“Stop!” Marilyn shouted, jumping up and down like a child in a tantrum. “It’s over! They’re coming!”
But even with the end drawing near—Marilyn could hear the shouts of men far below—she could see that the assassin would not stop until his grim task was finished.
The two men, both winded—only one of them armed with a blade now—again squared off. Marilyn looked frantically around for that fallen razor and could not find it; at the same time the assassin was putting some distance between himself and the premier, and she felt certain would hurl the knife….
Nikita saw her, threw her a conspiratorial signal by the tightening of his eyes, circling further, maneuvering until the assassin’s back was to her.
Then Marilyn threw herself on the man, covering his eyes with her hands, locking on with her legs, holding on with dear life, praying this would buy Nikita a few precious seconds to bring this monster down.
Though he was small, the assassin was lithely powerful, and with a growl of rage he flung her off, pitching her roughly against the curving wall, where she slid down in a pile, the air knocked out of her.
But Nikita took advantage of this latest Monroe distraction and leapt at the man, knife or no knife, and grabbed him by the throat, and—his face split with a terrible smile Marilyn would never forget—the premier of Russia twisted the would-be assassin’s neck with bear-claw hands until there was an awful, terminal… crack!
The killer—his eyes wide but empty—crumpled to the floor, his body twitching once before going limp, his head at an impossible angle, knife tumbling with a thunk from impotent fingers.
Marilyn, shakily on her feet now, covered her face with both hands and began to sob: the horror, the jeopardy, the emotions, all catching up with her.
Nikita came to her and held her tenderly.
“Is all right, now,” he said softly, stroking her hair. “Is all over…. You are very brave woman. Braver than many Russian soldiers. You I owe my life.”
She looked at him through her tears; his eyes were as moist as hers.
“That goes for me, too, Nikkie,” she whispered.
And there on the landing of the moon rocket at Disneyland, in the presence of a common enemy the Russian man and the American woman had worked together to defeat, their lips met in what was not a passionate or lustful kiss, but meant so much more than just friendship.
The pandemonium of an army of men swarming up onto the landing brought their embrace to a close, and Marilyn discreetly buttoned her blouse.
Suddenly Agent Harrigan was at her side. “Miss Monroe, are you all right?”
She nodded weakly.
Khrushchev’s KGB agents had surrounded him, and the men were joyously giving their leader hugs, speaking in Russian, some laughing with relief, the premier beaming, emitting a chuckle or two. One of them found his absent shoe and helped him on with it.
An American agent was leaning over the dead assassin.
Typically, Khrushchev’s mood changed.
“This assassin,” he said gruffly, gesturing to the corpse. “Who is he?”
A tall cadaverous man stepped forward with an answer. “John Munson, Premier Khrushchev,” he said, meaning himself not the corpse. “Central Intelligence… and that’s Lee Wong. We were tracking him in Hong Kong until he dropped out of sight a month ago.”
“Nationalist China send him?”
“We believe this is Chairman Mao’s work, sir…. Perhaps we should reserve the debriefing till we’re off-site.”
Marilyn blurted, “See, Nikkie—what did I tell you? Red China!”
Harrigan and Munson exchanged bemused looks—several of the men were turning to each other to mouth, Nikkie?—but Khrushchev only grunted, nodding solemnly.
Harrigan spoke, “Let’s get you and Miss Monroe down off this thing… and get that arm looked at.”
As Marilyn was helped down the flights of stairs by an attentive Harrigan, she heard Khrushchev and Munson chatting like old friends, coming down behind them.
“Maybe,” the premier was saying, “we could help each other.”
“How do you mean, Mr. Khrushchev?” the CIA agent asked.
“We are first in space, yes? But you are first in espionage. Perhaps we could share… information.”
“Go on.”
“I believe we get many secrets from same sources. Why not we combine forces, and cut down bill?”
There was a pause. Then the CIA agent responded with a laugh. “You know, Premier Khrushchev—if you don’t mind my saying, that’s a hell of an idea.”
