Portraits and Observations (26 page)

“Look at them zombies go!” said Jackson, and shouted to Lamar, “They’re skinned, man, skinned. Throw on the gasoline and burn ’em alive. Ooble-ee-do.”

Mrs. Breen, a smiling shepherd gazing at her flock, turned to Leonard Lyons. “You see. We’ve broken through. Robert’s done what the diplomats couldn’t.” A skeptical Lyons replied, “All I say is fiddles play while Rome burns.”

At one of the tables I noticed Priscilla Johnson, the college friend of Miss Ryan’s who was studying Russian law, and writing, so she said, articles on Soviet love life. She was sitting with three Russians, one of whom, a gnarled unshaven gnome with frothy black hair, splashed champagne into a glass and thrust it at me. “He wants you to sit down, and, gosh, you’d better,” Miss Johnson advised. “He’s a wild man, sort of. But fascinating.” He was a Georgian sculptor, responsible for the heroic statuary in the new Leningrad subway, and his “wild man” quality came out in sudden rash assertions. “You see that one with the green tie?” he asked in English, pointing at a man across the room. “He’s a rotten coward. An MVD. He wants to
make me trouble.” Or, “I like the West. I have been to Berlin, and met Marlene Dietrich. She was in love with me.”

The other couple at the table, a man and wife, were silent until Miss Johnson and the sculptor left to dance. Then the woman, a death-pale brunette with Mongolian cheekbones and green almond eyes, said to me, “What an appalling little man. So dirty. A
Georgian
, of course. These people from the South!” She spoke English with the spurious elegance, the strained exactness of Liza Doolittle. “I am Madame Nervitsky. You of course know my husband, the crooner,” she said, introducing me to the gentleman, who was twice her age, somewhere in his sixties, a vain, once-handsome man with an inflated stomach and a collapsing chin line. He wore make-up—powder, pencil, a touch of rouge. He knew no English, but told me in French, “
Je suis
Nervitsky. Le Bing Crosby de Russie.” His wife was startled that I’d never heard of him. “No?
Nervitsky?
The famous
crooner
?”

Her surprise was justified. In the Soviet Union, Nervitsky is a considerable celebrity, the idol of young girls who swoon over his interpretations of popular ballads. During the twenties and thirties he lived in Paris, enjoying a minor vogue as a cabaret artist. When that faltered, he went on a honkytonk tour of the Far East. Though of Russian parentage, his wife was born in Shanghai, and it was there that she met and married Nervitsky. In 1943 they moved to Moscow, where she launched a not too prosperous career as a film actress. “I am a painter really. But I can’t be bothered ingratiating all the right people. That is necessary if you want your pictures shown. And painting is so difficult when one travels.” Nervitsky spends most of the year making personal appearances throughout Russia. He was currently engaged for a series of concerts in Leningrad. “Nervitsky is more sold out than the Negroes,” his wife informed me. “We are going to the Negro première,” she said, and added that she was sure it would be a “delightful” evening because
“the Negroes are so amusing and there is so little amusing here. Nothing but work, work. We’re all too tired to be amusing. Don’t you find Leningrad absolutely dead? A beautiful corpse? And Moscow. Moscow is not quite as dead, but so ugly.” She wrinkled her nose and shuddered. “I suppose, coming from New York, you find us very shabby? Speak the truth. You think
me
shabby?” I didn’t think that, no. She wore a simple black dress, some good jewelry, there was a mink stole slung over her shoulders. In fact, she was the best-dressed, best-looking woman I’d seen in Russia. “Ah, you’re embarrassed to say. But I know. When I look at your friends, these American girls, I
feel
shabby. There are no nice things next to my skin. It isn’t that I’m poor. I have money …” She hesitated. Miss Johnson and the sculptor were returning to the table. “Please,” she said, “I would like to say something to you privately. Do you dance?”

The band was smooching its way through “Somebody Loves Me,” and the crowd on the floor listened to Lamar rasp out the lyrics with transfixed, transfigured faces. “… who can it be oh
may
-be
ba
-by
may
-be it’s you!” Madame Nervitsky danced well, but her body was tense, her hands icy. “
J’adore le musique des Negres
. It’s so wicked. So vile,” she said, and then, in the same breath, began to whisper rapidly in my ear, “You and your friends must find Russia very expensive. Take my advice, don’t change your dollars. Sell your clothes. That is the way to get rubles. Sell. Anyone will buy. If it can be done discreetly. I am here in the hotel, Room 520. Tell your friends to bring me shoes, stockings, things for close to the skin. Anything,” she said, digging her nails into my sleeve, “tell them I will buy
anything
. Really,” she sighed, resuming a normal voice and raising it above the shriek of Mignatt’s trumpet, “the Negroes are so delightful.”

