Oswald's Tale (56 page)

Here in these first three months in Fort Worth their marriage suffers grievously from these episodes, and what may be an irremediable set of blows—and he withdraws from her, turns into himself and the dank pit of the ugliest part of himself—that coward who had found no stature in the eyes of other men. Now, from time to time, he will indulge a crucially expensive portion of his rage by striking his wife.

4

The Well-born Friend

If there is any place where a narrative of Oswald’s life is bound to take on the seductive ambiguity of a spy novel, it is with the entrance into Lee’s affairs of Baron George De Mohrenschildt,
¹
a tall, well-educated, powerful, handsome fifty-one-year-old with an incomparable biography.

McMillan:
. . . born in Mozyr, Belorussia, in 1911 . . . he was . . . fond of pointing out [that] he was . . . a mixture of Russian, Polish, Swedish, German, and Hungarian blood . . . 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.
²

Gary Taylor, who had been married to De Mohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra, offers a good description of the Baron:

MR. TAYLOR.
Uh—he is a rather overbearing personality; somewhat boisterous in nature and easily changeable moods—anywhere from extreme friendliness to downright dislike—just like turning on and off a light.

MR. JENNER.
What about his physical characteristics? . . .

MR. TAYLOR.
He’s a large man, in height only about 6′2″ but he’s a very powerfully built man, like a boxer . . . And he has a very big chest which makes him appear to be very much bigger than he actually is . . .

MR. JENNER.
All right. Give me a little more about the personality of George De Mohrenschildt . . .

MR. TAYLOR.
I would say that he has an inflammable personality. And he’s very likable, when he wants to be . . .

MR. JENNER.
Is he unconventional? . . .

MR. TAYLOR.
Yes; oftentimes wearing merely bathing trunks, and things like this, that—for a man of his age, which is about 50 to 52—is a little unusual . . . In fact, during the time that I was married to his daughter, I have not known him to hold any kind of a position for which he received monetary remuneration. So, as a result, why, he could spend his time at his favorite sport, which is tennis. And this could be in 32-degree weather in the bathing shorts I mentioned [any] time during the week. They have always owned convertibles and they would ride in them in all kinds of weather with the top down. They are very active, outdoor sort of people . . .

MR. JENNER.
Is [his wife] unconventional at times in her attire in the respects you have indicated in regards to him?

MR. TAYLOR.
Yes; very similar.

MR. JENNER.
She, likewise, wears a bathing suit out on the street, does she?

MR. TAYLOR.
Yes, quite a bit. And usually a bikini.
³

Inasmuch as Jeanne De Mohrenschildt was blond and agreeably overweight, she too had her impact on observers. The Warren Commission was, naturally, interested in her, but they were fascinated with De Mohrenschildt. His testimony would fill 118 pages of close print. Virtually half of this extended contribution was devoted to his biography, but then, so various were the details of his life that it was difficult not to wander afield:

MR. JENNER.
. . . the records show [that your brother Dmitri] was naturalized November 22, 1926, in the U.S. District Court at New Haven, which is where Yale University is located . . . do those facts square with your recollection?

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Yes; approximately the right period. I remember he went to Yale with Rudy Vallee—they were roommates.
⁴

When it came to name dropping, De Mohrenschildt had credentials. He was the only man in the world who had known both Jacqueline Kennedy when she was a child and Marina Oswald when she was a wife and a widow, and you could count on him to speak of that. He looked to the moment in conversation. Twitted by Warren Commission counsel Albert Jenner for arriving bare-chested at a formal dinner party—or so Jenner had already been told by a good number of witnesses—George was asked if he didn’t have a taste for shocking people.

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Well, it is . . . amusing to get people out of their boredom. Sometimes life is very boring.

MR. JENNER.
And get you out of your boredom, too?

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Maybe my boredom also.
⁵

He had, in fact, lived in so many countries, worked at so many occupations—cavalry officer in the Polish army, lingerie salesman in Belgium, moviemaker in New York, and petroleum engineer in Dallas—and had accumulated so many adventures and married so often (so cynically and so idealistically, sometimes for money, sometimes for love, having once been as wealthy as a gigolo who had hit on double-zero in matrimonial roulette, but reduced by 1962 to living on what Jeanne, his fourth and last wife, was making as a fashion designer at Nieman-Marcus) that boredom could easily have been one of his afflictions: Too much experience can prove as dangerous to maintaining a lively interest in life as too little.

We will learn a good deal more about him, however, if we take a close look at his writings and his testimony. The two are separated by thirteen years: He gave his testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964 and wrote his manuscript about Oswald in 1977—it would be printed in the twelfth volume of the House Select Committee on Assassination Hearings—but we might start with the manuscript, for De Mohrenschildt gives an interesting description there of meeting the Oswalds. Having heard about the new arrivals from the other émigrés, he claims he was curious to know more, and so, sometime in the first or second week of September, he set out to visit them. A window now opens to banish the stale and unanimous verdicts of the other émigrés. Odd currents blow in.

