Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (41 page)

CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who was also in the Soviet capital, was crossing Red Square when
he saw a mob milling around. He
went to investigate and found Van hemmed in by women proffering flowers, silver vases, and cuff links and
clutching at his clothes.
“Aw, look at that,” Van said with a sigh, kissing them. “It’s so beautiful—thank you.” An all-women fan club, called the Van Club, had grown around a nucleus of admirers who’d met one another while standing in line all night for tickets to his competition bouts. Its unofficial leader was Irina Garmash, a simple-seeming young woman who wrote Van heartbreakingly beautiful letters every two weeks. The devotees socialized regularly, swapping news about their idol, and now they followed him down the streets and stood outside his hotel, waiting for a friendly wave from his window. When he left the hotel to play his first concert on June 3, they were ready with
huge bouquets of flowers.

Outside the conservatory thousands once again filled the courtyard and the surrounding streets. Squads of militiamen were struggling to keep order. Students wearing red armbands directed ticket holders inside. The few spares sold for more than ten times their face value. From the loudspeakers a voice barked at the crowd to move along, but no one paid any heed.

In the Great Hall the aisles and stairs were packed solid. Tommy Thompson was present, as was an array of Soviet officialdom, including the magisterial
“Madame” Furtseva, a former weaver who was now the minister of culture. By the time Van came out, his fans had spread a thick layer of flowers over the stage apron and piano bench. Roberta Peters looked on in awe. Four years older than Van, she was already famous when he started at Juilliard and had starred in the Hurok biopic
Tonight We Sing
while he was still a student, but she had never seen anything like this. Van bowed over and over to ringing cheers and shouts of “Vanya” and “Vanyusha,” removed some flowers, and sat down to play Prokofiev’s Third and Brahms’s Second Piano Concertos, with Kondrashin conducting. At the end, the audience clapped in thunderous unison, and dewy-eyed girls surged down the aisles. In Van’s dressing room Prokofiev’s widow embraced him, saying in Russian, “Wonderful, wonderful.” During
the encores, including “Moscow Nights,” women at the front propped their elbows on the stage and stared up in a reverie. Van bent down to shake their hands and talk to each of them, and when he finally made to leave, they climbed up and dragged him back to sign autographs. As the house lights went off, he was still there, standing amid a frenzy of flowers in front of Soviet and American flags, saying in broken Russian, “I will never forget your wonderful welcome.”

“Strained relations between the Soviet Union and the United States over the U-2 spy plane incident did not discourage hundreds of cheering Muscovites from pelting the 25-year-old Texan with flowers and nearly mobbing him with affection as he emerged from the conservatory,” the
New York Times
reported. At a post-concert dinner,
“Soviet cultural officials were extremely courteous and carefully avoided political subjects.” On the embassy lawn sat an abandoned jet-powered speedboat with a silver plaque on its dashboard inscribed,
TO NIKITA S
.
KHRUSHCHEV FROM DWIGHT D
.
EISENHOWER
. As a satire on the stalled summit and state visit, it was priceless, but a monument was scarcely needed when Khrushchev was busy grandstanding at press conferences and heaping invective on Ike and America. The Soviet leader was still livid about the U-2 imbroglio. On top of everything else, a great deal of money had been spent preparing for the president’s now-canceled visit: as well as the golf course, a shoreside mansion had been built on Siberia’s unspoiled Lake Baikal, complete with costly new roads and communications.

In America, where newspapers were still giving saturation coverage to the squall of Soviet denunciations, reaction to Van’s ecstatic welcome was far from universally positive. A reader wrote to the
Chicago Tribune
to suggest that the pianist
“could do his own country a great service by canceling his tour and leaving Russia because of the attacks on this country and its President by Mr. Khrushchev. This step might cause Mr. Cliburn some inconvenience, but in the long run he would have the satisfaction of making a widespread protest against such an unsavory character as the Russian leader.” Those who thought that with diplomacy in crisis it was more important
than ever for artists to step into the breach, or who were reassured that the Soviets still loved at least one American, stayed silent.

