Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  Spinning and kicking, barracking and blustering, Khrushchev continued his ungainly gopak on the international stage. His embrace of the young American pianist had stunned the world, but it remained to be seen if Van and his beloved music would prove to be partners in peace or pawns in a brutal game.

  • 12 •

  “He Played the Piano and the World Was His”

  ON BOARD the departing SAS flight, Van watched Russia recede for a long while before looking down at a card that a spokesman for Soviet musicians had slipped in his hand at the last minute. It was another touching paean to an unforgettable few weeks and a heartfelt plea for him to return soon. Yet again he choked up, but during the short flight to Copenhagen there were plenty of thoughts waiting to crowd in. Could anything in his life match up to this feeling he was carrying away? What did his extraordinary stroke of fortune signify? How was he ever to live up to it, when the Leventritt Award had seemed an onerous responsibility? And what did it mean that if the piano competition he’d won had been in Berlin, scarcely anyone would have noticed?

  The plane was late arriving, and Van missed his connection to New York. While he waited for the next flight an enterprising reporter tracked him down, and he gave a telephone interview. “I’m going home with the most exciting memories of my life,” he gushed. “There are moments I will never forget. Of course I will go back to Moscow one day to play there again. Russian audiences inspire me. All Russians are very warm. They’re sweet people. The only thing that the Russians want from the Americans, English or Scandinavians is to meet them in an atmosphere of friendship, sincerity, and mutual understanding. I’m glad to be going home but still I’m going to miss Russia. I have friends there in the world of music and this friendship will live forever.”

  Eventually the new flight began boarding, and the hostess came over.

  “Oh!” she said, “you’re the one on the magazine!”

  “What magazine?” Van asked.

  “Time magazine,” she replied. “Your picture is on the cover.” She fished out her copy, and there he was, drawn with a pained expression and reddish hair waving like a sea anemone. A banner across the masthead read: THE TEXAN WHO CONQUERED RUSSIA. On the reverse, unpromisingly, was a full-page advertisement for the “CONVAIR-Astronautics’ ATLAS . . . the free world’s first ICBM,” with a color picture of a giant rocket rising into the night amid furies of fire. The U.S. Air Force had just conducted a successful test flight of the burly missile, which was touted as “a vital weapon for our national security and a key to ultimate peace.”

  Van turned to the lengthy cover story, “The All-American Virtuoso.” After reading a few words, he shuddered with dismay. “Ah swear to goodness, ah just can’t believe all this is happenin’ to li’l ole Van Cliburn from the piney woods of East Texas!” it began, purporting to quote him, Van. It made him out to be a comic rustic, “as Texan as pecan pie.”

  He read on. There was private information about his failed relationship with Donna, his health troubles, and his debts, which were said to be so heavy that he “took to such money-saving devices as playing classical music for his supper in Manhattan’s Asti Restaurant.” There were lines about his childhood being hell and his schoolmates thinking him queer, things he had never intended people back home to read. There were intimate descriptions of his preconcert routine and his fits of sobbing, including at Richter’s recital, which made him sound kooky. Over and over, there were private words spoken to just one person: a cynical aside about the prospect of “all those people making money out of me” as offers rolled in; moments of elation after his Moscow concerts. “I tell you, these are my people,” he read himself quoted as saying. “I guess I’ve always had a Russian heart. I’d give them three quarts of blood and four pounds of flesh. I’ve never felt so at home anywhere in my whole life.” Paul Moor, his purported protector, had betrayed his confidence. Or, rather, Van realized to his chagrin, he had trusted in Moor’s discretion. He would never make the same mistake again.

  The plane banked through dense clouds and landed at Idlewild at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, May 16, four hours late. The crew let Van off first, and as he climbed down to the wet tarmac, photographers came running. Flashbulbs flared, movie cameras whirred. Like a pro he stopped and smiled, stretching his arm out to wave.

  An official diverted him to a packed conference room. He glimpsed his beaming parents in the last row, but reporters surrounded him, shouting questions. One brandished a copy of Time.

  “Why does this say, ‘These are my people?’” the man demanded.

