Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  Kennedy and Khrushchev stared each other down across the German fault line. In the end it was Khrushchev who blinked first.

  At midnight on August 12, 1961, GDR troops lined up across Berlin. The next morning, the streets along the Eastern side of the border were torn up and 124 miles of barbed wire was rolled out around the Western zone. Within a week, concrete blocks went up, and then guard towers. Western leaders did nothing; some wondered what had taken the Soviets so long. A broad gash running across the city was preferable to an East German offensive or an attempt to seal off West Berlin completely; besides, the wall had unlimited propaganda potential as a concrete symbol of Eastern Europe’s captivity.

  To regain the advantage, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would end its self-imposed nuclear test ban by exploding the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built, a 100-megaton monster with the combined force of six thousand of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response, Kennedy finally stepped out of his crouch and did what Eisenhower had never dared. Armed with compelling evidence from new spy satellites, he tore up his own election platform and called Khrushchev’s bluff. Administration officials revealed that the Soviet Union had never come close to outstripping America’s nuclear arsenal. “We have a second strike capability,” explained the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, “which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.” Khrushchev retaliated by giving the go-ahead for the test shot on October 30. Last-minute adjustments cut the predicted yield by half, to lower the risks of widespread fallout and the fireball’s consuming the delivery plane. Even so, windowpanes broke more than five hundred miles away. Yet the device, which became known as the Czar Bomba, was nuclear posturing: a white elephant that was too big and heavy to deliver by ICBM or carry very far by bomber.

  As well as delivering a fiery riposte to Kennedy, Khrushchev had timed the bomb to explode on the penultimate day of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when more than four thousand delegates were assembled in his newly completed Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Among the diversions laid on for them was an exhibition at the Manezh, the old czarist riding school (next to the Kremlin), which had recently become home to the Central Exhibition Hall. Prominent among the contemporary Soviet artworks were “at least three busts of Van Cliburn.” No other American could have sat comfortably amid the great Soviet jamboree of ideological reaffirmation, but for all his anger at America’s leadership, Khrushchev had not lost his reformist zeal. The show of nuclear might gave him the cover he needed to shovel more manure over the corpse of Stalinism. Already he had pushed to retitle cities, factories, and landmarks named after the dictator: Stalinabad, Staliniri, and Stalino would henceforth be known as Dushanbe, Tskhinvali, and Donetsk. As new revelations flew and the state media luridly recounted a litany of “monstrous crimes” that cried out for “historical justice,” the biggest acts of revisionism were left for the Congress’s approval. On October 31, Stalin’s embalmed body was removed from Lenin’s mausoleum and reburied near the Kremlin Wall. Days later Stalingrad, the reborn symbol and proof of the dictator’s victory in the Second World War, was renamed Volgograd. For the Chinese delegation it was the last straw. They walked out of the Congress and would never attend one again.

  When the Czar Bomba went off, the United States immediately resumed testing with a series of small underground shots followed by larger-yield atmospheric and high-altitude tests, popping off dozens of nuclear devices like fireworks at intervals of two or three days. Kennedy’s revelation had grabbed back the atomic advantage—with real deployable weapons, not hot air. Yet, as Eisenhower had suspected, the price was to humiliate the Soviets and play into the hands of Kremlin hard-liners.

  MUSIC, JOHN F. Kennedy once remarked, was important “not just as part of our arsenal in the cold war, but as an integral part of a free society.” Unlike Ike, he attended concerts regularly—Van played for him twice—relying on Jackie to tell him when to applaud. And unlike its predecessor, his new administration was intensely relaxed about using Van as a political weapon.

  In February, with the Bay of Pigs invasion imminent, Van had made a goodwill tour of Mexico with spectacular results. His concerts sold out, he was mobbed in the streets, and when he attended a bullfight, the stadium shot to its feet chanting his name. He turned beetroot red and shyly waved, while in the ring, Mexico’s foremost matador dedicated the doomed toro to the young pianist. Days after the Berlin Wall went up, Van had made his West Berlin debut with the Radio Free Berlin Symphony, earning the useful headline VAN CLIBURN PLAYS FOR FREE BERLIN. When The Ed Sullivan Show taped an episode at West Berlin’s Sportspalast, with Van playing a Chopin polonaise to an audience of Allied military personnel, he was mobbed by screaming female fans like a chastely classical Elvis.

