Word: friendly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dictator-Coddling & Neglect. The charge that most impressed Nixon is that the U.S. has let itself seem more and more the friend of hated dictators. Thrown in his face again and again were such questions as, "Why did Eisenhower give Perez Jimenez the Legion of Merit? Why was that ruthless dictator admitted to the U.S. with such ease after he fell?" Nixon concluded that his unhappy reception in Caracas was a direct result of "ten years of dictatorship" associated in the public mind with...
...technical equipment is superb. The enormous hands cover a twelve-note span. He has a dazzling warmup technique of playing swift scales in octaves and tenths with his hands crossed, a trick that he says does wonders to develop the left hand. When a friend told him about big-handed Soviet Pianist Richter's trick of playing tenths and simultaneously playing thirds between thumb and forefinger, Van immediately duplicated it, commented, "Aw, that's not hard." He plays Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the cadenza that the pianist-composer rewrote for his own performances because...
...came forward after a concert in Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed all through the first movement of the Schubert B Flat Sonata. Toward the end of his visit...
...fees and security; it has given him the freedom to play as little or as much as he pleases, and to pick his repertory. But at the same time it has cast him in a unique musical role. "He may be the first man in history," says a friend, "to be a Horowitz, Liberace and Presley all rolled into one." What some friends worry about is that in the easy flush of success Van might be tempted to keep on repeating himself in the showy, romantic repertory he handles so well, neglecting his powers to develop. Says Juilliard Dean Mark...
...Navy during World War I, "Mom wanted me to be President and the old man wanted me to be an admiral. Me, I wanted to be a charter boatman. I bought a backyard-built, potbellied boat called the Bonita in Bay Head, N.J., put my mother, father and girl friend on board, and headed for Miami. The girl got off in Maryland, but we made it to Miami." In those days "the water in the bay was gin-clear, and you could stand on the bank and catch twice your weight in fish...