Her surprise was justified. In the Soviet Union, Nervitsky is a considerable celebrity, the idol of young girls who swoon over his interpretations of popular ballads. During the twenties and thirties he lived in Paris, enjoying a minor vogue as a cabaret artist. When that faltered, he went on a honkytonk tour of the Far East. Though of Russian parentage, his wife was born in Shanghai, and it was there that she met and married Nervitsky. In 1943 they moved to Moscow, where she launched a not too prosperous career as a film actress. “I am a painter really. But I can’t be bothered ingratiating all the right people.
That is necessary if you want your pictures shown. And painting is so difficult when one travels.” Nervitsky spends most of the year making personal appearances throughout Russia. He was currently engaged for a series of concerts in Leningrad. “Nervitsky is more sold out than the Negroes,” his wife informed me. “We are going to the Negro première,” she said, and added that she was sure it would be a “delightful” evening because “the Negroes are so amusing and there is so little amusing here. Nothing but work, work. We’re all too tired to be amusing. Don’t you find Leningrad absolutely dead? A beautiful corpse?
And Moscow. Moscow is not quite as dead, but so ugly.” She wrinkled her nose and shuddered. “I suppose, coming from New York, you find us very shabby? Speak the truth. You think me shabby?” I didn’t think that, no. She wore a simple black dress, some good jewelry, there was a mink stole slung over her shoulders. In fact, she was the best-dressed, best-looking woman I’d seen in Russia. “Ah, you’re embarrassed to say. But I know. When I look at your friends, these American girls, I feel shabby. There are no nice things next to my skin. It isn’t that I’m poor. I have money …” She hesitated. Miss Johnson and the sculptor were returning to the table. “Please,” she said, “I would like to say something to you privately. Do you dance?”
The band was smooching its way through “Somebody Loves Me,” and the crowd on the floor listened to Lamar rasp out the lyrics with transfixed, transfigured faces. “… who can it be oh may-be ba-by may-be it’s you!” Madame Nervitsky danced well, but her body was tense, her hands icy. “J’adore le musique des Negres. It’s so wicked. So vile,” she said, and then, in the same breath, began to whisper rapidly in my ear, “You and your friends must find Russia very expensive. Take my advice, don’t change your dollars.
Sell your clothes. That is the way to get rubles. Sell. Anyone will buy. If it can be done discreetly. I am here in the hotel, Room 520. Tell your friends to bring me shoes, stockings, things for close to the skin. Anything,” she said, digging her nails into my sleeve, “tell them I will buy anything. Really,” she sighed, resuming a normal voice and raising it above the shriek of Mignatt’s trumpet, “the Negroes are so delightful.”
Somewhat set back from the Nevsky Prospekt, there is an arcaded building bearing a marked resemblance to St. Peter’s. This is the Kazin Cathedral, Leningrad’s largest antireligious museum. Inside, in an atmosphere of stained-glass gloom, the management has produced a Grand Guignol indictment against the teachings of the church. Statues and sinister portraits of the Popes follow each other down the galleries like a procession of witches.
Everywhere ecclesiastics leer and grimace, make, in captioned cartoons, satyr suggestions to nunlike women, revel in orgies, snub the poor to cavort with the decadent rich. Ad infinitum the museum demonstrates its favorite thesis: that the church, the Roman Catholic in particular, exists solely as a protection to capitalism. One caricature, an enormous oil, depicts Rockefeller, Krupp, Hetty Green, Morgan and Ford plunging ferocious hands into a mountainous welter of coins and blood-soaked war helmets.
The Kazin Cathedral is popular with children. Understandably so, since the exhibition is liberally sprinkled with horror-comic scenes of brutality and torture. The schoolteachers who herd daily swarms of pupils through the place have difficulty dragging them away from such attractions as The Chamber of the Inquisitors. The Chamber is a real room peopled with the life-sized wax figures of four Inquisitors relishing the agonies of a heretic. The naked victim, chained to a table, is being branded with hot coals by a pair of masked torturers. The coals are electrically lighted. Children, even when pulled away, keep sneaking back for a second look.
