The year 2009 marks several anniversaries that the home viewing and music industries are eagerly acknowledging in order to sell product of some kind. It’s Errol Flynn’s 100th birthday; it’s the 40th anniversary of Elvis’s best album, From Elvis in Memphis; and Tina Turner celebrated 50 years in show business with a year-long tour. Ronald Reagan would have been 100 this year, too, and I wonder if anyone is packaging those boxed sets of the Bonzo movies as we speak.

 I discovered another milestone that seems ripe for celebration — the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s trip to Hollywood. While there, he visited the set of 20th Century Fox’s lavish musical Can-Can, starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Juliet Prowse. Given the ridiculous marketing campaigns I have seen over the years in the home viewing business, surely a special Nikita edition of Can-Can can’t be long in coming!

 When President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited the Soviet Union’s most memorable Premier to America in the fall of 1959, he was hoping to diffuse the volatile situation regarding Berlin. Khrushchev readily accepted but told the President that in addition to hashing things out about Berlin, he wanted to travel around the country and do some sight-seeing —  which must have given Ike a few sleepless nights. News about the invitation and upcoming visit resulted in a mixed reaction by the American public. Some protested his arrival by sending thousands of angry letters to Congress, while others sent the Soviet Embassy friendly requests urging Khrushchev to swing by their fair cities. The chairman of the Minnesota Apple Festival not only asked the Premier to come to the festivities but assumed he would join in the fun, “If you’d like to enter a float,” noted the chairman, “please let us know.”

 Five days into his trip to America, Khrushchev and his wife Nina flew to Hollywood at the invitation of Spyros Skouras, president of  Twentieth Century Fox. Skouras thought the world leader might be interested in watching the shooting of the musical Can-Can. Viewed in hindsight, Can-Can seems a lackluster choice for the occasion, because the film was neither groundbreaking entertainment nor a well-crafted classic. While I am a fan of Juliet Prowse, and the film features Sinatra singing a haunting version of “It’s Alright with Me,” it pales in comparison to the big MGM classics of the 1950s. Yet, looking through the perspective of 1959, Can-Can held a lot of promise for Fox in 1959. It was based on the Broadway hit about the scandalous French dance from the turn of the century; it featured music by Cole Porter; and it starred Sinatra at his Rat Pack coolest. I am sure Skouras thought he was showing off the best of his studio. As it turned out, Can-Can proved a poor choice for other reasons.

LUNCH WITH THE STARS

 Khrushchev’s day at the studio began with a long lunch at the studio commissary where the biggest stars and names of the day gathered to dine with the dignitary. Celebrities clamored to be invited to lunch with the world’s most famous communist, despite the fact that fallout from the infamous blacklist still lingered. The witch hunts for communists in Hollywood by Joseph McCarthy and the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), which resulted in several writers, directors, and performers permanently losing their jobs, peaked during the mid-1950s, but the blacklist didn’t completely disappear until 1959 — the year of Khrushchev’s visit. A few stars refused to come to lunch because of what Khrushchev represented, including Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Ward Bond, and Adolphe Menjou, but 400 others readily accepted. Space was at a premium so no spouses — or agents — were allowed unless one star was married to another. I am not surprised that spouses and agents were considered expendable, though enough agents squawked so that the ban was quickly lifted on them.  

 The no-spouses rule was strictly enforced, however, and the only married couples present besides the Khrushchevs were Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Dick Powell and June Allyson, and Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher. Also attending the lunch was Debbie Reynolds, who had been once been married to Fisher. Fisher had abandoned Reynolds and their two children for Taylor in one of the biggest scandals of the 1950s. Care was taken to seat Debbie Reynolds across the room from Liz and Eddie. Talk about a Cold War; the volatile Fisher-Taylor-Reynolds situation made tensions between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. seem like a kiddies’ quarrel.

MM LOOKS GOOD IN HER TIGHT BLACK DRESS

 The most sensational star to attend was undoubtedly Marilyn Monroe, who was married to playwright Arthur Miller. A diehard leftist, Miller did not attend the much-heralded event probably because he had once been investigated by HUAC. Twentieth Century Fox requested that MM fly to Hollywood to meet the Premier, and, according to the memoirs of her maid, Lena Pepitone, the studio told her to wear a tight dress.  Though juicy, this tidbit regarding the dress sounded improbable to me. In my opinion, I don’t think  the studio held this much sway over her by 1959; after all, she had formed her own production company in 1956 and was not shy about voicing her displeasure with studio execs and producers for treating her like a dumb blonde. While she still made films for Fox, she did so under terms of a new contract that gave her more creative control and more confidence. It made no sense to me that she would revert to behavior more suited to a compliant starlet than a star of her stature. After checking in several major MM accounts, including those by professional biographers Summers, Leaming, and Guiles, in addition to Arthur Miller’s autobiography, I found nothing that would verify Pepitone’s story.

