Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  A few weeks later, after a brief trip out of town to deliver a speech, she called Wright from New York, requesting that he pick her up at the New Haven train station later that night. When she got into her car at the station, she immediately saw that the handyman was drunk, and ordered him out of the driver’s seat. She took the wheel herself and drove off. But somewhere en route, Wright grabbed the steering wheel and struck her so hard on the side of the face that two of her teeth cut through her lower lip, and she blacked out. That’s the story she told the FBI a few days later. But it was not the story Mr. Wright told when he was subpoenaed by U.S. Attorney Myles Lane a few days after that. Wright said that when he picked up Bentley at the station, she insisted on going out for drinks. The two consumed $13.50 worth of liquor—more than enough to pay for a half dozen drinks apiece—at a “respectable restaurant” in New Haven. Bentley was drunk but insisted on driving them home. When Wright became concerned over her ability to keep the car on the road, he grabbed the keys from the ignition and told her he was going to drive the rest of the way home. Bentley was infuriated, he said, and struck him across the face with her gloves, which were trimmed with buckles. At that point, Wright said, he “blew his cork and hit her with a right cross.” But Tom Spencer at the New York field office, the FBI agent who knew Bentley the best, thought both versions were fishy. He figured Bentley and Wright had gotten sloppy drunk together, then had gotten into a fight that veered out of control.

  Whatever the truth, the fact was that Bentley was injured. The blow to her face loosened several teeth and, by the time she saw her doctor in New York, the gashes inside her mouth where the lower teeth had punctured the soft tissue, were badly infected. And, whoever started the fight for whatever reason, Bentley was now scared of her handyman. The day after the altercation, she found him lounging in her living room. He did not apologize or even acknowledge the attack. Later that week, she noticed that a bottle of scotch was missing from the cupboard. That’s when she came down to New York and told her story to Agent Spencer. Just as the FBI and the Justice Department had often turned to her for help, so she viewed the agents and the lawyers as her personal champions. Could Spencer arrange a bodyguard for her? She wanted to go back up to Connecticut, pack some clothes and get out of her house, but she was afraid to do it by herself. She was sure the FBI would want to help her. Wasn’t she still an important source of information? And wasn’t she set to be the star witness at yet another trial for William Remington? Surely the Bureau would want to intercede on her behalf in this matter. Surely it was in everyone’s best interest that no adverse publicity should come of this unfortunate event.

  It wasn’t exactly blackmail, but it was close. Spencer told her that the FBI could not get involved but that he would see what he could do. Perhaps the U.S. Attorney General’s Office could be of help. In fact, Roy Cohn was happy to be of service. Bentley had been a good witness for him during the Rosenbergs trial, and he needed her badly for this new trial Remington’s lawyers were demanding. She installed herself at the Prince George Hotel in Manhattan and met twice with Cohn as he tried to figure out how to get her out of the mess she was in. It was Cohn’s idea to threaten the caretaker with federal charges—his attack on Bentley could be construed as interfering with a government witness—and see if Wright could be scared off. Bentley got her handyman to come down to New York on a pretense. There he was served with a subpoena and forced to meet with U.S. Attorney Myles Lane, Cohn, and an FBI agent. The plan was for Lane to do the talking, to start out nice and easy but then, if Wright gave him any trouble, to “bear down” and serve him with a grand jury subpoena. Wright gave him no trouble. He quickly agreed to stay away from Bentley and her house. A short time later, Mr. Wright disappeared.

  Moving to the Prince George Hotel may have helped Bentley feel safe, and it certainly solved her transportation problems now that she had no one to deliver and pick her up from train stations. But the move also worsened her already shaky financial condition. She was now paying ten dollars a night for lodgings in addition to upkeep on the Connecticut house, her considerable medical expenses—she saw her doctor at least every week—plus her equally considerable liquor bills. She had apparently already spent the $2,000 the FBI released to her just a few months before, because she complained to Roy Cohn—who seemed to offer the most sympathetic ear—that she owed $600 and had only $150 to pay her debts. Cohn told the FBI that Bentley was acting “like a spoiled child” and that her requests were “very much out of line,” but he nonetheless recommended that the Bureau authorize payments to Bentley of $50 a week for three weeks.

  At first, the FBI balked. Agents familiar with Bentley knew she was bad with money and saw little point in dispensing funds. But in early June, the Bureau relented, handing Bentley a check for $100 “in recognition of [her] time and assistance.” Really, it was in recognition of her debt load. Then in July, Hoover authorized a $500 lump-sum payment to help settle her debts, plus a $50-a-week stipend for three months—or until she ceased to be useful in the upcoming second trial of William Remington.

  The FBI had rescued her, at least temporarily, from her financial problems, but no one could rescue Elizabeth Bentley from herself. On the afternoon of August 29, while driving an acquaintance and two children from Madison to the New Haven railroad station, she sideswiped a car and drove on. The car she hit sustained only very minor damage—the repair bill turned out to be less than $25—but the other driver, understandably upset when Bentley failed to stop, swore out a complaint against her with the Connecticut State Police. Bentley’s license plate number was radioed to state troopers, and within the hour, she was apprehended, charged with hit-and-run, and jailed. Bentley was belligerent and uncooperative, at first denying that she hit the other car, then refusing to identify the passengers in her car, and finally demanding to be able to call the Bureau’s New Haven field office. She was, she told the commanding officer of the Connecticut State Police, “working for the FBI.”

