by Nigel Cliff
He was grateful for everything, but he was ready to give it all up for the same reason he had coped remarkably well with fame: he did not care all that much for it. Fame was a vehicle for a sacred trust: to spread the glory of classical music. Yet he had done virtually nothing else for twenty years, and he was tired. He was tired of the perfectionist’s edginess he had never shaken off, the excitement mixed with dread that seized him before every concert, and the self-reproach that bedeviled every curtain call. He was tired of giving his heart and being bruised by politics, first from the Americans and now from the Russians. He was tired of being hailed as a hero and being watched all the time, of hesitating to go places in case he was seen doing something he shouldn’t do. He was tired of disappointments: in 1977 there were only two Soviet entrants to the Cliburn Competition after the Soviet authorities demanded higher concert fees for their winners, nearly all of which went to the state. Also, sad to say, he was tired of the piano. The eighty-eight keys were the medium he used to express himself, but they were not real. They were not even his first interest, he whispered in unguarded moments. That was the voice, but he had no voice, and he had been saddled with the piano and had spent his life trying to make it what it was not, a singing instrument.
Toward the end he was almost played out, and his habitual lateness got-out of control. In 1973 he turned up for a 7:00 p.m. concert at Mississippi University for Women at 11:00. “I’m late,” he said as he walked onstage before a full house. “I apologize for that. With your permission I’ll get right to it.” And he did, to thunderous applause. In 1977 he was supposed to take off at 2:00 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. recital in Buffalo, New York, but at 4:00 he was still at the Salisbury Hotel. “Don’t worry, honey,” he told his publicist and close friend Mary Lou Falcone, “we’ll get a private plane.” Sometime after 7:00 they headed to LaGuardia and boarded the jet, only to run into a blizzard. He walked in at 9:30 p.m.; announced he would play only half the program, so the audience could get home; and launched into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Another time, he was desperate to see André Chenier at the Met the same night he was booked to play with the New York Philharmonic. He watched the first act, strode across to the concert hall, and went on without a warm-up.
Always canny with timing, Van knew his moment had passed. It was time to live for himself a little. Many of his friends were much older than he, and when Rosina Lhévinne died in 1976, he realized he would soon lose them all. That made him reflect on how much he had sacrificed by living half his life out of a suitcase. He was never quite sure when his mother had become his best friend: somewhere along the lonely road, when they prayed together before a concert, she elegant as always, perhaps in a turquoise brocade with a corsage of fresh cut sweet peas. He adored her, idolized her, but it was hardly the same thing as a romantic relationship. Oddly, it was Rildia Bee who made one possible. In the summer of 1966, when he was thirty-two and had gone to play at a small midwestern college, a nineteen-year-old student of mortuary science had been assigned to give Rildia Bee a campus tour. Tom Zaremba happened to share a family name with Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher and Anton Rubinstein’s successor as director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was compactly built, with pallid, chiseled features, slicked-back blond hair, and the ready humor of a man at ease with himself. Rildia Bee found him so amusing that she introduced him to her son, and they took him on as an assistant. As well as helping look after Rildia Bee, the trainee mortician did Van’s stage makeup, and along the way they began a relationship. Van was far too circumspect to allow it to become public knowledge; when a filmmaker played him concert footage that showed Zaremba indistinctly at the back of the frame, Van angrily refused to sanction its release. Yet in 1977, with his concert career winding down, he asked Tom to move into the Salisbury with him and Rildia Bee. Zaremba commuted back and forth to Detroit, where he taught mortuary arts at Wayne State two days a week, but he was increasingly at Van’s side.
By September 1978, Van’s last booking was played out and he became a private citizen for the first time in his life. “Private” was an understatement: second only to Greta Garbo, he became a legendary recluse, “the most famous dropout in American concert history.”
VAN TOLD everyone that he had retired in order to have more time to attend the opera. His good friend Arlene Dahl had another explanation: astrology, a mutual obsession they had discovered at one of the early Hollywood parties. The years when Van stopped performing, Dahl explained, “were not terribly good years for him to be in front of the public according to astrology and his sign, which is cancer, the moon child.” Sometimes Van called her at night on her private number to talk horoscopes; he told her about his investments and asked what she thought, and she read the charts and advised him as to whether to keep or sell them.
