Nikita sat, frozen with the terrible memory.
After a moment, Marilyn managed to ask, “What… what did you do then?”
“What would any man do? I ran outside and emptied stomach in snow.” He let out a breath, swallowed. “Then I go back to Moscow to see Stalin. But my plea for more food to Ukraine, it falls on deaf ears. He was rude and most insulting and called me dubious character.” Nikita looked down at the hands in his lap. “Millions of people died of starvation that winter… and many of dead became only food the living could get.”
“Oh, dear God,” Marilyn gasped.
“God?” He raised an eyebrow. “We have proverb—‘Pray to God if you must… but take care of your garden.’”
Marilyn, horror-struck, said nothing.
“Afterward,” Nikita went on, “Stalin began to look at me as troublemaker. I find out later Secret Police going to take me away, and have me eliminated… but I come down with pneumonia, very ill, in bed for six months. By time I get well, Stalin has change of mind—that happened with him, many times—he even reassigned me back to Ukraine.”
Marilyn felt numb; she hugged herself, shivering. “Someone should have killed him.”
Nikita laughed hollowly. “Ah, this coming from citizen of country where there is no assassination?… Forgive me… I hurt your feelings… I am sure some tried to kill Stalin. But Stalin, he was very clever in his madness. He rarely left his dacha—which had more and more locks on it each time I came. Whenever I would return to Moscow, he would have me over for dinner. I would dread these affairs, because he would say, ‘Oh, look, Nikita Sergeyevich, here is your favorite dish—herring.’ That meant I was to taste it to see if it was poisoned. If I stayed upright in my chair, then he would have some, too.”
Wide-eyed, Marilyn asked, “Did you always taste it?”
“How could I not?” Nikita said with a fatalistic shrug. “These dinners, they were frightful. They go on for hours, because Stalin, he was terribly lonely. Usually American movie afterward, brought by Minister of Cinematography, fellow named Bolshakov. He was supposed to interpret, but didn’t know English, so instead he would say, ‘Now the man’s leaving room… now he’s walking across street,’ and Stalin would yell, ‘I can see that, you idiot! But what does he say?’ So I was ordered to translate.”
She smiled a little, the first time in a while. “Did you ever show any of my films?”
Nikita shook his head, made a face in the negative. “Stalin had huge library of films, but mostly he watch cowboy pictures. He would curse at them, but always order another—cowboys, only cowboys.”
“Do you screen anything besides ‘cowboy pictures’?”
“I never show cowboy pictures!… Except John Wayne. John Wayne I like…. This summer I saw your Some Like It Hot.” He gave her a shy, sideways look. “If I may say… you were prihkrashs-nuh!”
Marilyn beamed; the word wasn’t included in her limited Russian vocabulary, but she would take it as a compliment. And his opinion meant the world to her. “That’s very kind of you to say,” she said, almost as shyly.
Nikita grasped her hand again, giving it a firm pat. “Why don’t you come to Moscow?” he said, and he gestured to the sleeping park around them. “You could be much bigger star in Russia! You could make your own movies. Produce, direct, choose only script you approve…. I see how they treat you here…. It is disgrace.”
Marilyn’s smile turned wistful. “I wonder….” What would her life be like in Russia? She gazed up at the stars, musing, “Dostoevsky said Mother Russia was a freak of nature—maybe that’s why I identify with her… because that’s what people say about me.”
Nikita blustered: “Such stupid people are wrong! Why, Miss Monroe… Marilyn… you are the most beautiful, talented woman in any country!”
The compliment stunned her.
“But I,” he said, his voice nearly inaudible now, all the bravado gone, “must be ‘freak’ to one so beautiful.”
Marilyn squeezed his hand, shaking her head slowly. “You know, that’s one thing men never seem to understand about me,” she said. “What’s on the outside doesn’t attract me—it’s what’s on the inside.”
She moved closer to him and whispered in a devil-like ear. “I think I know how to make the cold war a little warmer….”
He turned his homely face to her, not sure of her meaning.
So she explained by kissing him on the lips. Softly. Sweetly.
