American Prometheus (99 page)

As time went by, Oppenheimer became more visible as an international celebrity. He began to travel abroad more often. In 1958, he visited Paris, Brussels, Athens and Tel Aviv. In Brussels, he and Kitty were greeted by the Belgian royal family—Kitty’s distant relations. In Israel, his host was Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. In 1960, he visited Tokyo, where reporters greeted him at the airport with a barrage of questions. “I do not regret,” he said softly, “that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn’t that I don’t feel bad; it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night.” The translation of that ambiguously loaded sentiment into Japanese could not have been easy. The following year, he toured Latin America, sponsored by the Organization of American States, garnering headlines in local newspapers as “El Padre de la Bomba Atomica.”

LILIENTHAL, who so admired Oppenheimer’s intellect, was saddened by what he observed of Robert’s family life. There was, he later said, a “contradiction between Oppenheimer’s brilliant mind and his awkward personality. . . . He did not know how to deal with people, his children especially.” Lilienthal later harshly concluded that Oppenheimer “ruined” his children’s lives. “He kept them on a tight leash.” Peter grew up to become a shy but highly sensitive and intelligent young man. But he lived estranged from his mother. Francis Fergusson knew that Robert loved his son, but he saw that Robert seemed incapable of protecting Peter from his mother’s volatile moods. In 1955, Robert and Kitty sent Peter, fourteen, to the George School, an elite Quaker boarding school in Newtown, Pennsylvania, hoping that a little distance would ease tensions between his son and his wife.

A crisis occurred in 1958 when Robert was offered a visiting professorship in Paris for a semester. He and Kitty decided to pull Toni, twelve, out of her private school in Princeton and bring her with them. But they decided that Peter, seventeen, should remain behind at the George School. Robert wrote his brother that Peter had expressed the desire to visit Frank on his ranch and maybe try to get a summer job on one of the dude ranches in New Mexico. “He is still in a very volatile mood,” Robert wrote, “and I am afraid I cannot predict what will happen in June with any kind of certitude.”

Robert’s personal secretary, Verna Hobson, disapproved: “What a slap to leave him behind. He [Peter] was enormously sensitive. I felt tremendously on his side.” Hobson told Robert what she thought, but it was clear that Kitty had made up her mind. Hobson saw it as a real turning point in Peter’s relationship with his father. “There came a time,” Hobson said, “when Robert had to choose between Peter—of whom he was very fond— and Kitty. She made it so it had to be one or the other, and because of the compact he had made with God or with himself, he chose Kitty.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“It Was Really Like a
Never-Never-Land ”

Robert was a very humble man. I adored him.

INGA HIILIVIRTA

BEGINNING IN 1954, the Oppenheimers spent several months each year living on the tiny island of St. John in the Virgin Islands. Surrounded by the stunning, primordial beauty of the island, Robert relished this self-imposed exile, living as if he were a social outcast. In the words of a poem he had written as a young man at Harvard, he was fashioning in St. John “his separate prison,” and the experience seemed to rejuvenate him now as his summers in New Mexico had reinvigorated him decades earlier. During their first few visits, the Oppenheimers returned to the small guest house at Trunk Bay on the north shore of the island, owned by Irva Boulon. But in 1957, Robert bought two acres of land on Hawksnest Bay, a beautiful cove on the northwest tip of the island. The site lay just below a towering hump-shaped outcropping of rock known ironically, at least for Robert, as “Peace Hill.” Palm trees dotted the cove’s gently sloping white beach and the turquoise waters were filled with parrotfish, blue tang, grouper and the occasional school of barracuda.

In 1958, Robert hired the eminent architect Wallace Harrison—who had helped design such landmarks as Rockefeller Center, the United Nations building and Lincoln Center—to design a spartan beach cottage, something of a Caribbean version of Perro Caliente. However the contractor Robert hired for the project poured the foundation in the wrong spot—perilously close to the water’s edge. (He claimed a donkey had eaten the surveyor’s plans.) When finally built, the cottage consisted of one large rectangular room, some sixty or seventy feet long, sitting atop a slab of concrete. The room was divided only by a four-foot-high wall, setting off the sleeping area from the rest of the cottage. The floor was covered with pretty terracotta tiles. A well-equipped kitchen and a small bathroom occupied the back of the structure. Shuttered windows let sunlight pour into the cottage from three sides. But the front of the cottage, facing the cove, was completely open—to the cove and to the island’s warm trade winds. The house thus had only three walls, with a tin roof designed to roll down to cover the front of the structure during the hurricane season. They called it “Easter Rock,” after the large, egg-shaped rock that sat perched atop Peace Hill.

