Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (34 page)

ONE OF
the transfixed faces in Lewisohn Stadium that evening belonged to the Moscow Conservatory’s
Sergei Dorensky, who had arrived July 7 as part of the first group of Soviet exchange students since World War II. Wearing plaid shirts and floored by New York’s summer heat, the students had visited the United Nations, taken in Broadway shows, and gone on a Circle Line boat tour during which the guide pointed out a large building near Grant’s Tomb as
Van Cliburn’s school. When Dorensky returned to Moscow, Khrushchev bustled up to him after a concert and asked how Van was. News also reached Van of a conversation between Khrushchev and an American in Moscow.
“I felt very sorry for your young musician, Mr. Cliburn,” the premier reportedly told the visitor. “He never had a minute’s rest the entire time he was in our country. We were so enthusiastic about him, he was so acclaimed, so much in demand, that we doubt that he ever slept.” Khrushchev added that Van was “a very warm, friendly young man who absolutely captivated the Soviet people” and had drawn the two nations closer together.

Van was
still hoping to reappear at the World’s Fair, this time with a Soviet orchestra. He had already cabled his acceptance when he told the press that he was unsure if he could go, almost certainly because he had been warned that the U.S. government had taken an interest in the issue. By then the Soviets had already put up posters announcing
his arrival, and in early August they brought the matter to a head by tipping off the American press. Van had been looking forward to escaping the New York heat at a series of swimming parties, but instead he flew to Washington to seek official blessing for the Soviet linkup.

There had always been tension at the heart of Cold War cultural diplomacy between joining hearts and winning minds. What to peacemakers was the art of fostering friendship was to warriors a tool for demonstrating their side’s superior values and diminishing the enemy’s credibility and appeal. The psychological warfare approach was dominant, and from that perspective, Van was a mixed blessing. Certainly he proved that an American could play the piano as well as any Soviet, which was no mean thing. Yet, rather than promote avant-garde music (as the CIA advocated) or American music (as the State Department advised), he loved Russian culture, believed it was the greatest in the world, and said so, loudly. Besides, he kept blurting about the Soviets wanting peace, which to foreign policy professionals was dangerously naive. When Van finally got a hearing, State Department officials made it clear that they disapproved of him playing at the Soviet pavilion on the USSR’s showcase National Days. Amid hurried consultations, that hurdle was overcome when the concert was recast as a commercial enterprise sponsored by a Belgian impresario in a Brussels concert hall. Still, after several days Van returned to New York deflated and defeated by bureaucracy. “Officials here said that it was
not up to them to say whether a concert artist could perform,” the press reported. “They said only that the United States had no objection to his playing at the commercial concerts.”

Van flew to Brussels for the unsanctioned concert, which took place on August 17 in the presence of Elisabeth, the Red Queen. Along with the rest of the audience, she loudly applauded the determined efforts of orchestra and pianist to cede the limelight to each other, as did the
New York Times
’ Howard Taubman.
“A young American and 100 Russians made music together stirringly tonight,” he reported, “showing an audience of Western Europeans on holiday
that at least on this one thing the United States and the Soviet Union were in perfect accord . . . There have been intimations in certain quarters that it was wrong of Mr. Cliburn, an American, to appear with a Soviet orchestra in the World’s Fair forum, where competition in the performing arts between the two major powers is keen. But the pianist’s willingness to appear and the Russians’ to have him is a credit to both.” The Soviets scarcely lacked virtuosos of their own, and by intimating that nationalism had no place in music, once again they occupied the moral high ground ceded by the U.S. government.

Whether at the State Department’s instigation or in response to its concerns, Van went on to Heidelberg, in West Germany, and played for the servicemen of the U.S. Seventh Army. Photographers snapped him
scanning the jukebox at an airport snack bar, where he eventually spent a nickel on Vaughn Monroe’s “There’s No Piano in This House.” Afterward the army flew him back to Washington, and the navy flew him on to New York. Van quietly dropped his idea of taking his parents for a vacation by the Black Sea, but he was not about to abandon his Russian friends, and he began to plan a tour of the Soviet Union for
spring 1959.

BY NOW
he had gained back seven of his ten lost pounds and was thinking of having his clothes let out again. Yet having returned from Moscow with just two of the efficient Soviet sleeping pills, he had not slept two nights together for months. A cigarette was constantly in his hand except when he was playing, and for breakfast he nibbled at hamburgers washed down with coffee. The nerves, the diet, and the absurd schedule were beginning to take their toll. Throughout the summer, he was plagued with toothaches and carbuncles, and spent hours a day at the doctor and dentist.

Audiences at home and abroad were still clamoring to hear his prizewinning program, but the critics were beginning to gripe about the lack of a new repertoire. Even though he had turned down far more engagements than he had thought of procuring before Moscow, it was impossible to find time to practice, polish, and perfect.
There were lawyers, accountants, record company executives, and agents to deal with. Tributes kept coming: one made him an honorary citizen of Minnesota; another, the Lotus Club’s youngest honoree. Accepting an honorary doctorate from Baylor University, he returned his four-thousand-dollar fee to make endowments to the departments of religion, law, drama, and music in honor of his great-grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, and mother, and jointly with Harvey donated ten thousand dollars to establish a fund for the orchestra. There were offers of movie and TV appearances; he accepted a guest spot on
What’s My Line?
but with some reluctance turned down most, including the lead role in two Hollywood biopics of Liszt. There were press conferences to give, such as the
one he called that September—he was no slouch at publicity—to announce he was donating his remaining Moscow winnings to New York City’s cultural program. Even when he took time off to attend the opening night of the
Metropolitan Opera, eyes were as much on him and Rildia Bee as on the stage. Amid it all, he somehow found time for acts of remarkable altruism. When he heard that a
New Yorker with whom he shared a doctor was dying of cancer, he asked the man’s family to hire a piano and lend him an apartment key and he turned up late, once in white tie and tails and another time in plaid shirt and jeans, to play Rachmaninoff. He played through the nights until, one morning, he was softly crooning along to Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me” when the sun came up and the patient was gone, borne away on a soulful tide.

