On eve of bitter election, consider story of actress Ruta Lee
We have a rule on the opinion pages of the nation’s oldest newspaper: nothing about the election two days before the election. An error would be difficult to correct in a fair manner; there would be insufficient time to react to a revelation. I saved for this week a story more inspiring than partisan competition: It’s the improbable story of actress Ruta Lee, her grandmother and a call to Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev.
By 1964, Lee was a busy and popular actress in Hollywood and New York with a burden. She’d danced in the last great MGM musical, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” and become a frequent guest on some of the nation’s most popular television series. Frank Sinatra cast her in his last Rat Pack movie, “Sergeants 3.” Lee’s ebullient personality made her a popular game show regular, and her reputation as a stage actress continued to grow. Lee was tormented by her inability to get her grandmother, Ludvise Kamandulis, from a life of relentless misery in the imprisoned nation of Lithuania. Kamandulis and her husband had been put on a cattle car to Siberia during Josef Stalin’s long, murderous reign of terror. Her husband died on the journey.
Kamandulis, Lee told me in a phone interview Wednesday, was alone in a gulag, prepared to perish.
A Soviet army officer in Siberia chose Kamandulis to work as a nanny to his children, providing some relief from communism’s deprivations. After 15 years, Lee’s grandmother was allowed to make her way back to Lithuania. Lee would send her money sewn into used clothes.
Lee, who had spent years working official channels to get her grandmother to the United States, despaired at news from an aunt that her grandmother’s health was failing. Friends took Lee to dinner to console the star. The bar bill was formidable that night. When Lee arrived home, she initiated some epic drunk dialing.
At 1 a.m., the masterful storyteller recalls, Lee initiated a person-to-person call to Khrushchev at the Kremlin, where she knew the workday had begun. In 1957, Lee played a pivotal character in film’s greatest courtroom drama, Agatha Christie’s “Witness for the Prosecution.” Her part required her to give some lip to the love rival played by the imperious Marlene Dietrich. A cranky Soviet operator stood no chance against Lee, whose saucy memoir “Consider Your Ass Kissed,” will be published next spring.
The savvy Lee knew to accept the offer to speak to Khrushchev’s young interpreter, whom she’d seen softening some of his boss’s inflamed speeches for Western audiences. And he knew the name Ruta Lee, because the most hardened totalitarian functionary often possessed a taste for razzle-dazzle American entertainment. Two days later, Lee and her parents were on their way to Lithuania. Getting her grandmother to freedom would take longer. In the meantime, Lee, a Johnny Carson favorite, began to unfurl the saga on “The Tonight Show,” enthralling the host and viewers. When Kamandulis reached America, Lee recalled, she came down the steps of the plane, knelt, kissed the ground, and proclaimed, “Hello, America.”
Lee and her grandmother made a triumphant appearance on Carson’s show. America was delighted. The reaction confirmed what the Montreal-born actress knew about the United States. “Americans are