The Post-Standard [Syracuse, NY]
26 December 1961, p. 11.
By Leonard Lyons
ARTUR RUBINSTEIN tells of a French couple he knew who
made their first trip to Moscow. They’d been warned that their hotel room
probably would be bugged, so they searched for hidden wires. They found a lump
under the rug, and there were the wires. They cut them and retired for the
night… The next day the manager asked if they’d slept well. They said yes. “You
weren’t awakened?” he asked. No.
“That’s strange,” said the manager, “because during
the night the chandelier in the room directly below yours suddenly crashed
down.”
Denys Parsons, Funny
Ho Ho and Funny Fantastic (London: Pan Books, 1967), p. 23.
Miss Dorothy Provine, as she indicated but did not
say, was clearly on the watch for secret agents following her and tapped telephones.
She recalled a tale told her by pianist Rubinstein of one of his visits to
Moscow. Mr Rubinstein, seeking for bugging in his hotel room, discovered some
cunningly concealed wires under the carpet and carefully cut them all with his
nail scissors, before going to bed.
‘The next morning,’ said Miss Provine, ‘the
chambermaid told him: “A funny thing happened last night. For no reason at all
the chandelier in the room below fell down.”’ Evening Standard
[The pianist is unidentified in the following three snippets
from Google Book Search, but Rubinstein’s name does appear elsewhere on the
page, so it may be about him. This variant ends with a fatality, which is
unusual.]
Percy Tucker, Just
the Ticket! (Jonathan Ball, 1997), p. 149.
During his first visit to Moscow after World War II,
the pianist was convinced that his hotel room was bugged. Since many of the
friends who would be visiting him were politically suspect in the Communist
era, he instituted a thorough search of his room but could find no sign of a
bugging device. At the dead of night, unable to sleep, he crawled
Using the only tool at hand, his nail file, he
patiently sawed through the wires and climbed back into bed for a good night’s
sleep.
exclaimed, “Thank heavens you are all right, maestro.”
He then told the bemused pianist that the man in the room directly beneath his
own had been found dead, killed by the fall of a chandelier directly above his
bed…
[While researching the Rubinstein variant, I came
across the following item which, if Hollander’s memory is correct, dates the
legend to at least 1956.]
Jack Hollander, My
Lunch with Shostakovich (Lulu, Inc., 2009), pp. 118-9.
When in spring 1956 I informed the Laboratory
director, Ernest Lawrence, of my interest in visiting the Soviet Union, he
responded that it was still politically premature – invitations were only
beginning to come. And indeed, the first exchange visits, which took place shortly
afterwards, involved very high level scientists. The first group of Soviet
scientists to visit the Laboratory were prominent high-energy physicists, and
their visit was soon followed by the return visit to the Soviet Union of a
group of American physicists, which included the great Berkeley physicist, Luis
Alvarez (1968 Nobel laureate).
[…] Immediately upon his return from the Soviet Union,
Luis described what he had learned about Soviet physics at a packed
laboratory-wide colloquium, and he included the following story. Suspicious
about his hosts’ intentions, he assumed that his hotel room would be bugged,
and he was determined to locate evidence of the bug. When he searched his room
on the first evening, initially he found nothing. But then he lifted the carpet
and there they were, in the middle of the floor – a large set of wires that
were surely part of the electronic bugging system. Reaching for the little
pliers he carried in his suitcase, Luis cut the wires and went to bed,
satisfied with his sleuthing. When he was having breakfast the next morning, he
was accosted by the maître-d, who asked, “Professor Alvarez, did you stay in
Room 304 last night?” When Luis responded “No, I was in Room 404” the maître-d
looked relieved and said “Oh, I am glad, because in the middle of the night the
chandelier in Room 304 came loose and crashed to the floor!”
