Emanuele Berry

She is going to take us inside a very big American life.

A man who became one of the most famous people in the world and then all of a sudden was not.

This story is hilarious and moving and it is very messy.

Stay with us.

It's This American Life, Act One, The Was It Couple.

So, Nicole Hill has a podcast that I love called Our Ancestors Were Messy.

Every show is a true-life saga that she tells someone, and there's of course drama and glamour and heartbreak and poor judgment, all the best ingredients.

Some of these stories are about capital-F famous people, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson exists in this weird twilight, right?

Like, I think he's still famous enough that a lot of people know his name, but probably in a way that's like, oh, yeah, he sang that song, right?

Old Man River.

And it is shocking, as you'll see, that this is all that's left because Paul Robeson was so famous.

Like, I can't even think of a modern celebrity to match how big he was.

He was an athlete, an actor, a singer.

It's like he would have sung the national anthem at the beginning of the Super Bowl, played in the football game, and then performed the halftime show.

He was also a lawyer and spoke a bunch of languages, including Russian, Greek, Swahili, and French.

His wife, Eslanda Robeson, Essie for short, was also famous, and also an everything-at-once type person, scientist, writer, anthropologist.

So what the hell happened to these two superstars that now America barely knows who they are?

Well, you will find out not just what happened, but also how and why.

And you'll see what a marriage between two superstars looks like, inside and out.