Hollywood Double Agent

The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy

Jonathan Gill

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781683358152
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This true story of Golden Age Hollywood and Cold War espionage is a "captivating, fast-paced narrative [that] reads like a thriller" ( Library Journal ). Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and '40s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War—Boris Morros also worked for Russian intelligence. Morros's assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain. The high-level intel he provided the KGB included military secrets and compromising information on prominent Americans: his friends. But in 1947, Morros flipped. At the height of the McCarthy era, he played a leading role in a deadly tale. Jonathan Gill's Hollywood Double Agent is an extraordinary story about Russian spies at the heart of American culture and politics, and one man caught in the middle of the Cold War. "Well-written and perceptive... Morros was an empty vessel who could be turned left or right depending on how it satisfied his personal interest." — New York Journal of Books "Reads like an espionage thriller... with malevolent, powerful—and sometimes bumbling—characters." — Kirkus Reviews "A fascinating and swift-reading biography." — The Wall Street Journal

PART I

CHAPTER ONE
ENTER BORIS, 1891–1914

Boris Morros was born on January 1, 1891, though the papers couldn’t agree on his age when he died seven decades later in a New York City hospital bed. Determining the date of his debut, not to mention understanding what happened between then and the rolling of the credits, is no simple matter, because nothing about Boris Morros was simple.

Well into the twentieth century, Russians paid little attention to birth dates. Stalin himself died without ever knowing for sure when he was born, and like Stalin, who would claim different birth dates to serve different political goals, Boris took advantage of the confusion. As he later put it: “A little embellishment never ruined a good story,” which is why at one point or another he claimed no fewer than four different birth dates, though the overwhelming documentary evidence, including his Social Security records and his World War II draft registration card, as well as investigations by Soviet intelligence, points to New Year’s Day of 1891.

It is just as difficult to discover where Boris was born. Over the years he claimed St. Petersburg as his birthplace, but the most reliable evidence, including his Ellis Island arrival documents and background checks by the FBI, points to Bobruisk, then a town of forty thousand in what is now southern Belarus. Smaller than Minsk, but bigger than Pinsk, as the old joke went, Bobruisk was a lively port town, and most of its inhabitants made their living in lumber, bricks, turpentine, tar, grain, shoes, textiles, and beaver hats.

Bobruisk is often remembered as the birthplace of Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, the founder of modern Belarusian literature, but the town was mostly famous for its mud. Between April thaw and November freeze, its unpaved streets turned into rivers of knee-deep muck. Simply walking the streets required strength and ingenuity, and indeed, throughout Belarus, Bobruiskers were renowned improvisers, smart and inventive, always in motion, always in search of a way over and across any obstacle. This description certainly fits Boris, who was the first of nine children born to Mendel and Malka Morros, a Jewish couple who gave their son a traditional Jewish education consisting of Torah and Talmud. But Boris, like so many of his friends, was interested in more worldly pursuits. For many of the town’s Jews in the late nineteenth century, the future wasn’t in the Yiddish used at home and in the schools, markets, and streets, but in the Russian used by anti-tsarist revolutionaries in St. Petersburg, the Hebrew used by Zionists in Palestine, or the English used by those who ended up in America.

Bobruisk’s Jewish residents had long bemoaned the town’s poverty and overcrowding, the illness and hunger. They lived in constant fear of conscription: Involuntary military service in the Russian army, which might last decades, was an ever-present threat. Worst of all were the waves of both informal anti-Semitic persecution and government-orchestrated mass violence against Jews that followed the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Alexander had freed the serfs and made important gestures toward ending the anti-Semitic policies of his predecessors, who had given many Jews a strong incentive to escape the “walled-in dungeon,” as Boris later described the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement, where Russian Jews were required to live. But Tsar Alexander III, unlike his more progressive father, was determined to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem” by converting a third of them to Christianity, using work restrictions to encourage another third to leave the country altogether, and exterminating those who remained. Bobruisk’s Jewish community dwindled accordingly. Terrible fires in 1899 and 1902 destroyed most of the town. If that wasn’t enough, there were mass arrests of students and government-directed pogroms against Jews following the assassination of the Russian minister of education in 1902.

