All along the road into Vladivostok, the trees were shrouded in gray dust. A vast road-building scheme went on for mile after mile, turning the landscape into a dead wilderness, which reminded me of images beamed back from the surface of Mars. Maybe that had to do with my sense of having fallen off the edge of the planet arriving here at the farthest limit of Russia, seven times zones east of Moscow. I had wanted to see Vladivostok for years because it had always seemed so impossibly remote, out here on the edge of the Sea of Japan, beyond North Korea, beyond Beijing. Of course that was the pull of the place, that sense of existing on the margins of imagination. I remembered the old maps where medieval cartographers marked an unknown land with the warning “Here be dragons.” And now I had arrived at last in Vladivostok, where the warning “Here be tigers” was a reality. I had heard that a tiger had been spotted not long ago prowling through the outskirts of the city, wandering in from the endless forests of Primorye. Wild tigers? Stalinist gulags? Gigantic nuclear tests? This place had it all.
I peered through the brown curtains of the ancient Soviet bus. No sign of tigers—just more Martian wilderness scattered with earth-moving machines, tractors and diggers standing idle while gangs of workmen sat around smoking. It was as though out here on the edge of everything, the huge country had finally exhausted itself.
I had come to Vladivostok to find if there was anyone left of the Soviet Beatles generation here, four thousand miles from Saint Petersburg—from where Kolya Vasin had felt he could almost see Liverpool. Was there anyone who still remembered and cared? I knew the city had been a closed military base until the 1990s, one of a scatter of places across the Soviet Union sealed off from the outside world for decades by Stalin’s paranoia and by military secrecy. Nuclear bases and bomb factories had always been prime candidates for lockdown, usually shut away behind sinister science-fiction names like Arzamas 16 or Chelyabinsk 45. As “non-places,” they never appeared on maps or railway timetables. Still, for the insulated citizens of the closed cities, there were compensations. I had seen something of those privileges when I filmed with Vladimir Pozner inside Russia’s biggest missile base, near Saratov on the Volga. The city of Svetly was shut away behind checkpoints and barbed wire; but life was dramatically better than in the ramshackle village just outside the fence. The villagers of Tatishchevo lived in crumbling wooden shacks and pumped their water from muddy wells. Inside the base was an alternative universe where people enjoyed comfortable apartments and schools that would have been envied in Moscow. We filmed a naming celebration for new babies, with twirling teenage ballroom dancers and champagne.
Vladivostok earned its closed status as headquarters of the Russian Pacific Fleet, based in the city’s vast Golden Horn Bay. When Russia grabbed the place more than a century ago, ahead of envious Western powers, it was claimed that the bay could shelter all of Europe’s navies. Everything about the city felt exotic, the ultimate destination in Russia’s Wild East. In the 1960s, when the Beatles generation on the other edge of Russia were beginning to tune in, it was still a two- or three-week rail journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I wanted to know if the Beatles message had made it across the continent, how it had could have found its way through the fences, or whether the Fab Four were now as rare here as those tigers.
We passed a garishly colored statue of a tiger, and I saw a horse running loose in the midst of traffic. Through the veil of my jet lag after the seven-hour flight from Moscow, everything seemed wild and edgy. At last the old bus rattled into the city, wheezing up the switchback hills overlooking the harbor that have reminded some visitors of San Francisco—Vladivostok’s twin city. To me it looked more like Liverpool—if Stalin had been in charge of the town planning. Gray tower blocks littered the hillsides, and the place still had the brooding feel of the closed city.
But things were clearly stirring. The streets were alive with young women, teetering along on daringly high heels and squeezed into microskirts that emphasized legs as long and slender as the cattle-herding women I’d filmed in East Africa. The city seemed to be under siege from battalions of construction cranes, and a gigantic new suspension bridge was poised to throw itself over a bay. The bus juddered to a halt near a colossal statue of heroic soldiers. “That’s the memorial to the fighters for Soviet power in the Far East,” my driver said. Clearly the old Soviet empire still had some fans here. But tonight at least it looked as though the heroic fighters would have to share the stage with a rock concert. A huge open-air stage was being set up in the harbor square, and guitar riffs were roaring across the waterfront as roadies assembled their rock paraphernalia.
