Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  On May 22 the president and the First Lady arrived in Moscow and settled into a large but not overly comfortable suite in the Kremlin Palace annex. The following evening, Van opened his first Soviet tour in seven years in the Great Hall of the conservatory. To his astonishment the years had not dimmed his fans’ ardor. Hundreds of women waited outside the hotel, applauding and shouting, “Vanya!” and “Vanyusha!” At the concert they swooned and threw flowers and went wild, and the line to see him backstage snaked round the building as he found the right words for each fan. Afterward the Mikoyans welcomed him back to the House on the Embankment. “What happened to you?” he said when Aschen Mikoyan opened the door. The last time he had seen her she was a teenager; now she was twenty-two, gamine, and pretty, with dark wavy hair, and she had a son. She also still had a crush on Van and, since he always called her “darling,” reason to believe it was requited.

  Roberta Peters was amazed all over again by the power Van held over regular Russians. He was an even more imposing presence now, with an otherworldly aura of grace that drew people in and put them at their ease. When she complained that she couldn’t get hold of the best caviar, he called over the maître d’ at the National (where he had managed to move) with the natural authority of a returning Romanov. “Anything for you, my dear maestro,” the waiter said, and produced a giant can of beluga. Still, the atmosphere was even tenser than before. The guests at the National were ordered to keep their shades down, and when an official car was due to pass by, KGB officers knocked on doors to ensure they had complied. One morning Van was woken well before nine o’clock by a secret policeman, who insisted on watching from Van’s fourth-floor window as Nixon laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, across the way. “Why did he have to do it so early?” Van said with a moan.

  There were even signs that subtle differences over Van’s musicianship had hardened into something stronger. “It’s hard to recall any major performer whose tour received such varying reviews, such sharp conflicts of opinion, as Van Cliburn’s recent concerts,” noted Sovetskaya Muzyka. “‘The pianist of the century,’ ‘the great conquering skill,’ and, right next to it, ‘boring declamation’ and ‘provincial sentimentality.’” Nor did Van’s welcome cause the old stir back home. “Cultural exchanges have settled into a decade-old pattern,” noted Max Frankel, now chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times but back for Nixon’s trip:

  Van Cliburn is here playing the piano and Roberta Peters is singing in recital, and they are impressing the same old audiences and embracing the same old friends.

  Moreover, the Soviet leaders seem to have found the formula by which to protect their political system from alien ideological viruses. They are yielding on pants for women and rock music for the young, but they intend to tolerate nothing that Mr. Nixon has in mind when he speaks of a free exchange of ideas. The warmth above does not seem to reach the permafrost below. Moscow is not Peking, but it remains farther still from Washington.

  And Washington remained a world away from Moscow: Western ways might have infiltrated the Soviet Union, but fourteen years after the Kitchen Debate, Nixon was still unable to comprehend the Soviets’ worldview. It was as if cultural exchange had become an end in itself, rather than part of a broader meeting of minds.

  This was détente without the excitement or the fun, but there was plenty of business to do. If Nixon in China had been like Marco Polo reveling in the wonder of discovery, in Moscow he was a traveling salesman working well-trodden turf, selling grain and conferences, linkups in space and arms control agreements. There were endless plenums and signing ceremonies in the Grand Kremlin Palace and meetings in Brezhnev’s office or at his dacha, where in time-honored fashion he took Nixon boating. The food, service, and accommodation suffered in comparison with those in Beijing, and there were the usual bureaucratic challenges, such as telephones and telex machines that were mysteriously misplaced at inopportune moments. But by way of compensation the Soviets had Swan Lake to offer instead of the revolutionary Chinese ballet Red Detachment of Women.

  After exhaustive negotiations the two parties sealed the terms of SALT 1, the first comprehensive strategic arms limitation agreement, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which halted work on systems to intercept incoming missiles. Peaceful coexistence, even meaningful collaboration, was once again on the leaders’ lips on May 26 as they arrived at Spaso House prior to the late-night signing ceremony. After dinner, Van sat at the piano in the main hall, with its ionic columns and Montgolfier chandelier, and struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Soviet national anthem. The guests stood up, but General Secretary Brezhnev and his wife were not among them. Neither were the other top Soviet officials, Premier Alexei Kosygin and head of state Nikolai Podgorny. All four, and only those four, had gone home after dinner. Perhaps they needed to rest, but it looked suspiciously like a deliberate snub on account of Van’s closeness to Khrushchev, or a refusal to accredit, as Khrushchev had, the American’s expertise in their musical heritage. To Van, with his romantic attachment to Russia and deep pride in his historic role, it was the cruelest cut.