  “Who put those words in my mouth?” Van retorted. He had brooded all the way home and had steeled himself for an inquisition. “I actually said, ‘These all remind me of Texas people.’” His welcome in Moscow had been so warm, he explained, that he was certain there “must be a little bit of Texan in the Russians.”

  “And I told them so,” he brightly added, spotting a group of hometowners who had come up from Texas to welcome him back. Mrs. Leo Satterwhite Allen’s speech and dramatics training was finally coming in handy.

  “You said Khrushchev was a nice man,” a journalist stated accusingly.

  “He was to me,” Van evenly replied. “I only saw him socially. He was nice to me, and I was nice to him.”

  “You must think you’re a big success,” another taunted.

  “Oh no, I’m not a success,” he politely demurred. “I’m just a sensation.”

  How did he feel, asked another reporter, about playing Carnegie Hall before some of the biggest names in American music?

  “In general, I wish I didn’t have to do it,” Van drawled.

  He scanned the faces in the close, low-ceilinged room. They looked mildly disappointed. Clearly they had come expecting a flaming Red sympathizer or at least a self-important upstart, and all they got was a prim young man who was dying to hug his parents. The New York Times noted that the pianist looked even younger than he was and acted correspondingly: he called his father “Daddy” and his mother “Honey” or “Sweetie.”

  The Cliburns set off for Manhattan in a limo, with Van’s luggage following—except for the lilac shrub, which had been impounded by the plant quarantine authorities. The family’s destination was not Van’s little apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street but the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, one of the city’s most elegant addresses. The elevator whizzed them up to the plush calm of a twenty-second-floor suite overlooking Central Park. Van’s eyes opened wide, especially when he discovered that his parents had an adjoining suite. In one of his two living rooms his eyes fell on a Steinway parlor grand, and he shot over, his hands eagerly sweeping up and down the keyboard.

  The sun pierced the blanket of clouds and flooded the tower suite with spring light. Porters began wheeling in luggage, and Van fell on it, eager to show off his souvenirs and tell the stories behind them. Soon the piano and every piece of furniture were piled high with an astonishing twenty-five hundred items, among them samovars, silver spoons and tea services, medallions, woodcuts, etchings, oil paintings, music scores, albums, photographs, and leather-bound books. Some were intended for Rildia Bee, including “a gold and white satin evening bag with matching white kid gloves, amber and silver jewelry, beautifully packaged bottles of perfume, samples of modern Russian ceramics and antique Russian enamels, and cigarette boxes fashioned of malachite.” Several moved Van to tears, including a little plate painted with Tchaikovsky’s portrait that a boy violinist in Riga, who had received it for his birthday, had shyly proffered.

  People arrived. Bill Judd was there with Van’s new press agent, Elizabeth Winston, trying to settle him down. A Life photographer was snapping away, and a New York Times reporter looked on, making notes for a piece that was splashed over the morning’s paper along with photographs of some of Van’s loot, including a sculpture of his head:

  “He hasn’t had one bite to eat since 8 o’clock,” Mr. Cliburn said, talking pure Texan. “I carried him out to the doctor just to see if he was all
right. He was, but he’s got to have some rest.”

  Meanwhile, Van was inviting stragglers into the suite, hugging his mother again and assuring her that he really was all right and that there was every reason to celebrate.

  “Honey,” he said, “let’s learn where we are.”

  He warmly greeted everyone who got near him, and when one man offered to spare him another handshake, remarked, “Oh, stop it.”

  As he became convinced that the visitors showed no tendency to harass his son, the elder Mr. Cliburn shyly pointed out some of the gifts Van had brought back.

  “Just look over there,” Mr. Cliburn said, almost in a whisper, pointing to the corner of a sofa. “That little top and those dolls.”

  After a few hours’ sleep and a visit from the hotel barber for a much-needed haircut, Van was back at Idlewild to greet Kirill Kondrashin, honored artist of Soviet Russia and winner of two Stalin Prizes, whose visa had been rushed through just in time. The Russian emerged into brilliant sunshine and said a few words to an AP reporter about Van’s Moscow triumph. Then the two hurried to the waiting limo and went directly to Carnegie Hall, where the Symphony of the Air was already assembled.

