Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (33 page)

The official aloofness left the stage to the Soviets. That night, as a society audience filled Constitution Hall, the Cliburns pointedly took their seats in the box of Smiling Mike Menshikov, the Soviet ambassador, who had already sent a gargantuan basket of flowers backstage. Afterward the Soviet embassy in Washington hosted a gourmet supper for fifty guests, with Van and Kondrashin at the top of the horseshoe table and the first-desk members of the orchestra ranged on either side. Glasses were set for champagne, brandy, wines, and vodka, and Smiling Mike began toasting Van, Van’s parents, and Kondrashin, the
“number two papa of Van Cliburn.” Menshikov could match any Bolshevik in verbosity. When he had presented his credentials that February, the president cordially asked about his background. His answer, the State Department memorandum recorded,
ran “through his
entire employment record” and “consumed 15 minutes of the 33 minute appointment.” Three weeks later Menshikov contrived
another lengthy meeting with Eisenhower, who was forced to explain that if he personally heard out all eighty ambassadors he would have no time to run the country. As soon as he could, Van sprang at the piano and played into the small hours. Between the music and the vodka, the normally somber embassy swam with warmth and camaraderie and light.

The next morning, General Robert Cutler, the president’s national security adviser, asked Pat Coyne, an FBI veteran on the NSC’s intelligence staff, to call the agency and find out what it had in its files on Van Cliburn and Kirill Kondrashin.
“According to Coyne,” noted J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant A. H. Belmont, “Cutler advised that following the ovation that Cliburn received at his concert in Constitution Hall here last Friday, Cliburn gave Kondrashin two ‘European kisses’ and then kissed him on the lips.” The inference was clearly that such unhealthy behavior might be a sign of unpatriotically effete tendencies.

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“He’s Better Than Elvis by Far!”

BACK IN
New York, Van was too keyed up to sleep, and he kept Liz Winston and Bill Judd talking into the early hours. Harvey, who didn’t much like the big-city habits his son had picked up, came in rubbing his eyes.
“You’ve got to let this poor boy have some sleep,” he scolded them. They would have been only too glad: Liz had lost thirteen pounds in the nine days since Van’s return; Bill, eight. Van himself had grown so thin that he had had his clothes taken in. But he pulled the two friends back: “Oh
please
,” he implored. “Please don’t go. Not yet. Let’s have just another cigarette.” They were still talking at dawn.

He had coasted on nerves through parades and speeches and concerts played under pressure that few musicians had ever experienced. Acting as if nothing had changed was his way of coping, but the next day the cracks began to show. That night, he was to appear on
The Steve Allen Show
, and during a rehearsal, the host held up a dummy sleeve of Van’s yet-to-be-recorded first album, mocked up with a color photograph taken in the Soviet Union.

“What is that you’re holding?” Van burst out. “This is unauthorized. I never authorized this.” Color was for pop sensations, not serious musicians, who on album covers remained as black-and-white as piano keys and concert garb. He grabbed the sleeve, ripped it to pieces, and stormed off to his dressing room, slamming the door. A soberer album cover was quickly concocted, while Allen rehearsed
his next guest, the great Louis Armstrong, and Van emerged his usual self in time to play the last movement of the Tchaikovsky and banter gamely. His fee was
three thousand dollars, thirty times the sum he had received the previous time, but there was no complaint about that or his tantrum. He had the package: talent, youth, congeniality, fame, and photogenic looks, his rapt absorption especially striking in close-up.

At the Pierre, Van suddenly stood up at midnight. “I’m going
back to my apartment to practice,” he declared drastically. “I can’t go on like this. Do you know, I haven’t really worked in two months? I’ve just been playing, playing, playing.” He grabbed his coat, ran out the door, and returned at 5:00 a.m., again too wired to sleep. But on May 26 he was back in remarkable form for a reprise of his program at Carnegie Hall.
“A great event in the history of music in America is taking place tonight,” intoned the announcer on WQXR, which broadcast the concert in full. At the beginning of the second half, Van brought on Kondrashin and turned to the audience.
“I do hope you will forgive me,” he politely drawled, “for departing from concert procedure and decorum to express one thought of appreciation to you for being so very kind to me.” It came across as a charming mark of youthful gregariousness and the novelty of the occasion, though some may have felt he was taking his new role as a public figure too seriously. Afterward, he introduced Mayor Wagner, who expatiated on Van’s impact in the worlds of music and international relations; then Van played the Rachmaninoff, to another raucous ovation. With cheers still echoing in their ears the Cliburns entertained a throng of guests until 3:00 a.m., when Abram Chasins noticed they had been too busy being hosts to eat, and proposed a trip to Reuben’s.
“Y’all go along,” Harvey said with a grimace. “I’m
daid
.” Van, Rildia Bee, and the others traipsed down the street. Cabdrivers honked and waved. Cops walked over to slap Van on the back, doormen stepped out to pump his hand, and passersby thanked him “for doing what you did for us over there.” Small shrieks met their entrance to the restaurant. As they made their way to their table, a drunk staggered up to shake
the hero’s hand and then slid to the floor. As the man babbled his congratulations, Van gently lifted him up and pulled up a chair. Putting an arm round him, he asked, “Do you
really
mean it? Did I do
that
much?”

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 Nineteenth 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.