Marilyn to Feature in Khrushchev Movie

Listening to Khrushchev, September 1959

Paul Giamatti will star in a new HBO movie, to be produced by Tom Hanks, about Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev’s trip to the US in 1959. Based on a 2009 book by Peter Carlson, K Blows Top is named after a New York Daily News headline, penned after the premier’s desired visit to Disneyland was unceremoniously cancelled.

Khrushchev may not have met Mickey Mouse, but he did go to Hollywood and was introduced to Marilyn Monroe at a star-studded luncheon at Twentieth Century Fox. Which has to be an improvement, don’t you think?

“The lunch over, Skouras led his new friend toward the soundstage where Can-Can was being filmed, stopping to greet various celebrities along the way. When Skouras spotted Marilyn Monroe in the crowd, he hastened to introduce her to the premier, who’d seen a huge close-up of her face—a clip from Some Like It Hot—in a film about American life at an American exhibition in Moscow. Now, Khrushchev shook her hand and looked her over.

‘You’re a very lovely young lady,’ he said, smiling.

Later, she would reveal what it was like to be eyeballed by the dictator: ‘He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman.’ At the time, she reacted to his stare by casually informing him that she was married.

‘My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greeting,’ she replied. ‘There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.'”

Extract from K Blows Top in Smithsonian Magazine

Vintage newspaper articles from The Los Angeles Times

Vintage newsreel footage

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