"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (36 page)

Lee had dropped into a strawberry-tinted, banana scented tunnel, sliding down, and further down, with the possibility that no end awaited him.

But that was not true. Only a nightmare. For here he was, waking to a new day, if a bit worse for wear.

Lee had to be certain, though, make sure he was the person he believed himself to be. He grabbed for his jacket, whisked out his wallet, flipped through his identification.

The passport made clear that he was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald. So that much seemed certain.

Moreover, the photograph next to it proved that his life had, up until this strange sojourn in mid-April, been what he believed it to be.

For there was Marina, the girl with the flashing eyes, waiting for him even now in Russia.

All at once, he could not wait to be with her again.

“Marina liked Italian cinema, loved Fellini films so much.

Those movies certainly gave her ideas!”

—Norman Mailer,
Oswald's Tale
; 1995

 

“Can we go to the movies?” Marina asked when Lee Harvey Oswald picked her up for their first date on March 19, 1961. The two had met five days earlier at a social function in Minsk, a gala prelude-to-spring celebration at the Palace of Culture.

“Sure. Anything in particular?”

“
La Dolce Vita
. The Soviet censors have finally allowed it to be shown here without cuts.”

“Who's in it?”

“I don't know. It isn't like one of those Hollywood films where you can identify a movie by the stars.”

“Who, then?”

“The director, of course. In this case, Federico Fellini.”

“I heard of him back in the states.”

“I've seen every one of his pictures. I believe him to be a true genius. So?”

“Your wish is my command, lovely lady.”

“Precisely what I hoped to hear, Alik.”

From the moment that film began, Lee, aka Alik, knew that he was witnessing something special. In the opening, a plane carried a statue of Jesus out of the city of Rome, off to be repaired. Over the rooftops they fly; down below, beautiful young women, in daring bikinis, sun-bathe on top of apartment buildings, their radios turned to stations that play American rock ‘n' roll. The pilot waves; they respond in kind.

But it appears as if they're waving ‘bye-bye' to Jesus.

A metaphor, just like my English teacher used to say. This is about life not only in Rome but any modern city. Christ is removed. All that's left below is hedonism: ‘The Sweet Life.'

*

Though she didn't appear in that movie, no single person more perfectly captured the essence of ‘La Dolce Vita' than the French
actress Brigitte Bardot. Lee, like most every other male in
America, rushed out to a theatre to catch her first important film ...
And God Created Woman,
when released late in 1957.

Previous to his first view of ‘Bebe,' Lee had, like pretty much all American men, considered Marilyn Monroe The Dream Girl: sweet, flirtatious, kookie. For five years Marilyn defined what sexiness meant in the late-Eisenhower era, via onscreen roles and a 1954 nude lay-out in
Playboy
.

Already, though, the fifties were moving toward end-game. This newcomer from France stole away much of Marilyn's steam.

Bebe flaunted all the conventions. In several films, the character Bardot played, based on herself, casually married. Soon she engaged in adulterous affairs. Not out of some deep, uncontrollable passion. On a whim, just for the hell of it.

“It is better for a woman to be unfaithful by choice,” the Gallic beauty stated without shame, “than faithful and unhappy.”

Here, Lee knew, falling madly in love with her precisely as several million other men simultaneously did, appears the shape of things to come.

Bardot is not some aberration, rather a role model for a New Woman about to emerge. Girls will see her and imitate her, even as only a few years back they did M.M.

My guess: by 1960, every female in every remote corner of the world will mimic Bebe's swagger, her smile, that casual display of her body. They'll dress like her, talk like her.

And style their hair in the careless, devil-may-care way Bebe's blonde locks fall down all over her face.

*

“You look just like Brigitte Bardot,” Lee Harvey Oswald, calling himself Alik, said to Marina the first time the two met. Each had arrived separately at the dance, Lee showing up early, anxious as always to meet women. Marina waltzed in three hours late, only a short while before the party was about to conclude.

This was entirely deliberate on her part, planned as if Marina were a military leader executing a strategy planned out far in advance. As she drifted in, dream-like, wearing a heavy black overcoat, a cowl covering the top and sides of her head, all eyes turned to consider the late-comer: those delicate near-perfect facial features and intense eyes initially demanded the crowd's attentions. Then, with the precision that can only be achieved through hours of rehearsal, the actress (for that's what Marina was in this theatre of life; character might be a better term still, as Marina was not this woman's actual name but the role she had agreed to play) drew her shoulders inward.

As she did, the cowl fell back, the coat slipped off her deliciously slender frame. Anatoly and Sasha, two young men enamored of Marina, had waited patiently for her to arrive. Each had grown fearful Marina would not show. At once they rushed to grab her wrap before it could reach the floor.

Marina meanwhile stood, like a professional fashion model, still as a statue, posing, preening, glamorous in a bright red Chinese brocade dress, white slippers out of some old fairytale adorning her tiny feet. Her bright eyes were overly made up, midnight-black Mascara adding a dark, decadent aspect to her otherwise pert, Lolita-ish girl-woman's facade.

Perhaps most breathtaking was Marina's hair, precisely styled like that of Bardot in glossy magazine layouts that first appeared in Paris, then the U.S. and free world, finally here in the Soviet Union, even provincial Minsk.

“Your accent is strange,” Marina answered the intense young man. “Do you hail from one of the Baltic regions? Estonia—“

“I'm an American.”

Lee noted that the young beauty lit up at this statement. She could not, he guessed, know his secret: that, in his youth, other boys wanted nothing to do with him, so atypical was Lee of what a U.S. male was supposed to be. Yet as is the way of the world she would assume he represented his homeland. For those living in Russia, dissatisfied with the ways of communism and its dull lifestyle, America provided a dream of excitement, fun and wealth. The grass is always greener, as the cliché goes.

