Paul Robeson (32 page)

CHAPTER 9

The Discovery of Africa

(1932–1934)

Robeson gave his triumphant first recital of the new tour to a packed house in Town Hall on January 18, 1932. Most of the program consisted of familiar spirituals, but for the first time in New York he successfully tried out his increasingly expert Russian with Gambs's “Prayer” and Gretchaninov's “The Captive” (and, as one of the encores, introduced Larry Brown's “Dere's No Hidin' Place Down There”—Brown accompanying). The Russian songs were well received; some Russians in the audience, including members of the Kedroff Quartet, applauded enthusiastically. “I have found a music very closely allied to mine—and emotionally to me as an individual,” Robeson explained to a reporter; “in six months I have learned the language, which I also find a more natural means of expression than English. Certainly many Russian folksongs seem to have come from Negro peasant life and vice versa.” “He feels he is a kindred soul” to the Russian, Emma Goldman wrote Alexander Berkman the following year, praising him for having “gone into the very spirit of the language. I swear if I had not known Paul as a Negro I should have thought an educated Russian before me. I can't tell you how beautiful he talks Russian.” “He's so keen,” Essie wrote in her diary. “He feels that he can become an official, and important interpreter of Russian music, and literature. He feels he understands it, and is close to it, and he loves the language.”
¹

At Robeson's next tour stop, Boston—his first appearance there in six years—one critic found his voice in “excellent condition,” another essentially “untutored.” In Des Moines, a request from the audience for “St. Louis Blues” and “Sing You Sinners” brought a frosty response from Robeson's traveling manager: “Mr. Robeson never sings blues!” A reporter's
question about the origins of Robeson's singing career prompted him to send Carlo a postcard message saying he had replied “that Mr. Carl Van Vechten had launched me upon my concert career. He's a nice fellow.” In Montreal, the sold-out house cheered wildly at the close, and the
Gazette
's critic packaged the excitement in racialist wrappings: “… he looks like an ebony Apollo. He is as tall as a guardsman and carries himself with a royal air. In manner he is as simple as a child, and his beaming face and wide smile, which is sometimes a regular grin, prove him to be, with all his worldly successes, an unspoiled son of mother nature and still close to the earth in which he lives.” (The same critic's enthusiasm waned when it came to describing the Russian songs; there, he felt, Robeson was “a stranger in a strange land.”)
²

The two-month tour completed, in March Robeson joined Yolande on the Continent for a brief break before his scheduled return to the States in April for a revival of
Show Boat
. (While in Paris, he discussed with Sacha Guitry the prospects of appearing with him and Yvonne Printemps in a play with an African theme—a project that hung fire while they searched for a suitable vehicle.) Paul was late in sending money to Essie, which annoyed her, and then sent an oblique cable that added mystification to annoyance: “Interesting plans ahead … Put flat on market … See Paris ahead …” “He is a funny boy,” Essie wrote in her diary on receiving the cable. “Evidently, he means he wants me to join him in Paris, which is a good one.…” Essie, for the moment, was feeling exhilarated over her writing prospects—putting in a lot of hard work on her prospective play,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(“I honestly think it's good, different, and interesting,” she wrote the Van Vechtens. “The role of Tom could be played wonderfully by Paul, but he isn't
NECESSARY
to the play at all”), and enjoying an independent life in London that included a heady round of socializing and an occasional flirtation. “I mean to
PROVE,
” she wrote exuberantly to Larry Brown, “that I made Paul what he is, by doing the same for myself that I did for him. I mean for little Essie to speak up. And loud, too.” She also meant to be prepared in case she and Paul ended up in court. Responding to Larry's sympathetic noises, she tried to enlist him in looking through Paul's pockets or luggage for letters from Yolande, claiming that Paul had “stolen” from her file case the ones she had earlier procured “entirely by accident.”
³

