Soviet spies! G-men! Blackmail! Assassins! Silly code names! This sounds like a movie, but they can all be found in Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy, a biography of perhaps the world's most improbable secret agent.
It wasn't just that Morros was short, bald, rotund, poorly dressed and otherwise superficially the anti-James Bond; he was also, writes Jonathan Gill (Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America), "ideologically uncommitted, constitutionally indiscreet, addicted to fame and money, and oblivious to the distinction between truth and fiction." When researching Hollywood Double Agent, Gill couldn't rely on Morros's 1959 autobiography, My Ten Years as a Counterspy--even Morros's widow called it fiction. Instead, Gill turned to previously classified documents from the FBI and the KGB, and the result is a gob-smackingly good read.
Morros was born in 1891 in Russia; a piano prodigy, he became a member of the tsar's court. After the Russian Revolution, Morros went to Baku, Azerbaijan, and met Catherine, a wealthy woman with a sick husband. Morros fled with her to Constantinople, where, as someone "more interested in Mozart than Marx," he resolved to get to Europe or the U.S. After Catherine's husband died, she became Morros's first wife, and the pair managed to secure passage on a boat to New York in 1922. Following a stint in Boston, where Morros massaged the truth to become the director of music at a synagogue, he and Catherine returned to Manhattan in 1925. There Morros made a name for himself in the music biz working for Paramount Pictures, impressing founder Adolph Zukor. But Zukor wasn't the only one taking note of Morros's rise.
At a meeting in 1934, by which point Morros was one of the pillars of the Paramount operation, Soviet agents appealed to him to help create an anti-fascist underground in Germany in exchange for cash. For starters, Morros was to provide cover: he would fabricate business correspondence and send a monthly "salary" to Germany for "Herbert," who was ostensibly there to scout for talent. Soon Morros was expected to do more. He worked his second job even after he moved to the West Coast to head Paramount's music department. This was Hollywood's golden age, and Morros was realizing his dream of becoming a big-shot movie producer--until the demands of his sideline started to take over his life.
Readers of Hollywood Double Agent may come for the glitter, but they'll stay for the intrigue. Although Gill's book reads like a Cold War thriller, at heart it's the amazing true story of an American dream gone wrong. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Like a multiplex blockbuster, this biography of a Russian-born Hollywood player turned spy has it all: intrigue, glamour, humor, romance and danger.