A hundred yards up the beach lived their only neighbors, Robert and Nancy Gibney, who had reluctantly sold them the beach property, after much gentle cajoling by Robert. The Gibneys had been living on the island since 1946, when they had bought for a paltry sum seventy acres around Hawksnest Bay. A former editor at
The New Republic,
Bob Gibney had literary ambitions, but the longer he lived on the island, the less he wrote.

Gibney’s wife, Nancy, came from a wealthy Boston family. An elegant woman, she had once worked as an editor at
Vogue.
With three young children, and little regular income, the Gibneys were land-rich and cash-poor. Nancy Gibney had first met the Oppenheimers in 1956, during a lunch at Trunk Bay’s guest house. “They were got up in routine tourist garb,” she later wrote, “cotton shirts and shorts and sandals, but they looked like nothing human, too thin and frail and pale for earthly life. . . . Kitty was the more humanoid of the two, although she seemed to have no features except for her dark eyes. Her voice was too deep and hoarse to emanate from her tiny chest. . . .”

Upon being introduced, Kitty said to Nancy, “Aren’t you hot with all that hair?” It was a remark Nancy considered “staggeringly rude.” But initially she liked Robert. He looked “astoundingly like Pinocchio, and he moved as jerkily as a marionette on strings. But there was nothing wooden about his manner: he exuded warmth and sympathy and courtesy along with the fumes of his famous pipe.” When Robert politely asked what her husband did, Nancy explained that on occasion he worked for Laurance Rockefeller at his Caneel Bay hotel.

“He worked for Rockefeller?” Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, “I, too, have taken money for doing harm.”

Nancy was awed. She had never met such exotic people. The next year, Oppenheimer persuaded the Gibneys to sell him the land for a cottage—and then in the spring of 1959, while a construction crew was still putting up the new house, Kitty wrote to Nancy Gibney, telling her that they wanted to come down to St. John in June but had no place to stay. Against her better judgment, Gibney offered them a room in their large rustic beach house.

A few weeks later, the Oppenheimers showed up, together with fourteen-year -old Toni and a schoolmate, Isabelle. Kitty said the two girls would sleep in a tent they had brought. And then she announced they couldn’t possibly stay the whole summer, but might manage a month. Nancy Gibney was stunned; she had thought they would be staying for a few days. Thus began what Nancy later called “seven hideous, hilarious weeks,” marked by disagreements, misunderstandings and worse.

To say the least, the Oppenheimers were not easy houseguests. Kitty was invariably up half the night, often groaning with pain from what she called her “pancreas attacks.” These only got worse with her drinking. Both Kitty and Robert “were great believers in drinking and smoking in bed.” Each night the Gibneys heard Kitty rummaging around in the kitchen, getting more precious ice for her drink. Nancy Gibney was sometimes awakened by Robert’s “frequent nightmares.” Insomniacs, the Oppenheimers often would not rise until noon.

One night in August, Nancy was awakened for the third time by Kitty banging about in the kitchen, looking for ice with a flashlight. Rising to investigate, Nancy finally exploded with anger: “Kitty, no one who drinks all night needs ice. You get back in that room and you close the doors and stay in there if it kills you.”

Kitty looked at her for a moment and then hit Nancy as hard as she could with the flashlight. The blow just grazed Nancy’s cheek. “I got a good grip on her shoulder,” Gibney later wrote, “and gave her the bum’s rush into ‘their room’ and slammed and barricaded all the doors.” The next morning, Gibney left to visit her mother in Boston, telling her children that she would return only “when those lunatics go.” The Oppenheimers finally left in mid-August.

The next year, they returned to their now finished beach cottage—but, not surprisingly, their relations with the Gibneys never recovered. Never again on speaking terms with the Oppenheimers, Nancy Gibney routinely provoked Kitty by sticking “Private Property” signs on her side of the beach. The Gibney children remember Kitty marching up and down the beach, ripping out the signs.

