Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  If Lee and Marina agreed about Russia, it seemed as if they disagreed about everything else. Mrs. Hall later said that Marina “was stubborn, and he was just cruel to her, and they would argue” over “nothing, just nothing and he would beat her all the time.”7 Kleinlerer for his part thought that Lee “treated Marina very poorly. He belittled her and was boorish to her in our presence. He ordered her around just as though she were a mere chattel. He was never polite or tender to her. I feel very strongly that she was frightened of him.” Kleinlerer was also critical of the way Lee had dumped his wife and child on Mrs. Hall and failed to contribute to their support. Lee “did not express any thanks or evidence the slightest appreciation,” Kleinlerer said. “He evidenced displeasure and contempt. He acted as if the world owed him a living.”8

  On Friday night, November 2, the telephone rang in Kleinlerer’s apartment. It was Marina, announcing that Lee had found them an apartment and she was moving to Dallas that weekend. Lee came abruptly on the phone. He “directed” Kleinlerer, in Kleinlerer’s words, to come to the Halls’ the next day to discuss the move, since the Oswalds’ possessions were in the garage and Mrs. Hall was away in New York.9

  On Saturday, soon after Kleinlerer arrived, he witnessed a memorable scene. “Oswald observed that the zipper on Marina’s skirt was not completely closed,” Kleinlerer later recalled.10

  He called to her in a very angry and commanding tone of voice just like an officer commanding a soldier. His exact words were “Come here!” in Russian, and he uttered them the way you would call a dog with which you were displeased in order to inflict punishment. He was standing in the doorway. When she reached the doorway he rudely reprimanded her in a flat imperious voice about being careless in her dress and slapped her hard in the face twice. Marina had the baby in her arms. Her face was red and tears came to her eyes. I was very much embarrassed and also angry but I had long been afraid of Oswald and I did not say anything.

  By what appears to have been a bit of foresight on Mrs. Hall’s part, only Kleinlerer had a key to the garage. His presence during the removal of the Oswalds’ goods the following day was therefore a necessity. The Taylors drove over from Dallas to help, and Lee and Gary went off and rented a U-Haul trailer. But there was trouble when Lee started to load it, for Kleinlerer recalled that there were “several instances in which I had to intervene when Oswald picked up some of Mrs. Hall’s things to place in the trailer. I could not say whether this was deliberate or inadvertent, except that there were several instances.”11 Lyolya Hall’s wariness had not been misplaced.

  The apartment Lee had found for them was at 604 Elsbeth Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Marina had not yet seen it, and when they arrived that afternoon, she and Alix Taylor reacted identically. “It was terrible,” Alix says, “very dirty, very badly kept, really quite a slum.” Outside, the place was “overrun with weeds and garbage and people.”12

  Marina did not want to move in. She said the place was “filthy dirty—a pigsty.” Lee thought they could fix it up. They were still arguing when Gary and Alix left to return the trailer. It was their second drive to Fort Worth in behalf of the Oswalds in a single day, a round trip each time of nearly three hours. As they were leaving Lee thanked them for helping him with the move. “It was a very brief thank you, and that was that,” said Alix.13 It was the only time she ever heard him say it.

  On the first night in their new apartment, November 4, Marina stayed up till five in the morning, scrubbing everything in sight. Lee helped for a while. He cleaned the icebox, then left about ten in the evening. He had paid for a room at the Y, he said, and he might as well use it. But since the YMCA has no record that he stayed there after October 19, it is likely he spent a final night in whatever rooming house he had been living in for the last two weeks.

  Their reunion was not a happy one. Within a day or two, they were fighting again. Lee told Marina that she had been spoiled by the Russians. He said that George Bouhe was trying to “buy” her. “I understand, he doesn’t want you as a woman. But he wants to have you in his power.” He went on to accuse Marina of “whoring” after the Russians because they gave her money and possessions—“If you like them so much, go live with them!”

