Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  “Liz, wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to display to the world that Johnson isn’t a hick, a hillbilly, that Texans are something besides cowboys and fiddle bands?” he had asked. “Why don’t we get Van Cliburn down?”

  “But this is a barbeque,” Carpenter had objected. “We can’t present Cliburn at a barbeque.” Still, Cactus persuaded her, Lady Bird Johnson approved, and LBJ picked up the phone. Hoover, at sixty-eight still vehemently in charge of the FBI, summarized the conversation in a memorandum that was distributed to senior staffers:

  President Johnson called and asked what I know about Van Cliburn, the musician. I advised him that Van Cliburn is a homosexual.

  The President then asked if there is any reason why Van Cliburn should not play for the White House, and I replied that there is no reason why he shouldn’t. The President remarked that most musicians probably are homosexuals and I told him a great many are.

  Johnson secretly recorded the rest of the exchange on his Dictaphone Dictabelt. Hoover added that Khrushchev had given Van a great deal of publicity while he was in Russia, but that Van’s eager response was not politically motivated. “It’s more, as I think, exhibitionism,” he explained. “But he’s a great pee-yanist, and I would see no reason why he couldn’t be used for entertainment purposes.” With the FBI director’s political and critical blessing, the president called Carpenter. “Edgar Hoover says Van Cliburn’s all right so I guess you can go ahead and invite him,” he said in his husky drawl.

  After supervising a candle-lighting ceremony at Lincoln Memorial that marked the end of thirty days’ mourning, Johnson flew home for Christmas. On the twenty-eighth, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of the Federal Republic of Germany landed with a large entourage. The next day, Van arrived at the Johnson ranch, also known as the Texas White House, and was handed a red-checked shirt and jeans. When he gathered that he was supposed to get into them before he played, he demurred and insisted on wearing white tie and tails.

  “But Van,” pleaded Carpenter, who came from the sleepy Bible Belt town of Salado, Texas, “they haven’t ever seen a tuxedo in Stonewall.”

  “This is a concert for the chancellor of Germany,” Van protested, aghast at the lapse in decorum.

  “But you’ve never seen Stonewall!” Carpenter and Bess Abell, Lady Bird’s social secretary, chorused. After a long debate a compromise emerged in the form of Van’s regular business suit.

  The clapboard gymnasium had been Western-themed in what Carpenter called “artistic rustic fashion,” with bales of hay, red lanterns, a tack shop’s worth of saddles and lariats, and yards of bunting in the German and American colors. A mariachi band welcomed the dignitaries for a chuck wagon meal of barbecued spare ribs, deer meat sausage, and hominy grits accompanied by Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann. Afterward the president shooed the party into the pasture, where they stepped gingerly over what Vice President Hubert Humphrey called “the Republican platform,” so Johnson could show off his prize herd of Texas longhorns.

  “He was a man,” Carpenter once said of LBJ, “like the raw land he came from, hard limestone land with twenty-seven inches of rainfall a year. He was as strong and open as the West Texas hill country.” Not all the European visitors relished the drastic change from the elegant formality of JFK’s reign, but the entertainment was unexpectedly well chosen: before he became an economist and then a politician, Chancellor Erhard had wanted to be a concert pianist. The “Spare Rib” summit ended with commitments to closer cooperation and renewed efforts at assuaging East-West tensions.

  As he turned thirty, Van had become America’s national pianist, a treasure to be wheeled out on state occasions. In 1965 he played Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1 at the president’s inaugural concert after “Landslide Lyndon” received the highest-ever share of the popular vote. He was featured at the White House Festival of the Arts, a presidential pat on the back for America’s artists that turned into a public relations catastrophe when the poet Robert Lowell declined his invitation on the front page of the New York Times in protest at the escalating Vietnam War. That Christmas, Van attended a White House state dinner for the returning German chancellor, and then accompanied LBJ home to Texas aboard Air Force One, with Rildia Bee at his side. The two families went way back: Johnson was virtually an adopted son of the Cliburns’ old friend Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn.