“Ah, I have been to hell already tonight. Let us call it… heaven of idea.”
“Fine. Fine.”
Everyone had to jump down from that first platform onto the cement “launching pad,” and Harrigan and Nikita were the first to make their landings, after which Marilyn lowered herself into Harrigan’s waiting arms. The State Department agent began issuing orders and four groups of assorted Secret Service agents, KGB guards, and police moved off in various directions.
Then Harrigan approached the actress and the premier, his expression somber.
“I’m going to escort the two of you out of here,” Harrigan said. “The assassin wasn’t working alone, and his back-up could still be on the grounds….”
Marilyn hugged the premier’s good arm. “Is Mr. Khrushchev still in danger?”
Perhaps to calm her, Harrigan lightened his expression; his tone was light, too, as he said, “Just a precaution—frankly with all this activity, he’s probably hightailed it over a fence the heck outa here.”
Harrigan escorted the unlikely couple around one of the curving paths, heading toward the looming castle, on their way toward Main Street. Despite his assurances, Harrigan had his revolver in hand, a fact that neither Marilyn nor Nikita missed. Still, she had a real sense that the crisis had passed. At the east the sky had a faded look, the sun just beginning to make itself known.
“We’ll get you to an emergency room, Premier,” Harrigan said, walking between Nikita and Marilyn.
“I have had my shots,” Nikita grunted.
Harrigan laughed, gently. “Nevertheless… we’ll have that wound tended to.”
Nikita said, “Has been tended to—by Miss Monroe.”
As they walked, the State Department agent glanced at Marilyn, warmly—but a little embarrassment was mixed in. “I hope you know,” he said, “that America… the whole world, in fact… owes you a great debt. Hell, if it hadn’t been for you—”
“Any American would have done the same,” she told him, and meant it.
The path was curving around a pagoda. “If there’s anything,” Harrigan was saying to her, “anything at all I can do, just let me know.”
After that Harrigan encouraged no further conversation as they walked along, and despite his casual demeanor, the agent was obviously on alert, his eyes everywhere, reacting to the smallest sound.
As they were approaching the castle, Marilyn—who had been reflecting on Harrigan’s offer to do “anything at all”—began to speak, intending to broach the subject of Nikita returning to the park in the safe light of day.
But she never got a word out, Harrigan cutting her off rudely with, “Quiet,” as he froze on the pathway, eyes narrowed, the revolver swinging toward thick bushes to the their left.
Marilyn didn’t hear a thing.
But Harrigan obviously had, because he yelled, “Down!”
The agent shoved Marilyn to the asphalt, while Nikita dropped himself like a trap door had opened under him. She looked up, terrified, and standing half-hidden in those bushes was a figure that Marilyn at first thought was the assassin in black, somehow come back to life!
But this was a different man in black, his face Asian but rounder, though the eyes were equally cold and hard and dead.
And in his hand was a weapon—an automatic with an extended snout, probably (she thought) what in the movies they called a “silencer”….
Marilyn took
all of this in, in half a second, during which Harrigan dropped to a knee and assumed a firing position with his .38. In the next half second Marilyn realized, with a terrible certainty, that the assassin and Harrigan had each other in their sights, that one or both men would surely die….
Then another figure lurched within those bushes, behind the assassin, swinging something that might have been a golf club but wasn’t, smashing it against the assassin’s neck and back, sending the man in black pitching forward out of the foliage, to lay sprawled like an offering at Harrigan’s feet.
Quickly Harrigan plucked the weapon from the hand of the stunned, flat-on-his-face assailant.
From the bushes stepped a big man in a short-sleeved pale yellow shirt and corduroy trousers.
Marilyn—who, like Khrushchev, had slowly risen from the asphalt to her feet—gasped in surprise and delight.
A grinning, self-satisfied Walt Disney was standing there, breathing hard, and in his arms was an old-fashioned rifle.
“One of our Davy Crockett props,” Mr. Disney explained, almost sheepishly.
Marilyn’s eyes were huge. “Ol’ Betsy!”
