Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (35 page)

So it ever was, from the time of the first virtuoso. But it was not conceit that kept Van repeating his prizewinning program: quite the reverse. With no false modesty, he called himself a
service professional, like a waiter, and he felt obliged to give listeners what they wanted and to thank each personally for his or her custom. The outreaching spirit, the reverence for beauty, the love of people, the duty to serve—the same qualities that made his art speak to millions drove him on, together with a dash of fear that soon it might all vanish. It was not for himself but for a greater cause: for classical music, which to Van was the breath of God that could heal the soul. Harvey’s dream for his son to be a missionary had rubbed off after all, just not the way he had expected. There was, though, a price to pay for ministering to others so publicly. Accepting his responsibility, he also accepted that he must always be above reproach. He was thrilled, humbled, and grateful for his success. Yet, haunted by the fear of scandal, he became guarded in public and yearned for quiet times with close friends. Few if any of them thought he was truly happy.

As the most improbable year in the history of classical music drew to a close, the utter impossibility of escaping the spotlight became clear when Van headed off to Tucson, Arizona, ready to play a concert on January 4. Three days after the concert he was still there,
apparently to have emergency dental surgery connected with the earlier removal of a wisdom tooth—so, at least, said a
“Tucson minister friend of Cliburn, acting as his spokesman.” The minister, Reverend Newton H. White III, a Juilliard graduate from a wealthy family who had organized the city’s Northminster Presbyterian Church, added that the dentist “foresees emergency treatment in the next few days,” and as a result, “Cliburn’s nationwide concert tour would be canceled on a day-to-day basis until the dentist allowed Cliburn to travel.” The
Tucson Daily Citizen
was unpersuaded. “It’s pretty hard to get your teeth into what’s keeping Van Cliburn in Tucson,” it punned in a front-page piece headlined “What’s with Cliburn’s Teeth?” The dentist in question, it noted, vigorously denied Reverend White’s statement: “There’s no question of any surgery or anything,” he said. “He’s simply suffering from a local dental problem. It’s not something that’s going to take very long. Nothing indicates he won’t be better real soon. He could have the work done anywhere.”

In fact, it appears that what kept Van in Tucson when he should have been playing in Texas and Georgia was Newton White, who had perhaps encouraged him to play hooky for a few days and recharge his energies in the sun. The two men were seen
dining at the Cliff House; the
Arizona Daily Star
reported that the skinny pianist had three bowls of turtle soup, beef Stroganoff, and a filet mignon, toothache notwithstanding. Van eventually left, but was soon back in Tucson for a vacation. This drew the attention of the FBI, which noted in Van’s file that the figure from Northminster Presbyterian Church who met him on arrival had been
“arrested at Phoenix, Arizona, on October 22, 1955, for violation of the Municipal Code relating to indecent acts and during interrogation revealed a long history of homosexual activities commencing at the age of sixteen or seventeen years.” Van returned to Tucson later in the year, attending a concert with White and White’s beautiful new thirty-two-year-old bride, Marjorie, and began house hunting. Eventually he bought a large adobe complex with a pool and mountain views on a dirt track called
North Indian House Road, which was about as far away from
the world as he could get. But his escape to the Arizona sun would be tinged with tragedy. Reverend White had agreed to organize a new church, St. Andrews, and on October 25 the first service was held at his spacious new marital home on Casas Adobes Drive, with Van playing the piano for the hymns. Less than two months later, just before Christmas, Marjorie White went back to her former home with her eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Later that day, the girl found her mother and brother
drowned in the backyard pool. Van kept his house, but in 1961 he
rented it out. Two years later,
Newton White died, aged forty-nine, of a weak heart. Van made a
handsome donation to Juilliard in his memory.

•
14
•

In the Heat of the Kitchen

WHILE VAN
Cliburn was belly flopping like a blue whale in the American musical pond, Liu Shikun was making a small but significant impression on a reservoir outside Beijing.

Classical Marxist theory held that revolution could never take hold in a nation of peasants. Mao had solved that problem by the simple expedient of declaring peasants to be proletarians, but once in power, he embarked, like Stalin, on a crash program of industrialization driven by an emperor-size cult of personality. One of the chief projects of the Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958 with orders to farmers to melt down their tools into unusable steel, was the construction of the vast Ming Tombs reservoir. On Liu’s return from Moscow the reservoir was under breakneck construction by hundreds of thousands of “volunteers,” and Premier Zhou Enlai extended the young pianist the signal honor of inviting him to help dig the dam. Zhou dug beside him the first day, and one day Mao himself came and dug, too. Liu shoveled dirt for two months and was paraded on the front page of the
People’s Daily
as a national hero, complete with his own stirring slogan:
“Learn from Liu Shikun.”

In July, while Liu was still digging,
Khrushchev arrived for a summit organized to try to patch things up with Mao. The Chinese chairman approached the meeting with an ineffable smugness born of the conviction that he, not his lily-livered revisionist comrade, was now the lodestar of communism,
“making him the historical pivot
around which the universe revolved.” There was no red carpet or honor guard to welcome the Soviet leader at the airport, and no air-conditioning at his dingy hotel to deal with the airless humidity of a Beijing summer. At their first meeting, Mao repeatedly leaped up and jabbed his finger in Khrushchev’s face, and the next day, he invited him to a pool party at his government mansion, aware no doubt that the portly premier could not swim. Mao famously bobbed up and down in the polluted Yangtze like a blubbery seal—according to his propagandists, breaking several records. When Khrushchev arrived, the chairman covered his hair with a knotted handkerchief, dived in, and energetically splashed up and down, displaying various inelegant but effective strokes while interpreters scurried along the edge trying to relay his splashy sermonizing. Khrushchev donned an enormous pair of green Chinese trunks and stood delicately in the shallow end until a swim ring and water wings appeared and Mao beckoned him into deep water. The rotund Bolshevik energetically dog-paddled and drifted far enough to get in a few words. If Mao was determined to treat him like a barbarian paying tribute to a Chinese emperor, Khrushchev had a gift that could make the chairman sit up and beg. Mao was desperate to get his hands on an A-bomb, but Khrushchev, having promised one complete with full documentation, had
yet to deliver. Meanwhile, he had an even more powerful device to wave in Mao’s face. “Now that we have the
transcontinental missile,” Khrushchev boasted, “we hold America by the throat. They thought America was beyond reach. But that is not true.”

