this has to be started by some feeling—not Othello's feeling, but Robeson's. Fortunately his tremendous vocal resources protect him.…” (Robeson himself acknowledged that a device he used to excite his nightly rage onstage was to imagine his trusted friend Ben Davis betraying him.)
⁴

Tickets for the week-long run at the Brattle sold out within hours of the first announcement, and debate over the production's prospects took no longer to heat up. Scholars quickly checked in with opinions about whether the casting of a black man in the role of Othello was a betrayal or a realization of Shakespeare's intentions. Broadway veterans argued over the commercial chances of the venture, whether American audiences would ever turn out in sufficient numbers for a Shakespearean play, let alone one with a racially mixed cast. Theater buffs debated the extent of Robeson's talent: Had his career up to now been the triumph of personal magnetism over aptitude? Did he, at age forty-four, have the experience and skill necessary to carry off such an assignment? Given the handicaps of an insufficient rehearsal period, a director who did not trust her star's talent, and, for good measure, an August heat wave in Cambridge so intense that Robeson had to wring out his robes between scenes, the prescription seemed set for opening-night disaster.
⁵

But in the theater, intensity—the charged edge of nervous uncertainty—is more often rewarded than composed confidence. In one of those peculiar “miracles” in which theatrical lore abounds, every element on opening night fell into near-perfect place. When the curtain fell, the audience
erupted in ovation. The contingent of Harvard undergraduates ritually pounded its heels and clapped its hands by way of offering Alma Mater's ultimate accolade. Wave after wave of “Bravo!” accompanied the curtain calls, the clamor so thunderous a reporter marveled that “the staid old walls didn't burst from the noise and enthusiasm.” Pacification was finally achieved only after the entire company joined the audience in singing the national anthem. Flora Robson, who had costarred with Robeson in 1933 in the London production of
All God's Chillun
, was in the Cambridge audience that night and reported to Margaret Webster's parents (the illustrious actors Ben Webster and his wife, Dame May Whitty), that the evening had been “a tremendous triumph for Peggy and Paul.… It went without a single hitch.…”
⁶

Next day the Boston critics weighed in with a favorable verdict equal in fervor to the audience's. “A great artistic achievement,” wrote one; an “abundantly deserved” ovation, declared another.
The New York Times
and
Variety
also covered the event and competed with the local critics for superlatives. The
Times
magisterially reassured those who had been concerned in advance of the opening as to whether “a Negro actor is acceptable, both academically and practically,” that Robeson's “heroic and convincing” performance had indeed captured all the facets of Othello's layered personality.
Variety
went further: “no white man,” its critic wrote, “should ever dare presume” to play the role again.
⁷

The critics were not, of course, above caviling. Louis Kronenberger, writing in
PM
, found Robeson's performance “uneven”; another chided Ferrer for insufficiently conveying Iago's “charm”; a third raised questions about the “comparatively small and limited color” of Uta Hagen's voice. Some doubts were expressed, too, about the effectiveness of the production, with one critic complaining that Margaret Webster's telescoping of the play into two acts and four scenes had made Iago's already “implausible machinations” still more incomprehensible. But such incidental complaints were lost in the general huzzahs. Kronenberger, despite his doubts, expressed the hope that, “after further polishing,” the production would “come to Broadway this winter.” Should it do so, the
Variety
critic predicted, it “would hurl Broadway on its practically invulnerable ear.”
⁸

But the production would not make it to New York for another fourteen months. This time it was not for want of managers—as soon as the reviews appeared, producers swamped Margaret Webster with offers (ultimately she gave the nod to the Theatre Guild). Robeson himself, however, was not available for a quick transfer to Broadway. He was able to follow the Brattle performances with a two-week run at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, but after that he had to meet a variety of prior commitments. The company temporarily disbanded, to reconvene a year later for a scheduled Broadway opening in October 1943.
⁹

