The drinks, Scotch and tap water, were being served by Bohlen’s aide, Roye L. Lowry, and Mrs. Lowry, a couple harmoniously matched in their conservative, schoolteacherish demeanor. Mrs. Bohlen’s close friend, Marina Sulzberger, the quick-witted wife of the Times man, was also present to provide the hostess with conversational assistance. Not that Mrs. Bohlen, a serenely efficient woman with a dairymaid complexion and sensible blue eyes, gives an impression of being unable to keep any conversation afloat, however awkward. But there was, if one remembers the exceedingly reproachful letter Breen had dispatched to Bohlen a few days earlier, a certain awkwardness inherent in this meeting between representatives of Everyman Opera and the U.S. State Department. As for the Ambassador, one would not suppose, from his amicable manner, that he’d ever received such a letter. A career diplomat for more than twenty-five years, a large percentage of them spent at the Moscow Embassy, where he first held Lowry’s present post, Second Secretary, and where he was ultimately appointed Ambassador in 1952, Bohlen still resembles a photograph taken the year (1927) he graduated from Harvard. Experience has harshened his sportsman’s handsomeness, salted his hair and reduced, rather obliterated, a dreaming naïveté around the eyes. But the direct look of youth, of rugged stamina, has stayed with him. He lounged in his chair, sipping Scotch and talking to Mrs. Breen as though they were in a country room with a warm hearth and lazing dogs on the floor.
But Mrs. Breen couldn’t relax. She sat on the edge of her seat, like an applicant for a job. “It’s so sweet of you to have come. Just dear of you,” she told Bohlen in a small-girl voice that was somehow not quite her own. “It means so much to the cast.”
“You don’t think we would’ve missed it?” said Bohlen, and his wife added, “Not for anything in the world! It’s the high point of the winter. We’ve thought of nothing else, have we, Chip?” she said, using the Ambassador’s nickname.
Mrs. Breen modestly lowered her eyes, a touch of color tinged her cheeks. “It means so much to the cast.”
“It means so much to us,” said Mrs. Bohlen. “Our life isn’t so amusing that we could afford to miss something like this. Why, we’d have got here if we’d had to walk the whole way. Crawled on our hands and knees.”
Mrs. Breen raised her eyes for an instant and glanced sharply at the Ambassador’s wife, as though half suspecting her of satiric intent; then, reassured by Mrs. Bohlen’s straight, clear face, she dropped her gaze again. “It’s just dear of you,” she whispered. “And of course we’re all thrilled about the party in Moscow.”
“Oh, yes … the party,” said Mrs. Bohlen, with detectable resignation. In honor of the company’s Moscow première, two weeks hence, the Bohlens had promised to give an official reception at their residence, Spaso House.
“Robert and I do hope Mr. Bulganin will be there. We want to thank him personally for all the courtesy we’ve received. The Ministry of Culture paid Robert a lovely tribute. Seven ivory elephants.” Mrs. Breen was referring to a mantelpiece parade of plastic elephants that Savchenko had presented as a gift to Breen.
“How very nice,” said Mrs. Bohlen dimly, as though she’d lost the conversational thread. “Well, of course, we can’t be quite sure who’s coming to the party. We’re sending out two hundred invitations, more or less, but since Russians never answer an R.S.V.P., we never know who to expect or how many.”
“That’s right,” said the Ambassador. “You don’t count on these fellows until they walk in the door. Any of them. And when they give a party themselves they almost never invite you until the last minute. Everyone in the diplomatic corps keeps the evening free when we know there’s going to be a big affair at the Kremlin. We just sit around, hoping the phone will ring. Sometimes we’re in the middle of dinner before they invite us. Then it’s a rush. Fortunately, you never have to dress for these things,” he said, reverting to a previous topic, and a painful one for Mrs. Breen, who, earlier in the day, had been chagrined to learn that Bohlen was unwilling to attend the opening in black-tie. Indeed, driven by her determination to “make everything gala,” she had gone a step further and envisioned the Ambassador wearing white tie and tails, which is what her husband planned to do. But, “It never occurred to me to bring a dinner jacket,” said Bohlen, fingering a button of the dark gray suit he considered proper to the occasion. “No one wears them here. Not even for a première.”
