was certain to strike an eighteen-year-old American boy as radical indeed) involved swimming along the Moscow River. The waterfront was segmented into four separate, fenced-off beaches: male nude, female nude, mixed in bathing suits, and mixed nude.
In a matter of months after America’s belated recognition of the Soviet Union, the University of Moscow had established an Anglo-American Institute for English-speaking students. One of them was the former president of the Socialist Club at Princeton. I called on him the day I reached Moscow. The next day, I canceled the rest of my program with Intourist, moved into a dormitory at the university and enrolled myself in Sociology II or “Crime and Punishment in the Soviet Union.”
The Americans at the Institute had gone to Russia, for the most part, under the aegis of the decidedly left-wing National Students Union. Two members of the Dartmouth delegation were to be among my closest friends in Hollywood, Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf, both sons of important movie executives. Two and a half year later, Budd and I were a writing team for David Selznick. Maurice went on to teach film at Dartmouth, where, as a student in the early thirties, he was a founder of the film society.
Of the three of us, Budd was the most ideologically committed. I was viewed, by contrast, as something of a rightwinger. I nearly got thrown out of the country, in fact, for a frivolous deed that I committed in cahoots with a Canadian student named Mark. A group of our peers had put up a “wall newspaper” whose leaden seriousness prompted the two of us to post one of our own. Our comic intent was, we believed, unmistakable, so we were ill-prepared for the reaction of one Professor Pinkevich, a robust scholar with bushy eyebrows who had been selected to run the Institute despite his flimsy command of English. Summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of critiquing our work, we found that he had provided himself with an interpreter in order to prevent misunderstanding. As Mark and I entered the room, Pinkevich rose and greeted us formally. Then he sat down again while the interpreter opened the proceedings:
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