Paul Robeson (54 page)

In July, Robeson joined Robert Shaw's Collegiate Chorale, with Alexander
Smallens conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra, for a concert that filled Lewisohn Stadium's twenty thousand seats. From that triumph it was out to Chicago to sing and speak at a Production for Victory rally at the Apex Smelting Co. plant, then back to Los Angeles in early August to participate in a rally to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and to San Francisco to address a CIO-sponsored conference on racial and national minorities. At the Apex plant he confessed himself “a little discouraged” with aspects of the domestic scene after traveling through the West and seeing the extent of opposition to “giving everybody a fair chance”; and in San Francisco he told the crowd that “the temper” of black people in the United States had changed during the war and that if there was to be a solution to the race problem, “Labor will have to rally and understand these problems”: white allies within the CIO would have to help push for more integrated opportunities in the job market.
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By August 1943 Robeson had cleared his calendar to begin rehearsing for the scheduled Broadway opening of
Othello
on October 19. But just prior to the start of rehearsals the show's producers, the Theatre Guild, decided to replace Ferrer and Hagen. The Guild objected mainly to Ferrer: his draft status was uncertain, he had received the weakest reviews of the three principals during the tryouts, and, most important, he was insisting on star billing and on substantial salaries for himself and Hagen—while also making it clear that neither would work without the other. Robeson and Margaret Webster took their side. Robeson argued that he worked well with the couple and that their talent warranted their demands; Webster argued that Ferrer simply needed more rehearsal time. When no agreement could be reached, the Guild decided to hire Stefan Schnabel for Iago, and Virginia Gilmore for Desdemona. Margaret Webster had her doubts about Gilmore but was pleased with Schnabel, and wrote her mother, May Whitty, that “Paul—who, as usual, was not to be found for several days while everything hung in mid-air—is delighted with him” as well.
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Hardly. Paul confided his unhappiness over the cast changes to Freda Diamond. There simply wasn't the same magic, he complained, that he had previously felt when performing with Uta and Joe, and he wished there was some way Bob Rockmore could manage to overcome the contractual stumbling blocks to their continuing. Freda told him to do it himself—
he
was a lawyer, he didn't need Rockmore's intercession. Why didn't he just get on a train to Ossining (where the Ferrers had a house) and work things out directly with Uta and Joe? Freda says that Paul took her advice, went up to Ossining that same evening, and settled it.
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After smoothing over terms with Uta and Joe, Robeson laid down the law to the Theatre Guild. Flexing the combined muscle provided by his star status and his contractual rights, he declared his refusal to continue unless the Ferrers were rehired. His adamance infuriated Margaret Webster.
“Against his inarticulate but immoveable resolve, pleas, arguments, threats, reason broke in vain,” she reported to her mother. “No Ferrers no Robeson, no Robeson no show. And I, as usual, left to straighten it out.” She did, negotiating to buy out Schnabel's contract (Robeson agreed to pay half of the four thousand dollars), soothing the cast's alarm over the escalating rumors, persuading the Ferrers to forgo equal billing with Robeson in exchange for being “prominently featured in all display advertising,” and having their salary demands met fully. All the while, she wrote her mother, she behaved “as if I loved them and didn't want to pitch them off the balcony into 52nd St.”—in order to “get a show out of that big, black jelly-fish and those two conceited little asses and make us all happy and bursting with harmony and enthusiasm!” Robeson later succeeded in getting the Ferrers costar billing as well—in smaller type than his own name, but featured above the title. That, in turn, engendered renewed rage in Webster; she felt, with some justification, that costar status did not accurately reflect the comparative drawing power of the Ferrers as measured against Robeson's and was, in the bargain, an insult to her own worth as an actress (she had again cast herself as Emilia). To which Robeson responded—at least so Webster reported—that she “had ‘got' plenty out of it as the producer-director and in effect took the attitude that if [she] didn't want to be billed below Uta but would prefer to leave the cast that was all right too!!” Webster's indignation may have been fed by having previously miscalculated Robeson's temperament. She now recognized, belatedly, that “This sweet, unassuming, dear, big bear of a man could crush us all.” It would seem, she wrote her mother in icy fury, “I have not been playing Svengali to his Trilby, but Frankenstein to his monster.” Expressions of high dudgeon in the theater, particularly during the tension of a rehearsal period, rarely survive as final verdicts. Passions rise and fall, and antagonism quickly transmutes into felicitation when a project culminates in success. To that end all hands now bent their efforts.
