Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff Page A
Authors: Nigel Cliff
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year, radioactive rain fell on Chicago. Soon deadlystrontium 90 began to turn up in the milk supply, prompting fears of a generation prone to bone cancer and leukemia. A study found fifty-times-higher-than-normal levels of the same radioactive isotope, a product of nuclear fission, in hundreds of thousands ofmilk teeth. The postwar generation was rushing ahead without the basic comfort of assuming its children would survive. Doomsters argued about whether this unprecedented loss of faith in the future would lead to riotous living, mercenary individualism, or glassy-eyed nihilism. The only certainty was that it would be traumatic.
Radiation, the invisible killer, buried the atomic boom in a thick concrete coffin and boosted activists of every stripe into the saddles of their hobbyhorses, with the prophets of domestic bliss leading the charge. It was not really a paradox that a world facing unfathomable threats decided that security began at home. To social conservatives, American families in their picket fence fortresses were moral crusaders who preserved the nation’s fiber in the face of enemy assaults. In an about-face from the permissive 1920s and the Depression-hit ’30s, the postwar generation was settling down earlier, having bigger families, and divorcing less. Boosters recommended twenty-one as the best age to tie the knot; twenty-three was past it. Since marriage and the production of lots of well-mannered children were patriotic duties, expressions of responsible citizenship, it followed that other lifestyles gave succor to America’s enemies, which meant Reds. When sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported that premarital sex, homosexuality, and adultery were widespread, he was accused of giving succor to international communism.
Homosexuality caused the greatest stink. Officially classed as a psychiatric disorder, during the Cold War it was treated as a contagious social disease that threatened the nation’s security and sapped the virility that had tamed a continent. In 1950 the U.S. Senate had set the tone with a report entitled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which equated gay men in consenting relationships with violent pedophiles.“Those who engage in overt acts of perversion,” the authors declared, “lack the emotional stability of normal persons . . . One homosexual can pollute a government office.” As thousands lost their jobs, gay hunts became as ferocious as Red hunts; in the minds of prosecutors, who forced those who confessed to being “perverts” to name their “accomplices,” the two were barely distinguishable. Plainclothes FBI agents fanned through the nation’s parks and movie houses, bars and restaurants, to entrap the lonely and unwary, arresting a thousand a year in Washington alone. Eisenhower’s cynical “Silent Generation” either condoned the persecutions or raised a Bogartian eyebrow. Taught as children that the Russians were allies and the Japanese and Germans were enemies, only to be told the opposite when they were barely in their teens, most kept their noses clean and walked on by. The pressure to conform was irresistible.
In the spring of 1955, Van ran into a tall, lissome Texan brunette namedDonna Sanders at a concert. They had met a year and half earlier, on registration day at Juilliard, when Donna, an aspiring singer who had won an episode of the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts variety show on CBS, had enrolled on a scholarship fresh out of high school. She briefly became part of Van’s set before quitting after a few months to take up a role alongside a young Shirley MacLaine in the chorus of Me and Juliet , a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that was opening on Broadway.
This time Van asked Donna out. Their dates were patchy because he was often away touring and because, as she soon realized, the piano came first for him. By now he had moved out ofthe Spicers’ and was living temporarily in a little eleventh-floor apartment at
Radiation, the invisible killer, buried the atomic boom in a thick concrete coffin and boosted activists of every stripe into the saddles of their hobbyhorses, with the prophets of domestic bliss leading the charge. It was not really a paradox that a world facing unfathomable threats decided that security began at home. To social conservatives, American families in their picket fence fortresses were moral crusaders who preserved the nation’s fiber in the face of enemy assaults. In an about-face from the permissive 1920s and the Depression-hit ’30s, the postwar generation was settling down earlier, having bigger families, and divorcing less. Boosters recommended twenty-one as the best age to tie the knot; twenty-three was past it. Since marriage and the production of lots of well-mannered children were patriotic duties, expressions of responsible citizenship, it followed that other lifestyles gave succor to America’s enemies, which meant Reds. When sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported that premarital sex, homosexuality, and adultery were widespread, he was accused of giving succor to international communism.
Homosexuality caused the greatest stink. Officially classed as a psychiatric disorder, during the Cold War it was treated as a contagious social disease that threatened the nation’s security and sapped the virility that had tamed a continent. In 1950 the U.S. Senate had set the tone with a report entitled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which equated gay men in consenting relationships with violent pedophiles.“Those who engage in overt acts of perversion,” the authors declared, “lack the emotional stability of normal persons . . . One homosexual can pollute a government office.” As thousands lost their jobs, gay hunts became as ferocious as Red hunts; in the minds of prosecutors, who forced those who confessed to being “perverts” to name their “accomplices,” the two were barely distinguishable. Plainclothes FBI agents fanned through the nation’s parks and movie houses, bars and restaurants, to entrap the lonely and unwary, arresting a thousand a year in Washington alone. Eisenhower’s cynical “Silent Generation” either condoned the persecutions or raised a Bogartian eyebrow. Taught as children that the Russians were allies and the Japanese and Germans were enemies, only to be told the opposite when they were barely in their teens, most kept their noses clean and walked on by. The pressure to conform was irresistible.
In the spring of 1955, Van ran into a tall, lissome Texan brunette namedDonna Sanders at a concert. They had met a year and half earlier, on registration day at Juilliard, when Donna, an aspiring singer who had won an episode of the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts variety show on CBS, had enrolled on a scholarship fresh out of high school. She briefly became part of Van’s set before quitting after a few months to take up a role alongside a young Shirley MacLaine in the chorus of Me and Juliet , a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that was opening on Broadway.
This time Van asked Donna out. Their dates were patchy because he was often away touring and because, as she soon realized, the piano came first for him. By now he had moved out ofthe Spicers’ and was living temporarily in a little eleventh-floor apartment at
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