by Nigel Cliff
For all the paranoia, the fear was real. The Soviet triumph was one of the greatest shocks in American history—as great in its way as Pearl Harbor. Until Sputnik beeped into their consciousness, Americans had owned the future. For many, the Nifty Fifties, with its drive-in restaurants, movie theaters, and churches (honk for amen), its Hula-Hoops and food blenders and beers and ball games on Saturday afternoons, was a decade of ease and prosperity and glitzy excess. Detroit was in the midst of its big tail-fin mania, grafting ever more outrageous protrusions onto the rear fenders of Cadillacs and their imitators, from the delta-winged Buick to the everyday Chevy and compact Rambler. “Suddenly, it’s 1960!” cheered the advertising slogan for the 1957 Plymouth. Now automobiles took on the flowing shape of the R-7 and sprouted radio antennae modeled on Sputnik 1. The Soviet satellite was a wake-up call that everything was not as it appeared, that the nation had been partying toward a precipice. Politicians more used to telling voters what they wanted to hear admonished their fellow Americans to renounce their love affair with material goods and shore up their preeminence in global affairs. “The time has clearly come,” declared Republican senator Styles Bridges, “to be less concerned with the depth of pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin on the car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears if this country and the Free World are to survive.”
ON NOVEMBER 6, 1957, Nikita Khrushchev stood before the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber-stamp parliament, to open the official celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He was in ebullient form, buoyed by bumper harvests and acclaim for his de-Stalinization campaign as well as by the new scientific triumph. “Our sputniks are circling the world,” he boasted, flush with excitement. “Now, with America’s failure, it will not be able to stop the forward march of communism.” In fact, Khrushchev had been as surprised as anyone by the extraordinary impact of the little metal globe, but he was delighted to reap the political rewards.
Faced with a growing crisis and attacked for a failure of leadership, Eisenhower ordered the navy to bring forward its own satellite program. On December 6 the first Vanguard rocket carrying a satellite—a six-inch, three-pound sphere that Khrushchev laughed off as a grapefruit—was readied for launch at Cape Canaveral in the presence of the world’s media. At home and at work, a huge audience watched the first live countdown to be broadcast nationally. The cameras rolled as the slender missile wheezed up four feet, then collapsed in billowing flames. The remainder of the nation’s self-belief went up in smoke with it. OH WHAT A FLOPNIK! groaned one newspaper, while others came up with KAPUTNIK, DUDNIK, and STAYPUTNIK. At the United Nations a Soviet delegate asked whether America cared to receive aid earmarked for undeveloped countries. Time sealed Khrushchev’s victory by putting him on the cover as Man of the Year. A golden, bejeweled Kremlin crowned his head; between his fingers he held Sputnik 1 as if he were about to nudge it personally into Earth’s orbit. “In 1957’s twelve months,” the editorial noted, “Nikita Khrushchev, peasant’s son and cornfield commissar scorned by the party’s veteran intellectuals, disposed all his serious rivals—at least for the time.” He had also thoroughly confounded Western leaders, and nothing was scarier than an unknowable enemy.
Goaded by Khrushchev and spurred by Sputnik, Ike announced the establishment of NASA and signed the National Defense Education Act, which increased funding to schools and universities as a matter of national security. To many it seemed too little, too late. With Moscow firing off rockets and threats in every direction, and with conspiracy theorists muttering darkly about a vast fifth column of spies, Americans’ confusion turned to near hysteria.
The Sputnik moment threw down a historic challenge to America and the West. They had been humiliatingly outplayed in their own game. Now, somehow, they needed to defeat the Soviets at theirs. People were desperate to rebuild their shaken faith in their way of life. The problem was they had no idea how to do it.
VAN WAS despondent for different reasons. In the 1956/57 season he had played twenty-three concerts, seven fewer than the previous year, and most were small-town recitals. In this, his fourth season, he was looking at three recitals in October, in McAllen and Graham, Texas, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, and then, after a three-month gap, two others, in Norwalk, Ohio, and Coldwater, Michigan. For the 1958/59 season he had a booking with the New York Philharmonic, which was rare for a pianist at his stage. Still, that was it.
