Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (26 page)

“Van, you’ve won!” he cried, sweeping him up in a bear hug.

“You can’t know that, Eddik, not yet,” Van demurred, shaking his head. “Nothing’s official till tomorrow noon.” He was still objecting when Naum Shtarkman ran in, panting heavily.

“Vanya, you’ve won!” he said. “There’s no question about it. I just heard the news.” Van shook his head and began explaining the situation again when a uniformed conservatory official rushed in.

“Vanyushka,” he said, grinning knowingly, “you’d better go up to your room and put on your white tie and tails.”

Van stopped talking, smiled shakily, and headed to the door. “Everyone is going back to the conservatory now,” the official was saying as the winner walked heavily up the stairs.

OUTSIDE THE
conservatory, hundreds of hard-core fans had refused to go home and were loitering in the cold night, scrutinizing the comings and goings for clues to the results. When they saw Van and his friends approaching, they flocked over, applauding excitedly.

In the Great Hall, the lights were dimmed and covers were draped on the chairs. Kondrashin was at the podium, the orchestra was tuning up, and technicians were setting up movie cameras to film the winning program for the many Soviet citizens without access to television. Van
strode up to the piano, whipping off his crumpled sweater and throwing it to the floor, and sat down flexing his fingers. A few silent beats of Kondrashin’s baton, a few introductory bars from the orchestra, and Rachmaninoff’s great concerto once again poured from his hands. But a few minutes in, he stopped, unhappy with the way he was playing. Kondrashin tried to persuade him there was nothing wrong with it, but he shook his head, placing his huge palm on the damp back of the conductor’s white shirt. “Okh no,” he said in a plaintive Russian accent, “one more time.” They began again. After a minute of near-perfect playing, he banged his fists on the keys and started replaying some passages to himself, as if he were quite alone and there were no orchestra waiting. The musicians sat back and rested, their eyes, hands, and lips sore after four days of
rehearsing all day and performing all night. Van’s friends drew near as he thumped his knees in frustration, as tense as fans whose team was losing. They groaned at the slightest flubbed note and guffawed when the exhausted brass players made a silly mistake. After four hours the cameramen got the concerto on film. With morning light streaming in through the clerestory windows, everyone took a short break and prepared to record the Tchaikovsky. No one was surprised when the orchestra started several times in a muddle, but everyone was startled when the piano rang out as crisp and clear as a fresh-washed spring day.

IN MARK
Schubart’s hotel room the phone woke him at 4:00 a.m.

“Van’s won!” Max Frankel shouted in his ear. He, too, had lingered at the conservatory long enough to catch a glimpse of the recording session before rushing off to the censor’s office. Schubart threw on some clothes, hurried downstairs, and sent a four-word cable to Bill Schuman at Juilliard:

WE ARE IN ORBIT.

This time Frankel’s piece ran across four columns of the
New York Times
front page, directly beneath the masthead.
U.S
.
PIANIST
, 23,
WINS SOVIET CONTEST
, proclaimed the headline. A large photograph showed Van shaking hands with juror Lev Oborin, with a beaming Henrietta Belayeva between them and a flashbulb about to pop. A second piece, entitled
TALL AT THE KEYBOARD
, profiled Van as a Man in the News and drove home its sheer unlikeliness:

A native of the American Deep South who is the son of an oil company employee and a beneficiary of the Rockefellers: that is who stands as the cynosure of Moscow today.

His name is Van Cliburn, and he now lives in New York.

In the first days of the Tchaikovsky International Piano and Violin Festival, when he emerged from among forty-nine contestants
here as the darling of the serious listeners and bobby-soxers alike, they called him “the American genius.”

Now that he has won the contest, the Russians have dubbed him “Malchik [little boy] from the South.”

Both titles seem apt. Despite his slender six-foot four-inch frame, Mr. Cliburn, who is 23 years old, is boyish in appearance. He has a small face, with a sharp nose and clear blue eyes tucked under a thick head of blond, curly hair.

He was born in Shreveport, La. His speech betrays the fact that he has not been away too long from his “daddy,” who lives in Kilgore, Tex., where Van spent his early years . . .

Mr. Cliburn brought to the stage of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory a formidable talent, combining great technical skill with a robust and crowd-appealing emotional style. And that is comparable to bringing a copy of Marx to the Kremlin.

In Morningside Heights,
Allen Spicer stared wonderingly at the papers. A few years ago he had berated Van for never reading them, and now the boy was the lead news. He called out to Hazel: “That’s great,” they agreed. “At last he can afford that piano he bought for the church.” Yet, as he read on, the Old Princetonian might have begun to wonder what his former roomer had gotten himself into. In the same issue, the
Times
ran an editorial headed
THE ARTS AS BRIDGES
that suggested that artists such as Van might succeed where politicians had so conspicuously failed in spanning the gulf of hostility and misunderstanding between the superpowers. It was a noble sentiment, but in a world of
sputniks
and ICBMs, it placed a crushing burden on tender shoulders.

As Van’s victory became a lead story on every global outlet, many eyes turned to watch his next step. At the State Department, Secretary
Dulles ordered officers to report on the young pianist’s personality, attitude, and reliability. In the Kremlin, the Central Committee began a detailed investigation of his case. The
KGB opened a file on him, and so did the FBI. Journalists knocked on the Spicers’ door,
interviewed Harvey Cliburn’s bank manager, and camped out on the Cliburns’ little lawn.

