National Affairs: Can-Can Without Pants?

As she flounced off the set of Can-Can in Hollywood one day last week, Actress Shirley MacLaine began running over her lines. “How the hell are you, Khrush? I’m goddammed glad you’re here. Welcome to our country; and welcome to 20th Century-Fox, and I hope you enjoy seeing how Hollywood makes a musical. We’re going to shoot the can-can number without pants.” Like most of Hollywood, which was like most of the U.S., Shirley MacLaine had the Khrushchev visit on her mind (she is an official movie hostess) and, since it was inevitable, saw no reason for not relaxing and making it the gayest oddball social event of the season.

Around Shirley, Hollywood was scrambling with Oscar-night fury for tickets for the Khrushchev lunch at the 20th Century-Fox studios. Wives who had not been seen publicly with their husbands for months were demanding that they were just as essential as Mrs. Khrush (only the celebrated married couples, e.g., Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Dick Powell and June Allyson, got automatic twosome invitations). Things were getting so tough that the host committee, trying to winnow Hollywood’s must-be-seen-there thousands down to a sociable 400, flatly decided to discriminate against actors’ agents.

It was the same all along the Khrushchev banquet circuit, from white tie to rolled sleeves, from the White House to Manhattan, to San Francisco, Des Moines and Pittsburgh. In San Francisco, demands for tickets to the Commonwealth Club’s banquet were matching Franklin Roosevelt’s historic appearance in 1932. Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria grand ballroom was booked solid for the mayor’s lunch (and a visiting convention of dentists, with a prior booking for the ballroom, was not too sure it was going to give up its rights) and again for a dinner sponsored by the Economic Club.

Even the solo performances took on the glamour of major production. New York’s ex-Governor Averell Harriman and Eleanor Roosevelt, both Khrushchev’s guests in Russia who doubtless had said politely, “Come and see me if you’re ever in America,” found themselves with protocol-sized problems—Harriman with a reception in his Manhattan apartment, Mrs. R. with a tour of the F.D.R. home at Hyde Park. Khrush’s favorite U.S. farmer, Roswell Garst of Coon Rapids, Iowa, placated photographers by trying on a coat given him by Khrushchev in Moscow last March, finally decided to turn his planned small country luncheon for the Khrushchev party over to a Des Moines caterer. Most overtaxed solo performer of all: U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., assigned by the President to be Khrushchev’s official host, ready to answer, parry or debate any of the unpredictable Khrushchev public thrusts.

The whole scene of week-before pandemonium would have pleased Nikita Khrushchev as much as a red carpet. He had made it clear to the State Department that he really did not want to see any more of the U.S. landscape than he could avoid (he ducked a visit to TVA and Ike’s old home at Abilene, Kans.). Quite obviously, he wanted a lot of places to talk and a lot of people to listen to him. From all the week-before signs, that is just what most of the curious and relaxed U.S. wanted too.