When their lips parted, she could see, even in the pale moonlight, that his cheeks were flushed. The effect she had on men never failed to amaze her. Or amuse her.
After an awkward silence, a flustered Nikita asked with forced gruffness, “And what is so great about teacup?”
Marilyn eyed him curiously. “What do you mean?”
Nikita gestured around him dismissively, as if it hadn’t been his own childish interest that had brought them to this attraction. “What is so wonderful about sitting in teacup that would make people pay money?”
“Well, you don’t just sit… you spin.”
He frowned in confusion. “Spin?”
She twirled one finger in the air. “You know, in a circle? But the ride has to be turned on. Needs power.”
He gave her half a smile. “Power is my specialty.”
She laughed. “Maybe not this kind.”
“You mean, electricity?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I know electricity,” he exclaimed, puffing himself up, “is like brother, like sister.”
“Really?”
“Who do you think built Moscow subway?”
Nikita scooted on the seat around the circular wheel, and stepped out of the little opening of the cup onto the wooden platform.
Tugging down her knotted shirt, Marilyn did the same.
“You’d have to get the cover off of that,” she said, standing on the edge of the platform, pointing to a metal box on a short pole next to the ride. “And it looks locked.”
“What if I have key?”
“Key?”
Nikita stepped down off the ride and again Marilyn followed. The Russian removed one of his heavy brown shoes and gave the box a tremendous whack!
And the cover fell off its hinges.
Marilyn gasped a laugh, then said, “But that’s private property!”
“I have… how is it called? Diplomatic immunity!”
Inside the box were two buttons, one red, the other green. Marilyn, at Nikita’s side, said, “In our country, red means ‘stop’ and green ‘go.’”
“In our country,” Nikita said, eyes twinkling like a mischievous elf, “‘red’ has other meaning. But, please—instruct me.”
“Okay,” she said, and pushed the green button. Behind them the ride began to creak and groan.
“Oh, it’s starting!” Marilyn said excitedly.
Nikita was frowning, though. “Do we attract attention?”
“No—we’re a million miles away from the real world. Come on… don’t be a ’fraidy cat.”
She grasped his hand, and they hopped up onto the moving platform, which was increasing in speed, and jumped into the first twirling cup that came by.
At first Nikita’s eyes were huge and he seemed terrified. But then Marilyn giggled at him and grabbed onto the steering wheel and gave it a twist, making the cup whirl.
Soon a grinning Nikita Khrushchev was gleefully crying, “Wheeeeeee!”
And the sight of the premier of Russia, behaving like a kid, made Marilyn Monroe break out in gales of uncontrollable laughter.
“This,” he yelled, “is special teacup!”
“Oh yes!” she shouted back. “But how are we going to stop it? I’m getting… getting dizzy!”
After another minute or so, sensing Marilyn was on the verge of seasickness, Nikita said in her ear, “For you I will stop this special cup!”
Struggling out of the spinning thing, Nikita made his way across the wooden platform floor, weaving like a Cossack w
ho couldn’t hold his vodka, then hopped off the edge of the ride, and disappeared.
After a moment Marilyn felt the teacups begin to slow, finally coming to a stop.
A breathless Marilyn staggered over to join Nikita on the ground beside the now-still teacup ride.
“That was what I call fun,” she exclaimed, pushing her tousled blonde hair back in place.
“Yes, is what we call fun, also,” Nikita admitted. “What box can we break now?”
Marilyn laughed, but shook her head. “We really shouldn’t, you know….”
Nikita gave her a surprised look. “Why not? I was promised Disneyland. Is only fair.”
“Well….” She eyed him as if he were a precocious child. No one was around for miles—they were alone in the huge park… what was the harm? “All right,” she said. “But just to preserve world peace.”
“Is noble goal.” Nikita thrust a thick finger, pointing across the midway to where colorful flags flapped in the gentle breeze over a faux-brick front. “What is this ride?”
She laughed. “Mr. Toad’s Ride… his Wild Ride, to be exact.”
He seemed skeptical. “And who is this Mr. Toad?”
“Well… a toad is sort of a frog. You know what that is, don’t you?”
