Reclaiming History (158 page)

During this period, in 1951, at the age of forty, de Mohrenschildt took a third wife, Wynne “Didi” Sharples, a physician from a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family involved in the oil business. They met through Hooker in New York, where she was just graduating from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. They settled in Dallas, plunged into a giddy social whirl, and had children, a son and a daughter, both of whom suffered from cystic fibrosis. George and Didi set up the National Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis, of which Jacqueline Kennedy—then the senator’s wife—eventually became the honorary chairman. In 1956, George and Didi divorced.
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De Mohrenschildt, becoming skittish for the first time in his life, decided he had had enough of the oil promotion business and started to take a series of consulting jobs that took him mainly to Mexico, but to Cuba and several African and Latin American countries as well. One eight-or nine-month job in Yugoslavia, under the auspices of a governmental agency called the International Cooperation Administration, resulted in extensive debriefing by the CIA on his return, although there is no record of his ever having been employed by the CIA or any other American intelligence agency.
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Before he left for Yugoslavia, he met Jeanne LeGon, a Russian woman who had been born in Harbin, Manchuria, as Eugenia Fomenko, daughter of the Russian director of the Chinese Far East Railway. The director was killed by Communists during the war, although Jeanne never knew whether they were Russian, Japanese, or Chinese. She married her first husband, Robert LeGon, in Harbin in 1932. Neither were qualified architects, but they had done well in the business of designing and building houses there until the encroachment of the Japanese forced them to flee southward. They got by for a time in Tientsin and Shanghai as a dance team under the name of LeGon, until in 1938 they fled again, this time to the United States. They were about to open in New York’s Rainbow Room when Jeanne became pregnant and was no longer able to dance. She became a model and then a successful fashion designer, living in both New York and California, and her profession took her often to Europe. As she flourished, LeGon waned, becoming increasingly depressed about the loss of his family’s fortune in China and eventually wound up in serious mental trouble.
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The LeGons were living apart, he in California with their daughter, she in Dallas, when she met George de Mohrenschildt. She spent several weeks with George in Yugoslavia when he was on a mission for the International Cooperation Administration and, after their return, LeGon came to Dallas to break up their affair, hiring a private detective and threatening George with a pistol. Eventually, however, he agreed to divorce his wife provided George would marry her. George called LeGon “a charming fellow” and married Jeanne.
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A year or so later, George’s son by Didi Sharples died, and George, in his fifties, made another astounding change in his life: in 1960 and 1961, he and Jeanne left the states and took an incredible walking trip from Mexico through Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. Though Jeanne would say it was an “exciting, wonderful time…a trip I would never forget,” it was also exhausting physically and financially, and the de Mohrenschildts were still trying to recover from it when they met the Oswalds in the summer of 1962. George hoped to publish a book about the adventure and had even written to President Kennedy—perhaps relying on his long friendship with the president’s wife Jacqueline—in the hopes that Kennedy would write a preface for it. Jeanne, meanwhile, was supporting them with a job in the millinery department of Dallas’s Sanger-Harris store.
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De Mohrenschildt’s experience with money paralleled his relationship with his friends. Ever profligate, he needed great quantities of both, but he also tended to squander both. Few of those who knew him well were able to resist his charm entirely, but everyone tended to reach a point where they had had rather more of it than they could take. It seemed that he was compelled to test people’s affection for him by assaulting their sensibilities however he could. He would show up at people’s homes without invitation. Though he was a “fighting atheist,” he would turn up at one of the two Russian Orthodox churches in Dallas, clad in shorts, because he wanted to sing along with the church choir, then say, “The Communists don’t believe in God and neither do I. We will all be fertilizer after we die.” He would show up at a formal party in bare feet, or a social get-together bare-chested. To call him a free spirit would be to dishonor the term.
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Though he was liberal, and felt most people were bigots, just to provoke shock he hurt close Jewish friends at a meeting of the Bohemian Club, a small group of Dallasites who got together “to argue,” by opining in a speech that Heinrich Himmler, head of the infamous SS, had not been so bad. He greeted his Russian immigrant friends, the Voshinins, who particularly loathed Hitler, with “
Heil Hitler
!” He jumped enthusiastically into discussions of political and social matters but would always “take the opposite side of whatever anybody would say.”
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Natalie Voshinin, a geologist and one-time employee and friend of George’s, thought him neurotic, noting that he would flare into a rage for no reason and complained several times to her that he couldn’t concentrate very well, one time speaking about seeing a psychiatrist.
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It would be nice to say that George’s wife Jeanne tried to be a moderating influence on him. But alas, she was not. Author Priscilla McMillan, who interviewed members of the Dallas–Fort Worth Russian community, writes of Jeanne,

