“Jean was Robert’s truest love. He loved her the most. He was devoted to her.”
That quote, from Robert Oppenheimer’s close friend Robert Serber, opens a chapter in the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s talking about Jean Tatlock, a medical student and eventual psychiatrist who was romantically involved with Oppenheimer for years. Their relationship, a key part of Oppenheimer’s personal and also political life, is also a major element of Oppenheimer—which even at three-hours long still doesn’t have quite enough time to get into everything that’s fascinating about Jean Tatlock.
Played by Florence Pugh in the film, Tatlock is described in American Prometheus as “a shapely woman with thick, dark curly hair, hazel-blue eyes, with heavy black lashes and naturally red lips; some thought she looked ‘like an old Irish princess.’” She did first meet Oppenheimer at a party, as depicted in the film, but he was also friendly with her father, John S.P. Tatlock, a Chaucer scholar who was impressed, as so many other people were, with Oppenheimer’s literary knowledge.
Jean too was highly educated, having spent time with a community of Jungian psychoanalysts in Switzerland even before she enrolled at Vassar to study English. One of her Vassar classmates remembered her as “the most promising girl I ever knew, the only one of all that I saw around me in college that even then seemed touched with greatness.” By the time she met Oppenheimer, she was enrolled at Stanford Medical School; she was also a dues-paying member of the Communist Party, and a writer and reporter for the Western Worker newspaper.
As depicted in the film, Jean could be a bit of a skeptic—she called organized religion “claptrap”—but she was a devoted Communist, telling a friend at one point, “I just wouldn’t want to go on living if I didn’t believe that in Russia everything is better.” When she and Oppenheimer began their relationship in 1936, she introduced him to many of her friends in the Party and “opened the door,” in the words of the biography, for his involvement in political causes like the Spanish Civil War and the plight of migrant workers. “I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country,” Oppenheimer later explained. When he once told Jean he would have to settle for remaining on the outside of some of these causes, Jean retorted, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t settle for anything.”
Their relationship was intellectual but also “intense” and mercurial, in keeping with what some speculated was Jean’s manic depression. “He’d be depressed some days because he was having trouble with Jean,” Serber remembered, per American Prometheus. She did indeed tell him to stop bringing her flowers, and rejected multiple proposals from him. There’s no evidence in the biography that she made him read the Bhagavad Gita aloud during sex, as happens very memorably in the film, but it’s possible to imagine it happening. She got him into the poetry of John Donne, which later inspired him to name the first nuclear bomb test “Trinity,” and he had been reading Sanskrit since the early 1930s.
Oppenheimer met his wife, Kitty, during a party in August of 1939, and his relationship with Jean had fallen apart by the end of this year. So the breakup scene between them in the film is very plausible. But as we see in the movie, their relationship did not end there. They continued to see each other about twice a year between their breakup and 1943; as Oppenheimer later explained, “we had been very much involved with one another, and there was still a very deep feeling when we saw each other.” Their reunion in June of 1943, during his return trip to Berkeley from Los Alamos, happens as depicted in the film, and was documented extensively by military agents who shared their findings with the FBI. The agents weren’t in the room to see the two naked, of course, but reported that “the relationship of Oppenheimer and Tatlock appears to be very affectionate and intimate.”
Oppenheimer was under “near-total surveillance” during his time at Los Alamos, with the government never letting go of their suspicions about his Communist ties. After this visit with Tatlock, that surveillance extended to her too. On September 1, 1943, J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a memo recommending that her phone be wiretapped because she had become “the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort.” Unlike Oppenheimer, she had not given up her Communist ties at this point. But after months of wiretaps the FBI had learned “nothing to confirm their suspicions that the young psychiatrist was Oppenheimer’s (or anyone’s) conduit for passing information to the Soviets,” as biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin write.
Given her brilliance and connections to some of the brightest minds of her era, Jean Tatlock could well have become someone we know as much about as Oppenheimer. Instead, her life ended suddenly on January 4, 1944. As depicted in the film, Tatlock was found lying on a pile of pillows with her head submerged in the bathtub. Her father, Professor John Tatlock, found her, and in an indelible image described in the book, lay her body on the sofa while he went through a stack of her letters and photographs, then burned them in the fireplace.
Tatlock’s death was ruled a “suicide, motive unknown.” She had ingested a number of drugs and left a note that read, in part, “I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” In American Prometheus, the authors speculate she may have been struggling with her sexuality at the time, telling a friend before her death that in order to overcome her attraction to women, she had “slept with every ‘bull’ she could find.” When told the news, as seen in the film, Oppenheimer took “one of his long, lonely walks high into the pines surrounding Los Alamos.”
In the film we see Tatlock’s death in snippets many times, seemingly from Oppenheimer’s imagination. Sometimes she slowly, methodically lowers her head in the bathtub; a few other times we see a black-gloved hand pressing her down as she struggles. That’s a nod to the lingering uncertainty some have about whether Tatlock’s death really was a suicide. One of the drugs in her system, chloral hydrate, is the active ingredient in a “Mickey Finn,” exactly what you would administer to someone if you wanted to knock them out cold. As one doctor says in American Prometheus, “If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it.”
One potential prime suspect is Boris Pash, the Army intelligence officer played by Casey Affleck in the film, who interrogates Oppenheimer about his Communist ties and also directed the wiretapping at Tatlock’s apartment. In 1975, a Senate hearing on CIA assassination plots determined that Pash’s CIA unit, where he worked from 1949 through 1952, had been assigned “responsibility for assassinations and kidnappings.” None other than E. Howard Hunt Jr., a former CIA officer who went on to play a key role in the Watergate scandal, said in 1975 that he was told Pash’s unit was responsible for “the assassination of suspected double agents and similar low-ranking officials.”
Pash denied any responsibility for assassinations during those hearings; he died in 1995. And in Tatlock’s case specifically, the facts don’t quite line up. By January 1944 he had been reassigned to London, far from Jean’s apartment in San Francisco.
Questions about Jean were a key component of Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing in 1954, as Nolan vividly captures in Florence Pugh’s last scene in Oppenheimer. She was not the only woman with whom Oppenheimer had an affair—Ruth Tolman, the wife of his good friend Richard Tolman, also appears briefly in the film—but his relationship with Jean was clearly foundational. And because history played out the way it did, we now primarily know about her only because of her connection to him.