Over in a corner, Mrs. Gershwin and Mrs. Sulzberger were elaborating on the same sartorial theme. “Of course we shouldn’t dress up. That’s what I’ve told Wilva all along. We went to a ballet the other night and looked perfectly ridiculous. Oh, there’s too much fuss around here. I don’t know what the fuss is all about. After all, it’s only little old Porgy.”
“Actually,” said Mrs. Sulzberger, a Greek-born woman whose clever eyes sparkle with Mediterranean mischief, “it might not be a bad thing for the Russians to see people dressed. There’s no excuse to go about looking the way they do. When we first came here, I felt sorry for them,” she said, and added that she and her husband had been in the Soviet Union two weeks, staying as house guests of the Bohlens. “I thought the way they dressed, the dreariness of it all, I imagined it was because they were terribly poor. But really, you know, that’s not true. They look this way because they want to. They do it on purpose.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “that’s what I think.”
“I wonder,” mused Mrs. Sulzberger. “I wonder. Do you suppose the Russians are so awful because they’ve always been beaten? Or have they always been beaten because they’re so awful?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “that’s what I think.”
Lowry caught the Ambassador’s eye, and glanced significantly at his watch. Outside the hotel a limousine was purring its engine, preparing to carry the Bohlens to the theater. Other Zivs, a street-long gleam of them, waited for Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Gershwin, for Savchenko and Adamov and the employees of AP, Time-Life, CBS. Soon the cars would start slithering across the square, like a funeral cortège.
Bohlen swallowed his Scotch and accompanied his guests to the door of the suite. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he told Mrs. Breen. “The Russians are very musical people. You’ll have rubles coming out of your ears.”
“Adorable man. And she’s charming, too,” Mrs. Gershwin remarked to Mrs. Breen, as the two ladies descended the stairs.
“Adorable. But,” said Mrs. Breen, her shy little-girl voice suddenly maturing, “Robert and I did want it to be gala.”
“Well, darling, we can’t be gala if we’re going to be conspicuous,” observed Mrs. Gershwin, whose diamonded decorations made her look as though she were moving in a spotlight. “Frankly, myself, I think it would do the Russians a world of good to see people dressed up. There’s no excuse for them to go around looking the way they do. When we first came here, I felt sorry for them, but now …”
Across town, at the Palace of Culture, snow-sprinkled crowds were massing on the sidewalk to watch the ticket holders arrive, and inside the theater a sizable number, baking in a blaze of newsreel and television arc lights, were already seated. Baskets of flowers, yellow and white, flanked the stage, and crossed flags, an entwining of stars and stripes and hammer and sickle, floated above the proscenium. Backstage, where the tuning orchestra’s chirping flutes and moaning oboes echoed like forest sounds, Martha Flowers, costumed and completely calm, despite the distant, rising audience-roar, was having, as she’d predicted, “a long sit.”
And it was very long. The curtain, announced for eight, went up at nine-five and came down at eleven-forty. By midnight I was back at the Astoria waiting for a call from Henry Shapiro, the UP correspondent in Moscow, who’d said he would telephone me after the première to find out “how it went. What really happened.” There is no absolute truth in these matters, only opinion, and as I attempted to formulate my own, tried to decide what I was going to tell Shapiro, I stretched on the bed and switched out the light. My eyes smarted from the recen
t glare of flash bulbs, I seemed still to hear the soft clickety noise of newsreel cameras. And indeed, lying in the dark, it was as though a film were rushing through my head, a disconnected rampage of pictures: Martha Flowers tripping to the footlights to throw the audience a kiss, Savchenko striding through the lobby listening for comments, the terror in Sascha’s eyes, Miss Ryan covering her face with her hands. I made a conscious effort to slow the film down, let it start at the beginning.
It began with the audience, an army standing at solemn attention while the orchestra played the national anthems of the two countries: Savchenko had courteously insisted that “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be heard first. Then individual faces came into focus: Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen, the Sulzbergers, the Lowrys, Miss Ryan and Leonard Lyons, all together in a front row. Near them, on a platform extending from the side of the stage, a squadron of photographers waited impatiently until the anthems ended: then the platform resembled a besieged fortress, photographers firing away while assistants reloaded their cameras. Some, like CBS’s Dan Schorr, desperately alternated between cameras and tape recorders as they went to work documenting the precurtain ceremonies. There was no need for such haste. The speeches, and their translations, lasted an hour.