Outside the cathedral, on the many columns supporting its arcades, there is another kind of display. Coarse chalk drawings, the usual men’s room graffiti, scarcely worth mentioning, except that it seems on first thought an odd place to find it; and on second it doesn’t. In a way it belongs.
Antireligious museums were not among the sightseeing projects their hosts had lined up for the Porgy and Bess cast. Quite the contrary, on Sunday, Christmas Day, the Soviets provided the choice of attending a Catholic Mass or a Baptist service. Eleven members of the company, including Rhoda Boggs, a soprano playing the part of the Strawberry Woman, went to the Baptist Evangelical Church, whose Leningrad parishioners number two thousand. Afterward I saw Miss Boggs sitting alone in the Astoria dining room. She is a round, honey-colored, jolly-faced woman, always carefully groomed, but now her little Sunday best hat was slightly askew, the handkerchief she kept dabbing at her eyes was wet as a washcloth.
“I’m tore to pieces,” she told me, her breasts heaving. “I’ve been going to church since I can walk, but I never felt Jesus like I felt Jesus today. Oh, child, He was there. He was out in the open. He was plainly written on every face. He was singing with us, and you never heard such beautiful singing. It was old people mostly, and old people can’t sing like that without Jesus helping them along.
The pastor, there was a sweet old man, he asked us colored people would we render a spiritual, and they listened so quiet, all those rows and rows and rows of old faces just looking at us, like we were telling them nobody’s alone when Jesus is everywhere on this earth, which is a fact they know already, but it seemed to me like they were glad to hear it. Anybody doubts the presence of Our Savior, he should’ve been there. Well, it came time to go. To say good-bye. And you know what happened? They stood up, the whole congregation.
They took out white handkerchiefs and waved them in the air. And they sang, ‘God Be With You Till We Meet Again.’ The tears were just pouring down our faces, them and ours. Oh, child, it churned me up. I can’t keep nothing on my stomach.”
That evening, with the première less than twenty-four hours away, the windows of the Astoria stayed lighted late. All night footsteps hurried along the corridors, doors slammed and telephones rang, as though a calamity were happening.
In Suite 415, Ambassador Bohlen and his wife entertained a small group of aides and friends who had just arrived with them by train from Leningrad. The gathering, which included Roye L. Lowry, Second Secretary at the Embassy and one of the two diplomats who had “briefed” the company in Berlin, was exceptionally quiet, since the Bohlens didn’t want their presence in the hotel known until the last possible moment. They concealed themselves so successfully that the next morning Warner Watson, believing the diplomatic contingent were coming by plane, set out for the Leningrad airport with a bouquet for Mrs. Bohlen. Directly below the ambassadorial apartment, in Suite 315, Mrs. Breen was seesawing on a Relaxer Board, while her husband polished the precurtain speech he planned to deliver.
It had been suggested to him that he might circumvent the Communist propaganda potential in Porgy and Bess by pointing out that its picture of American Negroes concerned the long ago, not today, and so he added the line, “Porgy and Bess is set in the past. It no more reflects the present than if it were about life under the Czars in Russia.” In Room 223, Leonard Lyons was at his typewriter outlining the opening-night column he intended cabling his newspaper, the New York Post. “On stage were the flags of both nations, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.” he wrote, previewing the event. “The last time an American flag was displayed here was when there were only forty-five states in the union.
A representative of the Ministry of Culture phoned to inquire how many states are united now. Yesterday a wardrobe mistress sewed three more stars on the old flag.” The item finished a page. Lyons inserted a new sheet with fresh carbons. Instead of throwing the old carbon in a wastebasket, he took it to the bathroom and flushed it into oblivion. It was safer, he felt, to destroy used carbons, otherwise the Soviets, or perhaps rival correspondents, might ferret them out and decipher what he was writing. And indeed, the hotel was seething with journalistic competitors. The Saturday Evening Post was there in the person of Charles R. Thayer, Ambassador Bohlen’s brother-in-law.
Thayer, and C. L. Sulzberger of The New York Times, had arrived with the Bohlen party. The Saturday Review was sending Horace Sutton, Time and Life already had a photographer-reporting team on hand,