There were two reasons for the trailing off, one simple and one more complex. The simple one was that the army had come calling. As required by law, Van had registered with the Selective Service System five days after he turned eighteen. A two-year academic deferment had run out that September. At any moment he expected to be called up for the statutory twenty-four months of active-duty service. He was perfectly open about it, and performance venues were therefore reluctant to risk a cancellation.
The other reason had to do with the structure of the American concert business. Of the two outfits that dominated it, CAMI was by far the bigger, which meant its artists had the lion’s share of the work. Yet its Community Concerts division was notorious for bundling together an ever-changing roster of cheap new artists—and cheap foreign artists, mostly Frenchwomen of a certain age—with a few expensive star names. The system did give a chance to newcomers, but most had a promising first season, only to be passed over as their novelty wore off; a few built a following but were locked out when they tried to raise their fees; and only rarely did anyone become a headliner in regular demand. Gary Graffman, who was one of CAMI’s battery of what it termed Outstanding Young American Pianists, or OYAPs, thought the firm’s motto could have been “Wait and See If It Sinks or Swims.” As a business model for market-testing unproven commodities, it might have been prudent, but for instilling confidence in sensitive artists, it was a bust.
Bill Judd was the firm’s idealist, and he was undoubtedly keen to build Van’s career. After his young client’s tremendous early surge, Judd was happy to move him down a gear, giving him time to learn his trade and keeping him out of the way of critics such as the Chicago Tribune’s Claudia Cassidy, known in the trade as Acidy Cassidy. Yet Van was convinced he was ready for more, and with time on his hands he began feeling unloved and unwanted. His classmate John Browning seemed to be pulling ahead: after winning the Steinway Centennial Award in 1954 and the Leventritt on his second attempt in 1955, he had already toured Europe and signed a recording contract.
To his friends, Van appeared distraught and confused, even depressed. He talked with them on the phone for hours, trying to figure out what the problem was and what to do about it, and moped round his gloomy apartment until he looked peaked. One day his church friend Nola Rhodes enticed him down to Riverside Park, where he sat on the riverbank and peeled off his shirt. “Ugh, I look so white!” he groaned, wrinkling his nose. A cabin cruiser glided past. “I want a boat like that!” he exclaimed, then ruefully added, “I seem to want everything. I want to travel, I want to help my parents, I want to be a really great artist, I want to go everywhere, see everything, know everybody! And here I am—look at me. Going nowhere, fast!” Nola reassured him that faith and hard work would bring him everything he wanted, and he ran home to practice. When a concert was coming up he was wedded to the keyboard, but in between engagements he decried practicing as pointless drudgery and dragged friends out to the movies. Rildia Bee began calling them from Kilgore, imploring them to see to it that he practiced.
Reports began to filter back to his managers that his performances were getting erratic, and the state of things became clear one day when he was walking down Fifty-Seventh Street and saw two CAMI managers coming his way. As they neared, they suddenly crossed the street and resumed walking on the other side.
“You can’t just sit on the tracks and pray; that won’t stop the train,” his parents had always taught him. “Cast thy bread upon the waters.”
As a tither, Van was supposed to give 10 percent o
f his earnings to the church, but he gave more like 20. One day that year he was playing the organ in Mozart’s Requiem Mass when it wheezed to a halt, and with the choir singing unaccompanied, he ran down from the loft and continued on the rickety old upright; the whole thing was broadcast live on the radio. Afterward he strode across to Steinway Hall and bought the church a concert grand. Even with his performer discount it cost as much as the Cadillac convertible he coveted, and he had to borrow the money from the bank. Unbeknownst to his parents, he was in debt to the tune of seven thousand dollars, a large sum at the time, and the monthly installments added to the burden. Anxiety got the better of him, and he began suffering from acute performer’s stomach. Then a childhood ailment returned: late one night his nose poured blood for hours, and he called his friends in a panic, waking them up.
