Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (36 page)

IN JANUARY
1959 the sixty-three-year-old Mikoyan arrived in America on a two-week visit that he described to the press as a
“holiday.” The Kremlin number two was the first senior Soviet official to visit since 1945, and the mystery deepened further when his vacation plans turned out to include two meetings with President Eisenhower and five with John Foster Dulles, who was bedridden and dying from cancer. The emphatic Armenian had become Khrushchev’s foreign policy troubleshooter, and his mission was to downplay his boss’s startling
recent ultimatum that the Western allies had six months to get out of Berlin, which had been quartered between the U.S., Britain, France, and the USSR at the end of World War II but was stranded in Soviet-backed East Germany. In public, he lost no opportunity to stress that the Soviets wanted peace and an end to the Cold War, and as part of his one-man charm offensive, he hosted a lavish reception at the Soviet embassy in Washington, to which he
insisted Van be invited.

Late as usual, Van arrived just before the reception was due to
end. As he leaped up the red-carpeted steps of the
Beaux-Arts mansion in downtown Washington, Smiling Mike Menshikov, the ambassador, sprang out to kiss and embrace him. A moment later the five-foot-five Mikoyan ran up, pulled Van down for a bear hug, and, to furious applause, kissed him on both cheeks in front of portraits of Stalin and Lenin. Half of the four hundred guests had already left, and the mounds of beluga caviar on ice were severely depleted, but Mikoyan hustled Van to the grand piano in an adjoining room.
“Play, please play,” he implored Van in Russian, standing inches behind him as he sat. Van launched straight into “Moscow Nights,” and Smiling Mike started singing in a strong voice. Mikoyan joined in, and the other Soviet officials and their wives followed suit. When Van tried to get up, Mikoyan pushed him back down and whispered in his ear a request for the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody. The deputy premier listened in a trance, tears welling in his glittering eyes. Afterward he took Van into the private VIP room and sat talking with him on a satin-covered divan for an hour.

In the morning’s
New York Times
the headline was gloomy:
MIKOYAN ANGRY AS U.S. SPURNS BID FOR FREER TRADE
. The next page carried the sunnier news of
Van’s starring role at the fete, suggesting that the undercurrent of fellow feeling was still flowing strongly. Yet to Americans allergic to the color red, the second story raised more hackles than the first. One
outraged housewife fired off a letter to Mark Schubart at Juilliard, expressing “consternation, anger and indignation” at Van’s embassy performance. “It is a pity,” she fumed, “to see an artist become embroiled in politics when he doesn’t know what the score is and, as in this case, when he accepts the patronage of people . . . who have stunned the civilized world with their unabating and wholesale criminal acts.” Probably much of official Washington agreed. Mikoyan had, after all, been one of Stalin’s intimates, while his younger brother, Artem, was co-designer of the Soviet Union’s most famous warplanes: the “Mi” in MiG stood for Mikoyan. Suspicions only grew when the deputy premier flew on to Cuba, where Fidel Castro had seized power during Mikoyan’s stay in America. The
USSR had rapidly recognized Castro’s government, but in reality, no one in the Soviet leadership had heard of the bearded revolutionary; Khrushchev suggested contacting the Cuban Communist Party, who replied that Castro was a bourgeois in the employ of the CIA. Mikoyan’s task was to find out what on earth was going on in Cuba, but American hawks surmised that something sinster was afoot. As usual in the Cold War, they were convinced that their rivals exerted a diabolical grip on world events, a belief that flattered the other side’s attempts to catch up with the chaotic reality.

IT IS
not clear whether Van had heard of Naum Shtarkman’s fate before he met Mikoyan, but in any case there was little he could do. Standing up for his Soviet friend would have meant exposing himself, and however high his stock was, it did not license him to meddle in internal Soviet affairs, especially in an area where America had no claim to the moral high ground. In any case, his love for Russia ran too deep to be easily shaken, and his plans to return to Moscow that spring were derailed only when his career hit an unexpected bump. In February he was manicuring his nails in a San Francisco taxi when the vehicle went flying over a pothole and the nail file sliced into the middle finger of his right hand, which turned red and painfully swollen. He bandaged it up and played with his left hand for an audience of twelve thousand at the American Association of School Administrators conference in Atlantic City, but five days later he was admitted to New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery and underwent a delicate operation to drain an abscess. Journalists speculated about whether he would be able to play again, reporting that he had been days from losing the finger, and possibly his right hand and forearm as well. On doctors’ orders, he canceled three months of concerts and recuperated in Tucson before returning to New York to attend the Bolshoi Ballet’s debut at the Met on April 16. As in piano playing, the Soviets considered they were
“ahead of the entire planet” in ballet, and the night, masterminded like most Soviet cultural visits by Sol Hurok, was the most glamorous that New York City had known in
years. The capacity crowd of nearly four thousand included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Noël Coward; the orchestra played the American and Soviet national anthems; the troupe performed Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
; the audience
stood and cheered; and the dancers applauded back. Yet many eyes, including
those of the FBI, were on Van, standing in Smiling Mike Menshikov’s box surrounded by Soviet and American flags.

