Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (43 page)

At home, Khrushchev’s stock rose again. Andrei Gromyko, his foreign minister, told a party assembly that the summit had been
“a meeting of a giant and a pygmy.” The change of U.S. president seemed to have played into the premier’s seasoned hands, and he renewed his ultimatum for Western troops to withdraw from Berlin within six months. Kennedy responded with a
televised address in which he declared that any Soviet action against West Berlin would mean war, announced a sharp military buildup, and urged a national effort to construct shelters in case of an atomic exchange. Yellow Fallout Shelter signs appeared on schools and other public buildings, and homeowners dug up their backyards.
Life
ran a feature on a young couple who spent their honeymoon sealed inside twenty-two tons of steel and concrete buried twelve feet under their lawn. Yet there were never enough bunkers to go round, and the drive, which had the unfortunate effect of causing America to look scared, had the makings of a fiasco. In “The Shelter,” a 1961 episode of
The Twilight Zone
set in a typical suburb, the only family with a suitable refuge barricades itself inside when the sirens go off by mistake, ignoring the desperate cries of neighbors who tear each other apart as surely as if an H-bomb had exploded overhead. The moral dilemma of whether a sheltering family could shoot an intruder was taken seriously enough that it provided a popular theme for
Sunday sermons.

To Khrushchev, Kennedy’s apparent weakness was a sign that power relations within the United States were in chaos, making accidental war more likely. The Soviet leader began to hanker after the
old days of mutual nuclear bluff and pondered what to do about Berlin. He had threatened to sign a bilateral peace treaty that December with the German Democratic Republic (Soviet-controlled East Germany), thus tearing up the four-power agreement made at the end of World War II that guaranteed the West land access to its own quarters of the city. But the threat was hollow: he was not willing to risk military reprisals by acting unilaterally, and it was clear the West was not going to budge. Meanwhile, droves of East Germans were defecting by the simple means of going down the steps to the subway, which still served the whole city. Already three million had taken the train to freedom, threatening the East’s economy and perhaps its existence. Even
Khrushchev’s aides joked that soon no one would be left in the GDR except its leader, Walter Ulbricht, and his mistress.

Kennedy and Khrushchev stared each other down across the German fault line. In the end it was Khrushchev who blinked first.

At midnight on August 12, 1961, GDR troops lined up across Berlin. The next morning, the streets along the Eastern side of the border were torn up and 124 miles of barbed wire was rolled out around the Western zone. Within a week, concrete blocks went up, and then guard towers. Western leaders did nothing; some wondered what had taken the Soviets so long. A broad gash running across the city was preferable to an East German offensive or an attempt to seal off West Berlin completely; besides, the wall had unlimited propaganda potential as a concrete symbol of Eastern Europe’s captivity.

To regain the advantage, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would end its self-imposed nuclear test ban by exploding the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever built, a 100-megaton monster with the combined force of six thousand of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response, Kennedy finally stepped out of his crouch and did what Eisenhower had never dared. Armed with compelling evidence from
new spy satellites, he tore up his own election platform and called Khrushchev’s bluff. Administration officials revealed that the Soviet Union had never come close to outstripping America’s nuclear arsenal. “We have a
second strike capability,” explained
the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, “which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.” Khrushchev retaliated by giving the go-ahead for the test shot on October 30. Last-minute adjustments cut the predicted yield by half, to lower the risks of widespread fallout and the fireball’s consuming the delivery plane. Even so, windowpanes broke more than five hundred miles away. Yet the device, which became known as the Czar Bomba, was nuclear posturing: a white elephant that was too big and heavy to deliver by ICBM or carry very far by bomber.

