At first, he was pleased. Then, as he reached for the books, his hands hesitated, withdrew, and his personal tic started; more shrugs, shrinkings, until he was swallowed again in the looseness of his clothes. “I have not the time,” he said regretfully. Afterward there seemed nothing left to say. He informed me that my passport was in order, and left.
Between midnight and two in the morning, The Blue Express stood still in a railroad siding near Moscow. The exterior coldness had stolen into the cars, forming lenses of ice on the inside surface of the windowpanes; looking out, one saw merely spectral diffusions, as if your vision were deformed by cataracts. As soon as the train left Moscow, a restless mood rippled through the compartments; those who had been asleep wakened, began to flutter about like chickens tricked by a false dawn. The stay-ups poured another drink and breathed a second wind. Already the pendulum was swinging toward the tensions of arrival.
Miss Thigpen woke up, calling, “Earl! Earl!” as though she’d had a bad dream.
“Gone,” said Miss Ryan, who was curled in her berth nursing a brandy and reading Mickey Spillane. “He’s out defying the law. Somebody’s running a bootleg Tonk in the next car.”
“That’s no way to do. Earl ought to be getting his rest,” said Miss Thigpen grouchily.
“Give him hell,” Miss Ryan advised her. “He’s got to marry you.”
“Nancy, quelle heure est-il?”
“Twenty to four.” At four Miss Thigpen again inquired the time; and again at ten past. “For God’s sake, Helen. Either get a watch or take an Oblivon.”
Miss Thigpen kicked back her covers. “No sense trying. I’m better off dressed.” It took her an hour and twenty-five minutes to select her costume and apply the right proportions of cosmetics and perfume. At five thirty-five she put on a feathered hat with a veil and sat down on her berth, completely clothed except for stockings and shoes. “I’m worried sick what to wear on my legs. I don’t want to be poisoned,” she said. Her fear was founded on a memo the Russians had issued to the ladies of the company on the subject of nylon hosiery. In conditions of severe cold, nylon, they announced, had a tendency to disintegrate, which might cause nylon poisoning. Miss Thigpen rubbed her naked legs and groaned. “What kind of place is this we’re going? Where a lady’s stockings fall to pieces on the street and maybe kill her?”
“Forget it,” said Miss Ryan.
“But the Russians …”
“How the hell would they know? They don’t have any nylons. That’s why they say it.”
It was eight in the morning before Jackson returned from his Tonk game. “Earl,” said Miss Thigpen, “is this how you’re going to do after we’re married?”
“Sweet-girl,” he said, wearily climbing into his berth, “the cat has howled his last. He’s zero point zero. Ooble-ee-dood out.”
Miss Thigpen was unsympathetic. “Earl, don’t you dare go to sleep now. We’re almost there. Go to sleep for such a little bit and you’ll wake up an ugly mess.”
Jackson muttered and drew a blanket over his head.
“Earl,” said Miss Ryan softly, “I suppose you know they’re going to make newsreels at the station?”
Very shortly afterward, Jackson had shaved, changed shirts and arrayed himself in a caramel-colored fur coat. He owned a hat of the same fur that he’d had “custom-made” fedora-style. While working his hands into a pair of gloves with holes along the fingers to reveal his rings, he gave his fiancée instructions on how to handle the expected cameras: “See, honey, we don’t want to get stuck with a lot of still-men. That’s a waste of time when they’re busting out the flicker stuff.”
He scratched at the window with his jeweled fist, and squinted out; it was nine-five and still pitch-black, not the ideal color for photography. But half an hour later the darkness had turned to steel-gray mist and one could see the blueness of lightly falling snow.
One of the Ministry’s representatives, Sascha, passed through the car, knocking at compartment doors. “Ladies and gentlemen, in twenty minutes we are arriving Leningrad.”
I finished dressing and squeezed my way into the crowded corridor, where an excitement was moment by moment accelerating like the wheels of the train. Even Twerp, shawl-wrapped and hugged in Miss Putnam’s arms, was prepared to disembark. Mrs. Gershwin was more prepared than Twerp. She bristled with mink, was frosted with diamonds, and her curls peeked charmingly from under a rich soft sable hat. “The hat, darling? I bought it in California. I’ve been saving it for a surprise. You do, love? How sweet of you, darling. Darling …” she said, an abrupt silence adding volume to her voice, “we’re there!”
