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FROM A POLICE STATE A Moscow Cold War Memoir |
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PEOPLE PASSING THROUGH |
 Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton in "Reds." Beatty won an Oscar for his direction of the film. |
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This is an excerpt from a book-length work in progress by Michael Johnson, presented in this form exclusively by TheColumnists.com through the courtesy of the author, who reserves all rights. |
for TheColumnists.com
One of the attractions of living in Moscow in those days was that all kinds of powerful people came by to visit. They tended to seek out journalists to try to get the inside story about what was going on in the Kremlin. In those days, everyone was worried about Russia. Now nobody much cares.
When we were there, we managed to rub shoulders with various newspaper editors, opera singers, artists and writers, plus some seriously big names--Oscar-winning film composer Dimitri Tiomkin (“High Noon,” "The High and the Mighty," etc.); the president of Macy’s (a guy named Friendly); Ted Sorensen (of the Kennedy cabinet); Lorne Greene of “Bonanza” fame; movie actors Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Sean Connery, and various medium-rank sports, TV and movie figures. Often I wrote profiles of them, quoting them on their impressions of Big Bad Moscow.
One evening, my boss’s nanny came into the office (just across the hall) to say she had just served coffee to two people who had turned up unannounced, but my boss and his wife were away on vacation. She thought for a minute, and said she recalled that their names were odd, “something like Julie Christie and Warren Beatty?” The nanny, a Swiss girl who apparently had been living in a cave under a rock, had never heard of them. I could have bopped her for letting the famous couple--in town for a weekend together--get away.
But Jacqueline and I had another crack at Warren Beatty a year or so later when he came back to Moscow without Julie. He was researching the movie that eventually became “Reds,” and was hoping to line up the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to write the screenplay. That didn’t work out but the movie was eventually made, with Beatty as producer and director while also playing the starring role as the American journalist John Reed. We felt we were present at the creation.
Beatty’s main contact in Moscow was the NBC correspondent Ken Bernstein, who was a good friend of ours. Ken invited us to dinner with Beatty and his traveling companion, John Chancellor of NBC News, at the Chaynaya (Tea Room) in the Metropole Hotel. Ken turned up with a pretty Russian girl whose long-term objective seemed to be to get an American passport.
Beatty was totally relaxed with us, making small talk, chatting easily. He even seemed pleased when a couple of teen-aged American girls, daughters of diplomats, came to the table giggling and asked for his autograph. “This attention doesn’t bother me. I kinda like it,” he said to us after they hopped and skipped back to their table.
Beatty was genuinely interested in Russia, and had even bought a “Learn Russian in Two Weeks” language kit including records and phrase books. He hadn’t retained much but I was impressed that he had made an effort. He was still struggling with the word for “hello,” admittedly a jawbreaker: “Zdravstvuitye.”
We talked all evening about his new passion--was the Soviet Union in a period of liberalization or was this just an illusion? We hardly talked Hollywood at all. The chat centered on the dissident political underground movement, the Russian film industry (remember, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein practically invented good movies), and problems with superpower politics. He actually even asked us what it was like to live there and what we wanted to do after Moscow. It was hard to believe he could be interested in that, but he was--or he’s a terrific actor. Yeah, it was probably that. Chancellor was also a perfect dining companion, with world-class grace and brains. Somehow we don’t expect big names like that to be real people, but these two were.
The Olympic and World Champion figure skater Peggy Fleming also came to town during our tenure, to perform with the Ice Capades. I got a half hour with her, but only after submitting to an interview with her mother. This was the world upside down. I was supposed to be the one who asks the questions. Mom’s role was to be the protector of her little flower, but she was also a good old down-home woman with a body to match--at least 200 pounds of it. She reminded me of some of the Delphi matrons. She wanted to know what I planned to ask her daughter, and she had a few suggested questions of her own--like, “How do you stay so beautiful?”
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visited Moscow, but Johnson recalls his interview with her was rather icebound. |
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Among Mrs. Fleming’s extra-curricular forays in Moscow while her daughter was on the ice had been a visit to the world’s largest department store. The Russians are hung up on being the first, the best, the biggest. As a Russian standing on a pebble beach once said, “Everything in Russia is bigger, even the sand.” Mrs. Fleming was running around the Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin, or GUM (they thought the acronym would be easier to remember, not to mention pronounce) looking for souvenirs. Leave it to Mrs. Fleming to Americanize the place. She boasted to me that she had “been over to GUM’s” for a little shopping. That struck me as hilarious but I couldn’t find a way to work it into my story.
I had been into GUM once, too. I bought my Lenin cap there, and picked up a birthday present for Sara, a skimpy little polyester headscarf with a hammer and sickle pattern. That must have raised eyebrows in Littleton, Colorado.
When I finally got my exclusive interview with Peggy, she was so guarded and over-rehearsed that I ended up virtually empty-handed except for a coy reply about her alleged love-interest, some guy in the troupe with a talent for toe loops and triple Salchows. “Maybe, some day,” I think she said. The world was waiting for them to get engaged. All I could think of was what in the world could they talk about in private other than ice and skates?
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. Note: This is actually Chapter 13 in Johnson's book.
The Peggy Fleming photo is from her official website.
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