 Monroe gave the event her full attention, using the skills of hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff and her favorite makeup artist Whitey Snyder to turn her into “Marilyn.” She took five hours to get ready for the event but still managed to arrive early, much do the dismay of director Billy Wilder who struggled for weeks with her tardiness to the set of Some Like It Hot. Her efforts were not in vain, because, according to many sources, the Premier was smitten with MM. He had seen a clip of her from Some Like It Hot in a film about American life at an exhibition in Moscow. When the two met face to face, she extended greetings to him from her husband, and he looked at her appreciatively. Later, she proudly remarked, “Khrushchev looked at me like a man looks at a woman.”

 With that special arrogance that only studio heads seem to possess, Spyros Skouras made a speech in honor of the occasion but took the opportunity to “teach” Khrushchev about the values of capitalism and democracy. In his speech, he told the story of his life as though it were straight from one of Fox’s historical dramas. Skouras recalled that he was the son of a lowly Greek shepherd, and when he came to America, he sold newspapers and waited tables until he and his brothers bought a movie theater. From those humble beginnings, he was able to become president of Fox “because of the American system of equal opportunity.” Not to be outdone, Khrushchev gave the communist version of the rags to riches story in which he reminisced about herding cattle, working in a hot factory, slaving away in the mines, etc., etc., until he became the Premier of the Soviet Union.

SKOURAS (LEFT) & KHRUSHCHEV (RIGHT): SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

 The best story regarding the lunch involved Khrushchev’s attempts to get to Disneyland. Apparently, Nina Khrushchev really wanted to visit the fabled theme park. But, L.A. Police Chief William Parker became unsettled when someone tossed a tomato at the Khrushchev limo on the way from the airport to Fox studios, and he was nervous about the Premier visiting an open-air tourist attraction. He told Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was touring with the Khrushchevs, that he could not guarantee everyone’s safety if the group went to Disneyland. So, Lodge broke the bad news to Mrs. K. that she would not be seeing Main Street U.S.A., Tomorrowland, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, the Hall of Presidents and all the other sites of Walt Disney’s hit attraction. Khrushchev made a point to mention his disappointment in his speech, pondering the supposed dangers of such a trip. He joked that there must be a cholera epidemic in Anaheim, or that gangsters had taken over the theme park. In other words, unless there was some really good reason for the safety precaution, America’s inability to protect him must be the result of the high crime rate and corruption inherent in a democracy. By the end of his speech, he was no longer joking, and in some accounts, his comments were labeled a “tantrum.” During lunch, Mrs. K leaned over to David Niven and mentioned her personal disappointment about the Disneyland fiasco. Sinatra, overhearing her, took Niven aside and declared, “Screw the cops. Tell the old broad that you and I will take ‘em down there this afternoon.” 

MR. & MRS. K WATCH "PORNOGRAPHIC EXPLOITATION."

Finally, it was time to visit Sound Stage 8 where director Walter Lang was shooting an actual can-can number from the movie. The group proceeded to watch the filming from a wooden box above the stage. After a few lines of dialogue were completed, Lang began shooting a master shot of the dance number. The playback music blared, and a gaggle of girls screamed as they bounded onstage with their skirts hiked up over their waists. They somersaulted, cartwheeled, and flipped in the air, as their skirts revealed lacy black underwear and sheer black stockings. The grand finish involved the whole group hiking their skirts up over their bottoms and pointing them to the camera, then popping up in the air one at a time and coming down hard on the floor in the splits. State Department Chief of Protocol Wiley T. Buchanan was vexed that Skouros chose this scene to entertain Khrushchev AND HIS WIFE!!!  Soviet culture was extremely conservative regarding the depiction of women and sex, and Buchanan assumed Skouros and the others at Fox knew this. At one moment in the production number, a male dancer slides under Shirley MacLaine’s skirt and comes out the other side holding what seems to be her red panties. At this point, Mr. and Mrs. K. looked on “in stolid, disapproving silence,” according to Buchanan. 

MR. K. WITH SHIRLEY MacLAINE

Other onlookers claimed that the Soviet Premier must have liked the dance because he was smiling during the production; but, back in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced the movie as pornographic exploitation. Years later, his son, Sergei, remarked that his father did not think Skouras meant any political slight with the event, but that this kind of thing — provocative dances in movies — was the nature of American popular culture. Sergei conceded that his father may have liked it to some degree, but, “My mother did not like it.”           

Shortly after the dance, the entire group left the studio. Despite the intentions of Sinatra, who probably had more connections than either Lodge or Buchanan, the Khrushchevs never did make it to Disneyland. Instead, Lodge and the guides came up with the perfect alternative destination for the couple —  a tract housing development.   

Sources 

Carlson, Peter. “Nikita in Hollywood,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2009, p. 44. 

Guiles, Fred Lawrence. Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe. Scarborough House, 1992.

Leaming, Barbara. Marilyn Monroe. Three Rivers Press, 2000. 

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. Penguin, 1995. 

Summers, Anthony. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Orion, 2000.