Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  The son had, it seemed, mastered his father’s experience all too well. Time and again his father had been on the inside, first of the czarist, then the Bolshevik, government, and time and again he had been driven out, until ultimately he was driven from the country altogether. Four times when he was between the ages of five and ten, George looked on as his father plummeted from a position of influence, down into danger and disgrace. The sight seems to have impressed him very much, for it was to become the central dynamic of his own life. But George’s “exiles” were only parodies, mindless reenactments of his father’s early, unforgettable odysseys into disgrace. The historical setting had been lost, the model was gone (Sergei von Mohrenschildt died in an air raid in Germany in 1945), and George’s friends, to say nothing of his wives, were at a loss to understand why he had to shock people so.

  And so, much as they had loved one another, there was to be in the end a vast difference between the experience of father and son. Where Sergei had been cloaked in the dignity of history, George de Mohrenschildt was merely trying to épater les bourgeois. He was a wound-up toy Don Quixote, truly tilting at windmills. And he had lost his latest battle. Where he had recently been “inside” Dallas society, George de Mohrenschildt, by the time he met Lee Oswald, was finally, irrevocably out—and longing to be back in.

  As a young man in 1938, de Mohrenschildt spent his first summer in the United States with his brother and his American sister-in-law at Bellport, near East Hampton, on the eastern, ocean tip of Long Island. White Russian noblemen were then very much the thing in the watering places of the very rich, sought after for their charm, their princely titles, their picturesque stories of woe. The bearers of some of the proudest names in all Russia could be found on weekends sunning themselves on the beaches of Newport and Long Island’s North Shore, frequently men and women of infinite breeding and cultivation who had to drag themselves gamely back at the weekend’s close to New York City and such incongruous jobs as salesmen at Brooks and Bonwit Teller.

  In this world de Mohrenschildt quickly made friends, among them a blind, soft-spoken young woman by the name of Janet Lee Bouvier; her handsome, dark, estranged husband John, known as “Black Jack” Bouvier, a scapegrace of New York society; and the Bouvier father and sisters. “We were very close friends,” de Mohrenschildt says of himself and the Bouvier clan. “We saw each other every day.” De Mohrenschildt is said to have liked Janet Bouvier very much, and during his frequent visits to the family, he saw a good deal of Janet’s and Jack’s nine-year-old daughter Jacqueline and five-year-old Caroline Lee.

  For the next few years, de Mohrenschildt commuted between two lives: that of fashionable Park Avenue on one hand, and that of the penniless émigré trying, as he put it, “to make a buck” on the other. His Belgian degrees safely tucked into his past, useless in late-Depression America for a Russian still wrestling with the English tongue, he did brief, disheartening stints as a salesman for a series of perfume and wine and fabric concerns in New York. For all his ebullience and bonhomie, de Mohrenschildt’s early years in this country were poignant ones; “just tough going,” he admitted later, adding that had it not been for his brother and his friends he might have starved.

  The story was an incongruous one—the European aristocrat, product of generations of breeding, accustomed to a life of privilege but not really interested in money, trying to make it in the land where money is king. But George de Mohrenschildt always had friends. Among them was Margaret Clark Williams, member of a family with vast oil holdings in Louisiana. Armed with letters of introduction from her, de Mohrenschildt landed a job with the Humble Oil Company and ended up as roustabout on an oil rig in Terebonne Parish, Louisiana. It was hard physical labor, and he excelled at it until he had an accident on the rig, was badly hurt, and contracted amoebic dysentery. He then tried and failed to get a job as polo instructor at a boys’ boarding school in Arizona, had little better luck as an insurance salesman in New York, was called up by the Polish army but just missed the last boat back to Europe in 1939, and had a fling making a documentary movie about the Polish resistance.

