Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (49 page)

ON OCTOBER
14, 1967, Van landed in Washington, DC, to play an evening recital at Constitution Hall and too late realized he had left his concert apparel on the plane. So he did what any celebrity with high-placed friends would: he
called the White House. LBJ told him to come over, and he was cleared to enter at 6:32 p.m. There was precious little time before the concert, and Sgt. Ken Gaddis, the president’s valet, had been given time off to attend a football game. The staff flew into a panic.

Presidential aide Sgt. Paul Glynn was at home when the White House operators tracked him down. Johnson came on the phone. “Paul, I sure need some help,” he said. “I gave Ken the afternoon off, and Van Cliburn has lost his black tie, he left it on the airplane. Can we do something? What size am I?” Glynn indelicately told the fifty-nine-year-old president that Van was a young man, and LBJ’s dress outfit would be too big. “I’ll call you back,” Johnson said, and minutes later he was on the phone again. “Paul, come on in,” he said, “and we’ll do it.” Glynn had barely had time to get ready when the phone rang a third time. “Haven’t you left yet?” growled the president, who was notorious for giving reluctant congressmen the viselike “Johnson treatment.”

Glynn sprinted into the White House at 6:47 p.m., found Johnson
in the pool, and headed up to the family quarters. Van was practicing at the piano. Ken Gaddis ran in as well, troubled as to what was so important that he had been summoned from the game. The two men began to fit Van into LBJ’s suit. At six feet, three and half inches, Johnson was the tallest president but one—Lincoln had a quarter of an inch on him—and almost a match for Van. But Johnson ate as he drank and womanized, to fill an unfillable pit, and the pants hung loose like a clown’s. The aides doubled them twice in the back and pinned them. The jacket needed less pinning, but the white shirtfront billowed like a full sail and would not sit smooth. When Van was all dressed and pinned in, he changed into his regular clothes and went down to the pool, where Johnson made him get into the suit again so he could take a look. It was 7:45 p.m.

“They look fine,” LBJ said, in surprise or perhaps satisfaction. Van asked if he could relate the story, and Johnson, scenting good publicity, readily agreed.

“Mr. President,” Van said as he got ready to leave, “I’ll return this suit, but I will not return this stud. I hope you’ll hold it for a minute, and then give it back to me—and it will be something for me to treasure the rest of my life.” He left at 7:50 p.m., barely in time to make the concert.

The episode was reported in virtually every news outlet.

With the help of the Texas takeover at the White House, Van had become an institution in his early thirties. Thanks to his example, American performers now rubbed shoulders with the power elite, their artistry appreciated as part of the idea of America.
Time
pronounced him a cultural hero “right up there with the
Beatles and Marshall McLuhan.” He was impersonated in the Marilyn Monroe vehicle
Let’s Make Love
, was a
regular on
What’s My Line?
, and was
name-dropped in
Bewitched.
In 1966 he was given an hour-long profile on NBC’s
Bell Telephone Hour
and featured on a CBS tribute to Sol Hurok. He endowed scholarships at Juilliard, Cincinnati, Louisiana State, Interlochen, Texas Christian University, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest; played fund-raisers for orchestras and venues;
and accumulated honorary degrees from Baylor, Loyola, TCU, Michigan State, and Cincinnati University, where he made a pitch that his mother should get one, too:
“I was moved,” noted president Warren Bennis, “but declined.” By late 1968, his
My Favorite Chopin
disc had been on the classical best-seller list for 138 weeks, and Van had all together sold three million albums at a time when five thousand was a good result for a classical LP; he could have sold more, but his contract, which tied him to making two records a year, did not bind him to approve any for release, and he was notoriously skittish about doing so. His audiences were loyal, his reviews often glowing, some placing him, according to one
Los Angeles Times
critic,
“unmistakably in the ranks of the greatest pianists of this or any other era.” He was still playing more than a hundred concerts a year, at fees starting at $7,500 for a recital. With memories of Moscow barely dimmed a decade on, to many he was a true American hero.

Yet America was changing, and one man’s hero was no longer his neighbor’s. The 1960s youthquake was erupting, Vietnam was burning, and the cultural outlaws were about to storm the picket fence fortresses.

THE VIETNAM
War began because America, like the Soviet Union, had tethered its credibility to weak client states in the name of building alliances. When their clients strained in inconvenient directions, the superpowers were tugged along, absurdly but inevitably locked into unwanted conflicts that were easier to escalate than escape. At first the war attracted widespread support among Americans, but beginning with the major troop increase of February 1965, it seared itself into the national conscience. A month later the first teach-in paralyzed the University of Michigan, and the Beat Generation’s barely concealed unease pushed to the surface in an upsurge of activist energy. As the war laid waste to lives and regions, for many, protest was a necessary human response that trumped Cold War geopolitics and fears of communism.