“Be sure you’re right,” Mr. Disney said with a shrug, “and then go ahead.”
Calling in the troops on his walkie-talkie, Harrigan knelt over the unconscious figure; Marilyn hadn’t seen it happen, but the State Department man had already slapped handcuffs onto the half-unconscious assailant, hands behind his back.
Marilyn made introductions, and Mr. Disney and Nikita were shaking hands and grinning at each other.
“If you’re up to it,” Mr. Disney said to the premier, as casually as if knocking out assassins was just another of his many responsibilities here at the park, “I’d like to show you around, some—we don’t open up for a number of hours, you see.”
“Now I really get to see Disneyland!” Nikita said, his face bright with childish anticipation.
Standing guard over his prisoner, Harrigan said, “Really, gentlemen, I don’t think—”
“Jack,” Marilyn reminded the agent, “you said if there was anything you could do… anything!”
Harrigan sighed. “Then let’s start with the nearest first aid station.”
Mr. Disney said, “You won’t need an E ticket for that.” Then, beaming a wide, warm smile back at the premier, the animator settled a fatherly hand on his V.I.P. guest’s shoulder. “I’d very much like to show you my Disneyland fleet, Mr. Premier—tenth largest battle armada in the world!”
“Already have seen, thank you.” Khrushchev turned to the young woman at his side, a movie star who might have been a Russian peasant girl… and a lovely one. “Where should we go first?”
Marilyn touched a cheek with a platinum-nailed finger, giving the problem some serious thought, ignoring the rush of hard footsteps on asphalt as cops and Secret Service men and KGB agents and a CIA man came running pell mell to join them. “We’ve been to Fantasyland,” she said, “and’ve already had quite an adventure…. Why don’t we stay in Tomorrowland for a while?” She shrugged and granted them her famous smile. “After all, Nikkie—who knows what the future will bring?”
Epilogue
DA SVIDANIYA, KHRUSHCHEV
IN OCTOBER OF 1959, after his ten-day visit to the United States, Nikita Khrushchev returned to his homeland. To his closest advisors he confided that he “brimmed with hope” that Russia and its chief adversary could avoid a nuclear confrontation, and even coexist peacefully.
Khrushchev’s enemies, however, did not share this hope, much less his desire for detente. Irritated by the premier’s praise of America, and his consideration of adopting U.S. manufacturing and farming techniques, communist party hard-liners secretly began plotting his downfall.
Later that same October, a trip to China proved revealing to Khrushchev, the premier receiving so cool a reception from Mao Tse-tung that he might well have longed for the hospitality of Mayor Poulson of Los Angeles. Although the Chinese of course insisted that the attempt on the premier’s life was not sanctioned by their government—and was in fact the action of renegade, self-interested agents—Khrushchev knew better.
At the conclusion of her Disneyland adventure with the Russian premier, Marilyn Monroe returned to New York to a broken marriage, which she and Arthur Miller held temporarily together only out of the necessity to complete their collaborative movie, The Misfits, to be shot in the blazing Nevada desert.
Now and then, during that troubled, oppressive production, she would hear from Nikita—letters forwarded to her on the set by the State Department in Washington, courtesy of a gracious Jack Harrigan. And after the completion of The Misfits, she and Nikita kept in touch, mostly by phone, often talking for hours.
Marilyn, living alone now in the Manhattan East 57th Street apartment, would ask Nikita about his wife and children and grandchildren, always interested in what they were doing. And Nikita would continue to try to persuade her to abandon America for Russia, where she could better pursue her artistic muse, creating motion pictures that she could be proud of, without studio interference.
Sometimes, in spite of suspicions that the phones were tapped—by both governments, and maybe someone else’s—their conversations would venture into politics, Marilyn as always interested in world affairs. Once, when the movie star extolled the virtues of America’s new president, John F. Kennedy, Nikita agreed wholeheartedly with her assessment, and recounted his first meeting with the man, at a Foreign Relations Committee Reception, when Kennedy was still a senator.
