When I first met her in June of 1964, the air around her was still thick with Texas promoters in their black suits and two-tone Italian silk shirts, proposing deals in which they would exploit Marina and she, her predicament. One offer was that she would be paid to tour the country with Lee’s body. Because it fitted so perfectly her own low view of herself, this proposal, and others that were equally outlandish, did not offend Marina nearly as much as they might have. And there were situations, some of which had to do with magazine or television interviews, in which Marina went to the opposite extreme and tried to drive a hard bargain because she knew nothing about “business” and did not want to be taken for “naïve” and a “little Russian fool.” Marina trusted no one in those days. Above all, she did not trust herself.
For ten months she spent hundreds of hours being interrogated, first by the Secret Service and then, increasingly, by the FBI. She liked Wallace Heitman, the FBI man who came most frequently to see her and treated her like his own daughter. But Marina never did surmount her fear of the FBI, and any visit from one of its agents, even Mr. Heitman, made her feel sick all day ahead of time in apprehension.
Besides, the endless questions she was asked had mostly to do with “hard” evidence. At what time had Lee come home on a certain night, or where had he buried his rifle? Such questioning was of no help to Marina in coming to terms with the questions that were peculiarly hers, questions of the emotions, questions of guilt and responsibility. Indeed, the lengthy hours of interrogation tended to submerge the very difficulties that were troubling her the most, and Marina had critics, especially among her former Russian friends, who thought that she did not behave with sufficient dignity, or as if she felt her proper share of responsibility.
Indeed, Marina became a little wild, taking only fitful care of her children, and spending as many waking hours as she could on escapades with boyfriends and neighbors, on all-night bowling sprees, and on well-publicized sorties to a Dallas nightclub called the Music Box, where she was soon a favorite. Aware of her self-destructiveness, Marina calls 1964 her “second Leningrad period.” Having an abased view of herself already, she was unable to absorb the notion that, as a helpless and pretty Russian widow with two children, there was a reservoir of sympathy for her among the American people. Marina would have been incredulous if she had known this and would have been driven to destroy a good public image if she had suspected that she had one.
As it was, she courted scandal and apparently wanted to plummet into danger and disgrace and carry everyone she knew down with her. Marina, better than anyone, understood the downward spiral in her behavior, lacking not the insight but the will to arrest it. And as always, she had boyfriends. They were from various walks of life, and some, out of bemusement at her quicksilver ways, or perhaps in a spirit of noblesse oblige, would gladly have lifted her from her outcast state and raised her a few rungs up the ladder of what Marina calls “culture.” But she contrived not to marry them. Once again her opinion of herself was so low that she simply could not risk placing herself in a position in which she would have to sustain the world’s regard.
During that year of 1964, Marina had reason to fill her waking hours with activity, for her dreams when she was asleep were harrowing. Sometimes she was looking for Anatoly, but once she found him he might turn out to have the character of Lee. Most of her dreams, however, appear to have reflected a feeling that she was Lee’s “keeper.” In one dream she dragged him up a marble staircase and shoved him into an elevator to get him away from a mob that would have killed him. Always there was a mob, and always the two of them were together. Once, when they had been running from a crowd, Lee, with his old nonchalance, seated himself on the grass to drink a cup of tea. Suddenly Marina looked over at him—and he was gone. Lee had vanished into the ground.
For more than a year after he died, perhaps because she was angry at Lee, yet unwilling to blame him for abandoning her, Marina was unable to speak to him in her dreams, or he to her. Finally, when most of the government questioning was over and the interviewing for this book nearly done, she had a dream in which Lee told her in Russian that he loved her, and Marina was able to answer. She was happy the whole day after that.
Marina’s trouble, of course, was that long after Lee was dead she loved him and wanted him back. Her most prized possession was a miniature straw donkey that he had brought her from Mexico. It had cost him only five cents, but to Marina it was a treasure. Then, in June 1964, seven months after Lee died, she had a terrible shock. Without her knowing about it in advance, the Dallas Morning News published Lee’s “Historic Diary.” Marina had watched as Lee wrote the diary in Minsk and had listened to him as, writing, he sang the theme song from High Noon. But she had not read the diary, and even after Lee died nobody told her the contents. Only now did she learn what Lee had written—that he had married her to get even with another woman. Marina had known about Ella Germann and had even seen her, but she had never had any inkling that Lee’s motive in marrying her had been to avenge himself on Ella. It was as cruel a blow as any she had suffered, for it caused her to call into question the validity of every one of her private memories—above all, the memory that Lee had loved her the best he knew how.
So great was her hurt and humiliation that for two months after publication of the diary she did not mention Lee’s name if she could help it, and she never did speak of him in quite the same way again. Marina learned to hold herself erect for new and cruel revelations. It was as if she was afraid of speaking, even privately, about moments of tenderness between them lest suddenly it be proven in public that Lee had never loved her at all. Marina’s view of Lee, and of the two of them, had been altered forever.
Even his bringing her breakfast in bed, his great indulgence and one of which she had been proud, now appeared not to have been proof of Lee’s love, but merely insurance against that far-off day when, intending to slip out and kill someone, he would not want her to see him go. As for his plan to send her back to Russia, that, too, fell into place. Marina saw that she had been only a pawn that Lee moved across the chessboard of his life merely to make his travels easier. She was convinced that anyone who could use another so could not, ever, have loved that other person. Her awareness hurt her the more because it fitted so exactly the abased view of herself that she had had all along—that she was nothing.
Luckily for Marina, she did grow outraged at Lee, although she has never, on her own account, been as angry at him as I think she has a right to be. I asked her if Lee had once had a sense of right and wrong but then lost it. Marina was furious. Lee had no moral sense at all, she said. Only egotism, anger at others on account of his failures, and inability to understand his mistakes. Although she saw that his act in killing the president had in part “a political foundation,” she refused to countenance the idea that Lee gave any thought, ever, to the good of anyone but himself. Yet, displaying once again her feeling that she as Lee’s wife was responsible for him, she said, referring to the assassination, that, “If he came back to earth and I could talk to him, I’d give him such a scolding that he would die all over again.”
Marina was stuck with her Russian “brother’s keeper” mentality that if your “comrade” commits a crime and you have failed to prevent it, then you are as guilty as he. Clearly, she felt guilty that she had failed to report Lee to the police after Walker, and she felt that guilt so strongly that it obscured such feelings of responsibility as she might have had on any other score. Had she informed on Lee then, he would have had a terrible fright. And had he been convicted of the attempt, he might have been in prison in November, and Kennedy would have been saved.