Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  Four days later, following an all-night recording session of the Tchaikovsky First with Kondrashin and the Symphony of the Air, Van was the featured guest on CBS’s Person to Person, the hit show that peered into the homes of public figures. In his case, “home” was the rococo suite at the Pierre, where multiple television cameras had been set up. Trademark cigarette in hand, Edward R. Murrow introduced the guest from the studio, then swiveled toward a big screen showing Van and his parents seated on a couch. After calmly explaining that beneath the “Hollywood glamor type of sensational publicity,” music was “really quite nerve-wracking, tedious, and quite demanding,” Van stood up to give Murrow a tour of the suite and of his Soviet souvenirs. When Rildia Bee talked about her son’s early fondness for playing, Van interrupted to say that it was true he was always famous for it, but “if it interfered with any of my outside activities or my friends, I never quite enjoyed it.” Harvey began to speak, but Van overrode him to tell America that his father’s great love was medicine and “he would have been a most fantastic doctor.” He broke into Russian to recount his acceptance speech in Moscow, then sat at the piano and dashed off a few bars of “Nostalgia,” which he described as “a mood picture after a short story I had read when I was fifteen, by Jack London.”

  The next morning, Van rented a white-and-baby-blue Lincoln Continental convertible and drove with the top down to Valhalla, a commuter hamlet twenty-five miles from Midtown Manhattan. In the backseat was the lilac shrub, which had finally emerged from quarantine, and the jar of soil from Leningrad. Drivers banged their horns and shouted, children leaned out to wave, and Van grinned and waved back. In the cemetery, he planted the sapling on Rachmaninoff’s grave and laid a floral piece before the Russian Orthodox cross, the flowers red, white, and blue for the Soviet Union and the United States. As the press looked on, Kondrashin scooped up some soil to return to Tchaikovsky’s grave, while Rachmaninoff’s daughter gave Van her father’s lucky coin, a small Czar Nicholas five-ruble gold piece.

  After that, the Soviet gifts were packed off to Steinway Hall, where more than two thousand of them went on public display. The Cliburns were moving out of the Pierre, and Rildia Bee and Harvey were heading home, but the question was where Van should go. Fan letters and telegrams were still pouring into his Osborne apartment, engulfing the tiny rooms, but to landlords, pianists were worse than dogs. Several rejected him the moment they heard his name, and for the time being he squeezed back into the old place.

  It was a strange life he had begun leading, half American and half Russian, half homey and half grand. One day he stepped out to a Horn and Hardart automat for a dollar dinner and found his neighbor reading a newspaper article headlined VAN CLIBURN SIGNS MILLION-DOLLAR CONTRACT. Nor was his the only life that had changed. Before she left town, Rildia Bee was a guest on the legendary CBS panel game show What’s My Line?

  ON JUNE 1, Kirill Kondrashin flew back to Moscow laden down with Van’s parting presents: a silver Tiffany table service and a life-size FAO Schwarz Russian bear. But Van was unable to manage without his number two papa, and less than two weeks later, Kondrashin rejoined the Cliburns in London after Van cabled a personal request to Khrushchev. “I wish you the greatest success in your remarkable creative work,” the Soviet premier wired back. On June 15 the two musicians brought seven thousand cheering Londoners to their feet in the presence of the American and Soviet ambassadors, and after thrilling Amsterdam, Van went on to the Brussels World’s Fair.

  A town-size conglomeration of exhibition halls and national pavilions had been erected on a plateau outside the Belgian capital, with the adjacent American and Soviet displays vying to create the biggest stir. The Soviets had already asked Van to perform with them, which added to the worries of Bill Schuman and his Music Panel that the USSR was saturating the fair with talent. But America got in first, and on July 5, Van appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the expo’s Grand Auditorium. It was lunchtime, an inauspicious hour in Belgium for anything but lunch, but the arena was sold out. In the audience was a leading student of Rildia Bee’s Russian teacher Arthur Friedheim, who knew nothing about Van beyond what he had seen in the headlines. When Van began to play, the man was sure he had heard the identical sound before: the same poise and great, rich sweep; the same uncanny pedaling and mastery of detail. Then he sat up with a start. “I listened to Cliburn with my eyes open,” he later wrote, “and I knew that Arthur Friedheim was playing again, as Liszt played before him.”

