Comrade "Masha" Monroe
We have reached that point, I believe; and we have reached a corresponding imperative to interject a little humor; so toward that end, I offer the following amazement. To wit: Moskovskij Komsomolets is a Muscovite newspaper known by its acronym MK. It publishes sensational and provocative stories about Russian politics and society. So, in accordance with those guidelines, on the 12th of April in 2012, MK published an article under the headline, “The Moscow Secret of Marilyn Monroe”, written by Александр Добровольский, AKA, Alexander Dobrovolsky, in English. An English translation of Dobrovolsky’s story, translated by a guy identified as just Phil, appeared the following day on the website Real Russian News, a site which claims to post professionally translated versions of real Russian news stories. I cannot contradict their claim.
Twenty-five days following the story’s publication in MK, the website Weekly World News expanded and embellished the story under the headline, “Marilyn Monroe Was A KGB Agent.” Most of us realize that Al Gore’s Amazing Internet is a vast wasteland populated by many odd and goofy websites featuring many odd and goofy stories, fake stories, tossed to a trusting, even gullible population like comic beach balls tossed about at a rock and roll concert. Weekly World News is one such website but still proclaims itself The World’s Only Reliable News, and that despite its frequent use of fictional and satirical yarns. Perhaps Moskovskij Komsomolets, considering their desire to publish sensational and provocative stories about Russian society, had been transformed into a site like Weekly World News, often fictional, often satirical. I cannot say for sure; however, it seems a smidgen sensational, and humorously fictional, to assert, that in 1959, Marilyn Monroe became a Soviet spy and betrayed her country.
In what could such a tale be rooted? Perhaps in this. On August the 3rd in 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower held a press conference and announced that the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, would visit the United States in September. Ike hoped to thaw the icy relations between the USA and the USSR who, at the time, were embroiled in a political crisis, one that began in 1958 over the fate of a WWII divided Germany and Berlin. On the 15th of September, Khrushchev arrived in America. Four days later, 20th Century-Fox sponsored a luncheon for the Soviet Chairman, his wife Nina, and their entourage.
Several plain clothes American and Soviet security police, along with a plethora of Hollywood’s major stars, producers and directors, attended the luncheon that Fox staged at the Café de Paris, their first class high class commissary located on the studio’s grounds. Frank Sinatra was there, as was Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, just to note a few. Several stars declined to attend as a protest against communism: Bing Crosby, Ward Bond, Adolphe Menjou and Ronald Reagan, again, just to note a few.One movie star that Fox was convinced had to attend, however, was Marilyn Monroe; but she would have to attend without her husband at the time, Arthur Miller: he was not invited by Fox. Arthur was much too controversial, much too hot politically: he had recently been accused of communist affiliations and testified before the House Un-American Activities Commit-tee. As an uncooperative witness, the Committee found the leftist playwright contemptuous of congress. I say, contempt when contempt has been earned, but then I digress. At the luncheon, Marilyn found herself seated in the center of the commissary between directors Joshua Logan and George Cukor but directly in view of Comrade Nikita Khrushchev.1
Dobrovolsky’s article claimed that Russian and American intelligence agencies exchanged document archives during the first decade of the 21st century. Among these archives, from the depths of the KGB, were materials connected to the development of Marilyn Monroe.2
The KGB documents revealed that Marilyn was given the code name Masha; but Khrushchev referred to Marilyn as Comrade Monroe. As a part of Masha’s development, she made at least one unsanctioned trip to Moscow during which she cooperated with the Russians. The preceding allegation, and many, many more, came from a former KGB agent, Vladislav Egorov, who allegedly became romantically involved with Marilyn not long after Khrushchev’s controversial visit to America in 1959. The agent reluctantly revealed his entire romantic story to Lyudmila Temnova, a Russian documentarian. A documentary film about Marilyn’s trip to Moscow resulted: Monroe in the Land of Dostoyevsky. Neither website for IMDb nor Rotten Tomatoes has any information on Temnova’s documentary. I am not contending that the film is imaginary; but IMDb has some type of information on just about every other film ever made and released. Temnova admitted that the producers of the documentary used a cover name for the confessing KGB agent. Humorously and oddly enough, “Real Russian News” provided a clear photograph of a man identified as Egorov. Should we assume that the news service also used a photograph as fake as the cover name?
