Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (3 page)

Backstage at the big new Art Deco Municipal Auditorium, she had little to do except hand the famous Russian a glass of orange juice or water, and she never got to tell him that, pianistically speaking, they were almost family. When she was a student at the Cincinnati conservatory, Rildia Bee had one day attended a recital by the famed pianist Arthur Friedheim, who despite his Germanic name was born to an aristocratic family in St. Petersburg when it was the Imperial Russian capital. Mesmerized, she followed him to New York, where she became one of his best students at the Institute of Musical Art, a forerunner to the Juilliard School. Friedheim had studied with the fiery Anton Rubinstein, the founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, before he balked at Rubinstein’s chaotic teaching style and defected to the superstar Hungarian Franz Liszt, becoming Liszt’s foremost pupil and, later, his secretary. Rachmaninoff counted Rubinstein as his greatest pianistic inspiration, and in his playing markedly resembled Friedheim, who had died less than a month earlier, leaving Rachmaninoff the greatest living exponent of the school of pianism that Rildia Bee adored. Perhaps it was just as well she never knew how depressing he found the experience of performing in Shreveport.
“Business is lamentable,” he wrote a friend the next day:

We play in an empty but huge hall, which is very painful. Today the local paper writes about the absence of the public! Furthermore, a few people dropped in to apologize because “there were so few of us.” The day before yesterday there was a football game here, with 15 thousand spectators. Well, wasn’t I right to say over and over that our day is interested only in muscles? Within five or ten years, concerts will no longer be given.

To rub it in, the
Shreveport paper reviewed his concert as if it had been a football game, under the headline
RACHMANINOFF WINS BY LARGE MARGIN IN MONDAY NIGHT GAME
! The lugubrious pianist went away from Shreveport and never returned. Yet Rildia Bee told the story of her backstage brush with greatness whenever she could, and as soon as her son was old enough to understand, she told it to him at bedtime. He lapped it up because not only was she hopeless at nursery rhymes, but by then he was already playing the piano.

The story of
how that happened went like this. A music room opened off the modest parlor of their little white frame house on Stevenson Street, and as a baby, Van sat in the corner listening to Mother’s lessons. Sometimes he crawled over and touched the keys gently, one by one, testing them. When he was a plump three-year-old, a local kid named Sammy Talbot came at his usual time and played Crawford’s “Arpeggio Waltz,” an intermediate piece that involved hand crossing. Sammy had been working on it for a while and was getting quite good. Rildia Bee dismissed him at the end and had ducked out to do some chores when the notes came rippling back. “Tell Sammy to go home, his mother’s gonna be worried about him!” she called out to Van, but the music carried on. She looked in the parlor, and there was Van sitting on the piano bench, picking the piece out perfectly.

“You! Do you want to learn how to play the piano?” she asked.

“Yes, Mother,” he said with a child’s fearless certainty.

“Well,” she said briskly, “you’re not going to play by ear. You’re
going to know what you’re doing.” So she entered him in her composition book for
regular lessons and began teaching him the grand staff. Harvey knocked together a blackboard, with one side lined and the other blank, and Rildia Bee chalked in the arcana of music, the secret language that Van was to become an adept in:

adagio,

allegro,

allegretto,

rubato.

He took to it like other children take to their toys. Occasionally he messed about with his tricycle and truck and tried to avoid taking lessons or practicing—an hour a day at first, in three periods. Usually, though, as soon as Rildia Bee clapped her hands three times or started playing, he came running. When they were seated side by side, or he on her lap, there was no wasting time.
“Now, when we’re taking a lesson, I want you to think of me as your teacher, not your mommy,” she told him from the start. At four he was lifted onto a stool at a local women’s college to make his debut, and at five, after hearing Rachmaninoff play on the radio, he informed his parents over dinner that he was going to be a concert pianist. Harvey frowned.
“Well, son, we’ll see about that,” he said. Rildia Bee had planted the notion in the boy’s head, he murmured. An affable but reticent man with a crop of tight dark curls severely barbered at the back and sides, Harvey nursed his own hope that Van would become a
medical missionary.