I jumped down from the bus. A blonde woman with no-nonsense spectacles bore down on me, trailed by an impish man sporting a pigtail. This had to be Natalya and Andrei, the moving spirits of the Pacific Meridian Film Festival. “You must come see photo gallery,” Natalya commanded. The exhibition of rock ’n’ roll photographs I had taken in the early sixties was due to open in a couple of days, and Natalya wanted me to see the venue. The State Philharmonic Hall was an imposing building, commanding the waterfront with a fine prerevolutionary panache. In a window, I spotted a familiar photo of John Lennon—a picture I had taken almost fifty years earlier. It was now the centerpiece of a poster for my exhibition “Rock Icons.” Seeing it here on the other side of the world was disorienting, like a hallucination fed by jet lag.
I followed Natalya and Andrei up a grand stairway to the gallery, an attractive room overlooking the harbor. It was a good place for the photos of the lads from Liverpool to find a berth. I would be hanging the pictures tomorrow in frames sent from Moscow, and Art Troitsky would introduce the opening the day after that. But would anyone come, I wondered? And then as I was leaving the gallery, a guy came up to shake my hand. “I am Beatle man,” he said.
I had only recently rediscovered my rock photographs, and the show in Vladivostok would be the first time I had put them together for an exhibition. Bringing them all the way from England, nestled between the shirts and underpants in my suitcase, had made me revisit the time, almost fifty years before, when I had taken the pictures. Could it possibly have been so long ago? I could still see those afternoons in the Manchester TV studios when I was a kid with a camera. The Beatles, the Stones, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis came to record shows in the studios where I was a trainee director, finding my feet in the routines of nightly magazine programs. As the sixties began to lift off, an extraordinary parade of people who would soon become rock royalty passed through the studios to plug their latest records. The Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, the Kinks, the Hollies, and countless others came and went, most of them without causing much of a stir. The Rolling Stones did upset one producer, who declared that their hair was unacceptably long for a family program and tried to have them ejected. Crisis talks ensued, hair was preserved, and the Stones did their thing.
My boyhood passion for photography had recently been rekindled by a new single-lens reflex camera, and from time to time I wandered into the studios where the visiting rock folk were performing to grab pictures. Following that first filming with the Beatles in August 1962, I had renewed the acquaintance when they came to perform “Please Please Me“ in January 1963. Over the following year they returned regularly to the Manchester studio, and when they came to perform “I Should Have Known Better” in October 1964, I grabbed a single roll of film, exchanged a few words with the boys, and moved around the studio snapping a couple dozen shots as they rehearsed the song. I finished the roll of film, and then went back to working in another studio on a program about the history of cycling. Over the next few months, I looked in on other rock people with my camera and took a few more rolls of film. And then, unaccountably, I lost my rock photos.
Where the hell were they? Why didn’t I take hundreds more pictures? How could I have been so casual about having a front-row seat as the giants of 1960s rock ’n’ roll paraded past my camera? From time to time I kept looking, but after a while I reckoned that between office juggling and house moves, they must have slipped through the cracks in my life. That was how it was, after all, with making documentaries. I would be consumingly involved with a project for a few weeks or months—guerrilla war in Africa, earthquake in Peru, nomadic tribes in Ethiopia, jazz in New Orleans—and then one night the film would be broadcast, and the next morning it was gone. All those intense relationships, the war criminals, the saints, the film crews, the never-ending cycle of engaging and moving on. I took thousands of photos wherever I went, but I kept remembering the missing rock photos. Where were they? Were they any good? Might they be worth a fortune?
And then, not long ago, I had found them. I opened a drawer and there they were, shut away in a plain envelope. I peered at the shadowy images preserved on negatives—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. They had slumbered in my drawer over the decades, like pharaohs snoozing in their tombs. I was ecstatic. I hunted down a man who could print the negatives, a rare craftsman in an age where digital cameras had made black-and-white negatives as irrelevant as typewriters and carbon paper. In a London basement, I watched as Peter Guest—who prints Linda McCartney’s archive—coaxed life back into my old negatives. The Fab Four swam up out of the developing bath, youngsters again on the verge of everything.
I told Art Troitsky about the photographs, and I could see that even the “Jesus of Cool” was intrigued. “Why don’t you do an exhibition?” he said. “Bring the photos to the Pacific Meridian Festival and I’ll host the opening.” Now I was in Vladivostok, looking at a poster for “Rock Icons.”