It was clearly time for the Morros family to leave. But how? The answer was literally in Boris’s hands. A contemporary of Boris’s from Bobruisk remembered: “A Jew in Bobruisk has actually two businesses—forestry and ‘arranging’ for his son to get into a gymnasia,” or secular secondary education that would lead to admission to a university in Moscow or St. Petersburg. That was the plan of Boris’s father, a humble locksmith whom Boris later preposterously claimed was the scion of seven generations of teachers, philosophers, and musicians who had performed at the court of the tsars and who supposedly served as the conductor of the Imperial Symphony Orchestra. It was actually Boris’s mother, an amateur singer, who engineered the family’s escape from Bobruisk. She gave Boris a quarter-size cello and found him a teacher who soon recognized that he was dealing with a child prodigy that might indeed change the fortunes of the whole Morros family.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the theaters and concert halls that dotted the towns of the Pale of Settlement offered both vaudeville and classical music, with frequent outdoor summertime concerts. But Bobruisk was no place for a musical prodigy. The writer Isaac Babel recalled in his 1931 autobiographical story “Awakening” that virtually every Jewish family in every eastern European backwater was willing to stake its future on one of its sons making his way to the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, which was among the few institutions of higher education in tsarist Russia that enrolled Jews and provided their families with the residence permits that allowed them to live legally in the city. So in 1903, Mendel and Malka Morros packed up Boris and his siblings and moved them to the capital of the Russian Empire. Whether the family would be able to remain and start a new life would be up to the twelve-year-old prodigy.

Located on a swamp on the Gulf of Finland, St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as Russia’s “Window to the West.” It replaced Moscow as the official capital of the tsar’s empire long before it became the country’s primary center of culture and business. When Boris and his family arrived in 1903, it was a heady time in the city’s history, and the Morros family got an unsettling welcome. The city was under martial law, yet striking factory workers and revolutionary students bravely covered the city with their red flags, marching as they sang “Hymn to Liberty” in place of “God Save the Tsar!” Boris’s parents heard with horror that the security forces of Alexander III’s son Nicholas II were breaking up the demonstrations and arresting hundreds of young men. Those who weren’t immediately executed were sent to the tsar’s brutal prison colonies in Siberia, never to be heard from again. The crackdown offered a lesson in the consequences of political commitment that Boris never forgot.

Boris was hardly the only child prodigy studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at this time. Opening in 1862 as the first Russian music school of its kind, the conservatory offered a ten-year course of study that included six years at the high school level followed by four years at the college level, as well as lessons for young talents who were not formally matriculated fulltime. Boris’s time there coincided with the waning of what is often called Russian music’s Silver Age, but the faculty still included such legends as Anatoly Liadov, Alexander Glazunov, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The student body, which had once included Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff, was in Boris’s time no less distinguished. Boris studied alongside numerous prodigies who later dominated the world of classical music, among them Jascha Heifetz, Serge Koussevitzky, and Sergei Prokofiev. They all practiced obsessively, learning to play every instrument in the orchestra, sometimes less out of musical passion than a desperate effort to stay warm during St. Petersburg’s long winters.

A degree from the St. Petersburg Conservatory all but guaranteed Jewish graduates a future that would have been otherwise impossible in tsarist Russia. The conservatory had been founded by a converted Jew, Anton Rubinstein, who made sure that Jews were welcome. In the early years of the twentieth century, half of the conservatory’s twelve hundred students were Jewish, at a time when Jews comprised 4 percent of the Russian population and most institutions of higher education capped their Jewish enrollment at 3 percent. A joke from the period calls the St. Petersburg Conservatory the only school in Russia that had a quota to keep out the goyim.

The Jewish atmosphere of the conservatory dominated not only head counts but musical content, which could be awkward for students like Boris who were interested in art, not religion. While Russian and German classics still predominated in the concert halls, St. Petersburg’s Jewish musicians were carrying out a revolution of their own, with the city becoming the center of efforts to document and promote the traditional Jewish religious and folk music of eastern Europe as an art in its own right. Under the auspices of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, the movement attracted many of the conservatory’s most talented musicians, but Boris never joined in the events they sponsored. Indeed, he refused to identify himself with any religion or political party, fearful that a reckoning was coming, when Jews—who were already considered insufficiently Russian and who were seen as foreigners and strangers, prone to violence, criminality, and revolution—could no longer depend on the meager protections offered by the tsar. Early on, Boris was an outsider among outsiders.

But it was impossible to escape history. In early 1905, midway through Boris’s second year at the conservatory, the tsar’s failure to approve a constitution guaranteeing basic civil rights, combined with widespread discontent with his war against Japan, in which more than a hundred thousand Russian soldiers had lost their lives, resulted in an enormous strike that shut down St. Petersburg. A peaceful crowd of more than a thousand men, women, and children gathered on Sunday, January 22, at the Winter Palace, the imperial family’s official residence, to demand economic and political reform. They were savagely attacked by the tsar’s troops, and more than two hundred civilians were killed.

