LEE STARTED to visit Alexandra and Gary Taylor during the few days that Marina and the baby were staying with them in Dallas. He used to come on foot or take the bus from downtown. The Taylors thought the atmosphere between Lee and Marina was one of estrangement, and that they did not like, let alone love, one another, because they never made any attempt to be alone together. Lee seemed to care nothing for Marina or for her feelings. Instead, he spent all his time with the baby, playing and gurgling to her in Russian. But he seemed to have been lonely after Marina and June went back to Fort Worth, for “he popped in and out” of the Taylors’ often for the next few weeks.
Alix has said that Lee “could be very polite if he wished. He could be very sarcastic, very blunt if he wished. He could be a very friendly person if he wished, and he could be very quiet if he wished. It just depended who the people were.”1 She adds, however, that he could also be “very, very rude. He appreciated absolutely nothing you did for him. He never thanked you for anything. He seemed to expect it of you.” She did not understand why her father’s Russian friends tried to help him. He did not deserve it, they did not owe it to him, and yet she got the feeling that he thought they did.
Gary Taylor was a little younger than Lee. He had many irons in the fire, and one of them was politics. He was an ardent Democrat, with a distaste for the John Birch Society, which was then very active in Dallas. Like his father-in-law, George de Mohrenschildt, Gary was a vociferous anti-Bircher and, if he disagreed with someone politically, was likely to dismiss him with, “Oh, he’s a Bircher.” Gary was probably the first person Lee actually met who felt strongly about the John Birch Society.
Lee enjoyed talking politics with Gary. “He was easy, not too hard to get along with,” Alix says. “We argued with him but it was always friendly.”2 And according to Alix, Lee could be very persuasive. “He could make almost anybody believe what he was saying.” He was forever telling the Taylors that they were “stupid,” but because they were his age, more or less, and perhaps because he thought they were “stupid” and presented no threat to him, Lee opened up with Gary and Alix. With them he did not feel the same chip-on-the-shoulder need as he did with Bouhe and Mrs. Meller to defend the USSR, and he gave the Taylors the impression that he had been very, very unhappy in Russia and did not want to go back.
“He disliked Russia just like he disliked the United States,” Alix said later, in an analysis of Lee’s character and political beliefs that was far from “stupid.”
He disliked Russia very much. He didn’t agree with communism and he didn’t agree with capitalism. He believed in the perfect government, free of want and need, and free of taxation, free of discrimination, free of any police force, the right to be able to do exactly as he pleased, exactly when he pleased, just total and complete freedom in everything. He believed in no government whatsoever, just a perfect place where people lived happily all together and no religion, nothing of any sort, no ties and no holds to anything except himself. I really don’t know if he planned to work or not. I don’t know what Lee wanted to do in life. I think he wanted to be a very important person without putting anything into it at all. He expected to be the highest paid immediately, the best liked, the highest skilled. He resented any people in high places, any people of any authority in government. My husband told him you can’t be something for nothing, can’t expect to get high pay and receive a good position with no education and no ambition. No particular goal, no anything. He just expected a lot for nothing. I don’t think he knew what he wanted, and I don’t think he was too interested in working toward anything. He expected things to be just given to him on a silver platter. But in his ideas, he was extremely devoted. You couldn’t change his mind no matter what you said to him.3
Alix asked Lee if he had written anything about Russia, and he brought her his manuscript one evening. She read it and told him he ought to publish it. His answer was no, it was not for people to read.
Lee himself was reading a good deal: Hitler’s Mein Kampf and William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He also reread George Orwell’s anti-Communist classics 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which were loaned to him by Alix’s father, George de Mohrenschildt.
