Portraits and Observations (29 page)

To Sascha’s surprise, his return bout was victorious. The audience was eager to hear what would happen in the next act, and Sascha, who two weeks later applied to the Moscow Art Theatre for a drama student fellowship, ecstatically recounted Crown’s murder and Porgy’s imprisonment. He walked off to one of the largest hands of the evening; Miss Lydia was still clapping after the house lights had dimmed.

The element in the opera which seemed most to disturb the
Soviets, its sensuality, reaches a peak of Himalayan proportions in the opening twenty minutes of Act Two. A song “I Ain’t Got No Shame” (“doin’ what I likes to do”), and the shake-that-thing brand of choreography accompanying it, proved too aptly titled, too graphically illustrated, for Russian comfort. But it was the ensuing scene which contained, from a prudish viewpoint, the real affront. The scene, a favorite of the director’s and one he’d kept heightening in rehearsal, begins with Crown’s attempting to rape Bess—he grips her to him, gropes her buttocks, her breasts; and ends with Bess raping him—she rips off his shirt, wraps her arms around him and writhes, sizzles like bacon in a skillet; blackout. Areas of the audience suffered something of a blackout, too. “Christ,” said one correspondent, his voice carrying in the hush, “they wouldn’t get away with that on Broadway!” To which another American journalist, a woman, replied, “Don’t be silly. It’s the best thing in the show.”

Leslie Scott had predicted the second act would “sail”; his forecast was almost verified during the opera’s remaining forty minutes. The street-cry song of the Strawberry Woman started favorable winds blowing. Again, like the love duet, the melody and the situation, simply a peddler selling strawberries, was one the Russians could grasp, be charmed by. After that, every scene seemed to be accepted; and though the performance did not sail, perhaps because too much water had already been shipped, at least it floated, wallowed along in a current of less frigid temperature.

As the curtain fell, and the calls commenced, cameramen, scooting up and down the aisles, divided their shots between applauding Russians and salaaming actors. “They’re stunned,” Lowry once more pronounced, and his wife tacked on the inevitable “They’ve never seen anything like it.” The applause, which one experienced witness described as “nothing compared to an opening night at the Bolshoi,” sustained a logical number of curtain calls, then swiftly
declined. It was now, when people were leaving their seats, that Breen made his bid for a more impressive demonstration by unleashing the extra-added “impromptu” curtain call he’d rehearsed that afternoon. On came the cast, one by one, each of them cavorting to the beat of a bongo drum. “Oh, no,” groaned Miss Ryan. “They shouldn’t do this. It’s just begging.” In the endurance test that followed, the audience compromised by substituting a chantlike pattern of clapping for authentic applause. Three minutes passed; four, five, six, seven. At last, when Miss Flowers had blown a final kiss across the footlights, and the electricians, et al., had been acknowledged, Breen, taking the ultimate bow, permitted the curtain to be lowered.

Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen, and various Soviet officials, were ushered backstage to shake hands with the cast. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Mrs. Gershwin gaily cried as she squeezed through the backstage pandemonium. “It’s
only
little old
Porgy
.” Savchenko pushed toward Mrs. Breen; stiffly offering his hand, he said, “I want to congratulate you on a very big success.” Mrs. Breen dabbed at her eyes, as though drying phantom tears. “That ovation. Wasn’t it glorious?” she said, turning to gaze at her husband, who was posing for a photograph with Bohlen. “Such a tribute to Robert.”

Outside, I had to walk some distance before finding a taxi. A threesome, two young men and a girl, walked ahead of me. I gathered they’d been part of the
Porgy and Bess
audience. Their voices reverberated down the shadowed, snow-silent streets. They were all talking at once, an exhilarated babble now and again mixed with humming: the strawberry street cry, a phrase of “Summertime.” Then, as though she had no true understanding of the words but had memorized them phonetically, the girl sang, “There’s a boat that’s leavin’ soon for New York, come with me, that’s where we belong, sister …” Her friends joined in, whistling. Orlov had said,
“And in the summer, that’s what you’ll hear: young people whistling along the river. They won’t forget.”

The promise of these young people who wouldn’t forget, who’d been stimulated into new visions: surely, I thought, that was enough to justify my telling Henry Shapiro the première was a success. Not the “bombshell” conquest the proprietors of Everyman Opera had expected; but a victory of finer significance, one that would mature and matter. And yet, as I lay in my room thinking it over, qualms seized me when eventually the telephone rang. “How did it go? What really happened?” were questions to be answered on journalism’s unsubtle level. Could I, with any honesty, give Shapiro a radiant account of the opera’s overall reception? I preferred to; and suspected that it was what he, quite naturally, wanted to hear. But I let the telephone ring while a plethora of
ifs
plunged around in my head: if the Russians had been able to consult a printed program, if the fanfare and ceremonial aspects had been curtailed, if less had been demanded of the audience, if … I quit stalling and picked up the receiver. But the person on the line was Miss Lydia, who said she was sorry, someone had called me from Moscow and been disconnected. I had no more calls that evening.

Reviews of the production were published by two of the city’s leading papers,
Smena
and
Evening Leningrad
. In Ambassador Bohlen’s opinion, the articles were “By and large, really excellent. Very thoughtful. It shows they took it seriously.”