Nancy Gibney fought with Kitty—but she reserved her real dislike for Robert. “I came to have a sneaking fondness and respect for Kitty, although I took care not to show it. At her worst, she was absolutely without guile, brave as a little lion, and fiercely loyal to her own team.” Robert, she thought—despite her originally favorable impression of him—was the devious one. Nancy’s perception of Oppenheimer was uniquely hostile. In her essay on that summer sojourn, she relates that August 6—the fourteenth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—“was a day of fond nostalgia for our guests, a day of smirks and excitable recall. No one observing Robert Oppenheimer
en famille
that day could question what had been his finest hour . . . he transparently loved the Bomb and his lordly role in its creation.”

Robert never raised his voice. Indeed, no one ever saw him angry—with one memorable exception. Several years after moving into their new beach cottage, Robert and Kitty were hosting a raucous New Year’s Eve party when one of their guests, Ivan Jadan, burst into gusty, operatic song. The singing was too much for Bob Gibney, who came storming down to the Oppenheimer beach in a rage. He had brought a gun with him, and, apparently in an effort to get everyone’s attention, he fired several shots in the air. Robert turned on him ferociously and shouted, “Gibney, never come to my house again!” Thereafter, the Gibneys and the Oppenheimers had nothing to do with each other. They hired lawyers and squabbled over beach rights. The feud became a legend on the island.

THE GIBNEYS’ view of the Oppenheimers was not shared by other natives of St. John. Ivan and Doris Jadan, a colorful couple who had lived on the island since 1955, adored Robert. “You never felt uncomfortable around him,” Doris recalled, “which was a tribute to the kind of poise he had.” Born in 1900 in Russia, Ivan Jadan was the Bolshoi’s premier lyric tenor in the late 1920s and ’30s. Despite his status, Jadan had refused to join the Communist Party, and in 1941, when the Germans invaded, he and a dozen Bolshoi friends walked toward the German lines and surrendered themselves. They were soon packed into cattle cars and sent to Germany. In 1949, he managed to emigrate from West Germany to the United States. He married Doris in 1951, and when the couple visited St. John in June 1955, Ivan announced, “I stay here.”

Introduced to the Oppenheimers, the Jadans were delighted to learn that these newcomers spoke German. Ivan’s English was always rudimentary and he and Doris usually spoke Russian to each other. Boisterous and outspoken, Ivan could break into song at the slightest pretext. He could also be rather prickly; he’d get up and leave the table if he found himself in disagreement with someone. Ivan was as profoundly anti-Soviet as anyone could be—but while he knew all about Robert’s trial, he detected nothing in Oppenheimer’s moral sensibilities that was not profoundly right. Ivan rarely talked politics, but with Robert he was drawn to the subject. They made an odd pair—but he and Robert obviously enjoyed each other’s company.

“Kitty, of course, was something else,” recalled Doris Jadan. “She was disturbed. But they [she and Robert] were both very protective of each other, even when she was not herself. . . . She could be quite mischievous. The devil had struck through part of her, and she knew it.” Doris nevertheless liked her. One day Kitty told Doris, “You know, Doris, you and I have something in common. We are both married to totally unique people, and it is for us a responsibility different than other people’s.”

Everyone drank on the island, and while Kitty drank a great deal, she could also be cold sober for days on end. “I don’t remember Kitty, or only a few times, being what you’d call drunk,” recalled Sabra Ericson, a neighbor of the Oppenheimers. “She was the great trouble in his life,” Doris Jadan said, “and she knew it. But she knew that he would not have gone through what he had done, I think, except for her. . . . She loved Robert. There’s no doubt about that. But she was a tangled person. . . . I think in fairness to her, she may have been as good a wife as he could have had.” As for Robert, “He treated her with total devotion,” said another St. John resident, Sis Frank. “She could do no wrong in his eye.”

Kitty occupied herself for hours on end with her gardening. St. John was a paradise for her orchids. “There might be a dead spot in the garden,” Frank observed, “and in a week’s time it was growing beautifully. She was wonderful with the orchids.” But she dreaded the thought of stopping by the cottage if Kitty was there alone. Inevitably, Kitty would make some caustic, “malicious” remark about something unpleasant. “I learned to overlook those things because a lot of the time she wasn’t herself. . . . I knew her moves. I knew what to anticipate. What a ghastly life, to be that unhappy.”