Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (51 page)

With relations with America improving, the Soviets and Chinese scaled down their support for North Vietnam, where it later emerged that they both had thousands of troops stationed throughout the conflict.
Eight months later, American combat troops began their final pullout from the ravaged nation.

IN CHINA
,
Liu Shikun was still moldering in solitary confinement despite his father-in-law’s leading role in Nixon’s visit. No one came to bother him anymore, and sometimes even the
People’s Daily
failed to arrive, though he could hear the doors banging as it was delivered to other prisoners. One day a copy landed on the floor, but moments later the guard rushed back. “Don’t read, don’t read!” he shouted as he unlocked the door and grabbed it. Yet Liu had glimpsed Ye Jianying’s name on a list of leaders accompanying Mao, and realizing his father-in-law had not been ousted as his guards had claimed, Liu guessed he was still being held simply to prevent Madame Mao and her Gang of Four from losing face.

More time went by, and finally his wife, the general’s daughter, came to visit. Under the table he palmed her the letter he had painstakingly composed from specks of newspaper and sticky bun, folded very small. She slipped it in her pocket. When she got home she gave it to her father, who immediately passed it to Mao’s aide Wang Dongxing, and with astonishing speed it was all over. Mao issued a “highest command”—a formulation that simply meant his word was law—and ordered the pianist’s release. “You should look after Liu Shikun,” he told the Central Committee. “Ask him to compose more national-style music. And he should continue his performances.” The pronouncement was a deep embarrassment for Madame Mao, who was now boss of all China’s cultural production, and to make the best of it, she invited Liu to her home and put on a great show of solicitude, sitting with him and two other members of the Gang of Four while they watched an American film about bullfighting that had presumably been selected for its piano score. Liu was formally absolved of his purported crimes and given a
staggering sum of money in lieu of lost salary. Still, seven years in prison had left him with neurological problems, and he was admitted to the hospital for what
would be a four-month stay. Before he went in he made a single comment to reporters asking about his treatment. “In the twentieth century,” he said, with righteous clarity, slicing the air with his
shaking hands, “political prisons in China during the Cultural Revolution, in terms of cruelty to inmates, are second only to Auschwitz during the Second World War.”

Internal politics and smuggled letters were not the only reasons for his release. As China creaked open its borders in the wake of Nixon’s visit, Premier Zhou convinced the leadership to agree to a program of cultural exchange. As one of the country’s two world-class pianists—the third had defected—Liu was once again needed, and one day in October he returned to work at the Central Philharmonic. The other remaining world-class pianist was Yin Chengzong, the second-prize winner in the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition. Yin had had a good Cultural Revolution, scoring an enormous success with the
Yellow River Concerto
, which had premiered in 1969 and was one of only two piano pieces now licensed for performance. The other was a concerto accompanied by the Peking Opera, but since there was no opera that day, Liu had no choice but to play the
Yellow River.
He had never attempted it before, but he had heard it over and over from loudspeakers hung on trees and lampposts outside his prison cell, and thanks to his father’s training, he had learned it by ear. To the surprise of the musicians who had turned up to see if he could still play, it went off well, and he was given a slot with Eugene Ormandy and the
Philadelphia Orchestra, early arrivals under the new cultural exchange agreement, along with basketball and swimming teams. Liu played the
Yellow River
again, and afterward the musicians, who had heard his story, silently got to their feet. Once again the international language of music was invoked to explain to confused populations why yesterday’s enemy was today’s honored guest.

Liu tried to put his life back together and not think about the past. Three years later Chairman Mao died, and a trio of leaders, among them General Ye and Wang Dongxing, the aide who had passed on
Liu’s letter, arrested the Gang of Four. With the Cultural Revolution officially over, the
Yellow River Concerto
was banned, and Yin Chengzong was purged in his turn.

THE WORLD
of politics had nearly lost Richard M. Nixon to a career in music. He was a competent amateur pianist: after one White House governors’ conference, he
played a duet with the great blues singer Pearl Bailey. LBJ had set great store by his fellow Texan Van, but he knew next to nothing about classical music; in Nixon, Van had a fan in the White House. The president
listened to his recordings of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff from his favorite armchair in the Lincoln Sitting Room while reading or smoking a pipe or cigar, and lobbied Van to put
his favorite piece, Brahms’s Rhapsody in G Minor, on vinyl. Nineteen of Nixon’s White House tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, contain copious mentions of his favorite pianist. The president pontificated to a gruff Kissinger and others on the beauties of Van’s playing. He relished his showmanship:
“He’s so colorful, isn’t he?” he remarked admiringly. And crucially for Nixon, he counted Van as a political supporter:
“He is our friend,” he stressed, adding for emphasis that he was “for us.”

Nixon kept Van busy. In January 1973 he played for the president’s second inauguration, and the following month, he performed at the state visit of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Nixon
upbraided his staff when Rildia Bee was omitted from the banquet and told them to get mother and son over. He also ordered them to find out if Van could perform in China. Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, pointed out that the Chinese might have a problem with Van because he was the favorite of the Soviets. “So he could come there and screw the Russians,” Nixon replied, ever triangulating, and perhaps casting his mind back to Van’s snub by Brezhnev.

