And so, much as they had loved one another, there was to be in the end a vast difference between the experience of father and son. Where Sergei had been cloaked in the dignity of history, George de Mohrenschildt was merely trying to épater les bourgeois. He was a wound-up toy Don Quixote, truly tilting at windmills. And he had lost his latest battle. Where he had recently been “inside” Dallas society, George de Mohrenschildt, by the time he met Lee Oswald, was finally, irrevocably out—and longing to be back in.
As a young man in 1938, de Mohrenschildt spent his first summer in the United States with his brother and his American sister-in-law at Bellport, near East Hampton, on the eastern, ocean tip of Long Island. White Russian noblemen were then very much the thing in the watering places of the very rich, sought after for their charm, their princely titles, their picturesque stories of woe. The bearers of some of the proudest names in all Russia could be found on weekends sunning themselves on the beaches of Newport and Long Island’s North Shore, frequently men and women of infinite breeding and cultivation who had to drag themselves gamely back at the weekend’s close to New York City and such incongruous jobs as salesmen at Brooks and Bonwit Teller.
In this world de Mohrenschildt quickly made friends, among them a blind, soft-spoken young woman by the name of Janet Lee Bouvier; her handsome, dark, estranged husband John, known as “Black Jack” Bouvier, a scapegrace of New York society; and the Bouvier father and sisters. “We were very close friends,” de Mohrenschildt says of himself and the Bouvier clan. “We saw each other every day.” De Mohrenschildt is said to have liked Janet Bouvier very much, and during his frequent visits to the family, he saw a good deal of Janet’s and Jack’s nine-year-old daughter Jacqueline and five-year-old Caroline Lee.
For the next few years, de Mohrenschildt commuted between two lives: that of fashionable Park Avenue on one hand, and that of the penniless émigré trying, as he put it, “to make a buck” on the other. His Belgian degrees safely tucked into his past, useless in late-Depression America for a Russian still wrestling with the English tongue, he did brief, disheartening stints as a salesman for a series of perfume and wine and fabric concerns in New York. For all his ebullience and bonhomie, de Mohrenschildt’s early years in this country were poignant ones; “just tough going,” he admitted later, adding that had it not been for his brother and his friends he might have starved.
The story was an incongruous one—the European aristocrat, product of generations of breeding, accustomed to a life of privilege but not really interested in money, trying to make it in the land where money is king. But George de Mohrenschildt always had friends. Among them was Margaret Clark Williams, member of a family with vast oil holdings in Louisiana. Armed with letters of introduction from her, de Mohrenschildt landed a job with the Humble Oil Company and ended up as roustabout on an oil rig in Terebonne Parish, Louisiana. It was hard physical labor, and he excelled at it until he had an accident on the rig, was badly hurt, and contracted amoebic dysentery. He then tried and failed to get a job as polo instructor at a boys’ boarding school in Arizona, had little better luck as an insurance salesman in New York, was called up by the Polish army but just missed the last boat back to Europe in 1939, and had a fling making a documentary movie about the Polish resistance.
For de Mohrenschildt these were years of high adventure; they were also years of failure and bruises to the ego. It has been said that during the late 1930s he did odd jobs for the Polish Intelligence service in the United States, and before America entered World War II, he worked under cover for French Intelligence in the United States as well, buying up American oil for France to keep it out of Axis hands. He also fell in love with a Mexican, Lilia Larin, the widow of a Mexican chocolate king, whom he described as the “love of my life.” Buoyed by a $5,000 legacy from his friend in New York, Mrs. Williams, he spent nearly a year in Mexico City, painting and “going out” with Lilia, until a Mexican general fell in love with her and had de Mohrenschildt expelled from the country. Even then, he managed to snatch something out of the jaws of defeat: in New York he had a one-man showing of watercolors he had painted in Mexico. It was like so many other things he did in those days. The critics said the paintings were original, but they did not sell.
On that memorable foray into Mexico, de Mohrenschildt had what proved to be the first of many brushes with agents of the United States government. Driving along the deserted coast between Corpus Christi and the Mexican border, he and Lilia stopped at a wild spot called Aransas Pass to swim and do some sketching. What they were sketching proved to be the site of a Coast Guard station, and suddenly five toughs erupted from the bushes, ransacked the car, and accused de Mohrenschildt of being a German spy. As he protested indignantly later on, he was spying for no one at the time, not even France. He was the recipient of intermittent attention from the FBI after that, and if Lilia was the love of his life, the FBI became his great hate.
In the course of things, de Mohrenschildt was married several times. His first wife was Dorothy Pierson, a very young, well-connected American girl in Palm Beach, by whom, on Christmas Day, 1943, he had a daughter, Alexandra. At times during the marriage de Mohrenschildt was utterly charming, while at others he flew into violent rages. She left him after seven months of marriage, charging her husband with physical cruelty and infidelity. Her parents were under the impression that their son-in-law had been pro-Nazi in his sympathies; other who knew him at this time considered that he was, if anything, pro-Communist.[4]
After the divorce de Mohrenschildt decided to go into the oil business and went to the University of Texas to obtain a master’s degree in petroleum geology, at which he was said to be “brilliant.” But from this period, too, there were well-concealed rumors of destructiveness. De Mohrenschildt’s roommate, Tito Harper, was a handsome and highly intelligent young man from a ranching family at Eagle Pass, Texas. The family was deeply religious, it stood at the very apex of the social aristocracy of the border, and Tito was thought to have a splendid future. Instead, he suffered a complete change of personality. He renounced his American citizenship and moved to Mexico, where he turned to drink and drugs and later died mysteriously, possibly a suicide, in Mexico City. To the end his family blamed their son’s disintegration on the atheistic and antisocial influence of George de Mohrenschildt.[5]
Once he had his degree, de Mohrenschildt went to Venezuela prospecting for oil. In the late 1940s he turned up in Rangely, Colorado, one of the great boomtowns of the country, on a project compiling statistics and engineering data for the oil companies that were drilling there. He spent three years in Rangely and was married a second time, to Phyllis Washington, the daughter of an American diplomat. Afterward he characterized her proudly as an “international beauty, with bikinis, walking around the oil fields,” a “wonderful, beautiful girl,” who “created a terrible confusion in Colorado.” The job eventually petered out, as did the marriage. Once again there were rumors of violence, but de Mohrenschildt was later to claim that he remained on the most amiable terms with Phyllis Washington and her family.
Next, de Mohrenschildt went into oil partnership with a young man named Eddie Hooker, his nephew by marriage. By this time de Mohrenschildt had a reputation as a very good man to do business with—one who played the game with zest but was straight and honest and never pursued his purposes in any ulterior fashion. He had affairs with the wives of countless oil tycoons, for example, but it was said of him with respect that he never used any of them to promote his own business fortunes. His easygoing attitude affected his partnership with Hooker, however, for Hooker wanted to make a killing, while all de Mohrenschildt wanted, to hear him tell it, was “a reasonable living.” “We made money, we lost money,” he says of the partnership, “but it was a pleasant relationship. We are still very good friends.” Friendships, mingling with the right people, the wrong people, any people, meant more to George de Mohrenschildt than vast sums of money ever did.
4
This account is taken from de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file. Of the informants whose hearsay remarks are used in this paragraph, one was anonymous, one was known personally to the author, and the third had been governess to Dorothy Pierson de Mohrenschildt.