  In 1965, Van returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since his unplanned visit three years earlier. With the world awash in Beatlemania, he once again passed for a rock star in a country where the Fab Four were outlawed as hedonistic and corrupting and where students still danced at parties to scratched 78s. True, he was a different kind of rock star: instead of destroying hotel rooms, he liked one so much that he bought its entire contents, including the drapes—or so it was said. With his Romantic devotion, natural aristocracy, and golden boy looks, he was still every bit a kumir, an idol. He was mobbed in Kiev and Leningrad and Novosibirsk, the press coverage was incessant, and in Moscow the Van Club danced in constant attendance. But there was no doubt the times were grayer and cooler and less sincere. The kind of personal relationship he had had with Khrushchev was impossible under the doughty Brezhnev, and official Moscow was closed to him.

  It was the first real rebuttal in seven extraordinary years. Van had always been easily discouraged and prone to paranoia, convinced that he “was not in good favor in certain places,” and despite his strong Christian faith, he had looked to alternative spiritual systems for answers. Now, less sure of himself than ever, he turned to the occult for the comfort he craved. He was hardly alone—American pianist Byron Janis was an ardent believer in the paranormal—but his dabblings went far enough that they attracted the attention of the FBI. While he was in the Soviet Union, the Bureau recorded numerous conversations between Van and a female “medium or spiritualist” living in the Bronx, who was “maintaining very close control over the subject’s activity.” A report to J. Edgar Hoover noted that Van was “completely dependent” on her and “obeys all her orders” and gave some excerpts from their long exchanges:

  MEDIUM: You seem disturbed.

  VAN: I am.

  MEDIUM: Do not hold a negative thought. [She says she has received a message that the spirits of all the great musicians are standing around him, holding positive thoughts and helping him.] The mind rules the body.

  VAN: Could I have a shot tonight?

  MEDIUM: Could you do it yourself?

  VAN: Yes, I feel I need it every day.

  MEDIUM: Twice daily will keep you above normal.

  VAN: Should I have some beer tonight?

  MEDIUM: Yes, it will relax you.

  VAN: Will they like my conducting?

  MEDIUM: Yes. I had a vision.

  VAN: I hope you will project to my mind so I will not make any slip.

  MEDIUM: The forces will be with you.

  VAN: The Embassy is short of tuna fish.

  MEDIUM: Send tuna fish to the Embassy. It will make a good impression.

  VAN: Daddy fell. Should I call a doctor?

  MEDIUM: No. It is painful but he will be all right.

  HE WENT home discouraged, but from a distance the Soviet Union still figured large in his life. In the summer of 1966, Kirill Kondrashin joined him at Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell concert venue and at the Hollywood Bowl, to resume their performances of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. In September, LBJ threw a reception at the White House for the five American prizewinners in that year’s Tchaikovsky Competition, and Van was master of ceremonies. Harvey and Rildia Bee were there among a lineup of musical royalty, including Rosalie Leventritt and pianist-entertainer Victor Borge, the author of a famous crack about Van: “Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 and was a rather obscure musician until 1958 when he was discovered by a Texan.” That same month, the second Cliburn Competition took place in Fort Worth. Twenty-year-old Radu Lupu, who was Romanian but had trained at the Moscow Conservatory, won first prize in a reduced field that was more
than half American. To Van’s dismay, the Kremlin had banned Soviet competitors from taking part, in protest at the huge American troop increases in Vietnam.

  That at least was the public explanation. In truth, both superpowers were losing the automatic support of their youth that had been taken for granted in the conformist 1950s. The Shook-Up Generation of New York and the Beat Generation of San Francisco had their bored, cynical counterparts in the Soviet Union, reared on pure Marxism-Leninism but the despair of the party. “LOST GENERATION” BAFFLES SOVIET; NIHILISTIC YOUTHS SHUN IDEOLOGY, headlined the New York Times. The stilyagi were long gone, and remembered almost nostalgically; the newly disaffected youth were more materialistic and drawn to anything Western, “from a new hair-do to a belief in democratic freedoms.” Girls wore nylons and spike heels or black cotton stockings and ballet pumps. Guys called each other “zhentlmen,” said things such as “tip-top” and “okay,” and sported Ivy League haircuts, fringe beards, tan slacks, and narrow italianate ties with horizontal stripes. Jeans, known as “kowbois” or “Texas trousers,” were rare but could be counted on to infuriate party propagandists. Both sexes read The Catcher in the Rye and danced to Western music played by Russian jazz bands or taped from the Voice of America. “Can you show us how to do the twist?” they asked foreign visitors, between trying to discover the truth about the West. By no means were all troublemakers: many were the educated sons and daughters of high officials, kids who spent their evenings hanging out at top hotels, including the National, where the hot bands played. “Komsomol bully squads rout them out of the restaurants and cafes and send them home,” the Times reported. “Photographs of them are plastered on billboards under headings: ‘Parasites, Get Out!’ They are shipped to the virgin lands or the construction sites of Siberia.” Yet nothing won them back to the cause. A few leaders quietly wondered how belief in a system that purported to be perfect could have been so easily lost to mass apathy. Most were content to revoke Khrushchev’s limited freedoms, lock up dissidents in mental institutions to be cured of their infectious desire for free speech, and support Brezhnev when, in 1968, he ordered tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