It was a year of accidents. That summer, he visited Mrs. Steinway and her family at her summer home in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and saw the ocean for the first time. “Oh!” he exclaimed: “The ocean!” It was in fact Cape Cod Bay. Later on, Schuyler Chapin and his kids invited him to take a dip. As a child he had been too busy for swimming lessons, but he stepped off the submerged shelf that dropped away a few feet from the shore and disappeared, until his hosts realized he was in trouble and pulled him out half-drowned.
In July his parents drove up from Texas to watch him play with the Cleveland Summer Orchestra, and while Rildia Bee was changing at the hotel, she slipped and landed heavily on her back. Van and Harvey called the house doctor, who gave her painkillers so she could attend the concert, and the following morning they got into the family Buick and headed east along the I-80 to New York. After seven hours she was in agony, but convinced it was just a sprain, she rested up so she could accompany Van to Billy Graham’s Crusade. The thirty-eight-year-old evangelist’s revival meeting had roared into town that May and filled Madison Square Garden (a venue more used to the sound of gloves thwacking jaws) with song and prayer and full-throated denunciations of communism. It was every Christian’s duty, Graham thundered, to be constantly on guard against Red infiltrators, the fifth column of a godless religion that was “master-minded by Satan . . . I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them.” A close friend and adviser to the president, Graham preached his apocalyptic message to more than two million during the sixteen-week Crusade. Van sang in the bass section of the thousands-strong choir, belting out Baptist classics such as “Blessed Assurance,” “I Love to Tell the Story,” and “Wonderful Words of Life.” He had a private box for the duration and dragged along Juilliard friends, including John Browning, Jimmy Mathis, and Jeaneane Dowis. Jerome Lowenthal, a studious, bespectacled pianist who had shared some classes with Van, met him one day coming home and was struck by how excitedly and emotionally Van enthused about the Crusade.
After several days of unremitting pain, Rildia Bee finally agreed to have an X-ray, which showed a broken vertebra that had narrowly missed paralyzing her. She was admitted to Doctors Hospital on East End Avenue and ordered to lie still for six weeks. After that, Van locked up his apartment, emptied his bank account to pay down several installments on the Steinway, and went back to Kilgore. Daddy had raised a bank loan to pay for the medical expenses, but there were Mother’s forty-odd pupils to take care of, and while he waited for his army summons, Van took them on, often going way over their allotted hour until they begged to be allowed to go home. He still had time on his hands, though, so when the local Lutheran church sent over for a pupil to play during services, he volunteered himself and played there for several weeks.
Eventually the army called him to the induction center at Longview. The draft board evaluation went well until his nose started bleeding, and it was still pouring blood when he stood to take the oath. His hand was raised over the Bible when an orderly interrupted. An examination of Van’s medical records revealed a history of chronic nasal hemorrhages and allergies beginning when he was eight. He was categorized 4-F, unfit for military service, and dismissed. He had been rather looking forward to a change of scene, especially as he had been preselected to join an Army Band tour of Africa. Instead he went back to Kilgore with nothing to do.
Bill Judd suggested throwing together a European tour, a possibility that Bill Schuman’s Music Panel had already discussed: “He has won many awards in competitions, by competent judges, and is a first class pianist,” the panel’s minutes recorded, adding that he was approved in principle. His name had come up again when a letter was received “which backs up the Panel’s opinion that he is terrific, brilliant, sensational. We shall try to see if a project can be worked out for him.” Still, Van was reluctant. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore. It was the lowest ebb of his young professional life, and for the first time fear crept over him.
AMONG THAT year’s Music Panel applicants was a striking young pianist from Los Angeles named Olegna Fuschi, who asked for a grant to take part in the Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition. The psychological warfare people were keen to assist Americans in competing abroad, but Washington had vetoed it, in part because of the difficulty of identifying winners. Fuschi was turned down but went anyway. One of the Rio judges was a Russian pianist, Pavel Serebryakov, who had also been named as a judge for the forthcoming piano competition in Moscow. He had brought along a pile of brochures and application forms in various languages, and he gave a packet to Fuschi, saying he hoped she would come.
