Paul Robeson (119 page)

17.
ER Diary, Aug. 28 (Minnie Sumner), Sept. 12 (Agnes Boulton), 26, 27 (Fischer), Nov. 4, 16, 1924, April 27, May 8, 10, 22, July 3, 21, Aug. 11, Sept. 11—all 1925, RA. They also saw something of May Chinn; when
The Emperor Jones
opened yet once more, this time for a brief run at a Broadway house, they took Chinn to the packed last showing in the old theater (ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1924, RA).

18.
ER Diary, May 15, 20, June 14, 22, 28, July 10 (O'Neill), 29, Aug. 23, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 1924, and May 12, 30, 1925, RA. Isaac Don Levine records another “memorable night in 1925” when he, O'Neill, and Robeson went on a tour of Harlem. Levine had recently returned from the Soviet Union, and he claims O'Neill and Robeson “plied” him with questions about “the dramatic struggle for power then taking place in the Kremlin” (Isaac Don Levine,
Eyewitness to History
[Hawthorn Books, 1973], pp. 84–89). Gig McGhee had played Smithers opposite Robeson in the Peterborough, N.H., showing of
Jones
. On May 4, 1925, Essie and Paul had a party at their place for about thirty of the Provincetowners; the Walter Whites, the James Weldon Johnsons, Zora Neale Hurston, and a Mrs. Carson were, she noted, “the only colored guests.”

19.
ER Diary, Sept. 12, 28 (McGhees' apartment), Nov. 4 (
Glencairn
), 11 (
Desire
), 1924, Feb. 6 (
Patience
), March 21 (Throckmorton), May 19, June 3 (
Elms
), 18, July 13, 25, 1925, RA.

20.
ER Diary, Feb. 12, 1924, RA; article on Bercovicis in New York
Evening Journal
, April 8, 1925; interview with the Bercovicis' two daughters, Rada and Mirel, July 7, 1985. In his book,
It's the Gypsy in Me
, Konrad Bercovici says that he and his wife Naomi were introduced to PR for the first time backstage after a performance of
Emperor Jones
, by director Jimmy Light. For background information on the family, I'm grateful to Rada and Mirel Bercovici for a variety of materials they shared with me. They credit their father with having originally suggested the use of a nonstop tom-tom beat in
The Emperor Jones
. In
It's the Gypsy in Me
(p. 194), Konrad Bercovici recalls that when the Robesons first came to dinner “the colored maid shed her apron, declared that she wouldn't ‘serve no “Niggers,”'” and left. When Paul came to see them again, “the colored elevator man refused to take him up.” Following those insults, “the agent of the house informed us that the other tenants threatened to cancel their leases unless I ceased having colored men go up in the same elevator with them.” At that point the Bercovicis bought the townhouse at 81st Street and Riverside Drive.

21.
Interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985; ER Diary, Sept. 27, Dec. 28, 1924, Jan. 17, Feb. 1 (Zuloaga; Gorky), Feb. 5, 26, March 1, 6, April 12, 20, May 8, June 2, 9, 16, 20, 21, 1925, RA. Robeson often sang to the children of his friends, sometimes giving them private concerts. From some dozen people (including Peggy Dennis, Cedric Belfrage, and Rose Perry) I have heard near-duplicate tales of Robeson's singing to their mesmerized offspring.

Rada and Mirel Bercovici (interview of July 7, 1985) cast doubt on the accuracy of a few details in Essie's diary. In regard to that diary, I've come to the overall conclusion that Essie
is
given to exaggeration and dramatic highlighting (though almost never to outright invention) and especially in one area—when recording the doings of “glamorous” people and events as they intersected with the Robesons' own lives. Rada and
Mirel Bercovici characterize her as more attracted to the “high life” than Paul (she tended to “costume things a bit,” as Rada put it) and was (in Mirel's words) “posthumously conscious”—meaning she was self-consciously aware of posterity's evaluations, and not likely to scribble away in a diary with entire spontaneity. She may have kept a diary in the first place in order to glamorize her life retrospectively. It's significant, in this regard, that she started her diary only in January 1924—just as Paul was being catapulted to fame. Still, Essie's pridefulness only occasionally comes across as wildly overblown; on the whole her diary remains a reliable, valuable resource.

22.
ER Diary, Feb. 2 (“honor”); March 26 (Junior Banquet), 1925; Dec. 17 (Rutgers concert; Gilpin), 1924; NAACP and Nazarene appearances from newspaper clippings in RA; Mary White Ovington to PR, Jan. 19, 1927, RA. The professor to whom ER made her remark (which is in the
Sunday Times
[New Brunswick], June 8, 1930) was Charles H. Whitman; for more on Whitman and PR, see note 16, pp. 573–74. The
Jones
revival moved—again for a brief run—to the Punch and Judy Theater on Broadway in mid-Jan. 1925.

