American Prometheus (72 page)

Freeman Dyson had a similar observation: “Robert just liked Kitty the way she was, and he wouldn’t have tried to force a different way of life on her any more than she would onto him. . . . I would say that Oppenheimer himself was certainly completely dependent on her—she was really the rock on which he stood. I think for him to have tried to treat her as a clinical case and try to reorganize her life, I think that would have been just out of character for him, and out of character for her too.” Another Princeton friend, the journalist Robert Strunsky, agreed: “He was just as loyal to her as anybody could be. He really wanted to protect her as much as anything. . . . He resented any criticism of her.”

Robert must have known that Kitty’s drinking was a symptom of a deep pain, a pain he understood would always be there. He never tried to stop her from drinking, and neither did he sacrifice his own evening cocktail ritual. His martinis were strong and he drank them with pleasure. Unlike Kitty, he took his liquor steady and slow. Pais, who believed the cocktail hour a “barbaric custom,” nevertheless thought that Robert “invariably held his liquor well.” Even so, the fact that Robert continued to drink alongside his clearly alcoholic wife did not go unnoticed. “He served the most delicious and the coldest martinis,” Sherr said. “Oppie made everyone drunk quite consciously.” Robert himself mixed the gin martinis with just a droplet of vermouth and then poured the concoction into long-stemmed glasses he had sitting in the freezer. One faculty member renamed Olden Manor “Bourbon Manor.”

Robert’s passivity in the face of Kitty’s drinking seemed strange to some. Whatever she did to him or to herself, he would be there for her all his life. Another old Los Alamos friend, Dr. Louis Hempelmann, admired Robert’s devotion to his wife. Louis and Elinor Hempelmann visited the Oppenheimers two or three times each year and felt they knew the family well. Robert never asked him for professional advice about Kitty—but he calmly, matter-of-factly, told Hempelmann what the situation was. “He was really just a saint to her,” Hempelmann recalled. “He was always sympathetic and didn’t ever seem to get irritated at her. He really stuck with her very well. He was a marvelous husband.”

On one occasion, however, Robert was compelled to intervene. Kitty not only drank; she often took sleeping pills to fight her insomnia. One night she accidentally took an overdose and had to be rushed to the Princeton hospital. After that, Oppenheimer asked his secretary to buy him a box with a lock on it. In the future, he said, Kitty could only get her pills by asking him for them. This arrangement lasted for a time, but over time fell by the way-side. Years later, Robert Serber insisted that Kitty “never drank excessively for a normal person.” He thought Kitty’s behavior could be explained by a persistent medical condition: “Kitty suffered from pancreatitis . . . and she would have to take very strong sedatives, and it gave the appearance of being drunk. I’d often seen it, staying with the Oppenheimers.” Bracing herself to attend a social function, Serber said Kitty would “pull herself together at the last minute and take a Demerol to get her through the evening and then she would appear drunk. Well, it wasn’t that at all.”

The source of Kitty’s unhappiness was no doubt rooted in her own psyche. But the pressures to play the role of the “director’s wife” didn’t help matters. At formal receptions, when she was required as hostess to stand and greet a long line of people, she often asked Pat Sherr to stand beside her. When Sherr asked why this was necessary, Kitty responded, “I need you at my side because when I start to fall, you’re going to hold me up.” Sherr realized that her friend was “very nervous and unsure of herself.” Kitty could intimidate those who did not know her well. And at times she could seem perfectly animated. But it was all an act. Sherr believed that, when required to put on a performance, Kitty was “really scared out of her wits.”

A free-spirited, whimsical woman, Kitty found it impossible to fit into Princeton’s stiff, small-town, high-society scene. A colleague of Abraham Pais’ once said of Princeton: “If you are single, you’ll go crazy; or, if you are married, your wife will go crazy.” Princeton drove Kitty crazy.

The Oppenheimers made no effort to accommodate Princeton society. “People left [calling] cards for them and they never returned the calls,” recalled Mildred Goldberger. “They never somehow cared for that part of Princeton which in our experience was really the best part.” The Goldbergers, in fact, developed a strong dislike for the Oppenheimers. Mildred literally thought Kitty a “wicked” woman, filled with “unfocused malice.” Her husband, the physicist Marvin Goldberger, who later became president of Caltech, saw Robert as “an extraordinarily arrogant and difficult person to be with. He was very caustic and patronizing. . . . Kitty was just too impossible.”