Boris read about the incident in the newspapers and went back to practicing. But in the wake of what became known as Bloody Sunday, the country descended into chaos, with disruptive waves of protests, marches, and strikes. Eventually the tsar backed down and proposed the creation of an elected assembly called the Duma, with limited legislative and administrative powers. The gesture was inadequate: Only ten thousand of Russia’s 130 million inhabitants would be eligible to vote, legislative sessions were to be closed to the public, the Duma would have no oversight over the tsar’s ministers, and the tsar could dissolve the Duma at any time for any reason. Not surprisingly, public unrest, stoked by communist revolutionaries, intensified, and in December 1905, protesters shut the city down once again. Residents were left without power, transportation, mail, telegraph service, or newspapers. All of the city’s shops, as well as the conservatory, closed their doors as communists fought the tsar’s troops for ten days before surrendering, having seen hundreds of their comrades shot in the streets or arrested and sent into exile.

The tsar finally relented in May 1906, consenting to the establishment of a Duma that would be more broadly representative, even as he shut down dozens of newspapers and jailed their editors. Still, only a third of the Duma membership came from anti-tsarist parties, so it was unsurprising when their demands for land reform, a new education policy, and wider suffrage were all refused by the tsar, who dissolved the Duma in July. Then a wave of political assassinations convinced the tsar to crack down even more brutally on the press and opposition parties: He restricted voting rights, executed or exiled radicals, and orchestrated more pogroms in the provinces. By the time yet another Duma was seated in February 1907, it was clear that the tsar would continue to reign supreme, no matter how many of his ministers were assassinated, no matter how many young people marched, no matter how many workers went on strike. The dissolution of the newest version of the Duma in June 1907, and the seating of a much more conservative legislative later that month that backed anti-Semitic riots throughout the empire, sent shock waves through Russia’s provincial Jewish communities, which lost more than two thousand of their own in the massacres. St. Petersburg’s Jews were relatively safe, for the moment, but more than one million Jews living in the provinces, about 40 percent of Russia’s Jewish population, left the country during the period between the Revolution of 1905 and the outbreak of the Great War.

Students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory were at the forefront of these events, which Lenin later called a dress rehearsal for 1917. They paid the price. The government expelled and arrested dozens of students and closed down the conservatory indefinitely. When Boris’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, took the side of the students, he was dismissed. It was only after three hundred students quit school and threatened further unrest that Rimsky-Korsakov was reinstated and the school reopened.

Far from manning the barricades, Boris locked himself in his practice room, working on his counterpoint and perfecting his vibrato. It was a survival mechanism, and it worked. His reluctance to identify as a Jew and his lack of political commitment paid off when things returned to normal. Boris was a seasoned performer by the time he graduated in 1914, his father having taken him on concert tours of the provinces every summer since 1904. That was no doubt one of the reasons he was selected, while still a student, to serve as assistant musical director for the Imperial Opera Orchestra’s conductor, Eduard Nápravník, who appreciated Boris’s combination of artistic gifts and organizational talents. Upon Boris’s graduation, Nápravník recommended him for a position organizing and directing musical activities at the Imperial Court. At a time when Nicholas II’s popularity was at its lowest, Boris would be responsible for recruiting, rehearsing, and conducting the ensembles performed for the tsar and his government, and he would write and arrange much of the music as well. Mendel and Malka were overjoyed by their son’s success, but they worried about whether Boris would end up on the right side of the revolution that everyone knew was coming.

