The Little-Known Cole Porter

What You May Not Know About COLE PORTER

Born in Indiana, he lived luxuriously—in Paris, on cruises. He once hired the entire Ballets russes to entertain his party guests. He had a valet. (Do you know anyone who has had a valet?)

Although he had 34 operations on his  legs, crushed by  horse in 1937, he lived to 73.

He was valedictorian of his  prep school class., Worcester Academy in Massachusetts.

He attended Yale,  then Harvard Law for a while, then took music  classes at Harvard. At Yale, he wrote 300 songs.

He studied (briefly) at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, under a famous composer, Vincent d’Indy. A private music school, its teachers included Wanda Landowska, Olivier Messian, and Darius Milhaud. Alumni included Erik Satie and Edgard Varese.

A homosexual, he married a beautiful and wealthy divorcee-- Linda Lee Thomas—partly for decorum’s sake.

Porter’s wife tried to get Stravinsky to give him lessons—unsuccessfully.

He may have served in the French Foreign Legion.

Among his friends: Noel Coward, Monty Woolley (The Man Who Came to Dinner), Irving Berlin.

At first he was not a successful songwriter. What made the difference ? His explanation: He learned to write Jewish songs—those with a little sadness in them.

His musical, “Kiss Me Kate,” was the first winner of a Tony award.

His most famous songs: Night and Day, Begin the Beguine, Anything Goes, Don’t Fence Me In. Others: I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Just One of Those Things,

Fred Astaire wanted to play him in a movie. Given a choice between having Fred or Cary Grant portray him, guess whom Porter picked?

In the gray and grim 1930s, writes Robert Kimball (co-author of “You’re the Top: Cole Porter in the 1930s”),  “his was a message of civilized cheer.”

Guess who popularized the song, “Don’t Fence Me In”? Roy Rogers, in the film 1944 film, ‘Hollywood Canteen.” Which Cole had written for the failed musical,

“Adios, Argentina) (1934-35).

Roy Rogers, Don’t Fence Me In

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLoYFvbR0XY&list=RDWLoYFvbR0XY#t=0

(Note: A hobble is a strap to tie together a horse’s legs.)

Like many other Broadway people, Porter fled to Hollywood in the dismal 1930s. When he came there, he said to Dorothy Kilgallen, people told him that he would be bored because all that everyone talks about here was pictures. After he was in Hollywood a week, he confessed that he himself didn’t want to talk about anything else.

Among those Broadway stars who appeared in his musicals: Ethel Merman (Zimmerman), Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland,  Ginger Rogers.

At one point, he decided that his musicals were too elitist. “Sophisticated allusions are good for about six weeks.”

Porter needed a singer for “Leave It To Me” (1938).  An agent appeared, “leading a dreary little girl who appeared to be the last word in scared dowdiness.  A pianist played and she sang…. A star was born named Mary Martin.” (“My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”)

“Night and Day” debuted in the film “Gay Divorce” (1932). Unique. One note is repeated 33 times over eight bars, followed by a note a semitone higher repeated 29 times.

“Night and Day” became so ubiquitous that some people were fed up. In 1944 someone wrote a song, “Let’s End the Beguine.” (Cole Porter himself.) And Porter’s Doppelganger, Noel Coward, wrote this:

She declined to begin the Beguine

Though they besought her to

And in language profane and. obscene

She cursed the man who taught her to.

She cursed Cole Porter too.

Cole was thinking of Jimmy Stewart for a role in the film Born to Dance. Could he sing? He came over and sang for Cole.  “He sings far from well, although he has nice notes in his voice, and he could play the part of a [clean-cut sailor] perfectly,” said Porter.

Stewart went to see the movie. Alas, someone else sang his part. But, later, Stewart’s voice was substituted. Perhaps Cole Porter  had insisted. Anyway, said Stewart, “They never asked me to sing in another movie again.”

Jimmy Stewart, So Easy to Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbyOCKU16gI

Sometimes Porter’s lyrics were rather risque.  Ring Lardner, of all people, thought that the line from “Night and Day”  that “There’s an oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me”  was close to being pornographic.