Yet Rildia Bee, whose warm manner and spirited laugh masked a steely resolve, had poured her forbidden dreams into her only child, and she was always going to get her way. By then, not even Christmas kept Van from the piano, except for one unseasonably chilly (for Louisiana) Christmas Day in 1939. That day, he unwrapped his present, a picture book of world history, and contentedly leafed through it until he stopped at a spread showing the Moscow Kremlin. A riot of colorful onion domes belonging to St. Basil’s Cathedral jostled over the old
fortress’s long red walls like the candy-striped turbans of a deputation of Eastern kings. He looked up, wide-eyed, his soul swelling with childlike surprise.

“Mommy, Daddy, take me there,” he pleaded. “Take me there,
please
.” Perhaps the architecture chimed in his young mind with the stories of Rachmaninoff and the other Russians whose music he had already begun to love.

“Maybe someday, sonny,” they said, smiling. It was impossible of course, even if intercontinental travel had been within their means. Soviet Russia was a closed and alien world of secret police and show trials, murderous purges and forced labor camps masterminded by its all-powerful strongman, Joseph Stalin. Besides, there was a war on in Europe. Four months earlier Stalin and Adolf Hitler had signed a notorious nonaggression pact and had promptly invaded Poland from opposite ends.

THE FAMILY
Buick left the municipal bustle of Shreveport and headed west along the I-20, crossing the state line outside sleepy Waskom, Texas. Back when Rildia Bee was about to go into labor, she had proposed to Harvey that they take the half-hour drive so her baby could be
born a Texan, and she had been only half-joking. The Lone Star State ran deep in her family, beginning with Grandfather Solomon, a circuit rider, hellfire evangelist, and math teacher who was a founder of Baylor University and the First Baptist Church of Waco and pastor to Sam Houston, who had virtually hauled the republic into the United States. Now, at last, Harvey’s employer had relocated them back where she belonged.

From Waskom the road led behind the pine curtain that cast its green shade across East Texas. In this subtropical land of shadows, so unlike the fabled Texas of cattle and cacti, ten-gallon hats and jinglin’ spurs to the west, there was space and peace, with little to hear for miles but rustling boughs.

Half an hour farther on, the unmistakable spindly towers of Kilgore came into view. The little city had been a railroad way station
until 1930, when a “poor boy” drilling test mounted by a seventy-year-old charlatan named Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner unexpectedly gushed forth a roaring geyser of crude. Thus Joiner, who had staged the lackadaisical operation to extract funds from widows to whom he professed undying love and from Depression-struck farmers desperate for a lucky strike, discovered the East Texas Oilfield, the biggest in the contiguous United States and at the time in the world. When it emerged that he had peddled the rights several times over, “Dad” was finessed into selling up to H. L. Hunt, who played a much meaner hand of poker, and Joiner died virtually penniless. Kilgore, meanwhile, sprouted oil derricks the way regular towns raised telegraph poles and traffic lights: at their densest, there were more than a thousand downtown, including forty-four on a single block, many in backyards, with their legs hard up against those of their neighbors. Tents, shanties, and ramshackle honkytonks heaving with prospectors, roustabouts, gamblers, and whores spilled along Main Street. Texas Rangers and the National Guard followed in pursuit of “hot” oil smugglers and oil pirates, among them some of East Texas’s leading citizens, who drilled long slanting holes to
draw off their neighbors’ crude.

