Reclaiming History (157 page)

Ofstein had studied Russian for a year at the army’s foreign language school at Monterey. He did not do well there but understood a little of the language. Like Oswald, he too had resided abroad. He had been stationed in Germany. It would be many months, though, not until February 1963, before he learned anything about his coworker’s sojourn to the Soviet Union or even, for that matter, that Lee’s wife was Russian.
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On November 3, Lee, now having a steady job and income, rented a sixty-eight-dollar-a-month apartment for himself, Marina, and June at 604 Elsbeth Street in the Oak Cliff district of Dallas.
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On Sunday, November 4, the Taylors helped Lee and Marina move their belongings from Elena Hall’s home in Fort Worth to the apartment using a rented trailer.
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The reunion of the Oswald family in a new place for a new start did not turn out to be a happy one. Marina was disheartened by the crummy apartment Lee had chosen for them. Alexandra Taylor agreed. It was a hole. “It was terrible,” she said, “very dirty, very badly kept, really quite a slum.” The floor slanted and had big bumps in it, and the exterior was as depressing as the interior, “a small apartment building…two stories, overrun with weeds and garbage and people.”
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That night, Marina described the place as “filthy dirty—a pigsty,” and didn’t even want to move in, but she was a trooper and stayed up until five in the morning trying to scrub it clean, without much help from Lee. After he cleaned the icebox, he told her he still had a night left at the YMCA that he had paid for so he might as well use it. It was another lie. He hadn’t been at the Y for days, and he probably went back to wherever he had been staying the previous two weeks that no one seemed to know about.
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The new beginning was really just a resumption of their old fights, but with a new savagery, and the small Russian community of friends was still hanging on to Marina, off stage.
*

Mr. and Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, the managers of the apartment who lived in one of the units, were aware of the frequent fights, and other tenants complained about the noise from the fights and the baby crying so much that she kept them awake at night. One reported that a window in a backdoor to the flat was broken, apparently in connection with a fight.
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Marina was making no secret of her sexual problems—she told the de Mohrenschildts, right in front of Lee, “He sleeps with me just once a month, and I never get any satisfaction out of it.” George was somewhat taken aback by her crude and straightforward confession to “relative strangers,” as he still regarded themselves to be at the time.
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Relative strangers they may have been, but the fact is that by the time of the move to 604 Elsbeth Street, the de Mohrenschildts were just about the only friends Lee had left.

B
aron George de Mohrenschildt is God’s gift to the conspiracy theorists. Foreign born, intelligent, urbane, multilingual, well connected, well traveled, eccentric, unconventional, with contacts in the CIA, he seems too extravagantly endowed with qualities
not
to have played some hidden role in the assassination.

De Mohrenschildt was born in 1911 in a small town near the frequently shifting Polish-Russian border, bearing the blood of many nationalities in his veins, which was not uncommon among the European aristocracy with their international family ties. The name, originally Mohrensköldt, was Swedish, and the family descended from Baltic nobility at the time of Sweden’s Queen Christina.
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All of the men in the family, including George, were entitled to call themselves “Baron,” although none of them did. George’s Uncle Ferdinand had been first secretary of the Russian embassy in Washington in the time of the Romanovs and married the daughter of Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo. George’s older brother, Dimitry, a prestigious scholar at Dartmouth, also shunned the title.
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George and Dimitry’s father, Sergei von Mohrenschildt, had been marshall of nobility in the province of Minsk and a representative elected by the landowners in the local government. At the same time, he was opposed to both czarist repression and the prevailing anti-Semitism of the period. He eventually resigned his post in order to direct the affairs of the wealthy Swedish family Nobel in Russia, a post that took the family to the oil fields of Baku, then to Moscow, and eventually to St. Petersburg, where they were when the revolution broke out in 1917. George was then six years old. The family fled back to Minsk, but when the Bolsheviks drove out the German occupying forces, they also jailed Sergei von Mohrenschildt, who, though a classic liberal, openly opposed the Bolsheviks. He was released through the good auspices of some influential Jew whom he had protected from persecution years before.

