The Day That the Reds Came

It was the day the temperature reached 112 in downtown L.A.

I was wearing the lightest suit I own, which is one of those rumpled, off-white things favored by British black marketeers in Kuala Lumpur.

I was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt I bought at Penney’s. It was drenched with sweat and stuck to my body like fly paper. I looked like hell.

That was particularly obvious because I was in one of the toniest clothing stores on Rodeo Drive, interviewing the mayor of Moscow near shirts that cost $300 each and a cashmere sports coat worth more than everything in my closet.

Even a leather chewing gum case sold for $145. I don’t think I paid that much for my suit.

The place was Hermes, an establishment that is to Penney’s what Paris is to Bellflower.

There were actually four Russians in the party and they were visiting at the invitation of the L.A. Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

They straggled in about an hour late, looking more like survivors from the battle of Stalingrad than messengers of a New Russia. That’s what heat and smog can do to a man.

The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Louzshkov, was not the most important Russian among them. Pavel Bounitch was. He is an economist, a member of the Supreme Soviet and the architect of perestroika.

This was whispered to me by several people in the entourage, both American and Russian, who hovered over me like bees at a honey farm.

Well, I was all they had.

No other media people showed up. It was just the Russians, two translators, two public relations people, some Hermes sales personnel and me, in my Kuala Lumpur suit.

I am thinking, at last, an opportunity to write an Important Column, which is what my leaders are constantly urging me to do. Never mind your dog-and-pony essays, they say. We want substance!

I will call it simply A Very Important Column, discuss perestroika and glasnost in concise and vivid terms and be invited to join the International Fellowship of Pundits. My dog and my pony will prance with joy.

But things went wrong.

Assistant store manager Elisabeth D’Chartoy presented each of the four Russians with a $95 silk tie. While they were thanking her, she made the mistake of offering to let them exchange their ties for other designs and/or colors if they wished.

The mayor of Moscow, who looked a little like Charles Durning playing Nikita Khrushchev, said OK, or the Russian equivalent thereof, and chose another one, just like that. I’ve never seen a mayor make a decision that quickly.

It was a ridiculous black and white speckled number, but, hey, these are people raised on borscht and boiled potatoes. They’ve got a long way to go before they attain even my level of haute couture.

Two of the others also made up their minds quickly, but Bounitch, the architect of Russian perestroika, lingered . . . and lingered . . . and lingered.

I saw my Bird of Significance flutter out the window and die in the crushing heat.

Someone suggested I ought to start interviewing the mayor, since time was fleeting and Bounitch was drifting somewhere between Ivy League diagonals and paisley prints.

If the theory of perestroika were neckties, he’d still be working on it. Every once in awhile he said “Goot,” meaning not bad, but then went on to something else.

Our translator was Sophia Lansky, who did a very nice job, but there was more than a language barrier here.

Louzshkov, being a mayor, was fluent in the dialect of diversion and managed to avoid adding anything noteworthy to the current dialogue between us and what used to be known as the Evil Empire.

He did say that the capitalistic elegance characterized by Hermes seemed to be unnecessary, but since the store had customers, it was OK. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

He was basically saying if it sells, sell it.

What Russia needs, he added, was more of the kind of peasant clothes I was wearing; good, I mean goot, basic stuff. “Our market is thin,” he said, “and so deep in its emptiness.”

I tried to get a little into what appears to be an end to the Cold War and possibly to Godless Communism (do we still call it that?), but platitudes prevailed.

He is glad we are friends, he is having a fine time in Beverly Hills, and he is delighted that the Soviet Union is concentrating on the production of clothes instead of tanks. Food will come next.

Just about then, Bounitch chose a tie of golden zebras grazing on a pale blue Masai Mara and everyone marched out the door, taking my chance at significance with them.

So much for the Russian Bear. Wanna hear about my dog and pony?