An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Kitty had been experiencing bouts of diarrhea in the weeks before departing St. John; she consulted a local doctor, who supplied her with pills. Then, with Serber as captain, Kitty as navigator, and four young men as crew, they set sail. The route took them to Martinique, Grenada, Bonaire, and on to South America. From Cartagena in Columbia, they sailed to the San Blas Islands where they planned to spend two weeks. Kitty was not doing well, though she tried to hide it. Soon her stomach pain became so intense that Serber made for Cristobal in the Panama Canal Zone where he knew she could get good medical care. Once there, they had a grueling hour-long train ride to Panama City where she was admitted to the Gorgas Hospital. Mrs. Robert Oppenheimer was well cared for; the hospital director paid special attention to her and the Governor of the Canal Zone sent flowers. The diagnosis was "a severe intestinal infection." It was as likely to have been an acute attack of pancreatitis or liver failure.

  Knowing Kitty was dangerously ill, Serber cabled Toni in French Polynesia. The message took time to reach her; she sailed for Bora Bora and began the long journey back. Air connections between Pacific islands were sporadic and difficult with frustrating delays. For ten days Kitty lay in the hospital becoming steadily weaker, sleeping most of the time.

  On October 17, 1972, Kitty Oppenheimer died of an embolism. She was sixty-two. Toni arrived the following day. Serber and Toni scattered her ashes near Robert's in the warm waters within sight of what is now called Oppenheimer Beach on St. John.

  OUTSIDE THE TIMELINE

  OUTSIDE THE TIMELINE

  We were seduced by Robert Oppenheimer. Intellectually, historically, even emotionally.

  Neither of us can remember exactly when this happened. We had never met him; he was long dead by the time we met. We do know that we began discussing an Oppenheimer book early in our friendship, and we have been friends now for more than three decades. We watched our own children grow up as Oppenheimer biographies began to be published, and we continued to read and talk about Robert and his role in what certainly was one of the most seminal events of our lifetimes. At some point we began to call him by his first name, figuring he had been in our lives long enough for us to take that liberty, though we never went so far as to call him "Oppie." That seemed presumptuous.

  We cannot pinpoint the exact date when the subject of a book veered from Robert to his wife Kitty. The biographies continued to be published, we continued to read them and Kitty continued to be maligned. But as we read all the hundreds of thousands of words, we found ourselves tantalized by other repeating, exuberant words or phrases. A name, a hint, a neural flash shimmering out of the pages of all those scores of books and interviews about Robert Oppenheimer.

  About his wife Kitty—she could be very bewitching, but . . . fascinating, but not very nice . . .

  About Jean Tatlock—a lyrical, sensitive, yearning creature . . . the one person in the room you would always remember.

  And Ruth Tolman, the woman Robert's Aunt Hedwig called his best true friend—one of those people who make us more civilized with each other.

  We became convinced that these three women who occupied Robert's heart, his mind and great swaths of his adult life had a story worth telling. We felt they were key to his life, lost in the ever-growing shadow of the man who has come to symbolize the world's entry into the Atomic Age. One day we simply knew that we wanted to rescue them from what seemed like historical oblivion. They took us on a voyage of discovery, these three: Kitty and Ruth and Jean.

  We must have constructed dozens of timelines during the writing of this book, tracing the chronologies of our four main subjects in increasing detail, keeping track of Jean, Ruth, Kitty and Robert, all born before the First World War, as each moved through the minefields—both public and private—of the twentieth century. We started out by charting the decades and then, as our research brought the four principals together and we began to see how their lives meshed, we plotted single years and at times, even months. We wanted to re-create the impact each of the four had on the others in time and space, played out against some of the most difficult periods in American history. All of this we worked into the pages of this book. What you won't find are some of what were, to us, illuminating stories which fell outside of the timeline, but are too compelling not to mention.

  Robert would have been proud of his brother Frank's contribution to the world of science. He and Jackie moved back to San Francisco and started the Exploratorium, a unique science museum that has become the model for others around the world.

