Portraits and Observations (13 page)

A member of the cast, John McCurry, raised his hand to ask a question. McCurry plays the villainous part of Crown, and is, in his own appearance, high and heavy and somewhat forbidding, as befits the role. He wanted to know, “Suppose some of these people invite us into their home? See, most places we go, people do that. Now, is it all right for us to go?”

The two diplomats exchanged an amused glance. “As you may well imagine,” said Mr. Walmsley, “we at the Embassy have never been bothered with that problem. We’re never invited
anywhere
.
Except officially. I can’t say
you
won’t be. And if so, by all means take advantage of the opportunity. From what I understand,” he continued, “your hosts plan an extensive program of entertainment. Something every minute. Enough to wear you out.”

Some of the youngsters smacked their lips at this prospect, but one of them complained, “I don’t touch a drop of nothing. So when they’re making all these toasts we’ve heard about, how do I get out of it gracefully?”

Mr. Walmsley shrugged. “You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.”

“Sure, man,” the worried one was advised by a friend, “nobody’s got to drink what they don’t want to. And what you don’t want, you hand to me.”

Now the questions came quickly. The parents, for instance, were concerned about their children. Would there be pasteurized milk? Yes. Still, Mr. Lowry thought it advisable to take a supply of Starlac, which is what he fed his own two children. And the water, was it fit to drink? Perfectly safe. Mr. Walmsley often drank it from the tap. How does one address a Soviet citizen? “Well,” said Mr. Walmsley, “I
wouldn’t
call them Comrade. Mr. and Mrs. will do.” What about shopping, was it expensive? “Outrageously,” but it hardly mattered, since there was nothing much to buy anyway. How cold did it get? Oh, it
could
occasionally go to thirty-two below zero. In that case, would their hotel room be warm? Yes, indeed. Overheated, actually.

When these fundamentals had been gone through, a voice from the back raised itself to say, “There’s been so much myth talk around here. We heard we’re going to be trailed all the time.”

“Trailed?” Mr. Walmsley smiled. “Perhaps. Though not in the manner you’re thinking of. If they assign anyone to follow you, it will be for your own protection. You must, you see, expect to attract extraordinary attention, crowds wherever you go. It won’t be like
walking down a street in Berlin. For that reason you may be followed, yes.”

“After all,” said Mr. Lowry, “the Ministry of Culture has been so anxious to have you come there that you will probably receive very generous treatment, free of the niggling-naggling that a stray foreign visitor might expect.”

The voice from the back persisted, somewhat in a key of disappointment, “We heard they were going to trail us. And open our letters.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Walmsley, “
that
is another matter. Something you take for granted. I always assume my letters have been opened.”

His audience shifted in their chairs, their eyes swerving with I-told-you-so’s. Robert Breen’s secretary, Nancy Ryan, stood up. Miss Ryan (Radcliffe ’52) had been with the company three months, having taken the job because of an interest in the theater. A New Yorker, she is blond, very blue-eyed, tall, just under six feet in fact, and bears considerable resemblance to her mother, an often-photographed and celebrated beauty, Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart. She wanted to make a suggestion. “Mr. Walmsley, if it’s true our letters will be censored, then wouldn’t it be better to do all our correspondence on postcards? I mean, if they didn’t have to open it to read it, wouldn’t that cause less of a delay in outgoing mail?”

Mr. Walmsley seemed not to think Miss Ryan’s plan had much merit, as either a time-saving or trouble-saving device. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gershwin had been urging Jerry Laws into action. “Go on, darling. Ask him about the microphones.”

Laws caught the diplomat’s attention. “A lot of us,” he said, “we’ve been worried about the possibility of wire-tapping in our rooms.”

Mr. Walmsley nodded. “I should say it’s more than a possibility. Again, it’s the sort of thing you should assume. Of course, no one really
knows
.”

There was a silent pause, during which Mrs. Gershwin, plucking at a diamond brooch, seemed to wait for Jerry Laws to bring up the matter of concealed cameras, but he hadn’t the chance before McCurry regained the floor.

McCurry leaned forward, hunching his burly shoulders. He said he thought it was about time they stopped beating around the bush and came to grips with “the big problem. The big problem is, now what do we say when they ask us political stuff? I’m speaking of the Negro situation.”