He was thereafter appointed by the Bolsheviks to the Belorussian Commissariat of Agriculture in Minsk, but it wasn’t long before he was in trouble again, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to live out his life in exile in Siberia with his wife and younger son. Sergei had opposed on principle, even though he was not very religious himself, the atheistic Bolsheviks forcing their irreligion and godlessness on others. And when they asked him at a court hearing, “What kind of government do you suggest for Soviet Russia?” and he answered, “A constitutional monarchy,” that sealed his fate. While their mother searched everywhere for influential friends who could help the family, young George “remained on the street making my own living somehow.” He was ten years old.

Jewish doctors in Sergei von Mohrenschildt’s prison came to his aid. They told him to eat little and feign illness, while they advised the government to allow him to return home until he grew well enough to survive the journey to Siberia and the harsh life there. The ruse worked. Sergei was released and promptly fled with his wife and young George in a hay wagon to a family estate just across the border in Poland, near Wilno. Meanwhile, George’s brother, Dimitry, who had been under a sentence of death by the Bolsheviks for being, as George said, “a ferocious anti-Communist” who was a member of the Russian czarist navy at the time of the revolution, was later released in an exchange of prisoners with Poland. For Dimitry’s mother, the relief was short-lived. She died in 1922, when George was eleven. The de Mohrenschildts lost the estate to expropriation by the Communist regime, somehow managed to get it back, then sold it off piecemeal to the tenants. Dimitry left for America and an academic career, while George remained with his father in Poland until he was eighteen, when he briefly attended the Polish Cavalry Academy. At twenty he went to Antwerp, Belgium, to take a master’s degree at the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies. Five years later he went on to the University at Liège, where he earned his doctorate in international commerce in two years. He also owned, with a girlfriend, a successful boutique for ski clothing, but in 1938, as Austria fell to the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Wehrmacht as a result of Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler at Munich, he broke with his partner and departed for the United States.
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That summer he stayed with his brother and his American sister-in-law at Bellport, near East Hampton on Long Island, where he quickly made friends with the smart set, including a young woman, Janet Lee Bouvier, who was estranged from her husband, John “Blackjack” Bouvier. Blackjack had more or less dropped out of the picture, but George spent a lot of time with the rest of the Bouvier clan, including Janet’s nine-year-old daughter Jacqueline, who would one day be the nation’s First Lady. George even dated Janet to the point of wanting to marry her, but according to Jacqueline’s brother Jack, his mother “wanted a very rich man,” and George didn’t qualify.
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Despite his easy entree into high society, assured by his aristocratic background, his superior education, his mastery of Russian, Polish, French, German, and Spanish, and even more by his good looks and fabled charm,
*
life was rough in those last years of the Great Depression, and George had to scramble to make a living as a salesman for a series of New York perfume, wine, and fabric companies. His degrees counted for little, but his contacts eventually paid off. Through letters of introduction from Margaret Clark Williams, whose family owned vast oil holdings in Louisiana, he landed a very well-paid job with Humble Oil, even if the work was physical. He enjoyed the hard labor until he was badly injured in an accident on a rig, and then contracted amoebic dysentery. He failed to get a job as a polo instructor at an Arizona boy’s school, tried selling insurance in New York—he was spectacularly unsuccessful, failing to sell even a single policy—and was then called up for service in the Polish army, which he narrowly avoided because the last ship for Poland, the
Battory
, had already sailed. He then made a documentary film, with a distant cousin named Baron Maydell, about the Polish resistance to Soviet aggression. The film was very popular with supporters of the resistance but made no money.
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It is during this period, at the outset of the war in 1939, that de Mohrenschildt began to develop contacts with intelligence agencies. He is reported to have done odd jobs for Polish intelligence, and in 1941 did work with a friend and business associate, Pierre Fraiss, for French intelligence. The two men traveled the country purchasing American oil for France, as much to keep it out of German hands as anything else. This activity came to a natural end when Germany declared war on the United States in December of 1941 and there was no further possibility of Germany buying oil in the United States.
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Around that time he pursued a romance with a woman he thought of as “the love of my life,” Lilia Larin, a Mexican to whom de Mohrenschildt was introduced in the United States by Dr. Declo de Paulo Machado, a fabulously wealthy Brazilian. Larin had been divorced once, but was now married to a Frenchman named Guasco, with whom de Mohrenschildt had a fistfight. George having just been declared 4-F by the draft and thus ineligible for military service, Larin invited him to go to Mexico City with her, which he did, devoting himself to her and to the painting of watercolors for about nine months, an idyll that was brutally interrupted when a Mexican general fell in love with Larin and eliminated the competition by having de Mohrenschildt expelled from the country. George proceeded to New York, where he exhibited his watercolors. Though they were well received by critics, they failed to sell.

