Paul Robeson (56 page)

Contrary to myth, the New York critics were nearly as divided in their verdict as their Boston counterparts had been—though in New York the split was not among the daily reviewers, but between the dailies and the weeklies, with the former nearly all favorable, the latter variously mixed (the disparity perhaps best explained by the fact that the daily reviewers had seen what all agree was the magical first-night performance). The outright panegyrics came from the lesser daily critics—Robert Coleman in the
Daily Mirror
(“the most absorbing” production of
Othello
“ever to command the attention of your drama reporter”), Robert Garland of the
Journal-American
(“in all my nights of attendance on the world of make-believe, there has been nothing to equal it”), and Burton Rascoe of the
World-Telegram
(“one of the most memorable events in the history of the theater.… It is unbelievably magnificent”).
⁴²

The five other dailies (whose reputation for critical astuteness was collectively somewhat higher than the other three) were only a shade more subdued. Praise for Margaret Webster's production was all but unqualified; she was uniformly hailed for simultaneously satisfying the needs of Shakespeare and the needs of the modern stage—and for doing so with blazing, melodramatic theatricality. All five critics were nearly as positive
in estimating the three principals, shading their preferences a bit for one over another and in entering this or that minor reservation about the work of the two also-rans. By a hair, praise for Robeson lagged behind that for Ferrer and Hagen. All five critics agreed that his performance was “memorable” and “towering,” but three of the five felt his “deep organ tones became a trifle monotonous,” the “anguish” coming out as strained declaration, or as “song.” The two major trade papers,
Variety
and
Billboard
, had comparable reactions, both lauding Robeson (“a great ‘Othello'”; “a tremendous performance”), both expressing reservations about his occasional tendency “to concentrate more on vocal tones than on acting,” to “expostulate rather ponderously in a monotone.”
⁴³

The weeklies, priding themselves on printing more considered judgments than were possible in the deadline-ridden daily press, weighed in with less glowing accounts. They included five of the most respected critics of the day: Stark Young (
The New Republic
), Louis Kronenberger (
PM
), Wolcott Gibbs (
The New Yorker
), Margaret Marshall (
The Nation
), and the Shakespeare specialist Robert Speaight. Of the five, Kronenberger was the most enthusiastic about Robeson's performance. He credited him with a “magnificent presence,” in bearing, in voice, in manner fully conveying Othello's heroic dimensions; yet he regretted Robeson's “tendency to confuse solemnity with grandeur” and felt that ultimately his success hinged on being “a great personality” rather than a great actor. The other weekly critics were somewhat less impressed. Gibbs lamented that Robeson sometimes employed his “majestic voice” for “meaningless organ effects” (though he doubted if “this matters very much. His reading is admirably clear … and he is ideal pictorially”). Stark Young found him “moving and intense” but lacking in an undefined quality he called “tragic style.” Speaight complained that Robeson's voice had not been trained for the Bard's verse, Marshall that his “monumental and inert” body was not the supple instrument of a trained actor.
⁴⁴

Robeson's own costar concurs. In Hagen's retrospective estimate, Robeson's “
humanity
onstage is what made him a tremendous success as Othello; everyone melted at his
personality
, even though it came through a rather vocal, verbal, conventional, ordinary shape of a performance—the human presence was so big that they went for it anyway.” Adding his estimate, the acting coach Sanford Meisner recalls Robeson as “impressive physically” onstage, his voice “beautiful and rich.” But, in Meisner's view, Robeson “couldn't act the demands of the part, only recite them—very eloquently, like a good reciter, but not emotionally alive.” Impressive as a man in life, as an actor Robeson conveyed to Meisner merely “impressive emptiness.”
⁴⁵

But many whites and almost all blacks would have regarded such measurements as possibly inaccurate and certainly insignificant when placed against the overriding importance of Robeson's
Othello
as a racial
event of the first magnitude. Many years later James Earl Jones, about to attempt the role himself, paid tribute to the importance of Robeson's performance (which Jones had seen): “… it was essentially a message he gave out: ‘Don't play me cheap. Don't
anybody
play me cheap.' And he reached way beyond arrogance … way beyond that. Just by his presence, he commanded that nobody play him cheap. And that was astounding to see in 1943.”
⁴⁶