The tops of the harbor cranes were vanishing into a sea mist as the rock concert blasted out from the stage. It looked like a concert anywhere; a buxom girl and a strutting man with a medallion were projected on a huge screen, firing an anonymous anthem at the crowd gathered round the heroic statue. Now I just needed to sleep. The distant uproar of the concert drifted through my hotel window as I pulled the curtains shut.
Next morning, at the Hyundai—the only remotely international hotel in Vladivostok—they were gearing up to be the focus of the film festival. In the lobby, a gang of youngsters in blue-and-white striped T-shirts were busy laying out leaflets and checking guest lists. They resembled a jolly yachting crew, radiating can-do energy, and they were mostly, I gathered, volunteers from the university. I met up with Vasilisa, a friendly young woman with impeccable English who said she was going to be my guide. She was nineteen, she loved the Beatles, and she said she was studying Chinese—“Like many of my friends.” It gave me an intriguing tilt on things, being in a place that looked out on the world from the very edge of my mental map. For Vasilisa and her friends, China was as close as Paris was for me at home in England. “Many girls drive to China to buy clothes,” she said. “It’s so much cheaper.” She said girls also popped into China to look for husbands.
I was still feeling bleary, and the breakfast room of the Hyundai, swathed in shades of brown like the rest of the hotel, didn’t exactly encourage guests to greet the day with a smile. Glum waitresses dispensed lukewarm sausages, and it seemed that the limited charms of post-Soviet hospitality were being tested out here in Vladivostok. Festival delegates peered into their coffee, and I spotted a handsome Frenchman carrying his own bread to a table. “I brought it from Paris,” he said. “I have been here before.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
One way and another, my life has been choreographed for decades by these documentary festivals. If it’s November, it must be Amsterdam; January is Biarritz, in April doc migrants trek to São Paulo, May is Tel Aviv—and so the year winds on. It’s a resolutely un-Hollywood circuit, populated mainly by poverty-stricken doc folk desperate to screen some film they have mortgaged their babies to make, and to beg funding for their next venture about the plight of tribal people in the rain forests. The style is more anoraks and backpacks than designer dresses and shades. I found that meeting up with the same supplicants touting the same films year after year was increasingly dispiriting, and I had jumped off the merry-go-round some time ago. Vladivostok promised something new. It was too far away for even the most intrepid documentary gypsy, and anyway they had offered to show my photographs. I couldn’t say no.
Natalya and Andrei had a crowded schedule of events arranged for me. On a morning when the sun was smudged by the inevitable dust, we drove out along a switchback of vertiginous streets to an interview at Radio Lemma. It looked like radio stations everywhere: dying plants on collapsing shelves, ashtrays piled with cigarette butts. The torrent of questions about the Beatles suggested that the boys were still big in Vladivostok. “What do you say about George?” “Do you think Paul is really dead? His bare feet on the Abbey Road cover surely prove it.” “What was John Lennon really like?” The questions were translated by an elegant woman called Larissa whose card told me she was “a Professor Coordinator for Cross-Cultural Projects.” She said she had been a Beatles fan since she was a girl. I was still feeling drowsy, but one phone-in caller grabbed my attention. He was disappointed by the films in the festival program. “Can’t we have more films of violence and humiliation?” he asked. The radio show’s hostess put her head in her hands.
I had asked to meet some local Beatles fans, and Andrei, the festival organizer with the pigtail, evidently had a hotline to the local Fab community. “No problem finding Beatlemen,” he said; and the next morning he delivered an authentic fan. A quiet man with steel-rimmed spectacles in a white Honda sedan came to pick me up at the hotel. “Vladimir Studenkov,” he murmured as we powered up another dizzying hill. At the end of a wordless journey, we got out of the car. We were high above the city, and my companion introduced a spectacular panorama with a wave of his arm. It was as though this mild man was somehow claiming ownership of the city. Feeling unsteady, and about to topple over the balustrade into the huge space with its tangle of half-completed roads and bridges crammed up against the vast harbor, I tried to understand why I’d been brought here. To talk about the Beatles? To enjoy the view? As we stood there, Vladimir and I and the spectacle of Vladivostok, behind us there was a burst of laughter. I looked up and saw a bride in a white dress with her brand-new husband. They were standing at the foot of a towering statue, a monkish-looking figure in a long robe. “It’s a monument to Saint Cyril,” Vladimir said, “the man who devised the Russian alphabet.” I guessed this must be the local version of the Yuri Gagarin statue in Moscow, a shrine where newly married couples dedicate their wedding to a hero. It all heightened the sense I often have in Russia, where I’m unsure of what’s really happening.