Somewhat set back from the Nevsky Prospekt, there is an arcaded building bearing a marked resemblance to St. Peter’s. This is the
Kazin Cathedral, Leningrad’s largest antireligious museum. Inside, in an atmosphere of stained-glass gloom, the management has produced a Grand Guignol indictment against the teachings of the church. Statues and sinister portraits of the Popes follow each other down the galleries like a procession of witches. Everywhere ecclesiastics leer and grimace, make, in captioned cartoons, satyr suggestions to nunlike women, revel in orgies, snub the poor to cavort with the decadent rich. Ad infinitum the museum demonstrates its favorite thesis: that the church, the Roman Catholic in particular, exists solely as a protection to capitalism. One caricature, an enormous oil, depicts Rockefeller, Krupp, Hetty Green, Morgan and Ford plunging ferocious hands into a mountainous welter of coins and blood-soaked war helmets.

The Kazin Cathedral is popular with children. Understandably so, since the exhibition is liberally sprinkled with horror-comic scenes of brutality and torture. The schoolteachers who herd daily swarms of pupils through the place have difficulty dragging them away from such attractions as The Chamber of the Inquisitors. The Chamber is a real room peopled with the life-sized wax figures of four Inquisitors relishing the agonies of a heretic. The naked victim, chained to a table, is being branded with hot coals by a pair of masked torturers. The coals are electrically lighted. Children, even when pulled away, keep sneaking back for a second look.

Outside the cathedral, on the many columns supporting its arcades, there is another kind of display. Coarse chalk drawings, the usual men’s room graffiti, scarcely worth mentioning, except that it seems on first thought an odd place to find it; and on second it doesn’t. In a way it belongs.

Antireligious museums were not among the sightseeing projects their hosts had lined up for the
Porgy and Bess
cast. Quite the contrary, on Sunday, Christmas Day, the Soviets provided the choice of attending a Catholic Mass or a Baptist service. Eleven members
of the company, including Rhoda Boggs, a soprano playing the part of the Strawberry Woman, went to the Baptist Evangelical Church, whose Leningrad parishioners number two thousand. Afterward I saw Miss Boggs sitting alone in the Astoria dining room. She is a round, honey-colored, jolly-faced woman, always carefully groomed, but now her little Sunday best hat was slightly askew, the handkerchief she kept dabbing at her eyes was wet as a washcloth.

“I’m tore to pieces,” she told me, her breasts heaving. “I’ve been going to church since I can walk, but I never felt Jesus like I felt Jesus today. Oh, child, He was
there
. He was out in the open. He was plainly written on every face. He was singing with us, and you never heard such beautiful singing. It was old people mostly, and old people can’t sing like that without Jesus helping them along. The pastor, there was a sweet old man, he asked us colored people would we render a spiritual, and they listened so quiet, all those rows and rows and rows of old faces just looking at us, like we were telling them nobody’s alone when Jesus is everywhere on this earth, which is a fact they know already, but it seemed to me like they were glad to hear it. Anybody doubts the presence of Our Savior, he should’ve been there. Well, it came time to go. To say good-bye. And you know what happened? They stood up, the whole congregation. They took out white handkerchiefs and waved them in the air. And they sang, ‘God Be With You Till We Meet Again.’ The tears were just pouring down our faces, them and ours. Oh, child, it churned me up. I can’t keep nothing on my stomach.”

That evening, with the première less than twenty-four hours away, the windows of the Astoria stayed lighted late. All night footsteps hurried along the corridors, doors slammed and telephones rang, as though a calamity were happening.

