As for the Oswalds, both of them were charmed by George. And Marina liked Jeanne right away, although Lee complained after their first meeting that she was too fat and lavished too much affection on her dogs. But he soon changed. He saw that Jeanne was a good cook, a splendid companion, and a loyal, devoted wife. He admired her for helping George financially. In fact, it was not long before he was holding her up as an example Marina ought to follow.
George was a tonic for Lee and shook him out of his depressed spirits. More than anyone else he met after his return to the United States, Lee was drawn to George, opened up with him, paid attention to his opinions, even sought his advice. They probably saw one another fifteen or twenty times in all, but people with resources far greater than the Oswalds’ still found any encounter with George unforgettable. And their score of meetings had all the more impact on Lee because they occurred in a vacuum. Outside the men he saw at work, he knew nobody else. Moreover, his usual way of dealing with people simply vanished when he was with this older, more experienced man. Lee used people to get what he wanted, then drove them away if they tried to get too close to him, if their usefulness was over, or if they expected something in return for their kindness. But when he saw that George expected nothing and did not intrude upon him, he left off maneuvering. He even lied less to George than he did to anybody else.
Curiously, de Mohrenschildt, too, who loved nothing better than to bruise the sensibilities of his bourgeois friends, was exquisitely tactful with Lee. Where nearly everyone else considered Lee arrogant, de Mohrenschildt found him “very humble. If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed, absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about himself, he was just out of this world. That was more or less the reason that I think he liked me very much.”[9]
De Mohrenschildt later insisted, however, that once the novelty wore off, once he and Jeanne had learned all they thought Lee had to tell them about Russia, they kept up with the Oswalds mostly out of sympathy. After that, George said, the relationship was “purely to give a gift”: take the Oswalds to a party, introduce them to people, feed them a much-needed meal. George’s epitaph of Lee might have been the epitaph of one of his dogs: “He was responsive to kindness.”[10]
Lee was indeed responsive. Sometimes, after they had talked over some political event and Lee heard what George had to say, he would alter his opinion. “George is right,” he would announce. It was Lee’s supreme accolade. With George alone among the émigrés, he did not feel that he had to defend the USSR. With George alone his discussions of Soviet affairs did not degenerate into argument and were not laced with hostility. Not feeling that he had to defend Russia, Lee spoke knowingly and from the inside, and far more critically with George than with anybody else. He received several Soviet newspapers, and George used to ask what was in them. Very often the two of them would compare the Soviet version of some event with the stories in the American press. Both assumed the American version to be the true one, and they had many a good laugh over the discrepancies between the two. “Those poor Russians,” Lee used to say. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
Both men admired Khrushchev, his de-Stalinization and his policy of peaceful coexistence. Besides, Khrushchev’s high spirits, his cheerful, slightly manic way of exuding aggressiveness, were not altogether unlike George’s own. But even George roared with laughter when Lee told him how Stalin’s statue had been dynamited in Minsk and carried away under the cover of night. “So they’re still doing things the same old way,” George said. “Things haven’t changed over there.”
Lee paid George another tribute. He asked him to read his manuscript, “The Collective,” which he had shown previously only to the typist Pauline Bates, his brother Robert Oswald, and to Gary and Alexandra Taylor. It was George’s opinion he cared about the most.
Lee must have been disappointed. George gave the manuscript only the most cursory glance. What he said of it to Lee is not known, but what he thought of it is. “He showed me his little memoirs,” George said afterward. “I did not take him seriously. That is all. All his opinions were crude.” George characterized Lee as a man of “exceedingly poor background who read rather advanced books and did not understand even the words in them. He read complicated economical treatises and just picked up difficult words out of what he had read and loved to display them. He loved to use the words to impress me. He did not understand the words—he just used them. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him. We realized that he was a forlorn individual, groping.”[11]
Like the other Russians, George considered the possibility that Lee might be a Soviet spy. He discounted the idea; Lee was “too outspoken in his ideas and attitudes.” He later said: “I would never believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important. An unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would. Even the government of Ghana would not give him any job of any type.” During one of their conversations, George recalled, “I asked him point blank, ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party?’ And he said no. He said, ‘I am a Marxist.’ Kept on repeating it.” George did not discuss it any further because, “knowing what kind of brains he had, and what kind of education, I was not interested in listening to him, because it was nothing; it was zero.”[12]
Whatever his private opinion, Lee felt that George respected him, perhaps because George, with his perfect democracy of manner, treated him exactly as he treated everyone, and Lee took a lot more teasing and criticism from George than he would from anybody else. Marina put her finger on it when she said: “The word ‘respect’ just doesn’t fit George. George has a respect for nature. But he does not respect human beings. He probably respects his dog or a good bottle of wine more than he respects any person.” Still, she thought that George liked her husband and treated him as an equal.
To both Oswalds, the de Mohrenschildts were figures of authority. Jeanne also treated Lee with warmth and respect, but she was frank with him, too. She scolded him for his strictness with Marina, whom he forbade to drink, smoke, or wear makeup. “Why do you forbid her to smoke?” Jeanne would ask. “She only does it because you disapprove. Let her smoke. I’m sure she’ll stop if you do.”
It was the same when it came to the English language. Both George and Jeanne told Lee emphatically that he must allow Marina, must encourage her, to study English. Lee refused with the usual excuse that he would forget his own Russian if he did not practice with Marina. “That is a very egotistical attitude on your part,” George said. Lee did not reply.
Jeanne was frank with Marina, too. Knitting away on a tiny jacket for one of her dogs, she advised Marina to give in to Lee more often. “You ought not to fight over trifles,” she said. But when Marina, encouraged, felt invited into the older woman’s confidence and sought some advice about sex, Jeanne was repelled. Sexually, Marina confided, Lee was “not strong.” He came to a climax very quickly. Was it her fault? Were there pills he could take that might help? Ought they to go see a doctor?[13]