He made a face. “Bah—frogs and mice…. Why is everything in Disney’s land small forest creatures?”
She shrugged. “Because they’re cute.”
Nikita grunted. “Frogs are to be eaten and mice killed.”
“Come along,” Marilyn said, looping her arm in his, “and I’ll tell you about Mr. Toad. It’s a good story.”
“I doubt this. Most good stories are by Russians.”
Mrs. Arthur Miller ignored this, and, as they walked toward the ride, she began, “Mr. Toad was very rich, but he was an irresponsible fellow…”
“I have known such a man,” Nikita interrupted. “But he was snake named Stalin. He would not want to take Wild Ride, believe me. He would hide under table.”
She kept walking him along. “… and one day Mr. Toad got his hands on an automobile. Only Froggy didn’t know how to drive, at least not very well.”
Marilyn continued the fable as she and Nikita approached the ride’s dark entrance, unaware that someone else had already slipped inside.
Someone who, like them, was an uninvited guest at the Magic Kingdom.
Chapter Twelve
APARTMENT ON MAIN STREET
WALT DISNEY WAS depressed.
This was not one of those suicidal bouts of depression the fifty-nine-year-old movie mogul had suffered in the early days, back when the weight of his growing studio had been so crushing. It seemed, ever since his friend and employee Ward Kimball had got him interested in scale-model railroading, he’d no longer had to fight that sort of battle with himself.
The railroad at Disneyland was an offshoot of the scale-model railroad he’d had constructed around his home in Holmby Hills, much to his wife Lillian’s consternation (cutting through her beloved gardens as it did). Between this hobby, and his in-house masseuse at the office (and the occasional belt of booze), Walt had managed to avoid the specter of another nervous breakdown.
Nonetheless, these last few years, he’d been sparring with melancholia, if not outright depression, despising growing older, a process emphasized in the mirror each day (“Mirror, mirror…”) by his thinning, graying-on-the-sides hair, his increasingly droopy eyelids, his jowly cheeks, and his spreading paunch. The public might like the image of “Uncle Walt,” but in his mind, Walt Disney viewed himself as the same vital young animator who had built on meager drawing talents and abundant entrepreneurial instincts to create a Hollywood kingdom.
Having the State Department yank the rug out from under the planned festivities for Premier Khrushchev had really hacked Walt off royal. Would he be reimbursed for the expense and trouble he’d been put to? No! Would he look a fool in the press, after he’d courted so much attention for the Russian visit? Yes!
One of his great pleasures, as the “mayor” of Disneyland, was to meet and greet world figures, and he relished the chance to show off his park, his personal personification of the American dream, to the world’s most famous Red.
Walt would have got a particularly big charge out of showing off his Disneyland Navy. Under his hands-on supervision, old-fashioned cannons had been affixed to the steamers that churned through the Adventureland’s jungle and down his version of the Mississippi, and he had assembled the paddle-wheelers—along with his Jules Verne submarines—in the Tomorrowland lagoon with an eye on presenting them to the Soviet leader, with tongue in cheek, as “the tenth largest battle fleet in the world.”
Not that losing the publicity of a Khrushchev visit was anything that concerned him… crowds remained strong, fed by the Disneyland TV show, even if the Davy Crockett fad had finally burned out, replaced by Mousekeeter caps and the God-given puberty of Miss Annette Funicello.
The only negative remained the ongoing complaints about the high price of admission (fifteen dollars, which included a book of ride coupons). Walt had to charge what he did because the park cost a lot to build and maintain—he had no government subsidy, after all! The public was his only “subsidy.” Hadn’t he mortgaged everything he owned, put his studio itself in jeopardy for “Disneylandia” (as it had originally been called)?
Walt glanced at the fancy version of a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist: it was approaching two a.m., and he still hadn’t gone to bed… just sat there with his bottle of Scotch and pack of cigarettes, puffing like one of his prized scale-model steam engines, going over Bud Swift’s latest draft of Pollyanna, a fine piece of sentimental craftsmanship which had brought a tear or two to his eyes.
Seemed like everything made him cry these days.
