Portraits and Observations Page 11

  All told, the Russians were investing approximately $150,000. This should not be construed as cultural philanthropy. Actually, for them it was a sound business proposition. If every performance sold out, as was almost certain to happen, the Ministry would double its investment, that is, have a total box-office gross the equivalent of $300,000. Whereas, on the basis of the Ministry-Company contract, and by applying the laws of income versus operating cost, it could be calculated that Everyman Opera would lose around $4,000 a week. Presumably Breen had devised a formula for sustaining such a loss. “But don’t ask me what it is, darling,” said Mrs. Gershwin. “It’s an absolute mystery.”

  While Mrs. Breen was still on the theme of “body blows,” her husband returned from the studio where he’d been rehearsing the cast after the diplomatic briefing. She asked him if he’d like a drink. He said he would, very much. Straight brandy, please.

  Breen is around forty-five, a man of medium height. He has an excellent figure, and one is kept aware of it by the fit of his clothes, for he is partial to trim Eisenhower jackets and those close-cut, narrow-legged trousers known as frontier pants. He wears custom-made shirts, preferably in the colors black and purple. He has thinning blond hair and is seldom indoors or out without a black beret. Depending on the expression, whether solemn or smiling, his face, pale and with a smoothly gaunt bone structure, suggests altogether opposite personalities. In the solemn moments, which can last hours, his face presents a mask of brooding aloofness, as though he were posing for a photographer who had warned him not to move a muscle. Inevitably, one is reminded that Breen, like his wife, has acted Shakespeare—and that the part was Hamlet, which he played in a production that, soon after the war, toured Europe and was even staged at Elsinore itself. But when Breen relaxes, or when something succeeds in catching his interest, he has a complete physical altering in the direction of extreme liveliness and boyish grinning good humor. A shyness, a vulnerable, gullible look replaces the remote and seeming self-assurance. The dual nature of Breen’s appearance may explain why an Everyman Opera employee could complain in one breath, “You never know where you stand with Mr. Breen,” and say in the next, “Anybody can take advantage of him. He’s just too kind.”

  Breen took a swallow of brandy and beckoned me into the bathroom, where he wanted to demonstrate how one of the toy boats operated. It was a tin canoe with a windup Indian that paddled. “Isn’t that wonderful?” he said, as the Indian paddled back and forth across the tub. “Did you ever see anything like that?” He has an actor’s trained voice, “placed” in a register so very deep that it makes for automatic pomposity, and as he speaks his manicured hands move with his words, not in an excitable, Latin style, but in a gracefully slow ritualistic manner, rather as though he were saying Mass. Indeed, Breen’s earliest ambitions were ecclesiastical. Before his interest turned toward the stage, he spent a year training to become a priest.

  I asked him how the rehearsal had gone. “Well, it’s a good cast,” he said. “But they’re a little spoiled, they take it too much for granted. Curtain calls and ovations. Rave reviews. I keep telling them I want them to understand going to Russia isn’t just another engagement. We’ve got to be the best we’ve ever been.”

  If Breen expected the wish contained in this last sentence to come true, then, in the estimation of some observers, he had his work cut out for him. In 1952, when Breen and his co-producer, Blevins Davis, revived the Gershwin opera, which had been a box-office and somewhat of a critical failure in its original (1935) Theater Guild presentation, the program listed William Warfield as Porgy, Leontyne Price as Bess, and Cab Calloway in the role of Sportin’ Life. Since then, these stars had been replaced, and even their replacements replaced, not always with artists of comparable quality. It is difficult to maintain a high level in performance of any long-run production, especially if the show is on tour. The strain of overnight hops, the dreamlike flow of rooms and restaurants, the electric emotional climate surrounding groups who continuously live and work together are factors which create an accumulative fatigue that the show often reflects. Horst Kuegler, a Berlin theater critic who, when he’d reviewed Porgy and Bess three years earlier (it was then appearing in Germany as part of the Berlin Music Festival), had been so enthusiastic he’d gone to see it five times, now felt, seeing it again, that it was “still full of energy and charm, though the production has deteriorated greatly.” For the past week, Breen had rehearsed his cast to the limit Actors Equity permits; but whether or not the show could be whipped into prime shape, Breen had no qualms about its reception at the Leningrad première. It was going to be a “bombshell”! The Russians would be “stunned”! And, what was an unarguable prediction, “They’ll never have seen anything like it!”

