In 1951 de Mohrenschildt, aged forty, was an exciting man to look at. He was intellectually exhilarating—and he had money besides. It was then that he met and married Wynne (“Didi”) Sharples, a practicing physician from a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family. They moved to Dallas, where, sparked by Didi’s aspirations, they cut a wide social swath: charity balls, country club outings, the works. But Didi seems to have lacked humor, a requisite of marriage to de Mohrenschildt. And difficulty deepened into tragedy when two children were born in rapid succession suffering from cystic fibrosis. It was the de Mohrenschildt who started the National Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis. (Several years later Jacqueline Kennedy, whom de Mohrenschildt had known as nine-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, became its honorary chair.)
After he and Didi were divorced in 1956, de Mohrenschildt, afflicted for the first time with physical infirmities and an inability to concentrate, decided not to stay in oil promotion. Instead, basing himself in Dallas, he took on a series of oil and natural gas consulting jobs abroad, mostly in Africa and Latin America, and went on a US government junket to Yugoslavia. After his trips to Yugoslavia and Ghana, he is known to have been debriefed extensively by the CIA. Those who knew him best, however, believe that he was never employed by the agency, and there are CIA documents that appear to support this.
It was in Dallas, after the journey to Yugoslavia, that de Mohrenschildt made his fourth and most enduring marriage, to Jeanne LeGon. Jeanne (pronounced “Zhan”) had been born and raised in Harbin, China, as Evgenia Fomenko, like de Mohrenschildt a White Russian.[6] Her father, also like de Mohrenschildt’s, was a prominent man, the director of the Chinese Far Eastern Railway, who was eventually killed by the Communists—Russian, Japanese, or Chinese, Jeanne never knew which. She and her first husband, Robert LeGon (born Valentin Bogoyavlensky), had been a successful dance team in Tientsin and Shanghai before coming to the United States in the late 1930s. They were about to sign into the Rainbow Room in New York City when Jeanne became pregnant; after her daughter was born, and she was unable to dance any longer, she took a job as a model.
It was a lucky choice, for on Seventh Avenue Jeanne blossomed. She became a successful fashion designer, living in New York and California, and traveling all over the country, with frequent side trips to Europe. She was said to be so aggressive in business that if you pushed her out the window she came back through the door. Some years Jeanne earned over $20,000, plus clothing and travel expenses, although, prodigal Russian that she was, she never saved a cent. Her husband, Robert LeGon, showed none of her resilience. He grew depressed, dwelled more and more on his family’s loss of fortune in China, and, unable to adjust to a new life in the United States, eventually became a mental patient in California.
After Jeanne started seeing George de Mohrenschildt, Robert LeGon came twice to Dallas. He is said to have gone after his wife’s admirer with a revolver, then hired a private detective. But like so many others before him, he succumbed to the de Mohrenschildt charm. He declared that he would grant his wife a divorce on one condition—that de Mohrenschildt promise to marry her. De Mohrenschildt pronounced this rival “a charming fellow” and proceeded to do exactly as he had been asked.
A year or so later, shattered by the death of his son (by Didi) from cystic fibrosis, George gathered up Jeanne and their dogs and set off on a year’s walking trip through Mexico and Central America. It was his way of forgetting the tragedy. But it was a rugged trip, much rougher than they had imagined, and by the summer of 1962, nine months after their return to Dallas, they had barely recovered from their exertions. Moreover, their savings were gone, furrowed into the wilds of Mexico. George was writing a report of their Mexican adventure, hoping to publish it as a book. He had even written a letter to President Kennedy, asking him to contribute the preface. And Jeanne, to support them, had taken a job in the millinery department of the Sanger-Harris department store. Financially, they were in one of their valleys.
Socially, things were not much better. Where once de Mohrenschildt had been a habitué of the higher reaches of Dallas society, knowing, or claiming to know, such people as H. L. Hunt, the wealthy Murchison family, the banker Serge Semenenko, and even the shah of Iran, he was now persona non grata. It was not that people did not like him. On the contrary, nearly all of them were enchanted, very often against their better judgment. Summer and winter, in blazing heat and freezing cold, he would dash about Dallas in his open Cadillac convertible, impervious to the ravages of weather. There was the magnificent build, the splendid chest. De Mohrenschildt was never unaware of his body—or the effect it was having on others. Women had always toppled into bed with him, while men envied him his swashbuckling charm. One friend, Max Clark, says that “he should have lived three or four hundred years ago and been an explorer or pirate or something.”[7] Bouhe thought that “George never missed a chance to be grandiose,”[8] while to the admiring Samuel B. Ballen, George de Mohrenschildt, for all his faults, “was like Hemingway and Lawrence of Arabia rolled into one.”[9] Morris I. Jaffe, the attorney who represented him in the 1960s, was less favorable in his opinion. He says George felt “the world owed him a living and he will not use his tremendous abilities and intelligence to any constructive end.”[10]
His attractions were enormous, but so was his capacity to outrage. Although de Mohrenschildt proclaimed himself a “fighting atheist,” he liked nothing better than to show up at one of the two Russian Orthodox churches in Dallas on a Sunday morning, clad in his shorts, not to worship but because he loved to sing in the choir and found it “amusing” to consort with the Russian folk afterward. On such an occasion he might say: “The Communists don’t believe in God, and neither do I. We will all be fertilizer after we die.” A close friend, Igor Voshinin, has said he was “absolutely unpredictable.”[11] He might appear at a dinner or cocktail party bare chested. Then the next time in a shirt but no tie. On still another occasion, he might drop in on a formal party barefooted. Again, he might be perfectly clad. You never knew what to expect.[12]
As for his fourth wife, Jeanne, she was even more extreme. Middle-aged and spreading a bit, she had platinum blonde hair and went around in tight pants and a very tight top, “like a teenager,” one of the Russians sniffed. Jeanne insisted on playing tennis clad only in the briefest of bikinis, years before the bikini was “in.” In Jeanne, in fact, George had at last found a helpmeet so wildly unconventional as to make him seem staid by comparison. Her conduct was often more outrageous and antagonistic than his. Like her husband, she thought religion a “fraud” and lost no opportunity of saying so. But the worst thing was her passion for her dogs. Jeanne had two little Manchester terriers with whom it was not too much to say that she had fallen in love. She would go nowhere without them, and friends who asked the de Mohrenschildt to dine found that they had asked the dogs, too. She dressed them in diapers and fondled them ostentatiously the entire time. People were driven away in droves.
6
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt’s story is taken from her testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 285–331, and from George S. de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.