Sometimes he just had to get away to this apartment, his private personal retreat, free from Lillian and Holmby Hills. He had chosen the decor himself—lavender-, red-, and pink-flocked wallpaper, thick red rugs, lush upholstery, heavy drapes, wind-up phonograph, china knick-knacks, faux gas lamps, brass bed, the furnishings Victorian all the way.
“Hell, Walt,” Ward Kimball had said, one of the few who dared kid him like this, “what fella wouldn’t feel at home here—darn thing looks like a New Orleans whorehouse!”
Walt had just laughed and held his temper in check, but the remark had cut him: he had done his best in the apartment to replicate the living room of the Disney family farmhouse back in Marceline, Missouri. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to make much use of this hideaway lately; brother Roy had gently broken it to Walt that a rumor was rife among Disney employees that Walt was using the apartment as a love nest for unceasing assignations with various young women.
The rumor was ridiculous, unfounded—he was not a womanizer, had never been sexually driven; like any studio boss, he could have had one starlet after another, if he so desired, and when he happened to walk through a dressing room where shapely girls were in various states of nakedness, he remained unimpressed: if you’d seen one naked girl, you’d seen them all.
But the rumors had to be quashed—he insisted on moral behavior from his employees at the park, and a single “damn” or “hell” would get a staffer fired on the spot—and, now, only occasionally did Walt use the apartment above the fire station adjacent to city hall, here on Disneyland’s Main Street.
That first six months he had spent all his days and nights at the park. Lillian had accompanied him at first, until one morning a guard at the Monsanto exhibit refused to let Mr. and Mrs. Disney inside, before opening. Walt had shown the guard his driver’s license, and had been admitted… but the guard still refused Lillian. Walt fired the son of a bitch, of course—anyone who’d paid to visit the park deserved the same courtesy given a guest at the Disney home—but Lillian was highly insulted.
After that, Mrs. Walt Disney refused to go to Disneyland.
Walt, however, hated to leave the place, and had the private apartment installed, to give hi
m twenty-four-hour access to the nostalgic world he’d created, which he found so preferable to the real one. Often, during the day, he would amble along Main Street, chat with visitors, tousle the kids’ hair; but just as often crowds of autograph seekers would make that impractical. Instead, he would sit locked in his Main Street apartment and stare out the window wonderingly at the Americans from every state and every walk of life who were strolling down his boulevard of unbroken dreams.
And bittersweet tears of joy at this manifestation of his imagination, tinged with the sting of a lost youth and forever bygone America, would stream down his face and pearl in his mustache.
He looked out into the darkness, only a few security lights providing pools of occasional illumination on his Main Street, which represented to Walt the heart of a small Midwestern town from his childhood. He had designed the park so that, at first blush anyway, it provided a trip into the recent past—his past.
With the railroad defining the borders of the park, its main station was plopped down right at Disneyland’s main entrance. From here, visitors—starting at the small square with its town hall and fire station (over which his apartment nestled)—would wander down the archetypically American Main Street, whose storefronts bore such familiar names as “Elias Disney, Contractor” (Walt’s father) and “Main Street Gym, Christopher D. Miller, Proprietor” (his grandson).
Main Street provided an operating base for concessions, too, but (no matter what anyone thought) Disneyland wasn’t about money to Walt. He wanted to create a home away from home for all Americans, and hence had—with his cartoonist’s instincts—seen to it that everything on Main Street was built slightly smaller than life-size, to create a sense of friendliness, intimacy, a childlike world.
At the end of Main Street, an unlikely sight for small town American beckoned: Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Walt had dangled this “weenie” (as he put it) to keep people moving, to propel the park’s visitors onward, visual magnets pulling them into the next world of attractions.
Following this route clockwise, visitors moved from Main Street, finding themselves in Adventureland, then Frontierland, Fantasyland, and finally Tomorrowland, the logical conclusion to a journey that had begun in the nostalgic past. But—unlike a movie, where a viewer was drawn through a linear sequence—Disneyland could be enjoyed however the visitor pleased: a left turn, a right turn, changing the sequence of events and the “story” being told. This concept delighted Walt.
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