Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (10 page)

“Beria is getting his knives ready for us,” he said to Malenkov.

“Well, what can we do?” pondered the accommodating premier, who was himself against nuclear weapons and for talks with the West. “I see, but what steps can we take?”

Khrushchev suggested a scheme, and to his surprise Malenkov
agreed to go along with it. Operating in secrecy, they won over a majority of the leadership, crucially including Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the hero of the Second World War, who was now deputy defense minister. An ambitious peasant like Khrushchev, Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin and hated Beria for his murderous inroads on the army command.

Three months after Stalin’s death, the plotters called a
meeting of the Presidium at which Beria was the only item on the agenda. Beria protested in astonishment, but Malenkov laid out the charges. When he finished, he invited others to add their concerns, and Khrushchev launched into a foul-mouthed diatribe. “What’s going on, Nikita?” asked the startled Beria. After Stalin’s dinners, Beria had often taken Khrushchev home paralytically drunk and tucked him in his bed, which he had invariably wet. “Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers?”

After two and a half hours, Malenkov pressed a concealed button that rang a buzzer outside. Zhukov burst in with ten officers and seized Beria. Apparently unprompted, a bodyguard blurted out that Beria had raped his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. In a typically Stalinist touch, the former security supremo was charged with being an agent of Anglo-American imperialism. When, in December 1953, a secret court convicted him of treason, terrorism, and counterrevolutionary conspiracy, he
“flung himself about the courtroom weeping and begging for mercy.” Stripped to his underpants, his hands in irons, he was hung mewling from a hook on the wall. A general shoved a cloth in his mouth, wrapped a bandage round his eyes, and fired point-blank into his forehead. Several officers followed suit. Libraries and schools across the Soviet Union closed so that staff could rip Beria’s face out of their books. His long entry in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
was pasted over with one about the Bering Sea.

On street corners, newly emboldened Russians
got drunk and beat up the local militiaman. In the Gulag camps, riots broke out among political prisoners, who had largely been excluded from the amnesty. But the hopes of change stirring in Soviet breasts were
not to be realized yet. Ukrainian women in national dress linked arms and were crushed by tanks. Automatic weapons mowed down camp strikers.

That September, Khrushchev had been named first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the single most powerful position in the Soviet Union. Now, with Beria dead, only Malenkov and Molotov stood in the way of his assuming total control. Spherical, loudmouthed, and jovial, he had always had the advantage of being underestimated. The U.S. ambassador dismissed him as boozy and
“not especially bright.” The British ambassador, the resplendently named Sir William Goodenough Hayter, described him as
“rumbustious, impetuous, loquacious, free-wheeling, and alarmingly ignorant of foreign affairs.” He was incapable of following complex reasoning, Hayter added, and the far more educated, intelligent, and agreeable Malenkov had to explain things to Khrushchev in “words of one syllable.” The celebrated Russian writer Boris Pasternak was unimpressed by both men and said so more bluntly:
“For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer, and now by a fool and a pig.”

To the West, the fool and the pig were not necessarily an improvement. That August, the Soviets had exploded their first hydrogen bomb—and unlike the American prototype tested earlier, it was ready for immediate use. Stalin had been a known if feared quantity, but there was no telling what these thermonuclear-armed nonentities might try.

•
4
•

Van Cliburn Days

NOT TWO
years had passed since Van fastened a small orchid on the gown of a pretty blonde named
Rosemary Butts and escorted her to the junior-senior prom at Kilgore College. Now
fifteen hundred East Texans were waiting for him in the same hall, which was less known for piano recitals than for the ice-white smiles and mountain-high legs of the Rangerettes, the world’s first precision drill team. By mayoral proclamation, April 9, 1953, was Van Cliburn Day in Kilgore.

Yet the young hero was nowhere to be seen. As far as he was concerned, the Rangerettes’ motto, “Beauty Knows No Pain,” applied equally well to concert pianists, who were expected to play exquisitely whatever their state of mind. His usual solution was to arrive at the last minute, or well after, and then pray, walk onstage, and play.

After half an hour the crowd began to squirm. Rumors spread that Van was still at home, talking long-distance to a girl in New York. Tempers were starting to fray when he finally traipsed out, sat down at the piano, and dashed off a florid rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The audience clambered to its feet, stirred by the unexpected pageantry, and with lumps in their throats cheered loudly before the concert began. When it did, they tipped to the edge of their seats, feeling each note as if they were the strings the hammer had hit. The nervous energy that shook Van’s frame, electrifying audiences as if each person were receiving his vital spark, was his burden and his blessing.

During intermission the president of Kilgore Music Club, a Mrs. Raymond Whittlesey, presented Van with a
check for six hundred dollars, to further his musical education. He had already brought credit to the oil patch communities of East Texas and Louisiana, she said, and they were mighty proud of him. He was overwhelmed, he replied, and would remember the help of the people he knew if he ever did anything really big. The delay had only added to the excitement, and the concert ended with a roar that would have pleased any college grid star. Later in the year he was back for two
“East Texas Days,” proclaimed in his honor by the mayor of Shreveport, which was not inclined to let Kilgore reap all the glory. Both communities had made heavy demands on their talented youngster’s time, but in return they had taught him a lesson unavailable to his worldlier peers: that when he performed, it was not just for the cognoscenti who wanted to hear his take on a familiar piece, but also for the doctor, lawyer, merchant, or fire chief who could not play the piano himself. To play to serve, to value all: experience like that was hard to buy.