  The bloody echo of 1956 further deepened the disillusion of the Western left with Soviet-style socialism. Still, there was always Mao’s China to make the Kremlin look like a model of enlightened governance.

  IN 1961, Liu Shikun had returned from Moscow to take up a post as piano teacher at the Beijing Conservatory. That same year he had married a daughter of Ye Jianying, a prominent marshal of the People’s Liberation Army. The top leadership attended the wedding, and Mao invited Liu to play at his home: “They told me Western music was not very nice,” Mao said afterward, “but what you played was very nice. We cannot totally reject Western music and arts.” Liu’s future seemed assured when, in 1964, he was sent to live with a farmer in a Shanxi province cave dwelling with no running water and bricks piled on a stove for a bed: not as a punishment but as part of the Four Cleanups campaign, which assigned intellectuals to learn from peasants and purge themselves of reactionary thoughts.

  By the time he was recalled two years later, the Cultural Revolution was already under way. Launched by Mao to “save” Communist orthodoxy from bourgeois infiltration and restore his authority after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, it soon consumed the entire nation in an orgy of denunciations and violence. Both Western music and the “feudalistic music of the old capitalistic China” were favorite targets; in their place, musicians were ordered to play “revolutionary songs which glorify Mao and are inspirational and fill one with courage.” At the Beijing Conservatory, which not long before had invited Van to tour China, students formed gangs of Red Guards and pounced on its president, Ma Sicong, a venerated composer who had been a judge in the violin section of the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. Some threw a bucket of glue over his head and covered him with posters—one denounced him as a “Blood-sucking ghost”—while others beat him with belt buckles and boards full of nails and made him march round banging a stick on a pot. At the Shanghai Conservatory, more Red Guards denounced Gu Shengying, the other Chinese competitor in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. Unable to bear the humiliation, she sent a parcel of chocolate to her father, who was still in jail, then swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and turned on the gas. She was just twenty-nine. In the same city, a whole family of classical musicians gassed themselves, while out of rage or mental derangement, a conductor tore Mao’s Little Red Book to pieces and was shot in the head. Vast though it was, China had no room for such gentle types.

  Liu returned from the countryside to find himself already the target of a campaign by a group of Red Guards calling themselves the Mao Zedong Thought Combat Team Revolutionary Committee General Service Station. At their rallies he was declared a “second-rank ghost and monster” and ordered to wear a paper hat identifying him as “Counterrevolutionary Musician Liu Shikun.” Conservatory students kicked him, spat at him, and made him confess to shaking Khrushchev’s hand and subscribing to Soviet revisionism. Eventually they arrested him and locked him in a storeroom with his colleagues. Each day, the prisoners were woken at six and set to read Mao’s Selected Works or newspaper articles before being marched off to clean toilets, break stones, and chop firewood. Sometimes they had to crawl like animals, eat grass, or stand facing a wall for hours. In the evenings, they wrote confessions and sang the “Howling Song,” with its chorus of forced masochism:

  If I speak or act without permission,

  May you beat me and smash me,

  Beat me and smash me.

  The Red Guards serenaded Liu with his own ditty:

  Liu Shikun you bastard,

  Now you can surrender.

  If you do not tell the truth,

  You may quickly die . . .

