Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (53 page)

Away from the world’s glare he was lighter now, an innocent-sophisticated man-child who never much cared for rules and barely noticed they existed.
“In
Te
xas,” he said, “we like to stay
ba
bies.” Yet the world would not stop wanting to know about him. He refused requests for interviews whenever he could, and when he couldn’t escape, he kept journalists waiting until he had them on his terms.
One reporter was ushered into the library in the early hours, where Van was settled with Baby Chops on a pillow-stuffed Georgian settee, and described a scene of aristocratic leisure:
“He twists a cigarette into a white holder and lights it, pressing it between his thumb and index finger, palm up, European fashion. Blue smoke curls upward in graceful rings.” Van had an almost saintly aura of innocence that, to jaded reporters, seemed too good to be true, but most went away utterly charmed and none the wiser.

As time went on, he sometimes answered with mumbling or silence, as if there were places he no longer wanted to go. When Mercury was in retrograde (astrologically a bad omen for all kinds of exchange), it was impossible to get an answer out of him at all. His life story repeated for the hundredth or thousandth time became an overrehearsed routine, seasoned always with Rildia Bee’s homey aphorisms. Unconsciously he overplayed himself like an aging actor, delivering his lines with overworked eyebrows. “They were so nice, very sweet, very kind,” he said of everyone, emphasizing each word: “I was so thrilled.” When he emerged from his seclusion to give speeches, starting with the 1978
commencement at Juilliard, he earnestly labored the same ripe lines about music being body, mind, and spirit; quoted the same wisdom from Plato, Chaucer, Rachmaninoff, and Rildia Bee; and recited an obscure Romantic poem, “Steal not away, O pierced heart,” by an obscure Romantic poet named Van Cliburn.

The sentiments were deeply felt, but in reality Van was funnier and naughtier than he appeared, and he had his demons. Often he was found with friends at the bar in his favorite restaurant, La Piazza. His cousin visited to drink Scotch and smoke cigarettes,
“just shy of Aunt Rildia Bee’s view.” There were tales of heavy drinking, including at public events. When he turned fifty in 1984, graying but still ludicrously youthful, he began worrying about his weight. His face had filled out and creased into a fleshier softness, and he had the
wrinkles erased from his photographs. Sometimes he embellished his legend, perhaps carried away with the romance of it. The famous
evening when Rildia Bee tended to Rachmaninoff moved back several years so it became a seminal event in Van’s decision to become a pianist. The boat ride at Khrushchev’s dacha extended until he and Van motored all the way into Moscow and looked up at the Kremlin Wall, an impossibility then as now.

His friends adored him, protected him, smiled at his foibles, and spoke of him with a warm glow—but few felt they really knew him. As the years went by, many told interviewers that they didn’t see how he could be happy unless he returned to the stage.
“Try me!” he shouted, roaring with laughter. He was scarcely alone among great pianists in shying away from performing. Liszt stopped early. Glenn Gould abandoned the stage at thirty-one. Horowitz reputedly thought his fingers were made of glass and would shatter if he touched the piano, and he took twelve years off. John Browning took off two decades. John Ogdon, who shared the 1962 Tchaikovsky Gold Medal with Ashkenazy, went mad, suffering delusions of glowing crosses, electrodes implanted in his body, and conspiracies orchestrated by Adolf Hitler. The childlike wonder and joy needed to summon up surging emotions night after night is a friable thing in a pushing world. Yet America had invested a good deal of its self-belief in Van, and the undying fascination with his disappearance suggested an anxiety about what had happened to the nation in the years since 1958. America’s old insecurity about European cultural imperialism had been a powerful spur to the nation’s determination to enrich itself. Yet now that that insecurity had been dispelled, above all by Van’s victory in Moscow, had a vital incentive to improve and compete also been lost? Did Van’s retreat from the field suggest that America was becoming complacent? Undoubtedly his premature retirement evoked a kind of melancholy, a sense even of being let down, as if by fulfilling his potential in his youth, he had tapped into an existential crisis about what the nation might be capable of in its riper years. Or perhaps the disappointment stemmed from the discovery that Van was not so much a driven, tortured genius as a thwarted homebody, that he was still a small-town Texan and not European enough after all.