Paul, it turned out, had not been hinting that Essie should join him in Paris. In early April he made his actual intentions clear in a letter: he wanted her to begin divorce proceedings, and to name Yolande openly as corespondent. Essie cabled back that she would proceed immediately. “I'm glad to have it all over with at last,” she wrote in her diary. “If he has still the same attitude after two years, that settles it, and we'll call it a day.” She was even prepared to put a good face on it publicly, announcing, in contemporary tones of emancipation, that if “this marriage business” was to
survive, it had to be brought up to date, and that divorce was the modernizing mechanism: “I have been married for eleven years to one of the most charming, intelligent, gifted men in the world. I am glad that we have become civilized enough to look at a relationship frankly and say: ‘That was grand. It isn't grand any more. That is enough, Period.' And end it as happily as it was begun. My husband and I have been exceedingly happy. I think we are happier now than we have ever been. But we no longer wish to be married. Not to each other, that is. We want to be friends. I hope our friendship will grow. This would be impossible, if we have to remain married to each other for the rest of our lives.” In an article, “Divorce,” that she intended to sell and use to “break into the journalism game,” she wrote “I enjoyed building Paul's career much more than he enjoyed achieving his success.” Paul, on his side, decided to face down public criticism over a mixed marriage directly, and he sent Essie the name of the hotel in Paris (the Lancaster) where he and Yolande had stayed and the specific dates (March 29 to April 6) when they had been in residence there. Following his instructions, Essie crossed the Channel to obtain the hotel manager's formal affidavit. Paul left for New York to appear in the revival of
Show Boat
.
⁴

No sooner had he arrived in New York than scandal erupted from an unexpected quarter. The
Daily Mirror
, a Hearst tabloid, published on May 2, 1932, the sensational story that the British heiress Nancy Cunard had come to New York in pursuit of Robeson and that the two were staying in the same hotel in Harlem. Cunard was indeed in New York and indeed staying at the Grampion Hotel in Harlem—not to pursue Robeson but to work on her path-breaking anthology,
Negro
, due to appear in 1934. The two had met briefly in Paris in 1926, and she had twice written to him in 1930 asking him to contribute to the planned anthology, an appeal he had not answered. That was the sum of their knowledge of each other—there was no truth to the story of an affair (possibly it had originated as a transposed version of her involvement with Henry Crowder, the black jazz musician). Both Cunard and Robeson immediately denied the
Mirror
article, with Cunard stylishly using the opportunity to promote
Negro
and to call attention to the plight of the nine “Scottsboro boys” being held in prison under death sentence.
⁵

She also wrote directly to Robeson to say she knew “nothing
at all
of this amazing link up of yourself and myself in the press,” to question whether his choice of the word “insult” in answering the
Daily Mirror
had been “particularly felicitous,” to chastise him for not having answered her invitations to appear in the anthology, and to suggest that, if the recent racist remarks attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham (her hated stepfather) proved accurate, it was Robeson's “duty to absolutely boycott all Beecham's musical activities here and in Europe.” The story soon faded from the press, but printed denials could not quite dispel the rumors—the
glamorous lifestyles of both principals were sufficient in the minds of some to sustain suspicion. Wendell P. Dabney, black editor of the Cincinnati paper
The Union
, wrote the Puerto Rican-born bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg,

I note that she denies, or rather Robeson denies anything apart from a mere acquaintance with the lady. I understood that she was rather partial to a young orchestra leader from Washington, D.C.—Cromwell [sic] by name. I hope, however, in her zeal to champion the “lost cause,” “a forlorn hope,” or an oppressed people, she will not get herself inextricably entangled in the meshes of Negroes whose only qualifications are a glib tongue, good clothes and a nice appearance. Verbum Sap.

The black novelist Claude McKay put the blame on Cunard, scorning her as “a very unreliable person and lacking intellectual purpose and balance, mixing up as she does her love affairs with the Negro problem.” And the black painter Albert Smith wrote Schomburg, “And so her [Cunard's] Romeo has slipped on his ladder. I have often imagined that that would happen. It was too good to last a long time. For those combinations you need more than flesh to hold them.” The “combination” prompted one anonymous white letter-writer to warn Cunard, “Either give up sleeping with a nigger or take the consequences. We will not only take you but we'll take your nigger lover-Robeson-with you.”
⁶

