Bombshell by Max Collins (pdf ebook reader TXT) 📕

Khrushchev said nothing.

“Now, we have lovely show for you next door on the sound stage … where we have been filming a delightful movie called Can-Can. We would please be honored if you would join us.”

Ironically, Marilyn had been offered the female lead in the picture, which co-starred Frank Sinatra, who oddly enough she had never worked with; but, in spite of pleas from the Voice, she had turned down the lightweight part. It had gone to Shirley MacLaine—talented girl, but hardly in Marilyn’s league.

Spyros Skouras turned to the audience and gestured graciously. “Everyone, please join us on the sound stage, where we will film an actual scene.”

Relief flooded the banquet room, which soon began to buzz again, as the guests whispered, some snickering, over the spectacle they’d just witnessed. His shoe back on, Khrushchev, looking weary, was ushered from the head table, along with his entourage, and the crowd started to rise, and file out of the commissary.

Soon the room was empty but for the bus boys and other kitchen staff …

… and Marilyn, who hadn’t moved from her seat.

A sadness cloaked her. She felt sorry for Khrushchev. He was a smart man but his background was unsophisticated, and the culture clash was surely jarring to him; his trip to the United States was just not going very well. The papers had reveled in plastering their front pages with his bellicose blusterings and outright threats. Didn’t he know such behavior wouldn’t go over with the American people?

But she also understood the man’s frustration. She knew how the press could twist your words, and turn against you…

Upset, preoccupied, Marilyn—getting in the way of the staff now—finally rose from her chair, left the table, and wandered off to the bathroom.

Minutes later, she was straightening her dress in a stall, and about to flush the toilet when the door opened.

Male voices trailed in, in that echo-chamber way.

Mortified, she froze, wondering if she had—in her self-absorbed condition—gone into the wrong bathroom. Soon sounds of male urination confirmed this suspicion, and she could have just died…

This wasn’t even the first time this had happened to her. She had once asked her analyst, Dr. Marianne Kris, why she so often did this, blundering into men’s restrooms; and the psychiatrist answered, “Perhaps you’d rather be in a man’s world.” And Marilyn had responded, “Only as long as I can be a woman in it!”

For now, Marilyn stood motionless, hoping no male eyes would glimpse her high heels under the edge of the stall.

Water ran in the sink.

One rough voice said: “Sivodnya vyechiram.”

Another rough voice answered: “Dva chisa.”

A hollow laugh preceded a chilling Russian remark from the first speaker: “Da svidaniya, Khrushchev.”

Through the crack of the door hinge Marilyn could see the men—two of Khrushchev’s people, in uniform … what was that spy agency called? The KGB—they were KGB agents! One wore thick wire-framed glasses and had a Kirk Douglas chin; the other had a pockmarked face and brown cow-eyes. The cow-eyed man with the ravaged face shut the water off, and they headed out, their boots slapping the tiled floor.

The bathroom door opened and whooshed shut.

Marilyn backed up into a corner of the stall. She had understood the words the two men spoke—that much she knew of the language—and those words sent fear rushing through her.

“Tonight.”

“Two o’clock.”

Laughter. “Goodbye, Khrushchev.”

She stayed there for a long time, trembling, eyes wide, leaning a hand against the metal of the stall. She knew what she had heard.

Betrayal—unmistakable, in any language.

6 Canned Can

“Oo la la la,” Frankie sang, with the burr in his voice that characterized the older Sinatra, the silky smoothness of the younger Voice replaced with something equally sexy, in the ears of many women and even a fair share of men. The singer usually left Jack Harrigan cold, however—he’d seen the mobster-friendly singer’s FBI file, after all—even though the State Department agent’s stomach growling provided a slightly off-key harmony.

Sinatra—now in costume, a black coat and vest and frilly cuffs and shirt and ribbon of a tie, an outfit that reminded Harrigan of Bret Maverick on TV, minus the cowboy hat—was swaying gently in the middle of the sound stage, performing a number he’d announced earlier as “C’est Magnifque,” a romantic, lightly up-tempo ballad written especially for him by Cole Porter for the movie Can-Can, which featured many of the famous songwriter’s standards.

Watching from the sidelines on the movie soundstage— which had been transformed into an eighteenth-century French dance hall—Harrigan had to admit that as much as he disliked Sinatra the man (whose file began in 1938 with an arrest for seduction of a minor), Sinatra in action was pretty goddamn impressive.

As he sang, Sinatra moved deftly along the glistening wooden dance floor, playing to the audience, as if each one of them was the specific person he was crooning to.

Providing the performer with a lavish backdrop, a wide staircase with ornate banisters opened onto the second-floor set—the red velvet-and-tasseled living quarters of the saloon’s owner, played in the film by Shirley MacLaine.

Just as Sinatra finished his tune, Harrigan’s stomach rumbled again, loud enough to be embarrassing, but fortunately got drowned out by thunderous applause from the hundred or so people who had come over from the commissary to see the show.

Marilyn Monroe didn’t seem to be among those who’d accepted Skouras’s invitation—visiting a set on a soundstage would be nothing special to her, and the blonde star had already had her moment in the spotlight, with Khrushchev. Harrigan was relieved she wasn’t around—he’d been ducking her at the luncheon.

Too busy with security matters to have eaten anyway, Harrigan had denied himself the meal (except for testing the portions fed to the premier himself). So far, the State Department agent had lost fifteen pounds on this strenuous junket; if it weren’t for his belt, he’d have his pants around his ankles. He’d stayed on the fringes, his Secret Service-trained eyes trained forward … in part to protect the premier, in part to avoid