  For de Mohrenschildt these were years of high adventure; they were also years of failure and bruises to the ego. It has been said that during the late 1930s he did odd jobs for the Polish Intelligence service in the United States, and before America entered World War II, he worked under cover for French Intelligence in the United States as well, buying up American oil for France to keep it out of Axis hands. He also fell in love with a Mexican, Lilia Larin, the widow of a Mexican chocolate king, whom he described as the “love of my life.” Buoyed by a $5,000 legacy from his friend in New York, Mrs. Williams, he spent nearly a year in Mexico City, painting and “going out” with Lilia, until a Mexican general fell in love with her and had de Mohrenschildt expelled from the country. Even then, he managed to snatch something out of the jaws of defeat: in New York he had a one-man showing of watercolors he had painted in Mexico. It was like so many other things he did in those days. The critics said the paintings were original, but they did not sell.

  On that memorable foray into Mexico, de Mohrenschildt had what proved to be the first of many brushes with agents of the United States government. Driving along the deserted coast between Corpus Christi and the Mexican border, he and Lilia stopped at a wild spot called Aransas Pass to swim and do some sketching. What they were sketching proved to be the site of a Coast Guard station, and suddenly five toughs erupted from the bushes, ransacked the car, and accused de Mohrenschildt of being a German spy. As he protested indignantly later on, he was spying for no one at the time, not even France. He was the recipient of intermittent attention from the FBI after that, and if Lilia was the love of his life, the FBI became his great hate.

  In the course of things, de Mohrenschildt was married several times. His first wife was Dorothy Pierson, a very young, well-connected American girl in Palm Beach, by whom, on Christmas Day, 1943, he had a daughter, Alexandra. At times during the marriage de Mohrenschildt was utterly charming, while at others he flew into violent rages. She left him after seven months of marriage, charging her husband with physical cruelty and infidelity. Her parents were under the impression that their son-in-law had been pro-Nazi in his sympathies; other who knew him at this time considered that he was, if anything, pro-Communist.4

  After the divorce de Mohrenschildt decided to go into the oil business and went to the University of Texas to obtain a master’s degree in petroleum geology, at which he was said to be “brilliant.” But from this period, too, there were well-concealed rumors of destructiveness. De Mohrenschildt’s roommate, Tito Harper, was a handsome and highly intelligent young man from a ranching family at Eagle Pass, Texas. The family was deeply religious, it stood at the very apex of the social aristocracy of the border, and Tito was thought to have a splendid future. Instead, he suffered a complete change of personality. He renounced his American citizenship and moved to Mexico, where he turned to drink and drugs and later died mysteriously, possibly a suicide, in Mexico City. To the end his family blamed their son’s disintegration on the atheistic and antisocial influence of George de Mohrenschildt.5

  Once he had his degree, de Mohrenschildt went to Venezuela prospecting for oil. In the late 1940s he turned up in Rangely, Colorado, one of the great boomtowns of the country, on a project compiling statistics and engineering data for the oil companies that were drilling there. He spent three years in Rangely and was married a second time, to Phyllis Washington, the daughter of an American diplomat. Afterward he characterized her proudly as an “international beauty, with bikinis, walking around the oil fields,” a “wonderful, beautiful girl,” who “created a terrible confusion in Colorado.” The job eventually petered out, as did the marriage. Once again there were rumors of violence, but de Mohrenschildt was later to claim that he remained on the most amiable terms with Phyllis Washington and her family.

  Next, de Mohrenschildt went into oil partnership with a young man named Eddie Hooker, his n
ephew by marriage. By this time de Mohrenschildt had a reputation as a very good man to do business with—one who played the game with zest but was straight and honest and never pursued his purposes in any ulterior fashion. He had affairs with the wives of countless oil tycoons, for example, but it was said of him with respect that he never used any of them to promote his own business fortunes. His easygoing attitude affected his partnership with Hooker, however, for Hooker wanted to make a killing, while all de Mohrenschildt wanted, to hear him tell it, was “a reasonable living.” “We made money, we lost money,” he says of the partnership, “but it was a pleasant relationship. We are still very good friends.” Friendships, mingling with the right people, the wrong people, any people, meant more to George de Mohrenschildt than vast sums of money ever did.