And Burt Lahr, the cowardly lion, objected: “When Cole got dirty, it was dirt without subtlety.”

Everyone—or so it seems—tried to devise new lyrics for “You’re the Top.” So Porter himself  forbid unauthorized parodies. He then wrote some extra lyrics for a radio broadcast—and was turned down by a network official! “But I am the composer!” expostulated Porter. “Reply: “Sorry,  no exceptions, not even for Mr. Cole Porter.”

“You’re the Top” does contain some antedeluvian lyrics. Arrow collars and Coolidge dollars? National Gallery and Garbo’s salary? Waldorf salad  and Berlin ballad?

And who remembers Cellophane, the Brewster body, Irene Bordoni, Ovaltine, and Whitney stables?

Famous People of the 1930s

On Ella Fitgerald: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” – Ira Gershwin

George Jean Nathan, the critic,  thought Porter had plagiarized a song—wrongly. Porter’s response: Nathan “wouldn’t recognize the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ unless everyone stood up.”

On Ethel Merman: Toscanini said “She does not possess a voice but an instrument in the band.” He also supposedly said that she sounded like a castrato. (Porter himself said she sounded like a band marching by.)

Re Mary Martin: She came from Weatherford., Texas. When she became famous, someone put a sign up on the courthouse lawn: “Home of watermelons and Mary Martin.” Griped Miss Martin, “Even in my hometown I didn’t get top billing.”

Re Lena Horne: She had a clause put in her contract with MGM that she would never have to play a maid or a prostitute…. She lost out playing the role of Julie in “Show Boat,” and Ava Gardner got the part. Ava Gardner stunk.

Libby Holman (Elizabeth Holtzman): Torch songs, like Moanin’ Low, were her specialty.  She was, Howard Dietz wrote, “game for anything….  A frivolous person who appeared in the nude in her dressing room, and who therefore had a lot of visitors.” She had married Zachary Reynolds, heir to the tobacco fortune, and he was shot to death in the bedroom of their North Carolina mansion, with the singer standing by. Preliminary verdict: suicide. Then Libby was indicted for murder. But the Reynolds family had the charge thrown out. Still, Libby’s career was blighted.

Libby Holman, Body and Soul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlzdNn4hRBM

Berlioz: The Genius Who Was a Bit Crazy

Hector Berlioz:   A Genius Who Was a Bit Crazy

Hector Berlioz, the French composer who lived from1803 to 1869, was a strange man. Among the things that made him strange was his tendency to fall madly in love with various women. I want to emphasize the word “madly.” And it wasn’t necessarily a beauteous Helen of Troy he would fall in love with. Later on, I’ll show you a picture of a woman whom he was madly in love with. Prepare to be shocked.

When Berlioz was young, he attended an opera by Gluck, and was so enchanted that he decided to become a composer. But his parents were not musicians and were vehemently against his writing music.

His father, a physician, wanted Hector to follow in his footsteps. His mother was also adamantly opposed to her son’s studying music. She yelled at him: “Go and wallow  in the filth of Paris, sully our name, and kill your father and myself  with sorrow and shame! You are no longer my son! I curse you!” No wonder poor Berlioz had trouble with women later in life.

   

 Hector wound up studying to become  physician. It was not a match made in heaven.  When Hector first entered the dissecting room of a hospital,  his biographer Victor Seroff reports,  he almost fainted upon seeing a litter of corpse fragments, ghastly faces and open skulls, sparrows fighting over bits of lungs, rats gnawing at bloody vertebrae, and smelling the horrible stench.

No, he didn’t become a doctor. He gave up medicine and enrolled at the music conservatory in Paris. As a result, his father stopped sending him money and Berlioz had to live in squalor, dining on stale bread, raisins, and prunes.

He was as a result much alone, as his biographer writes, and was denied the normal companionship of schoolmates. “I know perfectly well,” Berlioz wrote, “that at 25 I was still an awkward, ignorant child.”