Van was not as dexterous as Tricky Dick, and he never accepted the mooted mission. Yet the Brezhnev snub had undoubtedly taken the shine off his value as a symbol of U.S.-Soviet friendship. Though Nixon floated the idea, Van was not called on to play for Brezhnev’s
1973 visit to the United States, and not even Sol Hurok thought of sending him along on Nixon’s second visit to Moscow, the following year. A brighter moment came courtesy of the fourth edition of Van’s own competition, held in 1973, when Moscow Conservatory–trained Vladimir Viardo became its first Soviet winner.
Van virtually adopted him, taking him shopping in Cincinnati, buying him shirts by the dozen, and smuggling jeans to him in Moscow. Yet, back home, Viardo was refused a passport and banned from traveling abroad for twelve years, seemingly for failing to bribe officials with Western gifts he was expected to buy with the fraction of his foreign earnings he was allowed to keep. The Cliburn Competition, which owed its existence to a breakthrough in the Cold War, had been diminished by it.

So, deep down, had Van. Increasingly he looked elsewhere to make grand gestures, which sometimes led him to unlikely places. At the first Nixon inauguration he had met Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the First Couple of the Philippines, and the three had become friends; after an assassin tried to kill Imelda with a bolo during a speech, Van
visited her in the hospital. She was as energetic a patron of the arts as she was a buyer of shoes, and Van’s name featured repeatedly in the guestbook of the Coconut Palace, where she put up visiting celebrities. For months prior to his concerts, radio stations and movie theaters played his records, while Filipino fashion designers produced
“the Cliburn line—an array of gowns to make anyone beam with pride . . . while imbibing Cliburn’s music.” At a gala at the Malacañang Palace, Imelda sang Van a love song from the central Philippines, Ferdinand toasted him as “one of the most outstanding mortals of our time,” and the guests belted out
“Deep in the Heart of Texas” before being handed curfew passes with which they could escape arrest. Ferdinand’s high standing as the islands’ first elected president plunged after 1972, when he was accused of massive embezzlement and declared martial law rather than face an election, but the White House continued to back him, and Van continued to visit, playing a fund-raiser for young Filipino musicians at the huge
Araneta Coliseum in June 1973 and returning the following year to inaugurate the ten-thousand-seat Folk Arts Theater on Manila Bay. A critic wrote that his music touched minds, quickened hearts, and moved spirits, but that his dress sense offended local tastes.
“Only a person of his stature can get away with such an ill-fitting coat,” sniffed one columnist. “His arms are too long for his frame,” echoed another. “His legs are too long to fit under the piano. His pants are a bit short above his shoes.” This was not Moscow.

IN JANUARY
1974, Harvey Cliburn died, aged seventy-five, in the Shreveport hospital where he had been ailing for several months. His last words to Van were some of his first:
“Sonny Boy, I love you,” he said. “And look after your mother.” He had cut a
lonely figure of late; Van had occasionally convinced him to join him and Rildia Bee on tour as far away as Japan, but it was not his scene.
“To tell you the truth,” Harvey once told an amused Naomi Graffman in Monte Carlo, “ah’d rather be home with mah ca-ows.” As they laid him to rest, Van vowed to spend even more time with Rildia Bee and began worrying that traveling was getting too much for her.

Two months later Sol Hurok, Van’s other father figure, collapsed in a New York elevator and died. Months earlier Van had performed at the Met in honor of the great impresario’s sixtieth year in show business, a Gilded Age–style celebration that ended with an epic party at the Pierre. With Hurok went Van’s romantic dreams of backstage greasepaint in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg and fur-swaddled carriage rides through Central Park. Such dreams had already been splintered two years earlier when a bomb exploded in Hurok’s Fifth Avenue office, injuring him and killing his twenty-seven-year-old secretary,
Iris Kones. The Jewish Defense League, which opposed Soviet artists touring the United States, claimed responsibility for the bombing and its two Jewish victims.

Waylaid by feelings of grief and guilt as he turned forty that July, Van stopped taking new bookings. He never mentioned the word
retirement
;
he simply replied to requests with regrets that he had a prior engagement.

With four years’ worth of commitments to work through, he was still frantically busy through the mid-1970s, pulling in record crowds to stadiums and outdoor venues; increasing his rate of album releases to include Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Barber, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev; and picking up more awards and honorary degrees. In September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal and Vice President Gerald Ford took over, Van was behind the piano at the newly named Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston,
accompanying Soviet astronauts training for a planned U.S. Soviet space linkup in a chorus of “Moscow Nights.” For the 1975 state visit of the emperor and empress of Japan, President Ford recruited Van to play Chopin, Schumann, and Debussy and gave a speech celebrating Van’s service as a catalyst of culture who had brought East and West together with his
“legendary talent”; the performance was beamed live to Japan.