To his Soviet fans, Van transcended politics as a kind of ideal American-Russian hybrid, an exotic but beloved adopted son, and nothing short of outright war would have kept them away. Two days later the Great Hall was equally jammed for his second concert.
“In the summer heat,” UPI reported, “two spectators fainted during the first number of Mr. Cliburn’s program and had to be carried into the lobby. Many youngsters, as adoring of Mr. Cliburn as some American youth are of Elvis Presley, rushed down the aisles at the end of the Chopin program to thrust armfuls of lilacs and tulips at the tall, smiling pianist. Other music lovers pelted Mr. Cliburn with sprigs of lilies of the valley as he stood bowing and clasping his hands to his chest in gratitude for the reception.” Swept up in music and love, Van was overwhelmed and utterly alive, and he saw no reason to trim his sails to the political winds. He had grown especially fond of Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan since their divan chat in Washington, and now he met Mikoyan’s son Stepan, a test pilot, and Stepan’s wife, Ella, a classical music aficionado, who sat at the symphony with her head in the score. After each of his ensuing concerts, he slipped through the back door of the conservatory and crouched in the rear of Ste-pan’s Buick, a 1956 eight-cylinder monster, concealed under a mound of flowers. They then sped to the House on the Embankment, a grim monolith with five hundred apartments and twenty-five entrances, which housed many members of the upper echelon. In the courtyard, Van emerged from the blooms and hastened to the Mikoyans’ fourth-floor apartment, where Ella had a library of three thousand records, scrupulously cataloged and stored in a huge glass-fronted cabinet. Close friends came for dinner, and afterward they sang “Moscow Nights” and other sentimental songs round the piano till the small hours, while Ella mended Van’s frayed concert clothes. In this private world he was in his element, roaring with infectious laughter, telling preposterous stories about opera divas, and doing wicked impressions. His keenest fans quickly cottoned on to the ruse and threw
flowers at the car as it left after subsequent performances, and at four in the morning
Aschen Mikoyan, Ella and Stepan’s eleven-year-old daughter, looked down from her bedroom window and saw some of them sitting on a bench in the courtyard, gazing up.

Sol Hurok arrived and installed himself in Lenin’s old suite at the National. He invited Van, Roberta Peters, and Isaac Stern for dinner, and they reminisced about the past while digging into cans of caviar.
Van spoke glowingly of Rildia Bee and everything she had done for him. The flamboyant Hurok basked in his wealth and status, but at heart he was a closet socialist who had come to the United States with a handful of rubles and got his start arranging concerts for labor organizations. He never stopped scheming to bring great artists to the greatest number of people, an obsession for which he had an uncanny instinct. Van, though a lifelong Republican voter, was utterly in sympathy with him. He had come to love the impulsive impresario, with his thick Yiddish accent and his lurking humor, which always threatened but never quite managed to burst into a smile.

DURING A
break between Moscow performances, Van, Kondrashin, and Henrietta set off on a tour of Riga, Minsk, Kiev, Sochi, Leningrad, Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi. In Leningrad’s Philharmonic Hall two thousand fans swarmed down the aisles to present Van with souvenirs, including a pigeon that
“bounced out of his arms and flew to the ceiling.” A thousand followed him to his hotel, cheered when he stepped onto the balcony to appeal for “Russian-American friendship,” and continued cheering long after midnight. In
Tbilisi he was asked to don the Georgian national costume and sit at the piano while his photograph was taken. He gamely agreed and gave permission for the pictures to be published, which in Russia was interpreted as a
political statement, much as his innocent words in Leningrad had been at home.