23.
ER Diary, Aug. 25, Oct. 17 (Burleigh), Nov. 1, 2, 1924 (Copley), Dec. 12, 1924, Jan. 12, 1925, for other concerts; Mrs. C. C. Pell to PR, Oct. 15, 1924, RA; ER Diary, Dec. 6, 1924 (Pells), RA.

24.
ER Diary, Oct. 17, 1924 (Micheaux), Jan. 27, 28, 30, 1925 (Hayes), RA;
Variety
, Nov. 26, 1924 (Russell); Daniel J. Leab,
From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures
(Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1975), has more detail on Micheaux's career. The film critic J. Hoberman has called Micheaux's
God's Step Children
(1938) an account of self-directed racism “as profound and powerful an embodiment of American racial pathology as D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation
or John Ford's
The Searchers
and as amazing a movie as either of them”; according to Hoberman,
God's Step Children
was “temporarily forced out of circulation by the Harlem chapter of the Communist Party” (
Village Voice
, June 12, 1984). In her diary for Nov. 3, 1924, RA, Essie wrote, “Micheaux made storm scene out on Corona today. What with the wind machine, fire hose, etc., it was the most realistic thing I ever saw.” The day before Hayes appeared backstage at
Jones
, Paul had journeyed to Philadelphia to hear Hayes at the Academy of Music; and two days after Hayes's visit, Paul and Essie again returned the compliment by attending Hayes's concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as soloist with the Boston Symphony (Essie thought it “very fine” but “didn't like the robust things he did”).

25.
ER Diary, Sept. 24, Oct. 2, 20, Nov. 12, 20, 22, 24, 1924 (Germany); Dec. 7 (Reiss), 8, (Bartholomew), 24; Jan. 23, 18, 1925 (Madden); Dec. 1, 8, and passim, 1925 (Dwight portrait); April 25, 1925 (radio), Jan. 28 (Hampden), Feb. 19, 22, March 4, 10—all 1925, RA. Marshall Bartholomew to PR, Dec. 24, 1924, RA.

26.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, March 20, 24, 1925, RA; Seton, “Lawrence Brown” (“pondering”). Larry Brown's father had also been born a slave. The contracts are in RA. Carl Van Vechten to ER, n.d. (1925), RA; ER to CW, Sept. 28, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten. The black singer Taylor Gordon is among those rumored to have been Van Vechten's lover. A collection of nude photographs Van Vechten took of black men is in Yale: Van Vechten.

27.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

28.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (Brown “guided”). For a fine background discussion of the spirituals, see Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness
(Oxford, 1977), pp.30–55 (and for the ambivalence some educated blacks felt toward the spirituals, pp. 167–69).

29.
ER Diary, March 27, 29, 1925, RA; ER, Ms. Auto., RA; Van Vechten to PR, March 30, 1925, RA; PR, Music Notes (1956?), RA (children; Brown “guided”).

30.
Heywood Hale Broun,
Whose Little Boy
, p. 56; Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982.

31.
ER, Ms. Auto., RA; ER Diary, April 19, 1925, RA; Frank B. Lenz, “When Robeson Sings,”
Association Men
,
July 1927 (sixteen songs and encores); PR to Van Vechten, postmarked Oct. 21, 1927, Yale: Van Vechten (“unselfish interest”). Monroe Wheeler gave it as his opinion that Van Vechten and Donald Angus
were
lovers (interview with Wheeler, Nov. 12, 1985). The program for the concert is in RA. It was repeated twice more—on May 3, in the same Greenwich Village theater, and on May 17, in the 48th Street Theater. Three drafts of a blurb Van Vechten wrote for the second concert are in Yale: Van Vechten; in it he hailed Robeson and Brown for having restored “the spirit of the original primitive interpretation to these Spirituals … which apparently no other public singer has hitherto entertained.…”

32.
Van Vechten, draft of a blurb for the second concert (“wistful,” etc.), Yale: Van Vechten; New York
World
, April 20, 1925 (“infinite”); New York
Evening Post
, April 20, 1925 (“luscious”);
The New York Times
, April 20, 1925 (“conviction”); Edgar G. Brown in New York
News
, April 25, 1925 (Caruso); Du Bois to PR and Larry Brown, May 4, 1925, U. Mass.: Du Bois. (Du Bois attended the second concert.) Essie, Paul, and Larry wrote and thanked both Walter White and Van Vechten: “Your untiring work in our interest certainly brought very tangible results” (April 25, 1925, Yale: Van Vechten). White, who went along with them when they made their first test record for Victor (ER Diary, April 21, 1925) two days after the concert, wrote back (April 28, 1925, RA): “I have never in my life been so pleased—and moved—as I was by your joint letter of thanks.… You can always count on me to the limit. The best of all thanks and the thing that'll make me most happy will be an overwhelming success which will come and which the three of you so richly deserve.” PR had in fact given several earlier concerts devoted mostly to Afro-American music. Accompanied by Louis Hooper, he performed such a program on Nov. 2, 1924, in Boston, to warm praise from the reviewers (Boston
Transcript
and Boston
Post
, both Nov. 3, 1924), and again (still accompanied by Hooper) at Rutgers on Dec. 17, 1924, and at the Highland Park Reformed Church on Jan. 9, 1925 (the latter two programs are in RUA).