The Taylors did not know where Lee was living. They thought he was at the YMCA at 605 North Ervay Street in downtown Dallas. Once, after an evening at their house, they dropped him off on the curb outside. Another time Gary picked him up inside. But Lee was actually at the Y only one work week, from Monday, October 15, until Friday morning, October 19. No one knows where he was living from October 8 to 13 or from October 21 to November 2. The Taylors helped him look for a room to rent and once spent an hour hunting for Lee at a North Beckley Street address given them by Alix’s stepmother. “We went up and down and up and down and never found the place,” Alix says.4 Lee endorsed two checks that month, on October 16 and 22, his final paychecks from Leslie Welding. Both times he wrote not his own, but the Taylors’, address on the back with his signature. Even Marina had no idea where he was staying, and their Russian friends joked that her husband was sleeping on a park bench. He probably had a room in Oak Cliff, very likely on North Beckley Street. Why he bothered to keep the address secret is anybody’s guess.
Lee was happy in his job. Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall was an advertising photography firm that made billboards, posters, and advertisements for newspapers and magazines. For the first few days, Lee, an apprentice cameraman, followed his supervisor, John Graef, around to find out how things were done.5 Graef noticed that the new man did not seem to mind taking orders. Lee learned the intrinsic quality of various types of paper and film, and then he learned various photographic and developing techniques, including distortion photography. He was paid between $1.35 and $1.50 an hour, a forty-hour week. He had never had a job he liked so well.
Marina, meanwhile, was outrageously happy in Fort Worth with Lyolya Hall. With no Lee, no one “beating on her nerves,” she says, she slept until two every day—the baby being trained, more or less, to do the same—and spent her afternoons in delicious solitude. Mrs. Hall returned late from work, and the two had down-to-earth conversations in Russian. Mrs. Hall offered to take Marina to her doctor for contraceptives. According to Mrs. Hall, Marina replied that her married life was so strange, Lee was so cold to her, and they had sexual relations so seldom that she doubted she was in danger of conceiving a child.6
Marina’s version is a little different. She says that she took Mrs. Hall into her confidence as an older woman and asked her advice. Lee was not strong “as a man,” Marina explained, and came to a sexual climax very quickly. Was she to blame? What could she do to help? Were there any home remedies? Should one or both of them see a doctor?
When she had been at Mrs. Hall’s a few days, an episode occurred that was pure Marina. She wanted to baptize the baby, although she knew Lee was opposed to it. Mrs. Hall called Father Dmitry Royster, the American-born priest of St. Stephen’s Eastern Orthodox Church in Dallas, to arrange it. And on the evening of October 17 the two women drove to Dallas, where Father Royster baptized June Lee Oswald, with Elena Hall as godmother.
But that was not the end of the conspiracy. The next day was Lee’s twenty-third birthday. Marina had saved up some money and bought him socks, a shirt, and a sweater. On the night of October 17, Alexandra Taylor heard a knock at her front door, and there on the steps she found Mrs. Hall and Marina with June in her arms. They explained that they had just had the baby baptized on the sly, and since they did not dare go to the Y, they asked Alix to give Lee his presents and invent a story to conceal the fact that they had been in Dallas.
Marina did not leave it at that. When she got back to Fort Worth, she telephoned Lee and told him to stop by the Taylors’. He did as he was told, and so did Alix. She made up a story about the presents, but Lee put two and two together. After that, Marina quickly broke down and admitted over the telephone what she had been only half trying to conceal: that she and Lyolya had been in Dallas and had the baby baptized.
“Silly girl,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you’d forbid it.”
“It’s your right to do as you please,” he said to Marina’s astonishment. On the night following the baptism, Lyolya Hall was injured in an automobile crash and was in the hospital more than a week. But Marina was not left all alone. Gali Clark (Mrs. Max Clark) came by nearly every day and drove her to the grocery store, where she not only paid for groceries but also bought Marina a carton of cigarettes. A chain-smoker, starved for cigarettes by her disapproving husband, Marina was grateful. But she was intimidated by Gali Clark. Gali was a “society” person, from the “old aristocracy,” Marina commented later. Manners meant a lot to Gali, and at times Marina could not tell what she was thinking. Complicated as Marina might be herself, she preferred a proteletarian directness in other people. She wanted to know where she stood with them.
