Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  When the Russians heard of Lee’s behavior at Parkland and Marina’s tongue-lashing, they were confirmed in their hands-off policy toward the Oswalds. What was the point of helping people who were hellbent on hurting themselves? George Bouhe was incredulous. “Just think!” he said. “Lee took help from the doctors. He was rude and contemptuous to the nurses, he told innumerable lies to get out of paying—two dollars!” Lee did indeed get a bill from Parkland in the mail for exactly $2. He paid it without a murmur and even mentioned how little it was.

  Bouhe understood by now that Lee’s energies were so drained by inner turmoil that he had nothing left for anybody else. But his sympathies, as always, were with Marina. De Mohrenschildt said that Bouhe was still worrying about her as if she were his daughter. If Marina had behaved badly at the hospital, Bouhe said to himself, it could only have been because Lee had goaded her beyond bearing. Bouhe thought and he thought, and he came up with the direst of prophecies. “Just you wait,” he announced to the other Russians. “He’ll get her pregnant again.”

  Alone among the Russians, the de Mohrenschildts did not give up on the Oswalds. George dropped by every other week or so, and he generally brought Jeanne. The couples presented quite a contrast: the hearty, high-spirited George and the flamboyant, energetic Jeanne, side by side with the grave and humorless Lee and the drab, dispirited Marina. “Ho, ho, ho, how are you getting along these days?” George would greet them as he came in the door. Then, to Marina, “And are you planning to leave Lee again?” No, not right away, she would say. Jeanne would remark that Marina’s return to Lee had all but killed George Bouhe, and this brought another roar of laughter from de Mohrenschildt. His high spirits had a way of rubbing off on those around him, and he always left the Oswalds in a far more cheerful mood than he found them. But Marina noticed that his visits left her with very little else—a few anecdotes and dirty stories but no residue, nothing of substance at all. Yet she was always looking forward to the next encounter.

  It pleased George to get along with someone the other Russians had written off. It gave him a chance to tell them they were stuffy and narrow-minded. He particularly liked to show up George Bouhe on this score. Maybe it was a class thing—de Mohrenschildt was an aristocrat; Bouhe was not—but he felt distaste for Bouhe’s bourgeois, bookkeeping approach. One of the reasons he liked Lee was that he was “not a beggar, a sponger,” and he had bridled at taking help from Bouhe.3 If de Mohrenschildt gave you help, he promptly forgot all about it. There were no strings attached; it never occurred to him to ask afterward what you had done with it.

  George was delighted to discover in Lee a pearl, where the other Russians had found only a prickly oyster. Besides, George thought that in Lee he had found an original. The émigrés were disgusting because Oswald, having seen Soviet reality, still had not given it up, still was reading Marx and praising Khrushchev. George, on the other hand, was enchanted when he asked Lee why he had left Russia and he answered simply, “Because I did not find what I was looking for.” “I knew what he was looking for,” George was to say later. “Utopia, and that does not exist any place.”4 But he was overjoyed to have found a fellow seeker.

  Both George and Jeanne, however, also found him an enigma. “He switched allegiance from one country to another,” George remarked, “and then back again, disappointed in this, disappointed in that. He did it without the enjoyment of adventure. For him it was a gruesome deal.”5 Lee did not have any fun. His lack of gaiety, indeed, what might be called the deadness of his spirit, was a puzzle to the de Mohrenschildts, who had suffered and enjoyed so much. What to them would have been a glorious adventure to Lee was just another drink from life’s long, cold bucket of disappointment. But they resolved to back him up. When Katya Ford gave it as her view that Lee was “all mixed up and not very bright,” the two of them sprang to his defense. “No, no,” George objected. “He’s all right. The boy is thinking.”

  Marina got the impression that as the de Mohrenschildts saw him Lee was an unbourgeois, uncalculating spirit who had dared go to Russia without giving a damn for the consequences—in short, a young man who was as unconventional as they were. Whatever it was they saw in him, both the de Mohrenschildts, and George in particular, gave Lee a warmth, an approval, and an emotional support that, after his return to America, he got from nobody else. And unlike the other Russians, they seemed, after the separation at least, to prefer Lee and look down on Marina. Part of the reason, of course, was George’s rebelliousness against his fellow émigrés. But there was another aspect to their relationship. George said of Lee: “He could be my son in age, you see.”6 George’s only son had died, and he had not recovered from the loss. That fall he was losing one son-in-law by divorce, Gary Taylor, with whom he was on good terms politically, and for political reasons he was on deteriorating terms with Jeanne’s son-in-law, Ragnar Bogoyavlensky-Kearton. Jeanne, too, was underfulfilled as a mother. She had no son of her own, and other things being equal, she liked men better than women. But the great thing both de Mohrenschildts shared was a passion for underdogs. As Jeanne was to put it later, Lee could be “disagreeable, very very disagreeable. The personality he had would make anybody miserable to live with.” But they also saw him as “a puppy dog everybody kicked.”7 For the two of them, that was enough.

