Gary Taylor was a little younger than Lee. He had many irons in the fire, and one of them was politics. He was an ardent Democrat, with a distaste for the John Birch Society, which was then very active in Dallas. Like his father-in-law, George de Mohrenschildt, Gary was a vociferous anti-Bircher and, if he disagreed with someone politically, was likely to dismiss him with, “Oh, he’s a Bircher.” Gary was probably the first person Lee actually met who felt strongly about the John Birch Society.
Lee enjoyed talking politics with Gary. “He was easy, not too hard to get along with,” Alix says. “We argued with him but it was always friendly.”[2] And according to Alix, Lee could be very persuasive. “He could make almost anybody believe what he was saying.” He was forever telling the Taylors that they were “stupid,” but because they were his age, more or less, and perhaps because he thought they were “stupid” and presented no threat to him, Lee opened up with Gary and Alix. With them he did not feel the same chip-on-the-shoulder need as he did with Bouhe and Mrs. Meller to defend the USSR, and he gave the Taylors the impression that he had been very, very unhappy in Russia and did not want to go back.
“He disliked Russia just like he disliked the United States,” Alix said later, in an analysis of Lee’s character and political beliefs that was far from “stupid.”
He disliked Russia very much. He didn’t agree with communism and he didn’t agree with capitalism. He believed in the perfect government, free of want and need, and free of taxation, free of discrimination, free of any police force, the right to be able to do exactly as he pleased, exactly when he pleased, just total and complete freedom in everything. He believed in no government whatsoever, just a perfect place where people lived happily all together and no religion, nothing of any sort, no ties and no holds to anything except himself. I really don’t know if he planned to work or not. I don’t know what Lee wanted to do in life. I think he wanted to be a very important person without putting anything into it at all. He expected to be the highest paid immediately, the best liked, the highest skilled. He resented any people in high places, any people of any authority in government. My husband told him you can’t be something for nothing, can’t expect to get high pay and receive a good position with no education and no ambition. No particular goal, no anything. He just expected a lot for nothing. I don’t think he knew what he wanted, and I don’t think he was too interested in working toward anything. He expected things to be just given to him on a silver platter. But in his ideas, he was extremely devoted. You couldn’t change his mind no matter what you said to him.[3]
Alix asked Lee if he had written anything about Russia, and he brought her his manuscript one evening. She read it and told him he ought to publish it. His answer was no, it was not for people to read.
Lee himself was reading a good deaclass="underline" Hitler’s Mein Kampf and William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He also reread George Orwell’s anti-Communist classics 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which were loaned to him by Alix’s father, George de Mohrenschildt.
The Taylors did not know where Lee was living. They thought he was at the YMCA at 605 North Ervay Street in downtown Dallas. Once, after an evening at their house, they dropped him off on the curb outside. Another time Gary picked him up inside. But Lee was actually at the Y only one work week, from Monday, October 15, until Friday morning, October 19. No one knows where he was living from October 8 to 13 or from October 21 to November 2. The Taylors helped him look for a room to rent and once spent an hour hunting for Lee at a North Beckley Street address given them by Alix’s stepmother. “We went up and down and up and down and never found the place,” Alix says.[4] Lee endorsed two checks that month, on October 16 and 22, his final paychecks from Leslie Welding. Both times he wrote not his own, but the Taylors’, address on the back with his signature. Even Marina had no idea where he was staying, and their Russian friends joked that her husband was sleeping on a park bench. He probably had a room in Oak Cliff, very likely on North Beckley Street. Why he bothered to keep the address secret is anybody’s guess.
Lee was happy in his job. Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall was an advertising photography firm that made billboards, posters, and advertisements for newspapers and magazines. For the first few days, Lee, an apprentice cameraman, followed his supervisor, John Graef, around to find out how things were done.[5] Graef noticed that the new man did not seem to mind taking orders. Lee learned the intrinsic quality of various types of paper and film, and then he learned various photographic and developing techniques, including distortion photography. He was paid between $1.35 and $1.50 an hour, a forty-hour week. He had never had a job he liked so well.
Marina, meanwhile, was outrageously happy in Fort Worth with Lyolya Hall. With no Lee, no one “beating on her nerves,” she says, she slept until two every day—the baby being trained, more or less, to do the same—and spent her afternoons in delicious solitude. Mrs. Hall returned late from work, and the two had down-to-earth conversations in Russian. Mrs. Hall offered to take Marina to her doctor for contraceptives. According to Mrs. Hall, Marina replied that her married life was so strange, Lee was so cold to her, and they had sexual relations so seldom that she doubted she was in danger of conceiving a child.[6]
Marina’s version is a little different. She says that she took Mrs. Hall into her confidence as an older woman and asked her advice. Lee was not strong “as a man,” Marina explained, and came to a sexual climax very quickly. Was she to blame? What could she do to help? Were there any home remedies? Should one or both of them see a doctor?
When she had been at Mrs. Hall’s a few days, an episode occurred that was pure Marina. She wanted to baptize the baby, although she knew Lee was opposed to it. Mrs. Hall called Father Dmitry Royster, the American-born priest of St. Stephen’s Eastern Orthodox Church in Dallas, to arrange it. And on the evening of October 17 the two women drove to Dallas, where Father Royster baptized June Lee Oswald, with Elena Hall as godmother.
But that was not the end of the conspiracy. The next day was Lee’s twenty-third birthday. Marina had saved up some money and bought him socks, a shirt, and a sweater. On the night of October 17, Alexandra Taylor heard a knock at her front door, and there on the steps she found Mrs. Hall and Marina with June in her arms. They explained that they had just had the baby baptized on the sly, and since they did not dare go to the Y, they asked Alix to give Lee his presents and invent a story to conceal the fact that they had been in Dallas.
Marina did not leave it at that. When she got back to Fort Worth, she telephoned Lee and told him to stop by the Taylors’. He did as he was told, and so did Alix. She made up a story about the presents, but Lee put two and two together. After that, Marina quickly broke down and admitted over the telephone what she had been only half trying to conceaclass="underline" that she and Lyolya had been in Dallas and had the baby baptized.
“Silly girl,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
5
Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 174–194; Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, Vol. 10, pp. 194–213.