CHAPTER TWO
BROKEN CHORDS, 1914–22

St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace was the most luxurious of the tsar’s seven residences, a vast eighteenth-century baroque structure with more than fifteen hundred rooms on the banks of the Neva. It was a fitting monument to the world’s oldest and biggest empire, and it would be Boris’s new home, a world away from the cramped apartment that he had shared with his family. The entire ground floor of the Winter Palace was dominated by a state room that could accommodate ten thousand visitors and a dining room that could host a thousand guests at its central table. The third floor was reserved for living quarters for court officials like Boris, while the piano nobile in between served as the imperial family’s official home. The tsar and his family spent little time there, however, because the tsarina despised St. Petersburg, with its freezing winters and stifling summers. Moreover, because of the political turmoil that started in 1905, she felt safer in one of the tsar’s several palaces outside the city. She also had a strong distaste for the corruption and decadence of court life and tried to convince the tsar to scale back his official public duties. That wasn’t difficult, given the tsar’s preference for quiet evenings at home with his family. But there were still grand receptions for which Boris had to select the music and the musicians, rehearsing and conducting the ensembles in programs that ranged from military marches to the latest in social dancing imported from Western Europe. In 1913, Boris recalled, he organized the entertainment for a massive celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty’s ascension to power. The next year, when Russia entered the Great War, Boris conducted the military orchestra that played as the tsar and tsarina bid farewell to troops leaving for the front. If the music didn’t satisfy Boris’s artistic appetites, the prestige of the position more than compensated. The tsar’s guests must have been surprised to learn that the portly, already balding conductor providing the music was only in his early twenties, and they were often disturbed to hear the rumors that he was Jewish, but the tsar was happy to have found someone who could play anything and who never talked politics. Years of concertizing had given Boris a reputation in St. Petersburg as a crowd-pleaser, but Boris’s most frequent and appreciative listener was the “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias,” as the tsar was formerly known, a dignified, delicate, and well-bred man who insisted that Boris lead an ensemble to entertain the royal family at mealtimes. Boris also provided the keyboard accompaniment to the silent films the royal family loved to watch together on Saturdays, and he even performed for them aboard the imperial yacht. Much of this history comes from Boris’s own later accounts and is impossible to verify, given the chaos and destruction that the historical record was subject to during the Russian Revolution and the Soviet era. By the same token, there is nothing in the surviving archives to contradict most of Boris’s account. If nothing else, it leaves us with a very good idea of how Boris wanted this part of his life story to be written.

In 1915, when part of the Winter Palace was converted into a military hospital, a gesture aimed at appeasing the public’s outrage at the number of dead and wounded soldiers, Boris and his musicians were relocated to the nearby village of Tsarskoe Selo. There the Romanovs, insulated from the public unrest of St. Petersburg—the tsar read special newspapers printed just for him that didn’t include bad news—occupied the sumptuous neoclassical Alexander Palace, located in a sprawling complex of imperial palaces, churches, and gardens.

Despite the hardships that the war caused the average Russian, the tsar kept up appearances. A typical state dinner at Tsarskoe Selo included up to five hundred aristocrats, diplomats, and politicians who would be escorted into the palace’s semicircular gilt-and-marble Portrait Hall to the sounds of Boris’s orchestra. Seated under massive palm trees grown in the imperial greenhouses, guests enjoyed a French-style seven-course meal, starting with a traditional buffet of caviar, cheeses, cured meats, and smoked fish, and accompanied by copious amounts of champagne and vodka, which were poured by the two liveried servants assigned to each guest. Next came the dancing, again with music provided by Boris: The traditional polonaise was first, followed by waltzes and quadrilles, and then the tsar’s favorite opera arias and chamber works, church and military music, and Russian folk songs.

Boris tried to stay out of politics, but his role in the court put him square in the middle of the turmoil. In addition to providing entertainment at balls and receptions, he was charged with providing music at sessions of the Duma, which meant performing both the Russian national anthem, “God Save the Tsar!,” after major speeches by politicians who were partial to the tsar, and “The Marseillaise,” after addresses by members of the opposition parties.

Despite the enormous authority of the tsar and the considerable power of the Duma, the future of the empire, it was widely believed, was actually controlled by a filthy, smelly, rail-thin priest whom Boris encountered shortly after he came to the court. The notorious Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin’s supposed powers of prophecy and healing—he claimed to be able to treat the hemophilia that afflicted the young heir apparent, Alexei—captivated the superstitious tsarina and gave him entry to the most refined of St. Petersburg’s social and political circles. Boris came to know Rasputin, treasuring a set of amber beads that the “Mad Monk” gave him, but he knew to keep his distance, especially after Rasputin tried to convince the tsar to stay out of the Great War. That made Rasputin some very powerful enemies. Boris had heard the rumors that Rasputin was even secretly advocating for a separate peace with Germany, which was a very unpopular position in the tsar’s inner circle of advisors. Boris was shocked, but perhaps not surprised, to learn that on December 30, 1916, the tsar’s closest advisors tried unsuccessfully to poison Rasputin with a chocolate pastry. Hours later, they finished the job by shooting him in the back, beating and castrating him, drowning him, and then dumping his body into a St. Petersburg canal. Objects associated with Rasputin were soon in demand as collectors’ items and talismans, including his penis, which one of his paramours apparently preserved for decades. Boris already had his own relic, the amber beads, but he also learned a lesson about the wages of being close to power.

Boris witnessed the decline of Russian Empire firsthand. The tsar had dec...