  If George considered Lee one of those rare Americans who cared nothing for money or possessions, he viewed Marina, by contrast, as a real American in spirit, a more or less “normal” person, a “happy-go-lucky” bourgeois mouse who was bewitched by the gadgetry of American life and wanted more of it. They saw her as Ulysses saw his son, Telemachus: as a more or less “blameless” being, “centered in the sphere of common duty.” She seemed simply buried in problems: a baby, diapers, beatings, no money, no friends. Even Jeanne, a woman so generous that one friend said she had “an overdeveloped mother tendency,”8 appears to have been irritated by the bottomless pit of need that Marina represented. Moreover, the de Mohrenschildts felt that Marina always had her hand outstretched, that she would take anything you gave her. Not Lee—Lee had pride.

  As for the Oswalds, both of them were charmed by George. And Marina liked Jeanne right away, although Lee complained after their first meeting that she was too fat and lavished too much affection on her dogs. But he soon changed. He saw that Jeanne was a good cook, a splendid companion, and a loyal, devoted wife. He admired her for helping George financially. In fact, it was not long before he was holding her up as an example Marina ought to follow.

  George was a tonic for Lee and shook him out of his depressed spirits. More than anyone else he met after his return to the United States, Lee was drawn to George, opened up with him, paid attention to his opinions, even sought his advice. They probably saw one another fifteen or twenty times in all, but people with resources far greater than the Oswalds’ still found any encounter with George unforgettable. And their score of meetings had all the more impact on Lee because they occurred in a vacuum. Outside the men he saw at work, he knew nobody else. Moreover, his usual way of dealing with people simply vanished when he was with this older, more experienced man. Lee used people to get what he wanted, then drove them away if they tried to get too close to him, if their usefulness was over, or if they expected something in return for their kindness. But when he saw that George expected nothing and did not intrude upon him, he left off maneuvering. He even lied less to George than he did to anybody else.

  Curiously, de Mohrenschildt, too, who loved nothing better than to bruise the sensibilities of his bourgeois friends, was exquisitely tactful with Lee. Where nearly everyone else considered Lee arrogant, de Mohrenschildt found him “very humble. If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed, absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about himself, he was just out of this world. That was more or less the reason that I think he liked me very much.”9

  De Mohrenschildt later insisted, however, that once the novelty wore off, once he and Jeanne had learned all they thoug
ht Lee had to tell them about Russia, they kept up with the Oswalds mostly out of sympathy. After that, George said, the relationship was “purely to give a gift”: take the Oswalds to a party, introduce them to people, feed them a much-needed meal. George’s epitaph of Lee might have been the epitaph of one of his dogs: “He was responsive to kindness.”10

  Lee was indeed responsive. Sometimes, after they had talked over some political event and Lee heard what George had to say, he would alter his opinion. “George is right,” he would announce. It was Lee’s supreme accolade. With George alone among the émigrés, he did not feel that he had to defend the USSR. With George alone his discussions of Soviet affairs did not degenerate into argument and were not laced with hostility. Not feeling that he had to defend Russia, Lee spoke knowingly and from the inside, and far more critically with George than with anybody else. He received several Soviet newspapers, and George used to ask what was in them. Very often the two of them would compare the Soviet version of some event with the stories in the American press. Both assumed the American version to be the true one, and they had many a good laugh over the discrepancies between the two. “Those poor Russians,” Lee used to say. “They don’t know what’s going on.”

  Both men admired Khrushchev, his de-Stalinization and his policy of peaceful coexistence. Besides, Khrushchev’s high spirits, his cheerful, slightly manic way of exuding aggressiveness, were not altogether unlike George’s own. But even George roared with laughter when Lee told him how Stalin’s statue had been dynamited in Minsk and carried away under the cover of night. “So they’re still doing things the same old way,” George said. “Things haven’t changed over there.”

  Lee paid George another tribute. He asked him to read his manuscript, “The Collective,” which he had shown previously only to the typist Pauline Bates, his brother Robert Oswald, and to Gary and Alexandra Taylor. It was George’s opinion he cared about the most.

  Lee must have been disappointed. George gave the manuscript only the most cursory glance. What he said of it to Lee is not known, but what he thought of it is. “He showed me his little memoirs,” George said afterward. “I did not take him seriously. That is all. All his opinions were crude.” George characterized Lee as a man of “exceedingly poor background who read rather advanced books and did not understand even the words in them. He read complicated economical treatises and just picked up difficult words out of what he had read and loved to display them. He loved to use the words to impress me. He did not understand the words—he just used them. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him. We realized that he was a forlorn individual, groping.”11

  Like the other Russians, George considered the possibility that Lee might be a Soviet spy. He discounted the idea; Lee was “too outspoken in his ideas and attitudes.” He later said: “I would never believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important. An unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would. Even the government of Ghana would not give him any job of any type.” During one of their conversations, George recalled, “I asked him point blank, ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party?’ And he said no. He said, ‘I am a Marxist.’ Kept on repeating it.” George did not discuss it any further because, “knowing what kind of brains he had, and what kind of education, I was not interested in listening to him, because it was nothing; it was zero.”12

  Whatever his private opinion, Lee felt that George respected him, perhaps because George, with his perfect democracy of manner, treated him exactly as he treated everyone, and Lee took a lot more teasing and criticism from George than he would from anybody else. Marina put her finger on it when she said: “The word ‘respect’ just doesn’t fit George. George has a respect for nature. But he does not respect human beings. He probably respects his dog or a good bottle of wine more than he respects any person.” Still, she thought that George liked her husband and treated him as an equal.