  In 1951 de Mohrenschildt, aged forty, was an exciting man to look at. He was intellectually exhilarating—and he had money besides. It was then that he met and married Wynne (“Didi”) Sharples, a practicing physician from a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family. They moved to Dallas, where, sparked by Didi’s aspirations, they cut a wide social swath: charity balls, country club outings, the works. But Didi seems to have lacked humor, a requisite of marriage to de Mohrenschildt. And difficulty deepened into tragedy when two children were born in rapid succession suffering from cystic fibrosis. It was the de Mohrenschildt who started the National Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis. (Several years later Jacqueline Kennedy, whom de Mohrenschildt had known as nine-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, became its honorary chair.)

  After he and Didi were divorced in 1956, de Mohrenschildt, afflicted for the first time with physical infirmities and an inability to concentrate, decided not to stay in oil promotion. Instead, basing himself in Dallas, he took on a series of oil and natural gas consulting jobs abroad, mostly in Africa and Latin America, and went on a US government junket to Yugoslavia. After his trips to Yugoslavia and Ghana, he is known to have been debriefed extensively by the CIA. Those who knew him best, however, believe that he was never employed by the agency, and there are CIA documents that appear to support this.

  It was in Dallas, after the journey to Yugoslavia, that de Mohrenschildt made his fourth and most enduring marriage, to Jeanne LeGon. Jeanne (pronounced “Zhan”) had been born and raised in Harbin, China, as Evgenia Fomenko, like de Mohrenschildt a White Russian.6 Her father, also like de Mohrenschildt’s, was a prominent man, the director of the Chinese Far Eastern Railway, who was eventually killed by the Communists—Russian, Japanese, or Chinese, Jeanne never knew which. She and her first husband, Robert LeGon (born Valentin Bogoyavlensky), had been a successful dance team in Tientsin and Shanghai before coming to the United States in the late 1930s. They were about to sign into the Rainbow Room in New York City when Jeanne became pregnant; after her daughter was born, and she was unable to dance any longer, she took a job as a model.

  It was a lucky choice, for on Seventh Avenue Jeanne blossomed. She became a successful fashion designer, living in New York and California, and traveling all over the country, with frequent side trips to Europe. She was said to be so aggressive in business that if you pushed her out the window she came back through the door. Some years Jeanne earned over $20,000, plus clothing and travel expenses, although, prodigal Russian that she was, she never saved a cent. Her husband, Robert LeGon, showed none of her resilience. He grew depressed, dwelled more and more on his family’s loss of fortune in China, and, unable to adjust to a new life in the United States, eventually became a mental patient in California.

  After Jeanne started seeing George de Mohrenschildt, Robert LeGon came twice to Dallas. He is said to have gone after his wife’s admirer with a revolver, then hired a private detective. But like so many others before him, he succumbed to the de Mohrenschildt charm. He declared that he would grant his wife a divorce on one condition—that de Mohrenschildt promise to marry her. De Mohrenschildt pronounced this rival “a charming fellow” and proceeded to do exactly as he had been asked.

  A year or so later, shattered by the death of his son (by Didi) from cystic fibrosis, George gathered up Jeanne and their dogs and set off on a year’s walking trip through Mexico and Central America. It was his way of forgetting the tragedy. But it was a rugged trip, much rougher than they had imagined, and by the summer of 1962, nine months after their return to Dallas, they had barely recovered from their exertions. Moreover, their savings were gone, furrowed into the wilds of Mexico. George was writing a report of their Mexican adventure, hoping to publish it as a book. He had even written a letter to President Kennedy, asking him to contribute the preface. And Jeanne, to support them, had taken a job in the millinery department of the Sanger-Harris department store. Financially, they were in one of their valleys.