The
Evening Leningrad
critic wrote, “
Porgy and Bess
is a work stamped with brilliant talent and unusual mastery … warmly received by the audience.” A further fifteen hundred words elaborated on that statement. He praised the score (“Gershwin’s music is melodic, sincere, intentionally suffused with Negro musical folklore. There are plenty of really expressive and contrasting melodies”), Breen’s direction (“The show is directed with great mastery
and rivets one’s attention with its dynamic sweep”), the conductor (“The musical part of the performance is on a very high level”), and the cast (“… plays together with a harmony rarely to be seen …”). The libretto, however, provoked a gentle reprimand, for the writer noticed in it “some elements of expressionism and melodrama, and abundance of the customary details regarding criminal investigation.” Nor did
Evening Leningrad
forget to press the political pedal: “We, Soviet spectators, realize the corrosive effect of the capitalistic system on the consciousness, the mentality and the moral outlook of a people oppressed by poverty. This lifts Heyward’s play, as set to music by Gershwin, into the realms of social drama.” But such comments seemed a mere pianissimo compared to the loud chords of propaganda that opponents of the
Porgy and Bess
tour had anticipated.

The second critic, U. Kovalyev, writing in
Smena
, mentioned a factor ignored by
Evening Leningrad:
“The astoundingly erotic coloring of some of the dancing scenes is unpleasant. And it is hard to lay the blame on a specific national dance. It is more the taste of the director and perhaps his kind of ‘tradition’ stemming from Broadway ‘burlesques’ and ‘revues.’ But on the whole,” continues Kovalyev, “
Porgy and Bess
presents one of the most interesting events of this theatrical season. It is an excellently performed production, colorful, full of movement and music. It testifies to the high talent of the Negro people. Very possibly not all of the music and the staging will be approved by the Soviet audiences and everything will not necessarily be understandable to them. We are not used to the naturalistic details in the dance, to the excessive jazz sound of the symphony orchestra, etc. Nevertheless the performance broadens our concept of the art of contemporary America, and familiarizes us with thus far unknown facets of the musical and theatrical life of the United States.”

These reviews did not appear until Thursday, three days after the opening. By then, their publication was rather an anticlimax and the company was inclined to regard them with a yawn. “Sure it’s nice they write okay things, but who cares?” said one member of the cast, expressing a prevalent attitude. “It’s not what the Russians think. It’s the stuff they’re hearing about us back home.
That’s
what counts.”

The company was already aware of what America was hearing, for late Tuesday afternoon, the day following the première, Breen received a cable on the subject from Everyman Opera’s New York office. Miss Ryan typed copies of it, and she was about to put one of them on the company’s bulletin board when we met in the lobby. “Hi,” she said. “Guess what? Stefan the Bunny called. He wants to take me dancing. Do you think it’ll be all right? I mean, as long as he just wants to dance? Anyway, I don’t care. I’d go dancing with Jack the Ripper, anything to get away from
Porgy and Bess
,” she said, and thumbtacked her typewritten version of the cable to the bulletin board.

“Of course,” remarked Miss Ryan, perusing the cable, “that’s not
exactly
how it arrived. The Breens did a little adding and editing. There was one line: ‘
Times
says scored moderate success.’ You can bet Wilva cut that out! Well,” she said with a smile, a sigh, “why not make a good thing better? Wilva just wants everybody to feel wonderful, and I think that’s kind of endearing.”

All afternoon members of the company, passing through the lobby, stopped to read the message from New York. It made them grin; they walked away with lightened steps. “What’cha say, man?” said Earl Bruce Jackson to Warner Watson as they stood reading the cable. “We’re making history!” And Watson, rubbing his hands together, replied, “Yep, uh-huh. I guess we’ve got
history
fenced in.”

Most Japanese girls giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump peony-and-pansy-kimonoed figure. There seemed to be no particular reason for this merriment; the Japanese giggle operates without apparent motivation. I’d merely asked to be directed toward a certain room. “You come see Marron?” she gasped, showing, like so many of her fellow-countrymen, an array of gold teeth. Then, with the tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps that the wearing of a kimono necessitates, she led me through a labyrinth of corridors, promising, “I knock you Marron.” The “l” sound does not exist in Japanese, and by “Marron” the maid meant Marlon—Marlon Brando, the American actor, who was at that time in Kyoto doing location work for the Warner Brothers–William Goetz motion-picture version of James Michener’s novel
Sayonara
.

My guide tapped at Brando’s door, shrieked “Marron!” and fled away along the corridor, her kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of a parakeet. The door was opened by another doll-delicate Miyako maid, who at once succumbed to her own fit of quaint hysteria. From an inner room, Brando called, “What is it, honey?” But the girl, her eyes squeezed shut with mirth and her fat little hands jammed into her mouth, like a bawling baby’s, was incapable of reply. “Hey, honey, what is it?” Brando again inquired, and appeared in the doorway. “Oh, hi,” he said when he saw me. “It’s seven, huh?” We’d made a seven-o’clock date for dinner; I was nearly twenty minutes late. “Well, take off your shoes and come on in. I’m just finishing up here. And, hey, honey,” he told the maid, “bring us some ice.” Then, looking after the girl as she scurried off, he cocked his hands on his hips and, grinning, declared, “They kill me. They really kill me. The kids, too. Don’t you think they’re wonderful, don’t you love them—Japanese kids?”

The Miyako, where about half of the
Sayonara
company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches. But for the convenience of Japanese guests, who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travelers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself. His quarters consisted of two rooms, a bath and a glassed-in sun porch. Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando’s personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. The floors were covered with tawny
tatami
matting, with a discreet scattering of raw-silk pillows; a scroll depicting swimming golden carp hung in an alcove, and beneath it, on a stand, sat a vase filled with tall lilies and red leaves, arranged just so. The larger of the two rooms—the inner one—which the occupant was using as a sort of business office where he also dined and slept, contained a long, low lacquer table and a sleeping pallet. In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment’s storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors. All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider
and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it, and the long lacquer table was loaded with overfilled ashtrays and piled pages of his most recent creative effort, which happens to be a film script entitled
A Burst of Vermilion
.