Ten days after
Othello
closed at McCarter, and with scant rest, Robeson
resumed his hectic schedule of concerts and political appearances. On September 2 he spoke at a mass rally in Manhattan, sponsored by the Council on African Affairs, in support of the Free India movement, a cause dear to him since the 1930s, when, in London, he had come to know several future leaders of subject nations—including Nehru. “Many of these boys and I found we had much in common,” Robeson wryly told the September rally. What they “had in common,” he went on to explain, was the conviction that the era of colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America had to be brought to a close. The current war against the Axis powers, Robeson told the crowd, “is not a war for the liberation of Europeans and European nations,” but “a war for the liberation of all peoples, all races, all colors oppressed anywhere in the world.” The righteous Allied cause should not be contaminated, Robeson argued, by repressive policies historically linked to the constituent Allied nations. He credited President Roosevelt with seeing “very clearly” that the war was one for universal liberation—unlike Winston Churchill, Robeson said—but did not absolve the President or the country of blame for archaic policies and distorted attitudes; colonialism and racism, he insisted, compromised the moral integrity of the struggle against fascism and potentially diluted the commitment to it of oppressed people everywhere. Yet Robeson insisted, too, that blacks had a
greater
stake in the war than did whites, for an Axis victory “would mean a thousandfold intensification” of their present submerged status, given the “vicious doctrine of race hatred” associated with Italian, German, and Japanese fascism. The FBI agents at the Free India rally summed this up simply by reporting to headquarters that “the Communists” had met.
¹⁰

Robeson continued to sound his interconnected themes in rallies that same month of September 1942 in California. Speaking and singing before thousands of CIO aircraft workers at the North American Aviation plant and at mass meetings in Los Angeles and San Francisco, he emphasized over and over the connection between “the problems of the Negro today and the problems of oppressed people all over the world, in the Balkans, among the Welsh miners, in the London slums”—and stressed that the common solution to those problems “lies in the overthrow of Fascism.” Apparently the vision was too abstract for one reporter, who asked him to be more precise about the present attitude of blacks toward the war effort. “Some feel the war is theirs and some feel it isn't,” Robeson answered; “I feel it is ours.” Though he didn't minimize the persistence of Jim Crow, he felt heartened at “the progress, great progress,” being made against it. A month later, speaking before the nonsegregated audience he had insisted on in the Booker T. Washington School auditorium in New Orleans, he gave a somewhat different emphasis: “I had never put a correct evaluation on the dignity and courage of my people of the deep South until I began to come South myself.… I had imagined Negroes of the South
beaten, subservient, cowed. But I see them now as courageous, and possessors of a profound and instinctive dignity, a race that has come through its trials unbroken, a race of such magnificence of spirit that there exists no power on earth that could crush them.” Like many progressives during the war years, Robeson was sounding a fuller note of optimism than he would ever again feel. Yet, all his life, even in the discouraging years that followed the war, he would always emphasize his conviction that blacks had come through the duress of their historical experience with redoubled dignity and spiritual vigor. Unlike many black leaders of the subsequent generation, such as Malcolm X, Robeson continued to stress the success rather than the pathology of black life—a reading as much from his own sanguine temperament as from history.
¹¹

In October 1942, accompanied by Larry Brown and Clara Rockmore, Robeson set out on the longest concert tour of his career to date—some seventy performances, one every two to three days, concentrated in the Far Western states but stretching from New Hampshire to Montreal to Pocatello, Idaho. It ended up on April 5, 1943, in Mansfield, Ohio; thirteen hundred people jammed into an auditorium to hear what the local paper called “a sort of United Nations tribute”—a program of songs and folk tunes from Russia, France, England, and China, culminating in “Ballad for Americans” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—and earning Robeson thirteen encores. He returned to New York after the six-month tour, nagged by a persistent cold, overweight by twenty-five pounds (his normal weight of 230 had ballooned to 255), and underexercised (like many athletes, Robeson disliked mild forms of exercise and at the most might throw around a basketball). He promised himself a period of recuperation—a promise he did not keep—before the onset of rehearsals of
Othello
.
¹²

Instead, May saw him addressing a giant Labor for Victory rally at Yankee Stadium, along with Mayor La Guardia and Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union. In June he traveled to Morehouse College in Atlanta to receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, to deliver the seventy-sixth commencement address, and to hear Morehouse President Benjamin E. Mays laud him as “truly the people's artist,” a man who had experienced and expressed “a common bond between the suffering and oppressed folks of the world” and become champion of their cause, who “perhaps more than any other person” had “made Negro music accepted as first rate art by the world at large,” and whose performance as Othello had “rendered the Negro race and the world a great service” by demonstrating “that Negroes are capable of enduring interpretations in the realm of the theatre as over against the typical cheap performances that Hollywood and Broadway too often insist on Negroes doing.” These words were special balm to a man who had come to resent and regret bitterly some of his own performing history.
¹³