Fellow Travelers (33 page)

Over the years. Manny had gotten involved in a series of other business ventures on his own, most of them in partnership with some of his old bootlegging buddies—liquor distribution, radio broadcasting, electronic parts, and in the beginning at least he had wanted to involve me too, to handle the dirty work, to get things running on a financially viable basis. But I didn't like the people he chose to deal with. Running the Faust Brothers galleries had become more than enough to fill my life. And so for a number of years, except on those occasions when Manny used the family business to advance his own enterprises, I saw little of him.

Manny always promised to give me a piece of the gallery one day, but somehow he never got around to it anymore than he had when he promised me a share in our Soviet trading company. I did think of going out on my own—starting a new gallery with its own cadre of artists—but whenever I mentioned the idea Manny persuaded me that I would have nothing to gain by it. I would cut myself off from the Russian art treasures that were the bread and butter of our business.

I began to think I could do without the Russian connection. Our arrangements with the Russians were not going to last forever and I had begun to cultivate my contacts in New York's artistic community—especially those with a leftist point of view—people like Boardmar Robinson and William Glackens, Adolph Dehn, Ben Shahn, Rockwell Kent, and John Sloan. But setting up a gallery of my own?—what did I have to gain, Manny kept saying, except the glorification of my ego? I already had all the prerogatives of an owner. I was free to take whatever funds I needed and I did, but I never accumulated any substantial assets of my own. I bought a townhouse in the eighties, just off the park, a vacation house in the Hamptons, a ski lodge in the Berkshires, and an apartment in Beverly Hills. But it was Faust Brothers that owned them and it was Manny, of course, who owned Faust Brothers.

I went back to Moscow a few times thereafter to see Tania and the girls but it was clear that my visits were an embarrassment and even a danger to them. When I was there in 1936, I returned to my hotel room and found that my luggage had been gone through, and I decided not to go back. I did not see my daughters again for over twenty years.

In 1937, along with hundreds of other Soviet industrialists, Boris was charged with counterrevolutionary activity, tried publicly for his crimes in the great hall of Trades Union House, taken out into the courtyard of the Lubianka prison, and shot. It was around that time that the monthly letters Tania had dutifully written me after I left Moscow broke off, and thereafter I kept in touch with her through the American embassy. I tried to persuade her to come to the U.S. with the children, but she would not even discuss the matter. Her father had been guilty of all the things he was accused of, she knew that. But she and the children had nothing to worry about. The party did not hold children responsible for the crimes of their parents and she had long since demonstrated her devotion to the party and its goals.

The Churnuchins had lost everything, the house in Moscow, the dacha in Nizhi Novgorod. Svetlana was living with three other middle-aged women in a single room not far from the Hunters Market, while Tania and the twins had moved into a one-room apartment somewhere, where they shared kitchen and toilet facilities with a family of eight children next door.

Somehow Tania held onto her job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I never did understand what her responsibilities were, but she no longer guided distinguished tourists through the more seductive circles of the Soviet hell. I could not bring myself to ask her how she had managed to survive, but I always suspected that she had testified against her father in the show trials. I never asked her for fear, I suppose, of what I might hear.

Even before I left Moscow I had recognized that I was never going to be an actor, but I didn't lose my interest in the theatre. Sometime after I got back to New York I became involved with one of those leftist little theatre groups that seemed to occupy every loft and abandoned warehouse in the city in those days. The most famous was the Group Theatre, but there were others, and for a time I helped finance a group called Tomorrow Today. The company spent its summers on a dairy farm in a place called Sugar Loaf, sixty miles north of Manhattan, and I put up the money to pay the rent. All summer long I would spend my weekends watching a couple dozen young people trying to master the Stanislavki method.

That first summer I met a tall, slim, austerely beautiful dark-haired actress named Miranda Nickerson, a young New England woman with very serious ambitions in the theatre and even more serious attitudes toward life. She was pliant, interested, and willing, and we became lovers before the summer was over. When we came back to the city she moved into the apartment on the fourth floor of my Twenty Second Street townhouse, moved down a floor or two after the first few months, and eventually married me.