On July 4 he was back in Moscow playing for the Independence Day celebrations at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Khrushchev was in Austria, but Mikoyan attended and
sang lustily
along as Van played Russian songs. Afterward the Cliburn party moved south, and on the thirteenth it reached Sochi, on the Black Sea. At Adler airport, crowds pressed flowers and babies at Van in the warm sunshine, plump Sochi ladies with lovely smiles revealed gold teeth, and men wore plaid shirts and battered hats. He smiled back, hot in his dark suit, button-down shirt, and thin tie, his face nicked from shaving, while Kondrashin grinned in an airy white shirt and filmed the scene on his fancy cine camera. In another unprecedented mark of favor, Khrushchev had lent Van his state villa, an imposing mansion fronted by a two-story white portico set amid lush gardens with a swimming pool and badminton court. Van kicked around it for a week before returning to Moscow for his final concert on July 19. Twenty thousand fans filled the Lenin Sports Palace, which Khrushchev used for political rallies, to hear Van play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 with Kondrashin and the USSR State Symphony.
“More than 1,000 teen-age Russian girls stampeded down the aisles,” UPI reported. “They crowded around the stage and threw bouquets at the lank, grinning pianist. Usherettes flanked the stage at the end of the concert to defend Mr. Cliburn from the showers of flowers, gifts and notes that were directed his way by the fans. At times during the concert, the teen-agers sighed in unison or wept. When it finished, the entire audience kept Mr. Cliburn coming back for curtain calls for at least half an hour.” By the end, Van and most of the audience were weeping; so, no doubt, were many watching the broadcast on television.

His tour over, Van returned to the Black Sea for his long-delayed vacation. With its subtropical climate, the coast was the main resort for the whole Soviet Union, and it was especially famous for its medicinal spas. Every major institution had its own establishment where workers, gifted a voucher by their trade union, could get meals, treatments, and massages free or at cost. In the usual hierarchical Soviet way, the Council of Ministers’ spa was rated the highest in several categories. Cottages were dotted round a large park, and Van moved into one that had been equipped with a piano. Henrietta stayed with
him, and Ella Mikoyan installed herself in the main building. The three swam, walked, took trips to a mountain lake, and lazed in the sun. One day, Van went to the Mikoyans’ nearby compound for a late lunch party. With mock solemnity
Anastas Mikoyan warned Van not to divulge the address of Khrushchev’s dacha, as it was part of the nuclear weapons research facility; Van replied that it made no difference to him as he could barely work a camera, let alone understand complex technology when he saw it.
Young Aschen, who by now had developed a fierce crush on him, was sick in bed and missed the festivities, but at her mother’s prompting, Van stopped in to cheer her up.

Khrushchev had not arranged to meet his young American friend, probably because it was politically awkward to be seen championing an emissary of the treacherous imperialists, even one as beloved as Van. Yet he undoubtedly approved Van’s two final engagements. The first was a luncheon in his honor given by the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, at which
speaker after speaker insisted that political tensions would not affect artistic relations. The second was at the Ostankino Television Technical Center on August 22 for the filming of a TV show called
We Will Meet Again.
In front of the cameras, Van posed with Belka and Strelka, two feisty stray dogs plucked from the Moscow streets who had trained at the Institute of Aviation Medicine and had just returned from a day in outer space aboard the latest Soviet rocket. Van grinned, and the dogs wagged their tails in canine proof of the superiority of the Soviet system. The program was broadcast across the Soviet Union, and three days later the photographs were plastered on page
two of
Pravda.
Watching from Washington, the
FBI was less impressed. “Cliburn, described as a ‘Soviet matinee idol,’ appeared on television in Moscow giving his impression of his recently concluded tour of the Soviet Union which program was reported as cleverly arranged to reinforce current communist propaganda images,” an agent noted. “Cliburn was reported to have expressed appreciation for the ‘wonderful hospitality’ he had received.” So he
had, but before he left he proved his imperviousness to politics in a different direction by endowing Moscow’s crumbling Central Baptist Church to the tune of
eighty thousand rubles, the sum total of earnings from his recent Soviet tour. Russia’s Baptists had been severely persecuted before the war, and that very year, a new campaign banned them from having prayer houses, publishing literature, and forming an association. There were mass arrests of Baptist activists, and they were forced to become an underground movement, meeting clandestinely and illegally disseminating information.