“So Vladimir,” I ventured at last, “tell me about you and the Beatles.” It was the trigger he was waiting for. “I grew up in a town about two hundred miles from here,” he began, and I tried to imagine how remote that must have been when he was a boy, growing up in a place where wild tigers were much easier to find than Beatles records. “It was a closed military town like Vladivostok,” he went on, “but I had heard a Beatles song recorded by a soldier from a military radio.” It had been hard for privileged kids in Moscow and Leningrad to track down information about this hypnotic new music. Hunting for the Beatles from Komsomolsk, where Vladimir lived on the limits of the Soviet Wild East, must have been like searching for a new constellation with toy binoculars. But he had the unstoppable dedication of the convert. “I found an old copy of a music magazine from Czechoslovakia, Melodiya it was called, and it told me something about the Beatles.” That source disappeared after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but by then Vladimir had found other ways to fuel his passion.
He looked out over the city toward the bay, sparkling now in a splash of sun. “I wanted to record Beatles music from the Japanese radio I could pick up, but I couldn’t find any reel-to-reel tapes.” Again, the Soviet military came to the rescue of a rock-starved teenager. “I got hold of army audio tapes. They were big, as wide as a book, so I sliced them into thin strips that I could use in my reel-to-reel tape recorder.” As so often on my journey, I was staggered by the ingenuity and pioneering determination of the Beatles generation.
Vladimir Studenkov’s memories were interrupted by a shouted greeting, and a rangy man with the bristling gray hair of a startled badger strode toward us, introducing himself before he arrived. “Alexander Gorodny,” he yelled, and then crushed my hand in a fierce grip. I spotted his Frank Zappa T-shirt, but he was already urging us toward an immaculate building that looked like an outstation of a Disney theme park. Cherry-red roofs and turrets gave the place the look of a child’s fantasy castle. “My gallery,” Gorodny announced. At last I began to understand why I had been brought to this place with Gorodny’s castle high over the city. The Beatles connection was still mysterious.
A shiny brass plaque announced that we had reached ARTETAGE, and along with Vladimir I followed the two-tone shoes of our un-stoppable host as he galloped up several flights of gleaming white stairs. Leading the way, Gorodny gave us a running commentary about the gallery. “Artists in Vladivostok felt isolated in Soviet times, but they adapted in the same way jazz and rock music adapted. When Gorbachev arrived, they dragged their work out of storage, full of hope.” He reached the top of the stairs and paused at the door of a huge room lined with paintings. “But we all had a feeling of lost possibilities.”
He moved on. “We’ll look at the pictures later. Come into my office, and let’s talk about the Beatles and rock ’n’ roll.” With a child’s abandon, he hauled up his Zappa T-shirt to reveal a Rolling Stones tattoo on his shoulder—the inevitable lascivious-mouth-and-lolling-tongue logo. On the wall, a photograph of Jimi Hendrix smiled down approvingly.
From a cupboard, Gorodny hauled down a pile of books, each beautifully bound in blue denim. “This is how I kept the faith in Soviet times,” he said. As he turned the pages, I saw an exquisite record of rock ’n’ roll history. He was clearly a remarkable draftsman, and he had drawn perfect copies of scores of classic album covers: the Beatles’ Abbey Road, of course, and Sgt. Pepper, the Who, Pink Floyd, the Doors, King Crimson, T. Rex, Jethro Tull, Stones, Stones, Stones. It put me in mind of Kolya Vasin’s archive in Saint Petersburg, but where Kolya had amassed a collage of clippings and memorabilia, Gorodny had labored to create a handmade memorial to decades of forbidden Western rock. The precision and detail had the obsessive quality of a monkish scribe.
“How on earth did you find all these albums to copy when they were illegal?” I asked, “and Vladivostok was so remote and closed to all outsiders?” Gorodny seemed lost in his memories as he turned another page and found a naked body on which he had replaced all the acupuncture points with names of rock bands. The Beatles were the heart. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “Remember, Vladivostok is a huge port city, so we always had an endless traffic of ships and sailors bringing in new things. We often got news before they did in Leningrad, and I remember we knew Janis Joplin was dead before kids in Moscow.” It was another reminder that my mental map was skewed. Vladivostok was wildly remote from my European perspective; but the huge port connected the city to the outside world. Of course it was how the port of Liverpool became a gateway for the black American music that had fired up the Beatles’ love of rock ’n’ roll.