  Outside the hall, Van’s cornflower-blue eyes peered from a large poster advertising his concert the following evening. A green-lettered banner partly obscured his face and announced: SOLD OUT. A growing crowd of disappointed fans was trying to convince the doorman that they should be allowed into the rehearsal, and when they spotted Van they swarmed round him. “Are you Harvey Kilgore?” asked one man, thrusting out his hand. After the rehearsal, another crowd surrounded him as he made his way toward Sixth Avenue and dropped into a diner for a Coke and some American cigarettes for Kondrashin.

  Back at the Pierre, the Cliburns and Bill Judd conspired to restrain Van for the rest of the day. The drapes and blinds in the living room were drawn against the sun, and in the half-light Van and Kondrashin sat down at a lunch table with a record company boss, a concert manager, and a conductor, who talked business in somber, hushed tones. Van was more interested in making Kondrashin feel at home, and they communicated in a mix of hugs and gestures, cigarettes in hand. Abram Chasins, the chairman of Van’s Leventritt jury, dropped by with his pianist wife, Constance Keene, who as always was dressed head to toe in red, and Chasins thought he had entered a wake. Van got up and showed them into the other living room, where the Russian booty was arrayed. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he whispered, as if he half-believed there would be a knock on the door and it would all be carted away—though the bigger risk came from Chasins, a notorious kleptomaniac, who carried a card signed by a psychiatrist to prove it. Every so often, Manhattan hostesses caught him in the act of palming the spoons at dinner and firmly told him to hand them over.

  Three penguin-suited waiters wheeled in wagons piled with sizzling steaks, chops, and cutlets. Judd wrote Van’s name on the check and added a large tip. Van jumped up, looked over his shoulder, and turned white. “Can we afford this?” he murmured.

  In the Liberty Music Store a life-size model of Van sat at the grand piano. Down on Broadway, the Time sign blazoned his story in tall neon letters. That night, its subject was back among the pipes and strip lights of the Steinway Hall basement. He had an audience even there, and the Life photographer never stopped snapping away.

  THE NEXT evening, scalpers were unloading tickets outside Carnegie Hall for one hundred fifty dollars a pair, compared with the regular prices of fifty cents to five dollars. The advance demand had been the heaviest in the hall’s history; hundreds, probably thousands, had been turned away. An enormous crowd was milling around in every conceivable manner of dress, from voluptuous ball gowns to jeans and sneakers. The music pack was out in force, but there were also people who had never been to a classical concert and had been drawn by the excitement.

  Inside, it was punishingly hot. Every one of the 2,760 seats was taken, and there were far more standees than the regulation eighty. Rosina was there, anxious and still a little peeved at Van, with Mark Schubart and Bill Schuman. Mikhail Menshikov, the elegant, ebullient Soviet ambassador known among the diplomatic corps as Smiling Mike, was watching. So was Rachmaninoff’s daughter, Princess Irina Volkonsky. The New York City mayor was present, along with nearly every notable critic. Only one important person was missing: Sascha Greiner, the Steinway veteran who had lunched with Van until he agreed to go to Moscow, had died a week after Van won.

  Backstage, Van’s only pair of shoes was distracting him. A sole had come loose, and he fastened it with a rubber band. He said a prayer with old Benny, the faithful Carnegie Hall artists’ attendant, before striding toward the low doorway that led onto the stage. On his way through he thumped his head on the lintel, but he quickly recovered with a rueful smile and bowed modestly to a polite, expectant ovation. His tails looked enormous, the trousers billowing round his skinny frame. He sat down and got up again. The seat was too high, and he tried to wind it down. It jammed, and he sighed, shrugging to the audience. He tried twisting the knobs again and shook his head. If he was aware that he, a twenty-three-year-old not yet four years out of Juilliard, was about to be measured against the greatest pianists of the age, he gave nothing away.