  Nixon addressed the people of the United States and USSR simultaneously on TV and radio, signed a final agreement outlining the principles of future relations, visited the Baptist church that had benefited from Van’s largesse, and met a group of cosmonauts. On the twenty-ninth the presidential party headed for Vnukovo Airport and, after a farewell ceremony, boarded a Soviet Ilyushin Il-62 jetliner to fly to Ukraine for the last leg of their nine-day Soviet tour. Mechanical failure kept the big plane firmly earthbound, and Premier Kosygin and President Podgorny red-facedly joined the Nixons on board while they waited for a replacement aircraft.

  With relations with America improving, the Soviets and Chinese scaled down their support for North Vietnam, where it later emerged that they both had thousands of troops stationed throughout the conflict. Eight months later, American combat troops began their final pullout from the ravaged nation.

  IN CHINA, Liu Shikun was still moldering in solitary confinement despite his father-in-law’s leading role in Nixon’s visit. No one came to bother him anymore, and sometimes even the People’s Daily failed to arrive, though he could hear the doors banging as it was delivered to other prisoners. One day a copy landed on the floor, but moments later the guard rushed back. “Don’t read, don’t read!” he shouted as he unlocked the door and grabbed it. Yet Liu had glimpsed Ye Jianying’s name on a list of leaders accompanying Mao, and realizing his father-in-law had not been ousted as his guards had claimed, Liu guessed he was still being held simply to prevent Madame Mao and her Gang of Four from losing face.

  More time went by, and finally his wife, the general’s daughter, came to visit. Under the table he palmed her the letter he had painstakingly composed from specks of newspaper and sticky bun, folded very small. She slipped it in her pocket. When she got home she gave it to her father, who immediately passed it to Mao’s aide Wang Dongxing, and with astonishing speed it was all over. Mao issued a “highest command”—a formulation that simply meant his word was law—and ordered the pianist’s release. “You should look after Liu Shikun,” he told the Central Committee. “Ask him to compose more national-style music. And he should continue his performances.” The pronouncement was a deep embarrassment for Madame Mao, who was now boss of all China’s cultural production, and to make the best of it, she invited Liu to her home and put on a great show of solicitude, sitting with him and two other members of the Gang of Four while they watched an American film about bullfighting that had presumably been selected for its piano score. Liu was formally absolved of his purported crimes and given a staggering sum of money in lieu of lost salary. Still, seven years in prison had left him with neurological problems, and he was admitted to the hospital for what would be a four-month stay. Before he went in he made a single comment to reporters asking about his treatment. “In the twentieth century,” he said, with righteous clarity, slicing the air with
his shaking hands, “political prisons in China during the Cultural Revolution, in terms of cruelty to inmates, are second only to Auschwitz during the Second World War.”

  Internal politics and smuggled letters were not the only reasons for his release. As China creaked open its borders in the wake of Nixon’s visit, Premier Zhou convinced the leadership to agree to a program of cultural exchange. As one of the country’s two world-class pianists—the third had defected—Liu was once again needed, and one day in October he returned to work at the Central Philharmonic. The other remaining world-class pianist was Yin Chengzong, the second-prize winner in the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition. Yin had had a good Cultural Revolution, scoring an enormous success with the Yellow River Concerto, which had premiered in 1969 and was one of only two piano pieces now licensed for performance. The other was a concerto accompanied by the Peking Opera, but since there was no opera that day, Liu had no choice but to play the Yellow River. He had never attempted it before, but he had heard it over and over from loudspeakers hung on trees and lampposts outside his prison cell, and thanks to his father’s training, he had learned it by ear. To the surprise of the musicians who had turned up to see if he could still play, it went off well, and he was given a slot with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, early arrivals under the new cultural exchange agreement, along with basketball and swimming teams. Liu played the Yellow River again, and afterward the musicians, who had heard his story, silently got to their feet. Once again the international language of music was invoked to explain to confused populations why yesterday’s enemy was today’s honored guest.