A stunned instant of disbelief, then a collective pushing toward the vestibule. The sad-eyed car attendant, stationed there to receive his tips, found himself not only ignored but also crushed against the wall. Alert as horses at the starting gate, Jackson and John McCurry jockeyed by the exit for position. McCurry is the heftier of the two, and when the door opened, he was the first man out.
He stepped straight into a gray throng, and a flash bulb’s pop. “Bless you,” said McCurry, as women vied to thrust bouquets into his hand. “Bless your little pointed heads.”
“As we arrived, there were many birds flying about—black and white,” wrote Warner Watson, as he later recorded the scene in his diary. “The white ones are sakaros. I write it down for my bird-watching friends. We were greeted by many friendly Russians. The women and men (of the company) were given bouquets of flowers. I wonder where they got them this time of year. Pathetic little bouquets like those made by a child.”
Miss Ryan, also the keeper of a diary, wrote: “Official welcoming party of giant men and shabby ladies dressed more to meet a coffin than a theatrical company (black clothes, gray faces) but perhaps that’s what they were doing. My useless plastic galoshes kept falling off, making it impossible to elbow efficiently through the press of microphones, cameras, and those battling to get at them. The Breens were on hand, Robert still half asleep but Wilva smile-smiling. At the head of the quay, dull brass letters spelled out LENINGRAD—and then I knew it was true.”
The poet, Helen Wolfert, composed for her journal a lengthy description. Here is an excerpt: “As we advanced along the platform to the exit, two columns of people stood on either side applauding. When we reached the street a press of spectators closed in on us. Policemen pushed them away to let us pass but the people in return pushed them with equal vigor. The actors responded to the warmth and bustle and welcome with grace, graciousness, expansiveness and flair. If the Russian people fell in love with them, they weren’t alone. I fell in love with them myself.”
Perhaps a few footnotes should be added to these entries. The persons Miss Ryan refers to as “giant men and shabby ladies” were a hundred or more of Leningrad’s leading theatrical artists who had been organized to meet the train. Remarkably, none of them had known in advance that Porgy and Bess had a Negro cast, and before the committee could rearrange their bewildered faces into expressions of positive welcome, the company were halfway out of the station. The “press of spectators” noted by Mrs. Wolfert consisted of ordinary citizens whose presence was the result of an item printed in the local edition of the previous day’s Izvestia. “A touring American opera company will arrive by train tomorrow morning in Leningrad.
It is expected they will perform here.” These two lines were, by the way, the first publicity the Soviet press had given Breen’s venture; but despite its meager detail, the announcement had proved sufficiently intriguing to attract the at least one thousand Leningraders who lined the length of the station, cascaded down a flight of stairs, and spilled into the street. I was less aware of the “warmth and bustle” that impressed Mrs. Wolfert. Except for light sprinklings of applause, the crowd, so it seemed to me, watched the exiting cast with immense silence, an almost catatonic demeanor that provided few clues as to what they thought of the American parade—Mrs. Gershwin, loaded with more bouquets than a bride; small Davy Bey, dancing an impromptu Suzy-Q; Jackson, dispensing royal waves; and John McCurry, walking with his hands clenched above his head like a prize fighter.
While the Russian reaction may have been inscrutable, the official Company Historian, Leonard Lyons, had a very definite opinion of his own. Taking professional note of the scene, he shook his head. “It hasn’t been handled right. No showmanship. Why, if Breen knew his business,” he said, passing through the door of the station, “we would’ve come out singing!”
PART II
The Leningrad première of Porgy and Bess, an event expected to reap international publicity, was planned for the evening of Monday, December 26, which gave the company five days to prepare and rehearse, a sufficient time considering that the show had been touring the world nearly four years. But Robert Breen, the production’s director, was determined that the audience at the Leningrad première would see the finest possible rendering of the Negro opera.
Breen and his energetic partner-wife, Wilva, and their chief assistant, the gentle, yet highly strung Warner Watson, were confident that the Russians would be “stunned” by the musical folk tale, that they would “never have seen anything like it.” Several observers, though sympathetic, were not as sure. However looked at, by the Americans or by their Russian sponsors, the opening