In this context of romantic rumor—and more was shortly to follow—the opening of
Show Boat
on May 20, 1932, could have been an (unsalacious) anticlimax. But producer Ziegfeld had assembled a powerful cast, retaining most of the members from the original American company—Helen Morgan as Julie, Edna May Oliver as Parthy Hawks, Norma Terris as Magnolia, and Charles Winninger as Cap'n Andy—substituting only Dennis King as Gaylord Ravenal and Robeson as Joe. The show received not reviews but hyperboles—“the greatest musical comedy ever produced,” Robert Coleman raved in the
Mirror;
“the most beautifully blended musical show we have had in this country,” seconded Brooks Atkinson in the
Times
. Robeson's personal notices soared beyond hyperbole: “celestial” was how Percy Hammond, the famously acerbic, usually reserved
Trib
critic described Robeson's voice. Edna Ferber, author of the book on which the show was based, wrote Alexander Woollcott that the ovation given Robeson on opening night exceeded any she had ever heard accorded a “figure of the stage, the concert hall, or the opera”—the audience “stood up and howled.” “Remarkable,” James Weldon Johnson wrote Robeson by way of congratulation—and the word was not exaggerated.
⁷

Ten days after
Show Boat
opened, the rumor mill began to grind again.
On May 31, in London, a reporter from the
Daily Herald
came to see Essie. Was there truth to the report, he asked, that she had filed suit for divorce, and had named Lady Louis Mountbatten as corespondent? Recently returned from her Paris fact-finding mission (as directed by Paul) to gather the needed evidence for divorce proceedings, Essie, with Paul in agreement, decided to confirm the long-circulating rumor of their separation, though not its purported cause. The marriage, she said, “has gone on the rocks of sheer ennui.” In New York, Paul told the press, “Mrs. Robeson and I have been separated for two years, but the separation has been amicable, and I believe the divorce will be.” He confirmed that he had been seeing an Englishwoman but, beyond denying that she was either Nancy Cunard or Peggy Ashcroft, refused to reveal her identity; whether they would marry, he told one reporter, “is in the lap of the gods. However, if we do marry, I am prepared to leave the United States if there is any stir about it.” “I desire above all things,” he told another reporter, “to maintain my personal dignity,” and rather than tolerate any racist abuse, “I am prepared to leave this country forever.”
⁸

And the role of Edwina Mountbatten? In London, Essie, too, refused to name the actual corespondent, adding, “It is most incredible, though, that people should be linking Paul's name with that of a famous titled English woman, since she is just about the one person in England we don't know.” But since Edwina Mountbatten was notorious for her multiple paramours (she served as the model for Amanda Prynne in Noel Coward's 1930 play
Private Lives
), the gossip continued to gain ground. The London Sunday paper
The People
headlined a story, “Society Shaken by Terrible Scandal,” and suggested that Lady Louis, caught red-handed with Robeson, had been exiled from England for two years by the Palace—“a colored man I have never even met!!!!,” the indignant Edwina wrote in her diary. Amused friends brought Essie further elaborations of the gossip—that the Queen had directly asked Essie to discontinue her suit, that Lady Louis had offered her a great sum of money and had had to sell Brook House, her mansion in Park Lane, to raise it. The issue finally came to court in July, Edwina Mountbatten, apparently pressed by Buckingham Palace, having decided to bring a libel suit against Oldham's Press, publisher of
The People
. The British legal system smoothed every path. Norman Birkett, one of the great advocates of the day, represented the Mountbattens, the Lord Chief Justice opened court at the unusual hour of 9:30 a.m. (and without prior notice to the press), and the Mountbattens were accorded the privilege of giving direct testimony themselves. When Edwina took the stand, she denied “the abominable rumours,” and the Lord Chief Justice ruled in her favor, compelling Oldham's to make a full apology.
Almost
certainly, “justice” triumphed. No direct evidence exists of an affair between Robeson and Edwina Mountbatten. Yet the writer Marie Seton, who knew all parties
concerned, insists that she heard directly from Robeson himself that he and Lady Louis did “go to bed once,” that she had been the seducer, and that he had graciously consented to her bringing a lawsuit denying that he had ever been in the house—but that it “jarred inside him.”
⁹