  When Bentley reached the special agent in charge in New Haven and told him she was in jail, he stonewalled her. Her legal problems were not the FBI’s business, he told her. She should call an attorney and take care of it herself. Bentley was upset, bordering on hysteria. No, she said, she would not get an attorney. She insisted that the Bureau intercede on her behalf. The agent told her there was nothing he could do. But when he hung up the phone, he called Tom Spencer at the New York field office, who called Roy Cohn at the Attorney General’s Office, who called the Connecticut Police Commissioner. Within a half hour, Bentley was released from jail with no bail and promises to try to keep the matter out of the newspapers. Cohn had once again saved the day, but in doing so, he had encouraged Bentley’s dependence and rewarded her helplessness.

  Two weeks later, she was in trouble again. While driving along state route 79 in Connecticut on the way to meet with the lawyer handling her hit-and-run case, she lost control of her car, struck a boulder, and blacked out. She told the FBI that she had swerved to avoid being hit by a drunk driver, but it was more likely that she was the drunk driver. Bentley was taken home by three bystanders and then heavily sedated by a local doctor. Her 1939 LaSalle was a total wreck. A few days later, she called the New York field office to complain and make demands. Her local doctor had given her a sedative that made her sleep for more than twenty-four hours, she said, and a pill that wiped her out for another whole day. She was sick, her face was swollen, and she couldn’t eat. She wanted to be treated by her own doctor in New York. And she wanted FBI agents to be dispatched to her home to drive her into the city.

  Bentley was becoming a significant problem for the Bureau, and the agents didn’t know what to do with her. If she was publicly discredited, if the press got hold of the stories of her drinking and her car accidents, if she came to be seen as unstable and out of control, then much of her previous testimony would be suspect. Roy Cohn may have worried about her future usefulness as a witness, but the Bureau had far more to worry about.
The Bureau had a seven-year investment in Bentley. She had fingered sources, helped develop files, aided in loyalty cases, and offered so many details about so many people that the FBI was still pursuing her leads. On the one hand, Hoover did not want to get involved in Bentley’s private life. He was more than happy to let Cohn handle the problems. But on the other hand, he needed to protect his investment. The agents themselves seemed to view Bentley as a burden—which she undoubtedly was—but they may also have been motivated by a kind of chivalry. She was, after all, a woman alone and in trouble, even if the trouble was of her own making.

  Two agents from the New York field office were dispatched to Madison, a three-hour trek through Sunday traffic, to bring Bentley into Manhattan for medical treatment. On the drive back to the city, Bentley was rambling and incoherent, weepy and quarrelsome. The state of Connecticut was out to get her, she said. The local doctor who treated her was a quack. She fingered a small crucifix obsessively, and chain-smoked. It was apparent to the agents that she had been drinking. When they got to the Prince George Hotel, she demanded that the agents register her and call her doctor. They refused, but she created such a scene in the lobby that they made the call for her. During the next few days, she phoned the New York field office several times. The agents found her excessively talkative and “inclined to dwell on her various problems to the exclusion of almost all other conversation.” They were beginning to think that it wasn’t just the alcohol. Bentley was emotionally unstable even when not under the influence. She was “difficult to handle,” they reported, and unable to cope with her own affairs.

  A few days later, Bentley was making trouble again, this time at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Lower Manhattan. She had gone there unannounced and was engaged in what the Bureau—which was, of course, immediately notified—called a “sit-down strike.” She refused to leave Roy Cohn’s office until her transportation problems were solved. She had wrecked her car, and she had no money to buy a new one. She could take the train into New York or down to Washington, D.C., but how was she supposed to get to the train station? And how was she to get from her house into town for shopping? Had Cohn and her friends at the FBI not facilitated Bentley’s helplessness in the past, had she not learned she could get away with just about anything as long as she continued to be politically useful—and had Bentley herself not been in the worst psychological shape of her life—this would not have been the full-blown crisis it turned out to be. But as it was, Elizabeth Bentley planted herself in the office of the special assistant to the attorney general and refused to budge. Cohn spent the afternoon mollifying Bentley as he scurried around trying to get the FBI to do something.

  Would the Bureau have a New Haven agent contact Bentley twice a week to see if she needed to go into town? Cohn pleaded. Absolutely not, said the New York agent in charge. No personal services would be provided by Bureau agents. From headquarters in Washington, D.C., the response was even more adamant: the FBI “could not and would not act as a nursemaid to Bentley.” Yet the Bureau “happily” agreed to have an agent meet Bentley at the New Haven railroad station and drive her home. Cohn got nowhere with the AG’s Office or the FBI when he requested a car for Bentley. She wanted a car or she wouldn’t leave, she told him. And he took her at her word. Quickly tapping into his anticommunist connections, he secured money from an “unidentified source” and rented Bentley a car. Once she was gone, Cohn, his boss Myles Lane, and a special agent from the New York field office met to discuss Bentley’s “latest manifestations of instability and idiosyncrasies.” Officially, everyone—including Hoover and his assistant directors—heaved a sigh of relief. The crisis was over. But its resolution had left Bentley that much more dependent, that much more unable to take care of her own affairs.