  Musically as well as diplomatically, in 1961 Van charted a new course. For three years he had studied conducting with the venerable German-born maestro Bruno Walter: “I recognize the divine spark in your nature and musicianship,” wrote Walter, who unsuccessfully tried to introduce Van to anthroposophy, the spiritual system founded by Rudolf Steiner. Walter became a cherished mentor, and their sessions proved invaluable when the New York Philharmonic invited Van to conduct Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3 from the piano at a few weeks’ notice. After he played an afternoon recital at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, a police escort rushed him to the airport in time to make the flight to New York, where he headed straight to Carnegie Hall and pulled off the Prokofiev to good reviews.

  Three years after his Moscow victory he was constantly on tour, playing the biggest arenas in cities nationwide and abroad. He performed with all the great orchestras and developed an especially strong partnership with the Chicago Symphony, recording Beethoven and Schumann with the great Fritz Reiner. His LP of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3, recorded at Carnegie Hall on his return from Moscow but long delayed while he agonized over a few wrong notes, reached the top ten and won him a second Grammy. At the end of 1961, RCA presented him with a gold disc for his Tchaikovsky First, which Variety noted marked “the first time that a long-hair artist has come up with a million-seller on an individual disk.” His fees, starting at six thousand dollars per performance but often doubled by his share of the box office, were the highest in the business. Percentage takers attached themselves to him like remoras on a shark, but he had plenty left over to liberally endow orchestras and establish scholarships, including one at Juilliard in Rosina Lhévinne’s name. She had been swamped with students since his victory made her the world’s most famous piano teacher, and every New Year she received hundreds of greetings from Russians saying, “Thank you for sending us Van Cliburn!” The two remained affectionately in touch, though sometimes she wrote complaining that he was impossible to get hold of and had unaccountably deserted her, and once, she grumbled—perhaps while slurping the mound of caviar that she had taken to having nightly with dinner and never offered to anyone else—to Van’s old friend Jeaneane Dowis, who was now one of her assistants, that she couldn’t understand why he had never attempted to repay her for the free lessons she gave him before Moscow.

  Van’s life was spent in airports, hotel rooms, and halls, or traveling between them. Stewardesses became his friends; on one flight the attendant turned out to be his old Latin teacher and childhood crush Winifred Hamilton. With the house in Tucson rented, he had no home of his own and no intention of getting one. In 1961 the Osborne went co-op after residents banded together to save it from demolition, but instead of buying, Van moved along West Fifty-Seventh Street to the modest Salisbury Hotel, which perched on top of Calvary Baptist Church. Gary Graffman bumped into Van carrying his furniture down the block. One room served as his combined office and living room, with the Steinway lid piled with sheet music, a carved wooden troika, and a bronze-tinted bust of Chopin that Rildia Bee had given him for an early b
irthday. When he was away from New York, the hotel rented out his apartment on the understanding that he could keep his piano there. Kilgore remained his legal residence until his parents moved back to Shreveport for Harvey’s work: Magnolia had now become part of Mobil Oil, and Harvey was the area representative for its new crude oil and liquid gas department. Van changed his permanent address to Shreveport.

  Not having a home did not deter him from splurging on antiques. Harvey panicked that his profligate son was going to fetch up in the poorhouse, and on one visit he proposed various ideas for investments. “Oh, Daddy, I just don’t have that much to invest now,” he demurred. “Did you buy something else?” his father said, frowning. Van loved pretty things so much—Sheraton furniture and Russian imperial silver were among his favorites—that he couldn’t resist. Yet he was cannier with money than he gave out. A financial adviser in California purchased a good deal of West Coast property on his behalf, including strip malls and residential complexes that provided a handsome return even if they failed to delight their tenants. One struggling actor checked into the Halifax, a rat-infested pile owned by Van off the crack alley section of Hollywood Boulevard, and described it as “the crappiest hotel in history.” Most of the residents, the man recalled, were “retired character actors who were living out their golden years in Van Cliburn’s dump.”