  After a performance in Paris, Van flew home to fulfill one of the few engagements he had made before Moscow: two concerts in Chicago’s Grant Park—at his old fee of eight hundred dollars, for the pair. When he arrived in the Windy City on July 15, a waiting troupe of Kilgore Rangerettes draped themselves over him. A wailing police escort whisked him to his hotel, where the brass band of the Moolah Temple in St. Louis serenaded him with “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You” and its interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s First, while teenagers who had mounted a vigil in the lobby flew at him. The following evening, hundreds of policemen struggled to hold back the crowds as Van’s motorcade nosed through. Seventy thousand turned out to watch him, spilling far into the distance beyond the twelve thousand seats; the previous season’s record was eighteen thousand, for Carmen. Two days later Van played to eighty thousand, wearing long johns under his tails and nursing a fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit; it was after that evening that the Elvis Presley Fan Club of Chicago forsook the King of Rock and Roll and voted to relaunch itself as the Van Cliburn Fan Club.

  The mega concerts kept coming. July 31, it was the Hollywood Bowl, whose twenty-two thousand seats Van filled two nights running. This time he netted eighteen thousand dollars, but his biggest thrill was the chance to mix with the stars. Noted anticommunist Cecil B. DeMille and his niece Agnes lent him their piano for practice and threw him a lavish post-concert party. Norma Shearer asked him to play at her dinner soiree, where the guests included Clark Gable, Joan Fontaine, and Arlene Dahl. In his first semester at Juilliard he had played at Dahl’s wedding reception to make some extra money, and he reminded the flamboyant actress that she predicted he would become a big star. Shearer set up movie screenings for Van at MGM, and he ate with Danny Kaye and visited with Jack Benny, Merv Griffin, Greer Garson, and Ingrid Bergman. Van loved Hollywood with its tinsel glamor, and Hollywood pressed him to its well-padded bosom.

  Three days after the Bowl, he was back in New York for a benefit to rescue the indebted Lewisohn Stadium, a colonnaded amphitheater on the City College campus that was the summer home of the New York Philharmonic in pre-air-conditioning days. With tickets at double the regular price, a record audience of 22,500 crammed in, and hundreds more lined the windows and rooftops of nearby apartment buildings. A watching critic sensed an enormous hunger for beauty: “Going toward the back for the slow movement of the Rachmaninoff,” he wrote, “one heard the romantic strains which were being gratefully received by thousands of upturned faces. One needed a Cinemiracle eye to take them all in, yet hardly one of them stirred.” At the end they went wild, and made Van play seven encores. But if confidential reports were true, the concert nearly ended in tragedy. The next day, two FBI special agents were interviewing “a prominent individual in New York City,” also described as “a wealthy real estate operator,” about a separate matter when he told them that Van had come to his apartment at four o’clock that morning in a state he described as “extremely emotionally upset.” The developer added that his family physician had been with Van, and the two had explained that following the Lewisohn concert, Van’s father “came backstage and caused a great disturbance” by pulling a gun on the physician and threatening him for influencing his son with “liberal ideas.” The man described Harvey as “very conservative, politically, and possibly a Ku Klux Klan member.” The whole scene, he added, “was observed by Soviet Diplomatic officials, and Van Cliburn is greatly upset over the incident.” The developer had notified his contacts in the NYPD’s Nineteent
h Precinct to see if they could pick up the gun; the reason he was telling the FBI, he said, was because “he felt that a ‘valuable piece of propaganda’ like Cliburn should be protected from any type of emotional or physical upset.” The reliability of the information was clouded by the fact that Van’s father was referred to as “Frank,” but J. Edgar Hoover was sufficiently concerned to pass the information on to the State Department’s director of security.