  Marina was angrier than she had ever been. Perhaps, after her month away from Lee, she had forgotten his brutality and how hard he could be to live with. Or perhaps, having been treated with kindness, she had grown to think better of herself, and what she had considered her due only a few weeks before seemed intolerable to her now. Besides, Lee had used the Russian blyad, a very strong word for “whore,” which was simply so insulting and profane that it seemed to give her no choice. Trembling, she ran out the door.

  “Go. I don’t care,” Lee shouted after her. “I don’t need you.”

  She forgot the baby. And she did not have a dime. But a garage attendant listened carefully to the name she kept repeating to him and dialed the telephone of Teofil Meller. Anna Meller answered the phone. After a brief pause during which she convinced her recalcitrant husband, Mrs. Meller told Marina to come by cab right away. They would pay for it when she got there.

  Marina went back to the apartment, grabbed the baby and a couple of diapers, and went out again. Lee was stretched out on the bed.

  She went into a doughnut shop and somehow conveyed to the waitress that she needed a cab. By eleven o’clock that night she was at the Mellers’. They found her shaking and upset, but she did not cry much and did not say what she and Lee had been fighting about. Mrs. Meller noted that the baby had nothing but diapers, a shirt, and an empty bottle and that Marina was wearing a light summer blouse and skirt (in early November). “She had no coat, no money, nothing.”14

  The next day the Russians had a council of war, as usual led by George Bouhe. “I don’t want to advise or interfere,” he told Marina. “But if you want my opinion, I don’t like Lee. I don’t think you can have a good life with him. I can’t come between a husband and wife. If you leave him, of course we’ll help. But if you say one thing now and then go back, next time no one will help.”

  “I’ll never go back to that hell,” Marina promised herself.

  — 18 —

  George de Mohrenschildt

  Anew voice had joined the chorus of Russians in Dallas—Alix Taylor’s father, George de Mohrenschildt, who met the Oswalds while they were in Fort Worth in September. It was a fateful meeting.

  An unlikelier pair of candidates for a friendship than Lee Harvey Oswald and George de Mohrenschildt can hardly be imagined. On one side was Oswald, twenty-three years old, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches in height, pale, balding, slender with sloping shoulders, Puritanical, friendless, more or less lacking in humor, a lower-middle-class American with a ninth-grade education and a head full of self-taught Marxist theories.

  On the other was de Mohrenschildt, fifty-one years old, 6 feet 1 or 2 inches tall, handsome, dark, broad-shouldered, a man of arresting physique who frequently wore bathing trunks on the street the better to display it, loud, hearty, humorous; a man who was forever dancing, joking, and telling off-color stories and who could drink all night and never show it, lover of innumerable women, a European aristocrat so secure of his lineage that there was no one whose friendship could demean him, holder of higher degrees from universities as far apart as Antwerp and Dallas, and a refugee from Communist Russia who would proclaim, as if the subject were closed: “Marxism, the sound of that word is boring to me. When it comes to dialectical materialism, I do not want to hear that word again.”1

  The contrast between two men could not have been more complete. Yet in what was at most fifteen or twenty encounters during the fall and winter of 1962–1963, George de Mohrenschildt became by far the most important of the new people that Lee Oswald met following his return to the United States.

  So unlikely a pair were they that some who knew them denied they were really friends at all. De Mohrenschildt, these people claimed, was a patron, not a friend, of Oswald’s. He was just
one of the many “stray dogs” (some pedigreed and aristocratic, others not) whom George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne took in out of generosity. Others said that de Mohrenschildt, having alienated nearly everyone else in Dallas, had no one but people like the Oswalds to fall back on, and that his friendship with Lee and Marina, which itself pushed other friends away, was a measure of how far he had fallen. Still others likened the relationship of the two men to that of Trigorin, the aging writer, and Nina, the young girl, in Chekhov’s play, The Seagull: “A man came along, saw the seagull and, having nothing better to do, destroyed it.” Such people felt that de Mohrenschildt knew very well what sort of man Lee Oswald was and played him like a violin. Consciously or unconsciously, de Mohrenschildt, they said, understood Lee’s capacity for violence and used him to act out his own violent fantasies.