The Russians were brief enough. Konstantin Sergeev, the dapper young ballet master of the Leningrad Theater, shook hands with Breen and, speaking into a microphone, said, “Dear Brothers in art, welcome. We in the Soviet Union have always paid attention and tribute to the art of the United States. We know and cherish the works of such fine artists as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jack London and Paul Robeson. We appreciate the talents of George Gershwin, and that is why this meeting is so joyous.” Afterward, apropos of this speech, Mrs. Gershwin said, “I thought I’d faint when I heard the name Gershwin being lumped in with all those Communists.”
Breen bowed to Sergeev, and stepped up to the microphone, a preening, impeccable figure in his trim tuxedo and starched shirt. “He just lost his nerve,” said Miss Ryan, explaining why at the last minute her employer had abandoned the idea of wearing white tie and tails. But now, watching Breen react to the applause that greeted him, one wouldn’t have guessed there was a nerve in his system. His smooth blond face, bleached by the strong lights and exploding flash bulbs, possessed an inward-gazing remoteness, as though he had for so long dreamed the scene before him that it was still a dream; and when he spoke, the measured, sepulchral timbre of his actor’s voice strengthened the impression that he thought himself alone on an empty stage addressing an imaginary audience, practicing, as it were, for an ego-satisfying moment that would someday come true. Imaginary audiences are notoriously submissive; but the Palace of Culture assemblage began to grow talkative themselves as Breen rambled on, the Russian translator trailing behind him. With graceful, grand seigneur sweepings of the hand, he introduced Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen, who rose in their seats to acknowledge applause. The Ambassador had been expected to deliver a speech, but much to Bohlen’s relief, and Breen’s regret, the Soviets, extremely sensitive to protocol, had asked that this part of the program be deleted because they had no one of “comparable eminence” to make, on the Russian behalf, a rejoinder. Mrs. Gershwin was also introduced, and the conductor, Alexander Smallens, who received a sumptuous hand when Breen announced that Smallens was “born right here in Leningrad.” The introductions continued as Breen presented members of the cast who were not performing that evening: Ethel Ayler, the alternate Bess, sufficiently recovered from her cold to have climbed out of bed and into a skimpy, strapless blue gown. And Lorenzo Fuller, the alternate Sportin’ Life. Fuller had a “few” words to say, among them a Russian phrase he’d memorized, “Dobro poshlavat, druzya,” which means “Welcome, friends.” The audience roared approval. But as clock hands crept toward nine, even the frenzied photographers paused to consult watches. “Jesus,” said one correspondent, “they ought to have a gong around here. Like Major Bowes.” It was as though Breen had overheard him, for abruptly the ceremonial group vacated the stage.
The theater grew quieter than a hens’ roost at sunset as the audience settled back, confident that now the curtain would rise and reveal what they’d paid their rubles to see, Porgy and Bess. Instead, Sascha appeared. He crossed the stage stiff-legged and wobbly, as though he were walking a plank. A sheaf of typewritten pages quivered in his hands, and his face, bloodlessly pallid, was drenched with sweat. The instant the audience caught wind of why he was there, to read them the opera’s plot, the hens’ roost turned into a hornets’ nest. They couldn’t tolerate another syllable about the show, they simply wanted to see it; and a mutiny that broke out in the balcony, where rude voices started shouting, spread to the orchestra: the patrons clapped, whistled, stamped their feet. “Poor Sascha, oh, poor boy,” said Miss Ryan, covering her face with her hands. “It’s too terrible. I can’t bear to watch.” Several rows back of Miss Ryan, Sascha’s two friends, Igor and Henry, slumped on their spines, but Miss Lydia, less squeamish, glared round at her neighbors, as though she’d like to crack them with her pocketbook. On stage, Sascha went on reading, mumbling, as if he were whispering a prayer against the deafening tumult; like Breen before him, he seemed locked in a dream, a numbing, naked-in-the-street nightmare. Smallens flicked his baton, and the overture sounded as Sascha retreated into the wings.