As a composer, Berlioz was unusual, too. He didn’t play the piano. He played the flute, the guitar, and the drum. And generally he was self-taught. Not so surprising, then, that he was so original. His music had long melodies, changing rhythms, complex orchestration, Listening to operas (he could attend free), he had become so knowledgeable about the various instruments that he revolutionized orchestration. But then and now, audiences had trouble appreciating his music.  This year’s WQXR Classical Countdown had only one Berlioz piece in the top 100: The Symphonie fantastique, 98^th on the list.  No Roman Carnival Overture, no Harold in Italy.

Getting back to his love life: At the age of 12, Berlioz had become infatuated with a  woman named Estelle Duboeuf, age 18. But although he obsessed over her, for years he was so shy that he hardly dared talk to her. But don’t forget the name of his first love: Estelle.

In 1827, when Berlioz was 24, he saw a performace of Hamlet given by an English company in Paris. Playing Ophelia along with Juliet was an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, age 27. He fell in love—madly. He tried to meet her, wrote her letter after letter, but all he succeeded in doing was scaring the hell out of her.  By the way, she didn’t speak French and he didn’t speak English. Not an auspicious beginning to a happy relationship.

Harriet Smithson

http://www.oae.co.uk/hector-harriet-love-tragedy-and-the-bard/

Harriet Smithson was considered a so-so actress, but physically attractive. “Tall, well-built, and handsome” is what she was called.

Berlioz became so depressed because he couldn’t meet her that, at night, he would walk around Paris and fall asleep wherever he was. Once he fell asleep for 5 hours on a table in a  Paris café. Waiters didn’t try to awaken him because they thought he was dead.

But finally…finally…there was good news. After failing three times to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, in 1827 he finally aucceeded. (Maurice Ravel later would fail four times.) This entitled him to a five-year scholarship, three of those years to be spent in Italy.

He didn’t think much of Italy or of its music. (In general, Berlioz had very high standards.) He positively loathed Donizetti’s music. Italians, he claimed, knew almost nothing about Beethoven and Mozart. The better-educated Italians, he reported, did know that Mozart was dead. As for Italians and music, “They like music that they can absorb at first hearing, without reflection or attention, just like a plate of macaroni.” As for the city of Rome, he wrote, "Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know; it is no place for anyone with head or heart."

In Italy he met Mendelssohn, and they became good friends, even though Mendelssohn thought Berlioz didn’t have a “spark of talent” and wrote “the most horrible things.”

Meanwhile, he forgot about Harriet. For a while. He had fallen in love with Camille, and even got engaged to her. But then Camille’s mother, who didn’t cotton to the idea of her daughter’s marrying an impecunious composer,  informed Berlioz that Camille had gone and married a wealthy piano manufacturer.

Now, did I tell you that Berlioz was a little strange? Berlioz, now 29, decided to murder Camille, her mother, and the new husband. And then commit suicide. He would visit them in Camille’s home in Nice, disguised in a chambermaid’s dress. He was perfectly serious. He took two loaded double-barreled pistols and two bottles of laudanum and strychnine in his pockets (to kill himself, if a pistol didn’t work), and boarded a mail coach going to France.

 But…curses! He discovered that the dress he was planning to wear was gone! So, in despair, he threw himself into the sea…but was fished out. And at that point he decided…the hell with it.

Berlioz wrote his most famous work, the wonderful Symphonie fantastique, about this time, and it was performed in Paris. Guess who came to see it. Harriet Smithson herself! And the day after the concert he was finally—FINALLY—introduced to her! He wrote: “What an improbable romance life is!... Yes, I love her and am loved in return.”

  But Harriet was still a bit reluctant to marry Berlioz. So he did what every lover would do to persuade her. He took poison. And told her that only if she consented to marry him would he take the antidote. She consented, he took the antidote, and they were married. “She is mine, and I defy the world,” said Berlioz.

Harriet didn’t age well. Three years older than her husband, she was gaining weight, neglecting her appearance, and drinking a lot. Her career had foundered. She was also becoming crazily jealous. Well, not so crazily.