On May 4, Van was presented with the prize for best instrumental performance with an orchestra at the inaugural Grammy Awards, which were handed out at simultaneous ceremonies in Beverly Hills and New York. His hand had finally recovered, and he was practicing hard. In June he set out on a whirlwind European tour, bringing down the house in such august settings as
La Scala, in Milan, before returning to New York in time to
attend the Soviet exhibition that had opened at the Coliseum as another manifestation of the new cultural exchange program. He toured the stands as an honored guest of the exhibition’s director-general, Aleksei N. Manzhulo—
another fact the FBI duly recorded—and was astonished to see his face in full color on a piano-shaped box of chocolates. “My goodness, it’s me,” he said as a Soviet press officer explained that it was the best-selling candy in the Soviet Union. Elsewhere there hung a huge photograph of Van receiving his gold medal from Shostakovich. He sat at a Soviet-made “Estonia” grand piano, which he obligingly praised, and then played as the flashbulbs popped: first Schumann and Chopin, and then “Moscow Nights.” “All right, Van, go through one more routine,” a cameraman demanded, and he rattled off a Chopin ballade before recording a message for Soviet state radio, which broadcast it along with the whole impromptu concert.

He was eternally obliging. The
bon viveur
in him loved the life of a concert pianist: the meetings with old acquaintances and new, the rehearsals and performances and parties, the famous friends and the attention. Yet the loner in him yearned for the self-communion of solitary practice. A few weeks later a
New Yorker
journalist ran into him under the marquee of the Plaza Hotel during a downpour, and
they retreated to the Oak Room for onion soup. In an age of relentless publicity, the journalist asked, how did Van continue his struggle to master music?

“Divine indifference,” said Van, happily slurping the last of his soup. “Swami Vivekananda says it is divine indifference that urges men to qualify for building an ideal. The Buddhist says
‘Neti! Neti!’
—‘Not this! Not that!’ I suppose one could call it unconcern. Prestige or simple recognition is often mistaken for success. Nothing could be further from the truth. For me, the greatest possible success would be to be utterly alone without feeling the need to talk to anyone.”

WITH VAN
absent from Moscow, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic filled the gap on a State Department–sponsored tour.
“Your music and ours are the artistic products of two very similar people who are natural friends, who belong together and who must not let suspicions and fears and prejudices keep them apart,” Bernstein rousingly told Russian musicians. He ended his last concert with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony; in the audience, the first time he had appeared in public since his censure, was Boris Pasternak. The effect was sensational, but it was quickly eclipsed when, on July 23, another American visitor became embroiled in the most famous verbal sparring match of the Cold War.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon had come to open the
American National Exhibition at leafy Sokolniki Park, in suburban Moscow, the counterpart to the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum. Futuristic glass-and-steel pavilions displayed chrome-finned automobiles, pleasure boats, heavy tractors, hi-fi sets, model railways, and modern art. A multiscreen film by Charles Eames called
Glimpses of the U.S.A.
played alongside fashion shows and dancers from Oklahoma. Muscovites flocked to have Polaroids taken of themselves and to munch on corn on the cob. At the permanently mobbed Pepsi-Cola stand—Coca-Cola had cried off—one woman complained that the
brown liquid smelled like benzene, while men wanted to know if it could get them drunk. Most popular of all was the “Typical American House,” a full-scale replica of a six-room ranch-style suburban home furnished by Macy’s. The house was cut away for easy viewing, which, together with its shock value, earned it the nickname Splitnik. To its fifty thousand daily visitors, the most mind-boggling part was its kitchen.

On a hot summer’s evening, Khrushchev gamely accompanied the famously Communist-hating Nixon to the official opening. The Soviet leader sported a roomy light gray suit and white homburg; Nixon, a dark tailored suit and dark tie. After the vice president cut the ribbon, they moved to a mocked-up RCA color television studio, where the cameras rolled and Nixon took the first jab by extolling the wonders of videotape. “This indicates the possibilities of increasing communication,” he said, grinning toothily, “and this increasing communication will teach us some things and it will teach you some things, too. Because after all, you don’t know everything.”

“If I don’t know everything, you don’t know anything about communism—except fear of it,” Khrushchev shot back. Nixon was on the defensive; if anyone had told his opponent that a Soviet émigré founded Ampex, the firm that made the video recorder, he might have been floored. Khrushchev followed with a sharp cross, grunting that the Americans would doubtless use the video of the exchange for propaganda purposes and would not translate his words. Nixon slipped past this by promising that every word would be broadcast on American television. Khrushchev beamingly pumped his hand, and Nixon hit back that he hoped
his
words would be broadcast across the Soviet Union. “Da,” Khrushchev barked, slapping Nixon’s hand and going for a combination of punches. Jabbing his finger, the premier bragged that the Soviets were ahead in most things and would soon be saying “bye” as they overtook the United States. Taken by his own turn of phrase, he chortlingly repeated it in English, vigorously waving his hand to the delight of the crowd. Then he goaded a
glum Nixon into congratulating the Soviets on their achievements in rocket science and astronomy. The first round ended in a draw.

The Nik and Dick Show moved on to the model house, where Nixon scored some points by going on about how advanced America was. Standing by the railing in front of the kitchen, he aimed an uppercut at his opponent by boasting that capitalism alone could produce a comfortable home filled with laborsaving devices. “We don’t have to have one decision made at the top by one government official,” he explained. “We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice.” He ended with a low left hook: “Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?” Khrushchev bobbed and weaved, scoffing at the electric lemon squeezer and insisting that most Americans could ill afford these “typical” luxuries. Nixon gestured to a built-in panel-controlled washing machine, which a young Russian-speaking American was demonstrating, and found his mark. “In America,” he said with a smirk, “these are designed to make things easier for our women.”