It was soon evident that the audience regretted not having paid more attention to Sascha’s résumé of the two-act tale the opera tells. In skeleton, the story is this: a crippled beggar, Porgy, falls in love with a Charleston tart, Bess. Alas, this neurotic young woman is under the wicked influence of two other gentlemen. One, a devilish dope peddler, Sportin’ Life, has enticed her into drug addiction, while the second, an alluringly muscular criminal named Crown, monopolizes the heroine’s libidinous impulses. Porgy dispenses of the latter rival by killing him, and when he is sent to jail for the deed, Bess alleviates her woes by going on a dope binge, during which Sportin’ Life persuades her to forget Porgy and traipse off with him to New York: “That’s where we belong, sister” he sings as they head for the sugary lights of Harlem. In the last scene, Porgy, acquitted of Crown’s murder, sets out for the North in a goat-drawn cart, believing, and leaving the spectator to believe, that he will find Bess and bring her home. Although this narrative line seems straight as a ruler, the intricate vocal-choreographic terms in which it is developed would confuse any audience where the language barrier is present, particularly if the music, the style of dancing, the directorial approach are each and all virgin territory, as they were to the overwhelming majority of those assembled in the Palace of Culture.
“Summertime” ended, and there was no applause. The entrance of Porgy went unheralded. Leslie Scott, playing the part, finished “A Woman Is a Sometimes Thing,” and paused for the acclaim the number ordinarily arouses. The fact that none came caused a temporary lapse of stage action. Recovering, the cast launched into a jazzy crap-game sequence: whispering ran through the audience, as though they were asking each other what it meant, these excited men tossing dice? The whispering gathered momentum and turned into gasps, a tremor of shock, when Bess, making her initial appearance, hiked up her skirt to adjust her garter. Miss Ryan observed to Mrs. Lowry, “If they think that’s so daring, just wait.” The words weren’t out of her mouth before Sportin’ Life’s witty, lascivious gyrations ignited fresh firecrackers of audible astonishment. The crap game concludes with Crown killing one of Porgy’s neighbors; a funeral scene follows: while the murdered man’s widow sings a lament, “My Man’s Gone Now,” the mourning inhabitants of Catfish Row sway in a tribal circle around the corpse. At this point, an important Soviet dignitary turned to a correspondent and said in Russian, “Ah, now I see! They are going to eat him.” The deceased, undevoured, was trundled off to his grave, and the opera progressed to Porgy’s optimistic “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothin’.” Scott, a big and solidly constructed baritone, belted it across the footlights with a fervor that should’
ve stopped the show. It didn’t.
The audience’s persistent silence seemed not altogether attributable to apathy; rather, for the most part, it appeared to be the result of troubled concentration, an anxious desire to understand; and so, fearful of missing the essential phrase, the significant clue that would unmask the mysteries confronting them, they listened and watched with the brooding intentness of students in a lecture hall. But the first act was almost over before the warmth that comes with comprehension wafted through the theater. It was created by “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a duet sung by the two principals: suddenly it was clear that Porgy and Bess were in love, that their song was a tender rejoicing, and the audience, rejoicing too, deluged the performers with applause that was brief but heavy, like tropic rain. However, the drought set in again as the music segued into the jamboree fanfare of “I Can’t Sit Down,” the first-act finale. The scene is peppered with folklorish humor; and, occasionally, isolated chuckles, lonely-sounding patches of laughter, indicated there were persons who appreciated it. The curtain descended. Silence. The house lights began to come up; the audience blinked, as though until this instant they hadn’t known the act was over. They caught their breath, like passengers at the end of a roller-coaster ride, and began to applaud. The applause lasted thirty-two seconds.
“They’re stunned,” said Lowry, parroting the words, though somehow transforming the spirit, of Breen’s prophecy. “They’ve never seen anything like it.”
If the Russians were stunned, they were not alone. Several of the American journalists huddled together, comparing notes. “It’s not going over,” a baffled Dan Schorr complained to a bewildered Time-Life photographer. And Mrs. Bohlen, following her husband up the aisle, was poignantly pensive. Later she told me the thought behind the expression: “I was thinking—well, we’ve laid an egg. Now what are we going to do about it?”