As well as delivering a fiery riposte to Kennedy, Khrushchev had timed the bomb to explode on the penultimate day of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when more than four thousand delegates were assembled in his newly completed Kremlin Palace of Congresses. Among the diversions laid on for them was an exhibition at the Manezh, the old czarist riding school (next to the Kremlin), which had recently become home to the Central Exhibition Hall. Prominent among the contemporary Soviet artworks were
“at least three busts of Van Cliburn.” No other American could have sat comfortably amid the great Soviet jamboree of ideological reaffirmation, but for all his anger at America’s leadership, Khrushchev had not lost his reformist zeal. The show of nuclear might gave him the cover he needed to shovel more manure over the corpse of Stalinism. Already he had pushed to retitle cities, factories, and landmarks named after the dictator: Stalinabad, Staliniri, and Stalino would henceforth be known as Dushanbe, Tskhinvali, and Donetsk. As new revelations flew and the state media luridly recounted a litany of
“monstrous crimes” that cried out for “historical justice,” the biggest acts of revisionism were left for the Congress’s approval. On October 31, Stalin’s embalmed body was removed from Lenin’s mausoleum and reburied near the Kremlin Wall. Days later Stalingrad, the reborn symbol and proof of the dictator’s victory in the Second World War, was renamed Volgograd. For the Chinese delegation it was the last straw. They walked out of the Congress and would never attend one again.

When the Czar Bomba went off, the United States immediately resumed testing with a series of small underground shots followed by larger-yield atmospheric and high-altitude tests, popping off dozens of nuclear devices like fireworks at intervals of two or three days. Kennedy’s revelation had grabbed back the atomic advantage—with real deployable weapons, not hot air. Yet, as Eisenhower had suspected, the price was to humiliate the Soviets and play into the hands of Kremlin hard-liners.

MUSIC, JOHN
F. Kennedy once remarked, was important
“not just as part of our arsenal in the cold war, but as an integral part of a free society.” Unlike Ike, he attended concerts regularly—
Van played for him twice—
relying on Jackie to tell him when to applaud. And unlike its predecessor, his new administration was intensely relaxed about using Van as a political weapon.

In February, with the Bay of Pigs invasion imminent, Van had made a goodwill tour of Mexico with spectacular results. His concerts sold out, he was mobbed in the streets, and when he attended a bullfight, the stadium shot to its feet chanting his name. He turned beetroot red and shyly waved, while in the ring, Mexico’s foremost matador dedicated the doomed
toro
to the young pianist. Days after the Berlin Wall went up, Van had made his West Berlin debut with the Radio Free Berlin Symphony, earning the useful headline
VAN CLIBURN PLAYS FOR FREE BERLIN
. When
The Ed Sullivan Show
taped an episode at West Berlin’s Sportspalast, with Van playing a Chopin polonaise to an audience of Allied military personnel, he was mobbed by screaming female fans like a chastely classical Elvis.

Musically as well as diplomatically, in 1961 Van charted a new course. For three years he had studied conducting with the venerable German-born maestro Bruno Walter:
“I recognize the divine spark in your nature and musicianship,” wrote Walter, who unsuccessfully tried to introduce Van to anthroposophy, the spiritual system founded by Rudolf Steiner. Walter became a cherished mentor, and their sessions proved invaluable when the New York Philharmonic
invited Van to conduct Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3 from the piano at a few weeks’ notice. After he played an afternoon recital at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, a police escort rushed him to the airport in time to make the flight to New York, where he headed straight to Carnegie Hall and pulled off the Prokofiev to good reviews.

Three years after his Moscow victory he was constantly on tour, playing the biggest arenas in cities nationwide and abroad. He performed with
all the great orchestras and developed an especially strong partnership with the Chicago Symphony, recording Beethoven and Schumann with the great Fritz Reiner. His LP of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3, recorded at Carnegie Hall on his return from Moscow but long delayed while he agonized over a few wrong notes, reached the top ten and won him a second Grammy. At the end of 1961, RCA presented him with a gold disc for his Tchaikovsky First, which
Variety
noted marked “the
first time that a long-hair artist has come up with a million-seller on an individual disk.” His fees, starting at six thousand dollars per performance but often doubled by his share of the box office, were the highest in the business. Percentage takers attached themselves to him like remoras on a shark, but he had plenty left over to liberally endow orchestras and establish scholarships, including one at Juilliard in Rosina Lhévinne’s name. She had been swamped with students since his victory made her the world’s most famous piano teacher, and every New Year she received hundreds of greetings from Russians saying,
“Thank you for sending us Van Cliburn!” The two remained affectionately in touch, though sometimes
she wrote complaining that he was impossible to get hold of and had unaccountably deserted her, and once, she grumbled—perhaps while slurping the mound of caviar that she had taken to having nightly with dinner and never offered to anyone else—to
Van’s old friend Jeaneane Dowis, who was now one of her assistants, that she couldn’t understand why he had never attempted to repay her for the free lessons she gave him before Moscow.