McCurry’s deep voice made the question ride across the room like a wave, collecting as it went the complete interest of the audience. Mr. Walmsley hesitated, as though uncertain whether to ride over it or swim under; at all events, he seemed not prepared to meet it head-on.

“You don’t have to answer political questions, any more than they would answer questions of that nature put to them by you.” Walmsley cleared his throat, and added, “It’s all dangerous ground. Treading on eggs.”

Mutterings in the audience indicated that they felt the diplomat’s advice was inadequate. Lowry whispered in Walmsley’s ear, and McCurry consulted his wife, a melancholy woman who was sitting beside him with their three-year-old daughter on her lap. Then McCurry said, “But they’re bound to ask us about the Negro situation. They always do. Last year we were in Yugoslavia, and all the time we were there—”

“Yes, I know,” said Walmsley peremptorily. “That’s what this whole thing is about. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

Walmsley’s statement, or possibly the manner in which it was made, seemed to rub several people the wrong way; and Jerry Laws, a legend in the company for his fighting quick temper, jumped to his feet, his body stiff with tension. “Then how do we handle it?
Should we answer it the way it is? Tell the truth? Or do you want us to gloss it over?”

Walmsley blinked. He took off a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “Why, tell the truth,” he said. “Believe me, sir, the Russians know as much about the Negro situation as you do. And they don’t give a damn one way or another. Except for statements, propaganda, anything they can turn to their own interests. I think you ought to keep in mind that any interviews you give will be picked up by the American press and reprinted in your hometown newspapers.”

A woman, the first who had spoken, rose from her seat in the front row. “We all know there’s discrimination back home,” she said in a shy voice to which everyone listened respectfully. “But in the last eight years Negroes have made a lot of progress. We’ve come a long way and that’s the truth. We can point with pride to our scientists, artists. If we did that [in Russia], it might do a lot of good.”

Others agreed, and addressed the group in a similar vein. Willem Van Loon, a Russian-speaking son of the late historian, and one of the persons handling publicity for Everyman Opera, announced that he was “very, very glad this matter is being gone into so thoroughly. The other day I had a couple of the cast taping an interview for the American Service stations here in Germany, and touching on this point, this racial question, I knew we had to be very, very careful, because of being so near to East Berlin and the possibility of our being monitored—”

“Of course,” said Walmsley, quietly interrupting. “I suppose you realize that we’re being monitored right now.”

Clearly Van Loon had not, nor had anyone else, to judge from the general consternation and gazing-round to see who could be the cause of Walmsley’s remark. But any evidence, at least in the shape of mysterious strangers, was not apparent. Van Loon, however,
didn’t finish what he’d intended saying. His voice trailed away, as did the meeting itself, which shortly came to a meandering conclusion. Both of the diplomats blushed when the company thanked them with applause.

“Thank you,” said Walmsley. “It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you. Mr. Lowry and I don’t often get into contact with the atmosphere of greasepaint.”

The director, Robert Breen, then called his cast to rehearsal, but before it began, there was much milling about and swapping of opinions on the “briefing.” Jerry Laws restricted himself to one word, “Uninformative.” Mrs. Gershwin, on the contrary, seemed to have found it too informative. “I’m stunned, darling. Think of living like that! Always assuming. Never
knowing
. Seriously, darling, where are we going to gossip?”

Downstairs, I was offered a return ride to the hotel by Warner Watson, production assistant to Mr. Breen. He introduced me to Dr. Fabian Schupper, who also shared the taxi. Dr. Schupper is an American student at the German Psychoanalytic Institute. I was told he’d been invited on the Russian tour to counteract any “stresses” members of the company might experience. At the last moment, much to his disappointment, Dr. Schupper did not actually go, the management having decided that a psychiatrist was perhaps, after all, not necessary; though the fact that psychoanalysis and its practitioners are not welcome in the Soviet Union may well have been a contributing cause. But at the moment, in the taxi, he was advising Warner Watson to “relax.”

Watson, lighting a cigarette with hands that trembled noticeably, said, “Relaxed people do
not
get productions like this played on the samovar circuit.”

