"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (34 page)

As they proceeded along a barely visible trail through foliage so thick it appeared black rather than green in the increasing brightness of an early-afternoon sun, Lee spotted a guard station ahead. Manning the small outpost, three scruffy fellows, each brandishing a large pistol in a holster by his side, lolled about chatting until the Corvette cruised up.

“Hello, Le Muse,” the trio's leader called out.

“Buenos dias,” she answered with a Cheshire cat smile.

“I hoped to show my companion here the outpost.”

“Any amigo of yours, Johnny,” the man responded with a pleasant smile, “is our friend as well.”

This man in charge nodded to one of the guards. He pushed a button, bringing the metallic gate up so that the car might pass into the compound. On Lee's passenger side, a long stretch of barbed wire, naturally camouflaged by the twisted overgrowth, could barely be detected. Deeper inside the hidden camp, Lee spotted several groups of young Cubans, all in para-military fatigues, training under similarly attired Anglos.

Johnny swerved his car off the trail, up onto the gravel, so they could watch experts instructing Cubans in martial arts, the handling of heavy and light weapons, and a guerilla tactic in which scouts slipped up behind an enemy, shadow-like.

“Hello,” one instructor, his face shrouded by the brim of a fatigue hat pulled low, called out. At once, Lee recognized the voice:
George!
He allowed his trainees a ten minute break and
sauntered over, pulling away his cap to reveal the face of Lee's CIA mentor. “Welcome to Operation Vaquero.”

Vaquero?
Lee thought.
Isn't that Spanish for cowboy?

“I might have known you'd be in charge here.”

“Actually, I'm only assisting. I found a Cuban national to handle that job. That's why you're here: to meet him.”

Lee gradually put the pieces together. This had to do with the upcoming D-Day he'd heard Dick Tracy mention during the flight to Cuba. Apparently, now that they were back—mission
not
accomplished—no longer did the brass have to fear Lee breaking down and talking under torture.

“That'll be my pleasure,” Lee said.

Johnny pulled the car back onto the muddy dirt road and continued on past flat fields. Lee assumed these to be take-off and landing points for airborne arrivals and departures. Most intriguing: the Company made no serious attempt to conceal this place from the public. Yet few if any in the nearby city knew of its existence. Nor, apparently, did they care. If the media were aware, few reporters felt any compunction to report on it. The attitude trickled down from the government: ignore everything.

Seeing was believing. People believed what they read in the papers and watched on TV. There, they perceived none of this.

Ignorance was bliss. Until something unexpectedly went awry.

True, the New York
Times
had printed probing editorial pieces, insisting those in authority in D.C. should be called on to explain what was taking place. That small percentage of the public labeled the intelligentsia, which read this paper, mostly agreed. The other ninety-percent of Americans were happy to remain blissfully ignorant as to pretty much everything.

Their attitude? What we don't know can't hurt us. Those in charge know what's best. Anything they do is for our benefit.

The mainstream press in those pre-Watergate days? Their job was to rubber-stamp anything the government said, pass it on to readers and listeners, mostly without comment. Already, the newspapers and TV networks were doing precisely that as to yet another theatre of war then developing: Vietnam; southeast Asia.

And, for the time being at least, the majority of Americans believed whatever they were told. As Lee's mother liked to say: If it weren't true, they couldn't put it on TV.

At the compound's main building, an ebullient Cuban came darting out to greet the trio and shake Lee's hand.

“Meet Manuel Artime Buesa,” Muse said. “George's hand-picked choice for this all-important task.”

“Oh? This one actually has a full name?” Lee asked, the other Cubans at the guard post having remained anonymous.

Buesa laughed heartily. “We all do, amigo. But it would prove difficult for me to try and keep mine secret. You see, I am Miami's secretary general for the MRR.”

Lee knew that to be the abbreviation for
Movimiento de
Recuperacion Revolucionario
, an umbrella title for all those splinter groups that manned the Biscayne recruitment tables; originally united by George, now fully overseen by Buesa.