Either because of Dahl’s advice or despite it, he had become a rich man. Over the years, he had taken over more rooms at the Salisbury, one at time, until he ended up with fourteen, eight on one floor and six on another. The rooms were packed with what he modestly called his “junk”: a vast collection of the finest antique English furniture and European silver and jewelry, including many items from imperial Russia. Every month, he paid his hotel bill, never taking a lease. New York had always been temporary for him, and after the 1985 Cliburn Competition, he stayed on in Fort Worth to look for a home. In the fall of that year, he bought a sprawling Tudor Revival manor on an eighteen-acre estate in exclusive Westover Hills that had belonged to the grain magnate and museum benefactor Kay Kimbell, and the following spring a flotilla of moving vans headed south with the “junk.” At the last minute, Van remembered a piano stored at Steinway Hall and rolled it along Fifty-Seventh Street.
Standing on a bluff, with lawns sloping down to the tree line and far-reaching views of the river valley and city, the house was as oversize and elegant and fussy and relaxed as Van was. The front door opened into a large entrance hall with smooth limestone walls and golden oak cornices and moldings. A step led down into a living room the size of an Olympic pool and lit by two Baccarat chandeliers and countless lamps, which led in turn to a sunroom. Islands of antique chairs and couches floated in a gleaming sea of silver candelabra, vases, and bowls. Nineteenth-century oils shared the walls with a full-length portrait of Rildia Bee, a gift from Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos; and a sketch of Baby Chops, a white Maltese formally known as Bootsie Costanza Cliburn. Dozens of silver-framed photographs topped the Steinway, which was out of tune and held together with Scotch tape and chewing gum. A hundred more lined a long table: Van and Nikita Khrushchev, Van and Maria Callas, Van and Sol Hurok, but mostly Van and Rildia Bee. Back in the hall another door opened into a formal dining room, which led to a family dining room, a breakfast room, and the kitchen. A third door revealed a library stuffed with memorabilia from Van’s career. An elevator, necessary now for Rildia Bee, led to the multiple bedrooms. Huge sprays of flowers were everywhere, some fresh, some wilted, and some long dead, thickening the air with a perceptible bouquet of decomposing matter. “I enjoy flowers as much when they get old and dried out as when they were fresh,” Van explained to a reporter. “I just look at these flowers, and in my mind, I still see the beauty they once had.”
Sometimes, in the early hours, Van sat at the living room Steinway, a bust of Rachmaninoff staring gloomily from a nearby pedestal, wearing a suit and tie and playing for Rildia Bee. Occasionally he played one of the other fourteen grand pianos scattered through the house, perhaps working on the sonata he had been composing forever. More often, he left them untouched and he and his mother listened to opera, Renata Tebaldi or Leontyne Price or Cecilia Bartoli. At four or five in the morning he headed to the industrial-size kitchen, with its freezer full of leftovers from takeout and counters piled with morsels of food in tiny plastic boxes, and slurped a plate of microwaved garlic ravioli. As dawn approached he retired to his bedroom, with its balalaikas and dried flowers and photographs from Russia, and read a historical romance or watched a classi
c movie, perhaps Random Harvest, with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, before turning in; he was also addicted to Jeopardy! and soap operas. He’d surface in the afternoon, stretch for a few minutes, drink a cup of hot water with lemon, go down in his torn T-shirt and dark blue bathrobe, and have poached eggs on toast for breakfast. Rildia Bee was already there, like a delicate tropical bird in her blue quilted bathrobe and bouffant pink nightcap, eating chicken as she did every day, with Tom Zaremba in his white terry cloth robe, a housekeeper or two, and a handyman.
