Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff Read Free Book Online

his Texas-ness, which he wore more strongly than the Dallas contingent, despite years of speech and drama lessons with a neighbor,Mrs. Leo Satterwhite Allen, whose son had studied with Rildia Bee. The typical Juilliard student was the son of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals raised in a wood polish world of museums and Chekhov plays and studied language. Van went round with his brightly patterned shirts and his wide, floppy collars, his southern accent and down-home humor and artless affection for everyone.“Boy, isn’t it wonderful,” he’d say, shaking his head in wonder, when he liked something. Students who considered themselves intellectuals talked down to him, but what they found most outlandish was his taste in music: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Liszt—his heroes were so cringingly unfashionable that it was hard to take him seriously as an artist. That pained him,more on account of his beloved music than his ego, which his upbringing and gentleness kept modestly bound.
    Since he was dismissed as a hayseed he began playing the enfant terrible, banging out jazz and pop tunes, thumping the keyboard as if he had boxing gloves on, and fooling his classmates into thinking he coasted on his admittedly spectacular musical instincts. To the Spicers’ consternation, he started coming home in the early hours and leaving notes for Hazel: “Hello, darling! I’m home! Whee! Wake me up so I can talk to you in the morning. Love, Van.” They soon solved the mystery of his late nights. When the night caretaker at Juilliard threw Rosina’s gang out of the practice studios, Van walked with them as far as the 110th Street subway station, but instead of joining them for a beer, he took the downtown 1 train, with its screeching brakes and wicker seats, to Fifty-Seventh Street and disappeared down the service stairs at the back of a tall stone building. Squeezing past the trash cans, he tugged on a heavy sliding door and entered a windowless basement lit by factory-style fluorescent lights and crisscrossed by pipes. There, parked against drably painted walls, were his nightly dates: a bank of several dozen nine-foot concert grands. This was the basement ofSteinway Hall, where pianists on the roster of Steinway Artists could choose an instrument for their next performance from a storied fleet that included Rachmaninoff’s favorite, number CD-18. At night, after the white-coated technicians had finished their tuning and buffing, the black beauties were available for practice. Some students used the basement as a musical club, where friends gathered to dispense gossip and criticism. Van took the last time slot, when he could be alone and concentrate while the world was asleep. In the morning he was perpetually late for his nine o’clock class. This drove Rosina crazy and irritated his classmates, who thought he was dopey and pitched in to buy him a Big Ben alarm clock. He started picking up chocolates or flowers on the way to school and presenting them to Rosina with his excuses, which made him even later.
    To his peers’ equal bemusement, three times a week he rode the subway to Fifty-Seventh Street to attend Calvary Baptist Church.In true New York style, the church was interrupted by its own skyscraper, with a Gothic portal supporting a dozen floors of apartments and a tower perched up high. Inside, a proscenium arch and gallery gave it the look of a Broadway theater, but the fellowship was warm, hands were raised high, and here in Mammon the living God felt present in daily life. Van’s fellow Texan Jeaneane Dowis was as suspicious as any of Van’s worn-on-the-sleeve faith, but he kept asking her out for dinner, and a free meal was not to be sniffed at. She and Jimmy Mathis, Rosina’s other Texan pianist, became Van’s best friends. Jimmy had short dark hair; a sensitive, clammy face; and a penchant for making a hysterical drama out of anything.“Well, far be it from me to say,” he’d begin in the tones of a bossy