Alex Kleinlerer, a friend of Lyolya Hall’s, also came every day during his lunch hour to check up on Marina. At 1:30 in the afternoon he would wake her up by banging on the front door and ringing the bell. Inside he found chaos—dirty dishes in the sink and baby clothing everywhere. He did the cleaning and sometimes came back at suppertime. He and Marina took turns cooking; he would cook a Polish supper one night, she a Russian supper the next. Once or twice he took her and the baby out to eat.
Lee came by bus to Fort Worth for all or part of every weekend to see Marina and the baby. They missed each other, and their weekend interludes were comparatively idyllic. But Lee’s attitude toward Mrs. Hall’s hospitality was paradoxical in view of his own Spartan style of living. “This is your house. I give it to you—all!” he would announce to Marina, sweeping his arm grandly about the entrance hall upon his arrival on a Friday. “Isn’t this a fine house I bought you?”
Marina remembers that he was “always running to the icebox,” a thing he never did at home when he was paying for the groceries himself, to fix a Coke or a sandwich. “A full icebox!” he would exclaim delightedly before he pounced. He was fascinated by the kitchen gadgets, like the electric can opener, the sort of thing that Mrs. Hall and the other Russians thought he scorned. And at night he made love to Marina while watching another “gadget,” the bedroom television set, a distraction that helped slightly his problem of premature ejaculation. Afterwards, the two of them slept in separate bedrooms, a luxury that Lee said made him feel “like an aristocrat.”
Lee took an acute dislike to Alex Kleinlerer, a short, dark man of about forty who sported a black mustache, spoke with an accent, and dressed with European flair. The facts of Kleinlerer’s relationship to Marina were innocent, but it was no secret that he dropped by Mrs. Hall’s on weekdays when Lee was not there. Kleinlerer’s feelings for Marina were intensely, and obviously, protective. Lee was furiously jealous.
On Friday, October 26, Mrs. Hall returned from the hospital, and on Sunday Alix and Gary Taylor picked Lee up outside the Dallas Y and drove over for the evening in Fort Worth. The major topic of conversation was Cuba. President Kennedy had learned of the buildup of Soviet missiles on the island and demanded their withdrawal. The previous Monday the president had declared a naval blockade of Cuba, and for nearly a week the world had been teetering on the brink of thermonuclear disaster. Lee observed that in Dallas people were hoarding food in anticipation of war. Marina was certain that her country would never go to war over a tiny nation like Cuba, and Lee agreed. He had been to Russia, he said to Mrs. Hall, to Kleinlerer, and the Taylors, and he was sure the Soviet government would not start a war. When the missile crisis was over, Marina was greatly relieved, for throughout that ten-day period, she had felt torn between her own country, which she continued to love, and the kind Americans with their nice-looking president, Mr. Kennedy.
If Lee and Marina agreed about Russia, it seemed as if they disagreed about everything else. Mrs. Hall later said that Marina “was stubborn, and he was just cruel to her, and they would argue” over “nothing, just nothing and he would beat her all the time.”7 Kleinlerer for his part thought that Lee “treated Marina very poorly. He belittled her and was boorish to her in our presence. He ordered her around just as though she were a mere chattel. He was never polite or tender to her. I feel very strongly that she was frightened of him.” Kleinlerer was also critical of the way Lee had dumped his wife and child on Mrs. Hall and failed to contribute to their support. Lee “did not express any thanks or evidence the slightest appreciation,” Kleinlerer said. “He evidenced displeasure and contempt. He acted as if the world owed him a living.”8
On Friday night, November 2, the telephone rang in Kleinlerer’s apartment. It was Marina, announcing that Lee had found them an apartment and she was moving to Dallas that weekend. Lee came abruptly on the phone. He “directed” Kleinlerer, in Kleinlerer’s words, to come to the Halls’ the next day to discuss the move, since the Oswalds’ possessions were in the garage and Mrs. Hall was away in New York.9
On Saturday, soon after Kleinlerer arrived, he witnessed a memorable scene. “Oswald observed that the zipper on Marina’s skirt was not completely closed,” Kleinlerer later recalled.10
He called to her in a very angry and commanding tone of voice just like an officer commanding a soldier. His exact words were “Come here!” in Russian, and he uttered them the way you would call a dog with which you were displeased in order to inflict punishment. He was standing in the doorway. When she reached the doorway he rudely reprimanded her in a flat imperious voice about being careless in her dress and slapped her hard in the face twice. Marina had the baby in her arms. Her face was red and tears came to her eyes. I was very much embarrassed and also angry but I had long been afraid of Oswald and I did not say anything.