“I liked his face,” Nikita told her, in a 1961 phone call (declassified in 2001), “sometimes stern but, often, would break into big, good-natured smile. I could tell he was interested in finding peaceful solution to world problems.” Nikita had paused, then added, “I help put him in office, instead of that puppet Nixon.”
“Whatever do you mean, Nikkie?” Marilyn had asked him breathlessly.
“You remember this U-2 pilot of yours—this Gary Powers?”
“The one who crashed in Russia and got captured—sure.”
“Yes, this one. Well, I wait until after the election to release him.” Nikita chuckled. “This way Nixon cannot claim that he could deal better with Russians than JFK.”
“Well,” she laughed, “I can see how that might have given Jack the edge to win.”
“By at least half million votes,” Nikita said proudly.
“Nikkie, you’re a genius.”
“Da.”
Khrushchev was vacationing with his family in the Crimea, on August 5, 1962, when he received word that Marilyn Monroe was dead of a drug overdose. Devastated, he took to his bed.
Newspaper accounts that were brought to him attributed the movie star’s death to probable suicide or at best an accidental fatal self-medication; but Nikita suspected otherwise. In her last phone call to him at the Kremlin, made in July of 1962, she had been enthusiastic about the Kennedy brothers, and her newfound opportunity to “really get involved in politics.” He wondered perhaps if, finally, Marilyn had gotten too involved in politics.
A request by Nikita to the State Department to retrieve his personal letters to her was unsuccessful; no correspondence of the premier’s was ever found among her belongings… or so the State Department claimed (Harrigan in 1961 had returned to the Secret Service, retiring during President Clinton’s first term).
Khrushchev’s after-hours visit to Disneyland slipped past the media and through the cracks of history; but it was nearly otherwise, thanks to Walt Disney.
Despite the U.S. government’s efforts to keep the episode under wraps, Disney—who may have been a loyal American, but was after all the king of a magic realm—decided in 1960 to make a movie on the subject. Disney assigned one of his top scriptwriters to a film that would be called Khrushchev in Hollywood, and signed Peter Ustinov for the part, despite the actor’s reluctance to shave his head.
In Disney’s re-imagining (which skirted the espionage realities of the event), Khrushchev
defied the State Department and visited Disneyland in secret, in various comical disguises, ducking both U.S. officials and anti-Russia demonstrators.
But it wasn’t till 1965 that the screenplay was in shape and Ustinov could make time in his schedule, and so, in the end, Walt Disney pulled the plug.
When his associates, knowing how keen Walt had been on this picture, asked why he had at this late date nixed the project, Disney had only shrugged and said, “Old news.”
Khrushchev, after all, was out of power.
In October of 1964, after a disastrous harvest had sent his popularity plummeting, the premier’s enemies finally brought him down, though without any Stalin-esque bloodshed. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev resigned from office at the age of seventy, retiring to a dacha outside Moscow, where he wrote his memoirs, living peacefully until his death in 1971.
A TIP OF THE COONSKIN CAP
DESPITE ITS EXTENSIVE basis in history, Bombshell is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible, reflecting the needs of the narrative as well as conflicting source material.
This novel expands upon a short story by Barbara Collins, “Da Svidaniya, Khrushchev,” published in Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (1997), edited by Carole Nelson Douglas. The invitation to write this story—taking advantage of Barbara’s longtime interest in Marilyn Monroe—came from Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg. Our thanks to Carole, Ed, and Marty.
Among the sources for the characterization of Nikita Khrushchev were: Khrushchev Remembers (1970), Nikita Khrushchev; The Space Race (1962), Donald W. Cox; Inside Russia Today (1958), John Gunther; Khrushchev: The Years in Power (1978), Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev; and Life in Russia (1983), Michael Binyon. Contemporary accounts consulted regarding the Khrushchev visit included: Time magazine, September 28, 1959; Newsweek magazine, September 21, 1959, and September 28, 1959; and Life magazine, January 13, 1958, January 20, 1958, September 28, 1959, October 5, 1959, and October 19, 1959.
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