Most of the black press hailed the production as a milestone in race relations, but almost none of the white press did—although one or two referred to Robeson's blackness as an asset in heightening the play's plausibility, and one or two others latched on to the production's success as a happy gauge of the country's progress toward racial equality. It was left to Robeson's old costar Fredi Washington (who for lack of decent roles was currently serving as theatrical editor for the Harlem paper
The People's Voice
) to sound a somewhat different note. She interviewed Robeson backstage before the opening and lauded him in her review for having taken “onto the stage his ideals, beliefs and hopes,” for having created “a great social document.” But she stopped short of hailing the event as a tribute to American democracy. It was only
possible
to hope, she wrote, that “the dynasties of the far-reaching picture world will become adult enough to shoulder their full democratic responsibilities” and to make a
film
of
Othello
“for all the small-minded unjust elements of our country … to see, digest and become enriched thereby.” That hope would not be realized. Robeson had been in demand for a decade to portray black stereotypes in film, but he would never be given the chance to portray Othello.
⁴⁷

CHAPTER 14

The Apex of Fame

(1944–1945)

J. Edgar Hoover was among the few Americans unimpressed with Robeson's triumph in
Othello
. The director had already received numerous reports from FBI agents in the field that Robeson had: lent his name to a dinner at the Hotel Commodore in New York “celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Red Army”; included in a concert several songs originally “sung by Loyalist soldiers during the Spanish Civil War”; made “a speech pertaining to the common man”; been seen in the company of “a wealthy woman [Louise Bransten] extremely active in Communist Party Front organizations”; “pointed out the similarity of the Russian serfs prior to the 1860s and the Negro of the United States”; recorded “the new Soviet National Anthem.” By 1943 J. Edgar Hoover was quite prepared to believe the opinion of his agents that Robeson “is a confidant of high officials of the Party” and “is undoubtedly 100% Communist.”
¹

Hoover aside, letters of congratulation poured into Robeson's dressing room, awards multiplied, requests for personal appearances avalanched. “I take pride in your reflected glory,” wrote William L. Dawson, the black Congressman from Illinois, as the box-office line for
Othello
stretched in double file out to Broadway and the advance sale within two weeks of opening night climbed to an astronomical (for Shakespeare) hundred thousand dollars. Old friends joined in the chorus of praise. Walter White wrote Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, “It is one of the most inspiring and perfectly balanced performances I have ever seen,” and added that “the playing of a Moor by a Negro actor” “has given [blacks] … hope that race prejudice is not as insurmountable an obstacle as it sometimes appears to be.” Even Van Vechten, recently estranged,
wrote Essie to say, “Paul's success is terrific. I think it will turn into a record for a Shakespeare run, judging by the advance sale.” Noel Coward, who had been out of touch for some time, sent a telegram inviting the Robesons to a cocktail party. W. E. B. Du Bois requested a photograph of Robeson in costume for publication in the journal
Phylon
.
²

Among the major honors that came Robeson's way in the immediate aftermath of
Othello
, and from a host of different constituencies, were the Abraham Lincoln Medal for notable services in human relations, election (along with Sumner Welles and Max Lerner) to the editorial board of
The American Scholar
, a testimonial dinner tendered by the national black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, the First Annual Award of Kneseth Israel, the Donaldson Award for “outstanding achievement in the theater,” a citation from the National Negro Museum “for courage and devotion to the ideal upon which American democracy was founded,” the Page One Award from the New York Newspaper Guild (for his “distinguished performance in
Othello
”), and election (along with twenty-one others) to the Chicago
Defender
's Honor Roll of 1943 for having “contributed most to mutual goodwill and understanding” in the battle against racial prejudice. He was also the subject of an article in
The American Magazine
entitled “America's No. 1 Negro” and the recipient (only the tenth in twenty years) of the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for the best diction in the American theater. Willa Cather, Samuel S. McClure, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Theodore Dreiser were honored at that same AAAS ceremony—“a really dreary demonstration,” Dreiser wrote H. L. Mencken afterward; “the best bit of the whole show was Paul Robeson—an outstanding personality who in my judgement dwarfed all the others.”
³

