Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Bentley immediately called the New Haven field office, telling the agent there that she believed Fitzgerald’s lawyers would seize on her income tax problem to attempt to discredit her. Should that happen, she warned the agent, it would reflect “most unfavorably” on the director, the attorney general, and Vice President Nixon, all of whom had publicly commented on the value and veracity of her testimony. The potential threat to Hoover’s status was taken most seriously by the agency over which he had for decades ruled like a caesar. Moreover, Fitzgerald’s overambitious lawyer had committed the political faux pas of having a subpoena served on Hoover himself. Bentley was after help with the IRS, but her problem became secondary to the one at hand: protecting the director. The FBI must have moved quickly, for a week later, the judge directing Fitzgerald’s contempt proceedings voided the subpoenas, ruling that the issues they raised were not germane to the case. Neither the director nor Bentley would have to testify, which was undoubtedly a relief. But it was not the outcome Bentley was looking for. She had hoped that the Fitzgerald case would provide a compelling reason for the IRS to back off. She had hoped it would give the Bureau the ammunition it needed to deal with the headstrong agency. But now that she was no longer under subpoena, the immediate threat of exposure disappeared, and the tax case dragged on.

  Through the summer, Bentley became increasingly impatient and, as far as the Bureau was concerned, increasingly difficult to deal with. Others might be intimidated by an agency as powerful and seemingly untouchable as the Internal Revenue Service, but Bentley was not. She was aggrieved, angry, and defiant. She had stood up to KGB operatives and had testified before congressmen, grand jurors, and judges. She had toured the country giving speeches and appeared on national radio and television. This was a woman who, regardless of the victim role she sometimes played with the FBI, knew how to make her way in the world. And she knew the way to make this problem go away was to keep nagging the Bureau.

  She was right. As Bentley was busy calling the New Haven office, demanding action and threatening to go to the press, the Bureau was busy making “discreet inquiries” within the IRS to determine if someone in particular was pushing action against her. The FBI, with its connections and power, its loyalty to Bentley, its fear of her as a loose canon—and, most important, its concern for the integrity of its director—cast a wide net. The district director of the IRS and the IRS regional commissioner were brought into the conversation, as were the chief counsel of the Treasury Department and the deputy attorney general. Privately, the IRS told the FBI that it was “unfortunate that this matter had gotten out of control” and promised to send a revenue agent who had “tact and diplomacy” to talk to Bentley. Meanwhile, hoping to help her keep her job at Sacred Heart, the FBI, conferring privately with the assistant attorney general and several lawyers, tried to pressure the IRS to put out a news story in Louisiana that slapping a lien on Bentley’s bank account had been a mistake. When that tactic didn’t seem to be working, the Attorney General’s Office sent the U.S. attorney in New Orleans to pay a personal visit to the mother superior to vouch for Bentley. The college relented. Bentley would have a job to come back to in the fall. But still, her tax problem did not go away.

  In September, Hoover himself got involved, taking the occasion of a regular conference with the attorney general to call to his personal attention the handling of Bentley’s case. The director was blunt and forceful, citing the unresolved tax problem as “indicative of the gross lack of cooperation upon the part of the Treasury Department.” That may have done the trick, for finally, after months of meetings, memoranda, and sub rosa maneuverings, an agreement was reached. Bentley would arrange, over time, to pay a portion of what she owed, and the IRS would back off. There would be no fines, no prosecution for tax evasion. Bentley’s bank account would be unfrozen, and the IRS would not demand that she sell her house. She would be out of the spotlight, free to resume her quiet life.

  Through all the turmoil, the unwanted attention, and the negative publicity that were a constant in her life in the mid-1950s, Bentley attempted to carry on, spending her summers in Connecticut and the school year in Grand Coteau. In the summer of 1954 and again in 1955, she stayed at her Connecticut house, one summer commuting into Manhattan several times a week to take classes at Columbia. She was thinking about pursuing her Ph.D. In the fall, she was back in Louisiana teaching Romance languages again, dealing not only with the Taylor and Matusow attacks and then the seemingly intransigent IRS problem but also with an unending parade of agents, investigators, attorneys, and reporters who turned to her whenever they needed an expert in communism or espionage. She was, the New Orleans field office told Hoover, “constantly beset” and under “considerable mental strain” from the demands put on her by government agencies, congressional committees, and the press. But the FBI itself was the most insistent. Rarely did a week go by in the mid-1950s when Bentley wasn’t being questioned by an agent from New Orleans, New Haven, New York, or headquarters.

  She continued to be interviewed regularly about Out of Bondage. Agents at the New York field office had gone over the book dozens of times since its publication in 1951, and each time they found something new to ask her about: a name she mentioned in the book but not in her 1945 statement, a relationship that needed clarification, a party connection, a bit of history she could sketch in, the whereabouts of a former compatriot. She was, even in the midst of her other troubles, cooperative and forthcoming. Agents from both the New Haven and New Orleans offices regularly visited her to ask questions about ongoing espionage investigations and to show her pictures of unidentified or code-named suspects, hoping she might supply names or pertinent facts.