  As Breen was finishing his brandy, his wife called from the next room, “You’d better get ready, Robert. They’ll be here at six, and I’ve reserved a private dining room.”

  “Four Russians from the Embassy,” Breen explained, showing me to the door. “They’re coming over for dinner. You know, get friendly. It’s friendship that counts.”

  When I arrived back in my own room in the Kempenski, I found waiting on my bed a large package wrapped in plain brown paper. My name was on it, the name of the hotel and the number of my room, but nothing to identify the sender. Inside, there were half a dozen thick anti-Communist pamphlets, and a handwritten card, without signature, which said, Dear Sir—You can be saved. Saved, one presumed, from the fates described in the accompanying literature, most of which purported to be the case histories of individuals, primarily Germans, who had gone behind the iron curtain, either voluntarily or as the result of force, and had not been heard from again. It was absorbing, as only case histories can be, and I would have read through the lot uninterrupted if the telephone hadn’t rung.

  The caller was Breen’s secretary, Nancy Ryan. “Listen,” she said, “how would you like to sleep with me? On the train, I mean. The way it works out, there are going to be four in a compartment, so I’m afraid we’ll have to do as the Russians do. They always put boys and girls together. Anyway, I’m helping assign the berths, and what with all the affections and frictions and those who want to be together and those who definitely do not, well, really, it’s frightening. So it would simplify the situation if you and I shared a compartment with the lovebirds.”

  The so-called “lovebirds” were Earl Bruce Jackson, one of three alternates in the role of Sportin’ Life, and Helen Thigpen, a soprano who plays the part of Serena. Jackson and Miss Thigpen had been engaged for many months. According to Everyman Opera’s publicity releases, they planned to be married in Moscow.

  I told Miss Ryan the arrangement sounded satisfactory. “That’s brilliant,” she said. “Well, see you on the train. If our visas ever come through …”

  On Monday, the nineteenth of December, passports and visas were still in abeyance. Regardless, around three o’clock that afternoon a trio of chartered buses began circling through Berlin to collect, from the hotels and pensions where they were staying, the personnel of Everyman Opera and transport them to the railway station in East Berlin where the Soviet train, The Blue Express, was scheduled to depart at four or six or midnight, no one seemed to know for certain.

  A small group, spoken of by Warner Watson as “our distinguished guests,” waited together in the lobby of the Hotel Kempenski. The distinguished guests were persons who had no direct connection with Porgy and Bess, but had, nevertheless, been invited by the management to travel with the troupe into Russia. They amounted to: Herman Sartorius, a New York financier and close friend of Breen’s; a newspaper columnist, Leonard Lyons, who was described to the Soviets in Everyman Opera’s official dossier as “Company Historian,” neglecting to mention that he would be mailing his history to the New York Post; another journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Ira Wolfert, accompanied by his wife, Helen. Mr. Wolfert is on the staff of the Reader’s Digest, and the Breens, who keep extensive scrapbooks, hoped he would do an
article on their Russian adventures for that publication. Mrs. Wolfert is also an author, a poet. “A modern poet,” she emphasized.

  Mr. Lyons paced the lobby, impatient for the bus to arrive. “I’m excited. I can’t sleep. Just before I left New York, Abe Burrows called me up. We live in the same building. He said you know how cold it is in Moscow? He heard on the radio it was forty below. That was day before yesterday. You got on your long underwear?” He hiked up his trouser leg to flash a stretch of red wool. Ordinarily a trim-looking man of average size, Lyon had so well prepared himself for the cold that, resplendent in a fur hat and fur-lined coat and gloves and shoes, he seemed to bulge like a shoplifter. “My wife, Sylvia, bought me three pairs of these. From Saks. They don’t itch.”