  Van would have been horrified. He was as modest as ever, an endearing mix of celebrity and small-town boy. He was friends with everyone, from Frank Sinatra to Placido Domingo, whom he introduced to each other, and ate at Club 21 and the Oak Room. Yet he also sat for hours talking to budding musicians at gatherings such as the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan, sharing ice creams and munching through heaps of hamburgers between rehearsing, playing, and sometimes conducting as often as three times in a day.

  Fame had not spoiled him, but neither had it improved his concept of time. He became notorious for turning up late for rehearsals or recordings and for disappearing to make epic phone calls. Before concerts, he seemed oblivious to the waiting audience; beset by nerves, he would lock himself away in his dressing room, praying for the strength to play until he found the comfort he needed, or furiously chain-smoking for half an hour until the moment was just right. Increasingly he canceled engagements on short notice. Rildia Bee was the only person who could discipline him, and in 1962 Sol Hurok took her on as her son’s tour manager. “Well he’s a nice boy, but sometimes I could just wring his neck,” she deadpanned, or something like it, while sitting backstage and following every note. Soon she was with him nearly all the time, which stopped Harvey from fretting about his wayward son—at the cost of being increasingly left on his own. Van gave in gracefully and loved having his mother there. He trusted her advice and, after putting up a show of independence, invariably followed it, and she cushioned him from the pressures of fame. Mother and son became famous for staying up all hours, wrapped in the quiet of night, which was comforting and cozy and put paid to any lingering thoughts that Van might have entertained of having a romantic life.

  • 18 •

  Endgame

  IN MOSCOW the Second International Tchaikovsky Competition got under way in April 1962. Since Van’s victory, Soviet musicians had been furiously racking up awards, winning twenty-seven first prizes and thirty-five second and third prizes at thirty-nine international competitions. Yet being humiliated at home a second time was an intolerable prospect, and the rigorous selection procedures were quietly scrapped. Instead, “Madame” Furtseva, the all-powerful minister of culture, pulled seven leading pianists into her office and ordered them to take part. Among them was Vladimir Ashkenazy, who tried to explain that the Tchaikovsky concerto was not good for his small hands; he received short shrift. Ashkenazy had recently married Thorunn Johannsdottir, and the ministry had already warned him that his career would be finished if his foreign wife refused to become a Soviet citizen. Scared of getting more strikes against his name, he gave in, and to the authorities’ considerable relief, he won joint first prize with British pianist John Ogdon, which was enough to save Soviet face. An American, Susan Starr, shared second prize with a Chinese pianist, Yin Chengzong, confirming an unsuspected depth of talent in both countries, but all but one of the remaining prizes went to Soviet competitors.

  Van missed the contest. Unlike most musicians, he could not simply drop in on the Soviet Union, play a concert or two, and move on. A Cliburn visit was a national event in which critics pored over his every note to detect minute changes in style, fans spent their savings to join him at every stop, and journalists sought his views on the state of the world. Even in his absence the Soviet media pestered their American intermediaries to obtain interviews with him or information about his activities. One Moscow journalist commissioned a contact to procure Van’s salutation to a conference of Soviet painters and artists; another requested and received greetings “addressed to his friends, the people in the USSR on the anniversary of the October Revolution.” Russian friends and officials kept in touch with him by phone, and the FBI logged the conversations. One piano graduate of the Moscow Conservatory told the Bureau that she was hoping Van might urge Khrushchev to let her mother join her in America. For all his political insouciance, he was aware that everything he did and said concerning the Soviet Union had an impact. “Some politicians maintain that the world of art and music is a closed isolated world,” he told the Soviet news agency TASS in an interview from New York. “I do not share this opinion. Arts and music play a tremendous part in getting people of various nations closer and in establishing mutual understanding and friendship.”

