Their reunion was not a happy one. Within a day or two, they were fighting again. Lee told Marina that she had been spoiled by the Russians. He said that George Bouhe was trying to “buy” her. “I understand, he doesn’t want you as a woman. But he wants to have you in his power.” He went on to accuse Marina of “whoring” after the Russians because they gave her money and possessions—“If you like them so much, go live with them!”
Marina was angrier than she had ever been. Perhaps, after her month away from Lee, she had forgotten his brutality and how hard he could be to live with. Or perhaps, having been treated with kindness, she had grown to think better of herself, and what she had considered her due only a few weeks before seemed intolerable to her now. Besides, Lee had used the Russian blyad, a very strong word for “whore,” which was simply so insulting and profane that it seemed to give her no choice. Trembling, she ran out the door.
“Go. I don’t care,” Lee shouted after her. “I don’t need you.”
She forgot the baby. And she did not have a dime. But a garage attendant listened carefully to the name she kept repeating to him and dialed the telephone of Teofil Meller. Anna Meller answered the phone. After a brief pause during which she convinced her recalcitrant husband, Mrs. Meller told Marina to come by cab right away. They would pay for it when she got there.
Marina went back to the apartment, grabbed the baby and a couple of diapers, and went out again. Lee was stretched out on the bed.
She went into a doughnut shop and somehow conveyed to the waitress that she needed a cab. By eleven o’clock that night she was at the Mellers’. They found her shaking and upset, but she did not cry much and did not say what she and Lee had been fighting about. Mrs. Meller noted that the baby had nothing but diapers, a shirt, and an empty bottle and that Marina was wearing a light summer blouse and skirt (in early November). “She had no coat, no money, nothing.”[14]
The next day the Russians had a council of war, as usual led by George Bouhe. “I don’t want to advise or interfere,” he told Marina. “But if you want my opinion, I don’t like Lee. I don’t think you can have a good life with him. I can’t come between a husband and wife. If you leave him, of course we’ll help. But if you say one thing now and then go back, next time no one will help.”
“I’ll never go back to that hell,” Marina promised herself.
— 18 —
George de Mohrenschildt
A new voice had joined the chorus of Russians in Dallas—Alix Taylor’s father, George de Mohrenschildt, who met the Oswalds while they were in Fort Worth in September. It was a fateful meeting.
An unlikelier pair of candidates for a friendship than Lee Harvey Oswald and George de Mohrenschildt can hardly be imagined. On one side was Oswald, twenty-three years old, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches in height, pale, balding, slender with sloping shoulders, Puritanical, friendless, more or less lacking in humor, a lower-middle-class American with a ninth-grade education and a head full of self-taught Marxist theories.
On the other was de Mohrenschildt, fifty-one years old, 6 feet 1 or 2 inches tall, handsome, dark, broad-shouldered, a man of arresting physique who frequently wore bathing trunks on the street the better to display it, loud, hearty, humorous; a man who was forever dancing, joking, and telling off-color stories and who could drink all night and never show it, lover of innumerable women, a European aristocrat so secure of his lineage that there was no one whose friendship could demean him, holder of higher degrees from universities as far apart as Antwerp and Dallas, and a refugee from Communist Russia who would proclaim, as if the subject were closed: “Marxism, the sound of that word is boring to me. When it comes to dialectical materialism, I do not want to hear that word again.”[1]
The contrast between two men could not have been more complete. Yet in what was at most fifteen or twenty encounters during the fall and winter of 1962–1963, George de Mohrenschildt became by far the most important of the new people that Lee Oswald met following his return to the United States.
So unlikely a pair were they that some who knew them denied they were really friends at all. De Mohrenschildt, these people claimed, was a patron, not a friend, of Oswald’s. He was just one of the many “stray dogs” (some pedigreed and aristocratic, others not) whom George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne took in out of generosity. Others said that de Mohrenschildt, having alienated nearly everyone else in Dallas, had no one but people like the Oswalds to fall back on, and that his friendship with Lee and Marina, which itself pushed other friends away, was a measure of how far he had fallen. Still others likened the relationship of the two men to that of Trigorin, the aging writer, and Nina, the young girl, in Chekhov’s play, The Seagulclass="underline" “A man came along, saw the seagull and, having nothing better to do, destroyed it.” Such people felt that de Mohrenschildt knew very well what sort of man Lee Oswald was and played him like a violin. Consciously or unconsciously, de Mohrenschildt, they said, understood Lee’s capacity for violence and used him to act out his own violent fantasies.
Different as they were on the outside, the older and the younger man actually had a good deal in common, starting with the connection they both had with Minsk. It was near there that George de Mohrenschildt was born, in Mozyr, Belorussia, in 1911.[2] As he was later fond of pointing out, he was a one-man melting pot, a mixture of Russian, Polish, Swedish, German, and Hungarian blood. But the family name was Swedish (Mohrenköldt), and 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.
Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sergei von Mohrenschildt had been a minor official of the czar. He was marshal of nobility in Minsk Province, the landowners’ elected representative in the local government. But although he was an aristocrat, Mohrenschildt was a classic liberal in the Russian mold, and deeply critical of the oppressions of the czar. He wanted a constitution that would guarantee the rights of the individual, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship. And he strongly opposed anti-Semitism, a touchstone in Belorussia, where there was a large Jewish population and where pogroms—“Beat the Jews and save Russia”—had been a scourge of the Jews for generations. He did all he could to help persecuted Jews whose troubles came to his attention.
The elder Mohrenschildt eventually resigned as marshal of nobility and, through his connections, obtained a job as director of the extensive interests of the Nobels, a wealthy Swedish family, in Russia. For a while the Mohrenschildts lived in Baku, where Sergei supervised the Nobels’ enormous holdings in the oil fields. They also lived from time to time in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they were in one of those cities when the revolution struck in February and again in October 1917. Later, when the anarchy and violence that accompanied the Bolsheviks to power was compounded by famine, the family fled to their old home in Minsk, which was then under German occupation. But soon the Bolsheviks took over, and Sergei von Mohrenschildt was thrown in jail for openly opposing them. A Jew whom he had helped in the old days and who now held a position of power with the Bolsheviks heard about his plight and obtained his release (so many members of the formerly oppressed minority had joined their ranks that both the Bolsheviks and their opponents the Mensheviks were thought of by some as “Jewish” parties).
2
De Mohrenschildt’s story is taken from his testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 166–284; from the FBI file on George S. de Mohrenschildt in the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and from conversations with Samuel B. Ballen, George A. Bouhe, and Declan and Katherine Ford.