Watson is in his late thirties. He has a graying crew-cut, and timid, resigned brown eyes. There is about his face, and his manner
too, a blurred gentleness, a beyond-his-years fatigue. At one time an actor, he has been associated with Everyman Opera since its inception in 1952. In his job, he is primarily concerned with what he calls “fencing things in.” During the past two weeks in Berlin, he’d very nearly taken up residence at the Soviet Embassy, attempting to get a few things fenced in. Despite these efforts, there remained a multiplicity of matters that had escaped corralling. Among them, there was the situation over the company’s passports, which, at this late date, were still lurking in Russian hands waiting to be visaed. Then, too, Watson was encountering trouble on the subject of the train by which the troupe was to travel to Leningrad. The production had requested four sleeping cars. The Russians had replied, quite flatly, that they could supply only three second-class cars with “soft-bed” (the Russian term for sleeping berth) accommodations. These, together with a baggage car and a car for the show’s scenery, would be attached to The Blue Express, a regularly scheduled Soviet train running between East Berlin and Moscow. Watson’s difficulty was that he could not obtain from the Russians a plan of the “soft-bed” cars, and so was unable to chart out sleeping arrangements. He therefore imagined on the train a slapstick
Walpurgisnacht:
“More bodies than berths.” He’d also not been able to learn at what hotels in either Leningrad or Moscow the troupe would be staying, and other details of that nature. “They’ll never tell you the whole thing about anything. Not all at once. If they tell you A, they
might
tell you B, but between the two there’s a long, long wait.”

Apparently, though, the Russians themselves did not practice the same patience they required of others. Some hours earlier a cable had arrived from Moscow that Watson counted among the causes for his trembling hands.
UNLESS ORCHESTRATIONS DELIVERED EMBASSY BERLIN TONIGHT WILL POSTPONE LENINGRAD OPENING REDUCE FEE
.
The Soviets had for weeks been demanding the orchestrations because they wanted their musicians to rehearse in advance of the company’s arrival. Breen, fearing the orchestrations, his only copy, might be lost in transit, had refused to comply. But this ultimatum cable, with its two dire last words, seemed to have changed his mind, and now Watson was on his way to deliver the orchestrations to the Soviet Embassy.

“Don’t worry,” said Watson, wiping beads of moisture from his upper lip. “
I’m
not worried. We’re going to get all this fenced in.”

“Relax,” said Dr. Schupper.

Back at my hotel, the Kempenski, where many of the company were staying, I stopped by Breen’s suite to see his wife, Wilva. She’d just returned from an overnight flight to Brussels, where she’d gone to consult a doctor. For some while twinges of appendicitis had been troubling her, and when, the day before, she’d flown to Brussels, it was with the knowledge that she might have to undergo an immediate operation, thereby canceling her part in the trip to Russia. The previous October she’d spent ten days in Moscow discussing arrangements for the tour with the Ministry of Culture, a “fascinating” experience that had made her anxious to return.

“It’s all right, the doctor says I can go. I didn’t know how much I wanted to until I thought I couldn’t,” she said, smiling the smile that seems less an expression than a circumstance of her eager, her anxious-to-please personality. Mrs. Breen has dimples and large brown eyes. Her hair, a maple color, is worn upswept and held in place by huge pins that could serve as weapons. At the moment, she was wearing a dress of purple wool, the color that dominates her wardrobe: “Robert’s mad for purple.” She and Breen met at the University of Minnesota, where both were graduate students in the
drama department. They have been married eighteen years. Though Mrs. Breen has played professionally on the stage, once as Shakespeare’s Juliet, her real devotions, in the words of one of their associates, are to “Robert and Robert’s career.” If she could find enough paper, she’d wrap up the world and hand it to him.

On the surface of it, a shortage of paper would not appear to be one of Mrs. Breen’s problems, for she lives with a traveling mountain of letters and clippings and files. The international correspondence for Everyman Opera is among her principal responsibilities; that, and seeing that the company is “kept happy.” In the latter role, she’d brought back from Brussels a parcel of toys to be distributed among the children of the cast at Christmastime in Leningrad. “
If
I can get them away from Robert long enough to pack them again,” she said, pointing to a bathroom where an armada of mechanical boats floated in a filled tub. “Robert’s mad for toys. Really,” she sighed, “it’s dreadful to think of getting all
this
into suitcases.” Several of the objects on view, in the bedroom and in the living room which doubled as an office, presented obvious packing difficulties, especially a large seesawlike apparatus known as a Relaxer Board. “I don’t see why I can’t take it to Russia. I’ve taken it everywhere else. It does me a world of good.”