  From Perro Caliente, Katy Page—"the reigning princess of the House of Chaves"—wrote to Robert at Princeton in his time of trouble, "It makes my heart ache to sit on your porch having tea when you are in the heat and confusion of man's world. I suppose, however, that one of the main functions of a heart is to ache."528 Katy had her share of sorrow. She married again, moved into Santa Fe. In 1961, she was murdered in her home during a burglary; a neighborhood youth was found guilty.

  Anne Wilson Marks, Robert's secretary at Los Alamos and good friend during the Hearing, had her life jolted in 1960 when her husband, Herb, died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her a widow for forty-six years. Until her death in 2006, she worked for international arms control.

  Had this book been fiction, we would have left Herb and Anne together longer, and we would not have allowed so many suicides. We would have saved Jean (perhaps by setting the story in the twenty-first century, when science has found some of the answers to the depression from which she suffered), and bright and funny Charlotte Serber, who couldn't face the ravages of Parkinson's disease. We would have wished an easier death for Kitty's mother. And for Kitty. Toni Oppenheimer deserved a longer life; she hanged herself in the family beach house on St. John in January of 1977. By then, she had been twice married and twice divorced. As her friend Fiona St. Clair said, Toni "could not find her path." The girl her mother had once described as "one of those girls who is so unfortunate as to want to do good,"529 left a note offering the beach house to the people of St. John as a community center.

  After Kitty's death, Toni had returned to live on St. John, and since Fiona was about her age, they became friends. After Toni's death, Fiona married Robert Serber, then seventy. She had a son, Zach, from a previous marriage, and she and Serber had another son, Will. Serber died in 1997 at the age of eighty-eight. We interviewed both Robert Serber and Fiona St. Clair Serber (he in 1994, she in 2012) at their Riverside Drive apartment in New York City.

  The journeys we took through cyberspace turned up some of our most exciting discoveries. One of us would call the other and ask, "Are you sitting down?" That happened the day we found Martin Vissering, whose mother was a cousin of Kitty's, in Bremen, Germany. Martin in turn contacted his great-aunt and his brother Ulrich, who gave us the information on the Visserings' family background.

  We spent months trying to track down Kitty's first husband, knowing only his name, Frank Ramseyer, that he was a musician Kitty had met in Paris, and that their marriage was annulled after Kitty discovered a journal he kept (in mirror writing) that divulged, she said, that he was homosexual and a drug addict. And that the Court papers had been sealed on the grounds of "obscenity." This is the story reported in Oppenheimer biographies. Online, though, we discovered that Frank was a good deal more than a musician wandering around Paris romancing Kitty Puening. He had graduated from Harvard College and worked in the music department there. In the bulletin of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, we discovered that the daughters of Frank Ramseyer had donated family land to the Trust. We found one daughter listed in a church bulletin, and sent an e-mail to the church, asking that the message be passed to her. We were thrilled to receive an e-mail from Lin Ramseyer Clayberg. She and her sister, Helene Ramseyer Dickel—Lanie—an emerita research professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois, were delighted to talk about their father; they told us he spent his career teaching in the music department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Lanie wrote: "
He was a true Renaissance man, knew the names of birds, ferns, trees . . . studied classical Chinese on his own, and first pointed out the summer constellations to me."530

  Lin said their father was a sweet and humble man, a fine musician, and that he never spoke to them about his first marriage. It was their mother who told them about Kitty, and that Frank had been saddened by the abortion of his son. Their father could do mirror-reading, the sisters told us. They said he may have been bisexual and it is possible that he experimented with drugs at one time in his early life, but certainly he was not an addict. They did know that he and their mother, Linda, were devoted to each other. Frank Ramseyer, clearly, had a long and happy life with his music and his family.531 Lanie would go on to get a Ph.D. and study the birth of stars, a topic of early interest to both Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Tolman. In 1985, she spent a year doing research at Los Alamos.

  Frank was a handsome man; in fact, three of Kitty's husbands looked curiously alike. Joe Dallet was the rugged exception. When one of the wives from Los Alamos met Stewart Harrison after the war, she was startled by how much he resembled Robert.