Marina fell in love with Lee, or Alik, or whoever he was at first sight. What she fell in love with was not the person but her idea of him: the American male,
her
American male, the long hoped for example of that seemingly glimmering culture, arriving on the scene none too soon. The longed-for prince approached the unappreciated princess, he a half-formed idea out of her wildest fantasies. If she played her cards right, he might whisk her off to his American castle, where they would live happily ever after.

Take me away from all this. Please? I've been waiting!

Lee fell in love with Marina at first sight. What he fell in love with was not Marina the person (who did not exist now and never had) but an idea of her: the enchanting European dream girl, slim yet with lush, upturned breasts beneath that exotic costume, hungry to be touched by the right male. And the hair! Free flowing, seemingly unkempt, carefully fashioned to allow for that impression. A princess, lost here in the outer reaches of her world, longing for a prince among men to appear ...

There must be a dragon to slay; merely tell me where it is and I'll rush out to conquer the thing and win you forever...

All those boys, those Russian boys, some wealthy as far as was permitted in this communist state, most far more appealing than this scrawny youth before her, fell away in comparison.

He had said the magic words: ‘I am an American.' Where do you keep your Bowie knife, your Winchester repeater? When do I meet your faithful Indian companion? Why are you not wearing a buckskin jacket? Where do you stable your great stallion?

Lee fell in love because everyone wanted her and no one could have her, as the situation made clear. Marina fell in love because here was her American at last.

Your shortness, that in-truth homely face, the leering grin are all wonderful, though I would reject any Russian boy with any of those defects.

You are you; or, at least, my dream of you.

I love a man who exists only in my imagination. My vision of him, I impose onto whoever might be standing here now ...

I love a woman who exists only in my imagination. My vision of her, I impose on whoever might be standing here now ...

That night, Marina and Lee each fell in love with a persona rather than a person; an image, not a reality; a projection of each individual's needs, these rightly or wrongly conceived as belonging to the imperfect person standing there. Love at first sight, if with an already existing fantasy the dreamer falsely believes has miraculously become actualized. There is, in the world, no more certain a formula for disaster, though neither would have believed so during this spectacularly silent moment.

The world appeared to open as their oyster. The future would be a great mutual adventure. They would share everything, their love a great novel, each day the next chapter.

How could anyone doubt it? For they had fallen in love at first sight.

*

Nineteen months earlier, on August 18, 1959, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, worldly beyond her years in emotion and intellect if not experience, stepped into Moscow's KGB headquarters. To her surprise, she was ushered into the office of the director as though a Very Important Person had just arrived. This, she had not expected. She was, after all, only an ordinary girl, other than her remarkable looks and sharp mind; from the most average sort of family.

She had applied in May to the Leningrad KGB post offering her services as a spy, was accepted into their program, and went
through extensive training. She had no idea what sort of mission she might be sent on. She didn't care; anything to break the monotony of her boring life.
I'll take anything!!

After all, she'd seen movies. And in movies, particularly Hollywood films, young women, born bright and beautiful, got to live exceptional lives. Not your average marriage and/or job; something ... Romantic! Yet her outstanding attributes aside, that hadn't happened. As a result, she determined not to settle but venture out in the world, or her corner of it; make her own fate, seeing as it had failed to come and find her.

Recently, she'd caught a spy film, knowing that it was only a movie. Still, it had to be based on something real. There were spies. Everyone had heard of Mata Hari, the German seductress from World War I who almost changed the conflict's outcome and the course of world history owing to her irresistibility, which allowed her to draw secrets from formidable enemy officers.

So this young Russian woman had decided to give it a try.

On a whim, of course. Most things that most women do are whimsical. Beautiful women? Their very lives are whimsy!

“The situation is this,” Alexander N. Shelepin, head of the country's KGB, a bloated middle-aged man who looked more like a butcher than a high-ranking government official, explained: “We received word only a few days ago that a young American, just now returned to California from service with the marines in the South Pacific, has filed for permission to withdraw from any further duty to care for his ill mother. In fact, this is but his cover. He plans to leave for Europe under the auspices of attending university in Helsinki, upon arrival there applying for a six-day Visa to visit Russia, intending to defect.”

“And your correspondents believe him sincere?”

“We can never know such a thing for certain. But our agents in the U.S. followed his course of action for some time. Since late childhood, he has expressed serious interest in communism. While in the service he condemned American imperialism in the Third World while secretly joining our secret cells, passing along classified information he'd obtained on his base.”

“It doesn't smell right to me. If he feels so for our way of life, why would he join an elite fighting force?”

“There's the question we must attempt to answer,” piped in the other man occupying the room. Yuri Nosenko, the KGB agent assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald, even now had that American's file open on his lap. “It could mean that he is a plant, an agent for the CIA, sent here as a spy.”

“Precisely what occurred to me as you were speaking.”

“It's also possible he's the real thing,” Shelepin added. “We can't ignore the possibility this may be the case and pass up information he apparently has about America's new super-spy plane, the U2, as well as other significant military details.”

“What makes me believe this could be the case,” Nosenko said, flipping through the file, “is that he has a history of strange, self-conflicting activity. Our agents who have been in contact with him in the U.S. and Japan during his tour of duty suggest that once a person comes to terms with his own self-contradictions, it's logical, at least according to this man's unique logic— the world as it exists in his individualistic vision—he'd volunteer as an American warrior, simultaneously dedicating himself to the seeming opposition of communism.”

“It's not unheard of,” the young woman, extremely well-read and university educated, agreed. “One of their greatest generals from the Second World War, Carlson, was a dedicated communist.”