The first black superstar

Paul Robeson was the first concert performer to refuse to appear before segregated audiences, the first to politicise Negro spirituals and the first African-American screen actor with attitude.

The son of an escaped slave, the internationally renowned civil-rights activist was duly blacklisted in 1950 by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for suspected communist sympathies. So synonymous was Robeson with rebellion, in short, that when the young Truman Capote was advised by a fellow Southerner to stay away from "Negroes and commies", he famously quipped: "You mean, I mustn't have an affair with Paul Robeson."

No chance of that. The staunchly heterosexual Robeson, whose artistic affinities with London are celebrated in a new exhibition at Covent Garden's Theatre Museum to coincide with Black History Month in October, had love-affairs with women throughout his married life. His bestknown conquest was the luminous young Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona to his Othello in 1930 at the Savoy Theatre; but all his extra-marital relationships are unflinchingly documented in a new biography by his son Paul Robeson Jnr, a 73-year old journalist, translator and lecturer. "I tried to make dad human," he explains on the phone from his home in Brooklyn. "He always was a free spirit; even if he had been reincarnated five times, he would never have been monogamous."

Despite the "Red Robeson" reputation, Paul Jnr insists his father was a free spirit in the political sense too. "He was an inspirer who would only go to rallies to sing. I was a communist from 1948 to 1962, but dad never joined any political party."

Currently, he's working on volume two of the biography, which will allege that the CIA drugged his father with LSD in Moscow at the height of the Cold War in 1961.

"It was a professional hit: dad was on his way to visit Cuba at Castro's invitation three-and-a-half weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion. And there are a lot of fingers that also point towards the collusion of MI6 with the CIA."

Yet according to Paul Jnr, his father found London, which he made his second home for 17 years before and after the Second World War, "vastly more tolerant about race than America". Robeson had first come over in 1924 to share digs at 6 Regent Street with fellow black American, Lawrence Brown, a musician working on arrangements of spirituals. He went on to make his theatrical name here as the plantation slave Joe in the musical Showboat, at Drury Lane, and in his long association with the Left-wing Unity Theatre, where the young Michael Gambon, Warren Mitchell and Bob Hoskins started out.

As for his cinematic career, he shot Sanders Of The River at Shepperton Studios and The Proud Valley, his penultimate and most radical film, in the mining community of South Wales. There are also contributions to the exhibition from the private collections of historian Stephen Bourne and black archivist Leon Robinson, but the rarest items on display will be Paul Jnr's collection of prewar family snapshots of an icon at play: "Dad had this funny side that he could never show; he always had to be on his dignity in public."

Yet his adopted city did not always give him the open-hearted welcome he found in the Welsh valleys. A month after the announcement that Robeson would play Othello opposite Ashcroft, he and his wife Essie were refused service at the Savoy Grill next door to the theatre because of the colour of their skin. And recently, residents have lodged mystifying objections to the plan by English Heritage to put up a blue plaque at 19 Buckingham Street, where the Robesons lived longest. The family's subsequent home at St Alban's Villas, in Dartmouth Park is now being considered as an alternative.

In a curious postscript to the Ashcroft affair, Paul Jnr found himself making an emotional trip back to London to meet his father's former mistress.