# Jean Gordon (Red Cross)

Jean Gordon (February 4, 1915 – January 8, 1946) was an American socialite and a Red Cross worker during World War II. A niece by marriage of General George S. Patton, some writers claim she had a long affair with Patton, allegedly beginning years before the war and continuing behind the front lines of wartime Europe. The published memoirs of Gordon's good friend, Patton's daughter Ruth Ellen, who also collaborated on her nephew Robert's work on the Pattons, as well as correspondence from Patton's wife, Beatrice, reveals that the family considered Gordon and Patton to have been in a romantic relationship. Patton's scholarly biographers disagree. After her lover (a junior officer) returned to his wife, and shortly after Patton died, she committed suicide.

## Early life

Jean Gordon's mother, Louise Raynor Ayer, daughter of the textile industrialist Frederick Ayer and his first wife Cornelia Wheaton, was a half-sister of Patton's wife Beatrice. Her father Donald Gordon, a well-known Boston lawyer, died of leukemia when Jean was 8 years old. Gordon, described as "a quiet but witty girl, highly intelligent and beautiful," and "a vivacious and lovely brunette," was prominent in prewar Boston high society, being a member of women's organizations such as the Junior League and the Vincent Club. The same age as Patton's younger daughter Ruth Ellen and her best friend, she spent many of her vacations with the Pattons and was a bridesmaid in the weddings of both Patton girls.
According to writer Nancy J. Morris, Gordon's long romantic involvement with General Patton began during one such vacation in the 1930s. Patton was posted in Hawaii, and Gordon visited the family there. Morris writes: "When Beatrice's niece, Jean Gordon, visited, Patton began a flirtation with the girl. Gordon was a recent Boston debutante, pretty, lively, and the best friend of Ruth Ellen, the Pattons' daughter. Unwisely, Beatrice did not accompany Patton and Jean on a horse-buying trip to a neighbor island, and when the two returned, it was clear to Beatrice that the flirtation had become an affair."
Morris quotes Ruth Ellen Patton's memories of her mother's reaction via biographer Carlo D'Este's research into Ruth Ellen's personal papers. By this telling, Beatrice told her daughter "Your father needs me. He doesn't know it right now, but he needs me. In fact, right now, he needs me more than I need him.... I want you to remember this; that even the best and truest of men can be bedazzled and make fools of themselves. So, if your husband ever does this to you, you can remember that I didn't leave your father. I stuck with him because I am all he really has, and I love him, and he loves me."

## World War II

After completing the Red Cross nurse's aide training course early in the war, Jean Gordon volunteered in several Boston hospitals, serving for a while as vice-chairman of the Boston Red Cross Volunteer Nurse's Aide Corps, before being sent to England in May 1944 as a Red Cross staff assistant. She contacted Patton early in July, and he visited her in London shortly before departing for Normandy. He later told General Everett Hughes, his close friend serving on Eisenhower's staff, that he wanted to keep her presence a secret. When Hughes wondered about their relationship, Patton, "more boastful than repentant," told him that Jean had "been mine for 12 years." If this is accurate, it would suggest that they had been involved from the time Gordon was 17 years old, which would pre-date the episode in Hawai'i. Gordon was assigned to the ARC Clubmobile group L attached to the Third Army headquarters as a "donut girl", a volunteer who served donuts, coffee, and cigarettes to front-line troops, as well as diverting them with music, dance, and chat. She became Patton’s constant companion and his hostess when he entertained guests at his headquarters. The two of them would converse animatedly with each other in fluent French, to the confusion of those around them. (This custom of speaking in French in public settings was something that Patton also practiced with his wife, Beatrice.) Patton made a practice of inviting the Red Cross girls to dine with his staff, especially when dignitaries, such as General Eisenhower, visited his headquarters, and they also had Patton to dinner several times. Once the war was over, the girls became even more a part of his entourage.

### Postwar

According to Everett Hughes, Patton had quarreled with Jean Gordon not long before Hughes visited his headquarters early in May 1945; perhaps, he thought, about what would become of her now. Soon, however, they had made up, and apparently renewed their liaison during Patton's leave in England a while later. In June, Patton returned to the United States for a month-long bond drive. After seeing him off, Hughes took the distraught Jean back to his apartment so she could "have a good cry."