  Socially, things were not much better. Where once de Mohrenschildt had been a habitué of the higher reaches of Dallas society, knowing, or claiming to know, such people as H. L. Hunt, the wealthy Murchison family, the banker Serge Semenenko, and even the shah of Iran, he was now persona non grata. It was not that people did not like him. On the contrary, nearly all of them were enchanted, very often against their better judgment. Summer and winter, in blazing heat and freezing cold, he would dash about Dallas in his open Cadillac convertible, impervious to the ravages of weather. There was the magnificent build, the splendid chest. De Mohrenschildt was never unaware of his body—or the effect it was having on others. Women had always toppled into bed with him, while men envied him his swashbuckling charm. One friend, Max Clark, says that “he should have lived three or four hundred years ago and been an explorer or pirate or something.”7 Bouhe thought that “George never missed a chance to be grandiose,”8 while to the admiring Samuel B. Ballen, George de Mohrenschildt, for all his faults, “was like Hemingway and Lawrence of Arabia rolled into one.”9 Morris I. Jaffe, the attorney who represented him in the 1960s, was less favorable in his opinion. He says George felt “the world owed him a living and he will not use his tremendous abilities and intelligence to any constructive end.”10

  His attractions were enormous, but so was his capacity to outrage. Although de Mohrenschildt proclaimed himself a “fighting atheist,” he liked nothing better than to show up at one of the two Russian Orthodox churches in Dallas on a Sunday morning, clad in his shorts, not to worship but because he loved to sing in the choir and found it “amusing” to consort with the Russian folk afterward. On such an occasion he might say: “The Communists don’t believe in God, and neither do I. We will all be fertilizer after we die.” A close friend, Igor Voshinin, has said he was “absolutely unpredictable.”11 He might appear at a dinner or cocktail party bare chested. Then the next time in a shirt but no tie. On still another occasion, he might drop in on a formal party barefooted. Again, he might be perfectly clad. You never knew what to expect.12

  As for his fourth wife, Jeanne, she was even more extreme. Middle-aged and spreading a bit, she had platinum blonde hair and went around in tight pants and a very tight top, “like a teenager,” one of the Russians sniffed. Jeanne insisted on playing tennis clad only in the briefest of bikinis, years before the bikini was “in.” In Jeanne, in fact, George had at last found a helpmeet so wildly unconventional as to make him seem staid by comparison. Her conduct was often more outrageous and antagonistic than his. Like her husband, she thought religion a “fraud” and lost no opportunity of saying so. But the worst thing was her passion for her dogs. Jeanne had two little Manchester terriers with whom it was not too much to say that she had fallen in love. She would go nowhere without them, and friends who asked the de Mohrenschildt to dine found that they had asked the dogs, too. She dressed them in diapers and fondled them ostentatiously the entire time. People were driven away in droves.

  The de Mohrenschildts delighted in shocking even those friends who had remained loyal to them. At a celebrated gathering of the Bohemian Club in Dallas at which close Jewish friends of George were present, he scandalized and hurt his friends by declaring in a speech that Heinrich Himmler had not b
een so bad.13 He knew that his friends the Voshinins hated Hitler particularly, so he rarely met them without the greeting: “Heil Hitler!” “He would love to do just exactly what people would object to,” Mrs. Voshinin explained. Whatever you favored politically, he would tell you that he held the opposite view. And if he could not get at you through politics, he would tell you that he favored free love. Whatever you were for on any subject, George took the opposite side. And he was “for the underdog, always.” She would not exactly call George a liar, Mrs. Voshinin added, but “he is certainly loose with the truth.” Igor Voshinin later called George and Jeanne “the most unconventional people I have ever seen,” both emotionally and politically, “and they seemed to enjoy it.” Voshinin allowed for George’s elaborate exaggerations, “taking, of course, thirty or forty percent off of what he says.”14 With Jeanne the figure was said to be 90 percent.

  Another close friend has conceded that social occasions with the de Mohrenschildts “did have a way of ending up in tension. The discussion would get personal, heated, intimate. Normal inhibitions were not present.”15 And although the de Mohrenschildts’ only “race prejudice” was said to be against white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, their feelings ran high against their fellow Russians, too. When they were at a party together, emotions often grew so intense that the party simply broke up in anger. “You are all one-sided reactionaries,” Jeanne would explode at her compatriots. People would walk out and not speak to one another again for months.

  That was how matters stood in the summer and fall of 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts found that doors formerly open now were closed to them. Yet George was a compulsively gregarious man who hated to spend an evening by himself and whose energies were by no means fully absorbed by his effort to write a book. And Jeanne was a generous but indiscriminate collector of “stray dogs”—human ones, that is.