  Different as they were on the outside, the older and the younger man actually had a good deal in common, starting with the connection they both had with Minsk. It was near there that George de Mohrenschildt was born, in Mozyr, Belorussia, in 1911.2 As he was later fond of pointing out, he was a one-man melting pot, a mixture of Russian, Polish, Swedish, German, and Hungarian blood. But the family name was Swedish (Mohrenköldt), and the Mohrenschildts traced their ancestry back to the Baltic nobility at the time of Sweden’s Queen Christina—the proudest nobility in all Russia. The men of the family had a right to be called “Baron,” but such were their liberal opinions that neither George’s father, Sergei von Mohrenschildt, nor his Uncle Ferdinand (first secretary of the czarist embassy in Washington, who married the daughter of William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and secretary of the treasury), nor George himself, nor his older brother Dmitry, ever made use of the title.

  Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sergei von Mohrenschildt had been a minor official of the czar. He was marshal of nobility in Minsk Province, the landowners’ elected representative in the local government. But although he was an aristocrat, Mohrenschildt was a classic liberal in the Russian mold, and deeply critical of the oppressions of the czar. He wanted a constitution that would guarantee the rights of the individual, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship. And he strongly opposed anti-Semitism, a touchstone in Belorussia, where there was a large Jewish population and where pogroms—“Beat the Jews and save Russia”—had been a scourge of the Jews for generations. He did all he could to help persecuted Jews whose troubles came to his attention.

  The elder Mohrenschildt eventually resigned as marshal of nobility and, through his connections, obtained a job as director of the extensive interests of the Nobels, a wealthy Swedish family, in Russia. For a while the Mohrenschildts lived in Baku, where Sergei supervised the Nobels’ enormous holdings in the oil fields. They also lived from time to time in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they were in one of those cities when the revolution struck in February and again in October 1917. Later, when the anarchy and violence that accompanied the Bolsheviks to power was compounded by famine, the family fled to their old home in Minsk, which was then under German occupation. But soon the Bolsheviks took over, and Sergei von Mohrenschildt was thrown in jail for openly opposing them. A Jew whom he had helped in the old days and who now held a position of power with the Bolsheviks heard about his plight and obtained his release (so many members of the formerly oppressed minority had joined their ranks that both the Bolsheviks and their opponents the Mensheviks were thought of by some as “Jewish” parties).

  When the Bolsheviks finally secured a permanent hold on Minsk in 1920, Sergei von Mohrenschildt could have fled to Poland, where he and his wife had an estate, but he elected to stay. For his loyalty and his liberal views, and because he could still be of use to them, the Bolsheviks rewarded him with an appointment to the Belorussian Commissariat of Agriculture. For several months “we lived more or less happily,” George de Mohrenschildt remembers, although like everyone else the family was afflicted by famine.

  But Sergei von Mohrenschildt’s outspokenness soon got him into trouble again. He opposed the antireligious policy of the Bolsheviks and was arrested, tried, and sentenced to live out his life in Siberia with his wife and younger son, George. Dmitry, the older son, was already under sentence to be shot. While the mother went about the country looking for influential friends who could help them, ten-year-old George was left to run wild. “I remained on the street making my own living somehow.”

  In jail in Minsk, Sergei von Mohrenschildt fell ill. Miraculously, he was once again saved by Jews he had helped—this time, the prison doctors. They told him to eat very little and appear as sick as possible. They then advised the government that he might die and suggested that he be allowed to go home until such time as he recovered his health and could survive the journey to Siberia. The government agreed, and Sergei von Mohrenschildt, his wife, and George made their escape to Poland in a hay wagon. (Dmitry was released in a prisoner exchange with Poland.) But the three wayfarers contracted typhoid on the difficult journey, and the mother died. It was 1922; George was eleven years old.