## Dispute over the relationship with Patton

Beatrice Patton clearly believed that Jean Gordon was intimately involved with her husband and wrote to him repeatedly to express her concerns, prompting his cavalier dismissals and a dishonest denial that he had even seen her. The evening before he left for his bond-raising tour, during a farewell dinner at the Ritz, Patton confessed to Everett Hughes that he was "scared to death of going back home to America;" and upon his return told Hughes: "Beatrice gave me hell. I'm glad to be in Europe!"
During her lifetime Ruth Ellen Patton publicly denied the rumors of an affair between her father and Gordon. Yet her posthumously published memoirs, as well as her nephew Robert's work on the Pattons she collaborated on, reveal that the family considered Gordon and Patton to have been in a romantic relationship; Ruth Ellen herself suspected that the romance had begun as early as 1934, which makes her father's assertion of a 12-year affair more credible.
Jean Gordon's supervisor, Betty South, the captain of the ARC Clubmobile crew attached to the Third Army headquarters, claimed that although Gordon adored General Patton, it was strictly in a father–daughter relationship, while the man she truly loved was a young married captain who left her despondent when he went home to his wife. However, her version is colored by the fact that she was protective of both Patton's and Gordon's reputation.
Patton's biographers have generally been more skeptical about the romantic link between Gordon and George Patton. Stanley Hirshson states that the relationship was casual. Dennis Showalter believes that Patton, under severe physical and psychological stress, made up claims of sexual conquest to prove his virility. Carlo D'Este agrees that Patton's "behavior suggests that in both 1936 [in Hawaii] and 1944–45, the presence of the young and attractive Jean was a means of assuaging the anxieties of a middle-aged man troubled over his virility and a fear of aging."
According to the noted film and military historian Lawrence Suid, the family's fear that a movie might portray the extramarital affair was a major contributing factor to their ongoing opposition to any production.
David Irving used General Hughes' wartime diary, which contains multiple references to Patton's intimate relationship with Gordon, to write about the affair in his 1981 book The War between the Generals. It had been available in the Library of Congress since 1958, but was not studied due to Hughes' illegible handwriting. However, since in 1980 Irving hired the handwriting expert Molly McClellan to decipher it and transcribe its 900 pages, most historians have used the diary as a source, while refraining from giving a definite verdict on the nature of the relationship.

## Death

Jean Gordon returned to the United States in December 1945 on the M.S. Gripsholm.
That same month, George Patton was critically injured in a car accident in Germany. He died in a hospital on December 21, 1945.
According to military historian Martin Blumenson, who later edited Patton's papers at the invitation of the family, Betty South "telephoned Jean to express her sorrow... Jean said, 'I think it is better this way for Uncle Georgie. There is no place for him any more, and he would have been unhappy with nothing to do.'... Whatever she had been to Patton before the war, during the conflict, and afterward, she helped to sustain and support him. Immediately after the war was over, when he... had no place to go in the army, he needed all the help he could get."
According to Carlo D'Este, shortly after Patton's death his wife Beatrice arranged to meet Gordon at a Boston hotel where she furiously confronted her over the supposed affair.
D'Este writes: "Beatrice's jealousy of Jean Gordon was that of an older woman for a young and attractive mistress who has stolen her husband's interest... Jean told a friend that... with the war now over, perhaps Patton's death had been a blessing in disguise. [Robert Patton writes that she] 'had an understanding of him that was insightful and not frivolous, ample reason for his wife to deem her a serious rival. Beatrice, out of love, could forgive Georgie's indiscretion, but Jean she was determined to punish.'"
In the early morning hours of January 8, 1946 — only days after this confrontation with Beatrice and a little more than two weeks after Patton's death — Jean Gordon committed suicide, surrounded by General Patton's pictures, in the Upper East Side Manhattan apartment of a friend. She was found asphyxiated, with the four gas jets of the kitchen stove open and hissing gas.