That year, Van summered at Chautauqua, in western New York State, the original location of a nineteenth-century adult education movement that spawned camps nationwide. He stayed in the lakeside summerhouse of Mrs. Stephen I. Munger of Dallas and played with the festival orchestra under the baton of Walter Hendl, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The numerous Texans in the audience, reported the
Chautauquan
,
“seemed barely able to keep from drawing their ‘shootin’ irons,’ and ‘whoopies’ trembled on their lips.” Texans were famously supportive of their own, but Van’s unusual ability to embrace and grip an audience was attracting wider attention. Juilliard’s bald, urbane dean, Mark Schubart, a former
New York Times
music editor, was sure Van was something special the moment he heard him.
“After all,” he pointed out when asked, “not all people who talk like Texans are dumb.” Schubart phoned Bill Judd at Columbia Artists Management, Inc., the mega-agency that dominated concert promoting, which everyone called CAMI.
“I’ve
never done this before,” Schubart told him, “but there’s a pianist here named Van Cliburn that you ought to hear.”

“I’ve been hearing
about
him,” Judd replied, and asked if he could listen discreetly. When Van played Mozart and Prokofiev one afternoon in the Juilliard auditorium, Judd was sitting in the back. He later declared that Van was the only artist he was completely certain about from the first. The way Van looked did no harm, either; with a little metropolitan gloss, the strikingly tall, baby-faced Texan was beginning to cut quite a figure.

Judd was a four-martini-lunch man who started mixing again at dinnertime and “worked from home” in the mornings. Yet he had an impeccable pedigree—his father was manager of the Boston Symphony—and was an important vice president in the most glamorous division of CAMI, called Judson, O’Neill, and Judd. It was highly unusual to offer a student a contract, but when Judd made his play, Van politely thanked him and promised to think it over. He was in pressing need of some fees—in January 1954 he dropped by the Juilliard Placement Bureau to remind them that he would still like some students—but he had his hopes set elsewhere. A few months earlier he had gone to the Capitol Theatre, a four-thousand-seat movie palace near Times Square, to see a feature called
Tonight We Sing.
The film was a schmaltzy take on the rags-to-riches life and career of Sol Hurok, a legendary Russian-born impresario who represented many of the world’s top artists, and
Van was swept away. Another of his childhood dreams had been to appear in lights under the famed rubric “S. Hurok Presents,” and while he made
overtures to Hurok, he dragged his feet with Judd. The surprised manager pursued his nineteen-year-old quarry for more than a year, with improved contracts, dinner invitations, and concert tickets, which Van accepted with great grace without coming near to signing.

“How good, really, do you think Van is?” Allen Spicer asked Judd over a libation one evening, when the manager had swung by to press his suit. “Tell it to me so that a businessman can understand it.”

“Well, let me put it this way,” Judd replied. “First, he is one whale of a piano player. And second, he’s better than even
he
knows.”

Judd’s faith was about to be put to the test.

THE LEVENTRITT
Competition had no formal rules, application forms, cash prizes, or repertoire beyond requiring a concerto by Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms. It took place only in years when its prime movers, the conductor George Szell and the pianist Rudolf Serkin, heard there was talent at large. Yet it was the toughest contest for young instrumentalists in America. To carry off the title—there were no runners-up—a pianist had to be ready to play a solo engagement with the New York Philharmonic and sustain a concert career. That set the bar so high that for four years an annual crop of thirty or forty entrants had not produced a single winner.

The competition was shepherded by
Rosalie Leventritt, a petite southern belle with smiling violet-blue eyes and an impish humor whose spacious apartment at 850 Park Avenue was the unofficial headquarters of New York’s classical musicians. Entrants had to submit evidence of professional experience, and bright, jolly
Naomi Graffman, who two years earlier had married the last winner, the brilliant young pianist Gary Graffman, went through forty-eight packages with Mrs. Leventritt’s daughter, who was also called Rosalie but who had sensibly married early and become a Berner. Most consisted of a few sheets of typed paper, but Harvey Cliburn had put together a scrapbook as thick as a phone directory with a picture of Van aged six on the cover. Newspaper clippings and more photos spilled from its pages. There were numerous articles about the G. B. Dealey Award, which neither Naomi nor Rosalie had heard of, and full details on some twenty-four concerts in unlikely places such as Muskogee, Oklahoma; Clinton, Mississippi; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Paris, Texas. The two women ran their own sweepstakes based on the submissions, and between fits of giggles, Naomi burst out,
“He’s going to win!”

Van prepared thirteen pieces, including three concertos, and practiced hard; to reach peak form, he played a benefit for a Shreveport
college, another for a Riverdale retirement home, and a concert at Calvary Baptist. The opening sessions were held in Steinway Hall, in front of a lineup of American musical aristocracy. Dominant in every way was the six-foot-four, barrel-chested Arthur Judson, a founder of CBS, president of CAMI, and manager of the New York Philharmonic, who ascribed his ruddy cheeks to permanent rage at dealing with artists. Alongside Szell and Serkin were conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein and pianists Nadia Reisenberg, Leopold Mannes, and Eugene Istomin. The chairman was
Abram Chasins, the stuffy but gifted music director of WQXR, the
New York Times
radio station.

Van strolled in with his wild hair, and Naomi Graffman was enchanted. He was so tall, and so thin that he looked even taller. “And not even Jewish!” she marveled. “How odd to see a
cowboy
play the piano.” But all visions of bucking broncos vanished the instant he began to play. Afterward her husband got a call from Serkin.

“You must come to the finals,” he gushed. “There’s this marvelous, incredible talent! His Liszt, Chopin, Schumann—beautiful.”

“Did he play Mozart?” asked Graffman, a bespectacled classicist who dismissed Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff as razzle-dazzle Russians.

“Nah, that wasn’t good at all,” said Serkin, “but he’s such a great talent.”

Van called his friends from Calvary Baptist:
“You won’t forget to pray for me, will you? It buoys me up when I know you’re praying.”