Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff Page B

Whittlesey, presented Van with acheck for six hundred dollars, to further his musical education. He had already brought credit to the oil patch communities of East Texas and Louisiana, she said, and they were mighty proud of him. He was overwhelmed, he replied, and would remember the help of the people he knew if he ever did anything really big. The delay had only added to the excitement, and the concert ended with a roar that would have pleased any college grid star. Later in the year he was back for two“East Texas Days,” proclaimed in his honor by the mayor of Shreveport, which was not inclined to let Kilgore reap all the glory. Both communities had made heavy demands on their talented youngster’s time, but in return they had taught him a lesson unavailable to his worldlier peers: that when he performed, it was not just for the cognoscenti who wanted to hear his take on a familiar piece, but also for the doctor, lawyer, merchant, or fire chief who could not play the piano himself. To play to serve, to value all: experience like that was hard to buy.
    That year, Van summered at Chautauqua, in western New York State, the original location of a nineteenth-century adult education movement that spawned camps nationwide. He stayed in the lakeside summerhouse of Mrs. Stephen I. Munger of Dallas and played with the festival orchestra under the baton of Walter Hendl, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The numerous Texans in the audience, reported the Chautauquan ,“seemed barely able to keep from drawing their ‘shootin’ irons,’ and ‘whoopies’ trembled on their lips.” Texans were famously supportive of their own, but Van’s unusual ability to embrace and grip an audience was attracting wider attention. Juilliard’s bald, urbane dean, Mark Schubart, a former New York Times music editor, was sure Van was something special the moment he heard him.“After all,” he pointed out when asked, “not all people who talk like Texans are dumb.” Schubart phoned Bill Judd at Columbia Artists Management, Inc., the mega-agency that dominated concert promoting, which everyone called CAMI.“I’venever done this before,” Schubart told him, “but there’s a pianist here named Van Cliburn that you ought to hear.”
    “I’ve been hearing about him,” Judd replied, and asked if he could listen discreetly. When Van played Mozart and Prokofiev one afternoon in the Juilliard auditorium, Judd was sitting in the back. He later declared that Van was the only artist he was completely certain about from the first. The way Van looked did no harm, either; with a little metropolitan gloss, the strikingly tall, baby-faced Texan was beginning to cut quite a figure.
    Judd was a four-martini-lunch man who started mixing again at dinnertime and “worked from home” in the mornings. Yet he had an impeccable pedigree—his father was manager of the Boston Symphony—and was an important vice president in the most glamorous division of CAMI, called Judson, O’Neill, and Judd. It was highly unusual to offer a student a contract, but when Judd made his play, Van politely thanked him and promised to think it over. He was in pressing need of some fees—in January 1954 he dropped by the Juilliard Placement Bureau to remind them that he would still like some students—but he had his hopes set elsewhere. A few months earlier he had gone to the Capitol Theatre, a four-thousand-seat movie palace near Times Square, to see a feature called Tonight We Sing. The film was a schmaltzy take on the rags-to-riches life and career of Sol Hurok, a legendary Russian-born impresario who represented many of the world’s top artists, andVan was swept away. Another of his childhood dreams had been to appear in lights under the famed rubric “S. Hurok Presents,” and while he madeovertures to Hurok, he dragged his feet with Judd. The surprised manager pursued his nineteen-year-old quarry for more than a year, with improved contracts, dinner