Middle-aged and spreading a bit, she had platinum blond 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 helpmate 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 Mohrenschildts to dine found that they had asked the dogs too. She dressed them in diapers and fondled them ostentatiously the entire time.
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Mrs. Voshinin, who knew the de Mohrenschildts well, said that both of them were “like children.”
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But because the de Mohrenschildts were the only members of the small Russian community in Dallas and Fort Worth who weren’t ultimately driven away from the Oswalds by Lee’s offensive behavior, and continued to see and try to help them (Jeanne told Katya Ford it was their duty since everybody else had dropped them and they still needed help),
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and because the Warren Commission painfully and minutely examined every single aspect of Oswald’s life that could possibly lead to the complicity of others, the life and background of one of these “children,” George de Mohrenschildt, came under the intense scrutiny of the Commission.
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F
or all his byzantine cosmopolitanism, George de Mohrenschildt is in one respect an odd choice to be one of the primary villains for the conspiracy theorists, because he was a conspiracy theorist himself, convinced from first to last that his friend Lee had been set up to be the patsy.
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Never tired of talking, even writing about it, at the time of his death he was still working on a book-length exoneration of Oswald entitled “I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy!”
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Nevertheless, the screaming incongruities between the vigorously outgoing, well-educated, well-connected man-of-the-world de Mohrenschildt and the hopelessly awkward, reclusive, and inadequate Oswald are striking, fueling speculation that something else just had to be behind their relationship. Moreover, as de Mohrenschildt would say, “Marxism,” Oswald’s guiding star, “is very boring to me. Just the sound of that word is boring to me…When it comes to dialectical materialism, I do not want to hear that word again.”
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Intellectually, the contrast is also conspicuous, de Mohrenschildt with several graduate degrees, Oswald the “semi-educated hillbilly,” as de Mohrenschildt himself once called him, with his unremarkable elementary school education.

Lee had no real friends, according to Marina, but he did have, per Marina, “a great deal of respect for de Mohrenschildt,” because he considered George to be “smart, to be full of the joy of living, a very energetic and very sympathetic person.” Marina liked him too. “He would bring some pleasure and better atmosphere when he came to visit.”
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The fact that de Mohrenschildt took Oswald seriously was no doubt a major part of his attraction for Lee. Why de Mohrenschildt took him seriously is more perplexing, but there are clues in his manuscript. Here is de Mohrenschildt’s description of their first meeting, at the Oswalds’ place in Fort Worth: “He wore overalls and [had] clean workingman’s shoes on. Only someone who had never met Lee could have called him insignificant. ‘There is something outstanding about this man,’ I told myself. One could detect immediately a very sincere and forward man. Although he was average-looking, with no outstanding features and of medium size, he showed in his conversation all the elements of concentration, thought, and toughness. This man had the courage of his convictions and did not hesitate to discuss them. I was glad to meet such a person.”
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In Lee’s very cantankerousness and rebellious ways, so offensive to others, George seems to have seen some reflection of his own youth. He was “carried away back to the days of my youth in Europe, where as students we discussed world affairs and our own ideas over many beers and without caring about time.” He was also impressed by Lee’s social consciousness, the fact that he was a “seeker of justice” with “highly developed social instincts,” the lack of which George had come to deplore in his own children.
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Lee was also of an age to be George’s son—he mentioned that in his testimony to the Warren Commission.
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As indicated, George’s only boy had died, and at his age (fifty-one) it was unlikely that he would ever have another.
*

A few days after that first meeting in Fort Worth, Lee called George and offered to visit the de Mohrenschildts in Dallas—an offer almost unique in Lee’s history. He rarely offered to visit anyone, never with his family in tow. George was willing to drive over to Fort Worth to fetch them, but Lee politely declined. He, Marina, and June would go over to George and Jeanne’s home on the bus.

The two men sat on a couch and talked the whole evening. George was naturally curious to hear anything of recent vintage about Minsk, which he thought of as a hometown, but he also encouraged Lee to talk about his childhood, his military service, how he had come to his radical ideas, what drove him to try the Soviet Union. They even traded some of those wonderfully cynical jokes people in Communist countries tell about their predicament. (“Comrade Secretary, I want to ask you four questions: What happened to our petroleum, wine, and meat, and also what happened to the comrade who asked the first three questions some time ago?”) Above all, George paid attention to Lee, an experience for the younger man that had heretofore been almost unknown. That visit was to be only the first of several to the de Mohrenschildts.
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The friendship was extraordinary for one so brief. Priscilla McMillan estimates that they saw each other only fifteen or twenty times in all over a period of less than a year.
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They met in the late summer of 1962 and the de Mohrenschildts moved to Haiti in May of 1963 on an oil-and gas-drilling venture.
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When relations between Lee and Marina turned really ugly in early November of 1962 after the move to Elsbeth Street, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne were the only ones in the emigré community with the will and courage to confront Lee directly. Lee had accused Marina of “whoring” after her Russian friends—using a particularly abominable Russian word for “whore,”
blyad
—because they gave her money and possessions she could not get from him. He invited her to leave: “If you like them so much, go live with them.” Marina was so offended she ran out the door, with Lee shouting after her, “Go. I don’t care, I don’t need you!”
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She ran to a nearby filling station, where an attendant listened to the name she kept repeating, finally understood she wanted to speak to Teofil and Anna Meller, found the number, and dialed it for her. Marina asked if she and her baby could come to her home.
*
Anna, after a brief argument with Teofil, who was dead set against her coming, told Marina to take a cab, which the Mellers would pay for when she arrived.

Marina went back to the apartment just long enough to get the baby and a couple of diapers and ducked out again, while Lee was stretched out on the bed. She didn’t tell him what she was doing or where she was going. She somehow managed to convey to a waitress at a donut shop not far from the apartment that she needed a cab, and around eleven she turned up at the Mellers, upset and shaking but dry-eyed. She was wearing only a skirt and light blouse—on a chilly November night. Meller recalls that Marina was holding her “baby…a couple of diapers and that was all. No coat, no money, nothing.” Marina and Junie stayed with Anna and her husband for several days, at which time Anna took Marina to the doctor because she was “as skinny as she could be” and the doctor said she was “very undernourished.”
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The day after Marina came to the Mellers, some of the Russians met with Marina to confer about the problem, and George Bouhe encouraged her to leave Lee. “I don’t think you could have a good life with him.” Everyone was still willing to help her, he said, but if she went back to Lee, no one would want to help her again. Marina told herself, “I will never go back to that hell.”
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