  The financier, Herman Sartorius, attired in a conservative topcoat and business suit, as though he were setting off for Wall Street, said that no, he was not wearing long underwear. “I didn’t have time to buy anything. Except a map. Did you ever try to buy a road map of Russia? Well, it’s the damnedest thing. Had to turn New York upside down before I found one. Good to have on the train. Know where we are.”

  Lyons agreed. “But,” he said, lowering his voice, and with his alert black eyes snapping from side to side, “better keep it out of sight. They might not like it. A map.”

  “Hmm,” said Sartorius, as though he could not quite follow the drift of Lyons’s thought. “Yes, well, I’ll keep that in mind.” Sartorius has gray hair, a height, a weight, a gentlemanly reserve that inspire the kind of confidence desirable in a financier.

  “I had a letter from a friend,” continued Lyons. “President Truman. He wrote me I’d better be careful in Russia because he was no longer in any position to bail me out. Russia! What a dateline!” he said, glancing around as if hunting some evidence that his elation was shared by others.

  Mrs. Wolfert said, “I’m hungry.”

  Her husband patted her on the shoulder. The Wolferts, who are the parents of grown children, resemble each other in that both have pink cheeks and silvering hair, a long-married, settled-down calm. “That’s all right, Helen,” he said, between puffs on a pipe. “Soon as we get on the train, we’ll go right to the dining car.”

  “Sure,” said Lyons. “Caviar and vodka.”

  Nancy Ryan came racing through the lobby, her blond hair flying, her coat flapping. “Don’t stop me! There’s a crisis!” She stopped, of course; and, rather as though she enjoyed imparting the bad news, said, “Now they tell us! Ten minutes before we leave! That there isn’t a dining car on the train. And there won’t be, not until we reach the Russian border. Thirty hours!”

  “I’m hungry,” said Mrs. Wolfert plaintively.

  Miss Ryan hurried onward. “We’re doing the best we can.” By which she meant the management of Everyman Opera were out scouring the delicatessens of Berlin.

  It was turning dark, a rain-mist was sifting through the streets when the bus arrived, and with a joking, shouting full load of passengers, rumbled off through West Berlin toward the Brandenburg Gate, where the Communist world begins.

  In the bus I sat behind a couple, a young pretty member of the cast and an emaciated youth who was supposed to be a West German journalist. They had met in a Berlin jazz cellar, presumably he had fallen in love, at any rate he was now seeing her off, amid whispers and tears and soft laughter. As we neared the Brandenburg Gate, he protested that he must get off the bus. “It would be dangerous for me to go into East Berlin.” Which, in retrospect, was an interesting remark. Because several weeks later who should turn up in Russia, grinning and swaggering and with no plausible explanation of how he’d got there, but this selfsame young man, still claiming to be a West German and a journalist and in love.

  Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag. “Oh, the mink’s for Russia, darling. Darling,” she said, “why do they call it The Blue Express? When it’s not blue at all?”

  It was green, a sleek collection of dark green cars hitched to a diesel engine. The letters CCCP were painted in yellow on the side of each car, and below them, in different languages, the train’s cities of destination: Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow. Soviet train officers, elegantly turned out in black Persian lamb hats and flaring princess-cut coats, were stationed at the entrances to every car. Sleeping-car attendants, more humbly dressed, stood beside them. Both the officers and the attendants were smoking cigarettes in long vamp-style holders. As they watched the confusion around them, the excited milling about of the troupe, they managed to preserve a stony uninterest despite the bold attentions of those Americans who approached and stared at them as though amazed, and rather peeved, to discover Russians had two eyes correctly located.