By what appears to have been a bit of foresight on Mrs. Hall’s part, only Kleinlerer had a key to the garage. His presence during the removal of the Oswalds’ goods the following day was therefore a necessity. The Taylors drove over from Dallas to help, and Lee and Gary went off and rented a U-Haul trailer. But there was trouble when Lee started to load it, for Kleinlerer recalled that there were “several instances in which I had to intervene when Oswald picked up some of Mrs. Hall’s things to place in the trailer. I could not say whether this was deliberate or inadvertent, except that there were several instances.”11 Lyolya Hall’s wariness had not been misplaced.
The apartment Lee had found for them was at 604 Elsbeth Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Marina had not yet seen it, and when they arrived that afternoon, she and Alix Taylor reacted identically. “It was terrible,” Alix says, “very dirty, very badly kept, really quite a slum.” Outside, the place was “overrun with weeds and garbage and people.”12
Marina did not want to move in. She said the place was “filthy dirty—a pigsty.” Lee thought they could fix it up. They were still arguing when Gary and Alix left to return the trailer. It was their second drive to Fort Worth in behalf of the Oswalds in a single day, a round trip each time of nearly three hours. As they were leaving Lee thanked them for helping him with the move. “It was a very brief thank you, and that was that,” said Alix.13 It was the only time she ever heard him say it.
On the first night in their new apartment, November 4, Marina stayed up till five in the morning, scrubbing everything in sight. Lee helped for a while. He cleaned the icebox, then left about ten in the evening. He had paid for a room at the Y, he said, and he might as well use it. But since the YMCA has no record that he stayed there after October 19, it is likely he spent a final night in whatever rooming house he had been living in for the last two weeks.
Their reunion was not a happy one. Within a day or two, they were fighting again. Lee told Marina that she had been spoiled by the Russians. He said that George Bouhe was trying to “buy” her. “I understand, he doesn’t want you as a woman. But he wants to have you in his power.” He went on to accuse Marina of “whoring” after the Russians because they gave her money and possessions—“If you like them so much, go live with them!”
Marina was angrier than she had ever been. Perhaps, after her month away from Lee, she had forgotten his brutality and how hard he could be to live with. Or perhaps, having been treated with kindness, she had grown to think better of herself, and what she had considered her due only a few weeks before seemed intolerable to her now. Besides, Lee had used the Russian blyad, a very strong word for “whore,” which was simply so insulting and profane that it seemed to give her no choice. Trembling, she ran out the door.
“Go. I don’t care,” Lee shouted after her. “I don’t need you.”
She forgot the baby. And she did not have a dime. But a garage attendant listened carefully to the name she kept repeating to him and dialed the telephone of Teofil Meller. Anna Meller answered the phone. After a brief pause during which she convinced her recalcitrant husband, Mrs. Meller told Marina to come by cab right away. They would pay for it when she got there.
Marina went back to the apartment, grabbed the baby and a couple of diapers, and went out again. Lee was stretched out on the bed.
She went into a doughnut shop and somehow conveyed to the waitress that she needed a cab. By eleven o’clock that night she was at the Mellers’. They found her shaking and upset, but she did not cry much and did not say what she and Lee had been fighting about. Mrs. Meller noted that the baby had nothing but diapers, a shirt, and an empty bottle and that Marina was wearing a light summer blouse and skirt (in early November). “She had no coat, no money, nothing.”14
The next day the Russians had a council of war, as usual led by George Bouhe. “I don’t want to advise or interfere,” he told Marina. “But if you want my opinion, I don’t like Lee. I don’t think you can have a good life with him. I can’t come between a husband and wife. If you leave him, of course we’ll help. But if you say one thing now and then go back, next time no one will help.”
“I’ll never go back to that hell,” Marina promised herself.