I was fond of Miranda, she was fun to be with and after a while I fell in love with her. We enjoyed our life together and we made, I suppose, a good team. She lent a certain glamour to the receptions we threw at the gallery, just as I lent a certain financial stability to the theatrical productions she got involved in. She had a modest success at a settlement house on the Lower East Side in a play somebody had written about the Paterson textile strike, and she seemed promising enough to be solicited by Elia Kazan and some of the other cocksmen that ran the Group Theatre. Their political credentials were impeccable and so was their libido, and Miranda handily outperformed Frances Farmer for the right to appear in what I guess was Clifford Odets' first flop. She was a magnetic figure on the stage with her flowing dark hair and lissome figure. She had a thrillingly icy voice and a commanding manner, sort of a beautiful Judith Anderson. In the late thirties and early forties she went to Hollywood and appeared as a heavy in a number of antifascist movies.

I used her West Coast sojourns as an excuse to open a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and we very soon had plenty of friends among Hollywood's leftist elite, ranging from expatriates like Bert Brecht and Gerhart Eisler to internal exiles like Ring Lardner and Lillian Hellman. I disliked the lot of them, but I sat there under the palm trees by the pool at their endless parties listening to the fairy tales they told each other about the socialist paradise that obsessed them all.

Miranda's acting career ended in 1952. One of those Paul Revere publications—
Red Channels, Counterattack
, I forget which after all these years—discovered that Miranda had appeared at a number of leftist rallies in the thirties, supported the sit-down strikers at General Motors, raised money for loyalist orphans during the Spanish Civil War, and in the end opposed the enactment of the Taft-Harley Act.

Those were difficult days for me though I did not share the views of either the red hunters or those they hunted. I had not spent ten years of my life in the Soviet Union in a state of somnambulism. I had little doubt that in most cases the charges being made against party members and their fellow travelers were essentially true. But these people had never done anything Americans should not be perfectly free to do under any circumstances. I refused to accept the proposition that anyone—the Congress, the FBI, anyone—should have the power to deprive people of such rights along with their reputations, their livelihoods, and their sense of their worth to the world.

Miranda never worked in motion pictures again. She hung on for a while doing voices on spooky radio programs like
Lights Out
and
Inner Sanctum
, but when even they no longer wanted her, she wasn't devastated. She expected to be persecuted for her beliefs and accepted her lot, and so while friends like Eddie Blomberg developed psychosomatic heart trouble or, like Gale Sondergaard, drank themselves to death, Miranda and I just went on with our lives, finding each other more and more satisfying as the years went on.

We led a good life. We were involved in all the right liberal causes, we ate in the best restaurants and went to the most fashionable parties, vacationed in all the new places, and hobnobbed with the glamorous people who imagined they ran New York. Everyone thought of me, or us, as wealthy, but we weren't at all. We just lived on the edge of desperation like everyone else, except at a much higher socioeconomic level.

We never had any children and I'm not sure we cared whether we did or not. We had the girls, my Russian twins, and that was probably quite enough. Miranda seemed more interested in them than I was. She would have liked them to live with us.

I lost touch with Tania and the twins for nearly ten years after the Hitler-Stalin pact. Then sometime after the war, in the early fifties, I managed to get a visa and went back to Russia for the first time in nearly twenty years. Tania was older. She was still thin and wiry, only sinewy now, rather than fragile, and her honey-colored hair was streaked with gray, but she was as handsome and elegant as ever and still had her job with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Our girls were all grown up. They were in their twenties, identical as always, but the softness had gone from their faces, and so had the curls; they dressed in the same mannish style their mother affected. But on them it had none of the allure and glamour it gave Tania. I didn't like them, to be honest about it, not as individuals, though I loved them extravagantly. I was happy just to be with them; but they seemed harsh and acerbic where they should have been gentle and sweet.

