Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  The long, tall Texan ambled out, bowed modestly, sat unfussily, focused his energies into his hands, and plunged them into the opening chords of the Tchaikovsky. If some of the regular concertgoers expected showiness, what they got was a young man with a brilliant sound who was determined to communicate his beloved music to the best of his considerable ability. The end of the first movement brought an unconventional chorus of cheers and bravos—from the orchestra as well as the audience. After the third movement, they jumped to their feet and called him back seven times, and when the commotion died down, half the hall jostled backstage to the green room. The Graffmans took Rosalie Leventritt with them and chortled at the sight of hundreds of tall, red-faced Texans “ho-ho-hoing” as they clomped up the long staircase. Van was smiling and shaking hands and gazing gently into the eyes of every well-wisher, especially the youngest. He spotted the small, delicate Rosalie struggling up the stairs. “Honey, see all these people?” he cried. “Well, they all comin’ to yo’ party!” When she got to the top, he picked her up off her feet and twirled her round as she screamed with laughter. The two were getting on famously: he trusted her because of her southern accent, and she was utterly charmed by him, even though her tastes ran to the more intimate works of Brahms, Schubert, and Schumann.

  Later that afternoon, a few hundred hungry Texans piled into the celadon-green sitting room of Leventritt’s Park Avenue apartment. Rosalie begged her regulars to go easy on the food; the epicurean Gary Graffman nobly denied himself a second helping of the famous tomato aspic bursting with juicy jumbo shrimp. Van had sent a dozen long-stemmed roses, and someone had stuck them in an eleventh-century Song dynasty vase. It started leaking over the piano, first a trickle, then a flood. Rosalie was beginning to crack up when Van breezed in, sat at the piano, fixed his soft eyes on his patroness, and played the Schumann-Liszt “Widmung.” “Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,” he sang along, swaying into the music: “You are my soul, you are my heart.”

  The next morning, the reviews of Van’s Carnegie Hall performance were good but not effusive. One exception was Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram and Sun: “This is one of the most genuine and refreshing keyboard talents to come out of the West—or anywhere else—in a long time,” he wrote. “Van Cliburn is obviously going places, except that he plays as if he had already been there.”

  AFTER DRAWING a blank from Sol Hurok, Van finally signed with CAMI, and in January 1955 its Midwest representative Schuyler Chapin, who was married to Betty Steinway of the piano-manufacturing clan, wangled him a rare appearance on NBC’s Tonight, starring Steve Allen. “Longhair” music was usually considered the kiss of death for a talk show, and Van didn’t even have a name, but he played Ravel’s Toccata and a Chopin étude, and caused a minor sensation. Viewers sent in letters and telegrams and jammed the switchboard. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees’ club called for a booking. Across the Midwest, Chapin was asked about “that extraordinary guy with the hair we saw on TV.” Suddenly the concerts mounted up: that season, Van played twenty orchestral dates and ten recitals, the latter running through Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Medtner, Mozart, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Scarlatti, Schumann, and Stravinsky. When the Cleveland Summer Orchestra asked him to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, he learned it in two weeks. Audiences reacted so intensely that Van stood overwhelmed amid thundering applause, shaking hands over and over with the conductor and concertmaster, begging the orchestra to share the bows. Critics raved about the young musical Adonis with the flashing fingers and the unquenchable fire, likening his impact to that of Franz Liszt bursting on the Paris music world, also age twenty. “Tear out this name, write it somewhere, get to know it: Van Cliburn,” urged a Denver paper, declaring him “the most important young pianist of his generation.”

  This was sensational, though frequent mentions of cowboys and rodeos made it plain that the fascination stemmed in part from finding such talent in such an unusual person from such an unusual place. Meanwhile, Van’s impact on the Tonight show had been great enough that its host, Steve Allen, wanted him back. He was featured again that April, but this time he followed a slapstick act, played an obscure piece by Medtner followed by a long, reflective work by Chopin, and died. Novelty in the American entertainment world had a nasty habit of wearing off fast.