  ONE OF the transfixed faces in Lewisohn Stadium that evening belonged to the Moscow Conservatory’s Sergei Dorensky, who had arrived July 7 as part of the first group of Soviet exchange students since World War II. Wearing plaid shirts and floored by New York’s summer heat, the students had visited the United Nations, taken in Broadway shows, and gone on a Circle Line boat tour during which the guide pointed out a large building near Grant’s Tomb as Van Cliburn’s school. When Dorensky returned to Moscow, Khrushchev bustled up to him after a concert and asked how Van was. News also reached Van of a conversation between Khrushchev and an American in Moscow. “I felt very sorry for your young musician, Mr. Cliburn,” the premier reportedly told the visitor. “He never had a minute’s rest the entire time he was in our country. We were so enthusiastic about him, he was so acclaimed, so much in demand, that we doubt that he ever slept.” Khrushchev added that Van was “a very warm, friendly young man who absolutely captivated the Soviet people” and had drawn the two nations closer together.

  Van was still hoping to reappear at the World’s Fair, this time with a Soviet orchestra. He had already cabled his acceptance when he told the press that he was unsure if he could go, almost certainly because he had been warned that the U.S. government had taken an interest in the issue. By then the Soviets had already put up posters announcing his arrival, and in early August they brought the matter to a head by tipping off the American press. Van had been looking forward to escaping the New York heat at a series of swimming parties, but instead he flew to Washington to seek official blessing for the Soviet linkup.

  There had always been tension at the heart of Cold War cultural diplomacy between joining hearts and winning minds. What to peacemakers was the art of fostering friendship was to warriors a tool for demonstrating their side’s superior values and diminishing the enemy’s credibility and appeal. The psychological warfare approach was dominant, and from that perspective, Van was a mixed blessing. Certainly he proved that an American could play the piano as well as any Soviet, which was no mean thing. Yet, rather than promote avant-garde music (as the CIA advocated) or American music (as the State Department advised), he loved Russian culture, believed it was the greatest in the world, and said so, loudly. Besides, he kept blurting about the Soviets wanting peace, which to foreign policy professionals was dangerously naive. When Van finally got a hearing, State Department officials made it clear that they disapproved of him playing at the Soviet pavilion on the USSR’s showcase National Days. Amid hurried consultations, that hurdle was overcome when the concert was recast as a commercial enterprise sponsored by a Belgian impresario in a Brussels concert hall. Still, after several days Van returned to New York deflated and defeated by bureaucracy. “Officials here said that it was not up to them to say whether a concert artist could perform,” the press reported. “They said only that the United States had no objection to his playing at the commercial concerts.”

  Van flew to Brussels for the unsanctioned concert, which took place on August 17 in the presence of Elisabeth, the Red Queen. Along with the rest of the audience, she loudly applauded the determined efforts of orchestra and pianist to cede the limelight to each other, as did the New York Times’ Howard Taubman. “A young American and 100 Russians made music together stirringly tonight,” he reported, “showing an audience of Western Europeans on holiday that at least on this one thing the United States and the Soviet Union were in perfect accord . . . There have been intimations in certain quarters that it was wrong of Mr. Cliburn, an American, to appear with a Soviet orchestra in the World’s Fair forum, where competition in the performing arts between the two major powers is keen. But the pianist’s willingness to appear and the Russians’ to have him is a credit to both.” The Soviets scarcely lacked virtuosos of their own, and by intimating that nationalism had no place in music, once again they occupied the moral high ground ceded by the U.S. government.

  Whether at the State Department’s instigation or in response to its concerns, Van went on to Heidelberg, in West Germany, and played for the servicemen of the U.S. Seventh Army. Photographers snapped him scanning the jukebox at an airport snack bar, where he eventually spent a nickel on Vaughn Monroe’s “There’s No Piano in This House.” Afterward the army flew him back to Washington, and the navy flew him on to New York. Van quietly dropped his idea of taking his parents for a vacation by the Black Sea, but he was not about to abandon his Russian friends, and he began to plan a tour of the Soviet Union for spring 1959.