Several years later I managed to get them visas to come to New York but the trip was a fiasco. They found nothing they liked anywhere. New York was dirty and noisy and ugly, as Moscow was not, New York was filled with the poor, the underprivileged, and the desperate, as Moscow was not. They were especially upset by the constant intrusion of advertising on people's lives in the U.S., Buy Buy Buy—that was what America was all about—from the signs on the buses and subways, to the ads in the newspapers, the commercials on radio and television, the shop signs hanging over the streets, the neon, the displays in the store windows, even the dazzle and glitter of Times Square.

They were not enchanted by the city's renowned skyscrapers. They couldn't enjoy the theatre, because, of course, they had never learned English, and they didn't think the opera or ballet was anywhere near as good as what they were used to. They dismissed the innovativeness of people like Menotti, Britten, Agnes DeMille, and George Balanchine, never mind Martha Graham and José Limón. As for painting, I who had never been all that taken with abstract expressionism, found myself defending the verve and imagination of our artists. If I had any notion that the twins might want to stay and be a comfort to us in our old age I was mistaken.

In the fifties Manny married his third wife—Genevieve Anderson, a wealthy widow he had had a fling with in the thirties—and moved to Houston, where she lived, and began raising Angora sheep. He learned to ride a horse and played Tom Mix for a while on a 10,000-acre ranch in the Texas Panhandle. But he needed more than chaps, spurs, and a Stetson to make him feel he was proving his worth to the world. He needed to wheel and deal, to rub elbows with the people who moved and shook the world, and sheep ranching didn't afford that to him. And then he made his investment in Pacific Petroleum, got into the oil business, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Manny got into the oil business on Genevieve's money and over the years parlayed Pacific Petroleum into one of the giants of the oil business. He set out to create a big company and he did. For a while he dumped everything but the kitchen sink into the company—not just oil, but gold, silver, fertilizers, electronics, you name it. By then he had started calling himself CPI Faust, not because Pop had named him after Carl Phillip Immanuel Bach but, as Manny liked to explain, because Pacific Pete was as broadly based as the Consumer Price Index. The mix eventually changed, but the moniker lingered on.

Once he took the company public, all those fast buck boys on Wall Street began to go for whatever he did. He was selling himself, his charm, his get-up-and-go, his outrageous imagination. He'd reinvent the company at a moment's notice, lay out a bold plan for the future, devise mergers, takeovers, and acquisitions, and if none of them ever materialized, who cared, as long as something else did, so Pacific Pete stock went through the roof.

If people suggested Manny had bought or bribed his way into his good fortune, he didn't apologize. He'd explain that that was the way the world worked—not just in Um al Quayamm and Venezuela, but in the U.S. and U.K. as well. And who could maintain he was wrong?

Though he sold off most of his stock over the years, Manny nonetheless ran Pacific Petroleum as if it were his own private fiefdom. He packed the board with his friends, and the board rubberstamped whatever he wanted to do—acquire a yacht, a helicopter, a private jet for his personal use, put up the money to advance his private enthusiasms, his art museums, cultural centers, symphony orchestras, and international fellowships.

After the death of Stalin, he began rebuilding his Russian connections, shuttling between the U.S. and the USSR, making. friends, making deals, no longer as the son of his father, but as a power in his own right, an oil man and international capitalist. He was not just a link with the glorious socialist past, a man who had known Lenin and been blessed by him, but also a friend, defender, and advocate of the Soviet Union.

Doors opened that had never swung open before. When he came to Libya or Sharjah or Brunei, he came as the equal of kings, sheiks, presidents and prime ministers. He wasn't just a businessman, he was an international statesman, an apostle of world peace, and to advance that dream he worked out a series of major development schemes with the Russians, the Poles, the Chinese, and the Roumanians. You wanted to avoid war between the Soviet Union and the West? Well you did that not by building nuclear arsenals but by promoting trade between East and West. Even the Russians would think twice about shooting nuclear missiles at some of their best customers.