NINE YEARS
went by without Van playing a note in public, but he was still in the public eye, giving speeches and receiving honors. April 1983 brought the
Albert Schweitzer Award for “a life’s work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity,” which was presented at Carnegie Hall with Leontyne Price singing and Greer Garson as emcee, and followed by a dinner dance for four hundred in the Plaza ballroom. But the honor came amid a month of disturbing news: of multiple nuclear tests in the USSR, the United States, and France; and a suicide bomber who killed sixty-three at the U.S. embassy in Lebanon.

Vietnam, underground testing, and the unreality of deterrence based on the potential to incinerate the earth had fostered a fatalistic nuclear apathy in the late 1970s. Yet when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter withdrew an arms control treaty negotiated with Brezhnev, Cold War fears once again came to the fore. Bilateral exchanges fell back to a level not seen since the Stalin era, as Soviet musicians were forbidden to tour America, and the United States, along with many allies, boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Defeating Carter in that year’s presidential election, Ronald Reagan abandoned détente and replaced the containment strategy that had served America since World War II with a policy of rolling back Soviet power. Reagan’s rhetoric wound up in concert with a massive increase in defense spending. “
The march of freedom and democracy,” he affably proclaimed in a 1982 address to the British Parliament, “will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” The following year, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as
“an evil empire” before a crowd of flag-waving evangelicals and proposed to weaponize space with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars. Making Reagan’s case, a Soviet interceptor shot down a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight as it crossed Soviet airspace en route from New York to Seoul, with the loss of all 267 crew and passengers, including a U.S. congressman. In 1984 the Soviet Union and every Eastern Bloc
country except Romania boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics; the next year, the Soviets also boycotted the Van Cliburn Competition, as they had in 1981. Van stayed silent, but when his old friends Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya were stripped of Soviet citizenship for “activities harmful to the prestige of the state,” even he was moved to comment.
“I felt sad,” he said, “because I know they love Russia very much. All the time I’ve known them I never heard anything but how deeply they adore their country.”

Liu Shikun was dragged back into the Cold War, too. In 1978 his father-in-law, General Ye, had become China’s head of state, and the following year, Liu was the
first Chinese artist to perform in America. In contrast to his youthful pyrotechnics, his style was now broodingly romantic, the harvest of his solitary meditations on Van’s playing. Yet the general’s resignation in 1983 stripped Liu of his political protection, and as part of China’s Anti–Spiritual Pollution Campaign against Western liberal values, the pianist was accused of
smuggling and womanizing. Two years later he was visiting his eldest son in Los Angeles when a leading Republican politician heard his story and encouraged him to apply for political asylum. Everything was readied, including an FBI safe house, but despite tearful pleas, he flew back to China, convinced despite everything that the country was opening up. Still, he regretted the lost opportunity to make his name in America, never more so than the following year, when he was arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling and gold speculation after a female undercover agent working for the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and the State Security Ministry befriended him to gather “evidence.” When he was released he sat at home, depressed and silent and drained of any interest in music, as factions on the Left and Right continued to toy with him.

In 1983 Emil Gilels performed for what would be the final time in New York, and he and Van met for dinner. To Van’s surprise, Gilels praised him for taking time off. Then he told him that he had seen in a dream that Van would play again soon, and it would have
something to do with Russia. As for when it would happen, neither could
say. Just as Van’s triumph in Moscow had marked an uptick in superpower relations, it seemed as if his disappearance had accompanied their downturn.

Human ingenuity strives to get ahead, which, for all but an exceptional few, means negotiating the system they are given. Yet the skills needed to coax privileges from a bureaucracy are not those that promote industry and initiative, and the Soviet Union was saddled with a sacrosanct theory of history that admitted no possibility of change. After seven decades the great Marxist-Leninist experiment had become a giant charade in which the government pretended to pay, the people pretended to work, and responsibility was shunted along. In the
classic Brezhnev joke, a Muscovite enraged by interminable lines for basic foodstuffs picks up a sharp knife and heads to the Kremlin to kill the general secretary. When he arrives he finds an even longer line, which he joins out of habit. He asks the man ahead of him what everyone is waiting for: “We’re all queuing to kill Comrade Brezhnev,” the man replies.