  THE SAME month that Van was competing for the Leventritt, the United States detonated its first viable thermonuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. By using nuclear fission, the mechanism of the atom bomb, to set off a secondary fusion reaction, scientists exponentially increased its destructive power. At fifteen megatons (the equivalent of 750 Hiroshima bombs) the “Castle Bravo” test produced a yield that was twice what was expected. Strong winds blew the radioactive fallout far across the Pacific Ocean, killing a Japanese tuna fisherman ninety miles away and contaminating the catch. If a single thermonuclear blast could have global ecological consequences, the world darkly brooded, what would be the effect of many? Experts provided the answer: just a hundred H-bombs could “create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”

  Nine months later, tuna was still being condemned by the ton; the following year, radioactive rain fell on Chicago. Soon deadly strontium 90 began to turn up in the milk supply, prompting fears of a generation prone to bone cancer and leukemia. A study found fifty-times-higher-than-normal levels of the same radioactive isotope, a product of nuclear fission, in hundreds of thousands of milk teeth. The postwar generation was rushing ahead without the basic comfort of assuming its children would survive. Doomsters argued about whether this unprecedented loss of faith in the future would lead to riotous living, mercenary individualism, or glassy-eyed nihilism. The only certainty was that it would be traumatic.

  Radiation, the invisible killer, buried the atomic boom in a thick concrete coffin and boosted activists of every stripe into the saddles of their hobbyhorses, with the prophets of domestic bliss leading the charge. It was not really a paradox that a world facing unfathomable threats decided that security began at home. To social conservatives, American families in their picket fence fortresses were moral crusaders who preserved the nation’s fiber in the face of enemy assaults. In an about-face from the permissive 1920s and the Depression-hit ’30s, the postwar generation was settling down earlier, having bigger families, and divorcing less. Boosters recommended twenty-one as the best age to tie the knot; twenty-three was past it. Since marriage and the production of lots of well-mannered children were patriotic duties, expressions of responsible citizenship, it followed that other lifestyles gave succor to America’s enemies, which meant Reds. When sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported that premarital sex, homosexuality, and adultery were widespread, he was accused of giving succor to international communism.

  Homosexuality caused the greatest stink. Officially classed as a psychiatric disorder, during the Cold War it was treated as a contagious social disease that threatened the nation’s security and sapped the virility that had tamed a continent. In 1950 the U.S. Senate had set the tone with a report entitled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which equated gay men in consenting relationships with violent pedophiles. “Those who engage in overt acts of perversion,” the authors declared, “lack the emotional stability of normal persons . . . One homosexual can pollute a government office.” As thousands lost their jobs, gay hunts became as ferocious as Red hunts; in the minds of prosecutors, who forced those who confessed to being “perverts” to name their “accomplices,” the two were barely distinguishable. Plainclothes FBI agents fanned through the nation’s parks and movie houses, bars and restaurants, to entrap the lonely and unwary, arresting a thousand a year in Washington alone. Eisenhower’s cynical “Silent Generation” either condoned the persecutions or raised a Bogartian eyebrow. Taught as children that the Russians were allies and the Japanese and Germans were enemies, only to be told the opposite when they were barely in their teen
s, most kept their noses clean and walked on by. The pressure to conform was irresistible.

  In the spring of 1955, Van ran into a tall, lissome Texan brunette named Donna Sanders at a concert. They had met a year and half earlier, on registration day at Juilliard, when Donna, an aspiring singer who had won an episode of the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts variety show on CBS, had enrolled on a scholarship fresh out of high school. She briefly became part of Van’s set before quitting after a few months to take up a role alongside a young Shirley MacLaine in the chorus of Me and Juliet, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that was opening on Broadway.

  This time Van asked Donna out. Their dates were patchy because he was often away touring and because, as she soon realized, the piano came first for him. By now he had moved out of the Spicers’ and was living temporarily in a little eleventh-floor apartment at the Buckingham Hotel. When he was practicing for a concert, Donna reported, “he’d shove the telephone under his bed and muffle it, and for days he’d be absolutely incommunicado.” There were other oddities. He was so obsessed with protecting his hands that he never wore a ring, for fear it would cut him, and he was scared of cooking, in case he burned his fingers. Strangest of all: “Van gets terribly depressed every time he has a birthday. He explained to me that it was terribly difficult to grow out of being a child prodigy.”