His acceptance of honorary membership in a number of CIO-affiliated unions produced some fallout. The
Tribune
reported Robeson saying during an interview that the CIO “is by far the most progressive section of the labor movement. It goes on record as giving Negroes equal opportunity for jobs and upgrading.… On the other hand … there is great discrimination in A.F. of L. unions.” It was not an attitude AFL President William Green appreciated. He remarked at the AFL convention that Robeson and others were hindering the Federation's efforts to organize black workers by throwing their weight behind “a rival labor body.” When Robeson continued to accept memberships in CIO unions and to encourage black workers to enlist in its ranks, the AFL accelerated its attack on him. The Central Trades and Labor Council, the ruling body of the AFL, demanded he either resign his honorary membership in two CIO unions (the Longshoremen and the Municipal Workers) or face expulsion from Actors' Equity Association, an AFL affiliate. When Robeson refused, Equity declined to press charges.
⁴

Along with honors came appeals—would Robeson sit for a portrait, read a script, listen to a song, contribute an essay, issue a statement, sign
a petition, meet a delegation, join a rally, support a strike, protest an outrage, declare, decry, affirm, affiliate—polite requests and peremptory demands combining to create an unmanageable deluge. Robeson's inclination was too often to say yes, and even with Yergan and Rockmore running interference, he sometimes took on more than his energy could accommodate, leading to temporary exhaustion and retreat. After a whirlwind of political appearances in behalf of Roosevelt's re-election in 1944, he told Yergan, “… I must have been somewhere every five minutes.… [It] just murdered me.… Of course it was worth it, you know, for the elections.…”
⁵

As it was, he managed—while playing seven performances of
Othello
a week—to put in a nearly nonstop string of appearances, lending his voice time and again against fascism, racism, and colonialism, and constantly reiterating the same themes: the first requirement for realizing a democratic America was to win the war against fascism; the best hope for blacks lay in an alliance with progressive (CIO) forces in the labor movement; the continued denial of full rights to black Americans was “the argument of fascism”—the exaltation of a “Master Race”; the fact that blacks continued to be “hurt and resentful” was “for good and sufficient reasons”; the remedy was for blacks everywhere to continue to demand the abolition of the poll tax, the end of segregation, the right of equal access to upgraded jobs; the Soviet Union had already provided a concrete example to the world of how racial prejudice could be eradicated within a single generation; the right of African peoples to self-government had to be high on the agenda of the postwar world, necessitating a worldwide coalition of progressive-minded people to combat the “new imperialists” who were using the argument of caution in dismantling the colonial systems as a blind for maintaining the
status quo
. Given the continuing bigotry, the seemingly endless blasting of hopes, Robeson marveled over and over again at the patience and patriotism of his own people: “They may not be allowed to vote in some places—but they buy bonds. They cannot get jobs in a lot of places—but they salvage paper and metal and fats. They are confronted, in far too many places, with the raucous, Hitleresque howl of ‘white supremacy'—but they are giving their blood and sweat for red, white and blue supremacy.”
⁶

Of Robeson's public efforts, his participation in the campaign to desegregate major-league baseball brought him special satisfaction. The pressure created by the long-standing arguments of the Negro Publishers Association and other groups for the desegregation of baseball was heightened in 1943 when Peter V. Cacchione, Brooklyn's Communist councilman, introduced a desegregation resolution. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the high commissioner of baseball, agreed to let eight black newspapermen and Robeson attend the annual meeting of the club owners in December 1943 and plead their case. Rumors spread that Landis was preparing
to recommend that the owners immediately sign black players, but Landis had avoided the issue before, allowing the negative arguments of Larry McPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to carry the day.