American Prometheus (29 page)
On their way into Spain, Dallet and Nelson were arrested by French authorities; after a trial in April, they served a sentence of twenty days in prison and were then released. When Dallet finally smuggled himself into Spain in late April, he wrote Kitty, “I adore you and can’t wait to reach A. [Albacete] and get your letter.” By July, he was still writing her upbeat, glowing accounts of his experiences: “It’s a bloody interesting country, a bloody interesting war and the most bloody interesting job of all the bloody interesting jobs I’ve ever had, to give the fascists a real bloody licking.”
Kitty had genuinely liked her husband’s friend and took the trouble to write Nelson’s wife, Margaret—a woman she had yet to meet—about their week in Paris together. “We had a nice few days,” she wrote. “I don’t suppose they were too good a preparation for the tough journey ahead, but they were fun.” She reported that they had attended a splendid mass meeting of 30,000 people protesting the West’s stance of strict neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. “The most thrilling part to us since we couldn’t understand the speeches at the meeting was the subway ride there. Hundreds of young communist leaders held up the subway until they got on, singing the Internationale and shouting anti-fascist slogans. Everyone joined in and by the time we arrived at Grenelle (the meeting station), it seemed as if the whole of Paris was roaring out the Internationale. I may be the emotional type (though I doubt it), but it made me feel as though I’d suddenly grown triple my size, brought tears to my eyes, and made me want to shout a big belly-roar.” Kitty signed the letter, “Comradely yours, Kitty Dallet.”
In Spain, Joe Dallet was soon assigned as “political commissar” to the 1,500-man McKenzie-Papineau Battalion, a largely Canadian unit that by then had absorbed many American volunteers from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. That summer, he and his men began their combat training. “Man, what a feeling of power you have when entrenched behind a heavy machine gun!” he wrote Kitty. “You know how I always enjoyed gangster movies for the mere sound of the machine guns. Then you can imagine my joy at finally being on the business end of one.”
The war was not going well for the Republican cause. Dallet and his men were outmanned and outgunned by the Spanish fascists, who were being supplied with aircraft and artillery by Germany and Italy. And, as Dallet soon discovered, the Spanish left was further weakened by fierce, sometimes deadly, sectarian politics. In a letter to Kitty dated May 12, 1937, Dallet ominously wrote that his Spanish communist superiors had promised a “cleaning out” of the anarchists among the troops. By that autumn, Dallet was supervising “trials” of deserters; by one account, a handful of these men may have been executed. Dallet himself became extremely unpopular with his own troops. These feelings, according to a friend of Dallet’s, amounted to “near hatred.” Some thought him an ideological zealot. According to a Comintern report dated October 9, 1937, “A percentage of the men openly declare their dissatisfaction with Joe and there is some talk of removal. . . .”
Four days later, he went into battle for the first time, leading his battalion in an offensive against the fascist-held town of Fuentes del Ebro. A few days earlier, an old friend had found him at night sitting alone in a small hut by the faint light of a kerosene lamp. Dallet confided that he felt lonely and knew that he was extremely unpopular. He said he was determined to prove to them that he was not one of those “safe behind the line” political officers; he would demonstrate his courage by being the first man over the parapet. When his friend argued that this might be a foolish way to lead an entire battalion, Dallet was adamant.
On the day of the battle, Dallet kept his word. He was the first man out of the trenches and had advanced only a few yards toward the fascist lines when he was hit in the groin by machine-gun fire. The battalion’s machine-gun commander later reported: “The attack started at 1:40 PM. Joe Dallet, battalion commissar, went over with the First Company on the left flank, where the fire was heaviest. He was leading the advance when he fell, mortally wounded. He behaved heroically until the very end, refusing to permit the first-aid men to approach him in his exposed position.” Suffering dreadfully, he was trying to crawl back to the trenches when a second round of machine-gun fire killed him. He was barely thirty years old.
Steve Nelson—who himself had been wounded in August—heard of Dallet’s death shortly afterwards while on a trip to Paris. Before his death, Dallet had written Kitty, telling her that Nelson would be passing through Paris, so Kitty had decided to make the trip from London to meet him. She planned to go on from Paris to Spain. Knowing that he had to tell her the tragic news, Nelson arranged to meet her in the lobby of her hotel. “She was crushed,” Nelson recalled. “She literally collapsed and hung on to me. I became a substitute for Joe, in a sense. She hugged me and cried, and I couldn’t maintain my composure.” When Kitty plaintively cried, “What am I going to do now?” Nelson on impulse invited her to move in with him and his wife, Margaret, back in New York. Kitty agreed, but not until Nelson talked her out of going on to Spain, where she thought she could volunteer as a hospital worker.
