Videoage International October 2020

14 Book Review October 2020 V I D E O A G E I n late July of 1934, three Soviet agents approached Boris Morros in his offices at the Paramount Building in New York City. It was from that moment on that Morros, a rising executive at Paramount, became, as his biographer Jonathan Gill notes, “a Soviet spy, and an American traitor.” In Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy (336 pgs., Abrams, 2020, $27), Gill depicts Morros as a complicated character, a Russian- born émigré who made a name for himself in Tinseltown and was turned into a counterspy for the FBI. Gill, a professor of American history and literature at the University of Amsterdam, previously wrote Harlem , a sweeping historical volume on the iconic New York neighborhood. With his latest book, Gill accomplishes an equally impressive feat, chronicling the life of aneccentric opportunist with a penchant for entertainment. Gill would not have been able to tell such a rich tale without previously classified documents from both the FBI and the KGB. With some irony, he observes that the available U.S. information was “somewhat less useful than the Soviet side, with the FBI having publicly released a miniscule fraction of the materials they hold related to Boris Morros’s activities.” Nonetheless, he provides a well-researched look into the veracity of Morros’s story. Back in 1934,Morros and the three Soviet agents toasted Morros’s entry into Soviet intelligence with some vodka. As Gill explains, the Soviets sought out individuals to provide cover jobs to spies abroad and create an anti-fascist network in Germany. With the assistance of Morros, whom the Soviets dubbed with the code name “Frost,” they placed a man in Berlin who billed himself as a talent scout for Paramount. All Morros had to do was make up some business correspondence and mail a salary. In Gill’s account of Morros’s entry into the tricky world of international espionage, Morros appears as a man with very few political feelings and convictions. “The Soviet archives emphasize Boris’s political motivation,” Gill writes, “but it is difficult to know how much to trust that version over the story Boris later told, in which it took threats to his family back in Russia to bring him onboard, in which he resisted every step of the way.” Before his life as a spy, Morros was a musical prodigy who performed in the tsar court under Nicholas II. After surviving Red October and the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and despite being taken as a prisoner of war by counterrevolutionaries, Morros fled to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where he met a singer who became his first wife, Catherine. With Catherine’s family, he traveled to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he boarded a boat to New York City. For a brief time, Morros and his wife lived in Boston, where he landed a position as a music director of a synagogue. Upon his return to New York, he got a job as an assistant conductor at the Rivoli Theatre, owned and operated by Paramount. He soon attracted the attention of founder Adolph Zukor, who later promoted Morros to head of Paramount’s music division. Morros also produced a small number of pictures, including films that starred Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, and Laurel and Hardy, among others. In the 1940s, Morros started a music publishing company, Boris Morros Music Company, which was funded by the millionaire Alfred Stern and his wife Martha Stern, the daughter of William Edward Dodd, who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first ambassador to Germany. The business was also used as a front for Soviet espionage. It was not until later in the decade, after first confirming the deaths of family mem- bers back in Russia, that Morros turned to the FBI. Morros told his life story to the Bureau in about a week and by the end was enlisted in the agency’s “efforts on defending against domestic subversion.” The FBI even had a name for Morros, “our special special agent.” Hollywood Double Agent closes with the results of Morros’s testimony before a grand jury. As a consequence, the FBI issued arrests for several associates of Morros’s espionage ring. Morros seemed thrilled by the exposure his confessions brought him. At a press conference, Gill writes, “[Morros] bounced around the room, grabbing a reporter’s hand as he rehearsed all of the old lies with the practiced skill of an advertising man or a Hollywood agent.” Not long after, Morros turned his testimony into a ten-part feature in the Chicago Tribune , telling his life story with some embellishments when needed. With the help of Charles Samuels, who wrote the as-told-to autobiographies of screen comedian Buster Keaton and chanteuse Ethel Waters, Morros published his own memoir, My Ten Years as a Counterspy . Columbia Pictures adapted the book into Man on a String , which premiered in 1960 and starred Ernest Borgnine as the show biz exec suspected of being a Russian spy. Overall, Gill presents a vivid portrait of Boris Morros in Hollywood Double Agent. The few moments in the book that leave the reader doubtful of Morros’s motives tend to be those when the biographer seems too lenient on his subject. When describing Morros’s actions under the guise of Soviet espionage, Gill is quick to remind the reader that Morros went along with being a Soviet spy less out of an affiliation with his homeland or a commitment to communism, and more out of a desire to follow where the money led him, which ultimately had a hand in his choosing to side with the U.S. As an interesting counterpoint, Gill includes the cri- ticism of one anti-communist news columnist, Walter Winchell, “who seemed to believe Boris’s work for the FBI was undertaken to save his own skin, not to oppose the Soviet menace.” Undeniably, Boris Morros was a surprising figure caught in the international espionage relations between the U.S. and Russia. As Gill says of Morros, “No one seemed less like a spy, much less a double agent, than Boris.” Author and historian Jonathan Gill investigates an eccentric figure who turned out to be an unlikely spy for both Russia and the U.S. Tale of a Cold War Spy: Studio Executive’s Double Deal in Hollywood and Russia By Luis Polanco