In Suite 415, Ambassador Bohlen and his wife entertained a
small group of aides and friends who had just arrived with them by train from Leningrad. The gathering, which included Roye L. Lowry, Second Secretary at the Embassy and one of the two diplomats who had “briefed” the company in Berlin, was exceptionally quiet, since the Bohlens didn’t want their presence in the hotel known until the last possible moment. They concealed themselves so successfully that the next morning Warner Watson, believing the diplomatic contingent were coming by plane, set out for the Leningrad airport with a bouquet for Mrs. Bohlen. Directly below the ambassadorial apartment, in Suite 315, Mrs. Breen was seesawing on a Relaxer Board, while her husband polished the precurtain speech he planned to deliver. It had been suggested to him that he might circumvent the Communist propaganda potential in
Porgy and Bess
by pointing out that its picture of American Negroes concerned the long ago, not today, and so he added the line, “
Porgy and Bess
is set in the past. It no more reflects the present than if it were about life under the Czars in Russia.” In Room 223, Leonard Lyons was at his typewriter outlining the opening-night column he intended cabling his newspaper, the
New York Post
. “On stage were the flags of both nations, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.” he wrote, previewing the event. “The last time an American flag was displayed here was when there were only forty-five states in the union. A representative of the Ministry of Culture phoned to inquire how many states are united now. Yesterday a wardrobe mistress sewed three more stars on the old flag.” The item finished a page. Lyons inserted a new sheet with fresh carbons. Instead of throwing the old carbon in a wastebasket, he took it to the bathroom and flushed it into oblivion. It was safer, he felt, to destroy used carbons, otherwise the Soviets, or perhaps rival correspondents, might ferret them out and decipher what he was writing. And indeed, the hotel was seething with journalistic competitors.
The Saturday Evening Post
was there in
the person of Charles R. Thayer, Ambassador Bohlen’s brother-in-law. Thayer, and C. L. Sulzberger of
The New York Times
, had arrived with the Bohlen party. The
Saturday Review
was sending Horace Sutton,
Time
and
Life
already had a photographer-reporting team on hand, and Mrs. Richard O’Malley, of AP’s Moscow bureau, was speeding toward Leningrad aboard the crack Red Arrow Express, the same train which had, the night before, brought CBS correspondent Dan Schorr.

Now, on the second floor, in Room 111, Schorr, a heavyset bachelor in his middle thirties, was simultaneously trying to correct a manuscript, keep a pipe lighted and dictate on the telephone to a stenographer in Moscow. “Okay. Here’s the story. You put in the slugs. Let’s go,” he barked, and began to read from typed pages. “
The Porgy and Bess Company comma believed to be the first American theatrical troupe ever to appear in Russia comma will open its Soviet engagement tomorrow night before a selected audience of two thousand two hundred
I repeat two two oh oh
at Leningrad’s Palace of Culture comma but offstage the Negro actors and singers have already scored a smash hit period The sixty members of the cast comma just by being themselves comma have had a tremendous impact on this comma the second largest city in the Soviet Union …
that’s right, isn’t it? It is the second largest?” For twenty minutes more Schorr droned out anecdotes and fact. Long lines of Leningraders had waited all night in the snow to buy tickets at a top-scale of sixty rubles ($15), a price doubled and tripled on the black market. “Hey, what’s a synonym for black market that we can get past the censors? Okay, make it curb price.” Toward the end, he was saying, “
They have given Leningrad a Christmas probably unlike any in history period Until four o’clock this morning they gathered around a Christmas tree dash provided by a solicitous Soviet government dash and sang carols and spirituals period
. Yeah, I know I’m overfiling this story. But I got excited. Real excited. You can see it. The impact of one
culture on another culture. And by the way, listen, I’m having a helluva time. They’re a great bunch, these
Porgy and Bess
people. Like living with a circus.”

On Monday morning, the day of the première, the cast met at Leningrad’s Palace of Culture for a final dress rehearsal with full orchestra. Originally the Soviets had intended housing the production in the attractive Mariinsky theater, but the demand for tickets convinced them they could double their profit by transferring the opera to the huge Palace of Culture. The Palace, a pile of muddy-orange concrete, was slapped together in the thirties. From the outside it is not unlike one of those decaying examples of supermarket architecture along Hollywood and Vine. Several things about the interior suggest a skating rink. Its temperature, for one. But Davy Bey, and the other children in the company, thought it was “a grand place,” especially the vast backstage with its black recesses for hiding, its fly ropes to swing on, and where the tough backstage crew, strong men and stronger women, caressed them, gave them candy sticks and called them
“Aluchka,”
a term of affection.

I rode over to the rehearsal in a car shared by two of the Ministry’s interpreters, Miss Lydia and the tall, personable youth named Sascha. Miss Lydia, a woman who enjoys her food, was in a fine state of excitement, as though she were about to sit down to a delicious meal. “We will see it, no? Now we will
see
this
Porgy-Bess
,” she said, wiggling on the seat. And then it occurred to me that yes, of course, at last Miss Lydia and her Ministry colleagues would be able to judge for themselves “this
Porgy-Bess
,” the myth that had for so long consumed their hours and energy. Even Savchenko would be having his first glimpse. Here and there along the route, Miss Lydia happily pointed at street placards advertising the show. Breen’s
name, repeated often, was in bigger, bolder type than Gershwin’s, and the name of his absent co-producer, Blevins Davis, was omitted altogether. The day before, Mrs. Gershwin had observed to Warner Watson that in Russia the name Gershwin seemed to be “riding in the rumble seat”; to which Watson had replied, “Look, Lee, it’s got to be Robert’s show this time. He wants it that way. He’s just got to have it.”