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.