After they got dressed Van ran errands. He loved doing everyday things such as shopping at the Piggly Wiggly and picking out fresh produce, sniffing the cantaloupes. Sometimes he went to Denny’s or the Ol’ South Pancake House on University Drive, always taking the same corner booth. When his favorite waitress, Dottie Satterwhite, returned after caring for her dying mother, Van met her at the door, hugged her, wept, handed her a check for five hundred dollars, and sent her flowers for two weeks. “What do you and that piano player have going?” Satterwhite’s husband demanded. Late in the afternoon, he’d attend to his affairs in the sunroom, which contained more junk, including two teddy bears, a silver bowlful of Christmas baubles on a pedestal, and spun-sugar flower bouquets (from one of Rildia Bee’s birthday cakes) displayed under a glass cloche. The house was Victorian in its density. Upstairs, beyond a room filled with unpacked suitcases and another housing long-wilted Christmas trees with the decorations still attached, there lurked a vast multitier replica of the cake from one of Rildia Bee’s birthdays, finished in frosting but empty inside so it could be preserved forever.
Some nights, there were legendary dinner parties at the house, especially when visiting musicians were in town. They began with cocktails at 11:00 p.m., and Van came down around midnight. White-gloved valets announced the meal. Pot roast, chicken and dumplings, spoon bread, black-eyed peas, and turnip greens might be on the menu, or Rildia Bee’s fabulous chicken soup, served in a lavishly ornate silver tureen that had belonged to the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, the murdered eldest daughter of the last Russian czar. Van sat next to his mother, calling her Little Precious and feeding her forkfuls of baked chicken while regaling his guests with “priceless stories populated with everyone from a European duke and a cantankerous conductor to a Hollywood starlet, a mysterious Russian plutocrat and, of course, multiple U.S. presidents.” He poked fun at himself and screamed with laughter, leaping from his chair to make a point. Sometimes the company belted out Baptist hymns at the table; Van commissioned new arrangements of Rildia Bee’s favorites. “Mother remembers this one,” he’d say with a gasp if she joined in. “Let’s sing it again.” Afterward they gathered round the piano, and Rildia Bee sang comic songs from her girlhood in the early years of the twentieth century, her voice shrill and old-fashioned but her eyes bright and her delivery intact. At 4:00 a.m. Van was still sparkling, while his wilting guests desperately propped up their eyelids.
Away from the world’s glare he was lighter now, an innocent-sophisticated man-child who never much cared for rules and barely noticed they existed. “In Texas,” he said, “we like to stay babies.” Yet the world would not stop wanting to know about him. He refused requests for interviews whenever he could, and when he couldn’t escape, he kept journalists waiting until he had them on his terms. One reporter was ushered into the library in the early hours, where Van was settled with Baby Chops on a pillow-stuffed Georgian settee, and described a scene of aristocratic leisure: “He twists a cigarette into a white holder and lights it, pressing it between his thumb and index finger, palm up, European fashion. Blue smoke curls upward in graceful rings.” Van had an almost saintly aura of innocence that, to jaded reporters, seemed too good to be true, but most went away utterly charmed and none the wiser.
As time went on, he sometimes answered with mumbling or silence, as if there were places he no longer wanted to go. When Mercury was in retrograde (astrologically a bad omen for all kinds of exchange), it was impossible to get an answer out of him at all. His life story repeated for the hundredth or thousandth time became an overrehearsed routine, seasoned always with Rildia Bee’s homey aphorisms. Unconsciously he overplayed himself like an aging actor, delivering his lines with overworked eyebrows. “They were so nice, very sweet, very kind,” he said of everyone, emphasizing each word: “I was so thrilled.” When he emerged from his seclusion to give speeches, starting with the 1978 commencement at Juilliard, he earnestly labored the same ripe lines about music being body, mind, and spirit; quoted the same wisdom from Plato, Chaucer, Rachmaninoff, and Rildia Bee; and recited an obscure Romantic poem, “Steal not away, O pierced heart,” by an obscure Romantic poet named Van Cliburn.