According to Egorov, during a break in the filming of Let’s Make Love in the winter of 1960, Marilyn visited Moscow. Temnova commented:
All these facts are beyond doubt. In the official biography of Monroe it actually mentions that in the winter of 1960 she disappeared from sight for 2 weeks. It’s not known if she was sick in the hotel the whole time or if she went somewhere. Our classified guest [Egorov] proves that it is during this “technical” break in the filming of “Let’s Make Love” that Marilyn, without telling anyone, made a “classified” trip to the Soviet capital.3
What was the result of Marilyn’s trip to Moscow? She became pregnant; and so the continuing saga of Marilyn-Monroe-gave-birth-to-a-child continues. Egorov suggested that he was possibly the father of the child conceived during Marilyn’s classified trip to Moscow, in this iteration, a daughter. Exactly what was Marilyn’s trip classified as being, dare I wonder? One for the purpose of conception? After her brief visit behind the Iron Curtain, Marilyn returned to the United States and continued filming Let’s Make Love as if nothing had happened; but she started to gain weight, according to Egorov, which
instigated rumors around the set about her being pregnant. “Official information about the birth of Marilyn’s baby doesn’t appear anywhere if [you] don’t take into account the reports written in the tabloid magazines,” says Temnova. However, according to many who knew her, the actress often talked of her love for her daughter as if she really existed.4
Dobrovolsky ended his story with a quotation from Marilyn’s alleged lover. Egorov admitted:
I may have forgotten much of the story. Who knows how everything was exactly! Believe me or don’t believe me! Many years have passed. Details continue to slowly slip away but some things, like the memory of a woman, I can never forget. Those memories will be with me ’till the end of my days.5
I can only react one way to Comrade Egorov’s equivocal closing statement. If he does not know how everything was exactly then who on Earth does? And how is it possible that his memories of an unforgettable woman, the details about her and the relationship that will remain with him till his death, are also slipping away. Egorov invites us to believe him or not believe him; and I admit that I do not believe his story.
Factual history always gets in the way of these Marilyn Monroe fantasy tales. For instance, Temnova alleged that Marilyn disappeared for two weeks during the winter of 1960 and traveled to Moscow; but during the winter of 1960, Marilyn constantly rehearsed and filmed Let’s Make Love with Yves Montand. Filming was interrupted in March when the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild went on strike and Hollywood’s movie productions came to a halt, a production break which sent Marilyn and Miller back east coast, to Connecticut and Roxbury Farm.
In April, after Miller and producer Frank Taylor traveled to Reno to scout filming locations for The Misfits, on the 11th of that month, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles. She gave Georges Belmont a lengthy interview before Miller returned from Nevada and then traveled east to visit with his children during their school’s spring break. Not long thereafter, Marilyn and Montand began their brief affair; but when the production of Let’s Make Love ended on June the 17th, the co-star’s affair also quickly and quietly ended.
On June the 24th, Marilyn and Montand, screened a rough cut of the completed film in Fox’s theater. Then in early July, her affair with Montand officially over, Marilyn returned to New York City for wardrobe and make-up tests for The Misfits. Depending on biographical account, either on July the 14th or the 17th, Marilyn boarded an airplane for a brief return to Los Angeles, arriving there on either the 16th or the 17th; and then on July the 20th, she was in the pressurized cabin of another airplane headed to Nevada to start filming what would be her last completed film.