  Jean Tatlock's brother, Hugh, and his wife, Anne Fisher Tatlock, had four children. Their eldest child and only daughter, named Marjorie for her grandmother, was clinically depressed throughout her short life. We located Jean's nephew, John Tatlock (named for his grandfather), in New York City, and he and his brother David searched out family photographs and papers for us. John told us that his sister had been in and out of private institutions; as the youngest child, John would often go with his parents to visit her. She would come home for periods, he said, and during one of these on a New England winter's night, she walked out of their house in her nightgown, through a woods and across the frozen river. She fell through the ice and drowned. She was twenty-six.532 For Hugh Tatlock, it would have been a reprise of the earlier tragedy.

  Hugh never spoke of Jean to his sons. In fact, his son John told us how, as an undergraduate, he was walking across Harvard Yard with a friend who, the night before, had seen the Kipphardt play, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The friend asked if he was related to the Jean Tatlock in the play, and John answered that he didn't know.

  After Jean's death, it had been Hugh who questioned the coroner's report, but it was not until 1991 that he was contacted by someone who was fascinated by the world of spies and government surveillance and had been investigating Jean's death. The name Boris Pash had raised a red flag. The investigator had eagerly reported, "I knew of him from work I had done earlier on CIA assassination activities . . . I believe Pash will prove a pivotal character in this story."533

  The coroner's report on Jean's death prompted the investigator to write: "[Jean] Tatlock's death is suspicious in the extreme. . . . As a doctor, she had access to ample and effective means for suicide. That she would choose such a painful, bizarre and unlikely method as drugging and drowning herself strikes me as questionable. . . . The autopsy found a trace of chloral hydrate in her system. Chloral hydrate is commonly known as knockout drops or a Mickey Finn. This may or may not be suggestive."534

  The investigator took the postmortem reports to a clinical pathologist in a reputable big city hospital, who concluded that they were consistent with death by drowning. "Could it have been murder?" the investigator probed. Not likely, the pathologist answered, since there were no signs of trauma to the body. But wasn't drowning "a strange way for a doctor/psychiatrist to commit suicide?" The pathologist responded that he had seen many "weird" suicides, and some of the most bizarre were psychiatrists. But what about the chloral hydrate—the Mickey Finn? The pathologist explained that the chloral hydrate has to be combined with alcohol to be effective, and there had been no alcohol in Jean Tatlock's body."535

  In his preliminary report to Hugh, the investigator went into detail on plans for "what we should do next." It was a long list, including compiling a list of names and addresses of surviving relatives and close friends to interview. Travel to San Francisco to visit Jean's apartment. Obtain copies of the 1976 hearings of the U.S. Senate Select Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, to study intelligence abuses and revealing illegal and immoral—including assassination attempts— practices within the CIA and FBI.

  And what about Boris Pash? Was he one of the "rogue elephants" Senator Church inveighed against? And did he have anything to do with Jean's death? The question was to go unanswered; Hugh Tatlock, a medical doctor himself, seems to have accepted the pathologist's explanation.

  HOW TO MEASURE HOW WELL a life has been lived is the biographer's dilemma, especially when trying to reconstruct the lives of women who are ancillary to the main attraction: Kitty, Ruth and Jean. Much depends on the paper trail, and in the beginning for these women, the paper trail was remarkably thin. We tried to remind ourselves that often, in researching, one or two vehement voices can overwhelm or misconstrue a subject. Kitty Oppenheimer had two main detractors who had the time and the access to know her well: her sister-in-law Jackie, and a sometime friend at both Los Alamos and Princeton, Pat Sherr. Both left a voluble and negative record of Kitty's behavior. Physicist Abraham Pais clearly detested Kitty. Even Verna Hobson's recollections appear at times to have another agenda. In an attempt at balance, we made a concerted effort to find people who actually knew Kitty and could give us a more tempered view. Over the long gestation period of this book, we spoke to a number of the wives (and husbands) who were at Los Alamos and the Institute, to the nieces and co-workers of Ruth and Jean, and to anybody, in fact, who could shed light on that time, that place, those three women.

