Katie Oppenheimer was born in Germany before marrying Robert Oppenheimer, whose name was Katie Puning. At the age of fourteen, she moved to the United States with her parents. As a teenager, she already showed great equestrian talent. As a youth, she joined the Communist Party of the United States. In middle and later years, she grew orchids in the greenhouse Oppenheimer built for her, and it was a regret for her that she failed to fulfill her dream of becoming a professional botanist.
In Oppenheimer's Biography, many sources refer to her as an unhappy woman, an irresponsible mother, and an alcoholic wife. In general, those who honor Robert Oppenheimer rate Katie much less. They thought Oppenheimer was a tortured saint and Katie wasn't. In their view, Katie's actions and demands put more pressure on the already overburdened Oppenheimer, who instead of comforting her in the family, she created chaos, and other voices that denied her included: capricious, selfish, irresponsible. She was called a bad mother, a bad daughter. She is unobtrusive and always dependent on men. In short, Oppenheimer's circle considered her unworthy of Oppenheimer.
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However, in Nolan's new film Oppenheimer, Katie's loyalty and bravery during Oppenheimer's political persecution reshaped the audience's perception of the woman. The audience also felt the personality charm of the long-demonized genius wife through their own interpretation.
Who was Oppenheimer's wife before she became?
Before marrying Oppenheimer, she was an only child and college student named Katie. She had three marriages. In 1912 or 1913, Katie was a toddler with her engineering father and mother, and she sailed across the Atlantic to immigrate to the United States to live in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Young Katie easily mastered a second language, participated in equestrian shows, and achieved social and academic success.
In 1928, she entered the University of Pittsburgh and persuaded her parents to sponsor her solo trip to Europe. During her travels, she quickly flashed a marriage with Frank Ramsey, a Harvard graduate, jazz lover and musician. However, after reading Frank's diary, Katie discovers that she is married to a drug-addicted homosexual, so she decisively divorces and undergoes an abortion.
Her second husband was the staunch communist Joe Dallet, and in Nolan's film Oppenheimer, Katie mentions that he was killed on the battlefield in Spain. Influenced by Dalai, Katie joined the Communist Party, distributing propaganda materials in front of factories and on the streets, teaching workers to learn English, and working as Dalai's nanny. When Dalai is killed, Katie tells an unnamed friend that she will never stop loving Joe. There are also specific sources in Oppenheimer's biography that Katie's drinking buddy Shirley Barnett in Los Alamos believes that Joe is the most loved person in her life, and his death is something Katie can't let go.
After Dalai's death, Katie returned to the United States with plans to complete an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She accepted a third marriage proposal, and her third husband was Stewart Harrison, an Oxford graduate, radiologist and Caltech researcher. Although Katie didn't love him, she needed Harrison financially to support her through her studies and life. She offered to marry and change her name again: agreeing that she would stay in Pennsylvania as an undergraduate and then go to UCLA to pursue a doctorate.
It was also during this marriage that Katie met Oppenheimer, a very tall, slender and intelligent physicist, at a party. The encounter changed her life completely and she decided to give up her doctorate to follow Oppenheimer. Katie and Oppenheimer quickly developed an affair and became pregnant with a child. Fortunately, Oppenheimer and Katie's then-husband Harrison reached a consensus on the phone that since they both had advanced attitudes to sexual issues, Harrison agreed to divorce, creating the conditions for Oppenheimer to marry Katie. Everything went very civilized. Katie divorced Harrison in the morning and married Oppenheimer in the afternoon.
Biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin wrote, "People judge Katie harsher... Because she intervened in Oppenheimer's path and forced him to marry. "Oppenheimer's Biography" describes the scene of Katie pursuing Oppenheimer, and also describes the process of getting Stuart Harrison to promise a divorce on the phone so that Oppenheimer can marry her. Everything went very sane.
Bad wife and mother?
Regarding Oppenheimer's family life, "Oppenheimer" leaves the impression of tension and darkness. They are incompetent as parents.
In the beginning, Katie plays the wife of an academic star, excited about her husband's status and success, but less satisfied with her motherhood. Their first child, Peter Oppenheimer, was born in 1941 and was not the focus of his parents' lives. In the biography of Oppenheimer's brother, Frank Oppenheimer, his wife complained that she "never had enough to eat" at a dinner party at her sister-in-law's house.
Katie acquiesced to Oppenheimer's two extramarital affairs. One is with Joan Tutlock, Oppenheimer's girlfriend before marriage; The second is with clinical psychologist Ruth Tolman, the wife of Oppenheimer's friend and Caltech colleague Richard Tolman. These plots are also reflected in the movie Oppenheimer.
Katie was heartily happy that Oppenheimer was the one who led the atomic bomb at Los Alamos Laboratory. She shared her husband's passion and ambition and delighted Oppenheimer's rise on the world stage. But she didn't realize that life in Los Alamos would be an ordeal for herself.
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In theory, she seems to be involved in a great adventure, but daily life in Los Alamos proves to be very challenging. Drinking water is scarce and electricity supply is unstable in the camps. The fruit and vegetables stocked at the commissary are not too fresh. The secrecy of the program meant that husbands could not talk to their wives about work, and wives could not reveal where they lived to relatives. Outsiders are not allowed to visit and all mails are censored. Katie isn't the only wife feeling trapped and struggling to adjust. This is revealed in the book Standby and Improvisation: Women of Los Alamos in Wartime: In the mountains of New Mexico, women are getting older day after day, and we have few conveniences that most of us used to take for granted. There were no postmen, milkmen, laundrymen, no newsboys knocking on the door... Everything must be reported to security officials. Living in Los Alamos is like living in prison.