  Occasionally the two went to the theater or the Met. Once, they drove with friends to Palisades Park, a popular amusement park on a bluff above the Hudson in New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan. Van was pressured into riding the Cyclone roller coaster and got off green-faced, swearing it was the last time. Sometimes they went together to Calvary Baptist, where Van had become a much-loved character, famous for ragging the old gospel hymns during choir rehearsals, rolling his eyes and flying up and down the organ keyboard with terrible tremolos and horribly lush chords until the minister walked in, at which point Van turned demure as a nun. As they were both observant Southern Baptists, he and Donna never got beyond light petting, and there was never a formal understanding. When Van went home to Texas for the summer, and Donna went to perform in Arabian Nights at the Jones Beach Marine Theater on Long Island, he called it off without quite saying so, and by the time he came back to New York, she was engaged to a fellow cast member.

  After the breakup Donna’s roommate, a pert, green-eyed, twenty-year-old blond soprano named Jean Heafner, took it upon herself to console Van. They talked constantly on the phone, sighing over his problems for an hour and a half at a stretch. Jean, who was keen on Van herself, was romantically convinced that he and Donna loved each other and “were as engaged as two people could be without a ring” but were fated to be kept apart by a third party. “He’s married to his music,” she explained. “What can you do with a guy who’s spent his life pounding black on white?” If Van ever cut loose a little, she added, he did a fine job of covering it up.

  Jean was at Juilliard for graduate study, and one day she was gossiping when a girl said to her, “Isn’t that rough on Donna? You know, Van’s queer.” Jean refused to believe it. From what she had seen he was strictly the all-American boy. Yet the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced that Rildia Bee was responsible for the end of the affair. Domineering or overprotective mothers were also targets during the Cold War, accused of a social crime called Momism; psychologists asserted as scientific fact that such mothers prevented their sons from forming normal relationships with women and turned them into effeminates, which of course put them on the path to communism.

  Vladimir Horowitz famously quipped that there were three types of pianists: Jewish pianists, gay pianists, and bad pianists. There were also gay Jewish pianists, such as Horowitz, who, during a separation from the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini’s daughter, Wanda, was snapped with a bevy of half-naked men at George Cukor’s notorious Hollywood parties. In fact, in the 1950s, that fearful-smug decade that percolated with the overpowering smell of the middle class, the music world was a very close-knit, very gay enclave. Juilliard, whose dean, Mark Schubart, was gay, was no exception. Jimmy Mathis was as out as they came. John Browning was out to his clique; Jeaneane Dowis was not the only girl to be used as a beard. Some of the girls were gay, too, though they were even more discreet than the men, who gossiped among themselves but seldom if ever with outsiders. Van, who loved women passionately and platonically, was never particularly closeted with friends he trusted. Yet with his family and the outside world it was a different matter. It was not just the danger; he was a southern gentleman who would never have dreamed of exposing his sexuality and discomfiting others. Better by far to keep it unspoken. Whatever the psychological fallout, it was a burden many shared.

  IN 1955 The Juilliard Review listed the salaries of musicians fortunate enough to have full-time jobs. It was sobering reading. A few hundred lucky souls working in the movies made $8,677 a year on average; a few thousand playing in traveling dance bands made around $6,000. From there it was a long way down to the 2,671 people working in the symphony, who took home $1,980 annually. Only opera and ballet paid worse: average salaries there hovered around $1,000, and though top artists made far more, that meant most made much less.

  By that measure, Van was doing fine. He was the first American pianist for whom CAMI asked $1,000 per performance from the get-go, and in his first full year out, he earned about $19,000 gross. Commission, travel, and publicity expenses reduced that to $150 a week, but with his parents’ help he signed a lease on three rooms at the Osborne Apartment House, a large brownstone rental house at 205 West Fifty-Seventh Street, on New York’s Music Row. The grotto-like lobby was a Gilded Age dream of the Renaissance that transported visitors to the time, six years after it was completed, in 1885, when residents could step across the road to watch Tchaikovsky open Carnegie Hall. Yet the mosaics and murals were dulled and dusty, rust ran from the faucets, and the building had become a haunt of actors, writers, artists, and musicians, who appreciated its location and the thirty-inch walls that muffled noise.