  To both Oswalds, the de Mohrenschildts were figures of authority. Jeanne also treated Lee with warmth and respect, but she was frank with him, too. She scolded him for his strictness with Marina, whom he forbade to drink, smoke, or wear makeup. “Why do you forbid her to smoke?” Jeanne would ask. “She only does it because you disapprove. Let her smoke. I’m sure she’ll stop if you do.”

  It was the same when it came to the English language. Both George and Jeanne told Lee emphatically that he must allow Marina, must encourage her, to study English. Lee refused with the usual excuse that he would forget his own Russian if he did not practice with Marina. “That is a very egotistical attitude on your part,” George said. Lee did not reply.

  Jeanne was frank with Marina, too. Knitting away on a tiny jacket for one of her dogs, she advised Marina to give in to Lee more often. “You ought not to fight over trifles,” she said. But when Marina, encouraged, felt invited into the older woman’s confidence and sought some advice about sex, Jeanne was repelled. Sexually, Marina confided, Lee was “not strong.” He came to a climax very quickly. Was it her fault? Were there pills he could take that might help? Ought they to go see a doctor?13

  Jeanne later claimed that Marina’s confidences were made in front of Lee, in front of all of them, and that she ran him down sexually to his face. Marina denies this vigorously, and her denial has the ring of truth. For one thing, her only other sexual confidences to friends were made in private. For another, she knew that Lee would beat her terribly if she dared say any such thing.

  Like his wife, George avoided personal confidences. He had already interfered in Lee’s private life by encouraging Marina to leave him when they first moved to Dallas. He had seen Lee’s capacity for violence, he knew that Lee had beaten Marina, and he may have been fearful for her safety. But he respected the private lives of others, and he was not going to interfere again. Besides, George had a certain delicacy. He was discreet about his own sexual exploits and evidently did not readily lend an ear to those of others. What was more, he approved of Marina’s return to Lee. Maybe she had gone back too soon, as Jeanne and the other Russians thought, but she had made the right decision. George considered Lee a good fellow, and he hoped the marriage would stick.

  The subject that George really liked to talk about with Lee was politics. He was later to claim that once they had exhausted the topic of Russia, he and Lee had little to say to each other.14 That, apparently, was not true. The two talked politics all the time. Sam Ballen and Declan and Katya Ford thought this was the real bond between them, and Marina remembers their talking politics every time they met. They spoke in English, and Marina missed most of what they said. Anyway, it was her job to keep the baby out of the way so that Lee could make the most of his moments with George. But when it came to his political ideas, she feels certain that her husband had no secrets from George. In this sphere alone, and with this one man, Lee was comparatively frank. Except for Alexander Ziger and Pavel Golovachev, Lee’s friends in Minsk, Marina thinks George knew her husband’s political views better than anybody else—and that he read Lee like an open book.

  Domestically, the subject closest to them both was civil rights. Lee told George that “it was hurting him, the fact that colored people did not have the same rights as white ones.” They agreed that President Kennedy was doing a good job, doing more for the black man than any president had before him. “Yes, yes,” Lee would say, “I think he is an excellent president—young, full of energy, full of good ideas.”

  The Cuban missile crisis may have tempered Lee’s opinion of Kennedy, although in spite of himself he may well have admired Kennedy’s bravura display. Lee did not say much about the crisis, but when he did talk about it, it was to George—perhaps in the week of the crisis, and certainly many times thereafter. Those who saw George at the time recall that on this occasion, and this occasion only, he was cr
itical of Kennedy and that he was, as always, highly sympathetic to Castro. George sided with the underdog on principle, while Lee had long admired and even hero-worshipped the Cuban dictator, so the two were in strong agreement about Castro.

  Another topic they discussed was the integration of Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Four times that fall, in September and early October, federal marshals and officials of the US Department of Justice had tried to enroll James Meredith, a black man, in the university; and four times they desisted because of opposition from Governor Ross Barnett and because an angry crowd, egged on by retired US Army Major General Edwin A. Walker, threatened to erupt into ugly violence. Finally, President Kennedy called out the National Guard and sent US army troops to nearby Memphis, and Meredith was allowed to register, but at the cost of a riot in which two men lost their lives.

  Ironically, the same General Walker who exhorted the segregationists at Ole Miss had been ordered by President Eisenhower in 1957 to lead one thousand paratroopers into Little Rock, Arkansas, in the battle to integrate Central High School. He was then sent to Germany, where he used his post to disseminate extreme right-wing propaganda to the troops. Because of congressional objections, he was removed from his command. He retired from the army to live in Dallas and soon became a leading figure in the John Birch Society. For his provocative role in the demonstrations at Ole Miss, Walker was arrested on charges of insurrection and seditious conspiracy, sent to the US prison and medical center at Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation, and later released on $50,000 bond.