Paul Robeson (27 page)

They danced the tango between takes, and enjoyed the beauty of the countryside, though not the hike up the mountains outside Montreux to get exterior shots—“Paul and I were frightened out of our wits,” Essie wrote, although she was mollified by a picnic lunch. In the village of Lutry, they were followed by crowds everywhere they went, Robeson attracting children “as honey does bees.” The townspeople filled the streets and hung out of their windows to catch sight of “Monsieur le Nègre.” The café did unprecedented business. The fire brigade, alarmed at the new electric installation in the studio (the town hall) for lighting, held a special practice session. The
Tribune de Lausanne
arrived for an interview. Except for an electrician, no one was paid (the total cost of making the film was two thousand dollars), yet, in Bryher's words, “extras had to be dispersed rather than sought, everybody wanted to be in it and every twenty minutes all the lights went out because the tram went by.”
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When they saw the first three days' work on the screen, Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that they were “surprised to see how well we both filmed.” Paul “of course” looked “marvelous”—his “face is so big and mobile and expressive.” But Macpherson assured Essie that she, too, was “very good”—and, indeed, two months later, after they had had a look at the first reel of the film, Bryher wrote Essie, “You really are stealing the picture. One knew that Mr. Robeson would be good—every time I see the film it is your acting and your sense of movement that amazes me. Even more than his—if this is not treason.”
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The Robesons never expected wide distribution for the film. Essie categorized it as “one of those very advanced expressionistic things in the Russian-German manner, so it will probably be shown by Film Societies, etc.” She described it in a letter home to A'Lelia Walker as “futuristic”—“We made it up in the Swiss Alps” and “enjoyed every moment of it, though it was hard work.” “It's a dreadful highbrow,” she confided to the Van Vechtens, “but beautifully done, I think.” G. W. Pabst, one of the heroes of the Pool Group—Bryher described his
Die Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street
), starring Greta Garbo, as “the one film that we felt expressed our generation”—was given a private showing of the film and declared himself “very enthusiastic”; he offered the use of his own people “to stick the negative and make the exhibition positives”—and also expressed a desire to make a “talkie” with Paul. If the film “is to be ‘popular' in the obvious sense, I don't know,” H. D. wrote Essie. “It is without question a work of art and that satisfies us.”
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It had to. The film was not a popular success, and the critics, on the whole, did not think it art. As Essie had predicted, it was booked by cine-clubs and film societies in Europe, and in October 1930 had a showing at the Academy Cinema in London. The British critics were particularly harsh. The reviewer on the
Evening Standard
dismissed the film as “self-conscious estheticism,” and the critic in
Bioscope
called it “a wholly unintelligible scramble of celluloidan eccentricity,” although adding that it “stimulates one's natural desire to see and hear Paul Robeson in a first-rate British ‘talkie' made for the public.” That was still a few years off.
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The nine days of shooting completed, the Robesons went straight from Territet to Berlin, where Paul had agreed to do two performances of
The Emperor Jones
under Jimmy Light's direction. Light was abroad for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and at his persuading, Essie had “wangled and rearranged and quarreled” in order to piece together the needed three days in Paul's schedule. The terms helped: the Deutsches Kuenstler Theater offered Light and Robeson together 50 percent of the gross receipts. Robeson trusted Light as a director and also liked him as a person, and the experience turned out to be a good one. Hooper Trask, the former actor and correspondent for
The New York Times
and
Variety
, was originally scheduled to play Smithers opposite Robeson, but in the end Light himself assumed the role. (Reviewing the production in the
Times
, Trask confined himself to praising Light's work as a director; Essie described his acting as “not bad.”) Audience and critics alike received Robeson warmly, the play much less so. The Berlin critics had earlier seen the great German actor Oscar Homolka in the role, but preferred Robeson; they had unanimous praise for his “childlike originality and naturalness”—he succeeded, as one put it, in “showing the soul of his people to the audience,” which no white actor, Homolka included, possibly could. One reviewer congratulated Robeson for having done his best to help a “weak poet” like O'Neill, whose “flat, sociological” play (in the words of another) had little to reveal to “culturally conscious Europeans.” Though O'Neill had his defenders, Robeson, not O'Neill, emerged as the star attraction.