Someone gave me Lee’s address and one afternoon a friend of mine, Colonel Lawrence Orlov, and myself drove to Fort Worth, some 30 miles from Dallas. We drove over the dreary sewage-smelling miles separating the two cities. Texas does have lovely open spaces, but here they were degraded and polluted. After some searching, we found a shack on Mercedes Street in a semi-detached, slummy area, near Montgomery Ward.

I knocked and a tawdry but clean young woman opened the door . . . To Orlov she was beautiful notwithstanding bad teeth and mousy hair . . .
⁶

Marina offered us some sherry and said that Lee would soon be home from work. We spoke a little, fooling around; she had a pretty good sense of humor but the opinions she expressed seemed trite to me. And then entered Lee Harvey Oswald who was to become so famous or infamous. He wore overalls and clean workingman’s shoes. Only someone who never met Lee could have called him insignificant. “There is something outstanding about this man,” I told myself. One could detect immediately a very sincere and forward man. Although he was average looking, with no outstanding features and of medium size, he showed in his conversation all the elements of concentration, thought, and toughness. This man had the courage of his convictions and did not hesitate to discuss them. I was glad to meet such a person and was carried away back to the days of my youth in Europe, where as students, we discussed world affairs and our own ideas over many beers and without caring about time.
⁷

These positive evaluations continue:

Lee’s English was perfect, refined, rather literary, deprived of any Southern accent. He sounded like a very educated American of indeterminate background.
⁸

. . . it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev—in Russian . . . I taught Russian at all levels in a large university and I never saw such proficiency in the best senior students who constantly listened to Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends.
⁹

. . . both Lee and I were non-conformist, even revolutionary . . . but my long years of experience in Latin America, followed by my son’s death and the ensuing sadness, made me commiserate with the fate of the poor and of the starving. As a younger man, I was career- and money-mad, a hustler . . . But Lee was the same since his childhood, which made him such a beautiful and worthwhile person to me.
¹⁰

. . . He was socially motivated, was a dreamer and a seeker of truth. But such people have a very hard time in life and that’s why so many people considered him a failure and a loser.
¹¹

Very often people ask me with suspicion why I, a person with several university degrees and of fairly good financial and social standing—with friends among the rich of this world—became such a friend of that “unadjusted radical”—Lee Harvey Oswald? Well . . . I already spoke of his straightforward and relaxing personality, of his honesty or his desire to be liked and appreciated. And I believe it is a privilege of an older age not to give a damn what others think of you. I choose my friends just because they appeal to me. And Lee did.
¹²

De Mohrenschildt’s manuscript is titled
I’m a Patsy.
Jeanne De Mohrenschildt mailed it to the House Select Committee on Assassinations the day after her husband committed suicide in March 1977.

In 1964, when De Mohrenschildt testified before the Warren Commission, he did not speak in such favorable terms of Lee or of Marina:

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
. . . I found her not particularly pretty, but a lost soul, living in the slums, not knowing one single word of English, with this rather unhealthy looking baby, horrible surroundings.
¹³

. . . She is that type of a girl—very negligent, poor mother, very poor mother. Loved the child, but a poor mother that doesn’t pay much attention. And what amazed us, you know, that she, having been a pharmacist in Russia, did not know anything about the good care of children, nothing . . .
¹⁴

MR. JENNER.
Do you recall making this statement . . . “Since we lived in Dallas permanently last year and before, we had the misfortune to have met Oswald, and especially his wife Marina, sometime last fall.”

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Yes.

MR. JENNER.
What do you mean by the misfortune to have met Oswald and especially his wife Marina?

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
. . . it is not pleasant to have known the possible assassin of the President of the United States. And since he is dead, it doesn’t matter. But we still know Marina. We had the misfortune of knowing her—it caused us no end of difficulty, from every point of view . . .
¹⁵
people like us should have been protected against even knowing people like Oswald. Maybe I am wrong in that respect . . .
¹⁶
He is just a kid for me, with whom I played around. Sometimes I was curious to see what went on in his head.

But I certainly would not call myself a friend of his.

MR. JENNER.
Well, that may well be. But Marina, at least, expresses herself that way—that you “were the only one who remained our friend.”

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
. . . We were no friends, nothing. We just were too busy to be with them—period . . .
¹⁷
they were very miserable, lost, penniless, mixed up. So as much as they both annoyed me, I did not show it to them because it is like insulting a beggar—you see what I mean . . .
¹⁸
I did not take him seriously—that is all.

MR. JENNER.
. . . Why didn’t you? . . .

MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT.
Well, he was not sophisticated, you see. He was a semieducated hillbilly . . . All his opinions were crude . . .
¹⁹
His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not even understand the words in 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 sort of a forlorn individual, groping for something . . .
²⁰
I was not interested in listening to him because it was nothing, it was zero . . .
²¹
After we found out what was going on in that town of Minsk, what was the situation, what were the food prices, how they dressed, how they spent their evenings, which are things interesting to us, our interest waned. The rest of the time, the few times we saw Lee Oswald and Marina afterwards, was purely to give a gift or to take them to a party, because we thought they were dying of boredom, you see—which Marina was.
²²