The de Mohrenschildts delighted in shocking even those friends who had remained loyal to them. At a celebrated gathering of the Bohemian Club in Dallas at which close Jewish friends of George were present, he scandalized and hurt his friends by declaring in a speech that Heinrich Himmler had not been so bad.[13] He knew that his friends the Voshinins hated Hitler particularly, so he rarely met them without the greeting: “Heil Hitler!” “He would love to do just exactly what people would object to,” Mrs. Voshinin explained. Whatever you favored politically, he would tell you that he held the opposite view. And if he could not get at you through politics, he would tell you that he favored free love. Whatever you were for on any subject, George took the opposite side. And he was “for the underdog, always.” She would not exactly call George a liar, Mrs. Voshinin added, but “he is certainly loose with the truth.” Igor Voshinin later called George and Jeanne “the most unconventional people I have ever seen,” both emotionally and politically, “and they seemed to enjoy it.” Voshinin allowed for George’s elaborate exaggerations, “taking, of course, thirty or forty percent off of what he says.”[14] With Jeanne the figure was said to be 90 percent.
Another close friend has conceded that social occasions with the de Mohrenschildts “did have a way of ending up in tension. The discussion would get personal, heated, intimate. Normal inhibitions were not present.”[15] And although the de Mohrenschildts’ only “race prejudice” was said to be against white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, their feelings ran high against their fellow Russians, too. When they were at a party together, emotions often grew so intense that the party simply broke up in anger. “You are all one-sided reactionaries,” Jeanne would explode at her compatriots. People would walk out and not speak to one another again for months.
That was how matters stood in the summer and fall of 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts found that doors formerly open now were closed to them. Yet George was a compulsively gregarious man who hated to spend an evening by himself and whose energies were by no means fully absorbed by his effort to write a book. And Jeanne was a generous but indiscriminate collector of “stray dogs”—human ones, that is.
One day in the middle of September, de Mohrenschildt was in Fort Worth with an American friend of Russian descent, Colonel Lawrence Orlov. They decided to pay a call on the couple who had newly arrived from Russia and went to the Oswalds’ Mercedes Street apartment. They were appalled at the “horrible surroundings,” the “slum” in which at first they found only Marina and her baby. To de Mohrenschildt, Marina looked “a lost soul,” and the child unwell. But he quickly established a bantering tone by telling her that little June, with her big, bald head, resembled nothing so much as a miniature Khrushchev. Marina sat her visitors down and gave them sherry. Colonel Orlov found her “very nice.”
Soon Lee came home from work and, after a few words in English, switched to Russian (confounding Orlov, who, his surname to the contrary, did not speak the language). Right away George spotted Lee as a “semi-educated hillbilly,” a Texan “of the very low category.” But like many an aristocrat, de Mohrenschildt had a perfect democracy of manner. Besides, it struck him that there was “something charming” about the fellow. He drew Lee into conversation and found him “very sympathetic.” Then and there he conceived a liking for him.
Jeanne for her part had been hearing about the Oswalds from George Bouhe for weeks, but she had not done anything to help them, and she felt ashamed. When Marina came to Dallas for her appointments at the Baylor Dental Clinic, she stayed with George’s daughter and son-in-law, Alix and Gary Taylor, and Jeanne drove her to the clinic. On October 15, when Marina again arrived in Dallas from Fort Worth for a final appointment at the clinic, she and the baby stayed overnight at the de Mohrenschildts’.
Late that evening, after George had gone to bed, Jeanne sat her guest down with a little wine and a lot of cigarettes and encouraged her to talk. Talk Marina did, about her life and that of other young people in Russia. Anxious to entertain and if possible to shock, she told stories of sexual orgies in Leningrad, leaving it unclear whether she had engaged in them or not.
Jeanne was taken aback. “Somehow she was not at all what I would picture as a Soviet girl.” To Jeanne, Marina seemed totally lacking in a sense of purpose; she was like a piece of flotsam, rising and falling on the surface of life without any goal whatsoever. It was the reverse of what Jeanne expected. She concluded that Marina represented a “degeneration,” a falling off in the quality of Soviet youth.
On the other hand, Jeanne had to admit that her visitor had charm. “She impressed me as an honest girl, and not malicious.” Jeanne gave Marina a nightgown with a housecoat to match. Marina was speechless—she sat there simply stroking her gifts with joy. Jeanne was touched by that. She decided that Marina was “a very, very pleasant girl,” a girl who “loved life” and “loved the United States absolutely.” As a matter of fact, Marina’s response to America, one of childish surprise, reminded Jeanne of her own feelings when she first came to this country.[16]
But she considered Marina a terrible mother. She could not get over the way Marina snatched the baby’s pacifier off the floor, popped it into her own mouth, which was filled with rotting, infected teeth, then into the baby’s mouth. How the child survived Jeanne did not know. Nor did she understand how Marina, who had grown up in a country where there was supposed to be a high level of medical knowledge and who had been trained as a pharmacist besides, could do such a thing to a child. She also considered Marina “lazy,” noting the late hour at which she rose the next morning.[17]
In spite of her mixed feelings for Marina, Jeanne was enthusiastic about continuing to help. George, meanwhile, was doing what he could for Lee. When he appeared in Dallas looking for a job, George urgently recommended him to his friend Samuel B. Ballen, a former New York businessman who was on the boards of several Dallas corporations. De Mohrenschildt told Ballen that Oswald was unusual in that he had “absolutely no hatred” of Russia. He was “very critical, knowingly critical” of both Soviet Russia and the United States, yet he was “outside the cold war on either side.” A compassionate and liberal-minded man, Ballen was intrigued. But after two hours with Oswald, Ballen concluded that rather than having “no hatred” for either side he had, to the contrary, “a little disdain for both.” He seemed “a little too aloof,” as if he knew “all things a little too affirmatively, too dogmatically,” and would too often close off discussion with an uncaring shrug. Ballen was drawn to a stubborn, self-educating, self-improving quality he detected in his visitor but reluctantly came to the conclusion that Oswald “wouldn’t fit in.” He was “too much of a rugged individualist, too hard-headed, too independent, a man who would upset any team operation.” Ballen thought that Oswald was “a humanitarian” and “a truth-seeking decent individual with a bit of Schweitzerian self-sacrifice in him—so much so that I didn’t want him working for me.” Ballen decided he was “too hot to handle.”[18]
Despite their disaffection for Lee, the Russians stood ready to help when he did find a job and was able to bring Marina and the baby to Dallas. Both Jeanne de Mohrenschildt and George Bouhe hoped they would settle nearby, and Jeanne even looked for an apartment for them in the University Park section where she and George were living. But Lee disappointed them once again by finding the apartment in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood on the opposite of town from where all of them lived. Then, suddenly, there was Marina, with her baby in her arms, standing on the Mellers’ doorstep. And when she announced that she had left Lee, the Russians, including George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, once again came to her rescue.
18
Testimony of Samuel B. Ballen, Vol. 9, pp. 47, 52–53; and conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.