The voices pretending to be “average” Americans seem precisely that: one has absolute belief in the man who says he’s a Midwest farmer, a Texas cowhand, a Detroit factory worker. Even the voices of “children” sound familiar as the crunch of Wheaties, the crack of a baseball. Adamov bragged that none of these actors had ever left Russia, their accents were manufactured right in Moscow. Himself a frequent actor in the plays, Adamov has so perfected a certain American accent that he fooled a native of the region, Lyons, who said, “Gee, I’m dumfounded, I keep wondering what’s he doing so far from Lindy’s.”
Adamov indeed seems to belong on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-first, a copy of Variety jammed under his arm. Although his slang needs dusting off, it is delivered with a bizarrely fluent side-of-the-mouth technique. “Me, I’m no museum-type guy,” he said, as we neared the Hermitage. “But if you go in for all that creepy stuff, they tell me this joint’s okay, really loaded.” Swart, moon-faced, a man in his middle thirties with a jumpy, giggling, coffee-nerves animation, his shifty eyes grow shiftier when, under duress, he admits that his English was learned in New York, where he lived from the ages of eight to twelve with an émigré grandfather. He prefers to skate over this American episode. “I was just a kid,” he says, as though he were saying, “I didn’t know any better.”
A foreign resident in Moscow, who knows Adamov well, described him to me as “no fool. An opportunist with two fingers in every pie.” And an Italian correspondent, another old Moscow hand, said, “Ah, si. Signor Adamov. The smiler with the knife.” In short, Adamov is a successful man, which means, as it does elsewhere, though far more so in Russia, that he enjoys privileges unknown to the ordinary citizen. The one he values most is a two-room bachelor apartment in Moscow’s Gorky Street, where he lives, to hear him tell it, the life of a Turk in his seraglio.
“Gimme a buzz you come to Moscow, you wanta meet some cute kids.” Meanwhile, he thought some members of the Porgy and Bess company were “pretty cute kids,” particularly the saucer-eyed singer in the chorus named Dolores (“Delirious”) Swann. At the museum, when the sightseers were separated into battalions of twelve, Adamov made a point of joining Miss Swann in a group that included, among others, the Wolferts, Mrs. Gershwin, Nancy Ryan, Warner Watson and myself.
The Hermitage is part of the Winter Palace, which in recent years has been repainted the imperial color, a frosty chartreuse-vert. Its miles of silvery windows overlook a park and a wide expanse of the Neva River. “The Winter Palace was started working 1764 and took seventy-eight years to finish,” said the guide, a mannish girl with a brisk, whip-’em-through attitude. “It consists of four buildings and contains, as you see, the world’s greatest museum. This where we are standing is the Ambassadorial Staircase, used by the ambassadors mounting to see the Czar.”
In the ectoplasmic wake of those ambassadors our party followed her up marble stairs that curved under a filigree ceiling of white and gold. We passed through a splendid hall of green malachite, like a corridor under the sea, and here there were French windows where a few of us paused to look across the Neva at a misty-hazy view of that celebrated torture chamber, the Peter-Paul fortress. “Come, come,” the guide urged. “There is much to see and we will not accomplish our mission if we linger at useless spectacles.”
A visit to the treasure vault was the mission’s immediate objective. “That’s where they keep the ice, the real stuff, crown jools, all that crap,” Adamov informed Miss Swann. A dragoon of stunted Amazons, several of them in uniform and wearing pistols strapped round their waists, guard the vault’s bolted doors. Adamov, jerking a thumb toward the guards, told Warner Watson, “I’ll bet you don’t have any female cops in America, huh?”
“Sure,” said Watson timidly. “We have policewomen, sure.”
“But,” said Adamov, his moist moon-face going scarlet with laughter, “not as fat as these, huh?”
While the vault’s complicated steel doors were being unlocked, the guide announced, “Ladies will please leave their pocketbooks with the custodians.” Then, as though to circumvent the obvious implication, “It is a matter of ladies causing damage dropping their pocketbooks. We have had that experience.”
The vault is divided into three small, chandelier-lighted rooms, the first two entirely occupied by the museum’s most unique display, a sophisticated panorama of Scythian gold, buttons and bracelets, cruel weapons, papery leaves and wreath garlands. “First-century stuff,” said Adamov. “B.C. A.D. all that crap.” The third room is intellectually duller, and much more dazzling.