When Brezhnev died (of natural causes) in 1982, receiving the full state funeral he had denied Khrushchev, long-serving KGB chief Yuri Andropov replaced him at the age of sixty-eight. After fifteen months, Andropov died, still so shadowy that it was confirmed he had a wife only when one showed up at his funeral. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was even older—nearly as old as Reagan—and struggled through the eulogy at Andropov’s funeral; he himself was dead after thirteen months. The Kremlin had become a rest home for whiskery revolutionaries, with Red Square the world’s most oversize funeral parlor. Every time Radio Moscow played a slow movement of Tchaikovsky, rumors flew that another leader had expired. From top to bottom, the whole system was so sclerotic that something had to change.

•
21
•

The Summit

IN
1987, Nancy Reagan’s office put in a call to Cliburn Foundation chair
Susan Tilley. Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s First Couple, were coming to Washington for a summit in December and they had requested that Van play for the after-dinner soiree. Tilley took the invitation to Van, who was thrilled to be asked and panicked that he had barely practiced in years. He thought it over, tried out a few pieces on Rildia Bee;
called his friend Franz Mohr, Steinway’s chief concert technician, to ask him to pray hard; and the next day accepted. By now he was better known for his
mysterious disappearance than for his prodigious talent, but he could scarcely have refused the chance to play for the Soviet and American leaders together at long last. He abandoned his owlish hours, began rising at 9:00 a.m., and practiced till his fingers bled.

Gorbachev had begun his career in the Khrushchev era, and like his forerunner, he launched a raft of liberalizing policies, including glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), in the hope of saving the sinking Soviet ship by encouraging initiative and weeding out corruption. Like Khrushchev, he was also eager to demilitarize foreign policy and free up precious resources. As ever, that hope depended on rapprochement with America, and in the two years since he became general secretary of the Communist Party at the sprightly age of fifty-four, he and President Reagan had met twice, in Geneva and Reykjavik, Iceland. The Soviets had plenty of bargaining chips in
the form of forty-five thousand nuclear warheads, twenty thousand more than America. Yet Reagan had restarted the arms race at a time when the capitalist world was enjoying a sustained boom and the Soviet economy was teetering toward collapse. In Geneva, Khrushchev attempted to broker an agreement to reduce nuclear stockpiles, but mutual confidence was lacking. For one heady moment in Reykjavik, total nuclear disarmament was on the table, but Reagan insisted on pursuing his Star Wars initiative. Both meetings had ended without a treaty, and Washington was the make-or-break summit.

With so much at stake, tempers among the leaders’ advisers were running high, and haggling over diplomatic niceties continued as six thousand journalists converged on the U.S. capital. Van flew in as well, with Rildia Bee, Tom Zaremba, Susan Tilley, and the rest of his entourage. He said nothing during the flight, staring silently out the window.

The elaborately choreographed spectacle began on the morning of December 8, 1987. Reagan and Gorbachev immediately made history by signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first to abolish an entire class of nuclear missiles. Yet the treaty had been agreed to beforehand, and it eliminated only 4 percent of the superpowers’ arsenal. The real business at hand was to negotiate deep cuts in the far larger stockpiles of intercontinental weapons. In public, Gorbachev was all charm and charisma, but in private, his temper was quick to flare, and as the two leaders began
talks in the White House Cabinet Room, he was tough and doctrinaire. After a testy exchange over Nicaragua, Reagan cracked a joke about a professor who asked a Soviet taxi driver what he wanted to be: “They haven’t told me yet” was the punch line. Gorbachev icily suggested that Reagan instruct his ambassador to spend less time collecting jokes and more time improving relations. The president took the advice badly and challenged the general secretary to prove that the Soviets had renounced their aggressively expansionist aims. Gorbachev frowned, darkened, and exploded. Every American administration in history, he snapped, gesticulating wildly, had been hell-bent on aggression
and expansion. The United States and its powerful military-industrial complex were well known to be intent on world domination. Like a parent reasoning with a wayward child, Reagan quietly replied that the Soviets were even then butchering innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and had an iron grip on Eastern Europe. Soon he flagged as he tried to remember a Russian proverb and gave the floor to his secretary of state.