Portraits and Observations Read online

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 gon
e 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.”

  Mrs. Breen asked if I were looking forward to boarding The Blue Express, and was exaggeratedly pleased to hear that I was. “Oh, Robert and I wouldn’t miss this train ride for the world! Everybody in the cast is so darling. I know it’s going to be the kind of fun you’ll never stop talking about. But,” she said, with a sudden sorrow in her voice that sounded not altogether sincere, “Robert and I have decided to go by plane. Of course we’ll see you off at the station here—and be right there on the platform when you pull into Leningrad. At least I hope we will. Only I can’t believe it. That it’s really going to happen.” She paused; for an instant a frown marred her immaculate enthusiasm. “Someday I’ll tell you the real story behind it all. The people who didn’t want this to happen! Oh, we’ve had such blows.” She struck her breast. “Real body blows. And they’re still coming. Right up to the last minute,” she said, glancing at a sheaf of cables on a desk.

  A few of the Breens’ tribulations were already common knowledge. For instance, it seemed an accepted fact, in the rumor and publicity surrounding the Soviet venture, that the Russians had, on their own initiative, and out of a Geneva-spirit impulse, invited Porgy and Bess to tour their country. The truth of the matter is, Everyman Opera had invited itself. Breen, having long considered a trip to Russia the logical extension of his company’s “good will” travels, sat down and wrote a letter to the Soviet Premier, Marshal Bulganin, saying, in effect, that Porgy and Bess would be pleased to undertake the journey if the U.S.S.R. was willing to have them. The appeal must have impressed Bulganin favorably, for he forwarded the letter to the Ministry of Culture, the government monopoly which, under the direction of Nikolai Mikhailov, controls every facet of artistic life inside the Soviet Union. Theater, music, films, publishing, painting, each of these activities comes under the specific, not always lenient, supervision of the Ministry of Culture, whose headquarters are in Moscow. Therefore, with the implied blessings of Bulganin, the Ministry began negotiations with Everyman Opera, though to do so could not have been a casual decision. Casual, say, as the decisions might have been in the case of the Comédie Française, whose company had appeared in Moscow a year earlier, or a British production of Hamlet, which had been given a Moscow première in the autumn of 1955. Both of these troupes had enjoyed wholehearted success. But from any point of view, whether that of the visiting artists or their hosts, the risks involved were merely aesthetic. Molière and Shakespeare do not lend themselves to the intentions of modern political propaganda.

  The same cannot be said of Porgy and Bess. Here, either side of the curtain, American or Soviet, had much to concern them, for the Gershwin opera, when slipped under the dialectical microscope, proves a test tube brimming with the kind of bacteria to which the present Russian regime is most allergic. It is extremely erotic, a serious cause for dismay in a nation with laws so prim, persons can be arrested for kissing in public. It is God-fearing; over and again it stresses the necessity of faith in a world above the stars rather than below, demonstrates in song and dialogue the comforts to be derived from religious belief (“the opium of the people”). Furthermore, it discourses, in an uncritical vein, on the subject of superstition, i.e., “The Buzzard Song.” As if this weren’t anathema enough, it also sings out loud that people can be happy with plenty of nothin’, an unwelcome message indeed.

  Certainly the Ministry of Culture must have taken these drawbacks into account, and then reflected that, though the pill was definitely there, at least it was sugar-coated. After all, and despite its accent on folkish fun, the situation of the American Negro as depicted in Porgy and Bess, an exploited race at the mercy of ruthless Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row, could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job. And so, midsummer of 1955, the Ministry informed Everyman Opera they were prepared to roll out the red carpet.

  Assured of a welcome in Russia, Breen then faced the problem of getting there, and that required money, an estimated $150,000. The first newspaper announcements of the Russian “invitation” to Porgy and Bess more or less suggested that the American State Department would not only be the spiritual heart of this “unprecedented project,” as Breen occasionally called it, but would also provide its financial backbone. Breen believed so, and with good reason. Over the last several years the State Department had received universal praise for its moral and financial sponsoring of Porgy and Bess, which The New York Times, among others, frequently summarized as the “best ambassador” the State Department had ever sent abroad. But Breen soon discovered, after a series of pleading trips to Washington, that he could no longer rely on the patronage of his Potomac friends. Apparently they thought his project too unprecedented, or, in their own phrase, “politically premature.” In other words, not one cent.

  In New York, theatrical circles theorized that the State Department had withdrawn its support because they feared the opera too vulnerable to the purposes of Soviet propaganda. Defenders of the enterprise considered this attitude nonsensical. In their opinion, the fact that such social-critical aspects as the opera contained could be freely presented in the American theater counteracted the possibilities of effective propaganda on that score. A further argument was that in Russia the very presence of the Negro cast, their affluent appearance, their so obviously unoppressed outspokenness, their educated, even worldly manner (“Why,” said Mrs. Breen, “some of our cast speak three and four languages. Perfectly”) would impress on the Russian people a different image of the American Negro from the stereotype that continues to make Harriet Beecher Stowe one of the Soviet’s best-selling authors.

  Variety, the theatrical trade paper, reported as rumor a more straightforward explanation for the St
ate Department’s reversal. According to them, the International Exchange Program, a branch of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), whose advice on theatrical matters carries great weight in Washington, had registered opposition on the grounds that the State Department had already spent enough money on Porgy and Bess, and that the funds at their disposal should be more evenly spread to allow a larger catalogue of events in cultural exchange.

  Nonetheless, ANTA and the State Department wished Everyman Opera the best of luck. They were not disowning, simply disinheriting. But well-wishers added little to Breen’s bank account, and as he pondered the possibilities of raising the needed amount of private subscription, there was an unexpected development. The Russians stepped forward and offered to pick up the tab themselves. While the feeblest linguist could translate the meaning of this gesture, designed, as it was, to embarrass the State Department, American partisans of Breen’s venture welcomed it for the very reason it was offered. They felt it would shame Washington into taking a less miserly position. They were mistaken.

  Consequently, with time growing short, Breen had the choice of abandoning his plan or permitting the Soviet to capitalize it. A contract, dated December 3, 1955, was drawn up in Moscow between the Ministry of Culture of the U.S.S.R. (“designated hereinafter under the name of the ‘Ministry’ ”) and Everyman Opera, Inc. (“hereinafter under the name of the ‘Company’ ”). The contract consists of three and a half closely typed pages, and contains several quaint items—the Ministry agrees to supply a Russian member of the cast, namely, “one domesticated she-goat.” But the burden of it is set forth in Article 5. When the writhings of language in this long clause are disentangled, it emerges that during their stay in the Soviet Union, the company would receive weekly payments of $16,000, a figure quite below their customary fee, especially so since the payments were to be made half “in U. S. Dollars in a bank check in New York, the remainder in cash Rubles at the official rate.” (As everyone knows, the official rate is an arbitrary four rubles to the dollar. Opinion wavers on what a fair exchange would be, but on the Moscow black market it is possible to get ten to one, and if a person were willing to take a chance on transporting currency out of the country, thereby risking Siberian detention, he could obtain in Switzerland only one dollar for every fifteen rubles.) In addition to these monetary agreements, Article 5 also promised that the Ministry would supply the Company with: “Free lodging and food in first-class hotels or, when traveling, with sleeper accommodations and food in a dining car. Furthermore, it is understood and agreed that the Ministry pay all expenses for traveling of all members of the Company and the transportation of its scenic equipment to and through the Soviet Union and back to a European border of the Soviet Union.”