Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (6 page)

Like any teenager away from home the first time, he cut loose
some strings. His room was a pigsty. Every day, Rildia Bee sent him the
Kilgore News Herald
, and the unread copies piled up with the other clutter until it threatened to block the door. Occasionally he stayed up all night and tackled a batch. “My room looks wonderful and I’ll never let it get untidy again,” he’d vow to Hazel Spicer in the morning, but it always did. He was terrible at writing home; after weeks of silence he telephoned, reversing the charges. Against his parents’ strict precepts, he tried smoking and drinking: “Just a little rum,” he said when he joined the Spicers in their late-afternoon rum and Coke. The biggest relief after years as a special case was Juilliard’s unabashed elitism. In a place where violinists strode down the hall throwing off double-stops and triple-stops, he no longer stood out for devotion to his craft.

Yet he still stood out. It was hard not to when his blond pompadour bobbed above the heads of everyone else and his contagious laugh echoed down the hall. He was perpetually putting his paddle-like arms round anyone who came within their ambit, which disarmed most but annoyed some. A young voice student named
Leontyne Price was shocked when he, a Lhévinne student, spoke to her in the cafeteria, a major arena for student showboating, where the tribes normally kept their own counsel. Then there was his Texas-ness, which he wore more strongly than the Dallas contingent, despite years of speech and drama lessons with a neighbor,
Mrs. Leo Satterwhite Allen, whose son had studied with Rildia Bee. The typical Juilliard student was the son of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals raised in a wood polish world of museums and Chekhov plays and studied language. Van went round with his brightly patterned shirts and his wide, floppy collars, his southern accent and down-home humor and artless affection for everyone.
“Boy, isn’t it wonderful,” he’d say, shaking his head in wonder, when he liked something. Students who considered themselves intellectuals talked down to him, but what they found most outlandish was his taste in music: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Liszt—his heroes were so cringingly unfashionable that it was hard to take him seriously as an artist. That pained him,
more on account of his beloved music than his ego, which his upbringing and gentleness kept modestly bound.

Since he was dismissed as a hayseed he began playing the enfant terrible, banging out jazz and pop tunes, thumping the keyboard as if he had boxing gloves on, and fooling his classmates into thinking he coasted on his admittedly spectacular musical instincts. To the Spicers’ consternation, he started coming home in the early hours and leaving notes for Hazel: “Hello, darling! I’m home! Whee! Wake me up so I can talk to you in the morning. Love, Van.” They soon solved the mystery of his late nights. When the night caretaker at Juilliard threw Rosina’s gang out of the practice studios, Van walked with them as far as the 110th Street subway station, but instead of joining them for a beer, he took the downtown 1 train, with its screeching brakes and wicker seats, to Fifty-Seventh Street and disappeared down the service stairs at the back of a tall stone building. Squeezing past the trash cans, he tugged on a heavy sliding door and entered a windowless basement lit by factory-style fluorescent lights and crisscrossed by pipes. There, parked against drably painted walls, were his nightly dates: a bank of several dozen nine-foot concert grands. This was the basement of
Steinway Hall, where pianists on the roster of Steinway Artists could choose an instrument for their next performance from a storied fleet that included Rachmaninoff’s favorite, number CD-18. At night, after the white-coated technicians had finished their tuning and buffing, the black beauties were available for practice. Some students used the basement as a musical club, where friends gathered to dispense gossip and criticism. Van took the last time slot, when he could be alone and concentrate while the world was asleep. In the morning he was perpetually late for his nine o’clock class. This drove Rosina crazy and irritated his classmates, who thought he was dopey and pitched in to buy him a Big Ben alarm clock. He started picking up chocolates or flowers on the way to school and presenting them to Rosina with his excuses, which made him even later.

To his peers’ equal bemusement, three times a week he rode the subway to Fifty-Seventh Street to attend Calvary Baptist Church.
In true New York style, the church was interrupted by its own skyscraper, with a Gothic portal supporting a dozen floors of apartments and a tower perched up high. Inside, a proscenium arch and gallery gave it the look of a Broadway theater, but the fellowship was warm, hands were raised high, and here in Mammon the living God felt present in daily life. Van’s fellow Texan Jeaneane Dowis was as suspicious as any of Van’s worn-on-the-sleeve faith, but he kept asking her out for dinner, and a free meal was not to be sniffed at. She and Jimmy Mathis, Rosina’s other Texan pianist, became Van’s best friends. Jimmy had short dark hair; a sensitive, clammy face; and a penchant for making a hysterical drama out of anything.
“Well, far be it from
me
to say,” he’d begin in the tones of a bossy schoolmarm, before delivering an outrageous zinger. The threesome ate together at Aki Dining Room on West 119th Street, where a full dinner could be had for ninety-nine cents, gabbing all the time about the superior virtues of Texas. When they were apart, Van was on the phone with them by the hour. Mr. Spicer had a free telephone that went with his job, but he consulted his conscience, decided it was wrong to put Van’s calls on it, and installed a separate line. His conscience thanked him when Van racked up staggeringly high bills.

Many evenings, Van bought a twenty-five-cent student ticket for Carnegie Hall from Joseph Patelson Music House on Fifty-Sixth Street, a little place with bins full of out-of-print sheet music that was universally known as the half-price shop; or he and his two friends queued for seventy-five-cent standing places at the Metropolitan Opera, down on Broadway. One night at the Met,
a wealthy lady beckoned him to take her spare seat down front, and from then on he bought standing but sat in an orchestra seat. Occasionally he went to the jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street, or the Village Vanguard downtown, where Ella Fitzgerald might be singing or Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson playing piano. Some said the improvised spontaneity of jazz inflected American classical music, but Van didn’t take it very seriously and liked cocktail piano and World War II songs just as well.