George’s Mexican adventure also produced his first run-in with American authorities. On the drive down to Mexico, he and Lilia stopped at a lonely spot on the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and the Mexican border for a swim and some sketching. On the way back from the beach their car was stopped by federal agents—he believes they were the FBI—who searched the car, were very insulting, he said, to Larin, and worst of all accused George of being a German spy. It seems his sketches were made too close to a Coast Guard station near Aransas Pass, although they apparently did not include the station itself. George protested that he wasn’t spying for anyone at the time, not even the French, and although George and Larin were let go, the incident left him with a lifelong grudge against the FBI. Larin complained to the Mexican ambassador about the incident.
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Back in New York City with a wounded ego, in 1942 de Mohrenschildt sold an investment he had made in sugar in Mexico at a tidy profit and started to work on a book of his early life, which he called “A Son of the Early Revolution.” He took a trip to Palm Beach, where he met and married a teenage girl, Dorothy Pierson, daughter of a woman who was, by a second marriage to a Florentine, the Countess Cantagalli. On Christmas Day of 1943, Pierson bore him a daughter, Alexandra, or Alexis, as she came to be known. Pierson also left him a month later, seeking a divorce on grounds of physical cruelty and infidelity. Alexis was transferred to the care of her aunt, Nancy Tilton, whom she came to think of as her mother and lived with for fourteen years while growing up in Arizona and Florida in the winter, and Vermont in the summer.
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After the divorce in early 1944, de Mohrenschildt decided that his efforts at writing and painting were getting him nowhere but he was still interested in the oil business. He enrolled at the University of Texas to study petroleum geology with a minor in petroleum engineering. He supplemented his income by teaching French at the university and received another master’s degree, this one in petroleum geology, in 1945.
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De Mohrenschildt had a job waiting for him in Venezuela as a field engineer, but it didn’t last long. He got in “some personal trouble” with the company’s vice president, which led to his resignation. He wanted to come back to the United States anyway to renew his application for American citizenship, as he was still traveling on his prewar Polish passport. So in 1946 he passed through New York and soon went on to Houston, where he found a job that took him to Rangely, Colorado, then the largest oil field in America. He spent three years there, working for the Rangely Field Engineering Committee, a joint operation of all the oil companies charged with compiling statistics and engineering data for the whole field. There, in 1947, he married his second wife, Phyllis Washington, the daughter of a diplomat with the State Department. Both job and marriage failed to survive. He terminated his employment in January 1949 and divorced Phyllis around that time too. He worked for a time as a consultant out of the Denver office of a friend in the business, Jimmy Donahue, and then realized that everyone was making money in the oil business except him, that he was little more than a flunky for the big operators. He got in touch with Eddie Hooker, a nephew by marriage who worked for Merrill Lynch, Fenner, & Beane in New York, and, in 1950, they went into business together, with de Mohrenschildt in Denver buying oil leases and Hooker raising New York money for exploratory wells. The partnership lasted two years before it foundered, and George developed reputations for square dealing in business but hanky-panky with other men’s wives. “We made money, we lost money,” he would later say of the partnership, “but it was a pleasant relationship. We are still very good friends.”
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