Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (57 page)

Mother and son, teacher and student, photographed at the piano in the Pierre suite.
(LIFE/Getty)

New York welcomes Van home with a ticker-tape parade on May 20, 1958.
(Courtesy of Cliburn Foundation)

President Dwight D. Eisenhower receives Van at the White House on May 23, 1958; also present but out of sight are Van’s parents and Soviet conductor Kirill Kondrashin.
(National Park Service/Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library &Museum)

Van with Rev. and Mrs. Newton White at a Tucson Symphony concert, October 1959.
(Jack Sheaffer/University of Arizona Libraries)

Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and embassy officials with Van at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, January 1959. Ambassador Mikhail “Smiling Mike” Menshikov is behind Mikoyan.
(AP)

Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon debate outside the model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, July 1959. This photograph was widely printed in American papers and was credited with helping Nixon to win the Republican presidential nomination the following year.
(Courtesy of National Archives)

Nikita and Nina Khrushchev welcome Van to a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, in September 1959 during their rambunctious tour of America.
(Ed Clark/LIFE /Getty)

The great impresario Sol Hurok, Van’s dream manager, photographed in the lobby of the old Metropolitan Opera House.
(Walter Sanders/LIFE/Getty)

Van holding the Soviet space dogs Belka and Strelka during filming of the show
We Will Meet Again
at the Ostankino Television Center, Moscow, August 1960.
(Valery Gende-Rote/TASS)

Two images of Van at concerts in the Soviet Union in 1960.

Grand Philharmonic Hall, Leningrad.
(Courtesy of Cliburn Foundation)

Palace of Sports of the Central Lenin Stadium, Moscow.
(Alexander Konkov/TASS)

Actress Pippa Scott reveals the five most eligible bachelors of 1962, as selected by the Hollywood Bachelor Girls’ Club. Besides Van the others are a TV star, baseball pitcher, U.S. senator, and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, whose agency took a keen interest in Van. Said Scott: “We pick the bachelors every year just to shake them out in the open as matrimonial targets. We predict that four of the five choices will be married by June 1963.”
(Bettmann/CORBIS)