The Johnson administration had been focused on domestic reform:
civil and voting rights, the war on poverty, and federal funding for education and health care—the “Great Society” agenda that banned racial discrimination, lifted millions off the bread line, and significantly extended the reach of the federal government. LBJ had deep misgivings about the Vietnam conflict even as he broadened it:
“I don’t think it’s worth fightin’ for and I don’t think we can get out,” he told his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, after a sleepless night. As a mounting chorus of criticism kept him virtually a prisoner in the White House, his large, friable ego crumbled. He began conceiving of his opponents as traitors and slipping back into the crude worldview of his time as a rising Texas senator, where the
“mad masters of the Kremlin” conspired to advance “the surging blood-red tide of communism.” Increasingly paranoid and self-pitying, he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to find proof that the antiwar movement and the urban race riots that broke out each summer were Red plots directed from Moscow or Beijing.
“The communists already control the three major networks and the forty major outlets of communication,” he lectured his staff, singling out the “bunch of commies” running the
New York Times
and fuming that the
“communist way of thinking” had even infected the West Wing. By the time Van played at a White House state dinner for the chancellor of Austria in April 1968—the month Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in a hundred U.S. cities—Johnson had announced that he would not seek another term. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, the Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, while Richard Nixon came back from the wilderness to clinch the Republican nomination.

Fresh-faced, God-fearing, and wholesomely Texan, Van had suited the 1950s as surely as chrome fenders fitted a Cadillac. Now, like many Americans in their mid-thirties, he was out of tune with the radical mood of young America, the angry generation that spurned the old values of hard work, discipline, and patriotism in favor of campus protests, pot, rock, and permissive sex. While he was never seen without his dapper off-work uniform of dark suit, white shirt,
and dark tie, hippies were dripping beads and beards and letting it all hang out. While he adopted a gracious but stiff public persona that made him a gentlemanly throwback to an age of all of a few years ago, rebels dropped LSD and tripped out from stifling conformity. While he was utterly discreet about his personal life, Allen Ginsberg wrote openly about homosexuality and listed his partner in
Who’s Who
as his spouse. While the children of the Cold War chanted,
“Down with the U.S.!” and “America stinks!” Van wore his patriotism on his sleeve. Even at Carnegie Hall, audiences began to object:
“Many in the full house were startled, and some annoyed, when Mr. Cliburn opened the program with the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’” reported the
Times
, adding that “one woman in a stage seat pointedly refused to rise, and a few listeners were rude enough to hiss.” Undeterred, he
sang the national anthem at Constitution Hall with the Johnsons watching. Yet as coffins rolled in, carpet-bombing spread, and college students burned their draft cards, the country had stopped believing in the old heroes.

Van had raised the profile, status, and salaries of pianists and performers across America and had shown infinite grace under unrelenting pressure. Still, like a latter-day Paderewski, his incredible popularity had always attracted enemies, and now the chorus of complaints grew louder.
Critics accused him of coasting, his rangy restlessness distracting him from sinking into the ultimate simplicities of great art. They complained that his repertoire had not expanded fast enough, though with an orchestra it stretched to Beethoven’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Piano Concertos; Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third Concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; both Brahms concertos; both Liszt concertos; Chopin’s First; MacDowell’s Second; the Schumann; the Grieg; Mozart’s C Major (K. 503); and Prokofiev’s Third. (His recital program was longer.) A
Houston Post
writer sniffed that his once-golden tone had become
“a bit ticky-tacky.” Others carped that Van’s interpretations were getting stale and had not matured. Privately and not so privately, some suggested that this was because he had not matured as a person, either. He was
still reliving his Moscow triumph, they said, or even further back, a sanctified childhood of which he’d never let go. In interviews, he rarely mentioned Rosina Lhévinne now, only Mother, prompting a friend to dash off a furious letter accusing him of extreme ingratitude, which
“shows both in your character and in your development as an artist.” Perhaps it was true that with Rildia Bee eternally at his side, he stayed in the sky and never came down to earth, with its compromises and nakedness and fears learned through joy. But that was who he was.

He smarted at the criticism, but he saw nothing wrong with the way he played. As for his choice of music, it had been set in stone when he was eighteen, and during his first summer vacation, he had gone through the entire piano literature, deciding there and then which pieces were for him. Or perhaps it had been even earlier, when with his mother’s guidance his keen musical instincts unfolded the plan of the great concertos to him. “Choose carefully which works to learn, and never let them go,” Rildia Bee had said. “They will always be your friends.” So they had been, and he saw nothing wrong with that, either.

ON JULY
20, 1969, America landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, fulfilling the pledge JFK had announced and LBJ had upheld. Yet the space race continued: within two years the Soviets launched the first crewed space station,
Salyut 1
, and three top-secret military stations followed between 1973 and 1976. Nor was the arms race in retreat. Punching through a loophole in the 1963 test ban treaty, both superpowers developed sophisticated underground testing techniques that led to an increase in U.S. detonations. By 1970 the USSR was fast closing the real missile gap, and attention moved to new destruction-enhancing innovations such as fitting many independently targetable warheads to a single missile.

From his small dacha near Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev followed events as best he could. He had spent the last few years dictating his memoirs in his usual crude, self-justifying, colorfully charismatic style. His son, Sergei, had smuggled some tapes to the West, and in
1970 they were transcribed and published under the title
Khrushchev Remembers.
In response, the Sovet authorities demoted Sergei and made Khrushchev sign a statement denying any knowledge of the work. When Moscow Radio broadcast the disavowal, it was the first time the former premier’s name had been heard in six years.