Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (45 page)

After lunch the party sped along the river in motorboats, Van in his suit and tie seated next to the premier in his loose shirt and homburg. They stopped for a shooting party, one of Khrushchev’s favorite pastimes, which Van sat out with Nina Khrushchev and the other ladies. Afterward they went bathing. Viktor Sukhodrev stood stiffly on the bank while Khrushchev’s youngest daughter, Elena, called him a Foreign Ministry fuddy-duddy and ordered him to jump in. He politely refused on the grounds that he was working, until Khrushchev needled him as well, whereupon the interpreter stripped off and splashed round with Van and the extended Khrushchev clan. Finally, Van and Khrushchev hugged and said their good-byes.
“Wouldn’t you like to take along a glass of
kvass
for the road?” Khrushchev asked. “
Kvass
, never!” Van replied in Russian, and the unlikely pair burst out laughing.

The premier and his family were deeply fond of the American pianist, and Van went on his way with indissoluble memories. But it is also possible that Khrushchev had engineered Van’s entire visit and
showered him with favors to give himself
useful political cover for the greatest of all his foreign policy adventures.

Between Van’s invitation to Gorky and his trip to the dacha, the Soviets had earmarked sixty one-megaton missiles for Cuba, and a military delegation had visited the island in disguise. Fidel Castro had needed no convincing about a proposal to combat
“insolent American imperialism,” but finding locations where the missiles could be concealed had proved trickier. After driving round for a while, the ranking Soviet marshal had decided that coconut palms looked uncannily like rockets, and back in Moscow he convinced Khrushchev that the missiles could be disguised by the simple expedient of attaching a crown of leaves to their nose cones. Missiles also needed launchers, trailers, and fueling trucks, which resembled vegetation even less. Yet the proposal had the merit of being extremely cheap, which was important because the cost of Khrushchev’s scheme had already swollen alarmingly. Military advisers pointed out that troops were essential to defend the missiles against a possible American invasion: at least fifty thousand, with artillery and tanks. An air defense system had to be created, with antiaircraft guns and MiG-21 supersonic fighters. Shore defenses would need to include missile batteries, high-speed patrol boats armed with homing missiles, and bombers. Soviet submarines would have to be based in Cuba to patrol the U.S. coast. The biggest problem of all was how to transport and deliver so much military cargo undetected. The minister for the merchant navy reported that it could be done if the shipping plan for the entire year were scrapped. Khrushchev gave the order.

BACK AT
the National, the Soviet newspapers were hard on Van’s trail. A reporter for
Komsomolskaya Pravda
kept ringing the switchboard, but the receptionist explained that their star guest was too busy preparing for concerts and television appearances, holding official meetings, and taking walks round the city. The journalist cornered Henrietta Belayeva and enlisted her help, and the reporter climbed the staircase as if she were on her way to a
royal audience:

The door is opened and I enter the room. Cliburn is in front of me. He’s tall and slim, with a somewhat tired, pale face. His eyes are expressive and thoughtful and his hands are the hands of a magician, hands that touch the keys and make you fly away into the world of incredible heightened beauty and deep reflections.

Van introduced Rildia Bee, who was sitting in an armchair beside him. “We feel at home in the Soviet Union, we feel well here,” she said.
“Da da, ochen khorosho,” said Van. “Ya lyublyu Moskvu.” He continued in English: “It is a city that has given me wings.” The reporter posed her most pressing question: “Van, can you tell me what you think about the forthcoming Eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki?” He went red and apologized that he had had almost no chance to follow the young people of the world preparing for this exciting meeting, and then made some airy comments about there being nothing nobler than fighting for peace, which made flowers and music blossom. She solemnly reported these bons mots, adding that millions of Soviet citizens loved Van, were inspired by his brilliant art, and waited impatiently for his performances. In the same rapturous vein, Van told
Pravda Ukrainy
that he hoped to bring peoples together through his music.
“I think the cultural exchange between our countries is the greatest achievement of our time,” he declared. “They should develop it. It’s through art that people come to friendship, that’s my deepest conviction. Isn’t it thanks to art that I found so many friends in your country? I would so like to see them all and hug them. But, unfortunately”—he stretched out his arms—“even my long arms won’t be enough for that.”

Van went on to Israel, where his press conference was the first in Israeli history to be attended by representatives of both the American and the Soviet embassies. The Israelis received him almost as warmly as the Russians.
“Whenever he appeared on the teeming boulevards,” a reporter noted, “he was swamped by admirers and autograph seekers and charmed them as well as the press by his Texan
courtesy and boyish naiveté.” To all appearances Van had become a supranational institution, floating above the political troposphere as a celestial messenger of love and peace, while the dirty business of superpower rivalry carried on far beneath.