*

“How did they ever make a movie out of Lolita?” billboard advertisements and media commercials for the first controversial film of the new decade asked. There was Sue Lyon, the unknown child-woman picked to embody onscreen the perfect nymphette in red plastic heart-shaped glasses, sucking provocatively on her drink from a straw. Based on a much-banned book that had been subject of heated discussion during the previous decade,
Lolita
had been considered unfilmable then. No self-respecting L.A. producer was willing to consider such an explosive property.

Now? This was The Sixties. Things change ...

Johnny had received a pair of passes to a preview of
Lolita
and swung by The New Yorker to pick up Lee. In the Corvette, which caught the eyes of every female the two men passed, they headed downtown, arriving early to be sure to secure seats.

Lee, who had read the book, swept up by its artistic sensuality, wondered how close this commercial project dared approximate the power of Vladimir Nabokov's prose-poetry. The work analyzed an older man's fascination with an underage female.

James Mason, as Humbert, takes one of Sue Lyon's adorable little feet, gently holding her steady with his left hand while applying nail polish to the other. What a marvelous way for a filmmaker to suggest the man's obsession that Nabokov relayed in words ...
That'
s how they made a movie out of ‘Lolita!‘

“I've got a surprise for you,” Johnny said as they exited.

“I'm almost afraid to ask ‘what'?”

“How would you like to
meet
... ‘Lolita'?”

Lee stopped in his tracks. “The actress is in town?”

“Not her. Something even better. The
real
Lolita.”

*

“Absolutely true,” the beautiful twenty-year-old blonde, wearing the satin gown in which she'd performed as headline singer at one of Havana's night spots, explained after exhaling a mouthful of cigarette smoke. “
I
was supposed to play Lolita!”

“What went wrong?” Lee asked, sitting opposite the slender beauty at a prime table while Johnny made the rounds.

“The whole idea was, Errol would play ‘Humbert Hubert', and I'd be Lolita. Reflecting, of course, our actual relationship.”

Johnny says she started sleeping with Errol Flynn in 1958. That would make her fifteen at the time. Lolita's age, in the film. I gotta admit, she does look the part.

“Incredible. So?”

“Just before shooting was about to start, the law came down on us.” She paused for a long swig of her double-Scotch. “Errol was charged with statutory rape with me being so young. His mug was on the cover of every tabloid in the country. No major Hollywood company wanted anything to do with him after that.”

“But even if they dropped him, why didn't you—”

“A package-deal. Without him, I was persona-non-grata.”

“Such a shame! How amazing it would've been for people to see a
real
Lolita and the real Humbert together onscreen.”

“Well, actually, they can. I mean, we did make a movie, if not so big a one.” Surprised, Lee asked her to explain. As an inveterate movie buff, he could hardly believe a film had been shot with such a major star that he'd never heard about, much less caught. “It's called
Cuban Rebel Girls
. Shot on location!”

“Must've been only a short while before Mr. Flynn died of that heart attack up in Canada.”

“Bullshit! Errol didn't drop dead. He was murdered by the Mob. My guess is, your pal Johnny over there likely did it!”

“Please continue,” Lee begged. “I'm all ears ...”

*

The Tasmanian-born, Australian-raised devil-may-care star had always been a closet lefty. Following the war, his Warner Bros. contract finally exhausted, Flynn became an independent producer. For fifteen years he labored, trying to get a film made about William Tell, the great peasant-rebel from Swiss history. Flynn would have starred in the screen-play he co-authorized concerning the overthrow of a tyrant, Gessler. In the film, this would directly parallel current Latin American rebellions against corrupt dictators.

When Castro, whom Errol adored, appeared likely to succeed, this inspired Flynn all the more to create his movie-metaphor. He hoped his film would win over the American people, terrified of communists, to see the Cuban situation in a positive light.

