Soviet unionsAlistair Cooke's 1959 Guardian report of Khrushchev's trip to Hollywood
The Script That Got Away
Mr Khrushchev's Propaganda Tour at US Expense – Guardian, 21 September 1959
Los Angeles, 20 September. The world capital of make-believe was a rueful place this morning. It is at the moment making 80 movies, 75 of them for television. Every one of these scripts, no matter how deeply trivial its plot or revolting its message, has been scanned by x-ray eyes for the slightest error in a date, in the acoustic level of the sound, in such vital aesthetics as having a man who comes into a room with a felt hat leave with the same quota. Yet Hollywood looks back today on the most garbled production in its 50 years' experience. It is bewildered and guilty over the script that got away.
The formal details had been planned by the city government, the movie studios, and the state department. No detail of Mr Khrushchev's arrival - the route of his motorcade, his dietary preferences, the protocol of the seating arrangements at lunch, the rehearsing of the scene he was to see being shot - had gone unplanned.
He came in at an obscure corner of the airport and the mayor of Los Angeles greeted him in the cryptic, cool manner that has become a mark of patriotism among the American officials who have the misfortune to be cast as his hosts. He has whizzed so fast over the boulevards between the airport and the Twentieth Century Fox studio that not one Angelino in a thousand could have guessed, without prior knowledge, that here was the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and not, say, Marilyn Monroe on her way to a dress fitting.
He was shown what any other distinguished tourist would have been allowed to see. He saw the dancing girls of Can-Can. He was actually seated at the same table as Gary Cooper, Eddie Fisher, Marilyn Monroe and James Mason. The supreme accolade was reserved for his wife: she was seated next to Frank Sinatra. American hospitality can go no further.
"And yet, and yet ..." as the old silent movie captions used to say, the production blew up in the faces of hundreds of skilled politicos, directors and protocol experts who had written it. Nikita Khrushchev, the humble shepherd boy who grew up to play the starring role in the lurid melodrama known to the papers here as "The Hangman of Hungary", retraced his spiritual ancestry and suddenly turned from the home-town boy made good into a frightening "baddie".
He began, with amazing magnanimity, by greeting Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, as a "friend and brother before Christ". He ended by recalling again the futile invasion of his country by soldiers of America, France, Germany, Poland and Britain, by briefly catching himself an apology for such a tasteless memoir, and then by swelling the veins in his neck in protest at the state department's denial of his wish to go down to Anaheim and make a tour of Disneyland. (The Russian security men were against it, and Mr Khrushchev agreed not to go, but in public he tactically decided to change his mind.)
"What do you have there, rocket launching pads? Is there a cholera epidemic down there? Have gangsters taken control of the place? Your police are strong enough to lift up a bull; surely they are strong enough to take care of gangsters?" But no, the state department could not possible promise to "guard my security".
Unhappily, the state department was right. Not for nothing had the Los Angeles police been issued with a pamphlet of instructions for the safety of Mr Khrushchev that ran to 75 pages. He did not go to Disneyland.
"This situation is inconceivable," he bellowed. "I thought I could come to this country in peace, not sit in a closed car in the smothering heat under the sun. I thought I could come as a free man."
The movie stars could not have been more uncomfortable if they had been sitting there in nothing but their mascara. Miss Monroe ventured that Mr Khrushchev's speech was "interesting". Winston Churchill could not have done it better.
This it turned out, was only the beginning of the catastrophe of a nightmare of miscasting. Mayor Norris Poulson of Los Angeles is an admirable Californian, an alert host and a patriotic citizen. But he, too, tore up the script and played Frankenstein to the monster.
Mayor Poulson's sin was to mention again the delicate verb "to bury", which Mr Khrushchev thought he had interred once and for all at the National Press Club in Washington. "We shall not bury you," cried the mayor. "You shall not bury us ... But, if challenged, we shall fight to the death to preserve our way of life."
Mr Khrushchev's face was, in Miss Monroe's memorable word, "interesting". He does not take this sort of talk from Gromyko, let alone from such political midgets as the mayors of host countries.
"If you want to ride on this horse," he said, trotting out on one of those marvellously laborious Russian idioms, "we accept that challenge. I am talking seriously ... It is a question of war or peace ... I have not come here to appeal to you ... I have not come here to beg."
Nor had he come to America to be shown "your might" or to be left "shaky at the knees ... Our rockets are on the assembly lines and on our launching pads." Mr Khrushchev clinched the historic melancholy of his visit to the City of Angels by thinking aloud that he "might go home".
The only mystery left, in this factory of thrillers, is why the travelling Russian reporters so faithfully reported back home that America "welcomes the premier" and applauds his words. The visit is already a pathetic throw of the dice against the croupier, not a tour of America to see what America is about but a free campaign tour provided by the state department, an incomparable advertisement at the American expense of the glories of communism and the coming violent decline of the western world.
Alistair Cooke at the Movies, edited by Geoff Brown, is published this month by Allen Lane (£20).