Paul Robeson (19 page)

Within two weeks of their first meeting, Emma invited the Robesons to dinner, and thereafter they frequently exchanged visits. They took her to see Chaplin in
The Gold Rush;
she cooked them a roast goose, gave them her books (and Berkman's) to read, talked about her “disheartening” experiences in Russia and her loneliness in London. “She has a crush on Paul,” Essie wrote to Carlo and Fania, “and we like her very much. I like to hear her talk, and tho I often violently disagree with what she says, still it's rather thrilling to hear her—she's so earnest.” Carlo agreed, writing back that Emma is “a wonderful woman whom I admire very much.” When
The Emperor Jones
bowed at the Ambassadors on September 10, Emma was part of the opening-night audience, and she went back to see Robeson perform a second time.
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Along with Emma in the opening-night audience for
Jones
was a glamorous segment of London life—Arnold Bennett, Gladys Cooper, St. John Ervine, Ashley Dukes, Godfrey Tearle, Rose Macauley, Lawrence Langner, and his current wife, Armina Marshall. When the curtain fell, Paul was called back a dozen times, finally forcing him to make a speech. “The audience stood up and cheered and shouted,” Essie reported to Otto Kahn—shrewdly including a set of clippings from the London press—and described his performance (and Essie
was
objective about such matters) as
“the finest” she had ever seen him give, despite a dispirited dress rehearsal the night before. She also reported to Kahn that a purchase of “the very thinnest pure wool underclothing” at Jaeger's was providing Paul with maximum protection against catching cold. Kahn sent back “cordial congratulations” on “what must have been a veritable triumph,” adding his pleasure on learning “that Mr. Jaeger is shielding you and your husband against the vicissitudes of the English climate.…”
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Robeson's stunning personal reviews brought reporters flocking to the flat—by three o'clock the next afternoon, he had given six interviews.
The New Statesman
called his performance “magnificent,”
The Times
“superb,”
The Tatler
“singularly fine,”
The Saturday Review
“gigantic,”
G.K.'s Weekly
“wonderful,” and
West Africa
“a tour de force.” The theater promptly put Paul's name up in lights on the huge electric sign at Cambridge Circus. “Prettiest thing in London!” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens—“He's an honest to God
Star
now.”
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But neither play nor production fared as well as Paul. The incessant beating of the tom-tom onstage produced nervous laughter on opening night, apparently fraying some delicate British nerves, while the small space (and perhaps the unfamiliar English-African cast) apparently cramped Jimmy Light's directorial skills (more than one critic found his staging “only moderately effective”). The majority of reviewers did hail the play (“a work of gigantic range, both actual and symbolic,” Ivor Brown wrote in
The Saturday Review
), but a minority registered strong doubts about the repetitive “series of anti-climaxes” and O'Neill's tendency toward melodramatic monologue. Ordinarily a set of reviews so heavily weighted on the positive side would draw a strong public response, but
Jones
failed to catch on with an English audience. “They really did not like the play at all,” Essie wrote Countee Cullen, although “they did seem wild about Paul and his acting, and said so.”
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Essie probably put her finger on the failure: “London doesn't want red meat on the table,” she wrote Carlo and Fania; “the London audience likes its elegant applesauce on the stage—it does not like to have its neck wrung unless there's sex in the works.” To Otto Kahn she characterized the audience as having been “almost exclusively the intelligentsia and the society people—and of course they don't support a play indefinitely.” (The play was “too gloomy” for the general public, she wrote James Weldon Johnson.) But perhaps, too, the fact that
Jones
was “a negro play” worked against it. “The sight of a half-naked wretch gradually becoming more demented leaves an English audience cold,” one critic commented. Another claimed, “To us, as a people, the negro is unknown.” That attitude of bland indifference may have been more characteristic of the attitude of the English intelligentsia than the committed egalitarianism Essie attributed to it; only a single reviewer was inspired by the play to make any
comment at all on the questions it raised about the plight of blacks in the United States. Despite hopes for a long run,
The Emperor Jones
closed on October 17, after five weeks, Robeson again getting a prolonged personal ovation.
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The Robesons liked London so much they lingered on for two weeks after the play closed. Paul's spreading fame produced a new batch of invitations, and now they had the free time to accept them. The social calendar got jammed once more. They dined with the composer Sir Roger Quilter, the actress Athene Seyler and her guest Hugh Walpole; took tea with the radical American journalist Crystal Eastman and her husband; visited with the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (whose cantata
Hiawatha
had impressed the London critics); went to the Russian ballet and to a rugby game; saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell at the King's Theatre and for dinner afterward (“She looked the typical, up to the minute whore house proprietress,” Essie wrote in her diary, “but was lovely to us”); spent one afternoon with Miss Amanda Ira Aldridge, second daughter of the great black actor Ira Aldridge (she had written to express her appreciation of Paul's “magnificent performance” and had presented him with the earrings her father had worn on stage as Othello, expressing the hope he would one day wear them when he, too, played the role).
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Paul began vocal training with the well-known coach Flora Arnold. Essie described herself as “very jealous of Paul's style and his simplicity of singing” and ready to “fight anybody who tries to make him ‘technical,'” but she felt Miss Arnold gave him “just what he needs—and I think when he finishes with her he will have complete confidence in himself.” In addition, Essie had begun to cultivate some ambitions of her own. She confided to Van Vechten that she had “quite settled one thing in my mind definitely—as soon as I get home I'm going to make a try to get into the movies—isn't that funny? Of course I shall keep Paul's mark first always. I suppose I'll never get over that! We talked about that particular weakness—or was it strength—on my part one night—remember? Well, anyway … I've always longed to act in the movies.” She took to wearing her hair “back and a little kinky—something like Nora Ray wears hers.” Paul, she reported, thought it looked “interestingly African!,” and in combination with long earrings and deep colors it made her feel “much taller and much smarter.” Carlo sent back his encouragement: “I'm awfully excited about your movie ambitions. I don't see why you shouldn't realize them.”
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Essie decided that Paul was “very tired,” that “the vocal and nervous strain of
Jones
has been great and the damp climate has taken a toll on his throat and chest,” and that he needed a prolonged rest in the south of France. The vacation did prove, in comparison with the social whirl of London, restful—though the six-week stay in France starred its own arresting cast of characters. With introductions from Van Vechten, Paul and
Essie stopped for a week in Paris on their way to the Riviera. They called on Madame Matisse, who showed them the master's watercolors “and some fascinating African wooden carved art”; Paul, in turn, sang, and reduced Madame Duthuit, Matisse's daughter, to tears with his “Weepin' Mary,” though she knew scarcely a word of English. Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, already counted the Robesons as friends and, “to do a little publicity” for Paul, threw a “port and sandwich” party for him. Among the guests and reporters gathered that day at the Rue de L'Odéon to hear Robeson sing were James Joyce and his wife, the composer George Antheil, the American music publisher Robert Schirmer, Lewis Galantiere, the head of the International Chamber of Commerce, and the Ernest Hemingways.
¹⁴