The wooden skeletons still commanded the sky when the Cliburns arrived in 1940, topped at Christmas with illuminated stars in reds, greens, and blues like a forest of deconstructed firs. Yet, by then, the boomtown jamboree had moved on to leave a pleasant if scattered town of ten thousand. Big oil had bought up most of the leases, and among the operators was Magnolia Petroleum Company, an affiliate of Socony-Vacuum Oil of New York. Harvey was their purchasing agent for East Central Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, a title that was bigger than his annual salary, which was around
ten thousand dollars. Soft-spoken and sensitive, he was never cut out to be a player in the high-stakes oil business. While H. L. Hunt, an
old family friend, became the richest man in the world, the Cliburns moved their modest belongings into a
tiny one-story white house with a cedar shake roof eight blocks from downtown on South Martin Street. The
cozy living room was just big enough for Rildia Bee’s baby grands—a Steinway and a Bechstein placed six to nine so she could look her students in the eyes—together with a nine-by-twelve red floral rug, a few chairs, and an old windup Victrola.

At the back of the small plot was a hedge with a strategic gap that led directly to Kilgore Heights Elementary School. This was important because Van could squeeze out after morning practice wearing his little tweed suit, hair combed back and face scrubbed pink, but more important because, during recess, his classmates could squeeze
in
for piano lessons. On his first day of school, Miss Gray, his first-grade teacher, stopped by his desk during a spelling lesson and stared at his hands.
“Van, you have such long hands, you ought to play the piano,” she said. He smiled, and a few days later, when they were trying to find him a role in the class play, the maudlin
Tom Thumb Wedding
, he offered to take over the accompaniment. Oleta Gray literally jumped out of her seat when Van launched into the Bridal Chorus from
Lohengrin.

A minute after the last bell, he was back home at the piano, and he was at the keys again after dinner—except on church nights, which were as often as four times a week. Music and religion were the twin themes of his young life. Harvey was the Sunday school superintendent, Rildia Bee played the organ, and they all sang in the choir. With rehearsing, attending church dinners and prayer meetings, memorizing the King James Bible, praying for foreign missionaries, and shaming lapsed parishioners, First Baptist took up a good deal of what childhood the piano left. In return, it taught Van generosity, humility, and pluck: the last not least during Sword Drill, when children stood at attention, drew their Bibles, and on the word
Charge!
thumbed furiously through to find the day’s book, chapter, and verse.

Added to those qualities was service, which was a constant refrain at home as well as at church. While Van was still tiny, Harvey had him seat his mother at mealtimes and open the door for her. In his first year at elementary school, he set him to studying table etiquette and serving dinner. When Van was ready, they invited two couples over and
had him serve them. “If you do not know how to serve, you are not worthy to be served” was their mantra, and it became his. Playing was serving, too, Rildia Bee taught, and she took every chance to have Van perform in public. He played at ladies’ teas and the Rotary. He played in the chapel of rest at Rader Funeral Home, a few blocks over, before he could read the hymn titles. He played at the Southwestern Bible and Evangelical Conference, the Baptist Sunday School Convention, and the Texas Music Teachers Association State Convention. At the National Piano Playing Auditions in Fort Worth, he rattled off fifteen pieces and was graded
“superior” fifteen times. He wowed the Musical Arts Society of Muskogee, Oklahoma, and audiences in Nacogdoches, Texas, and Clinton and Brookhaven, Mississippi. Excuses did not wash. Shortly before a concert in Kilgore, when he was still six, he ran into a tree and knocked out a front tooth, adding another gap to the two already there.
“I can’t play without any teeth,” he wheedled. “Just don’t smile,” Rildia Bee replied. “The rest will be done by your hands—and God.” She had a way of pretending to let him decide whether to accept an invitation while giving him no choice whatsoever.
“Well, you know you are free,” she would say. “If you say no, oh! you can do anything you want, but if you say yes”—in a singsong staccato now—“there—will—be—restrictions, and you will have freedom only after you do this much now in the morning and that much after dinner, and then if you want to go to the movies, wonderful . . .”

Little by little a performer was created: poised in public, outwardly older than his years, a showman who, like many only children, desperately wanted to please everyone he knew, which in a small town meant everyone. Only he was aware how acutely he suffered from nerves before every concert, beginning when he was four. Yet, even then, he knew it wasn’t stage fright: it was a heart-wrenching feeling of responsibility to the beautiful music to which he had to do justice, to the audience he had to serve.