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At Robeson's insistence, a six-week rehearsal period was scheduled—in contrast to the two weeks allotted the cast before the Brattle tryout the preceding year. The praise of the Boston critics in 1942 had seemed to him excessive, even unwarranted. He, more than anyone, acknowledged—indeed, tended to exaggerate—the inadequacies of his tryout performance. He had not yet gotten to the bottom of his role, and he knew it. “It's not right,” he told Uta Hagen; “I don't have it.” Forty years later, Hagen admiringly recalls his attitude. “He had judgment about himself that was astonishing,” she said. “He didn't fall for praise—other people's accolades never went to his head.” Along with an “enormous capacity for self-evaluation” went unusual modesty about the work. He was determined to get it right, was determined to acquire the needed additional technique to rid his performance of the traces of self-consciousness, tonal monotony, and deliberateness some of the critics had pointed to. He was angry that he had
been denied the needed coaching in the past, that he had had directors regard him as a great “natural” talent—the soulful primitive—who should not be tampered with for fear of destroying his instincts, diluting his force.
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Surveying his past experience as an actor, he told one interviewer that at the Provincetown Playhouse during the 1920s, “no one told me anything. They didn't want any ‘actor's tricks.' So I was the former college athlete, playing on muscle.” Growing up in the oratorical tradition of the black church, he had, naturally enough, turned to declamation when in doubt. Throughout the 1930s, “directors assumed that I knew what I was doing, when the fact was that I had no technique at all. They no more questioned my ‘technique' than they would that of a Hindu dancer.” It was an attitude characteristic of the time: the art of the Negro was pure, instinctive, unique, and would be spoiled if any effort was made to guide or train it.
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Robeson had not been immune to that attitude himself. Throughout the early 1930s he had spoken fervently of the need for Africans to keep their cultural heritage unsullied, to stand apart from the contaminating influences of the West, to eschew imitation. But that was not quite the whole story, either. Robeson sometimes
deliberately
cultivated the image of a “natural actor who had been deprived of technical training.” He did so, typically, to cover all bases; he let others think he was stumbling through his roles on instinct as a hedge against being judged by standards he himself, with almost knee-jerk modesty, felt unable to meet; should he be found wanting when measured against those standards, he could fall back on his “noble-savage” disguise. In regard to his singing, too, he sometimes adapted this same double-edged defensive posture, on the one hand studying lieder diligently, on the other allowing the view to take hold that “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho” marked the outer limit of his range. In truth, Robeson had considerable training over the course of his life both as actor and singer—more at least than he was always ready to acknowledge—and, had he determined to, he could have had still more.
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With the Broadway opening looming, he did turn for help to Margaret Webster. And she did try to provide it. But Webster was accustomed to giving actors line readings; she conceived of the craft of acting as the process of shaping outer form. Her strong points, as a fellow director has said, “were picturing, pacing and energizing a show”—entertainment values, with theatricality stressed over poetry, the well-composed stage composition stressed over the well understood. Typically she would tell an actor where to stand and how to speak—hows, not whys—trusting that her own understanding was a sufficient guide for the others. She was willing to discuss the meaning of a line in a one-on-one huddle—but would then announce her conclusion: “What the old boy meant by that was …” When the meaning seemed transparent to her and an actor's hesitations incomprehensible,
she would simply command impatiently, “Well, just look at what Shakespeare
says
.” Webster's skill and intelligence were of a high order, and consequently her line readings were rich. But the external process she encouraged was antithetical to Robeson's need to move away from outer effect and vocalization.
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Early in rehearsals Webster concluded that Robeson “lacks the quality of real rage.” Of his anger over racism, she said, “he could not bring it onto the stage with him; he could not recapture it.…” In her view, he “was at his best in the gentle passages” and wooed Desdemona “with tenderness and loving humor.” But he “never matched at all” the frenzy and passion the role called for in the later scenes, substituting instead the speech of the pulpit, “sonorous and preachy,” with admixtures of “the slight artificiality of an opera singer.” Robeson acknowledged that he had trouble unearthing his rage on demand—he had been brought up, as a survival tactic, to keep it carefully interred.