  We met Ruth's nieces, Mary Tolman Kent and Deborah Tolman Whitney (she became the daughter-in-law of psychiatrist Elizabeth Whitney, who was briefly married to Jean's father late in life). It was especially exciting when we located Jerome Bruner, now ninety-eight, who had been Ruth's good friend "Jerry," and a close friend of Robert's as well. Dr. Bruner is referred to as "one of the best known and influential psychologists of the 20th century" as well as the key figure in the "cognitive revolution." He spent time with the Tolmans both in Pasadena and in Washington, D.C., during the war, and after at Princeton. He had ample time to observe Robert with both Ruth and Kitty, and to confirm our own conclusions about both women.

  "Ruth had . . . intellectual qualities of the first order and a capacity for reflection," he said. "Kitty was good at conversation, but not at the counter-punctual word play that Ruth and Robert enjoyed." Kitty was, he offered, someone who never seemed able "to get her act together." Bruner was puzzled by the relationship between Robert and Kitty, explaining that she ran the house, was adoring toward Robert and seemed to have dedicated her life to keeping him human and happy and not too conflicted. And he was always respectful of her. Robert and Kitty could work together, he said, but he did not know how emotionally close they were.

  It had never occurred to Bruner that there had been an "affair" between Ruth and Robert; when the idea was first mentioned to him, he wondered if he could have been naive. Upon further reflection he was adamant: he never saw an indication that theirs was more than a deep and loving friendship.536

  JEAN'S PASSIONATE, PRECOCIOUS ADOLESCENT LETTERS allowed us to watch her grow and flower and to feel, almost seventy years after her death, the loss of such talent and promise. Although Ruth lived a full life, when she died our feelings mirrored those of her friends; even from the distance of decades, her empathy and grace endeared her to us. Kitty remained for us, as for most of the people who knew her, an enigma: Bright, frustrated, capable of erratic kindnesses and frequent cruelties, she was the epitome of a life unfulfilled.

  UNTIL THE END OF HIS life, Robert remained loyal to these women. He steadfastly treated the memory of Jean and Ruth with respect. For the duration of his marriage, he remained, in some profound way, deeply committed to his wife. Each of the three in her turn helped shape his character, read poetry with him, opened doors to new worlds for him, took risks and laughed and entertained with him, encouraged
and comforted him. They gave companionship and friendship and, most of all, the love that Robert Oppenheimer, aloof and arrogant though he could be, needed as much as any man.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We live forty miles from each other in Northern California, Shirley in Kensington near Berkeley (only a few blocks from the Oppenheimers' One Eagle Hill) and Patricia on her farm near Petaluma, so for a number of years we have been meeting in between at the Marin Brewing Company at Larkspur Landing, a local watering hole which tolerates long working lunches. From there, we plotted our research and travels. First to Washington, D.C., to the home of Martin Sherwin (who with Kai Bird produced the Pulitzer-prize winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer); they have been wonderfully generous to us, allowing us to work with their extensive files before they shipped them off to the Library of Congress. On September 12, 2006, Marty wrote in Shirley's copy of American Prometheus: "To another Oppenheimer buff. With best wishes for your book." The wishes are appreciated; sadly, both of our copies of Prometheus were worn out doing heavy duty when we needed to check "what would Sherwin/Bird have to say about that?"

  Charles Weiner, the editor (with Alice Smith) of the excellent and oft-cited Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, also invited us into his home and shared his knowledge of Oppenheimer along with his interview files. Nora Murphy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped us with additional interviews in the Alice Kimball Smith Papers. We spent weeks reading the Oppenheimer papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where Jeff Flannery of the Manuscript Division answered our queries expeditiously, even after closing hours. At the National Archives in Maryland, Eric Vanslander located Ruth Tolman letters and her OSS Personal Files. In Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study, Christine DiBella guided us to useful letters. Also on the East Coast, we spent days at the New York Public Library reading letters in the Berg Collection, where Rebecca Filner was just the kind of librarian you hope to encounter when you come upon a treasury of letters, as we did with those Jean Tatlock wrote to May Sarton. The archivists at the Taniment Library (part of the Robert J. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University's Bobst Library) were most helpful in finding and copying letters from the Joseph Dallet, Jr. Papers. Traveling up the Hudson River Valley to Poughkeepsie, we worked at the archives at Vassar College Library, where Dean Rogers kindly located materials and arranged photocopying on several occasions and answered numerous questions later.