Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (11 page)

The finals were held at the Town Hall on West Forty-Third Street. In past years the deliberations had grown so heated that judges physically attacked one another: Serkin, who stood six foot three, once grabbed the four-foot-seven Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski when the latter was sixty years into his century-long life and gave him a good shaking. Whether from fear of a recurrence of discord or simply so they could listen with detachment, the jurors were placed several seats apart and required to communicate in writing.

Van played the Tchaikovsky concerto, his technique dazzling, his expression reverent, his sound liquid and songlike. In the last movement, the roller coaster hurtled triumphantly home.
“He really loves music, loves to play it, and loves the way
he
plays it,” noted Bernstein. “It’s so honest and refreshing.” Before excusing him, the judges asked Van if he would play the Brahms B-flat Concerto, which he had also listed.

“May I explain,” Van replied quietly but firmly, “that I have been ill much of this past week. I feel it would be an injustice not only to myself but, far more important, to this great work and to the patience and integrity of this jury if I attempted to play the Brahms. Would you permit me to play something else?”

He played Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, the old showpiece he had used to get into Rosina’s class, as audaciously and nobly as ever. Jaws dropped, and the judges emitted yelps of pleasure. At the end, Van sat waiting for instructions.
“Would y’all mahnd if Ah went and got a glass of WAWtuh?” he asked after a minute, or so Gary Graffman heard. While he stepped out, the jury scribbled furiously on their index cards. Naomi saw Arthur Judson drop his on the floor and, at the end, she picked it up. “Not this year,” his note read in his spidery writing: “Perhaps another time.” The other judges differed. As it happened, Van’s leading opponent was a newcomer to Rosina’s class, the intense, intellectual John Browning, whose elegantly reserved style appealed to Jeaneane Dowis but not to Jimmy Mathis, which finally broke up the Texas threesome, especially after Dowis and Browning started going steady. Browning played perfectly—almost too perfectly; against Van’s big, heartfelt sound, he came across as slick and somewhat bloodless.

Van went home to the Spicers’ and hovered by the telephone until it rang. “Congrats!” Bill Judd shouted. “Arthur Judson just got back to the office and said that the verdict was unanimous.” Even the obdurate Judson had bent before the prevailing wind.

“Hazel, Hazel, I’ve won, I’ve won!” Van cried, running into the living room and squeezing his landlady in a bear hug, and then jumping
until she feared for the integrity of her floor. “Isn’t it wonderful? Go get dressed up and we’ll go out for dinner!”

“Oh no, Van, go call up a girl,” she demurred.

“You go get ready,” he said, ignoring her: “I’ve got to call up Rosina right away.” He started dialing his teacher’s number and then stopped. “No. It’s no good,” he said. “I’m going up there to tell her myself.” He grabbed his overcoat with its missing buttons and dashed out, calling to Hazel to wait for him.

The doorbell rang and rang at 185 Claremont Avenue, a few doors down from Juilliard. Eventually Rosina answered, and Van barged into the tiny apartment, nearly knocking her over. “Honey, I got it! Honey, I won!” he shouted, twirling her round. When they both calmed down they called Kilgore to tell Van’s parents.

Afterward, Van slumped on the sofa, his head in his hands. “Oh, what a responsibility,” he groaned. “What a dreadful responsibility!” Silently he contemplated a future in which he would always be judged against this success.

“I’d better be going,” he said, jumping up.

On the way back, he took a detour to visit Calvary organist Clifford Tucker in the hospital and cheer him up with the news. It was late by the time he got home, but he dragged Hazel to Asti, in the Village, a hangout for musicians who played when they liked and paid for their food when they could. He had already endeared himself to flamboyant owner Adolfo Mariani, and the waiter refused to give him the check. “He’s such a
good
boy,” thought Mrs. Spicer as she dotingly watched him take over the piano.

The following month, on April 30, Van played Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel for his
Juilliard diploma recital. Rosina graded him “excellent” again. Teacher and student were now extravagantly in love. Van had gone from addressing her in letters as “Dear Mrs. Lhévinne” to simply “Darling.”
“My best love to you, darling,” he signed off, or more grandiloquently,
“I won’t even try to tell you how very deeply I appreciate, admire, respect, and, of course, forever love you, for I will only let Time supply the moment’s all
too inadequate phrases.” In May he graduated, and in her little ring binder, where she drafted reports, Rosina noted,
“Most promising student I have had.”

It was morning when the class gathered on the steps of the old Claremont Avenue building for their commencement photograph, and
Van was missing. Jimmy Mathis boldly told the photographer and school officials they would be pretty sorry not to have him in the picture and marched off to the Spicers’ to wake him up. He then ran back with Van and the two jumped into the edge of the frame. The camera clicked, half an hour late.

THAT NOVEMBER
, on the same date that Rachmaninoff had played in Shreveport in 1932, a coincidence that superstitiously thrilled him, twenty-year-old Van Cliburn stepped in front of the lights at Carnegie Hall. Dimitri Mitropoulos was on the podium, with the forces of the New York Philharmonic ranged in front of him. Unusually for a Sunday afternoon, the cavernous hall was crowded; this was partly explained by the presence of what the Graffmans conjectured must have been planeloads of Texans. The couple
surveyed the parterre and decided it looked like the Alamo. In pride of place were Rildia Bee and Harvey, who Naomi thought was a “farmery-looking person.”

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.”