Portraits and Observations (27 page)

“How do you sit that still?” Miss Lydia inquired of Sascha. “Now we
see
it. Before the ordinary people.” Sascha
was
still. He had a seasick, stricken look, and not without reason. That morning Savchenko had thrown Breen into a tailspin by telling him that the production’s theater programs were still at the printer and would not be obtainable for another few days. It was an authentic crisis because the programs contained a synopsis of the opera’s plot, and Breen was afraid that without this guide the audience would have difficulty following the action. Savchenko offered a solution. Why not have one of the Ministry’s translators come before the curtain and, prior to each act, outline the plot? Sascha had been chosen for the task. “How will I handle my feet?” he said, his eyes hypnotized with stage fright. “How will I speak when there is no water in my mouth?” Miss Lydia tried to soothe him. “Think only what an honor! Many important people will be present. You will be noticed. If you were
my
son, Sascha, I would be very proud.”

Inside the Palace of Culture’s darkened auditorium, Sascha and Miss Lydia found seats in the fourth row. I sat down behind them, between Savchenko and “Joe” Adamov, both of whom were exploring their mouths with toothpicks. Other Russians, some thirty-odd who had finagled invitations to watch the run-through, were scattered around in the first several rows. Among them were Moscow journalists and photographers who had come to cover the première. The orchestra in the pit, an importation from Moscow’s Stanislavski
theater, was winging through the overture with confident ease. The conductor, Alexander Smallens, a Russian-born American who has made rather a life’s work of
Porgy and Bess
, having maestroed its every incarnation, including the original 1935 production, said the Stanislavski was the sixty-first orchestra under his command and the best of the lot. “Superb musicians, and a joy to work with. They love the score, and they have the tempo, the rhythm. All they need now is a little more the
mood
.”

On stage, Breen, wearing a beret, a windbreaker, and a pair of close-fitting frontier pants, motioned the cast into place for the first scene. Flat overhead rehearsal lights shadowed the actors’ faces, drained the color from the scenery and accentuated its wrinkled wornness. The set, a simple functional job, depicts a corner of Catfish Row with its balconied houses and shuttered windows. Presently, responding to a signal from Breen, a soprano leaned over a balcony and began to sing the opening song, “Summertime.” Miss Lydia recognized the melody. She swayed her head and hummed with the music until Savchenko tapped her on the shoulder and growled an admonition that made her shrink in her seat. Midway through the performance, Adamov dug me with his elbow and said, “I speak pretty good English, right? Well
I
can’t figure what the hell they’re yelling about. All this dialect crap! I think …” But I never heard what he thought, for Savchenko turned round with a look that strangled Adamov. Most of the Russians were as silent as Savchenko could have wished. The rows of profiles, silhouetted in the glow from the stage, remained as severely unmarred by expression as coin engravings. At the end, with the last aria sung, there was a quiet drifting off to the cloakrooms. Savchenko and Miss Lydia, Sascha and two other young men from the Ministry, Igor and Henry, waited together while an attendant brought their coats. I walked over and asked Miss Lydia her opinion of what she’d seen.
She bit her lower lip, her eyes darted toward Savchenko, who said firmly, “Interesting. Most interesting.” Miss Lydia nodded, but neither she nor Sascha, Igor nor Henry, would venture a different adjective. “Yes,” they all said, “interesting. Most interesting.”

The average playing time of
Porgy and Bess
is approximately two and a half hours, but this final run-through, involving many pauses for corrections, lasted from 10
A.M
. until two in the afternoon. The cast, edgy with hunger and anxious to return to the hotel, were annoyed when, after the theater had emptied of Russian spectators, Breen informed them that the rehearsal was not yet over. He wanted to restage the curtain calls.

As matters stood, and though only the two players in the title roles took individual bows, the pattern of calls already established required six minutes to complete. Not many productions can expect an audience to sustain six minutes of applause. Breen now proposed extending these six minutes indefinitely by contriving what amounted to “a separate little show. Just,” he said, “an impromptu thing. Sort of like an encore.” It consisted of having a drummer beat a bongo while, one at a time, every winking, waving member of the company sashayed across the stage inviting individual applause. Even the stage manager, the wardrobe mistress, the electricians, and naturally the director himself, were set to receive homage from the audience. One had the choice of two conclusions: either Breen was counting on an ovation of volcanic vigor, or he feared the reverse, and so was insuring prolonged applause by staging this “impromptu” extra curtain call. Obviously, under the delicate diplomatic circumstances, no audience would walk out while the performers were still, in a sense, performing.