A dozen glass-enclosed cabinets (bearing the metal marker of their maker, Holland and Sons, 23 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, London) afire with aristocratic souvenirs. Onyx and ivory walking sticks, musical birds that sing with emerald tongues, a lily bouquet made of pearls, another of ruby roses, rings and boxes that give off a trembling glare like heat waves.
Miss Swann sang, “But dee-imonds are a girl’s best friend,” and someone who shouted, “Where’s that Earl Jackson?” was told, “Oh, Earl—you know that cat wouldn’t be up this hour of the day. But he’s sure going to be sorry he missed this. Him feeling the way he does about sparkles.”
Adamov planted himself in front of the cabinet containing one of the collection’s few examples of Fabergé, a miniature version of the Czar’s symbols of power: crown, scepter and orb. “It’s gorgeous,” sighed Miss Swann. “Don’t you think it’s gorgeous, Mr. Adamov?” Adamov smiled indulgently. “If you say so, kid. Personally, I think it’s junk. What good does it do anybody?”
Ira Wolfert, chewing on an unlit pipe, was rather of Adamov’s opinion. At least, “I hate jewelry,” he said, glowering at a tray of blazing froufrou. “I don’t know the difference between a zircon and a diamond. Except I like zircons better. They’re shinier.” He put an arm around his wife, Helen. “I’m glad I married a woman who doesn’t like jewelry.”
“Oh, I like jewelry, Ira,” said Mrs. Wolfert, a comfortable-looking woman prone to expressing decisive notions in a tentative tone. “I like creations. But this, this is all trickery and show-off. It makes me ill.”
“It makes me ill, too,” said Miss Ryan. “But in quite a different way. I’d give anything for that ring—the tiger’s eye.”
“It makes me ill,” Mrs. Wolfert repeated. “I don’t call these things creations. This,” she said, indicating a brooch of her own, a straightforward design in Mexican silver, “is what I call a creation.”
Mrs. Gershwin was also making comparisons. “I wish I’d never come here,” she said, forlornly fingering her diamonds. “I feel so dissatisfied, I’d like to go home and crack my husband on the head.” Miss Ryan asked her, “If you could have any of this you wanted, what would you take?”
“All of it, darling,” replied Mrs. Gershwin.
Miss Ryan agreed. “And when I got it home, I’d spread it on the floor and rip off my clothes and just roll.”
Wolfert desired nothing, he simply wanted to “get the hell out of here and see something interesting,” a wish he conveyed to the guide, who acquiesced by herding everyone to the door and counting them as they left. Some six kilometers later, the group, its ranks thinned by fatigue cases, stumbled into the last exhibit hall, weak-legged after two hours of inspecting Egyptian mummies and Italian Madonnas, craning their necks at excellent old masters excruciatingly hung, poking about the sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky, and marveling over a pair of Peter the Great’s Goliath-large boots. “Made,” said the guide, “by this progressive man with his own hands.” Now, in the last hall, the guide commanded us to “go to the window and view the hanging garden.”
“But where,” bleated Miss Swann, “where is the garden?”
“Under the snow,” said the guide. “And over here,” she said, directing attention to the final item on the agenda, “is our famous The Peacock.”
The Peacock, an exotic mechanical folly constructed by the eighteenth-century clockmaker James Cox, was brought to Russia as a gift for Catherine II. It is housed in a glass cage the size of a garden gazebo. The focus of the piece is a peacock perched among the gilded leaves of a bronze tree. Balanced on other branches are an owl, a cock rooster, a squirrel nibbling a nut. At the base of the tree there is a scattering of mushrooms, one of which forms the face of a clock. “When the hour strikes, we have here a forceful happening,” said the guide. “The peacock spreads her tail, and the rooster cackles. The owl blinks her eyes, and the squirrel has a good munch.”
Adamov grunted. “I don’t care what it does. It’s dopey.” Miss Ryan took him to task. She wanted to know why he should feel that way about an object of such “imaginative craftsmanship.” He shrugged. “What’s imaginative about it? A lot of jerks