The sentiments were deeply felt, but in reality Van was funnier and naughtier than he appeared, and he had his demons. Often he was found with friends at the bar in his favorite restaurant, La Piazza. His cousin visited to drink Scotch and smoke cigarettes, “just shy of Aunt Rildia Bee’s view.” There were tales of heavy drinking, including at public events. When he turned fifty in 1984, graying but still ludicrously youthful, he began worrying about his weight. His face had filled out and creased into a fleshier softness, and he had the wrinkles erased from his photographs. Sometimes he embellished his legend, perhaps carried away with the romance of it. The famous evening when Rildia Bee tended to Rachmaninoff moved back several years so it became a seminal event in Van’s decision to become a pianist. The boat ride at Khrushchev’s dacha extended until he and Van motored all the way into Moscow and looked up at the Kremlin Wall, an impossibility then as now.
His friends adored him, protected him, smiled at his foibles, and spoke of him with a warm glow—but few felt they really knew him. As the years went by, many told interviewers that they didn’t see how he could be happy unless he returned to the stage. “Try me!” he shouted, roaring with laughter. He was scarcely alone among great pianists in shying away from performing. Liszt stopped early. Glenn Gould abandoned the stage at thirty-one. Horowitz reputedly thought his fingers were made of glass and would shatter if he touched the piano, and he took twelve years off. John Browning took off two decades. John Ogdon, who shared the 1962 Tchaikovsky Gold Medal with Ashkenazy, went mad, suffering delusions of glowing crosses, electrodes implanted in his body, and conspiracies orchestrated by Adolf Hitler. The childlike wonder and joy needed to summon up surging emotions night after night is a friable thing in a pushing world. Yet America had invested a good deal of its self-belief in Van, and the undying fascination with his disappearance suggested an anxiety about what had happened to the nation in the years since 1958. America’s old insecurity about European cultural imperialism had been a powerful spur to the nation’s determination to enrich itself. Yet now that that insecurity had been dispelled, above all by Van’s victory in Moscow, had a vital incentive to improve and compete also been lost? Did Van’s retreat from the field suggest that America was becoming complacent? Undoubtedly his premature retirement evoked a kind of melancholy, a sense even of being let down, as if by fulfilling his potential in his youth, he had tapped into an existential crisis about what the nation might be capable of in its riper years. Or perhaps the disappointment stemmed from the discovery that Van was not so much a driven, tortured genius as a thwarted homebody, that he was still a small-town Texan and not European enough after all.
NINE YEARS went by without Van playing a note in public, but he was still in the public eye, giving speeches and receiving honors. April 1983 brought the Albert Schweitzer Award for “a life’s work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity,” which was presented at Carnegie Hall with Leontyne Price singing and Greer Garson as emcee, and followed by a dinner dance for four hundred in the Plaza ballroom. But the honor came amid a month of disturbing news: of multiple nuclear tests in the USSR, the United States, and France; and a suicide bomber who killed sixty-three at the U.S. embassy in Lebanon.
Vietnam, underground testing, and the unreality of deterrence based on the potential to in
cinerate the earth had fostered a fatalistic nuclear apathy in the late 1970s. Yet when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter withdrew an arms control treaty negotiated with Brezhnev, Cold War fears once again came to the fore. Bilateral exchanges fell back to a level not seen since the Stalin era, as Soviet musicians were forbidden to tour America, and the United States, along with many allies, boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Defeating Carter in that year’s presidential election, Ronald Reagan abandoned détente and replaced the containment strategy that had served America since World War II with a policy of rolling back Soviet power. Reagan’s rhetoric wound up in concert with a massive increase in defense spending. “The march of freedom and democracy,” he affably proclaimed in a 1982 address to the British Parliament, “will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” The following year, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” before a crowd of flag-waving evangelicals and proposed to weaponize space with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars. Making Reagan’s case, a Soviet interceptor shot down a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight as it crossed Soviet airspace en route from New York to Seoul, with the loss of all 267 crew and passengers, including a U.S. congressman. In 1984 the Soviet Union and every Eastern Bloc country except Romania boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics; the next year, the Soviets also boycotted the Van Cliburn Competition, as they had in 1981. Van stayed silent, but when his old friends Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya were stripped of Soviet citizenship for “activities harmful to the prestige of the state,” even he was moved to comment. “I felt sad,” he said, “because I know they love Russia very much. All the time I’ve known them I never heard anything but how deeply they adore their country.”