American Prometheus (28 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I’m Going to Marry a
Friend of Yours, Steve”

Her career was advancing Robert’s . . .

ROBERT SERBER

BY THE END OF 1939, Oppenheimer’s often stormy relationship with Jean Tatlock had disintegrated. Robert loved her and wanted to marry her despite their problems. “We were at least twice close enough to marriage to consider ourselves engaged,” he later recalled. But he often brought out the worst in Jean. He annoyed her with his old habit of showering friends with gifts. Jean didn’t want to be catered to in this way. “No more flowers, please, Robert,” she told him one day. But inevitably, the next time he came to pick her up at a friend’s house, he came armed with the usual bouquet of gardenias. When Jean saw the flowers, she threw them to the floor and told her friend, “Tell him to go away, tell him I am not here.” Bob Serber claimed that Jean went through phases when “she disappeared for weeks, months sometimes, and then would taunt Robert mercilessly. She would taunt him about whom she had been with and what they had been doing. She seemed determined to hurt him, perhaps because she knew Robert loved her so much.”

In the end, it was Tatlock who made the final break. Jean could be as strong-willed as Oppenheimer himself. Confused and highly distraught, she now rejected his latest offer of marriage. By then she had spent three years in medical school. Not many women became doctors in the 1930s. Her determination to pursue a career as a psychiatrist surprised some of her friends, who explained it as characteristic of a sometimes bold and impetuous woman. And yet they knew it also made sense. From her politics to her interest in the psychological, Tatlock had always been motivated by the desire to help others in a practical, hard-headed manner. Becoming a psychiatrist suited her temperament and intelligence, and by June 1941 Tatlock had a medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine. She spent the year 1941–42 as an intern at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., and the following year she was a resident physician at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.

ON THE REBOUND, Robert was seen dating a number of “mostly very attractive youngish girls.” Among others, he had relationships with Haakon Chevalier’s sister-in-law, Ann Hoffman, and Estelle Caen, the sister of the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s columnist Herbert Caen. Bob Serber recalled a half-dozen girlfriends, including a British émigré named Sandra Dyer-Bennett. He broke several hearts. Still, whenever Tatlock phoned him in a low mood, he came to her and talked her out of her depression. They remained the closest of friends, and occasional lovers.

And then, in August 1939, he attended a garden party in Pasadena hosted by Charles Lauritsen, and in the course of the afternoon he was introduced to a twenty-nine-year-old married woman named Kitty Harrison. Bob Serber happened to witness the encounter. Kitty, he could see, was immediately mesmerized. “I fell in love with Robert that day,” Kitty later wrote, “but hoped to conceal it.” Soon afterward, Robert surprised his friends by turning up at a party in San Francisco unannounced with Kitty Harrison on his arm. That evening Kitty was wearing a corsage of flaming orchids. Everyone was rather uncomfortable, since the hostess of the party was Estelle Caen, Oppie’s most recent lover. Chevalier called it “a not altogether happy occasion.” Some of Oppie’s friends—who very much liked Tatlock and had assumed they would reconcile—snubbed his new lady. Kitty seemed altogether too flirtatious and manipulative. Years later, Robert recalled that “there was among our friends much concern. . . .” But when it became clear that Kitty was not a passing fancy, his friends resigned themselves. “Oh, let’s face it,” said one woman. “It may be scandalous, but at least Kitty has humanized him.”

A petite brunette, Katherine “Kitty” Puening Harrison was as attractive as Tatlock but worlds apart in temperament. The orchids she wore the evening she met Oppie’s friends were no accident; she cultivated these flamboyant flowers in her apartment and wore them to make a statement. No one would ever find in the vivacious Kitty a touch of the morose. If she’d had some hard knocks in life, she had nevertheless always responded by making swift decisions to move on. If Tatlock looked like an Irish princess, Puening sometimes claimed to be the real thing, only of German royalty. “Kitty was related on her mother’s side to all the crowned heads of Europe,” recalled Robert Serber. “When she was a girl, she used to spend her summers visiting her uncle, the king of the Belgians.” Kitty had been born on August 8, 1910, in Recklinghausen, a small town in North Rhine– Westphalia, Germany. She had come to America two years later, when her parents, Franz Puening, thirty-one, and Kaethe Vissering Puening, thirty, immigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Trained as a metallurgical engineer, Franz Puening had landed an engineering position with a steel company.

