That Glasnost Girl

Forty-five million Russians can't be wrong, though quite a few were taken by surprise when, as one critic observed, glasnost came "storming out of the gate," gloriously embodied by Natalya Negoda in Little Vera (see review, page 20). One astonished Moscow movie maven called director Vasily Pichul's controversial film an act of cultural terrorism--as if someone had dropped a bomb into the lap of Mother Russia. There has been nothing quite like it in the annals of U.S.S.R. cinema. In London, the Red-hot film event was summed up under a banner headline welcoming "Vera the Terrible." Small wonder that Natalya was hailed in Montreal as "the Soviet Union's first sex star." Thus came worldwide fame to 25-year-old Natalya, who won a Best Actress award at Chicago's 24th International Film Festival for her title role as the wayward, sultry Vera in the film that was also honored in Chicago as Best Picture. Drugs, nudity, promiscuity and domestic violence are the previously taboo subjects that seem second nature to Vera, a rebellious working-class girl in the bleak port city of Zhdanov. She sheds her clothes, sleeps around, drinks, pops pills, otherwise generally testing the limits of censorship and contemporary community standards behind the Iron Curtain, of all the unlikely places.

Thanks to Gorbachev, that notoriously opaque curtain has begun to show signs of see-through seductiveness, permitting a little political peekaboo between East and West. Naturally, Playboy's editors were delighted late last year when some quiet negotiations well below the summit offered reasonable hope that the screen sensation wowing them from Minsk to Moscow might be free to fly West for a revealing pictorial. 'Twas the month before Christmas, and visions of glasnost and perestroika danced in our heads. Soon, Natalya herself arrived in Los Angeles, accompanied by interpreter Viviane Mikhalkov, to confer with West Coast Photo Editor Marilyn Grabowski, whose first impression was that a Soviet-American space walk might be easier than a joint effort in photography. "Natalya seemed dour, even grim," Marilyn recalls, "and gave off an aura of not trusting Playboy or Americans in general. When we asked questions, the word we heard more than anything else was nyet." Roughly two weeks later, their cold war had dissolved in a détente of girl talk and good vibes. Natalya was in New York to shoot her Playboy cover. She had been to Disneyland, even to the Playboy Mansion for a lengthy tête-à-tête with Hef (on-the-spot subtitles by Mikhalkov), and reported: "I would be happy that we talked longer, but his lady picked him up." Declaring herself "all filled up with the places I've been," Natalya mused about how Soviet people might view her adventures abroad. "Playboy is pretty fast for us in Russia. You know, we're a little heavy-minded."

At a leisurely lunch at New York's Jean LaFitte restaurant, Natalya joked, flirted with the waiter and sampled the joys of crème brÛlée, while her interpreter reminded us: "You know she doesn't have all day free... she wants to go shopping." The next day, she would catch a return flight to Moscow, and Natalya gravely noted, "On the plane, I must put my head back into being Russian. I won't be able to transmit all my emotions to my friends back in Moscow. They'll think I am inventing things." She recalled the furor Little Vera had set off because in it "a Soviet woman shows her tits in public. At the Moscow premiere, during the sexual scene, they were yelling, 'How dare you?' Don't forget, we are a hypocritical society. The sex was criticized much more than the film's social content." Natalya was intrigued to learn that similar reactions are not uncommon over here. "Young people, who are more open, love this movie. People of Stalin's time are more negative." The film was shot in Zhdanov, which was named for a Stalinist official "who's now nicknamed the strangler of Russian culture. For my generation, it's a paradox, this beautiful city on the seaside, where you want to be in love... with huge factories providing the wonders of pollution." In casting Vera, director Pichul saw free-spirited Natalya as a natural for the role. "He needed my freedom, I needed his discipline," she says. "Sometimes people ask me, 'How can you know about Vera? Your family is from the intelligentsia.' In Russia, I tell them, we're all in the same boat."

Brought up among worldly artists and writers, Natalya asserts she was "born in a trunk." Her mother is a movie director, her father directs plays. When she first heard about the possibility of coming to America to be photographed for Playboy, she didn't believe a word of it. "I thought it was all a joke, some friends playing a trick on me. But here I am." She didn't get much sleep on her American junket, given the pace of photo sessions in L.A. and New York. Still, from Disneyland to downtown Manhattan, Natalya declared the excitement outweighed her exhaustion. "I'm amazed how easily I was able to fight off a lot of complexes. I invented a role for myself, as an actress in America, and it started to please me very much. Also, people around me were so marvelous and creative.... I've been taught here a certain professionalism in front of a camera." Known since childhood as a tomboy, she has a hard time seeing herself as sexy and claims she became an actress because she was lazy and not very good at foreign languages or math. "But, of course, I have a big ego and a lot of pride. I'd love to be famous all over." Natalya's warmest memories of America, she decided, would be "my relationship with Marilyn and the smiles of people I've met." The feeling was mutual, according to Grabowski, who recalls a fond farewell: "She didn't want to say goodbye. I looked at this little girl with springy curls and pretty make-up, wearing a newly purchased sheepskin coat, also the Mickey Mouse watch I had given her as a souvenir, and we understood each other completely." Da.