  Father and son struggled to their feet in the town of Wilno, Poland, just across the border from Russia. The family estate of six thousand heavily wooded acres in Polesie, near Wilno, had been taken over by the peasants. But Sergei von Mohrenschildt regained ownership and sold the land back piecemeal to the peasants, so that he and his son were not, as many Russians in Wilno were, penniless refugees. And he became head of the Russian-language gymnasium, or high school, in Wilno, which was run for the children of refugees.

  George de Mohrenschildt grew up close to his father, lived with him until the age of eighteen, emulated and adored him. While his older brother, Dmitry, left for the United States, earned degrees at Columbia and Yale, and became a professor at Dartmouth College, George graduated from the gymnasium at Wilno, attended the Polish cavalry academy, and left for Belgium at the age of twenty to attend the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies in Antwerp. He spent five years there, was awarded a master’s degree, then earned a doctor of sciences degree in international commerce from the University of Liège. Throughout his seven years in Belgium, he made frequent trips to Poland to see his father. With a girlfriend he became part owner of a successful ski clothing boutique. But in 1938 de Mohrenschildt, aged twenty-seven, broke with the girlfriend, dissolved their partnership, and left for America.

  He carried with him to the New World certain assumptions, certain ways of looking at things, which he had acquired during his storm-tossed early years in Russia. He had, first of all, the aristocratic assumption of privilege and second, a sunny resilience and an optimistic conviction that even in the worst of circumstances, he would always know someone “at the top” who would come to his rescue. But he had also learned that life is like a yo-yo, that one can plummet from top to bottom in no time and must, accordingly, learn to live by one’s wits and make the accidents of fortune work for one. George de Mohrenschildt, a man of devastating charm, was to do just that in America.

  And yet he had other qualities that were to stand in the way of his success. His was an outlook predicated on privilege, on the possession of sprawling, poorly tended estates that yielded just enough income to send the owner off on long, leisurely visits in Moscow and St. Petersburg now and then before returning to carry on some enlightened but ill-fated experiment with the peasants. The Mohrenschildts were landowners no longer, yet George still had habits that were rooted in possession. He was not a riotous spender, but a certain ease of living became him. It suited him not to think about money. Something in his upbringing, his aristocratic forebears perhaps, had endowed him with an enduring lack of interest in making money, and nothing, not all the burgher institutes of Belgium, could imbue him with a motive that was not really there. He needed to be able to take an income for granted. Lacking one, it was more congenial for him to marry than to make one.

  Along with his aristocratic way of looking at things, his easy way of mingling, as one friend put it, with the rich, the highly placed, the �
�top men in any form of government,” George de Mohrenschildt had a liberal set of opinions and was often extraordinarily outspoken in expressing them.3 Thus he had a strong feeling for the freedom of the individual and a hatred for anything that interfered with it. He loathed oppressive government; he loathed restrictions of any kind. Some felt that he hated all authority, that he was a perpetual rebel, a sort of one-man revolution, all in himself. He was high-spirited and irrepressible, so much so that one could say of him what was said of the famous Russian anarchist Bakunin: that for his courage and his qualities of leadership he would be invaluable on the first day of the revolution, but on the second he would have to be shot.

  Many of George de Mohrenschildt’s opinions, and certainly his forthrightness in expressing them, could be traced to his father. But there was a crucial difference. Sergei von Mohrenschildt had, after all, been living through his country’s greatest crisis. It was a requirement of history that he speak out. He was a Don Quixote, in a sense, and amid the chaos of revolutionary Russia his actions had been as efficacious as a puff of smoke. But he had his existence in a genuine historical setting, and he did what a constitutional liberal of his time and place had to do. His son was not to be so lucky. Where the father had been pitted against society—a rotten czarist society first and a ruthless Bolshevik society afterward—the son came to be pitted merely against “society,” the moneyed families of New York and Long Island, of Philadelphia, Denver, and Dallas. These were the people who, in the New World, were to clasp him to their bosoms time and again for his charm, only to throw him out for his unconventional political opinions—and his outrageous behavior. Again and again he was on the “inside,” again and again he was tossed out.