Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  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.961

  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.962

  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.963

  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.964

  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.965

  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 1945.966

  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.”967

  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.968

  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.969

  Before he left for Yugoslavia, he met Jeanne LeGon, a Russ
ian 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.970

  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.971

  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.972

  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.973

  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.”974

  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.975

  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.976

  Mrs. Voshinin, who knew the de Mohrenschildts well, said that both of them were “like children.”977 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),978 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.979

  For 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.980 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!”981 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.”982 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.”983

  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.”984

  In Lee’s very cantankerousness and rebellious ways, so offe
nsive 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.985 Lee was also of an age to be George’s son—he mentioned that in his testimony to the Warren Commission.986 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.987 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.988 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.989