They also went to have tea with Gertrude Stein. Essie had dropped her a note a few weeks earlier, enclosing a letter of introduction from Van Vechten, which began, “This letter preludes the approach of two of the nicest people left in the world: Essie and Paul Robeson.” Van Vechten had already mentioned Paul in three earlier letters to Stein, describing him as “a great actor,” “a lamb of God,” and someone he liked “better than almost anyone I ever met.” “I think you will too and he will love you and you will like his wife just as much.”
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On the latter count, Van Vechten may have misjudged. Essie made no entry in her diary for November 6—an atypical lapse, given her penchant for recording in detail her meetings with the rich or famous; on her part, Gertrude Stein failed to make a single reference to Essie in her follow-up account of the visit to Van Vechten. But, as Carl had predicted, Gertrude Stein and Paul did take to each other hugely. “There is no doubt about it Carl,” Stein wrote him, “you have awfully good taste in friends.… Robeson is a dear and he sang for us and I had a long talk with him.” That talk, she reported to Carlo in another letter, revolved around “why you like niggers so much Robeson and I had a long talk about it it is not because they are primitive but because they have a narrow but a very long civilisation behind them. They have alright, their sophistication is complete and so beautifully finished and it is the only one that can resist the United States of America.” She did not, however, like hearing Robeson sing spirituals. “They do not belong to you,” she said to him, “any more than anything else, so why claim them.” On a later visit, “a very charming Southern woman” asked him where he was born. New Jersey, he said. Oh, not in the South? she responded—what a pity. “Not for me,” he answered. Robeson, Stein concluded, “knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a negro.”
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Two years after their first meeting, on the occasion of another talk with Robeson, Stein described him to Van Vechten as “really a perfectly ideal companion, the last time I saw him it was only once and it was in a
crowd of people. I liked him then but now after a quiet time alone with him we are really very good friends.… He did give charming pictures of you Carl, he does that awfully well makes the people he is talking about very really in front of you and it was nice having that done with you. Thanks for him.” Carlo, in turn, reported Robeson's reaction to Stein: “he adores you.”
¹⁷