Kitty Oppenheimer was like a tigress caged in Princeton. If invited to the Oppenheimers’ for dinner, Princetonians learned from experience not to count on anything substantial to eat; the quality of the dinner was directly related to Kitty’s mood. Guests would be greeted by Robert holding a pitcher of his potent martinis. “You would sit in the kitchen,” recalled Jackie Oppenheimer, “just gossiping and drinking, with not a thing to eat. Then, about ten o’clock, Kitty would throw some eggs and chili into a pan and, with all that drink, that’s all you had.” Neither Robert nor Kitty ever seemed hungry. One summer evening, Pais was invited over for dinner and after the usual martinis, Kitty served a bowl of vichyssoise soup. The soup was quite delicious, and Robert and Kitty “indulged in a rather extravagant exchange about its superb quality.” Pais thought to himself, “Fine, now let’s get on with the dinner.” But no more food was forthcoming, and after a decent interval, a famished Pais politely excused himself and drove into Princeton, where he bought two hamburgers.

In her unhappiness, Kitty’s marriage was everything to her. She was utterly dependent upon Robert. She tried hard to play the role of a good housewife, “running around at his beck and call, making sure that everything was perfect for him.” One evening at a party, Oppenheimer was standing in a corner of their living room, talking with a group of people, when Kitty suddenly blurted out, “I love you.” Clearly embarrassed, Oppenheimer simply nodded his head. “It was obvious,” recalled Pat Sherr, “that he wasn’t terribly happy; he didn’t coo over her at that point. But she would do this kind of thing out of the blue.”

Sherr had known the Oppenheimers since their years in Los Alamos, and during their first years in Princeton she was probably Kitty’s closest friend. Kitty seems to have confided to Sherr about her marriage. “She adored him,” Sherr said. “There was no doubt about that.” But in Sherr’s harsh view, Robert didn’t feel the same way. “I am sure he never would have married her had she not become pregnant. . . . I don’t think that he returned the love, and I don’t think that he was capable of returning any love.” By contrast, Verna Hobson always insisted that Robert loved Kitty. “I think he leaned on her tremendously,” Hobson said. “He didn’t always listen to her, but he respected her political and intellectual capacity.” Hobson tended to observe the marriage through Robert’s eyes. Both Sherr and Hobson admitted that the problem may have been one of clashing temperaments. Kitty was extreme in her passions, whereas Robert could be surprisingly disengaged. Kitty was somebody who needed to express her emotions or anger; but Robert provided no rebound, and instead just allowed all her emotions to be absorbed into a void. “I am sure that is why she threw things at him,” Hobson said.

Kitty told Sherr that while she had slept with many men in her life, she had never been unfaithful to Robert. The same, of course, was not true for Robert. Though probably unaware of his affair with Ruth Tolman, Kitty was nevertheless intensely jealous of Robert’s affections. Another Los Alamos friend, Jean Bacher, thought Kitty was always resentful of anyone who got involved with Robert. Hobson reports that Robert himself confided to her one day that part of Kitty’s problem was that she “was insanely jealous of [him] and she could not stand it when he either got praise or blame because he was in the spotlight . . . she envied him.”

Kitty also confided to Sherr that “Oppie had no sense of fun and play.” According to Kitty, he was “overly fastidious.” Kitty was surely right to think him maddeningly aloof and detached. He lived his emotional life introspectively. They were polar opposites. But that had always been the source of their mutual attraction. If their marriage was something less than a healthy partnership, after a decade of marriage—and two children—the Oppenheimers had developed a bond of mutual dependency.

Soon after arriving in Princeton, Sherr was invited to Olden Manor for a picnic. After picnicking, one of the maids brought Toni, now aged three, down from her nap. Sherr hadn’t seen the child—the baby that Oppie had once asked if she wanted to adopt—since she had lived with her for three months at Los Alamos. “She was a very lovely child,” Sherr said. “She had Kitty’s high cheekbones and very dark eyes and dark hair—but she had something of Oppie there as well.” Sherr watched as Toni ran over to Oppenheimer and climbed into his lap: “She put her head on his chest and he enveloped her in his arms. And he looked at me and nodded.” Tearyeyed, Sherr knew what he meant. “It was a message between us that I was right, he did love her very much.”