  Liu tried to put his life back together and not think about the past. Three years later Chairman Mao died, and a trio of leaders, among them General Ye and Wang Dongxing, the aide who had passed on Liu’s letter, arrested the Gang of Four. With the Cultural Revolution officially over, the Yellow River Concerto was banned, and Yin Chengzong was purged in his turn.

  THE WORLD of politics had nearly lost Richard M. Nixon to a career in music. He was a competent amateur pianist: after one White House governors’ conference, he played a duet with the great blues singer Pearl Bailey. LBJ had set great store by his fellow Texan Van, but he knew next to nothing about classical music; in Nixon, Van had a fan in the White House. The president listened to his recordings of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff from his favorite armchair in the Lincoln Sitting Room while reading or smoking a pipe or cigar, and lobbied Van to put his favorite piece, Brahms’s Rhapsody in G Minor, on vinyl. Nineteen of Nixon’s White House tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, contain copious mentions of his favorite pianist. The president pontificated to a gruff Kissinger and others on the beauties of Van’s playing. He relished his showmanship: “He’s so colorful, isn’t he?” he remarked admiringly. And crucially for Nixon, he counted Van as a political supporter: “He is our friend,” he stressed, adding for emphasis that he was “for us.”

  Nixon kept Van busy. In January 1973 he played for the president’s second inauguration, and the following month, he performed at the state visit of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Nixon upbraided his staff when Rildia Bee was omitted from the banquet and told them to get mother and son over. He also ordered them to find out if Van could perform in China. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, pointed out that the Chinese might have a problem with Van because he was the favorite of the Soviets. “So he could come there and screw the Russians,” Nixon replied, ever triangulating, and perhaps casting his mind back to Van’s snub by Brezhnev.

  Van was not as dexterous as Tricky Dick, and he never accepted the mooted mission. Yet the Brezhnev snub had undoubtedly taken the shine off his value as a symbol of U.S.-Soviet friendship. Though Nixon floated the idea, Van was not called on to play for Brezhnev’s 1973 visit to the United States, and not even Sol Hurok thought of sending him along on Nixon’s second visit to Moscow, the following year. A brighter moment came courtesy of the fourth edition of Van’s own competition, held in 1973, when Moscow Conservatory–trained Vladimir Viardo became its first Soviet winner. Van virtually adopted him, taking him shopping in Cincinnati, buying him shirts by the dozen, and smuggling jeans to him in Moscow. Yet, back home, Viardo was refused a passport and banned from traveling abroad for twelve years, seemingly for failing to bribe officials with Western gifts he was expected to buy with the fraction of his foreign earnings he was allowed to keep. The Cliburn Competition, which owed its existence to a breakthrough in the Cold War, had been diminished by it.

  So, deep down, had Van. Increasingly he looked elsewhere to make grand gestures, which sometimes led him to unlikely places. At the first Nixon inauguration he had met Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the First Couple of the Philippines, and the three had become friends; after an assassin tried to kill Imelda with a bolo during a speech, Van visited her in the hospital. She was as energetic a patron of the arts as she was a buyer of shoes, and Van’s name featured repeatedly in the guestbook of the Coconut Palace, where she put up visiting celebrities. For months prior to his concerts, radio stations and movie theaters played his records, while Filipino fashion designers produced “the Cliburn line—an array of gowns to make anyone beam with pride . . . while imbibing Cliburn’s music.” At a gala at the Malacañang Palace, Imelda sang Van a love song from the central Philippines, Ferdinand toasted him as “one of the most outstanding mortals of our time,” and the guests belted out “Deep in the Heart of Texas” before being handed curfew passes with which they could escape arrest. Ferdinand’s high standing as the islands’ first elected president plunged after 1972, when he was accused of massive embezzlement and declared martial law rather than face an election, but the White House continued to back him, and Van continued to visit, playing a fund-raiser for young Filipino musicians at the huge Araneta Coliseum in June 1973 and returning the following year to inaugurate the ten-thousand-seat Folk Arts Theater on Manila Bay. A critic wrote that his music touched minds, quickened hearts, and moved spirits, but that his dress sense offended local tastes. “Only a person of his stature can get away with such an ill-fitting coat,” sniffed one columnist. “His arms are too long for his frame,” echoed another. “His legs are too long to fit under the piano. His pants are a bit short above his shoes.” This was not Moscow.