  When a highly confidential source told the FBI that Jay Lovestone considered Bentley the only ex-communist “who had always told the truth and never been crossed up,” Hoover jumped on it. Lovestone had been head of the American communist party until his expulsion by Joseph Stalin in 1929, and the Bureau had amassed a considerable file on him. Now Hoover saw the opportunity to gather additional intelligence. He ordered agents from the New Orleans office to interview Bentley immediately, sending him full details of any and all conversations Bentley may have had with Lovestone. She had been out of the game for ten years, but she was still a player.

  The demands on her time were considerable, yet somehow Bentley managed to keep to her teaching schedule. She returned to Sacred Heart in the fall of 1955, thanks to the personal intervention of the Attorney General’s Office, and she was glad to be back. She needed to hold onto the job to support herself, so she made every effort to manage her messy and sometimes unmanageable life with its ongoing crises and conflicting demands. But the position at the Catholic college was more than a paycheck, and teaching was more than a job. It was her vocation, her calling. She had known that since she was a little girl. It was a link to her past, to her mother, to a time before she had created a notorious life for herself, a life that in many ways continued to hold her captive. She saw this clearly as she fended off attacks from people like Taylor and Matusow, as she fielded phone calls from reporters, as she agreed to yet another interview with yet another agent pursuing yet another lead. If there was a way to escape the past, to firmly establish a new identity—or rather, to reclaim an old one—it was through teaching, through holding a respected position at a respectable academy. Teaching was the cornerstone of her new life. In the absence of family or friends, of passions or attachments, it was her life.

  And so the news that Sacred Heart would be permanently closing hit her especially hard. The college had become too small to support itself, with only forty young women enrolled in the spring of 1956. Bentley got the news from the mother superior in late May. In June, she would be jobless once again, her future uncertain, the cornerstone crumbling. She was discouraged and despondent as she packed her bags for the move back to Connecticut a few weeks later. She had no idea what she would do. She had teaching credentials, but she also had—as she put it when s
he spoke to the New Orleans field office to say good-bye—a “background,” a past that followed her and made it difficult to find work.

  As it turned out, Bentley once again landed on her feet. She spent the summer living at the home of an acquaintance in Madison—her own house was rented—and then, probably with the help of supporters in the anticommunist movement and the religious community, she secured another teaching position. In the fall, she moved to Garden City, Long Island, to begin teaching English and Romance languages at the Cathedral School of St. Mary’s, an all-girls Episcopal secondary school. It was her third job and her fifth change of address in seven years. She was, as an adult, almost as rootless as she had been as a child, when her parents moved every two years. But it was the life she had made, and she lived it as well as she could. She was lonely, of course. She was always lonely. But she found satisfaction in the work.

  Things went well for her that fall. She seemed in control. There were no public incidents. If she drank, she drank at home, and alone. There were no headline-making trials, no subpoenas, no trips to Washington, D.C., to testify, no attacks from those she had named long ago. The IRS left her alone, and the FBI hadn’t quite figured out where she was. It seemed, for a moment, that the world had forgotten her.

  Then, in January of 1957, four months into her tenure at St. Mary’s, the New York Herald Tribune began running a twenty-four-part series on the FBI, which featured, one day, a photograph of top government informant and former communist spy, Elizabeth Bentley. One of the Long Island students saw the picture, and Bentley immediately became the hot topic of conversation in the hallways. Those who hired her knew of her past but her students did not and neither did their parents. The dean, sensing a catastrophe in the making, called an emergency assembly and asked the students to keep the information to themselves. Bentley, he stressed, was a heroine, a woman who had helped the government identify traitors.

  But having someone like Elizabeth Bentley in one’s midst was just too exciting to keep under wraps. The girls gossiped. Rumors flew. Someone must have gotten hold of a copy of Out of Bondage, because Bentley’s eighth-grade English class all of a sudden seemed to know quite a bit about their teacher’s notorious past, which, while juicy enough, was ripe for embellishment. The girls took some of the gossip home, just as the dean had feared.

  “Did you know Miss Bentley was someone’s mistress?” a thirteen-year-old girl in one of Bentley’s classes informed her astonished mother at the dinner table one evening. “Did you know they found a man murdered in her apartment? Did you know,” the girl confided, feeling very grown-up, “that her autobiography has some real ‘moments’ in it?” The mother, who had two daughters enrolled at St. Mary’s and two sons at St. Paul’s, the brother school, was scandalized. She immediately wrote the bishop in charge of the diocese but received only a curt acknowledgment. Furious, she tapped into the old girls’ network, writing a pointed letter to the national chairwoman of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), an organization to which she belonged and which Bentley, an authentic blueblood, would have been more than entitled to join.