The Robesons also saw a few old friends, like Donald Angus, and took in the much-touted
Revue Nègre
. The
Revue
had been put together by the white producer Caroline Dudley Reagan, an American living in Paris, whom Essie disliked and who was to cause Paul considerable trouble within a few years. Essie reported to Carlo and Fania that the
Revue
was “rotten”—“that is … between us,” she wrote, “I hate to run down our own stuff.” Josephine Baker started out well—“the things she does with her body are amazing”—but she continued to do “the same stuff all evening, and by the end you are slightly bored,” especially since her voice couldn't be heard above the orchestra. As for the touted “African scene,” the “idea is splendid, and it is all fine until Josephine does this ridiculously vulgar and totally uncalled for wiggling. It would be different if it fitted in anywhere, but it obviously [is] stuck in as an added attraction.” The
Revue
in fact marked Josephine Baker's Paris debut—and made her, still a teenager, an overnight sensation.
¹⁸

From Paris the Robesons went to Villefranche on the Riviera. They were immediately taken in tow by Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, whom they had met in New York at the Salemmés. Both were still in their twenties. Wescott had already gained a reputation as a writer with his first novel,
The Apple of the Eye
, and his lover, Monroe Wheeler (who as a fledgling publisher had printed a book of Wescott's poetry), would later become a highly regarded art curator and critic. Traveling as they did in artistic circles, the Robesons always knew gay men and lesbian women, and counted a fair number among their friends. Paul especially was (in the words of one intimate) “never moralistic or judgmental on that subject but rather wholly accepting,” and Monroe Wheeler recalls that when a “fashionable New York dressmaker offered Paul a lot of money to sleep with him,” Paul turned the man down with polite disinterest. Essie, in fact, unlike Paul, occasionally showed a bit of superior disdain, once referring to Elsa Maxwell as that “great ugly Lesbian” (adding that she gave “marvelous parties”), and another time reporting having met “a lot of fairies and degenerates” at a cocktail party given by Lady Duff Gordon. But more typically Essie, too, enjoyed the company of gay people. In 1931 she went three times to hear the “down-and-dirty” Gladys Bentley during her engagement at the Clam House, thought her “grand,” and wrote the Van Vechtens that she, Essie, would “never be the same.” She was also sometime companion and confidante to several gay men, and once expressed disapproving surprise on hearing that one of them preferred to hide his
passionate involvement with another man rather than risk being ruined in business and ostracized by French society.
¹⁹

Wheeler and Wescott had a villa in the hills above Villefranche, an unspoiled half-Italian, half-French village situated near Nice. They booked the Robesons into the famed Welcome Hotel (sometime home in 1925 to Cocteau), where the window and balconies of the Robesons' room directly faced the sea in front and the French Alps on the side. They read, wrote letters, ate on the balcony, and during the day strolled along the shore in the sun. Within a week, Paul's congestion began to thaw and Essie's self-described “nervous tension” to ease. It is “the most enchanting spot in the world—so far as we know,” Essie wrote Carlo and Fania, “and Paul and I are as happy as can be.”
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