Berlioz had taken up with an opera singer named Marie Recio. As a singer, she was…not great. But she insisted on singing in all of his music performances.

Poor Harriet! She became unable to move or speak coherently, a living corpse. She required two nurses along with doctor visits every day. Still, Berlioz never stopped paying for her care. After she died, Berlioz married Marie. She died eight years later.

And then Berlioz took up with...Amelie, age 26. He had met her while visiting Marie’s grave – Amelie was also visiting a grave, and they began talking. He fought against it,  “but I was conquered by my loneliness and by the inexorable need for tenderness that was killing me.”

Still,  he was worried. “But I am 60! She cannot love me!” They broke off.  She died a year later—and he didn’t find out for six months.

Berlioz had been supporting himself by teaching and by writing about music. He was a fine critic. His book on orchestration remains a classic. His  commentaries on Beethoven, whom he worshipped, are still worth reading. But he hated writing about music.  He was also a superior conductor. He was even invited to conduct in New York City by American Steinway, but turned it down—he had become wealthy enough. I’m reminded of what George Szell said about Glenn Gould: “That nut is a genius!”

Berlioz spent the remainder of his life writing music—operas, a requiem—and touring. He made a trip to Russia—Balzac gave him a fur coat—where he was a big success. In fact, Berlioz became world famous. His father, who had bitterly opposed his becoming composer, was now proud of him and had Hector describe his accomplishments again and again. (But he never actually heard Berlioz’s music.)

        An amazing man, Berlioz preceded Fritz Kreisler by perpetrating a clever hoax, claiming that a piece he himself wrote was actually written by an old composer. Berlioz then quoted a critic as saying, “Berlioz could never do that.”

In his old age—and by old age, I mean his 60s—he decided to visit…Estelle. His first love.

Estelle’s husband had died. She had had six children. She lived with her four sons. She was in her 60s.

He wrote to her:  “You could not have known how you overwhelmed my childish heart….” And he tried to reassure her. “I shall know how to control myself.” Could he occasionally visit her, and write to her? And on and on. Blah blah blah.

And she answered him. She was flattered. Berlioz was so famous, she had just read a biography about him! But she was moving to Geneva to be with one of her sons. “Farewell, Monsieur Berlioz.  I am deeply grateful for the feelings you have preserved for me.”

He wrote her another long letter. “Oh! Madame, madame, I have but one aim left in the world—that of obtaining your affection.”

She wrote a long, sad reply. “I am but an old, a very old woman six years older than you; my heart is withered by days of anguish…which have left me without any illusions about the joys  of the world…. There are certain dreams and illusions that should be abadoned when we reach our white-haired years…. I shall always hear of your future triumphs with pleasure. Farewell monsieur.”

So, was she as beautiful in her late 60s as she had been as a teenager?

You decide.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&sa=G&hl=en&q=hector+berlioz&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAQSkAEajQELEKjU2AQaBggDCAoIPQwLELCMpwgaYgpgCAMSKPUB9wT0AbQZ-AGeEsUCsxmdB9gOny6hLqAuxDqbLsI6wzrBOvUt9SQaMD4XC1CkWYlTapFLO1nmyOQbw9hmlPWQ0uygjNgAJfW6WfbS7Q4_1C9hpuv57topIpyADDAsQjq7-CBoKCggIARIE8iKOtww&ved=0ahUKEwiv0pDnmLnKAhUL62MKHWKZCpQQwg4IGigA&biw=1159&bih=706#imgrc=PwrW5L5AaX0_0M%3A

Berlioz lived a few more years, but it was a grim old age, lonely and sad and in pain. He wrote: “I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions…. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: 'When you will'. Why does he delay?^””

He did not seek comfort in religion. “I believe in nothing,” he said.

After he died, he was buried in Montmartre Cemetary. His two ex-wives were exhumed and buried next to him.

At one time, he was numbered among the three B’s—Beethoven, Bach, and Berlioz. Eventually Brahms took his place.

And, sadly, his music was seldom popular in his native France. Thinking about his funeral, his last, dying words were said to be: “At last they are going to play my music.”