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Webster, in turn, acknowledged that, if Robeson lacked the “emotional and nervous concentration which Othello required,” the fault may have been her own. “Had I been more of a ‘Method' director,” she was later to write, “perhaps I should have been better … about releasing the pent-up emotions in Paul”—thus granting that the essential problem was not Robeson's lack of emotional resources but his inadequate technique for uncovering and utilizing them. Webster, by her own admission, turned to “tricks to help him—speed above everything; if he slowed down, he was lost.” She gave him accelerated line readings, and she tried to “mask his heaviness of movement by having him stay still, while the other actors moved around him.” “My job,” she wrote, “is to jockey him into some approximation of Othello, and then make a kind of frame round him which will hold the play together. It's very difficult—like pushing a truck up-hill—yet sometimes when he catches fire (from me) he goes careening off at eighty miles an hour and leaves all the rest of us standing. But he's so undependable.” His performances showed “immense variation”: “Sometimes they are filled with his own personal quality; sometimes they are an empty house with nobody home.”
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In short, Webster superimposed surface effects, and what Robeson most needed and wanted was inner exploration. Her formalistic gifts and perceptions came out like prose essays, the content impressive and difficult for an actor to dispute—but equally difficult to translate into performance skills. Webster didn't purposefully withhold her help—she gave it in the only way she knew how. It was not, for Robeson, a fruitful way. “I don't think she ever helped Paul with
anything
,” is Uta Hagen's opinion. “Margaret Webster was a brilliant woman,” but she “belonged in a university.”
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Hagen herself was not able at the time to offer him anything more. She was still in her early twenties and in retrospect feels that she began to learn about acting for the first time only after she met Harold Clurman in 1948.
At the time of the
Othello
production, “I thought I knew more and was better than Paul—and he encouraged me to think so—but I wasn't.” Robeson did turn to her for coaching, but she says, “I wasn't equipped to teach anybody” then and wouldn't have known whom to recommend for training. Prior to the late forties, “training” usually meant the American Academy of Dramatic Arts or the Royal Academy—“terrible then and terrible now,” in Hagen's judgment. Otherwise there were only limited options available to actors: pre-eminently, Sanford Meisner, Erwin Piscator, and Herbert Berghof at the Neighborhood Playhouse (in 1947 the Actors Studio was founded). For
established
actors to seek further training was not then a common phenomenon; once a performer had been “recognized,” the product tended to be considered finished—signed, sealed, and approved.
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By all accounts, Robeson got along beautifully with his fellow actors; the cast became “like a family,” and rehearsals were marked by warmth and mutual respect. Robeson knew everybody's name, even the spear-carriers with no lines or only the obligatory “What ho!” John Gerstadt, a youthful cast member who served as general factotum—making lightning changes for his roles as messenger, servant, and Cypriot—marveled at Robeson's ability to make him—and everyone—feel “special,” to convey focused concern for him.
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Gerstadt never felt that Robeson's attentiveness was calculated or compulsive—the star doing a
noblesse oblige
turn to elicit kudos for egalitarian virtue or to create a patina of backstage solidarity. Robeson's friendliness was not overemphatic or in any way suspect. He made no special point of asking cast members to call him “Paul”; his easy accessibility made that, in time, seem natural—though this was still a period in the American theater when stars were addressed as
Mr
. Paul Muni,
Mrs
. Priestly Morrison, or
Miss
Katharine Cornell. Nor did Robeson seal himself off in the star's traditional isolation, to be fussed over by dressers, fawned over by fans. (Gerstadt remembers that Robeson showed up one day to play on the cast softball team in Central Park—producing a storm of mock protest from the opposing team: “This is for cast members only!
That man's
obviously a ringer! You're not Paul Robeson!” “If I'm not Paul Robeson,” he called back, “I learned all those lines for nothing.” The
Othello
team won the game 24–3.) Robeson kept his dressing room at the theater open, except when he was onstage or making a change. The cast was otherwise welcome to hang out there, a gesture the nonfeatured players particularly appreciated, since the play was housed in the Shubert Theater, a musical house whose communal dressing rooms were quite a distance from the stage—a distance that could barely be covered before the next entrance cue.
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