An only child, Kitty led a privileged childhood, growing up in the wealthy Pittsburgh suburb of Aspinwall. She later told friends that her father was “a prince of a small principality in Westphalia” and her mother was related to Queen Victoria. Her grandfather Bodewin Vissering was a royal Hanoverian crown-land lessee, and an elected member of the city council of Hanover. The ancestors of her grandmother Johanna Blonay had been, from the time of the eleventh-century Crusades, royal vassals to the House of Savoy, one of Europe’s oldest surviving dynasties. The Blonays served as administrators and court advisers in various Savoy principalities in parts of Italy, Switzerland and France and occupied a magnificent château south of Lake Geneva.

Kaethe Vissering was beautiful and imposing. For a short time, she was engaged to a cousin, Wilhelm Keitel—who later served as Hitler’s field marshal and in 1946 was tried and hanged at Nuremberg as a war criminal. While Kitty’s mother made a point of taking her back as a child to visit her “princely” relatives in Europe, her father made her promise never to speak about her blue-blooded ancestry. As a young woman, however, Kitty occasionally let it be known that she came from a noble family. Friends of the family recall her receiving letters from her German relatives addressed to “Her Highness, Katherine.”

As German immigrants, the Puenings sometimes had a difficult time in Pittsburgh during World War I. As an enemy alien, Franz Puening was placed under surveillance by local authorities, and even young Kitty had a hard time with neighborhood kids. Kitty’s first language was not English, and even later in life she could speak a beautiful High German. As an adolescent, she found her mother “imperious.” They didn’t get along. She was a spunky, exuberant girl who paid little attention to social convention. “She was wild as hell in high school,” recalled Pat Sherr, a friend who knew her later.

Kitty began what became a checkered college career. She enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, but within a year, she left for Germany and France. Over the next couple of years she studied at the University of Munich, the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble. She spent most of her time, however, in Paris cafés, hanging out with musicians. “I spent little time on school work,” Kitty recalled. On the day after Christmas 1932, she impulsively married one of these young men, a Boston-born musician named Frank Ramseyer. Several months into the marriage, Kitty found her husband’s diary—he kept it in mirror writing—and learned that he was both a drug addict and a homosexual. Retreating to America, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin and began studying biology. On December 20, 1933, a Wisconsin court awarded her an annulment—and impounded the court testimony on grounds of obscenity.

Ten days later, Kitty was invited by a friend in Pittsburgh to a New Year’s Eve party. Her friend, Selma Baker, said she had met a communist, and asked Kitty if she would like to meet the guy. “The consensus was that none of us had met a real live communist,” recalled Kitty, “and that it would be interesting to see one.” That evening she met Joe Dallet, the twenty-six-year-old son of a wealthy Long Island businessman. “Joe was three years older than I,” Kitty remembered. “I fell in love with him at this party and I never stopped loving him.” Less than six weeks later, she left Wisconsin to marry Dallet and join him in Youngstown, Ohio.

“He was a handsome son-of-a-bitch,” recalled a friend. “Just a gorgeous guy.” A tall, gaunt young man with a thick mop of dark curly hair, Dallet seemed capable of almost anything. Born in 1907, he spoke fluent French, played the classical piano with ease and knew his dialectical materialism. Both his parents were first-generation Americans of German-Jewish origin, and by the time Joe was an adolescent his father had made a small fortune in the silk trade. Although he and his sisters attended a temple in the middle-class Jewish community of Woodmere, Long Island, when he turned thirteen Joe refused a bar-mitzvah. For a time he went to private school before enrolling in Dartmouth College in the autumn of 1923. By then he was already politically radical and went out of his way to champion, in a belligerent fashion, what he called “proletarian ideals.” His Dartmouth classmates regarded him as an eccentric, “an utter misfit in college.” After failing most of his courses, he dropped out halfway through his sophomore year and took a job with an insurance company in New York. Successful, he nevertheless quit his job in disgust one day and literally assumed a new life as a laboring man. His transformation seems to have been precipitated by the execution, in August 1927, of the Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. “It is difficult to tell what would have become of me,” Dallet wrote his sister, “had not a couple of ‘wops’ been burned to death in the electric chair of the state of Mass. on August 22, 1927.”