  “Do you think someone who inspires that sort of talk and thinking among minors…is the sort of person to have on a faculty?” she asked rhetorically. She called Bentley a “weak and twisted personality” who had “become a stool-pigeon to save her neck.” The DAR chairwoman forwarded a copy of the letter to J. Edgar Hoover, who could not have been pleased at this turn of events. He wanted Bentley employed. He didn’t want her broke and in trouble and on the phone bothering his agents. But the director chose not to become involved in the situation, and the old girls’ network kicked in. A month after the letter arrived at DAR headquarters, Bentley learned that she would not be asked to return for the following school year. St. Mary’s, it seemed, was “not entirely satisfied” with her as a teacher.

  It was a severe blow—and not just because it meant she would be on the move again, that she would be out hunting for another job in another town. She was smart enough to realize that her dismissal from St. Mary’s might mean something more serious and more troubling. It might mean that no matter how many years went by, no matter where she moved or how careful she was or how well she did her job, she could not outrun her past. She had done everything right in Garden City. She had been a competent and responsible teacher. She had lived quietly and kept a low profile. But so much was outside her control. Anyone from her former life could at any time surface and make waves. The newspapers could, for any reason or no reason, decide to turn the spotlight in her direction. That’s what had happened with the FBI story in the Herald Tribune. She hadn’t done anything to make news, but she was, by virtue of her past as both spy and informer, a story waiting to happen, a perennial public figure, fair game always in season. It was a situation of her own making, and she was trapped in it. And so, as much as she could help herself by finding a new job and a new place to live, as much as she could take control by refusing to give up or give in, by continuing to try to live an ordinary life, she must have also felt helpless.

  She moved back to Connecticut that summer, back to her house in Madison, and tried once again to restart her life. It wasn’t easy. She couldn’t find a teaching job, so she took employment as a secretary in the office of a Hartford construction company. For a woman with degrees from Vassar and Columbia, with six years of teaching experience and several years’ experience in running a company, this could not have been satisfying work. But she had a plan. That fall she started taking classes at Trinity College in Hartford, going to school in the evenings after work and on Saturdays. She would earn her Connecticut teaching certificate. Then, she hoped, a number of jobs would be open to her.

  She kept to the plan through the winter and into the spring. But this time, starting over proved to be too much. In early March 1958, as she was leaving Trinity one night after class, something happened. She couldn’t explain it herself. All she knew was that she got in her car to drive home and, an hour and a half later, she found herself back at the college with no memory of where she had been or what she had done, no sense that any time had passed. She called it a “blackout,” but had she really blacked out, had she actually lost consciousness, it is unlikely that she would have made it back to the college unscathed. Whatever happened—transient amnesia, a momentary mental breakdown, a kind of trance or stupor—Bentley thought it might be due to overwork. Certainly her schedule was taxing and left little time to relax. But her “blackout” that night could just as easily been caused by stress or depression or drinking or some combination of psychological factors.

  The psychiatrist whom Trinity obtained for her couldn’t figure out what happened either. He put her in Hartford Hospital for observation, concluding, after a week, that her past was in part responsible for her present difficulty. She should, he counseled, “try to put her espionage activity out of her mind.” But that would be difficult, for even though Bentley wanted to move forward in her new life, the FBI was always there to drag her back to her past. On May 5, a month and a half after being released from the hospital, Bentley was at the New Haven field office looking at photographs in sixty-five cases still pending. The agents there thought she was in good health, and she seemed to them both friendly and cooperative. But not far beneath the surface, things were still not going well.

  She had to sell her house that spring. Although the doctor told her she could go back to work after she left the hospital, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She dropped out of school, too. The strain was too much. Still, she needed money to live and funds to pay for her medical and hospital bills, and the house was her only asset. It was also the only home she had known as an adult, the only roots she had ever put down. But it sold in April, and Bentley, homeless and jobless now, moved to New Haven where her Catholic connections helped her get back on her feet. By the time she visited the New Haven office, ostensibly in good spirits, she was living at the Highland Heights Orphanage, where the nuns gave her room and board in
exchange for help with the children.

  A few weeks later, New York agents called her at the orphanage, asking if she would meet with them in connection with an espionage case they were working on. She agreed, but the day before the interview was scheduled, she presented herself at the New Haven field office where she told agents she no longer wanted to be contacted by the FBI. She had felt for a long time, she said, that she must make a complete break with her past. Interviews with agents and government committees always served to keep her in a “highly nervous state,” she told the agents. She was tense and on edge. She suffered severe headaches. And so, she was serving them notice: Elizabeth Bentley would no longer be available. She wanted out.

  The agents were taken aback, but it was not the first time an informant had balked, and they knew what to do. They treated her gently, praising her past contributions, stressing the importance of the information she had given them, and making as compelling a case as they could for her continuing assistance. This seemed to calm her, and she agreed to come back the next day to meet with the New York agents. But when she arrived at the office, she was visibly upset. She had now definitely decided she would no longer be available for interviews, she told the agents. Delving into the past was no good for her. There was nothing more to talk about. This was, she said, “good-bye.”

  Still, the agents pressed her. Would she be unavailable even in “the most urgent matters affecting the welfare of the country?” Bentley couldn’t quite close the door. She would have to decide “when the occasion arose,” she said.