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The Robesons were “crazy” about Berlin. “It is a marvelous city,” Essie wrote home, and recounted the special pleasure they took in hearing, at the Berlin zoo roof garden, Sam Wooding's Negro Band—“I can't tell you how the good old home rhythm sounded to us.” There's no evidence that either Paul or Essie saw anything disagreeable or threatening in the political climate during their stay in Berlin. Yet the year 1930 marked a turning point in German history, with massive Nazi rallies throughout the country, with Bruening, a Catholic conservative, succeeding to the chancellorship in March, and with the Nazis emerging in the September election as the nation's second-largest party. All of this went unremarked by Robeson—in much the way he had made no public comment on such recent events as the general strike in Britain in 1926, the phenomenon of
women under thirty voting for the first time in that country's 1929 general election, and, in the United States, the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Even after Bruening had been elected in Germany, Robeson told reporters—he was, of course, thinking of the artistic experimentation of Weimar—that his “one great desire” was to return to Germany to study and perform: “Germany is the gateway now of all of Europe,” and “on the Continent the colour bar does not exist.” As further regards fascism, a reporter from the Jamaican paper
The Daily Gleaner
quoted Robeson as late as 1932 as saying, “If the real great man of the Negro race will be born, he will spring from North America. The Negro Gandhi or Mussolini cannot be begotten but in the land of ancient oppression and revolutionary emancipation.”
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But it would be a mistake to imply that Robeson was unconscious of or indifferent to political developments. He had long since developed a deep interest in Jewish culture. As early as 1927, to give but one example, he had performed a concert in New York's Town Hall to aid the Women's Committee of the American ORT (the organization devoted to teaching trades to young Jewish people in Eastern Europe seeking to emigrate to Palestine); and he had frequently expressed the view that enslaved blacks had derived inspiration from the Old Testament account of the struggle of the ancient Hebrews. As regards labor unrest in Britain, moreover, Robeson at least once spontaneously offered a gesture of support for the plight of Welsh miners doubly beset by wage cuts and meager unemployment relief, which a Labour government seemed unwilling to ameliorate. To be sure, his political consciousness in 1930 was not yet developed to nearly the extent it would later be, but it was already greater than his near-total silence on public events would suggest. He was inactive (as was his style while awaiting some clear purpose), not unaware, continuing to hold in 1930 to his long-standing view that he could best work against injustice by advancing his own reputation as an artist. But that stance was shifting. Within a few years, Robeson would no longer be content with the view that the enhancement of his artistic stature would somehow produce a generalized improvement for others; he would move instead toward direct participation in organized political efforts to assail oppressive conditions.
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The Robesons returned to London in early April, and Paul went directly into rehearsals for
Othello
. He had hesitated about signing on for the production—“Am still afraid of Othello but we can talk it over,” he had written Maurice Browne when first approached. Browne later commented, “For eighteen months I wrestled with him,” and “my persistence broke down his objections.” He overcame Paul's qualms with promises of a first-rate director and a first-rate Iago. He got neither. Browne cast himself as Iago and gave the directing plum to his wife, Nellie Van Volkenburg. Both choices were self-indulgent. Browne had aspirations to act (“I had
always itched to play Iago,” he later confessed) without being an actor, and Nellie had had scant directing experience since her days with Chicago's Little Theatre, and none in Shakespeare. Robeson did get a first-rate Desdemona in the twenty-two-year-old newcomer Peggy Ashcroft. He had seen her in Matheson Lang's production
Jew Süss
, her first major success, and because his contract with Maurice Browne gave him the right to decide who would play Desdemona, asked Ashcroft to audition. She was terrified: “I can't sing in tune,” she remembered years later, “and I had to perform the Willow Song in front of Paul Robeson.” Nonetheless, he liked what he heard and she was offered the role. Ashcroft was thrilled at the opportunity; “for us young people in England at the time,” she later recalled, Robeson “was a great figure, and we all had his records, and one realized that it was a tremendous honor to be doing this.” The supporting cast was also well chosen: Sybil Thorndike as Emilia, the little-known Ralph Richardson as Roderigo, and Max Montesole, an experienced graduate of Frank Benson's famed Shakespeare company, as Cassio. They would prove “supportive” in several needed senses.