There was music everywhere in New York in 1951. There was everything
in New York, though many neighborhoods retained a quirky small-town feel. The city was rushing with the energies unleashed after the war. The West Side piers were busy with ships and freight, the billboard lights of Times Square glowed bright, and the colleges were full of men and women on the GI program. For a young man with a few dollars chasing his dream, it was an exciting time to be alive.

IT WAS
the brightest of times and the darkest of times. Cities across America were shooting skyward, but toward what future? With the map of Eurasia now overwhelmingly colored red, President Truman made it America’s overriding priority to resist at all costs what one official termed
“the Kremlin’s ultimate intentions to enslave mankind.”
Secret plans were drawn up for a fourfold increase in defense spending, a burgeoning of the atomic stockpile, and a possible
Third World War, which experts predicted was most likely to start, and end, in 1957. In New York, schoolchildren were issued dog tags so their bodies could be identified in case of a nuclear blast, and families upstate were warned to expect a flood of refugees.
“Every effort will be made to place people of similar interests with you,” officials assured them, as if Armageddon would resemble summer camp. Allegorizing how the world had got in this fix, movie theaters were showing
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, in which a well-meaning alien pleads for world harmony and an end to the weapons race only to meet with suspicion and violence from officials and citizens alike.

Since the human consciousness protects itself by refusing to countenance its own demise, many searched for a silver lining to the atomic cloud. In bookstores, a thin volume entitled
How to Survive an Atomic Bomb
was a best seller; its recommendations include practicing lying on the floor, ideally with no one watching; and wearing loose-fitting clothing and a hat to minimize burns. Reciting jingles or the multiplication table might help control fear during a nuclear attack, the book advises, but, in any case, life should be back to normal within a month or two. In an even more Pollyannaish vein, an engineer drew up plans for giant subterranean elevators that would lower
New York City’s skyscrapers in an atomic emergency; he calculated that the Empire State Building could be dropped as far as the eighty-sixth floor in fifty-eight seconds,
“leaving only the tower unprotected to avoid expense of added cellar depth.” Others saw in atomic energy not the flash of extinction but a dazzling future of cheap power, mass leisure, and a cultural and intellectual renaissance. Families would live in houses heated and cooled by walls of radioactive uranium and lit by panels glowing with the
“fluorescence which occurs around U-235.” They would brush their teeth with atomic toothpaste, eat crops grown with radioactive fertilizer and meat from giant mutant cattle, and drive atomic cars that ran for a year on
“a pellet of atomic energy the size of a vitamin pill.” One expert proposed melting the polar ice cap by bombing the Arctic, gifting
“the entire world a moister, warmer climate” and opening vast areas for development; others suggested leveling the Rocky Mountains with atom bombs to increase rainfall across the Great Plains and using the weapons
“generally to tidy up the awkward parts of the world.” This was a brave new era limited only by man’s imagination—and by reality, which soon set in.
“If an atomic-powered taxi hit an atomic-powered streetcar at Forty-second and Lex,” explained the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
, a publication not renowned for dryness, “it would completely destroy the whole Grand Central area.” Melting the ice cap,
Science Digest
pointed out, would be not only calamitous, but also ruinously expensive. Domestic applications of atomic power sources, noted
Scientific American
, were limited by the inconvenient fact that they weighed a minimum of twenty tons, excluding the cooling system and radiation shield.

Faced with such impossible calculations, most people did the only sensible thing: they tuned out, hoped for the best, and got on with their lives.

INSIDE ROOM
412 it was evilly hot. Rosina was a famous hypochondriac and sat wrapped in shawls, winter and summer, against imaginary drafts. “Open the window a little less!” she croaked if someone
dared nudge it. When her full complement of fifteen or twenty students crammed into the studio, they begged her to step outside while they aired it.

Behind the two pianos hung a small portrait of Josef Lhévinne and a bigger one of Anton Rubinstein. In 1889, the year she met Josef, when she (then Rosina Bessie) was nine and he (then Josef Levin) was fourteen and had shown up at her door as a substitute piano teacher, Rubinstein selected Josef to play Beethoven’s
Emperor Concerto
under his baton and, at the end, publicly embraced him, declaring him his successor. The rest of their story was legend. Rosina followed Josef into the conservatory, and a week after her graduation they married. Friends gave the marriage a year at most, but when Rosina overheard a remark that she was the better pianist of the two, she immediately stopped playing and devoted herself to Josef’s career. It was in search of opportunities for him that they moved to western Europe and Frenchified their name from Levin to Lhévinne.

In class, Rosina presided from her green chair, which was known as “the throne,” her short, wavy hair augmented with a steel-gray wig that sometimes lost its moorings. Behind the little-old-lady act lay a complex character. She was both a cuddly matriarch who shamelessly matchmade lonely first-year students and a master manipulator who kept control by withholding praise and playing classmates against one another. She told earthy jokes and pealed with laughter, but also suffered bouts of depression that left her coldly inscrutable, “with hooded eyes like a dour toad.” Her advice changed with her mood, but if a student dared complain, she waved it off: “Certainly, you know, that was Monday and today is Friday,” she’d purr in her thick Russian accent. She had a famously tortured relationship with the English language. When a journalist asked how she prepared for a concert, she replied, “After a little practice and a simple lunch I go to my room to rest and finger my passages.”