  He stilled himself, lifted his hands, fixed his gaze on Kondrashin, and played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1. A few nervous smashes caused an anxious ripple, but he settled into a restrained, bravura performance. Unorthodox ovations broke out between the movements, just as they had at his debut four years ago, and at the end the audience leaped, shouting, to its feet. As Van embraced Kondrashin, the orchestra joined in the ovation. Only two people, sitting in a first-tier box, were silent: Harvey sat with his hands folded in his lap, and Rildia Bee kept her gloved arms placidly crossed. “She really is bursting,” said a friend seated nearby. It was, thought the Times critic, “tremendously moving . . . They seemed not so much bursting with pride—and perhaps disbelief—as transfixed by it.”

  Van headed backstage and changed his sodden shirt. Moscow had been something else, but there was a reassuring fixedness to this place he knew well. “I’m so happy to be home again,” he said, and minutes later he emerged to play Rachmaninoff’s Third. Another roaring standing ovation brought him back six times for three encores, and while he was still bowing, half the audience rushed the backstage doors. For the first time in the hall’s sixty-seven years the green room became a dangerous crush, and the orchestra’s huge instrument room was opened up. Even that grew so full that photographers climbed on tables to get a clear shot. To the ushers’ horror, Van looked each fan in the eye, gratefully shook each hand, and gravely autographed the proffered programs. “What do you play?” he asked teenage musicians. “Who is your teacher? What are you studying now?” A journalist who was writing an article titled “Van Cliburn at Home” for the popular Soviet magazine Ogonyok shook the hero’s hand but was swept away before he could ask for an interview. He wrote the piece anyway, and did manage to tell his readers that Van’s friends were now calling him Ivan.

  Rosina scribbled her congratulations on her program, sent it upstairs, and headed back to Claremont Avenue. Outside Carnegie Hall, on Fifty-Sixth Street, a cordon of policemen with locked arms were struggling to restrain a throng of ticketless fans. “Jeepers, I wouldn’t even wish this on me mudder-in-law!” panted a young cop.

  “We can all breathe easily now,” the papers reported the next morning: “The Russians were right.” The note of relief was unmistakable, but the thought behind it was unspoken. If Van had disappointed, why would the Russians have given him the prize? Surely it would have meant there was a political stitch-up at work? Even now, some Americans found it easier to believe that Eisenhower’s office had talked to Khrushchev’s office than that one of their own was the deserving winner, though it would probably have been the first time in history that two government heads had discussed the arts, let alone a music competition that had been well off their radar till Van won. “Over and over again,” a reporte
r noted shortly after Van’s victory,

  the question last week has been: “Is this Van Cliburn really that good?” It was asked by people who were delighted with his triumph in Moscow and were eager to believe the best. It was asked by a skeptical few who cannot rid themselves of the prejudice that a foreigner is somehow automatically superior as a virtuoso to a tall young man from Texas. It was asked rhetorically by some who were convinced that this was just another example of Russian duplicity.

  Yet, if he really was the best, why had it taken the Russians to tell them so? A letter to Time pointed out the irony that the flap over a Soviet competition winner “would seem to indicate that the U.S. is the latest country to become a Russian satellite . . . Are we to understand that American artists will henceforth have to pay their obeisance to Khrushchev before they can hope to be recognized in their own country?”

  The fact was that the Old World’s blessing had always helped aspirants to make it as artists in America. The fascination with Van’s victory, though, went far beyond music. After the shock of Sputnik it was the first sign that America could rise to the Soviet challenge and win—win, moreover, on the Reds’ home ground, in a contest of their choosing. Perhaps it ran still deeper. Cultural insecurity, along with manifest destiny and a Protestant work ethic, had made America the powerhouse of the world. Yet, at this point in U.S. history, with the country’s dominance far from guaranteed, Americans were desperately in need of reassurance. Van had given it to them, in the very field where the nation felt most inferior to the Old World, and no one could have been more American than a blue-eyed blond Texan who loved big cars, mouthed folksy wisdom, and crooned “Blue Moon.” In 1958 he was a hero from central casting, to teenage girls the perfect bachelor, to their parents a squeaky-clean role model, an anti-Elvis who was said never to drink or smoke and who drew crowds like a musical Billy Graham with his message of spirituality and greatness from out of the heartland. As for the fact that he adored Russian culture, preached a gospel of friendship not victory, and was trailing a Soviet conductor everywhere he went—these were minor snags in the thick canopy of satisfaction.