As Jonathan Gill tells it, the Oscar-nominated Hollywood producer Boris Morros (1891-1963) had a story fit for the pictures. The Russian-born Morros was a Soviet operative in America who became a double agent for the FBI.
Gill’s biography, Hollywood Double-Agent, opens in a Munich hotel room, a rendezvous point with Morros’ KGB contact. He was apprehensive and had reason to worry that his deception had been unmasked, “Every little noise kept him awake,” Gill writes. Distant footsteps approach, someone turns the doorknob and finding it locked, slips a note under the door. With nervous hands, Morros reads it—a code word from his FBI handlers meaning “Run! The KGB is onto you and they’re coming!”
An executive at Paramount studio in the 1930s, Morros is described by Gill as apolitical, a survivor who “flourished by telling people what they wanted to hear.” He’s like a character out of John le Carré, and yes, Hollywood Double-Agent is a page turner.
Gill is a professor of American history at the University of Amsterdam and like many historians, he’s a little foggy on history when it falls outside his field of focus. Misfacts turn up several times in Hollywood Double-Agent: Russia was not the world’s oldest empire when Morro ostensibly took his post as a music director for the Tsar; the Bolsheviks were never on America’s side in World War I; the Pacific Ocean wasn’t “infested” with U-boats during World War II. Gill is on firmer ground once Morro reaches Ellis Island.
But then comes the book’s biggest challenge: Morros was an unreliable narrator, papering over gaps with entertaining stories. Gill looked at such U.S. and Soviet archives as are available, read contemporary press accounts and knit together a plausible account whose sources are impossible to verify, as Double-Agent includes no footnotes. Gill admits to the problem. “As with much of Boris’s early history, the facts are ultimately unknowable, and one suspects that Boris preferred them that way,” he writes. Gill sifts out the most improbable tales from the possible plot line.
The Morros who emerges from Hollywood Double-Agent is sympathetic—a hustler who got hustled but ducked every bullet. According to Gill, Morros was a reluctant spy. He may have begun his work for Soviet intelligence out of fear for his family in Russia; he might have wanted to use his position at Paramount to help support an anti-Nazi network in Germany; he might have seen the Soviet connection as tax-free income. In the end, who knows?