  A few days after Cohn arranged for the car, Bentley was on the phone to the New York field office indicating that she expected the Bureau or the Department of Justice to cover her hotel bill at the Prince George. The agent in charge found the demand “entirely unreasonable” considering that her hotel stay was for personal reasons and not on government business. The topic of conversation soon switched to the $500 lump sum payment, authorized by Hoover in July, that Bentley apparently had not yet received. If it was not immediately forthcoming, Bentley said, she would feel “disinclined to cooperate” in future interviews or to make further appearances as a witness. Never before had Bentley been so bald-faced about her manipulation. But the agent in charge called her bluff, pointing out that if she stopped cooperating, she would stop receiving the $50 weekly stipends the Bureau had been paying her since the summer. Bentley calmed down, at least for the moment, but the Bureau realized there would be continued trouble ahead. Among themselves, the agents and their bosses discussed her financial woes. Apparently, she was using the $50 stipend for current living expenses and not putting any of it against her numerous debts. She owed several hundred dollars to Jolly’s Drug Store in Madison—where she bought her liquor, among other things—and was behind in her mortgage, telephone, electric, and gas bills. She owed her doctor and her accountants. Her creditors were becoming increasingly insistent.

  Bentley had managed to persuade the Bureau—and it was probably true—that her financial problems were so upsetting that she would be of little use to the government until they were taken care of. And, for their part, the agents allowed themselves to think that her main problem was money, that if they relieved her current indebtedness, her worries would be over, her mood would improve, and she would presumably cease to be the “neurotic” and “emotionally unstable” burden she had become. Through the fall, agents in Washington, D.C., and New York traded memos on what to do about Bentley’s latest crisis. The New York field office suggested to headquarters that Bentley’s weekly stipend be temporarily doubled, allowing her to begin paying off her debts. But her improvidence was too well known. There was no guarantee that she would use the extra money for that purpose. No, said headquarters. It was incumbent on the New York agents to control Bentley, to get her to understand that the Bureau was not going to continue to bail her out of her financial difficulties.

  But once again, the talk was tough, and the action was not. At the end of October, Hoover authorized a lump-sum payment. Bentley would be required to submit receipted bills from the businesses to which she was indebted, and she was to be told that she “couldn’t go running to us for assistance every time she finds herself in financial or other difficulties”—but she got her money. On October 28, she picked up a cashier’s check for $550 from the New York field office. The agent who handed her the check observed that her mental and emotional condition was “improved to a considerable extent.” She “appeared much less nervous and more reasonable in her attitude.”

  But something deeper remained very wrong. Bentley was a good girl who had done bad things, and she hadn’t learned to live with that. She had done all she could. She had confessed. She had made amends. She had preached the anticommunist gospel. But her conscience, what she called her “good New England conscience,” was permanently scarred. She was finding solace in neither the Catholic Church nor the bottle. In the past, her drinking had masked her depression and anesthetized her loneliness. Now the “cure” was itself a major problem in her life. In the past, she was independent and brave, resolute and determined. She had goals. She had, in her way, ambition. But now she was truly in limbo—financially, occupationally, emotionally, even spiritually. Her closest and most enduring ties—her only friends—were federal agents, whom she manipulated and who put up with her because they felt they had to.

  On a frigid December afternoon in 1952, she had lunch, and undoubtedly drinks, with two acquaintances at the Hotel Abbey in Manhattan. When she left the restaurant, she was visibly upset. As she crossed the street, she turned to her female companion. “It doesn’t seem worth the struggle,” she said. “Sometimes I think I should step out in front of a car and settle everything.”

  Chapter 21

  Back in the Act
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br />   SOMEHOW, SHE PULLED herself together. It seemed that Elizabeth Bentley was made of sterner stuff than her friends at the FBI gave her credit for, or that even she herself thought. Nineteen fifty-two had been a terrible year. Her drinking was out of control, and it seemed her life was out of control, too. The questionable liaison with her caretaker, the beating, the car accidents, the sit-down strike in Roy Cohn’s office—this was the behavior of a troubled woman. But she was also, despite her evident neediness and her bouts of depression, despite her officially reinforced helplessness, a woman with inner resources.

  She had been, and therefore she knew she could be, independent. She had not been protected or attended to through life. She had not been cloistered by marriage or cradled by family or succored by friends. She had taken care of herself. Even during the five years when Golos was her lover, she had maintained her own apartment and held a job with significant responsibilities. She had made her own decisions. If anything, she had taken care of him, not vice versa. Now, faced with the choice of giving in—to alcohol, to depression, to suicide—or carrying on, she found a way to carry on. A New England backbone underlay the emotional frailty.