The Magnificent Elmer by Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner Read Free Book Online Page B

goings. A young KGB agent was our constant companion and he saw that we took no photos of sensitive military installations. Although we, as international guests, had relatively easy access to the festival screenings, tickets for movie-crazed Muscovites were hard to come by. At the main ceremonies, Stanley Kramer was given a special medal by the Soviet government for building a cinematic bridge to peace between the Russian and American people.
    More moving for me was the presentation of an award to a Russian director who had recently been released from a Russian gulag in order to be present at the festival. His release was part of the détente and liberalizing spirit of the Soviet government in the early sixties on the heels of Cuban Missile Crisis. He sobbed about having gained his freedom and described his incarceration.
    When Elmer and I deserted our enormous high-ceiled hotel suite, it wasn’t to attend a screening of Czarne Skyrzdla in the original Swedish. Some of the screenings held scant appeal to even such eclectic souls as Elmer and me. We spent a lot of our time doing what Americans like to do best: sightseeing. We had never visited Moscow before and naturally had to see the stores. Gumm’s was the city’s famous retail emporium, but we were surprised and depressed to see that the massive Gumm’s, like the many less famous stores, were as empty of merchandise as they were of customers. The major outlet for Russia’s manufacturers at that time seemed to contain little beside ball-point pens, picture postcards, and nested figurines.
    The mercantile market had moved outdoors onto Moscow’s grim gray streets. A black market was thriving. Venders who had rescued product from the backs of trucks were busy on the spider streets that grew out of Red Square. That summer the big deal was blue jeans. The citizens of Moscow that had survived Hitler’s armies had just surrendered to the comfort and strength of blue jean fabrics, and this formed a sartorial kinship with their American visitors.
    One evening the visitors to the festival were invited to a nearby movie theater to see another American film that had recently been released to great acclaim in the Soviet Union. It was the American version of the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story . It had been hailed in Russia as a movie landmark. American musicals had usually been attacked by Soviet critics—in story, in literature, in content, they were considered insubstantial. That was the basic criticism in Russia of all things American—a lack of substance . We offered a sports car to the Soviet tractor. But after all, West Side Story was Shakespeare updated to the mid-century world. And it didn’t hurt that it painted a picture of American prejudice and poverty.
    The movie-mad buffs in the Moscow audience were thrilled by the camera work in the film’s opening shot of New York City. It established the slum locale and brought applause from the audience, an ovation before the movie had even begun. Then I heard a whispered commotion begin at the front of the theatre. Heads turned as word spread of something epochal at work. Finally we learned its cause as a thick-set Soviet woman in the row ahead of us turned and whispered to us in an agony of excitement.
    “Bernstein—he’s here!”
    There was evidently some confusion. In Moscow all those Bernsteins looked alike.
    “Bernstein—he’s in the audience!” said a bald, black-bearded Russian in our row.
    I saw Elmer’s hands grip the arms of his seat. I detected a naughty look in his eye that I knew too well.
    “Don’t you dare stand up!” I hissed.
    ***
    On the first day of the festival, I picked up a copy of the New York Times at a kiosk on Red Square and read a story about a speech that President Kennedy had just delivered as a commencement address at American University. It seemed to augur well for our relations with the Soviet Union. Without a recommendation from Congress, Kennedy had