THAT SUMMER
, unprecedented numbers of Soviet ships sailed into the North Sea and the Mediterranean, catching the attention of European security services. Surveillance planes buzzed the decks but saw only agricultural machinery, while the ships’ passengers appeared to be technicians, tourists, and bearded Cuban revolutionaries. In September the CIA calculated that triple the number of Soviet ships had arrived in Cuba compared to the previous summer, and overflights soon revealed why. Columns of tanks, armored personnel carriers, launchers, and trucks piled with khaki crates of missiles were crawling inland from every port. Cruise missiles resembling small planes emerged from crates and were installed along the coast under camouflage, near antiaircraft batteries. MiG-21 fighters and Ilyushin Il-28 jet bombers were unpacked and assembled, and Soviet Komar missile boats entered the ports under cover of darkness.

At the White House, President Kennedy received the troubling reports. He warned the Soviets that installing offensive weapons in Cuba would bring serious consequences but publicly refused to countenance an invasion. Secretly he had already given the CIA the go-ahead for
Operation Mongoose, an aggressive covert operation designed to help Cubans overthrow the Castro regime. The operation allegedly stretched to getting into Castro’s hands exploding cigars and depilatories to make the dictator’s beard fall off. By a remarkable coincidence the Cuban revolt was intended to occur that October, the same month the Soviet warheads were due to arrive.

ON SEPTEMBER
24 the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition took over Fort Worth, Texas. Four students from the Moscow Conservatory took part, bringing
photographs and gifts for Van. With them were interpreters who were less interested in the
scores than in the bomber assembly lines at the nearby Lockheed Martin plant, a fact duly noted by the FBI, which amid the heightened tensions
filled up a large file with intelligence about the Soviet visitors.

Out-of-town reporters delighted in telling readers that Cowtown, famous for its fat cats, fat cattle, and monster honky-tonk, had discovered there was more to music than “
Willy, Waylon or Garth at Billy Bob’s saloon” singing about “whiskey rivers, lyin’ eyes or achy breaky hearts.” Yet with well-heeled residents vying to host the fifty-four competitors, Rildia Bee and Harvey glad-handing at every event, and cowboy hats and ranch parties galore, the contest had a definite flavor of Texan hospitality. Otherwise it was blatantly modeled on the Tchaikovsky Competition, which, depending on how you read it, was either a compliment or a challenge to the Soviets. There were three rounds, with lots of compulsory Russian music. The judges used the same twenty-five-point system, though their habit of stopping performers in mid-phrase and telling them to move on disconcerted many, as did the decision, urged by Van, to re-audition three second-round losers at the end of the finals. At first he had hoped the contest would never happen, and when it was clear that it would, he briefly considered
disassociating himself from it. Still, he came round, and it was his charm, elegance, and high standards that the thousand volunteers aspired to uphold.

Rosina was there as a guest, but Bill Schuman and Mark Schubert had evaded and finally refused entreaties that they join the advisory board, presumably not wanting to attach the Juilliard name to something untested, nearly provoking Van into backing out of a major
Juilliard fund-raiser. On October 7, Rosina’s student Ralph Votapek of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, won first prize, which undoubtedly caused Van mixed feelings. Soviet competitors Nikolai Petrov and Mikhail Voskresensky came second and third; in sixth place was a Portuguese pianist, Sérgio Varela Cid, who had gone up against Van in the original Tchaikovsky Competition. The prizes, some donated by Van, were generous, and the award included a Carnegie Hall debut
and management by Sol Hurok. Van greeted each contestant, discreetly watched many performances, and announced the winners. He seemed to have been around for so long that it was strange to think that, at twenty-eight, he was barely older than many of them.

It was a busy time for cultural exchange. That September, Sol Hurok had brought the Bolshoi Ballet back to America for a thirteen-week tour.
“For three hours,” the
Times
reported, “East-West tension—the threat of nuclear warfare, missile shots and planetary probes—was forgotten.” Meanwhile in Moscow, the
New York City Ballet opened on October 9 at the Bolshoi Theatre, sharing the stage with the Bolshoi Opera, whose production of
Boris Godunov
with American bass Jerome Hines was rapturously received, with
Khrushchev leading the applause. A week later Vladimir Ashkenazy began his second American tour in Washington, DC, his travel ban revoked after his victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition. Khrushchev was no doubt satisfied that the exchanges helped maintain the fiction of business as usual; perhaps he even hoped that the enthusiasm generated by ballet dancers, pianists, and singers might temper Americans’ response to the appearance of Caribbean-based missiles that flew at four miles a second and could hit Miami in less than a minute.