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At the start, Essie enthusiastically wrote Nellie Van Volkenburg, “I have a feeling that we are going to have a magnificent time with
Othello
,” It proved to be anything but. Robeson realized from the first that his director and his Iago were hopeless, likely to prove actual impediments to his own performance. After the first week of rehearsal, Essie, who had a sharp eye and a short fuse for incompetence, wrote indignantly in her diary, “Nellie doesn't know what it is all about. Talks of ‘tapestry,' of the scene, the ‘flow,' and ‘austere beauty,' a lot of parlor junk, which means nothing and helps not at all.… She can't even get actors from one side of the stage to the other. Poor Paul is lost.”
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Van Volkenburg and Browne were fascinated with the “psychological dimensions” of the play and urged on Paul the theory (both were gay) that Iago's motivation was best explained as the result of his having fallen in love with Othello. When Paul asked for specific direction, he got instead patronization, the more galling for coming from an officious amateur. Nellie had a penchant for standing in the back of the stalls and yelling instructions through a megaphone; one day, while rehearsing the Cyprus scene, Paul paused and asked her a question. “Mr. Robeson,” she shouted through the megaphone, “there are other people on the stage besides yourself!” Peggy Ashcroft, horrified at this gratuitous humiliation of Robeson, decided that Nellie was “a racist.”
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Ashcroft found her entire experience in
Othello
“an education in racism,” something about which she had previously been ignorant. “Paul would tell us stories which I could hardly believe.… He talked a lot to us, and particularly Rupert [Rupert Hart-Davis, her husband], about his problems in the States,” though “he didn't talk politics”—his concern then
was with the plight of his people, not with any particular political program for ameliorating it. When queried about “the racial aspect” of the production, Ashcroft was widely quoted in the press as saying, “Ever so many people have asked me whether I mind being kissed in some of the scenes by a coloured man, and it seems to me so silly. Of course I do not mind! It is just necessary to the play. For myself I look on it as a privilege to act with a great artist like Paul Robeson.” In fact they were a bit skittish during rehearsals. The press bombardment about “how the public will take to seeing a Negro make love to a white woman” made Robeson somewhat “infirm of purpose”; as he told a reporter fifteen years later, “For the first two weeks in every scene I played with Desdemona that girl couldn't get near to me, I was backin' away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlor, that clumsy.”
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Robeson was sympathetic to Ashcroft's plight under Nellie's direction. While rehearsing the scene where Othello denounces Desdemona as a whore, Nellie insisted Robeson keep slapping Ashcroft to “encourage” her to fall at a particular angle—one that Ashcroft felt “was physically impossible to do in one movement.… I think she was a sadist”—bringing her instead to the verge of tears. Without a word, Robeson got up and left the theater. He sent a message to Maurice Browne that he could no longer continue under Nellie's direction, and requested a replacement. When Browne threatened a breach-of-contract suit, Robeson—with the Equity suspension still fresh in his mind—returned to rehearsals.
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But thereafter, clear that (in Ashcroft's words) “there was no help, indeed only hindrances, from our director,” Robeson, Ashcroft, and Max Montesole—with Sybil Thorndike joining them whenever she could—took to rehearsing together evenings in one another's homes. Montesole, with his considerable experience in playing Shakespeare, provided crucial support; according to Ashcroft, he “was the saving of the production—as far as it could be saved.” Jimmy Light also pitched in by coaching Robeson privately. “I think Paul would have given up long ago,” Essie wrote in her diary, “if it hadn't been for Jim and Max. They have both been working like blazes over him.”
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