Private limousines had been put at the disposal of the leading players. Martha Flowers, who alternates with Ethel Ayler in the role of Bess, and who had been assigned to sing the part that evening,
offered me a return ride to the Astoria. I asked if she were nervous about the première. “Me? Uh-uh. I’ve been doing this show two years. The only thing makes me nervous is, maybe I’m ruining my voice for serious work.” Miss Flowers, a young Juilliard graduate, is ambitious to make a reputation as a concert recitalist. She is small and perky. Whether smiling or not, her lips are always pursed downward, as though she’d just tasted a green persimmon. “I’m tired, though. I sure am that. This kind of climate’s no good for a singer. You’ve really got to watch your throat,” she said, massaging her own. “The other Bess, you know—Ethel, she’s in bed with a bad cold. Got a temperature and everything. So I’ll have to sing the matinée tomorrow and maybe the evening, too. Well, a person could ruin their voice
forever
, carrying on like that.” She described her schedule between now and curtain time. “I ought to eat something. But first I’ll take a bath. Can you float in your tub? Mine’s so big I can float. I’ll take a nap, too. We start for the theater at six. Maybe six-thirty I’ll be slipping into my costume and pinning that old red flower in my hair. Then I guess I’ll have a long sit.”

At six-thirty, the hour when Miss Flowers was presumably in her dressing room pinning on a paper rose, Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Gershwin were in the Bohlens’ suite, where they had been asked to have drinks prior to leaving for the Palace of Culture. Breen himself, too busy to accept the Ambassador’s hospitality, had already gone to the theater.

The drinks, Scotch and tap water, were being served by Bohlen’s aide, Roye L. Lowry, and Mrs. Lowry, a couple harmoniously matched in their conservative, schoolteacherish demeanor. Mrs. Bohlen’s close friend, Marina Sulzberger, the quick-witted wife of the
Times
man, was also present to provide the hostess with conversational
assistance. Not that Mrs. Bohlen, a serenely efficient woman with a dairymaid complexion and sensible blue eyes, gives an impression of being unable to keep any conversation afloat, however awkward. But there was, if one remembers the exceedingly reproachful letter Breen had dispatched to Bohlen a few days earlier, a certain awkwardness inherent in this meeting between representatives of Everyman Opera and the U.S. State Department. As for the Ambassador, one would not suppose, from his amicable manner, that he’d ever received such a letter. A career diplomat for more than twenty-five years, a large percentage of them spent at the Moscow Embassy, where he first held Lowry’s present post, Second Secretary, and where he was ultimately appointed Ambassador in 1952, Bohlen still resembles a photograph taken the year (1927) he graduated from Harvard. Experience has harshened his sportsman’s handsomeness, salted his hair and reduced, rather obliterated, a dreaming naïveté around the eyes. But the direct look of youth, of rugged stamina, has stayed with him. He lounged in his chair, sipping Scotch and talking to Mrs. Breen as though they were in a country room with a warm hearth and lazing dogs on the floor.

But Mrs. Breen couldn’t relax. She sat on the edge of her seat, like an applicant for a job. “It’s so sweet of you to have come. Just dear of you,” she told Bohlen in a small-girl voice that was somehow not quite her own. “It means so much to the cast.”

“You don’t think we would’ve
missed
it?” said Bohlen, and his wife added, “Not for anything in the world! It’s the high point of the winter. We’ve thought of nothing else, have we, Chip?” she said, using the Ambassador’s nickname.

Mrs. Breen modestly lowered her eyes, a touch of color tinged her cheeks. “It means so much to the cast.”

“It means so much to
us
,” said Mrs. Bohlen. “Our life isn’t so amusing that we could afford to miss something like this. Why, we’d
have got here if we’d had to walk the whole way. Crawled on our hands and knees.”

Mrs. Breen raised her eyes for an instant and glanced sharply at the Ambassador’s wife, as though half suspecting her of satiric intent; then, reassured by Mrs. Bohlen’s straight, clear face, she dropped her gaze again. “It’s just dear of you,” she whispered. “And of course we’re all thrilled about the party in Moscow.”

“Oh, yes … the party,” said Mrs. Bohlen, with detectable resignation. In honor of the company’s Moscow première, two weeks hence, the Bohlens had promised to give an official reception at their residence, Spaso House.

