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), "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.
A piano prodigy in 1891 in Russia, Morros made a name for himself in the music biz working for Paramount Pictures in 1920s Manhattan. By 1934, Morros was one of the pillars of the Paramount operation, and Soviet agents appealed to him to help create an anti-fascist underground in Germany in exchange for cash. He worked this second job even after he moved to the West Coast to head Paramount's music department. 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