  In the spring of 1962, with relations between the Kremlin and the White House plumbing new depths, Van embarked on a European tour with no plans to visit Moscow. Yet when he reached Finland he found, to his surprise, that the Soviet government was urgently seeking him out.

  THAT MAY, Nikita Khrushchev paced alone around a park on the Black Sea with several puzzles on his mind. He was still itching to repay the Americans for the U-2 imbroglio, which, by upsetting his planned reforms, had loosened his grip on the party. Since then Turkey, which bordered two Soviet republics, had become host to American Jupiter-class intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could hit Moscow, as could American missiles already in Britain and Italy. Meanwhile, new glitches were plaguing his ICBM program, and though Soviet scientists had tested a new antiballistic missile system, it was a long way from being operational. Slowly but surely the balance of power seemed to be slipping to the West.

  As he walked back and forth to the sea, Khrushchev hit on a possible solution. To deter further attacks on Fidel Castro, help spread revolution across Latin America, and give the Americans a taste of their own medicine, he would secretly install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Perhaps it also crossed his mind that Van had stayed in his Black Sea house, because it was only days later that the Ministry of Culture tracked Van down in Helsinki and invited him on short notice to a festival of modern music that was under way in Gorky, some five hundred miles from the Finnish capital. Rildia Bee, who had come along as Van’s companion and handler, urged him to accept, and he cabled Anastas Mikoyan to make the necessary arrangements.

  The Cliburns went directly to the vast Gorky Automobile Plant, home to a Ford assembly line that had been shipped from Detroit in the 1930s and reassembled by Americans fleeing the Great Depression. The venue was the plant’s newly completed Palace of Culture, a monumental complex resplendent with marble columns, stained glass, and crystal chandeliers. Kondrashin was there to conduct the hastily arranged concert, and peeking at the audience from behind the curtain, Van experienced a rare moment of joy. “I saw the faces of people who understand every movement in a musical phrase, the subtlest tone,” he explained to a journalist from Moskva magazine. “I heard that there were many workers in the hall and I wanted to play for them.” None of the faces belonged to Americans: Stalin’s regime had taken away the immigrants’ passports, forced them to become Soviet citizens, and,
during the purges, executed most and sent the rest to Siberia. Blissfully unaware of anything beside the music, Van sat in front of the massed ranks of autoworkers and played Prokofiev’s demanding Piano Concerto no. 3.

  After two days, he and Rildia Bee set off for Moscow, also at the government’s invitation. It was late when they checked into the National Hotel, but Van walked over to Red Square and lost himself on the cobbles among the pigeons. Khrushchev naturally knew of his arrival and decided to make a fuss over one American he still counted as a friend. So that Van could rehearse undisturbed, the premier offered him use of one of the large new Politburo mansions on Lenin Hills. The Cliburns had no choice but to accept, but soon afterward Viktor Sukhodrev received an urgent call from the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, the department responsible for guarding Soviet leaders and sensitive facilities. The secret policeman explained that the visitors were thinking of moving back to their hotel, which could be seen as slighting Khrushchev; since Sukhodrev was friendly with Van, the KGB man asked, could he dissuade them?

  Sukhodrev sped over to Lenin Hills and found the Cliburns dining with the composer Aram Khachaturian, who was eating strawberries wrapped in smoked sturgeon. The interpreter joined them and smoothed the way by revealing that Khrushchev had inquired after Van’s health—a sign of favor, Sukhodrev marveled, that was not even accorded to foreign leaders—before making an eloquent plea that the guests should stay put. Van listened attentively and replied that he was very grateful for everything, but his mother had taken to the National and had already got to know the maids and staff. She was sad, and he missed the cozy hotel, too, with its lady admirers who brought him flowers and souvenirs and turned his room into a shrine to its resident deity. Sukhodrev reported his failure to the mansion commandant, and Van and Rildia Bee packed their bags.