The summit went so badly that on his return Khrushchev pulled hundreds of Soviet scientists and advisers out of China. Kremlinologists read their tea leaves and decided his de-Stalinization project was not going as planned. While Khrushchev had gone too far for Mao, he had not gone far enough to entice Yugoslavia back into the Soviet Bloc as he’d hoped; and while many neutral countries were leaning toward Moscow, expansion of the Soviet sphere was too slow to satisfy hard-liners outraged that NATO’s European members were talking of basing U.S. missiles on their soil. In September, Bulganin,
the demoted premier, was removed from the Central Committee, stripped of his Central Bank job, and sent to Stavropol as chair of the Regional Economic Council. Yet unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was not fully the master of his world, and little by little the screws were tightened again.

“There was a
pleasant period of thaw last spring when Moscow applauded Van Cliburn,” the
New York Times
reported. “But the freeze is on again.” A pair of cultural edicts signaled the changing winds as clearly as a weathervane. Two weeks after Van left Moscow, the Central Committee had unprecedentedly confessed to
“blatant errors” in its past judgments of musicians, including those “gifted composers” comrades Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Suddenly Soviet composers were free to look West to innovators such as Boulez and Stockhausen, while Shostakovich, going his own way as usual, put the finishing touches to an operetta called
Cheryomushki
, which some thought glorified Khrushchev’s new housing projects and others thought satirized them. Five months later, though, the authorities furiously hit back at suggestions of another misjudgment when the Russian writer Boris Pasternak unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The honor should have been ample recompense for their losing the Tchaikovsky Competition, but for the awkward fact that two years earlier Khrushchev had banned Pasternak’s great symphonic novel
Doctor Zhivago
on his censors’ advice that its story of lost aristocratic freedoms was anti-Soviet. Since then, the book had been smuggled to Europe and published in numerous languages, including a Russian edition
printed with CIA funds that was handed out from the Vatican pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. Desperate attempts to halt its spread had merely created more of a sensation and had been
called off, but Pasternak’s Nobel inflicted a propaganda defeat too humiliating to let stand. As the propagandists spun into action,
Pravda
trashed the book as
“low-grade reactionary hackwork,” prompting many of Pasternak’s friends and fellow writers to denounce it unread. Secret policemen arrived at the author’s dacha, threatening to return his mistress to the Gulag and send him into exile.
Begging Khrushchev
not to sever him from his beloved Russia, Pasternak turned down the award. On October 29, 1958, Komsomol leader Vladimir Semichastny, soon to be head of the KGB, tore into the sixty-eight-year-old writer before an audience of fourteen thousand, decrying him as a
“mangy sheep” who “went and spat in the face of the people . . . If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did,” Semichastny exploded, adding for clarity that a pig “never shits where it eats.” Khrushchev sat prominently in the audience, enthusiastically applauding the words he had dictated down the phone the night before about the book he had never read. It was one thing for artists to grapple with Stalin’s ghost and air intractable social issues; it was quite another to contravene the will of the party, or of himself.

In the wake of the
Zhivago
affair, every whisper of dissent was agonizingly debated at the highest levels for fear that one heresy let slip would spawn a thousand more. A general clampdown ensued, and among its more unpleasant episodes was a gay witch hunt at the Moscow Conservatory.

It was scarcely a revelation that some Russian and Soviet musicians were homosexual—Tchaikovsky may have ended his life when his “subversive passion” threatened to trigger a political scandal—and as usual, politics rather than morality was the issue. Like every Soviet institution, the school was riddled with KGB informers: even
Vladimir Ashkenazy had been pressured into signing up, though he was fired after being reported for devouring
Doctor Zhivago
on an overseas tour and refusing to help entrap a gay foreign pianist. Others were keener to curry favor, and when rumors spread that an
assistant professor of piano had seduced one of his students, they quickly reached the student’s father, an influential second-tier official with access to top government figures. To rein in the conservatory, the authorities rounded up
more gay piano teachers and made an example of them. Among them was Naum Shtarkman, Van’s close friend and admirer, who was arrested as he was about to perform at a factory in Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine, and sentenced to eight years in prison. Sviatoslav Richter, who lived with the soprano Nina Dorliak
but was known, like her, to take same-sex lovers,
refused to play in Moscow for so long that even the flintiest officials got the message.

Van had hoped to bring Naum over to perform in America, and he must have heard about his gentle friend’s ordeal. Perhaps it gave him pause for thought about his own impending return to the Soviet Union. If so, however sad the news, he was in no personal danger. During the competition, teachers and students had suspected from the start that he was gay, and at some point the FBI appears to have received intelligence that a Soviet agent
“knew that Van Cliburn was a homosexual,” though not whether any use was made of the knowledge. It seems inconceivable that any was. Like Richter, Van was politically valuable to the Soviets and had friends in the highest places, which made him untouchable. When Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan gave the traditional
anniversary of the revolution speech that November, he hailed Van as an example for foreign political leaders to follow in their dealings with the Soviets.