The large brochure was a luxury production that clearly heralded an important event. The royal blue cover bore a cameo of Tchaikovsky above the title INTERNATIONAL PIANO AND VIOLIN COMPETITION NAMED AFTER TCHAIKOVSKY. Inside were thirty-six pages lavishly illustrated with photographs of the composer, his birthplace, his house in Klin, his scores, his statue in front of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Great Hall of the conservatory from various angles, and the large Moscow concert venue named Tchaikovsky Hall. There was no mistaking Russia’s pride in its most famous composer, and there was no arguing with the stature of those behind the competition. Heading the Organizing Committee was Dmitri Shostakovich, now restored to first place in the Soviet pantheon. The always reliable Emil Gilels was chairman of the jury, which also included the highly unreliable but celebrated Sviatoslav Richter. After the programs for pianists and violinists, the brochure ended with a list of the eight prizes on offer, ranging from 25,000 rubles ($6,250 at the official 1957 exchange rate) and a gold medal to 5,000 rubles and a badge of honor.
Fuschi leafed through the brochure and then packed it in her bag. When she got back to New York, she brought it to the first lesson of the new school year and showed it to her teacher, Rosina Lhévinne. Rosina thanked Olenychika, as she called Fuschi, and turned over the pages. Still holding it, she walked slowly to the window and stared out. Very softly, half to herself, she said:
“Van.”
Oblivious to Olenychika’s interest in going herself, she dictated a letter to him. “I promise, they will love you,” it ended. Then she consulted Bill Schuman. “Are you sure he’s the right one?” the Juilliard president asked, and Rosina replied that he was, out of those in her class. Besides, she added, “I feel he vould make a vonderful representative of America in Moscow. He has the personality as well as the talent.”
Around the same time, the handsome brochure arrived at the Fifty-Seventh Street offices of Steinway and Sons. Sascha Greiner, the veteran head of the Concert and Artist Department, picked up the phone and called Kilgore. A German-Latvian refugee from revolutionary Russia who had originally been hired to communicate with Vladimir Horowitz before the mercurial pianist learned English, Greiner was himself a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. “You must go, Van!” he exclaimed excitedly. Van had already received the brochure from Rosina, but he hadn’t given the idea much thought. The political situation held no fear for him: as Allen Spicer had berated him, beyond having
a vague sense that world relations were strained, he barely knew what the situation was. Still, it was odd to think of dragging himself back to the competition circuit in his fourth year as a professional, with all the toil it entailed. Greiner got nowhere with Van, and when Rosina called two days later, Van told her he was truly grateful for the thought but wasn’t interested.
“Oh Van, you must go!” she insisted. When she got no further, she wrote him a much longer letter in which she spelled out four excellent reasons for his taking part. First, he would have to work with great intensity, which would be good for him. Second, he would have to learn a great deal of new material. Third, he would meet the cream of the world’s young pianists. Fourth, she believed he would win.
Bill Judd called her. “But you can’t do that, Rosina!” he cried. The whole thing looked ridiculous. The program was heavily weighted toward Russian music, the jury toward the Eastern Bloc. Everything in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was political, and clearly an American had no chance: Van would lose and look like an amateur. Besides, Judd would have to cancel the dates he had been busy lining up for Van in Europe. Rosina listened but refused to concede. Privately she must have known it was a long shot; Russia had changed incalculably since she left it a lifetime ago. On the other hand, Soviet Russians were still Russians, and if Van somehow pulled it off, it could be the boost his flagging career and confidence needed.
Van wrote back. He still didn’t think he would go, he said, but he would be in New York in early November, and they could discuss it then. Despite his reluctance, memories began to crowd in: memories of Christmas in Shreveport and the book with the pictures of St. Basil’s Cathedral, of Rildia Bee’s stories about Rachmaninoff, and Rosina’s about the conservatory where Tchaikovsky taught and where she and Josef triumphed. There was also the curious fact, which Van was superstitious enough to heed, that a psychic he consulted in the spring revealed in a séance that within a year he would travel to “an agrarian country” and win a gold medal.