Still, Alexander Gorodny had his battles. “In the sixties, I had red shoes and long hair, so they sent me off to the army. I was forbidden to go outside the Soviet Union.” While he was in the army, two of his precious books were stolen. After his military service, he became a sailor and spent much of his time in foreign ports collecting rock albums. On his visits home, he would tape the records for his friends and the virus claimed more victims. “In 1969,” he said, “I found myself in London and I was determined to be at the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park.” I remember it well, because I was there for that mass gathering of the 1960s tribes—a quarter of a million mods and rockers and hippies. That Hyde Park concert, when Mick Jagger released ten thousand butterflies and recited a Shelley poem in memory of Brian Jones who had just died, became lodged in the collective 1960s memory. It was cherished as the last good moment before the hippie dream collapsed—and those butterflies devastated every green plant within miles. “My ship got orders to sail, so I missed the concert,” Alexander said, “and it still upsets me now more than forty years later.” I told him I had filmed that Hyde Park concert, and I would be screening the film here in Vladivostok. He grabbed my hand.
Vladimir Studenkov had been quiet for a while. Now he said, “The Beatles spoke to the Russian soul.” Alexander Gorodny echoed the thought I had heard in Moscow. “If such wonderful music is forbidden, we knew there must be something wrong with our country.” Then he smiled. He opened another of his books. “Now those times are like a bad dream.” He found the page he was looking for. “Alice Cooper came here,” he said, and there was a photo of Alexander with Alice. Remembering Cooper’s stage show featuring guillotines, electric chairs, and boa constrictors, I couldn’t imagine what had brought the outrageous grandfather of heavy metal to Vladivostok. But I also recalled that Alice was a huge golf fan, so maybe there was a special course somewhere out here where he could fight a tiger for his lost ball.
We went into the gallery, a handsome space lit up with sunlight cascading through a glass roof. There were dozens of paintings on the walls, and Alexander was visibly proud of the collection. “These were all done by artists from this region before perestroika, when it could still be dangerous to speak out,” he said. There were startling images, mixing anti-Communist jokes and religious icons with blasphemous portraits of Lenin. I remembered what Gorodny had said about “lost possibilities,” and how artists had been compelled to adapt like rock fans. Art Troitsky had said that the Soviet Union had vanished like fog in the morning; but looking around the gallery I could see some of the costs of that long struggle to resist the dictates of the commissars who insisted that artists should be “engineers of the human soul.”
I walked back to his car with Vladmir Studenkov. He told me that he now spent much of his time making digital copies of his huge rock collection and swapping them with friends across Russia. I wondered if he had ever traveled in the past beyond his isolated home in Komsomolsk—a town built by idealistic young pioneers in the early 1930s with the slogan “Subjugating Time and Overcoming Adversities.” “Were you able to be in Red Square when Paul McCartney played there?” I asked him—and then wished I hadn’t. He looked upset. “No,” he said, “but I saw the concert on TV.” He looked out over the city. “I cried.” He put his hand on my arm and it was clear he wanted to say something more. “The Beatles were like bread for us.”
Documentary festivals soon morph into self-absorbed communes with their own territories and rituals. This time, the Hyundai was the gathering place. For me, breakfast meant meeting up with a bleary Art Troitsky, climbing out of yet another late-night bash with local movers and shakers. He was hanging an exhibition of his collection of paintings in a Vladivostok gallery, and he told me he was calling the show Still Farther East. He unfurled a poster that featured one of the paintings: a highly colored portrait of a black woman in a pink shawl with a white dog sprouting yellow wings. I thought it looked perfectly Art. The elegant Frenchman who transported his bread from Paris was a breakfast regular, and I gathered he was preparing the way for film star Vincent Perez who, like me, was presenting an exhibition of his photographs at the festival. Half of Vincent’s photos were stuck in Moscow customs, so his front man was spending most his days trying to get them out. He was, I thought, enviably relaxed—but then he mentioned that his wife was a stratospherically rich wine heiress.
And so the days rolled by in a benign daze of screenings and openings. For me there was the curious experience of being some kind of second-hand celebrity. My Beatles connection made me the target of autograph hunters and groups of Fab fans who lined up to be photographed with “the man who filmed the Beatles a long time ago.” I felt as much of a fraud as I had when I was asked for my autograph in the sixties by an insistent but deluded man outside the TV studio in Manchester. I signed “Yours sincerely, George Harrison.” I had the hair for it in those days.