At the same time, Katie suffered from postpartum depression and began to drink heavily for a long time. When she gets drunk, she reveals very personal details about her sex life to other women, including how she "taught" her husband the art of foreplay. In December 1944, Katie gave birth to her second child at Los Alamos Hospital, demonstrating symptoms of postpartum depression. Friends were shocked by Katie's depression, and the family seemed melancholy. Katie had been drawing the curtains all day and lying on the couch. Eventually, Katie took Peter to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to live with her parents. During Katie's absence, Tony was cared for by another Los Alamos wife and mother, Pat Schell. Oppenheimer had asked Scheer if he would adopt Tony while visiting his daughter, which frightened Shel. Robert Strensky, an acquaintance of the Oppenheimers, believes that "to be Oppenheimer's child is to have the biggest obstacle in the world."
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Due to the long-standing higher expectations for the role of women as mothers, in "Oppenheimer's Biography", people are more critical of Katie and more tolerant of Oppenheimer's dereliction of duty as a father. In the film Oppenheimer, director Nolan seems to be more tolerant of Oppenheimer, and even deliberately does not depict the plot of his intention to give the child to someone else for adoption, and saying "I have no extra love for her" (which may make the great scientist seem more cold-blooded and cruel). Instead, the film only shows that because of Katie's alcoholism and depression, Oppenheimer had to temporarily leave the child in the care of close friend Shivalier for several months.
He was praised again for his loyalty and bravery
After the war, Oppenheimer accepted the position of president of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He moved with his family, horses and dogs to a three-story Alden estate, just steps from Robert's new office. Although he also chaired the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer grew averse to those who believed that the more bombs, the better. He opposed the creation of hydrogen bombs and supported international arms control. These ideas were supported by some scientists, but they were also attacked by some people, including J. Edgar Hoover, Louis Strauss and others. Offended by Oppenheimer's faith and arrogance, these men formed a hostile group that eventually led to the revocation of his security clearance.
Katie also attended her husband's safety hearing, which she attended on crutches. During the meeting, when asked why she continued to appear with the communists, she replied firmly: "I left the communists, but not my past and friendship." Katie earned appreciation for her performance outside the conference room, and she was finally praised by Oppenheimer's circles. Freeman Dyson, a mathematician at Princeton University, described her as "our tower of power, as she did to Robert Oppenheimer." Physicist Rudolf Pelles described her as "a very brave person", especially when it came to Strauss. The film's restoration of this history also restores Katie's charm, and this passage makes the audience believe that the Oppenheimers are a couple with complementary personalities and deep love and support each other.
However, few people know that Katie often suffers from alcoholism while behind closed doors. To relieve the pain of persistent pancreatitis, she had to take medication for a long time. She often lay in bed smoking and even burned holes in her sheets and pajamas, nearly starting a fire. The safety hearing left the Oppenheimers angry and distressed, but they didn't feel alone because they supported each other.
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St. John's Island became a haven for the couple, where the Oppenheimers enjoyed swimming, fishing, sailing, walking barefoot, trying to forget the discomfort of the safety hearing. Neighbor Gibney said: "I started secretly liking and respecting Katie. At her worst, she was definitely not the slightest bit pretentious, as brave as a lion cub and very loyal to her team. "During the atomic energy commission cracking down on her husband and revoking his safety clearance, Katie showed absolute loyalty and support to him. She also harbors a deep and abiding hatred of all those who pushed Oppenheimer to step down, including physicist Edward Taylor, and we can see in the film that Katie was even brewing saliva when she met Taylor.
Until the release of Nolan's film Oppenheimer, Katie had been only a supporting role on stage and screen. For example, in a certain play, "The Love Song of Robert Oppenheimer", Katie's role is only visible to Oppenheimer. In the play Oppenheimer, Katie's character, always holding a wine glass, played for Oppenheimer at a garden party, gave him a glass of Scotch whiskey and soda, and complained when she first became a mother: "I smell disgusting, non-milky and baby feces".
In the BBC's seven-episode series Oppenheimer, Katie is portrayed almost all the time carrying a drink and a cigarette. The script reduced Oppenheimer's historically documented impatience and arrogance and left Katie to bear on the negative parts, such as her calling General Groves a "fat idiot" and Edward Taylor a "scumbag."
Katie must have felt that, given her own health, Oppenheimer should live longer than her. However, in January 1966, he was found to have a malignant tumor in his throat. Although surgery and radiation therapy were performed, the cancer returned a year later and could not be operated. At Robert's wishes, Katie scattered his ashes in Hawksnest Bay, right within sight of their beach house.
The biographer writes: "In the year or two after Oppenheimer's death," Katie began living with Bob Selber, a close friend and former student of Robert. The biographer describes Katie and Selber's relationship with this description: "When Katie didn't have a man, she did what she always did. She searched around and found another person to rely on, this time Robert Selber. Despite planning to travel the world together, Katie fell ill off the coast of Colombia and died of an embolism in a hospital in Panama City on October 27, 1972. Her ashes were also sprinkled in Hawksnest Bay. ”
It is worth noting: no source accuses Selber of needing to be attached to the women around him, and no source accuses him of "not being able to live without women."
Rather than commenting on Katie Oppenheimer quoted in literary works such as Oppenheimer, it shows how harsh history is on women. However, Dorothy van der Ford, Oppenheimer's granddaughter and daughter of Peter Oppenheimer, gave a relatively fair and up-to-date assessment of the grandmother she had never met: "At a time when women were not allowed to be colorful and outspoken, she was already an outspoken person... Over time, history will also see her through a different lens. ”