I caught the premiersha as she and Mamie emerged from the Red Room in a burst of photographers’ flashbulbs. As instructed, I took her arm and escorted her to the East Room, for the program of American songs that would highlight the evening. I spoke to her in Russian, though to my surprise she seemed to have a rudimentary grasp of conversational English (did she recall it from her schoolteaching days, or had she boned up for Ike?). Like a Cyrano, I told her that the president yearned for her tragically, that he’d thought of nothing else in the four years since Geneva, and then I recited a love poem he’d written her in English — I can’t recall the sense of it now, but it boiled with Elizabethan conceits and the imagery of war, with torn hearts, manned bastions, and references to heavy ordnance, pillboxes, and scaling the heights of love. Finally, just before we entered the East Room, I pressed a slip of paper into her hand. It read, simply: 3:00 A.M., back door, Blair House.
At five of three, in a rented, unmarked limousine, the president and I pulled up at the curb just down the street from Blair House, where the Khrushchev party had been installed for the night. I was driving. The rear panel slid back and the president’s voice leaped at me out of the darkness: “Okay, Paderewski, do your stuff — and good luck.”
I eased out of the car and started up the walk. The night was warm and damp, the darkness a cloak, street lights dulled as if they’d been shaded for the occasion. Every shadow was of course teeming with Secret Service agents — there were enough of them ringing the house to fill Memorial Stadium twice over — but they gave way for me. (Ike had arranged it thus: one person was to be allowed to enter the rear of Blair House at the stroke of three; two would be leaving an instant thereafter.)
She was waiting for me at the back door, dressed in pants and a man’s overcoat and hat. “Madame Khrushcheva?” I whispered. “Da,” came the reply, soft as a kiss. We hurried across the yard and I handed her into the car, admiring Ike’s cleverness: if anyone — including the legion of Secret Service, CIA, and FBI men — had seen us, they would have mistaken the madame for her husband and concluded that Ike had set up a private, ultrasecret conference. I slid into the driver’s seat and Ike’s voice, shaken with emotion, came at me again: “Drive, Paderewski,” he said. “Drive us to the stars.” And then the panel shot to with a passionate click.
For two hours I circled the capitol, and then, as prearranged, I returned to Blair House and parked just down the street. I could hear them — Ike and Nina, whispering, embracing, rustling clothing — as I cut the engine. She giggled. Ike was whistling. She giggled again, a lovely windchime of a sound, musical and coltish — if I hadn’t known better I would have thought Ike was back there with a coed. I was thinking with some satisfaction that we’d just about pulled it off when the panel slid back and Ike said: “Okay, Paderewski — let’s hit it.” There was the sound of a protracted kiss, a sound we all recognize not so much through experience — who’s listening, after all? — but thanks to the attention Hollywood sound men have given it. Then Ike’s final words to her, delivered in a passionate susurrus, words etched in my memory as if in stone: “Till we meet again,” he whispered.
Something odd happened just then, just as I swung back the door for Mrs. Khrushchev: a car was moving along the street in the opposite direction, a foreign car, and it slowed as she stepped from the limousine. Just that — it slowed — and nothing more. I hardly remarked it at the time, but that instant was to reverberate in history. The engine ticked up the street, crickets chirruped. With all dispatch, I got Mrs. Khrushchev round back of Blair House, saw her in the door, and returned to the limousine.
“Well done, Paderewski, well done,” Ike said as I put the car in drive and headed up the street, and then he did something he hadn’t done in years — lit a cigarette. I watched the glow of the match in the rearview mirror, and then he was exhaling with rich satisfaction, as if he’d just come back from swimming the Potomac or taming a mustang in one of those televised cigarette ads. “The White House,” he said. “Chop-chop.”
Six hours later, Madame K. appeared with her husband on the front steps of Blair House and fielded questions from reporters. She wore a modest gray silk chemise and a splash of lipstick. One of the reporters asked her what she was most interested in seeing while touring the U.S., and she glanced over at her husband before replying (he was grinning to show off his pointed teeth, as impervious to English as he might have been to Venusian). “Whatever is of biggest interest to Mr. Khrushchev,” she said. The reporters lapped it up: flashbulbs popped, a flurry of stories went out over the wire. Who would have guessed?
From there, the Khrushchevs took a special VIP train to New York, where Madame K. attended a luncheon at the Waldorf and her husband harangued a group of business magnates in Averell Harriman’s living room. “The Moscow Cha-Cha” and Jimmy Driftwood’s “The Bear Flew over the Ocean” blared from every radio in town, and a special squad of NYPD’s finest — six-footers, expert in jujitsu and marksmanship — formed a human wall around the premier and his wife as they took in the sights of the Big Apple. New York rolled out the red carpet, and the Khrushchevs trod it with a stately satisfaction that rapidly gave way to finger-snapping, heel-kicking glee. As the premier boarded the plane for Los Angeles, Nina at his side, he mugged for cameras, kissed babies, and shook hands so assiduously he might have been running for office.
And then the bottom fell out.
In Los Angeles, ostensibly because he was nettled at Mayor Paulson’s hardline speech and because he discovered that Disneyland would not be on his itinerary, the raging, tabletop-pounding, Magyar-cowing Khrushchev came to the fore: he threw a tantrum. The people of the United States were inhospitable boors — they’d invited him to fly halfway round the world simply to abuse him. He’d had enough. He was curtailing the trip and heading back to Moscow.
I was with Ike when the first reports of the premier’s explosion flashed across the TV screen. Big-bellied and truculent, Khrushchev was lecturing the nation on points of etiquette, jowls atremble, fists beating the air, while Nina, her head bowed, stood meekly at his side. Ike’s voice was so pinched it could have come from a ventriloquist’s dummy: “My God,” he whispered, “he knows.” (I suddenly remembered the car slowing, the flash of a pale face behind the darkened glass, and thought of Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the vast network of Soviet spies operating unchecked in the land of the free: they’d seen her after all.) Shaking his head, Ike got up, crossed the room, and lit another verboten cigarette. He looked weary, immeasurably old, Rip Van Winkle waking beside his rusted gun. “Well, Paderewski,” he sighed, a blue haze playing round the wisps of silver hair at his temples, “I guess now the shit’s really going to hit the fan.”
He was right, but only partially. To his credit, Khrushchev covered himself like a trouper — after all, how could he reveal so shocking and outrageous a business as this without losing face himself, without transforming himself in that instant from the virile, bellicose, iron-fisted ruler of the Soviet masses to a pudgy, pathetic cuckold? He allowed himself to be mollified by apologies from Paulson and Cabot Lodge over the supposed insult, posed for a photograph with Shirley MacLaine at Twentieth Century-Fox, and then flew on to San Francisco for a tense visit. He made a dilatory stop in Iowa on his way back to Washington and the inevitable confrontation with the man who had suddenly emerged as his rival in love as well as ideology. (I’m sure you recall the celebrated photographs in Life, Look, and Newsweek—Khrushchev leering at a phallic ear of corn, patting the belly of a crewcut interloper at the Garst farm in Iowa, hefting a piglet by the scruff of its neck. Study them today — especially in contrast to the pre-Los Angeles photos — and you’ll be struck by the mixture of jealous rage and incomprehension playing across the premier’s features, and the soft, tragic, downcast look in his wife’s eyes.)