“Robert and I do hope Mr. Bulganin will be there. We want to thank him personally for all the courtesy we’ve received. The Ministry of Culture paid Robert a lovely tribute. Seven ivory elephants.” Mrs. Breen was referring to a mantelpiece parade of plastic elephants that Savchenko had presented as a gift to Breen.

“How very nice,” said Mrs. Bohlen dimly, as though she’d lost the conversational thread. “Well, of course, we can’t be quite sure
who’s
coming to the party. We’re sending out two hundred invitations, more or less, but since Russians never answer an R.S.V.P., we never know who to expect or how many.”

“That’s right,” said the Ambassador. “You don’t count on these fellows until they walk in the door. Any of them. And when they give a party themselves they almost never invite you until the last minute. Everyone in the diplomatic corps keeps the evening free when we know there’s going to be a big affair at the Kremlin. We just sit around, hoping the phone will ring. Sometimes we’re in the middle of dinner before they invite us. Then it’s a rush. Fortunately, you never have to dress for these things,” he said, reverting to a previous topic, and a painful one for Mrs. Breen, who, earlier in the day, had been chagrined to learn that Bohlen was unwilling to attend
the opening in black-tie. Indeed, driven by her determination to “make everything gala,” she had gone a step further and envisioned the Ambassador wearing white tie and tails, which is what her husband planned to do. But, “It never occurred to me to bring a dinner jacket,” said Bohlen, fingering a button of the dark gray suit he considered proper to the occasion. “No one wears them here. Not even for a première.”

Over in a corner, Mrs. Gershwin and Mrs. Sulzberger were elaborating on the same sartorial theme. “Of
course
we shouldn’t dress up. That’s what I’ve told Wilva all along. We went to a ballet the other night and looked perfectly ridiculous. Oh, there’s too much fuss around here. I don’t know what the fuss is all about. After all, it’s
only
little old
Porgy
.”

“Actually,” said Mrs. Sulzberger, a Greek-born woman whose clever eyes sparkle with Mediterranean mischief, “it might not be a bad thing for the Russians to see people dressed. There’s no excuse to go about looking the way they do. When we first came here, I felt sorry for them,” she said, and added that she and her husband had been in the Soviet Union two weeks, staying as house guests of the Bohlens. “I thought the way they dressed, the dreariness of it all, I imagined it was because they were terribly poor. But really, you know, that’s not true. They look this way because they want to. They do it on purpose.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “that’s what I think.”

“I wonder,” mused Mrs. Sulzberger. “I wonder. Do you suppose the Russians are so awful because they’ve always been beaten? Or have they always been beaten because they’re so awful?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “that’s what I think.”

Lowry caught the Ambassador’s eye, and glanced significantly at his watch. Outside the hotel a limousine was purring its engine, preparing to carry the Bohlens to the theater. Other Zivs, a street-long
gleam of them, waited for Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Gershwin, for Savchenko and Adamov and the employees of AP, Time-Life, CBS. Soon the cars would start slithering across the square, like a funeral cortège.

Bohlen swallowed his Scotch and accompanied his guests to the door of the suite. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he told Mrs. Breen. “The Russians are very musical people. You’ll have rubles coming out of your ears.”

“Adorable man. And she’s charming, too,” Mrs. Gershwin remarked to Mrs. Breen, as the two ladies descended the stairs.

“Adorable. But,” said Mrs. Breen, her shy little-girl voice suddenly maturing, “Robert and I
did
want it to be gala.”

“Well, darling, we can’t be gala if we’re going to be conspicuous,” observed Mrs. Gershwin, whose diamonded decorations made her look as though she were moving in a spotlight. “Frankly, myself, I think it would do the Russians a world of good to see people dressed up. There’s no excuse for them to go around looking the way they do. When we first came here, I felt sorry for them, but now …”

Across town, at the Palace of Culture, snow-sprinkled crowds were massing on the sidewalk to watch the ticket holders arrive, and inside the theater a sizable number, baking in a blaze of newsreel and television arc lights, were already seated. Baskets of flowers, yellow and white, flanked the stage, and crossed flags, an entwining of stars and stripes and hammer and sickle, floated above the proscenium. Backstage, where the tuning orchestra’s chirping flutes and moaning oboes echoed like forest sounds, Martha Flowers, costumed and completely calm, despite the distant, rising audience-roar, was having, as she’d predicted, “a long sit.”