  IN JANUARY 1974, Harvey Cliburn died, aged seventy-five, in the Shreveport hospital where he had been ailing for several months. His last words to Van were some of his first: “Sonny Boy, I love you,” he said. “And look after your mother.” He had cut a lonely figure of late; Van had occasionally convinced him to join him and Rildia Bee on tour as far away as Japan, but it was not his scene. “To tell you the truth,” Harvey once told an amused Naomi Graffman in Monte Carlo, “ah’d rather be home with mah ca-ows.” As they laid him to rest, Van vowed to spend even more time with Rildia Bee and began worrying that traveling was getting too much for her.

  Two months later Sol Hurok, Van’s other father figure, collapsed in a New York elevator and died. Months earlier Van had performed at the Met in honor of the great impresario’s sixtieth year in show business, a Gilded Age–style celebration that ended with an epic party at the Pierre. With Hurok went Van’s romantic dreams of backstage greasepaint in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg and fur-swaddled carriage rides through Central Park. Such dreams had already been splintered two years earlier when a bomb exploded in Hurok’s Fifth Avenue office, injuring him and killing his twenty-seven-year-old secretary, Iris Kones. The Jewish Defense League, which opposed Soviet artists touring the United States, claimed responsibility for the bombing and its two Jewish victims.

  Waylaid by feelings of grief and guilt as he turned forty that July, Van stopped taking new bookings. He never mentioned the word retirement; he simply replied to requests with regrets that he had a prior engagement.

  With four years’ worth of commitments to work through, he was still frantically busy through the mid-1970s, pulling in record crowds to stadiums and outdoor venues; increasing his rate of album
releases to include Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Barber, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev; and picking up more awards and honorary degrees. In September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal and Vice President Gerald Ford took over, Van was behind the piano at the newly named Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, accompanying Soviet astronauts training for a planned U.S. Soviet space linkup in a chorus of “Moscow Nights.” For the 1975 state visit of the emperor and empress of Japan, President Ford recruited Van to play Chopin, Schumann, and Debussy and gave a speech celebrating Van’s service as a catalyst of culture who had brought East and West together with his “legendary talent”; the performance was beamed live to Japan.

  That year, he was also a guest at Ford’s state dinner for British prime minister Harold Wilson, where he was seated at the First Lady’s table, opposite the prime minister and next to gossip columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle. “There are so many important people at this table,” Van said, turning to Mehle. “I just wish I could get all of their autographs, but I’m afraid to ask.” If he was making small talk, he had not reckoned on his neighbor’s brass. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “You’re as important as they are. Give me your menu card.” She signed her name and passed the card on to Cary Grant. “I want everybody’s autograph, too,” Grant said, and both cards did the rounds of the table.

  Van was a true Romantic in his belief that playing the piano was a holy mission, but he lacked the Romantic ego that demanded, “Listen to my inner world!” He had never really believed his own press because he had never truly believed in his own legend. When fans told him he had changed their lives, he was genuinely amazed. When public figures extolled him as a hero, he all but scoffed. As he had foreseen at the time, the Tchaikovsky Competition was a burden as well as a blessing. Like Elvis, who died in 1977 after years of prescription drug abuse, Van had shot to fame in his early twenties faster and higher than any comparable musician. Ever since, he had had to restage his triumph and prove himself anew: reach the same high note of emotional connection, be a winner over and over, night after night. Nothing less would do than being the world’s greatest pianist, the American Horowitz, and yet not a single interview passed without his having to rehearse the events of 1958. He did so dutifully, because he was still proud of his win and because he fully realized it was the reason he was there. Yet he knew he would always be defined by his achievement at age twenty-three and that, whatever else he did, he would never get beyond it.