But there seems to have been little energy left in their lives for their parental obligations. “I think to be a child of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer,” said Robert Strunsky, a Princeton neighbor, “is to have one of the greatest handicaps in the world.” “On the surface,” Sherr said, “he was very sweet with the children. I never saw him lose his temper.” But over the years, her view of Oppenheimer changed radically. Sherr observed that Peter, aged six, was quiet and extremely shy, and to help him socialize she encouraged Kitty to take him to a child psychiatrist. But after talking to Robert about it, Kitty reported that he had no confidence in the notion of subjecting his young son to a therapist—an experience Robert himself had endured and detested. This angered Sherr, who thought Oppenheimer’s attitude was that of a father who “could not have a son who needed help.” She eventually concluded that she “didn’t like him as a human being. . . . The more I saw of him, the more I disliked because it ended up by my feeling that he was a terrible father.”

This was too harsh. Both Robert and Kitty tried to connect with their son. One day when Peter was six or seven years old, Kitty helped him build an electrical toy, a square board filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses and switches. Peter dubbed the toy his “gimmick,” and two years later he still loved to play with it. One evening in 1949, David Lilienthal was visiting the Oppenheimers and observed Kitty sitting on the floor with Peter, patiently trying to fix the “gimmick.” After nearly an hour, when she rose to prepare dinner in the kitchen, Robert, “looking very paternal and very loving at Peter, moved over and took his place on the floor where Kitty had previously been working with this mess of wiring.” As Robert sat on the floor, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, fiddling with the wires, Peter ran to the kitchen and whispered loudly to Kitty, “Mama, is it all right to let Daddy work with the gimmick?” Everyone laughed at the notion that the man who directed the construction of the ultimate “gadget” might not be qualified to fiddle with his child’s electrical toy.

Despite such moments of familial warmth, Robert was perhaps too distracted to be a very attentive father. Freeman Dyson once asked him if it wasn’t a difficult thing for Peter and Toni to have such a “problematical figure for a father.” Robert replied with his usual flippancy, “Oh, it’s all right for them. They have no imagination.” Dyson later observed of his friend that this was a man capable of “rapid and unpredictable shifts between warmth and coldness in his feelings toward those close to him.” It was difficult for the children. “To an outsider like me,” Pais later observed, “Oppenheimer’s family life looked like hell on earth. The worst of it all was that inevitably the two children had to suffer.”

Despite the “gimmick” and other indulgences, Kitty and Peter never bonded and their relationship was often quite contentious. Robert felt Kitty was the problem. “Robert thought,” said Hobson, “that in their highly charged passionate falling in love that Peter had come too soon, and Kitty resented him for that.” When he was about eleven years old, Peter put on some puppy fat and Kitty couldn’t stop nagging him about his weight. There was never much food around the house, but now Kitty put Peter on a strict diet. Mother and son fought frequently. “She used to make Peter’s life just miserable the way she went on about it,” Hobson said. Sherr agreed: “Kitty was very, very impatient with him; she had absolutely no intuitive understanding of the children.” Robert stood passively by, and if pressed, he invariably took Kitty’s side in these arguments. “He [Robert] was very loving,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann. “He didn’t discipline the kids. Kitty did all that.”

From all accounts, Peter was a normal rambunctious child. As a toddler, like most boys, he had been loud, active and altogether difficult to handle. But Kitty interpreted his behavior as abnormal. She once told Bob Serber that her relationship with Peter was fine until the boy turned seven years old, and then it suddenly changed and she never knew why. Peter was a great builder; like his uncle Frank, he could do marvelous things with his hands, taking things apart and putting them back together. But he never shone in school, and Kitty found this intolerable. “Peter was a terrifically sensitive child,” said Harold Cherniss, “and he had a very hard time in school. . . . [But this] had nothing to do with his ability.” In response to Kitty’s nagging, Peter retreated into himself. Serber recalled that when Peter was five or six years old, “he seemed to be starved for affection.” But as a teenager he was just very solemn. “You’d come into the Oppenheimer kitchen,” Serber said, “and Peter would be a shadow . . . trying not to be noticed—that would be Peter.”

Kitty treated her daughter very differently. “Her attachment to Toni,” Hobson recalled, “was profound and seemed just purely loving and admiring . . . She wanted only goodness and happiness for Toni and she was just horrible to Peter.” As a young girl, Toni always seemed serene and sturdy. “From when she was six or seven years old,” Hobson observed, “the rest of the family relied on her to be sensible and solid and to cheer them on. . . . Toni was the one you never worried about.”