When the new season began, he practiced from midnight until at least 6:00 a.m., back in the Steinway basement for fear of annoying the neighbors. His weight dropped again. In desperation, he tore out his precious phone. Messages left with the Osborne switchboard piled up unanswered, provoking accusations of bigheadedness from
old “friends” that leaked to the press. He was disloyal to no one, just completely overwhelmed. For one thing, he had a demanding young fan base to tend to that was unknown to other classical musicians. That summer, his RCA Victor recording of Tchaikovsky’s
Piano Concerto no. 1 hit the top spot on the
Billboard
LP chart, beating Johnny Mathis’s
Greatest Hits
and the
South Pacific
sound track, and stayed there for seven weeks.
“At Victor these days they mention the names of Presley and Cliburn in one breath,”
Billboard
reported. Teenagers played the Tchaikovsky down the phone to each other, puzzling their parents by running up huge bills. Parties of girls waited patiently until a restaurant table Van had once sat at became free. One girl refused to wash for weeks when he signed her arm. When a girl in Minneapolis wrote asking if he could play at reduced prices for teenagers, he opened all his rehearsals to children and students, for free or at a low price set by the orchestra or school board. Hundreds, including dating couples, turned up to the first, in New Haven, Connecticut, and afterward some wrote to thank him “from the
bottom of our hearts.” In Scarsdale, New York, eighteen hundred teens cheered as he walked in, tossed his jacket onto a chair, and sat down to rehearse Schumann’s Concerto in A Minor. Outside, the police caught two fans trying to climb in through a restroom window and held back nearly five hundred more, who stood in freezing autumn rain craning to catch the faint strains through the doors.
“To watch Elvis I could understand,” a traffic patrolman marveled. “But for this crowd to sit quiet and listen to Van Cliburn play it straight—this is a revelation.” Afterward the fans swarmed up for autographs; whenever Van grew tired he remembered he was only a few years older than many of them. Appreciating classical music no longer meant being derided as a longhair: that was the Soviets’ gift to the Americans. The music of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff was now more popular than ever before. Van had claimed it back, reminding the nation of the bond it shared, if not with the Soviet Union, then with the Russian people.

He pushed on, crisscrossing the country from Newark and Pittsburgh to Waco and New Orleans, performing benefits for orchestra pension funds in New York, where he played three concertos in a row;
Boston—two on consecutive days, at the highest prices ever charged—and Philadelphia, where his costar was Maria Callas. On
a
November morning he motored into Austin, Texas; stole an hour’s sleep; played a dress rehearsal attended by twenty-two hundred children and students, followed by afternoon and evening concerts that drew fifteen thousand; and was made an admiral of the Texas Navy. He was, they said,
Texas’s proudest brag, even bigger than oil. On another trip home he pushed through a fever and proudly escorted his mother to a dinner thrown in her honor by the Fort Worth Piano Teachers Forum. During the meal, Irl Allison, founder of the National Guild of Piano Teachers, stood up and waved a check for ten thousand dollars, to be awarded to the winner of a new piano competition named for Rildia Bee’s little boy. Van, still modestly aware of his youth and inexperience, dropped his fork in horror, and Rildia Bee reassured him it would never happen.

Kilgore, small in size but not in heart, responded on December 2 with “Van Cliburn Day in Texas,” the second-ever state day in honor of a living person and the
first for an honoree younger than ninety. Driving down Main Street, he came face-to-face with his portrait on a giant billboard fronting the oil derricks that bore the legend
KILGORE
,
PROUD HOME OF VAN CLIBURN
. At a press conference, he received another key to the city, this one nearly as tall as he; luncheon for five hundred followed at the National Guard Armory, which was bedecked with Rangerettes and flags.
“He’s better than Elvis by far!” a love-struck girl said with a sigh when Van played an afternoon matinee for students. Texas governor Price Daniel attended that, the evening concert, and the closing reception for two thousand. Two weeks later Shreveport, ever the bridesmaid, followed with its own Van Cliburn Day. That month, the State Department had asked Van to
play in India, which had developed close relations with the Soviets since Khrushchev’s visit there three years earlier. The thinking was probably that Van’s enthusiasm for Russia could do little harm in the subcontinent, while his youth and talent could earn America some kudos, but he pointedly refused, citing the engagements in his hometowns.

For eight months there had been no letup, and still he had only
one pair of shoes. It all reached a pitch of ridiculousness one afternoon in New York when he ducked into a modest restaurant to escape some especially persistent fans and found himself in the midst of a wedding ceremony. The rabbi abandoned the bridal couple,
“rushed up with the marriage certificate in hand, and thrust it into the unexpected guest’s palm, urging him on with excited little cries to sign it.” Reviewing the phenomenon, one critic,
an admirer, seriously advised Van to withdraw from concert activity for several years and return to study. Another bluntly warned that he was in danger of becoming
“a flesh and blood juke box which at the insertion of the proper coin always plays the same tune.” Even friends began to fret that without time to himself, he might never secure his status as an important artist.