Kitty returned to America the twenty-seven-year-old widow of a CP war hero. The American Communist Party made sure that his sacrifice would be remembered. Party chief Earl Browder wrote that Dallet had joined those who had given “themselves completely to the task of stopping fascism.” One of the Party’s few genuine Ivy League communists, Dallet had become a martyr of the working class. With Kitty’s permission, in 1938 the Party published
Letters from Spain,
a collection of Joe’s letters to his wife.
Kitty spent a couple of months with the Nelsons in their cramped apartment in New York City. She saw some of Joe’s old friends, all of whom were Party members. Kitty herself later told government investigators that she had at some point met as acquaintances such well-known Communist Party officials as Earl Browder, John Gates, Gus Hall, John Steuben and John Williamson. But she said she had ceased to be a member of the Party when she left Youngstown in June 1936 and stopped paying Party dues. “She seemed to be in a very unsettled state,” Margaret Nelson recalled. “I was under the impression that she was under a great emotional strain.” Other friends testify that Kitty remained deeply affected by Dallet’s death for a long time.
And then, in early 1938, she visited a friend in Philadelphia and decided to stay, enrolling in the University of Pennsylvania for the spring semester. She studied chemistry, math and biology and seemed ready, finally, to get her college degree. Sometime that spring or summer, she ran into a British-born doctor, Richard Stewart Harrison, whom she had known as a teenager. Harrison, a tall, handsome man with piercing blue eyes, had practiced medicine in England, and was then finishing an internship to become licensed in the United States. Older and apolitical, Harrison seemed to offer Kitty something she now desperately wanted: stability. Making another of her impetuous decisions, Kitty married Harrison on November 23, 1938. This marriage, she later said, was “singularly unsuccessful from the start.” She told a friend that it was “an impossible marriage” and that she “was ready to leave him long before she did.” Harrison soon left for Pasadena, where he had a residency lined up. Kitty stayed in Philadelphia and in June 1939 obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree, with honors in botany. Two weeks later, she agreed to follow Harrison to California and maintain the pretense of a stable marriage because, she said, “of his conviction that a divorce might ruin a rising young doctor.”
At twenty-nine, Kitty finally seemed ready to take charge of her own life. Although seemingly locked into a dead-end marriage, she now was determined to get on with her own career. Her main interest was botany, and that summer she won a research fellowship to begin graduate studies at the University of California’s Los Angeles campus. Her ambition was to earn a doctorate and, perhaps, a professorship in botanical studies.
In August 1939, she and Harrison attended the garden party in Pasadena where she met Oppenheimer. Kitty began her graduate studies at UCLA that autumn, but she did not forget the tall young man with such bright blue eyes. Sometime over the next few months they met again and began to date—and, though Kitty was still married, they made no effort to conceal the affair. They were frequently seen driving in Robert’s Chrysler coupe. “He would ride up [near my office] with this cute young girl,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelman, a physician who taught at Berkeley. “She was very attractive. She was tiny, skinny as a rail, just like he was. They’d give each other a fond kiss and go their separate ways. Robert always had that porkpie hat on.”
In the spring of 1940, Oppenheimer—rather audaciously—invited Richard Harrison and Kitty to spend some time that summer at Perro Caliente. At the last moment, Dr. Harrison later told the FBI, he decided he could not go, but encouraged Kitty to go anyway. As it happened, Bob and Charlotte Serber had been invited by Oppie to come to the ranch at the same time and when they drove into Berkeley from Urbana, Illinois—where Serber had been teaching—Oppie explained that he had invited the Harrisons but Richard couldn’t make it. “Kitty might come alone,” he said. “You could bring her with you. I’ll leave it up to you. But if you do it might have serious consequences.” Kitty went with the Serbers eagerly—and stayed a full two months on the ranch.