One of the festival volunteers told me she had caught the Beatles virus from her mother. She brought her mum over to say hello. Mum had stories about how Beatles albums used to flood off the boats arriving in the harbor. “But you had to be careful,” she said. “You could be punished copying them and passing them around.”
The festival’s nightly rendezvous was the Hyundai’s rooftop bar. A robotic band played nonstop bossa nova, waitresses who seemed traumatized by some recent tragedy served ruinously expensive drinks, statuesque hookers drifted by. I met the French film star Perez, who was smart and charming. He had entrancing stories about how he had inherited Carla Bruni from Mick Jagger as his girlfriend, and then had passed her on to Nicolas Sarkozy. I felt I had slipped through a time warp into 1967, where Paul McCartney might turn up with Jane Asher and Marianne Faithfull would drop by with Mick.
Art Troitsky’s opening was hot and claustrophobic. Hundreds of people glanced at the paintings and then moved on hoping for a glimpse of the famous Troitsky. Television cameras twirled, cellphone cameras flashed. I fought my way outside and found Perez, relaxing with a drink. We watched as Art emerged, burdened by a huge bouquet. “What a star!” Vincent said.
I walked up the blue carpet, feeling I had slipped into a fantasy. The official opening of the Pacific Meridian Film Festival was clearly aiming for the full Oscar-night glitz. Anorexic women and tanned men in tuxedos and dark glasses were welcomed to the carpet by a thunderous announcer. Crowds of spectators cheered and blitzed their cell-phone flashes at every new arrival. And now it was my turn to run the gauntlet of the celeb-hungry crowd. They can have had no idea who I was, but they cheered and flashed anyway. I approached the receiving line, an unsmiling troop of navy men in pressed white uniforms, and then the real stars of the evening, the governor of Primorye Province, broad-shouldered and commanding, together with his first lady, a former actress. I had been advised that the festival was really her toy, and she looked radiant in her gold ball gown and big diamonds. She offered her cheek to Art Troitsky for a fond kiss. Somewhere, a military band was playing “Yesterday.” At the head of the carpet, I was interviewed for television by a pretty girl who also had no idea who I was. It was all preposterous, and hugely enjoyable.
I joined the throng in a hot holding area, sipping warm sweet champagne.
This was all much more fun, I thought, than the regular festivals of my experience where people got together for grave conversations about the problems of fund-raising, or the whims of BBC executives. And there wasn’t an anorak or a backpack to be seen.
I gathered we were awaiting the arrival of a real celebrity. I had been startled to discover that Liza Minnelli was to join us for a screening of Cabaret. It has always been one of my favorite films, but it felt a very long way from home here. Minnelli had been recruited for the festival by a man who had caught my eye prowling through various events for days now. Rock Brynner was an unmissable figure, a tiny man perpetually welded to his fedora hat, and much given to regaling everyone in sight with his stories. Since his father was Yul Brynner, they were sometimes interesting stories. Yul Brynner had been born in Vladivostok and his house in the city was a place of pilgrimage. But Yul had moved out for Hollywood, and the star of The King and I and The Magnificent Seven had provided his son with A-list acquaintances. I had overheard Rock Brynner telling someone that as a boy, he used to babysit Salvador Dalí’s ocelot, and that had impressed me mightily. After tending to the ocelot, and its unpredictable owner, I guessed that persuading his friend Liza Minnelli to circle the planet and come to Vladivostok would have been a breeze.
And here she was, that utterly familiar face being shepherded through the crowd by Brynner. She walked a little stiffly now, but she dispensed her smiles with the effortless warmth and confidence of a true star. I wasn’t entirely sure that the celebrity hunters here knew who Liza Minnelli was either.
In the impressive auditorium, the opening entertainment began. High-energy dancers, imported from Moscow, dashed through a gauche routine about moviemaking; a pair of comedians, also imported from Moscow, seemed to baffle the audience, plowing on for minutes without generating a single laugh. Alongside me, I noticed Art Troitsky was deeply asleep. The opening ceremony came to a climax as a procession of freakishly tall girls walked onto the stage. Like a parody of a game show, they struggled to balance bulky glass awards on wobbly-looking plinths. I fought to stifle a huge sneeze.