  One of his students repeatedly beat him with his fists and a belt, fracturing a bone in his right forearm. Ma Sicong, meanwhile, had lost thirty pounds and was too weak to pick up his violin bow. After he had tried to commit suicide several times, a doctor diagnosed him with hepatitis, and he was allowed out to seek treatment. He donned overalls, hid his violin in a bag of tools, and fled. In January he and his family escaped on a small boat to Hong Kong and defected to the United States. More than fifty of his relatives and friends were rounded up; three died, and many were jailed, including the doctor, who received eight years for his solicitude.

  Liu did not try to escape, and after a year the Red Guards marched him to the public security bureau, where he was charged with spying for the Soviet Union and sent to prison. There he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured to extract proof that his father-in-law had spoken and acted against the party. By attempting to slow the pace of the Cultural Revolution, General Ye had crossed Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, whose Gang of Four happened to control the Central Special Case Committee in charge of the young pianist’s case. Eventually most of the general’s family and household were arrested, including Liu’s wife and their little boy’s nanny.

  Hardly any sunlight penetrated Liu’s cell, and his hair turned white. His daily rations consisted of a moldy cornmeal bun and two bowls of briny water with rotting leaves infested with nourishing worms. In cold weather, puddles turned to ice, and with only a cotton prison uniform and thin blanket for cover, he suffered from frostbite. He had no contact with the outside world and worried that if he died, no one would know what had happened to him. The only news came from the propagandistic People’s Daily, a copy of which a guard threw in the cell each morning and collected at night. One day Liu was moved to a new cell and discovered half a copy of the paper on the floor. In his mind, he had already composed a letter to Mao, and now, one by one, he cut out the characters from the newspaper with a twig that had broken off a broom, sticking them together with morsels of the steamed buns. When the letter was finished, he waited for an opportunity to smuggle it out.

  Months and then years went by, but one never came. As he bowed to Mao’s portrait and conf
essed to his own imaginary crime, he mainly thought about staying alive. Sometimes his mind turned to the piano, and he practiced in his head or mentally composed a concerto. In those moments, he often thought about Van’s playing at the competition, which had affected him so much. He puzzled over what it was that had made it sound improvised. Was it the influence of American jazz and pop music? If so, how could he absorb that himself? But that brought him back to his present surroundings and made him even more desperate to get out.

  ON OCTOBER 14, 1967, Van landed in Washington, DC, to play an evening recital at Constitution Hall and too late realized he had left his concert apparel on the plane. So he did what any celebrity with high-placed friends would: he called the White House. LBJ told him to come over, and he was cleared to enter at 6:32 p.m. There was precious little time before the concert, and Sgt. Ken Gaddis, the president’s valet, had been given time off to attend a football game. The staff flew into a panic.

  Presidential aide Sgt. Paul Glynn was at home when the White House operators tracked him down. Johnson came on the phone. “Paul, I sure need some help,” he said. “I gave Ken the afternoon off, and Van Cliburn has lost his black tie, he left it on the airplane. Can we do something? What size am I?” Glynn indelicately told the fifty-nine-year-old president that Van was a young man, and LBJ’s dress outfit would be too big. “I’ll call you back,” Johnson said, and minutes later he was on the phone again. “Paul, come on in,” he said, “and we’ll do it.” Glynn had barely had time to get ready when the phone rang a third time. “Haven’t you left yet?” growled the president, who was notorious for giving reluctant congressmen the viselike “Johnson treatment.”

  Glynn sprinted into the White House at 6:47 p.m., found Johnson in the pool, and headed up to the family quarters. Van was practicing at the piano. Ken Gaddis ran in as well, troubled as to what was so important that he had been summoned from the game. The two men began to fit Van into LBJ’s suit. At six feet, three and half inches, Johnson was the tallest president but one—Lincoln had a quarter of an inch on him—and almost a match for Van. But Johnson ate as he drank and womanized, to fill an unfillable pit, and the pants hung loose like a clown’s. The aides doubled them twice in the back and pinned them. The jacket needed less pinning, but the white shirtfront billowed like a full sail and would not sit smooth. When Van was all dressed and pinned in, he changed into his regular clothes and went down to the pool, where Johnson made him get into the suit again so he could take a look. It was 7:45 p.m.