Calendar for the Age of Anxiety

Years ago, I wanted to publish an Age of Anxiety calendar. No luck.
Couldn't find a publisher. It was a good idea, though. I had collected crude illustrations from a 19th century fiction magazine....

Moanday Tearsday Wailsday Terrorsday Frightday Shatterday Sinday

Jangleary Feverary Schmerz Acheril Ruin Deny Angst Sobtember Shocktober Nervember Distemper

Some of the weekdays came from James Joyce...

Remember Movie "Chapters"?

Remember movie serials? We called them “chapters. “ Besides the main feature (or two), there were exciting short films of ten or so episodes, most of them ending with a “cliffhanger”—the hero or heroine threatened with death, perhaps tied up on train tracks with a train barreling toward them. (In the next episode, our hero or heroine would be saved in the most ordinary, disappointing way.) Some serials involved the Lone Ranger or Captain Marvel or Dick Tracy. And occasionally someday-to-be-famous people appeared—like Ruth Roman. Robert Lowery was in them, of course -- he was, it seemed, in almost every other film of the ‘40s. I remember really scary serials—for example, one in which a big horrible spider ran across the screen. And I remember a serial featuring an irresistible skimply clad  “jungle girl”—the first female I ever had a crush on! And some serials were of foot races—and you, in the audience, might win if you had the right number. And in those races there was always a funny drunk with a fancy moustache and wearing a tux. Anyone remember who that gifted actor was?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_serials

The Rise and Fall of Paul Robeson

The Rise and Fall of Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the singer/actor/political activist, was dining in a restaurant when he spotted Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe, the baseball players, at another table. He asked a waiter to invite them over, so he could introduce them to his friends.

     Jackie Robinson sent back an angry response: “Fuck Paul Robeson.”

     That’s from a biography that tells the story of the tragic life of this gifted man (“Paul Robeson All-American,” by Dorothy Butler Gilliam, 1978). Robinson was angry because of Robeson’s recent unpatriotic remarks—that American blacks would never fight against the Soviet Union, even if there were a war between the two countries. Robinson had testified before Congress that Robeson’s remarks were “silly.”

    We’ll return to Jackie Robinson later. 

     Robeson did make horrible mistakes. He had a foolish love affair with the totalitarian Soviet Union: He had never lost his wonderment and delight in discovering a country where black people were treated as equals. When the Soviets attacked Finland, he indefensibly supported the Soviets. He fulsomely praised Stalin and accepted the Stalin prize; refused to acknowledge Stalin’s anti-semitic purges or the sham 1930s trials; defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; tried to get the United Nations to condemn the United States for genocide against blacks; and never joined the American civil-rights movement because James Farmer, a prominent black, asked that he first publicly reject the Soviet Union and communism. Even when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, Robeson said it in no way altered his convictions. The agreement, he said, was forced on Russia by France and England’s refusal to help protect the Soviet Uinion,

      While he never joined the Communist party, Robeson was clearly an unrepentant “fellow traveler.”

      When he had visited the Soviet Union, Robeson said, he had felt “like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a negro but a human being.  Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be….Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”

   It was his fatal flaw—a stubborn  allegiance to the communist Soviet Union. It ruined his reputation.

      Robeson also had an unconventional married life, and carried on many affairs, apparently with the knowledge of his wife, Essie, an intelligent, helpful woman. She was justifiably furious. After a while, they just had a “companionate” marriage.

     Jose Ferrar, the actor, was married to Uta Hagen, who played Desdemona to Robeson’s Othello, and Ferrar walked in on the two of them in bed—not inside a theater. A divorce followed.

     Robeson had almost married another woman he had acted with, Peggy Ashcroft. In fact, there were a few white women he almost married—but his black friends discouraged him. They also discouraged him from joining the Communist party when he offered to, thinking it might help the cause.

