THE DAY JUDY AND MARILYN MET KHRUSHCHEV

At the height of the cold war in 1959 Twentieth Century Fox invited Khrushchev to lunch and he accepted, and according to the New York Times "One of the angriest social free-for-alls in the uninhibited and colorful history of Hollywood is in the making about who is to be at the September 19 luncheon,"
Never in history has there been such demand for a ticket to an event. In Hollywood the clamoring to get in was unprecedented. To this day it remains Hollywood’s toughest ticket. Getting a front row seat to the Oscars is an easy task compared to getting an invite to the Nikita Khruschev luncheon. The lust for invitations to the Khrushchev lunch was so strong that it overpowered the fear of communism that had reigned in Hollywood since 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating the movie industry, inspiring a blacklist of supposed communists that was still enforced in 1959. Producers who were scared to death of being seen snacking with a communist screenwriter were desperate to be seen dining with the communist dictator.
Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan turned down their invitations as a protest against Khrushchev
20th Century Fox announced that it would not invite agents or the stars' spouses.. The only husband-and-wife teams invited were those in which both members were stars—Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh; Dick Powell and June Allyson; Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher. Marilyn Monroe's husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, might have qualified as a star, but he was urged to stay home because he was a leftist who'd been investigated by the House committee and therefore was considered too radical to dine with a communist dictator.
Waiting for Khrushchev to arrive, Edward G. Robinson sat at table 18 with Judy Garland and Shelley Winters. Robinson puffed on his cigar and gazed out at the kings and queens of Hollywood—the men wearing dark suits, the women in designer dresses and shimmering jewels. Kim Novak was there. And Dean Martin, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, and Elizabeth Taylor. "This is the nearest thing to a major Hollywood funeral that I've attended in years," said Mark Robson, the director of Peyton Place, as he eyeballed the scene.
Marilyn Monroe sat at a table with producer David Brown, director Joshua Logan and actor Henry Fonda, whose ear was stuffed with a plastic plug that was attached to a transistor radio tuned to a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, who were fighting for the National League pennant.
As the waiters delivered lunch—squab, wild rice, Parisian potatoes and peas with pearl onions—Charlton Heston, who'd once played Moses, attempted to make small talk with Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet novelist who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. "I have read excerpts from your works," Heston said.
"Thank you," Sholokhov replied. "When we get some of your films, I shall not fail to watch some excerpts from them."
Nearby, Nina Khrushchev showed Frank Sinatra and David Niven pictures of her grandchildren and bantered with cowboy star Gary Cooper, one of the few American actors she'd actually seen on-screen. She told Bob Hope that she wanted to see Disneyland.
That never happened.

Sections of this report were written by Peter Carlson.