Van’s life was spent in airports, hotel rooms, and halls, or traveling
between them. Stewardesses became his friends; on one flight the attendant turned out to be his old Latin teacher and childhood crush
Winifred Hamilton. With the house in Tucson rented, he had no home of his own and no intention of getting one. In 1961 the Osborne went co-op after residents banded together to save it from demolition, but instead of buying, Van moved along West Fifty-Seventh Street to the modest Salisbury Hotel, which perched on top of Calvary Baptist Church. Gary Graffman bumped into Van carrying his furniture down the block. One room served as his combined
office and living room, with the Steinway lid piled with sheet music, a carved wooden troika, and a bronze-tinted bust of Chopin that Rildia Bee had given him for an early birthday. When he was away from New York, the hotel
rented out his apartment on the understanding that he could keep his piano there. Kilgore remained his legal residence until his parents moved
back to Shreveport for Harvey’s work: Magnolia had now become part of Mobil Oil, and Harvey was the area representative for its new crude oil and liquid gas department. Van changed his permanent address to Shreveport.

Not having a home did not deter him from splurging on antiques. Harvey panicked that his profligate son was going to fetch up in the poorhouse, and on one visit he proposed various ideas for investments.
“Oh, Daddy, I just don’t have that much to invest now,” he demurred. “Did you buy something else?” his father said, frowning. Van loved pretty things so much—Sheraton furniture and Russian imperial silver were among his favorites—that he couldn’t resist. Yet he was cannier with money than he gave out. A financial adviser in California purchased a good deal of West Coast property on his behalf, including strip malls and residential complexes that provided a handsome return even if they failed to delight their tenants. One struggling actor checked into the Halifax, a rat-infested pile owned by Van off the crack alley section of Hollywood Boulevard, and described it as
“the crappiest hotel in history.” Most of the residents, the man recalled, were “retired character actors who were living out their golden years in Van Cliburn’s dump.”

Van would have been horrified. He was as modest as ever, an
endearing mix of celebrity and small-town boy. He was friends with everyone, from Frank Sinatra to Placido Domingo, whom he introduced to each other, and ate at Club 21 and the Oak Room. Yet he also sat for hours talking to budding musicians at gatherings such as the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan, sharing ice creams and munching through heaps of hamburgers between rehearsing, playing, and sometimes conducting as often as three times in a day.

Fame had not spoiled him, but neither had it improved his concept of time. He became notorious for turning up late for rehearsals or recordings and for disappearing to make epic phone calls. Before concerts, he seemed oblivious to the waiting audience; beset by nerves, he would lock himself away in his dressing room, praying for the strength to play until he found the comfort he needed, or furiously chain-smoking for half an hour until the moment was just right. Increasingly he canceled engagements on short notice. Rildia Bee was the only person who could discipline him, and in 1962 Sol Hurok took her on as her son’s tour manager.
“Well he’s a nice boy, but sometimes I could just wring his neck,” she deadpanned, or something like it, while sitting backstage and following every note. Soon she was with him nearly all the time, which stopped Harvey from fretting about his wayward son—at the cost of being increasingly left on his own. Van gave in gracefully and loved having his mother there. He trusted her advice and, after putting up a show of independence, invariably followed it, and she cushioned him from the pressures of fame. Mother and son became famous for staying up all hours, wrapped in the quiet of night, which was comforting and cozy and put paid to any lingering thoughts that Van might have entertained of having a romantic life.