    Robeson acted in a good many movies, and his most memorable performance was as Joe in “Showboat,” in which he sang “Ol’ Man River.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyJtGNk9iEU

He was so famous at one time—thanks to performances in films, plays, concerts—that just about everyone wanted to meet him, and he encountered Bernard Shaw, Harry Truman (he asked him to push for a strong anti-lynching law, but Truman said it wasn’t the right time), Lena Horne, Rebecca West, Pola Negri, Hart Crane, Heywood Broun, Mrs. Patricia Campbell, Emma Goldman, G.B. Stern, Mary Garden, Gertrude Stein, Ramsay MacDonald, Igor Sravinsky, Albert Einstein, Stanislavsky, Marian Anderson, Alexander Woolcott, Lorraine Hansberry, Zero Mostel, and Nikita  Khrushchev. 

  He became a famous singer, singing spirituals—which up to that time had been generally considered third-rate music, like the cheap food that blacks ate. Occasionally he sang opera—but said “I may sing a little opera in the morning but only in the bathroom.” His voice, writes biographer Martin Duberman, despite its warmth and richness, had a limited range. And the Met Opera, in 1933 when it featured an opera with a black man in it, “The Emperor Jones,” had a white man in blackface sing the role.

 Advised by his friend, the famous actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, to play Othello, Shakespeare’s Moor, he read the play—and easgerly agreed to play Othello. In the play, he must kiss a white woman, Desdemona. Very controversial. But he was amazingly successful as an actor. “Othello” became the longest-running Shakespearean play on Broadway. Here’s an excerpt from Robeson’s performance:

     But because of his strident and incessant left-wing activities, he became persona non grata in the United States, loathed by hoi polloi, tailed by FBI agents, who listened to his phone calls, shunned by record companies, theaters, and even by former friends. He could not escape abroad: The United States took away his passport – for eight years. People stopped attending his concerts. When he gave a concert in Peekskll, New York, the citizens of that fair city, inflamed by local newspapers, broke it up by attacking the concertgoers –and several had to be hospitalized.

     It was a time when Americans, led by that sociopath Joe McCarthy, went nuts over Communism. Communists were devils. Red-white-and-blue neck Americans saw Communists everywhere. In Texas, being a Communist was made punishable by death. (Yet in my entire life, and I’m pretty old, I’ve NEVER met a self-confessed Communist.)

      One man who remained a faithful friend of Robeson’s—accompanying him on walks to protect him, eventually serving as a pallbearer at his funeral—was actor Sidney Poitier. Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis were other faithful friends. As was Pete Seeger.

       Eventually, during a thaw in U.S.Soviet relations, Robeson’s passport was returned to him. At the Supreme Court, the liberal William O. Douglas led those judges in ruling that Robeson should get his passport back—a man’s political opinions should not deprive him of his freedom.

     Late in life he became deeply depressed. That’s what may happen to singers whose voices give out, to athletes who lose their athleticism.He tried suicide by slitting his wrists, and underwent  54 electroshock treatments. A very sad conclusion to his life.

     For a hero to wind up in disgrace is not unusual.  Lance Armstrong. Bill Cosby. Pete Rose. Barry Bonds. Shoeless Joe Jackson. (When a kid said to him, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” that he didn’t accept money to throw the 1919 World Series, Joe Jackson didn’t answer.) Sir Francis Bacon was guilty of corruption. Bobby Fischer, the chess champion, was an American hero who went crazy and turned against America. O.J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife. As for Paul Robeson, he was disgraced not because of financial greed, or sex, or taking illegal drugs, or murder, but because of his political views.

                                                                        +++

Robeson was born in Princeton, where his father was a minister—children of ministers tended to be remarkably successful. After Somerville High School, he took a test and attended Rutgers on a full scholarship – he was the only black there. He tried to join the football team--he was 6 feet 2 and 240 pounds. In a scrimmage the Rutgers varsity zeroed in on him, breaking his nose and inflicting other injuries. But ten days later he returned—and made the team—and then made the All-American team three times. He received letters in ten or 12 other sports at Rutgers—along with making Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and becoming valedictorian.

