The real Oppenheimer’s stranger-than-Hollywood love life

Young, brilliant and striking with his piercing blue eyes, Oppenheimer became a campus celebrity. His teaching career didn’t get off to a rousing start, however; students complained he used long, flowery metaphors, often referencing poetry, and wrote unreadable notes on the chalkboard. Once, a student asked him about an equation they didn’t understand. Oppenheimer said that it was “underneath” another equation he’d written. The confused student replied that there was nothing written under that line. 

“Not below, underneath,” Oppenheimer said. “I have written over it.”

But, as was the case throughout his life, Oppenheimer had an incredible capacity for adapting his personality to the situation. He began holding court with small groups of students in an office in LeConte Hall (and sometimes dating the female graduate students), answering questions as he paced the room chain-smoking. Out of the formal lecture setting, his brilliance and charm were on full display.

“He had the extraordinary ability to speak in complete, grammatically correct English sentences, without notes, pausing on occasion, as if between paragraphs,” according to the Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus.” 

His students were known for dressing like “Oppie” and adopting his passion for poetry and classical music. “His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him — male, female. Almost everybody,” one Berkeley friend recounted in “American Prometheus.”

“I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast and so completely as his did,” added Dorothy McKibbin, whom Oppenheimer would later hire to serve as the gatekeeper to Los Alamos. 

“He was great at a party,” McKibbin said, “and women simply loved him.”

According to the biography, Oppie was often seeing at least half a dozen women at any given time. One was the passenger in his car when he crashed while racing a coastal train. The woman was knocked unconscious by the crash, and for a moment, Oppenheimer thought he’d killed her. Oppenheimer’s wealthy father gifted her a Cezanne from his personal collection as an apology. 

It wasn’t Oppie’s only misadventure. In 1934, he had his first taste of international celebrity. “UC Prof Leaves Girl in Car, Goes Home to His Bed” read the headline in the San Francisco Examiner on Feb. 14, 1934. The night before, Oppenheimer had driven a young Berkeley woman up to Grizzly Peak for what the Examiner coyly called a look “at the scenery.” 

“[Oppenheimer] wrapped her in a blanket, asked if she were comfortable, and upon receiving an affirmative reply, announced he was going for a walk,” the story recounted. Around 3 a.m., a patrol officer found the woman asleep in the car. He tapped on the window to ask if she was alright. Panicked, she realized Oppenheimer hadn’t returned. For two hours, police searched the hills for the physics professor until someone had the sense to call up his room at the Faculty Club. Oppie had walked all the way home and gone right to bed.

“I am subject to doing eccentric things,” he sheepishly told police. “Although I don’t believe I ever did this before.”

The story was such a perfect anecdote that it traveled around the world. Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, then at Cambridge, was shocked to read the tale in the English newspapers.

But Oppenheimer became a one-woman man in 1936 when he met Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist in training at Stanford Medical School. They were passionately in love — but their fights were frequent and toxic. They broke up and got back together repeatedly until Tatlock ended their engagement in 1939. (Their volatile relationship continued after he married, however. You can read more about Tatlock’s fascinating life and tragic death in our previous story.) 

Their engagement over, Oppenheimer started dating an array of “mostly very attractive youngish girls.” Among them was Estelle Caen, a piano prodigy and the sister of famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. In August 1939, though, Oppenheimer went to a party in Pasadena and met his future wife Kitty Harrison. 

At the time, Harrison was married to her third husband. But the marriage was floundering, and she felt it was love at first sight with Oppie. Soon after, Oppenheimer was escorting the married woman on his arm to parties, including one awkward soiree hosted by very recent ex-girlfriend Estelle Caen. “American Prometheus” recounts that his friends were not happy; many hoped he’d get back together with Tatlock as he had so many times before. They found Harrison “too flirtatious and manipulative.” Oppenheimer’s family thought even worse of her; his sister-in-law Jackie called her “phony,” “a schemer” and “one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life.”

Less than a year after meeting, Harrison became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child. They called up her husband and broke the news over the phone: She needed a divorce. When Oppenheimer told friends he was getting married, some thought he was back together with Tatlock. They were shocked that he clarified he intended to wed Harrison. They married in November 1940 and moved into 1 Eagle Hill in the Berkeley hills, where they would live for a decade.

“American Prometheus” paints differing portraits of their marriage. Some thought Oppenheimer was too distracted and emotionally distant to ever be a supportive partner. (One friend at Cal once said Oppie was always desperate for companionship but “didn’t quite know how to make friends.”) Kitty was the jealous type, often frustrated by having to share her husband with the world. As the war went on, her addiction to alcohol worsened, as did their relationship. But Oppenheimer often talked through work conundrums with his wife, and friends saw that he valued her opinion. 

Sometime during the war, Oppenheimer allegedly began an affair with Dr. Ruth Tolman, a psychologist for the Office of Strategic Services, America’s forerunner to the CIA. According to “American Prometheus,” the affair lasted years and continued after Tolman’s husband died of a heart attack in 1948. When Oppenheimer’s former friend and colleague Ernest Lawrence was interviewed by the U.S. government about Oppie’s possible communist ties, he angrily said the Tolman affair “lasted for enough time for it to become apparent to Dr. Tolman who died of a broken heart.”

In 1965, Oppenheimer’s lifelong habit of smoking up to five packs a day caught up with his body. He was diagnosed with throat cancer and died less than two years later. His cremated remains were scattered off St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the Oppenheimers had lived for a time. 

After Oppenheimer’s death, Kitty moved in with Bob Serber, one of Oppie’s best friends from their days at UC Berkeley. While socializing, a friend called out to Serber, referring to him as Robert. 

“Don’t you call him Robert,” Kitty snapped. “There’s only one Robert.”