During that final year of planning, Beverly Aadland was to have been the female lead. Then, funding dried up in the light of the Errol Flynn/Bev Aadland scandal.

“Incredible! I'd heard that Flynn was a right-winger, even attracted to Hitler during the late 1930s.”

Bev roared at that. “No one in Hollywood hated the Nazis more than Errol. He never made a big deal about it because he believed stars should keep their politics to themselves, when speaking in public if not as to what they might slip into any film. Go back and watch
Robin Hood
from 1936: it's no accident that the peasants carry hammers and cycles into Sherwood.”

Of course! That was purposeful. I never realized it until now but, they do just that. Robin Hood as Red propaganda!

“So one day, Errol got invited to the White House for a special secretive meeting with F.D.R. The German bund was just then forming. The president asked Errol, owing to his Aryan appearance, to join. You can't imagine how many American lives were saved by information Errol picked up as a secret agent.”

“He did that, knowing he might later be considered a Nazi?”

“Errol believed the good of the country was more important than any man's reputation. Even his own.”

Just like me! Defecting to Russia, as George requested.

Acknowledging in late 1958 that the big William Tell epic was never going to happen, Flynn—now nearing fifty, looking decades older owing to years of wine, women and song—decided to use whatever box-office clout he might have left to realize his dream movie, a cinematic tribute to Castro, if on a considerably less spectacular scale. What mattered most, he believed, was the message: To paraphrase FDR we had nothing to fear from communist Cuba but fear itself. Fear would drive them into the enemy camp as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One night, while lying in bed with Bev after sex, his mind already off and wandering in search of a first tentative step, it dawned on Flynn: Why not go down there, improvise a movie on location? Perhaps even convince Castro to play himself! Such a trip would cost money. Lots of money. Once wealthy, Flynn didn't have any, his fortune squandered on what he referred to as ‘my wicked, wicked ways.' Then he admitted to Bev that in his secret life Errol Flynn had always wanted to be a journalist. She gazed on as his eyes, red and blurry, lit up as a scheme hatched.

Right-wing newspaper magnate William R. Hearst, unaware of Flynn's fellow traveler sensibilities, worshipped the star. The publisher, an extreme right-winger, had like many others heard of Flynn's pre-WWII era “legend” as an ardent Nazi sympathizer, Hearst secretly supporting Hitler in the days before the America entered the war.

“You're not thinking what I
think
you're thinking?”

Indeed he was. Flynn called Hearst. Could they meet in the publisher's office to discuss a unique project? In a half-hour session, Flynn convinced Hearst, in those days leading up to the New Year's Day takeover of Havana, to send him down as a reporter. Flynn promised to glorify Batista at Castro's expense while planning to do precisely the opposite.

Delighted at the prospect, Hearst tipped the CIA off. Aware of the star's previous Secret Service work, the Company approached Flynn with the idea of assassinating Castro during an interview. They too were unaware of Flynn's far-left leanings.

Devilishly delighted at how things were progressing, Flynn gladly agreed. He even went through several weeks of special training, planning to instead kill Batista, who would surely invite the Hollywood star to dinner upon arrival.

The CIA meanwhile put Flynn in touch with The Mob, already fearful of what would happen should Castro pull off his coup. Knowing the amount of money that the Made Men possessed, and that some, like Johnny Handsome, had once been involved in the movie business, Flynn came up with a far more bizarre concept, one that would realize his secret cinematic project: Talk the Mafiosos into financing a B-budget anti-Castro film while preparing to kill Fidel for the CIA. The idea flew.

Amazed at how beautifully all the pieces were falling into place, Flynn accepted the deal, writing a script that would instead glorify Fidel. He and Bev left for Cuba and, shooting on a shoestring, did precisely that.

*

Lee finally caught the flick about a year and a half later as the third feature on a triple bill at a Texas Drive In. He was with Marina and their daughter June, seated in an old jalopy, never mentioning that he'd met the female lead. So far as anyone could see, they were one more white trash family, out for the night.