Being black, he was not allowed to live on campus. And some schools, like William and Mary and Georgia Tech, wouldn’t play Rutegrs in football because Rutgers had a black on its team. Rutgers did play against Washington and Lee—after Rutgers agreed to bench Paul Robeson for that game.

            He decided to go to law school, and chose Columbia over Harvard. As a lawyer, he joined a prestigious firm and asked a secretary to take a letter. Said she, I don’t take dictation from a nigger. He resigned.

     Robeson didn’t complain about it, but in the U.S. and even in Europe he was subjected to racial prejudce. He had to use the freight elevator. When his light-skinned wife bought two tickets to a play, he was told he couldn’t sit in the orchestra with her. When he wanted to eat, in the Times Square area, he almost had to travel to Harlem to find a place that served blacks. When he was preparing to sing at a concert in Kansas City, the newspaper, the Star, agreed to run a story about it—but without a picture. The paper never ran pictures of black people. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, he and his wife were scheduled to check into a hotel—but were told at the last minute that it didn’t accept blacks. But the hotel relented. The Robesons were given a room on the first floor, so they wouldn’t be seen from the elevator, and told to use the side stiarcase, to eat in their rooms, and to “make themselves as inconspicuous as possible.” A newspaper critic for the New York Telegram didn’t acccept Robeson as Othello. The critic wrote: “There have doubtless been truly tragic negroes—but they are not really representive of their  rather happy go lucky race.”

     This disgusting prejudice against blacks existed not long ago—and it still exists.

      I remember inviting a black friend to join a bunch of us in going out to dinner. I can’t, he said, I need a shave. So, go to a barber and pay for a shave, I said. He looked at me and said, no white barber around here would shave me.

     In high school, in New Jersey, there were no blacks in my classes. Finally, in my senior year, I saw a black kid who had enrolled in our school playing softball. White kids were gathered around him…hooting.

     I had a black cleaning woman at one time. She asked me, can I use the downstairs bathroom or must I go upstairs? Use the downstairs one of course, I said. She looked grateful. I’m still shocked.

    I worked at a magazine with the sister of writer James Baldwin at one time. We would go out to lunch together. We always would bring a third person along. A white man with a black woman wasn’t acceptable.

                                                                        +++

Asplendid book about Robeson is by Martin Bubl Duberman. 800 pages. When people ask m how I spent the summer of 2015, I’ll say, I read this book…

  In his old age, Paul Robeson returned to the United States. This was his country and he missed it. He was ill and depressed, going in and out of hospitals, seeing visitors only seldom. He tried suicide by cutting his wrists. He underwent electroshock therapy—52 times—before dying. A very sad conclusion to his life.

     What really hurt him was that he wasn’t invited to take part in the civil rights movement. Black leaders felt that Robeson’s pro-Soviet views would hurt the civil rights struggle. A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkens, even Martin Luther King Jr. felt that way. So they didn’t invite him to speak, they didn’t give him any credit for the entire civil rights movemenbt.

    You remember that Jackie Robinson had cursed Paul Robeson? Yet Robeson, almost alone, had campaigned to have black players admitted into baseball! Jackie Robinson should have been grateful.

   On the other hand, Jackie Robinson, years later, became somewhat disillusioned with the slow progress of black freedom, and he said, “I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson who, over the span of twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people.”     

     Unlike Robeson, Jack Robinson could admit making a bad mistake.

                                                            ***

But the disgrace into which Robeson fell has been lifting. We Americans are a forgiving people. In 2004, the U.S. even issued a postage stamp in honor of Paul Robeson. And there were celebratons all over the country.  

http://www.bayarearobeson.org/StampsFullStory.htm

     In sum, Paul Robeson was a good man, an amazingly gifted man, who went very wrong. He was too stubborn; too loyal to a country tht didn’t deserve loyalty. How misguided his impatience was is shown by the fact that Barack  Obama is now our President. Paul Robeson would have been amazed—and very, very pleased. And yes, he deserves some of the credit.

Recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnXyGr668wg

Ballad for Americans

Documentary, Here I Stand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUki-v-NvoE