Determined to “throttle the evidence of his earlier sheltered life,” Dallet went to work first as a social worker and then as a longshoreman and coal miner. After joining the Communist Party in 1929, he wrote his worried family, “Certainly now you must see that I am doing what I believe in, want to do, do best, and most enjoy doing. . . . you must see that I am really happy.” He spent a few months in Chicago, where, after speaking before a crowd of thousands, he was beaten by the notorious “Red Squad” of the city police.

By 1932, Dallet was a union organizer in Youngstown, Ohio, where he served on the front lines of the rough-and-tumble CIO campaign to bring steelworkers into the fold of organized labor. He bristled with physical courage in the often violent confrontations with the steel companies’ thugs. On several occasions, local police clapped him into jail to keep him from speaking at labor rallies. At one point he ran for mayor on the Communist Party ticket. Kitty, despite being his wife, was only allowed to join the Young Communist League after proving her commitment by hawking the
Daily Worker
on the streets and handing out leaflets to steelworkers. “I used to wear tennis shoes,” she recalled, “when I handed out Communist Party leaflets at factory gates so that I could get a fast running start when the police arrived.”

Her party dues were ten cents a week. The couple lived in a dilapidated boardinghouse for five dollars’ rent a month and, ironically, survived on government relief checks of $12.50 every two weeks. Down the hallway for a time lived two other Communist Party stalwarts, John Gates and Arvo Kusta Halberg—who later changed his name to Gus Hall and rose to become chairman of the Communist Party USA. “The house had a kitchen,” Kitty later said, “but the stove leaked and it was impossible to cook. Our food consisted of two meals a day, which we got at a grimy restaurant.” During the summer of 1935 she served the Party as its “literary agent,” which meant that she tried to encourage members to buy and read Marxist classics.

Kitty stuck it out until 1936, when she told Joe that she could no longer live under such conditions. Joe’s whole life was the Party, and while Kitty hadn’t abandoned her political beliefs, they began arguing. According to a mutual friend, Steve Nelson, Joe “was a bit dogmatic about her reluctance to accept party loyalty as strongly as he did.” In Joe’s eyes, Kitty was just acting like a young “middle-class intellectual who couldn’t quite see the working class attitude.” Kitty resented his condescension. After two and a half years of living in extreme poverty, she announced that they had to separate. “The poverty became more and more depressing to me,” she recalled. Finally, in June 1936, she fled to London, where her father had taken an assignment to build an industrial furnace. For a while she heard nothing from Dallet—until one day she discovered that her mother had been intercepting his letters. Now eager for a reconciliation, she was pleased to learn that her husband was coming to Europe.

Early in 1937, Dallet had decided to volunteer to fight with a communist-sponsored brigade in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Republic and against the fascists. He and his old comrade Steve Nelson shipped out aboard the same cruise liner, the
Queen Mary,
in March 1937. Joe, clearly still in love, told Nelson that he had hopes that he and Kitty would soon work things out.

Kitty was waiting for them at dockside when their ship arrived in Cherbourg, France. She and Joe spent a week together in Paris—with Nelson tagging along. “I was like a third wheel,” Nelson recalled. “Kitty impressed me as a very cute young woman; not very tall, short, blonde [
sic
] and the very friendly type.” She had brought enough money with her from London so that the three of them could stay in a decent hotel and eat out in good French restaurants. Nelson remembered eating exotic French cheeses and sipping wine over lunch as he listened to Kitty scheme about how much she wanted to accompany Joe to the battlefields in Spain. The problem was that the Communist Party had decided that wives could not join their husbands in Spain. “Joe raised holy hell,” Nelson recalled of these luncheons. “He’d say, ‘This is bureaucratic; she could do a lot of work, she could drive an ambulance.’ Kitty was determined to go.” But all their efforts to bend the rules were in vain; by the end of the week Dallet was forced to leave Kitty behind as he and Nelson departed for Spain. On their last day together, Kitty took Dallet and Nelson shopping for warm flannel shirts, wool-lined gloves and wool socks. She then returned to London to await an opportunity to rejoin her husband. They corresponded often and Kitty got in the habit of sending him a snapshot of herself each week.