  A man from the cast walked over to one of the officers. “Tell me something, kid,” he said, indicating the lettering on the side of the train, “what’s that mean, CCCP?”

  The Russian pointed his cigarette holder at the man. Frowning, he said, “Sie sind Deutsch?”

  The actor laughed. “I’d make a kind of funny-looking German. Seems to me I would.”

  A second Russian, a car attendant, spoke up. “Sind sie nicht Deutsch?”

  “Man,” said the actor, “let’s us settle this misery.” He glanced down the platform and beckoned to Robin Joachim, a young Russian-speaking New Yorker whom Everyman Opera had hired to go along on the trip as a translator.

  The two Russians smiled with pleasure when Joachim began to talk to them in their own language; pleasure gave way to astonishment as he explained that the passengers boarding their train were not Germans, but “Amerikansky” on their way to perform an opera in Leningrad and Moscow.

  “Isn’t that peculiar?” said Joachim, turning to a group of listeners that included Leonard Lyons. “Nobody told them a thing about us being on the train. They never heard of Porgy and Bess.”

  Lyons, the first of the Americans to recover from the shock of this news, whipped out a notebook and pencil. “Well, what do they think? What’s their reaction?”

  “Oh,” said Joachim, “they couldn’t be happier. They’re delirious with joy.”

  It was true that the Russians were nodding and laughing. The officer gave the attendant a hearty slap on the back and shouted an order.

  “What did he say?” asked Lyons, pencil poised.

  Joachim said, “He told him to go put some tea on the samovar.”

  A station clock said six-five. There were signs of departure, whistle sounds, a clanging of doors. In the corridors of the train a radio began blaring martial music, and the company, now all aboard, were hanging out the windows waving at dispirited German luggage porters, none of whom had received the “capitalist insult,” as we’d been warned the People’s Democracies consider it, of a tip. Suddenly, at every window, a cheer went up. It was for the Breens, Robert and Wilva, who were plunging along the platform, followed by a wagonload of food supplies, cardboard cases of beer and wine, frankfurters, rolls and sweet buns, cold cuts, apples and oranges. There was only time to carry the cases onto the train before the radio’s military fanfare reached a crescendo, and the Breens, watching with brave parental smiles, saw their “unprecedented project” slide away from them into the night.

  The space to which I’d been assigned was in Car 2, Compartment 6. It seemed larger than an ordinary wagon-lit compartment, and had a certain prettiness about it, despite the presence of a radio loudspeaker that could not be completely turned off, and a blue light bulb, burning in a blue ceiling, that could never be extinguished. The walls were blue, the window was framed with blue plush curtains which matched the seat upholstery. There was a small table between the seats, and on it a lamp w
ith a rosy silk shade.

  Miss Ryan introduced me to our companions in Compartment 6, Earl Bruce Jackson and his fiancée, Helen Thigpen, whom I’d not met before.

  Jackson is tall and lean, a live-wire with slanting eyes and a saturnine face. He affects a chin goatee, and his hands are radiant with rings, diamonds and sapphires and rubies. We shook hands. “Peace, brother, peace. That’s the word,” he said, and resumed peeling an orange, letting the hulls drop on the floor.

  “No, Earl,” said Miss Ryan, “that’s not the word. The word is, keep things tidy. Put your orange hulls in the ashtray. After all,” she said, looking out the window where the lonely last lights of East Berlin were fading, “this is going to be our home for a hell-uva long time.”

  “That’s right, Earl. Our home,” said Miss Thigpen.

  “Peace, brother, peace. That’s the word. Tell the boys back in New York,” said Jackson, and spit out some seed.

  Miss Ryan began to distribute part of the last-minute picnic the Breens had provided. With a sigh, Miss Thigpen refused a bottle of beer and a salami sandwich. “I don’t know what I’ll eat. There’s nothing goes with my diet. Since I met Earl, I went on a diet and lost fifty-six pounds. Five tablespoons of caviar add up to one hundred calories.”