  Apartment 9B was not one of the grand suites with richly carved fireplaces and fourteen-foot ceilings that faced the street. During the Depression many apartments had been divided up, with the former sleeping quarters at the back chopped off and turned into studios. Here the ceilings were eight feet high, and the windows faced the backs of buildings on Fifty-Eighth Street, which suited Van: the gloom helped him sleep in. He had the telephone company install a long cord so he could talk from bed to bathroom, and he set about decorating: dove gray for the living room walls and bright Chinese red for the tiny kitchenette, which resembled the inside of a lacquered box. The cupboards were perpetually empty; there were only enough glasses for two or three to drink simultaneously. A sofa bed for his parents took up one wall of the living room; a loaned seven-foot Steinway muffled with a quilt occupied the rest. After moving in, he began frequenting museums and antique shops for inspiration, and snapped up bargains at auctions: murky oils for a dollar apiece and old mirrors, which he propped against the fireplace to mask the painted brick.

  It was a cozy life. He ate in smart restaurants, thanks to friends who liked his company, or dined alone at Carnegie Hall Tavern, where the waiters advised him to order the pot roast sandwich and ladled an entrée-size portion on two slices of rye. Underneath the Osborne was a florist’s shop, where he spent his lunch money on bouquets for CAMI’s secretaries, who worked out of the Steinway Building, a block over, next door to Calvary Baptist. Bill Judd had an office in the Osborne itself, and every morning at ten Naomi Graffman, who had left the Leventritt Foundation to work for Judd, telephoned Mrs. Hughes on the Osborne’s switchboard:

  “Would you call Van for me, please?”

  Buzz—buzz—buzz—buzz.

  “Rise and shine!”

  “U-u-u-h.”

  She’d call back at ten-minute intervals until he surfaced, around eleven, and at 12:45 the door to the left of her typewriter desk opened and his curly head poked in. “Honey, ah’m hungry,�
� he said. They’d go downstairs to Beefburger Hall and lunch on thirty-five-cent hamburgers or, if Naomi was feeling flush, forty-five-cent cheeseburgers. To Naomi, who was older than Van by five years, Van was a sweet, galumphing schoolboy with big eyes for everything and his nose pressed against the window. He always seemed impossibly cheery—except once, when his parents failed to let him know where they were for forty-eight hours and he went berserk, calling every place he could think of until finally he tracked them down.

  WITH SOL Hurok unresponsive and the Soviet Union impenetrable, Van’s Russian dreams had become a faraway fantasy. Then, in October 1955, three months after he grimaced through his twenty-first birthday, the first gust of change blew from Moscow to New York. It came in the burly form of Emil Gilels, a golden-toned virtuoso who was usually accounted the Soviet Union’s second-best pianist after Sviatoslav Richter, which by any measure put him among the greatest in the world. As the first Soviet musician to visit the United States since the war, he was big news, and passersby stared as his wave of red-blond hair bobbed along Fifty-Seventh Street. Naomi Graffman went a whole stage further and tailed him as he bought a stuffed Snoopy at Rappaport’s Toy Bazaar, ordered blintzes at the Carnegie Deli, and stocked up on jockey shorts at M. H. Lamston, the celebrities’ five-and-dime. Afterward he walked into Steinway Hall, chose a concert grand to be shipped to Moscow, and peeled off hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. Naomi drew the line at following him to a meeting with Rosina Lhévinne or another with the left-leaning Marilyn Monroe, whom Gilels cordially invited to Moscow.

  Gilels made his debut at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s favorite conductor. As he played the inevitable Piano Concerto no. 1 by Tchaikovsky, the audience’s mood transformed from uneasy to ecstatic. With the help of a Juilliard classmate who was doing some ushering, Van managed to snag one of the seats crammed onto the stage for a later performance. He had a direct view of the keyboard as Gilels played Stravinsky’s piano arrangement of Petrushka, his 1911 burlesque score for the Ballets Russes. By coincidence, Van was studying the music and had left it sitting open on his piano; afterward he went home and, certain he could never play it so well, put it away for good.