Just a day or two after her arrival, Kitty and Robert—she always insisted on calling him Robert—rode horses to Katherine Page’s dude ranch at Los Pinos. They spent the night and then rode back the next morning. They were followed a few hours later by Page—the woman whom young Oppenheimer had been so infatuated with in the summer of 1922—who mischievously presented Kitty with her nightgown, which she explained had been found under Robert’s pillow at Los Pinos.
At the end of the summer, Oppenheimer phoned Dr. Harrison to tell him that his wife was pregnant. The two men agreed that the thing to do was for Harrison to divorce Kitty so that Oppenheimer could marry her. It was all very civilized. Harrison told the FBI that “he and the Oppenheimers were still on good terms and that he realized that they all had modern views concerning sex.”
Even though Bob Serber was a witness to the passionate affair of that summer of 1940, he was still astonished in October when he heard from Oppie that he was marrying. When told the news, he wasn’t sure if Oppenheimer had said his prospective bride was Jean or Kitty. It could have been either. Oppenheimer had walked off with another man’s wife—and some of his friends were genuinely scandalized. Oppie was not a womanizer, but he was the kind of man who was strongly attracted to women who were attracted to him. Kitty had been irresistible.
One evening that autumn of 1940, Robert happened to share a platform with Steve Nelson at a Berkeley fundraiser on behalf of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Newly arrived in San Francisco, Nelson had never heard of Oppenheimer. As the featured speaker, Oppenheimer said the fascist victory in Spain had led directly to the outbreak of general war in Europe. He argued that those like Nelson who had served in Spain had fought a delaying action.
Afterwards, Oppenheimer approached Nelson, and with a broad smile said, “I’m going to marry a friend of yours, Steve.” Nelson couldn’t think who that could be. So Robert explained, “I’m going to marry Kitty.”
“Kitty Dallet!” Nelson exclaimed. He had lost touch with her since her stay with him and Margaret in New York. “She’s back there, sitting in the hall,” Oppenheimer said, and he motioned to her to come up. The two old friends hugged and agreed to get together. Soon afterwards, the Nelsons came to the Oppenheimers’ for a picnic dinner. Sometime that autumn, Kitty moved to Reno, Nevada, for the required residency of six weeks, and there, on November 1, 1940, she obtained a divorce decree. That very day she married Robert in Virginia City, Nevada. A court janitor and a local clerk signed the marriage certificate as witnesses. By the time the newlyweds returned to Berkeley, Kitty was wearing a maternity dress.
At the end of November, Margaret Nelson phoned Kitty to say that she had just given birth to a daughter, and that they had named the child Josie, in honor of Joe Dallet. Kitty immediately invited the Nelsons to visit and use the spare bedroom in their new house. Over the next couple of years, the Nelsons visited the Oppenheimer household on numerous occasions, although the visits gradually grew less frequent. In later years, their children would play together. “I also saw Robert at Berkeley now and then,” Nelson wrote in his memoirs, “because I was responsible for working with people from the university, getting them to conduct classes and discussions.” They also had one-on-one meetings. An FBI wiretap, for instance, shows that Oppenheimer met with Nelson on Sunday, October 5, 1941, apparently to pass him a check for $100, earmarked as a donation for striking farm workers. But the relationship went far beyond political transactions. When Josie Nelson turned two in November 1942, Oppenheimer surprised her mother by turning up on their doorstep, bearing a gift for the child. Margaret was “astounded” and touched by this typical act of kindness. “With all of his brilliance,” she thought, “there were very strong human qualities.”
Though pregnant, Kitty continued her biology studies and insisted to her friends that she still intended to make a professional career for herself as a botanist. “Kitty was very excited about the fact that she was going back to school,” Maggie Nelson said. “She was very much taken up with that.” But despite their common interest in science, Kitty and Robert were temperamentally poles apart. “He was gentle, mild,” recalled one friend who knew them both. “She was strident, assertive, aggressive. But that’s often what makes a good marriage, the opposites.”
Most of Robert’s relatives were put off by Kitty. Plain-spoken Jackie Oppenheimer always thought she was “a bitch” and resented the way she thought Kitty cut Robert off from his friends. Decades later she vented her animosity: “She could not stand sharing Robert with anyone,” recalled Jackie. “Kitty was a schemer. If Kitty wanted anything, she would always get it. . . . She was a phony. All her political convictions were phony, all her ideas were borrowed. Honestly, she’s one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life.”