In early November, with The Misfits complete, Marilyn returned to her apartment in New York City, alone: she was separated from Arthur Miller by then. Clark Gable, The King of Hollywood, died on the 16th of November; and the press blamed Hollywood’s reigning Queen for the King’s death. Devastated by Gable’s death, Marilyn spent the holidays saddened and depressed with the Strasbergs and Ralph Roberts in New York City. Suddenly, the year became 1961.
I do not know of any official Marilyn Monroe biography like the one mentioned by Temnova, one sanctioned by the State of America, that is. Donald Spoto mentioned Marilyn’s luncheon meeting with Khrushchev at Fox studios but did not mention that she disappeared from the sets of Let’s Make Love. The same applies to the biographies written by Michelle Morgan and Gary Vitacco-Robles. Each biographer chronicled Marilyn’s Khrushchev encounter but nothing else. Randy Taraborrelli’s clairvoyant biography did not even mention Nikita Khrushchev. Besides and moreover, Marilyn could never have disappeared from a movie production for two weeks without informing someone or without causing a panic. If that had happened, the press would have written many stories about her disappearance and no such stories were ever written or at least nothing of that sort appeared in the media at the time.
I do not believe that the CIA and the KGB began exchanging document archives in the year 2000. What would be the purpose in doing such a thing? How could either agency be certain of their counterpart’s honesty? Well, now that I mention it, they could not. At any rate, in 1999, Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, gave President William J. Clinton a packet of documents pertaining to Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and his return to the United States. Apparently, Yeltsin wanted to demonstrate that the KGB was not involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. Still, according to many historians, assassination experts and conspiracists, the few documents released by the KGB and presented to President Clinton did not even approximate fulfilling Yeltsin’s promise to release all the documents pertaining to Oswald’s time living in the Soviet Union.
At any rate, Marilyn did not, at any time quite obviously, disappear for two weeks from the sets of Let’s Make Love; and finally, Marilyn never gave birth to a child at any time in her life despite what has been asserted in the tabloids, a dubious book or a screenplay written by Nancy Maniscalco, a curious woman who appears in Section 5. I am quoting Lyudmila Temnova, here: All these facts are beyond doubt.
Preposterous stories like the preceding experience a certain mental fermentation in the mind of the odd conspiracist and out pops an alcoholic brew, as usual, featuring the death of Marilyn Monroe. The assertion that Marilyn was an agent for the Russian Secret Police, the KGB, is certainly ludicrous; but the ludicrosity does not end with that silly assertion. According to a few conspiracists, not only had Marilyn transformed into a radical communist, and not only was Comrade Marilyn, or Comrade Masha more correctly, having an affair with Comrade Egorov, she was also involved sexually with Comrade Khrushchev, certainly a nauseating thought and mental image. Apparently, Marilyn, Vlad and Nikita met regularly at a diner in Manhattan where they planned the conquest of the West and the destruction of America. You just might wonder, logically, just how the Big Boss of the Soviet Union could fly into America, undetected and unnoticed, of course, just to meet and engage in sex with Comrade Marilyn, or why Vlad and Nikita had to meet with Marilyn at a diner. Vlad maintained an apartment in New York City where he and Marilyn, and I assume Nikita as well, met for their assignations. It would have been much more discreet, much less treacherous and certainly much more logical for them to meet in Vlad’s love nest apartment; but let us, for a moment, leave logic out of this.
Like her middle Kennedy brother lovers, her Russian lovers revealed Russian secrets to Marilyn; and her loss of contact with reality made her a security threat. She was, after all, threatening to hold a revelatory press conference. Norman Mailer, as did Frank Capell, intimated that perhaps the Russian Secret Police had a hand in Marilyn’s murder, not because of her plan to reveal Russian secrets, but because Robert Kennedy was actually a Communist; and the Communists needed to protect the attorney general from the revelations of the blonde movie star, with whom he was also having an affair.
Of course, none of the preceding makes any sense whatsoever; and the assertions are so silly that they are absolutely and incredibly comic.
