Nyet, Nyet : Soviet Beauty Queen Denies Allegations of Affair With Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev should feel distinctly unflattered.

“I cannot even imagine it,” says Masha Kalinina, 19, as she waits backstage before an appearance Thursday on “A.M. Los Angeles.” “He is as old as my father. It is not possible.”

Kalinina, a tall, dark-eyed young woman who became the first Soviet beauty queen in 1988, has been accused in a Soviet tabloid of an ongoing affair with the 60-year-old Soviet president. The “Mish-Mash Affair,” it was called, after Gorby’s nickname, Misha. After the allegations were picked up recently by German and American tabloids, Kalinina decided to go public with her denials.

Kalinina arrived in America seven months ago to start an acting career after a series of international modeling appearances and an Italian movie. She achieved celebrity in 1988 after she beat more than 2,000 contenders to win the first beauty crown ever given in the Soviet Union, landing a German modeling contract and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

She found her way to Hollywood with the help of men like Michael Hammer, the grandson of the late Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum, who pioneered doing business with the Soviet Union when beauty queens were considered capitalist exploitation. It was as a favor to a public relations man at Occidental Petroleum, says Greg LaBrache of the huge PR firm of Hill and Knowlton, that he agreed to represent Kalinina for free. He did so, he added, only after meeting her and deciding she was “the all-American girl next door--from Moscow.”

A reporter asks jokingly if she knows the American phrase sugar daddy.

“Sugar daddy?” she echoes. “What is that? Sounds sweet, like candy. Nice, like father.”

LaBrache intervenes.

“Oh, no,” says LaBrache, a veteran, with a nervous look at the reporter. “You don’t understand, Masha.”

After learning that quick lesson in American idioms, she explains that when she was a child during the 1980 Olympics, teachers warned children not to take candy from American tourists because it might be poison.

About her beauty queen experience, she says, “The contest was a trampoline for my career. But I would never, ever do it again. Being in a bathing suit, you cannot think.”

Minutes later, the Russian ingenue meets the Hollywood press corps, men mostly, very prepared to disbelieve a young woman calling a press conference to preserve her reputation rather than to capitalize on a scandal.

LaBrache looks around at the crowd and wishes aloud his corporate presidents drew such a response.

Poised and friendly, Kalinina says right off, “It is untrue.”

She denies ever meeting Gorby. “Never, ever ,” she says, shaking her short dark hair. But she was privileged, she says, to have seen him once across a hall when attending a Van Cliburn concert with her parents in Moscow last year. He was with his wife, Raisa, whom Kalinina describes as the “ideal Russian wife.” Nor are the reports true, she says, that her father, a doctor, attends Gorbachev.

She adds that she turned down offers to pose for Playboy and Penthouse.

Why, asks a chorus of cynics, are you holding a press conference to call attention to this?

“Because I want to clear my name,” she insists. “I don’t want to start my career as a serious actress in this way. I am going to make my career in a different way.”

Kalinina doesn’t want to be Fanny Fox or Vicki Morgan or Donna Rice, she makes clear, but Audrey Hepburn, who is the goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Reporters look around at each other amused as she launches into discussion about appearances she is making on behalf of abused children, environmental causes, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign.

She smiles a lot, stands her ground, and doesn’t even have fake fingernails. The press corps is puzzled. One reporter asks if she can please restate her denials in Russian for a network there.

Silence. Nothing happens. Well? asks the reporter.

“I am waiting for the question in Russian,” she says.

Finally, realizing the reporter cannot oblige, she graciously starts into a quiet monologue. Then she repeats her performance in Spanish, lighting up this time in effusive and perfect Castillian she learned in school.

Determined to convince this group that she is a serious student of acting, she lists her schedule of studies (dialect training, two acting instructors, singing, dancing, aerobics). Then she gets down on all fours, in heels and a cashmere sweater with a yellow hammer and sickle on it, and pretends to be a cat--not, it should be stressed, a kitten. This cat purrs, scratches itself and hisses.

Then, finished with her demonstration, she suddenly jumps up, smiles like the teen-ager she is, and says, “Stanislavsky method.” The idea, she explains, is to pretend to be an animal to better show emotions.

After 40 minutes are up, Kalinina has reporters not only believing her, but asking to have their pictures taken with her.

A beguiling combination: a wordly ingenue. A little like characters Audrey Hepburn once played.