Hunting the rich and famous in the Cold War

Scratch any breathing person and you’re going to uncover a fan. The object of adulation might be a football team or a school or a singer or a movie star. There’s a slim chance it might even be a political figure.

What is fan-ship, anyway? Why is it that the mere sight of a certain person can cause heads to turn and pulses to quicken? Maybe you caught a glimpse of Matthew McConaughey making a movie in Dewey last year or Julia Roberts and Richard Gere filming “Runaway Bride” outside Ocean City a few seasons back.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet lots of famous people in my career as a radio news reporter. Even though film stars and all-star athletes are almost like the rest of us (no brighter, no better, sometimes not even better looking), an aura does surround them. Maybe it’s the aura that made them rich and famous. Or maybe luck was responsible and they sort of grew into the aura, along with the Rolex watch and the Giorgio Armani rags.

I had my greatest exposure to major-league celebs in the early ’60s in — of all places — Berlin, Germany. The Communist East Germans had just built their infamous wall and tensions were running extremely high between the Kennedy administration and the Khrushchev crowd in Moscow. Hardly a day passed without some American luminary from the world of politics, literature or show business turning up at Berlin’s teeming Tempelhof Airport.

For the show-biz folks, it was an opportunity to do “something for the boys,” to boost morale and show appreciation to the troops, as the USO has always done in times of conflict. In those tumultuous days after the Wall went up, Ed Sullivan brought his enormously popular variety show to Berlin. Jack Paar flew in his “Tonight” show cast. I interviewed Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Hayes, Jayne Mansfield, David O. Selznick, Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar and scores of other luminaries from stage, screen and television.

In early August, 1961, just before the Communists sealed off East Berlin, film-making legend Billy Wilder brought in Jimmy Cagney to star in a big-budget comedy called “One, Two, Three.” Filming was set to begin on Sunday morning, Aug. 13. It was precisely then that the East Germans closed off the border, unspooling barbed wire, setting up tank traps and sending armed troops to the Brandenburg Gate.

There were frantic calls between Wilder and the MGM head office back in the States. Some studio execs wanted to abandon the production since, they reasoned, no one would want to see a comedy set in Berlin during a major political crisis that could easily lead to war.

While “One, Two, Three”’s fate was being decided, the cast and crew had little to do but hang around the bar at the Berlin Hilton, which is where I found Cagney one afternoon, nursing a tall drink. He expressed interest in getting up close to the border, where East German work crews were using heavy equipment to tear up the asphalt in preparation for building their wall.

I offered to drive him there, since my press card permitted me to pass through the West Berlin police lines. As we approached the East German road crews, Cagney noticed the large number of men dressed in the forest green uniforms of the Communist “People’s Police.” All were armed with Tommy guns. My famous passenger, who built his career playing tough-talking gangsters said, “Hey, those guys are armed. I think this is close enough. Let’s go back to the Hilton for a drink.”

That seemed like a very good idea, since we were close enough to the “enemy lines” to appear provocative. I certainly did not want to be held responsible for getting us arrested. Imagine the headline: “Movie Tough Guy Jimmy Cagney Nabbed by Commies in Berlin.”

A few days later, MGM decided to continue shooting “One, Two, Three.” But the production company moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Munich, where director Wilder didn’t have to worry about interference from the Communist police when he had actor Horst Buchholz ride his motorcycle through a cleverly reconstructed Brandenburg Gate.

When the movie was released, the U.S. and Russia were in the midst of a full-scale crisis over the situation in Berlin. Not many people were interested in seeing a fast-paced comedy with Jimmy Cagney playing a loud, ugly American businessman trying to expand his soft-drink empire behind the Iron Curtain. It became one of Cagney’s and Wilder’s few commercial failures. But over the years it’s developed something of a cult following.

I think that a movie about the making of “One, Two, Three” would have been a heck of a lot more interesting.

Dick Rossé is a 36-year veteran of the Mutual and NBC radio networks, and for his final dozen years at NBC served as senior news correspondent in Washington, D.C. He currently resides in Dagsboro.