33.
Interview with Percy N. Stone in New York
Herald Tribune
, Oct. 17, 1926. The remark linking Hayes and PR is in the New Orleans
Item
, an article by Hudson Grunewald on Edna Thomas (a friend of Robeson's) lauding
her
, in contrast to the two men, as a purveyor of the real thing. Sandburg's remarks are in the Chicago
News
, Sept. 29, 1926.

34.
Carl Van Vechten to ER, Oct. 9, Nov. 19, 1925, RA; ER to Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, Oct. 8, 20, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to James Weldon Johnson, Nov. 1, 1925 (“pore”), Yale: Johnson. In his Oct. 9 letter, Van Vechten reported that H. T. Burleigh, the black composer and arranger of some of the songs Paul and Larry had used, “is in a frightful stew and does not hesitate to show it. Meeting Larry and Rosamond on the street he abused them roundly, saying that neither of them knew anything about Spirituals or even music itself and that the book was a botch.… He threatened to talk to certain critics and promised them bad notices. ‘If you knew anything about Brahms and Debussy,' he added, ‘your harmonizations would be far different.'” In his Nov. 19 letter, Van Vechten reported that “Bledsoe recently sang to a half-full listless house. He will not put his very real personality into his concerts and he sings Spirituals worse than any one I know.”

35.
New York
World
, May 3, 1925 (“anything more”); James B. Pond to PR, May 29, 1925 (two separate letters), RA; ER Diary, May 4, 23, 26, 1925, RA. The contracts with Victor are in the RA. ER Diary, April 21, July 16, 27, 30, Aug. 4, 1925 (recordings); May 11 (
Vanity Fair
); May 7, 11, 21, June 1 (Alda); May 3 (Equity); May 25 (Jewish Committee); June 19 (St. Philip's), 1925, RA. At the private program sung for Mrs. W. Murray Crane and her guests, Essie seemed inordinately pleased that they “were all asked into the drawing room and introduced to everybody” (ER Diary, May 11, 1925, RA). The photo of Robeson appeared in the July 1925 issue of
Vanity Fair
. In the issue of Feb. 1926, Van Vechten, in his article “Moanin' wid a Sword in Ma
Han',” wrote: “Paul Robeson is a great artist.… I say great advisedly, for to hear him sing Negro music is an experience allied to hearing Chaliapin sing Russian folksongs.”

36.
ER Diary, May 10 (Chaliapin); May 1, 2 (Hurston); June 8 (Savage), 1925, RA. Claire and Hubert Delany, the lawyer, were also part of the Robesons' party at the
Opportunity
dinner. Essie and A'Lelia Walker were more than acquaintances, less than friends; they occasionally corresponded, and in the twenties occasionally played bridge together (ER to Walker, April 8 [1930], courtesy of A'Lelia P. Bundles). Chaliapin's daughter, Marfa Hudson Davies, later wrote Robeson to tell him “how much my father in turn admired you” (Davies to PR, Oct. 8, 1960, RA). Hurston's views on black spirituals are in Hemenway,
Zora Neale Hurston
, pp. 54–55. Hemenway (pp. 54, 184–85) quotes from a comment Hurston made in 1934 specifically on Robeson as a singer of spirituals: “‘Robeson sings Negro songs better than most, because, thank God, he lacks musical education. But we have a cathead man in Florida who can sing so that if you heard him you wouldn't want to hear Hayes or Robeson. He hasn't the voice of either one. It's the effect.'“ In 1933, at Rollins College, Hurston produced a successful concert that implemented her view of the proper uses of folk art. Though the evidence is limited, it's possible to argue that Robeson's views on the spirituals in fact coincided with Hurston's. On the occasion of the Hampton Singers' performing in England, Robeson is quoted as telling a reporter that they would demonstrate “how Negro spirituals should be sung. I cannot possibly interpret them properly … when I sing them as solos. It is not recognized in Europe that singing spirituals is a social act, a group affair, in which there must be both the solo and the chorus. There are many spirituals such as ‘Go Down, Moses' which I absolutely refuse to sing alone, for it is nothing without the rolling refrain, ‘Let my people go'” (
The New York Times
, April 26, 1930).