  BY NOW he had gained back seven of his ten lost pounds and was thinking of having his clothes let out again. Yet having returned from Moscow with just two of the efficient Soviet sleeping pills, he had not slept two nights together for months. A cigarette was constantly in his hand except when he was playing, and for breakfast he nibbled at hamburgers washed down with coffee. The nerves, the diet, and the absurd schedule were beginning to take their toll. Throughout the summer, he was plagued with toothaches and carbuncles, and spent hours a day at the doctor and dentist.

  Audiences at home and abroad were still clamoring to hear his prizewinning program, but the critics were beginning to gripe about the lack of a new repertoire. Even though he had turned down far more engagements than he had thought of procuring before Moscow, it was impossible to find time to practice, polish, and perfect. There were lawyers, accountants, record company executives, and agents to deal with. Tributes kept coming: one made him an honorary citizen of Minnesota; another, the Lotus Club’s youngest honoree. Accepting an honorary doctorate from Baylor University, he returned his four-thousand-dollar fee to make endowments to the departments of religion, law, drama, and music in honor of his great-grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, and mother, and jointly with Harvey donated ten thousand dollars to establish a fund for the orchestra. There were offers of movie and TV appearances; he accepted a guest spot on What’s My Line? but with some reluctance turned down most, including the lead role in two Hollywood biopics of Liszt. There were press conferences to give, such as the one he called that September—he was no slouch at publicity—to announce he was donating his remaining Moscow winnings to New York City’s cultural program. Even when he took time off to attend the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, eyes were as much on him and Rildia Bee as on the stage. Amid it all, he somehow found time for acts of remarkable altruism. When he heard that a New Yorker with whom he shared a doctor was dying of cancer, he asked the man’s family to hire a piano and lend him an apartment key and he turned up late, once in white tie and tails and another time in plaid shirt and jeans, to play Rachmaninoff. He played through the nights until, one morning, he was softly crooning along to Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me” when the sun came up and the patient was gone, borne away on a soulful tide.

  When the new season began, he practiced from midnight until at least 6:00 a.m., back in the Steinway basement for fear of annoying the neighbors. His weight dropped again. In desperation, he tore out his precious phone. Messages left with the Osborne switchboard piled up unanswered, provoking accusations of bigheadedness from old “friends” that leaked to the press. He was disloyal to no one, just completely overwhelmed. For one thing, he had a demanding young fan base to tend to that was unknown to other classical musicians. That summer, his RCA Victor recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 hit the top spot on the Billboard LP chart, beating Johnny Mathis’s Greatest Hits and the South Pacific sound track, and stayed there for seven weeks. “At Victor these days they mention the names of Presley and Cliburn in one breath,” Billboard reported. Teenagers played th
e Tchaikovsky down the phone to each other, puzzling their parents by running up huge bills. Parties of girls waited patiently until a restaurant table Van had once sat at became free. One girl refused to wash for weeks when he signed her arm. When a girl in Minneapolis wrote asking if he could play at reduced prices for teenagers, he opened all his rehearsals to children and students, for free or at a low price set by the orchestra or school board. Hundreds, including dating couples, turned up to the first, in New Haven, Connecticut, and afterward some wrote to thank him “from the bottom of our hearts.” In Scarsdale, New York, eighteen hundred teens cheered as he walked in, tossed his jacket onto a chair, and sat down to rehearse Schumann’s Concerto in A Minor. Outside, the police caught two fans trying to climb in through a restroom window and held back nearly five hundred more, who stood in freezing autumn rain craning to catch the faint strains through the doors. “To watch Elvis I could understand,” a traffic patrolman marveled. “But for this crowd to sit quiet and listen to Van Cliburn play it straight—this is a revelation.” Afterward the fans swarmed up for autographs; whenever Van grew tired he remembered he was only a few years older than many of them. Appreciating classical music no longer meant being derided as a longhair: that was the Soviets’ gift to the Americans. The music of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff was now more popular than ever before. Van had claimed it back, reminding the nation of the bond it shared, if not with the Soviet Union, then with the Russian people.