In Van’s Moscow hotel room, the phone kept ringing, though he was hardly ever there to pick up. Sol Hurok had swung into action, sending one telegram to his friend Max Frankel asking to be put in touch with the young hero and another to Mark Schubart congratulating him on his signal service to American culture. Rather than wait, Hurok cabled Van, who had fruitlessly pursued him for so long, with an offer of management that somehow
leaked to the American press. RCA Victor, America’s leading classical label, also cabled Schubart, asking “that he
use his good offices to explain to Van Cliburn” that they had made a formal proposal for his services as a recording artist. When Columbia Records and every other major label joined the chase, Van briskly instructed Bill Judd to play them off against one another—so that “
if I go in one day and want to play ‘Clair de lune,’ they’ll have to record it.”

He had come to Moscow to marvel at St. Basil’s Cathedral, indulge in the music he adored, and perhaps, just perhaps, revive his floundering career. Instead he had become a worldwide phenomenon and had been handed an opportunity, and a responsibility, that no classical musician in history ever had. The prize giving that was about to take place was not the end of a crazy adventure: it was only the beginning.

•
10
•

“American Sputnik”

AT THE
Peking Hotel, Harriet Wingreen had
gone to sleep when there was a tremendous banging on her door. She opened up to find Van in a fluster.

“Let me in, Harriet. Let me in fast! I’ve gotta get in!” he blurted.

“What’s the matter, Van?” she mumbled.

“The girls are all after me!” he exclaimed. They were following him everywhere, and one had mysteriously appeared in his room in the dead of night.

Harriet closed the door and considered the situation: Van’s six-foot-four frame, her five feet, the couch, the bed. “Van, all right, you take the bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch,” she said sleepily. He spent the night and left the next morning, slipping out early and looking anxiously around.

It was a bright Monday morning, the spring sun suddenly flaring like a match struck in the dark. Later on, the mercury was expected to scale the unfamiliar heights of six degrees Celsius, and the lilac and apple were flowering ahead of time. At midday Van gingerly emerged beneath the stone shot-putter and wrestler and attempted to head off for the official announcement of the results. As soon as he was spotted—which was, after all, not hard—the cry went up, and a crowd of
devotees swarmed over holding out hand-knitted socks and hats and jars of jam. Some had heard reports that he had lost ten
pounds while in Moscow, and in a country where fruit was a great luxury, his fans shyly proffered bags of oranges.

At the conservatory most of the students had missed the night’s activity and were milling round in confusion.
“So Cliburn didn’t win first prize after all,” a young Soviet violinist ruefully thought as he arrived for class, noting the tense atmosphere. It turned out that the rumor had reached them several days late that the first prize was to be split so “Iron Lev” could come out on top after all. When the doors opened, they piled into the White Hall, which was soon crammed with contestants, judges, officials, students, fans, musicians, guests, photographers, and reporters, all noisily swapping the latest news.

“Dear comrades and guests,” Emil Gilels began. “We have all come here on this sunny spring day in order to announce the joyful news with which we have been preoccupied for a long time.” He praised the competitors, lamented the jury’s difficult job, and began to read out the results:

“First prize, which includes twenty-five thousand rubles and a gold medal, to Van Cliburn, USA.”

At Van’s name, screams of joy, wild applause, and chants of “Vanya!” burst out. The two men hugged and kissed, the flashbulbs popped, and Van blew a kiss to the room. Eventually Gilels was allowed to continue. The second-prize winners received twenty thousand rubles and a silver medal; the third-prize winner, fifteen thousand rubles and a bronze medal; and the rest, cash awards of descending value. As a mark of the exceptionally high level of playing, Gilels added, five violinists and five pianists who had failed to reach the finals were to receive diplomas and cash. Six semifinalists, including Jerry Lowenthal, collected honorary certificates. Then a series of judges stood up to praise the courage and talent of the winners, give a few career tips, and wish the losers better luck in the future. All declared that for quality of artistry and technique, there had never been a competition like it.

As soon as the speeches were over, the press set upon Van.

“What is your father?” asked a reporter from
Trud
, a mass-circulation trade union newspaper. “Is he a worker?”

“He is a worker,” Van replied, not mentioning the word
oil
.

“What is your mother?”

“She teaches piano.”

“Ah yes, good,” the reporter said, nodding.

A journalist for the United Press wire service pointed out that, under Soviet law, Van might not be able to take home his winnings.
“Money doesn’t mean anything to me,” he cheerfully replied. “There are so many things you cannot buy with it. Winning just means a great deal to me as an American. I would not take a million for this trip.” The reporter asked what he wanted to do next. “I would really like to go back to Texas,” he said. “I’m just about to break down.” Max Frankel thought Van was
basking in the attention, and he was not altogether wrong. For all his shyness, Van finally had a leading role that he was being allowed to play. It took the journalist and his friends more than an hour to drag him away for a snack. Afterward, Van sneaked in an hour’s practice, watched by Naum and Eddik, the other Soviet competitors, and the press.
Paul Moor snapped him kissing the matronly babushka who cleaned his studio, which was filled with fresh blossoms sent by admiring girls. The photojournalist was now acting as Van’s unofficial manager, at the request of his parents, who trusted him because he was from Texas.
Norman Shetler watched Moor and decided he was busy inveigling his way into Van’s confidence for his own purposes. Shetler resolved to stick by Van and help where he could.