The screening of Cabaret began. To my disbelief, Minnelli’s magical songs were completely drowned by a gravel-voiced Russian translation of the lyrics. On my Beatles wanderings, I had often been told that Russian popular music placed a high priority on the lyrics, but this was too much. I groped my way to an exit.
The governor’s reception was a strangely muted affair after the Hollywood pastiche of the festival opening. About a half-hour out of the city, the official mansion was a charmless white office block. It was dark now, and guests stumbled around in the gloom harvesting hot dogs and canapés from platters displayed in small plastic tents. The governnor’s first lady passed by with a throng of acolytes, her jewelry sparkling in the gloom. Folk groups played on a distant stage. The beams from green lasers flickered in the trees. I talked to a nice young Englishman called Stravinsky who bashfully admitted he was a direct descendant of the great composer, and said he was here to conduct the Vladivostok Symphony Orchestra. “We need a lot of rehearsal,” he said. He promised he’d come to my photo exhibition the next day, and I had a memory of how his illustrious ancestor once went to hear Charlie Parker in New York. Parker had spotted the great Stravinsky and mischievously inserted a quote from The Rite of Spring into his solo.
Art Troitsky went on the stage to sing something lugubrious with an anonymous band. Still trying to throw off the remains of my jet lag, I was ready to call it a day. As I was making my way to the gate an insistent woman wanted to interrogate me about the Beatles. “What do you say about John Lennon?”
From the window of the gallery where people were gathering for my photo exhibition, I watched an old man with an accordion. He wore a jaunty naval hat, and alongside his seat he had opened a case with a colorful poster inside the lid. I could just see the words FOLK SONGS and a few scattered coins. It was a timeless Russian scene, with nothing to place it in the twenty-first century. I turned back into the gallery and my two dozen rock photos on the walls felt weirdly out of place. Little Richard strutting his stuff on top of a piano; Jerry Lee Lewis raving into a microphone, mobbed by leather-clad rockers; Mick Jagger, impossibly young, sharing a song with Brian Jones; and the Beatles, larking in a TV studio. I felt responsible for dragging them around the world, and I wondered what kind of welcome they’d find here.
There was quite a crowd gathering now, peering at the photos, copying them on their cell phones, setting up video cameras. My new Beatles chums Alexander Gorodny and Vladimir Studenkov gave me a wave. Alex Stravinsky was here with his Russian wife. I was dragged off to be photographed with elderly Beatles fans, lobbied to sign autographs by matrons with purple hair and youths wearing Beatles T-shirts. Gorodny pushed through the crowd. “I brought you something,” he said, and handed over a copy of the album Paul McCartney had made for fans in Russia. The “golden disk” that had been converted into cars by Yuri Pelyushonok and his shipmates had clearly made it all the way to Vladivostok. Like Pelyushonok, Gorodny felt a personal connection with the record. On the back, after his name he had drawn a peace sign.
Soon there was a queue of people clutching scraps of paper, gazing at me with that hungry look of fans anywhere, eager for a brief contact with this man who had met the Beatles long, long ago. For a moment, I had a glimpse of how stifling it must have been for the Fab Four, shut inside a bubble of neediness and adoration. Now the interviewers were gathering, with their tape recorders and video crews. For me, the struggle to find something new to say to the repeating litany of questions—“What was Paul McCartney like?” “What do you say about Mick Jagger?”—began to induce a mild panic. There was a burst of shouting, and through the crowd I saw Art Troitsky, who was a real celebrity here, grappling with a woman wearing a John Lennon cap and brandishing a camera. It was time to declare the exhibition open.
Troitsky freed himself from his insistent fan and came across to join me. “Poyekhaly,” he said, quoting Yuri Gagarin’s breezy words before he blasted off into history: “Let’s go!” I was happy to follow Gagarin’s lead for my own tiny liftoff. Art was the perfect launch controller for my exhibition, funny, informative, concise. I thought he looked surprisingly bright, as he told me he’d been singing at the governor’s reception until two thirty in the morning. I was well aware that his support added a lot to the occasion and to the interest in the pictures. There was applause, and then the autograph hunters swooped again. I felt like Brian in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, pursued by thousands of supplicants who are convinced he’s Jesus. But I felt this was not the place to employ Brian’s unforgettable response to his baying followers: “I say unto you—fuck off!”
A chubby round-faced man with circular spectacles had been hovering for a while, and now he needed to ask me a question. “Do you think I look like John Lennon?” he said, flashing a confident smile. “Everyone says I do.” I looked at the man, lost for words.