Dr. Muriel Gardiner Dies; Helped Anti-Fascists Flee Austria

Dr. Muriel Gardiner, who as a young student of psychoanalysis in Vienna in the 1930s helped smuggle anti-Fascists out of Austria, died Wednesday at the age of 83 in a Princeton, N.J., medical center, where she was being treated for cancer.

Her memoirs were titled “Code Name Mary,” but many felt after seeing a 1977 film based on Lillian Hellman’s reminiscences that they could as well have been called “Julia.”

Although Hellman denied that the psychoanalyst was her role model for Julia, whose story originally was a chapter in the late author’s “Pentimento,” the similarities between the two women were striking.

Both were wealthy medical students studying in Vienna. Both came to abhor the suffering the Fascists and neo-Nazis were inflicting on Austria’s Jews and dissidents and both were involved romantically with leaders of the resistance.

Dr. Gardiner eventually married and had a daughter by Joseph Buttinger, head of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists, while Julia had a romantic alliance with an underground leader that also produced a daughter.

(Hellman always said she was prevented by legal and personal principles from further identifying her Julia.)

However, there were differences between Julia, portrayed in the film by Vanessa Redgrave with Jane Fonda as Hellman, and Dr. Gardiner. The differences were both superficial and substantial. Hellman wrote that Julia was tortured by Nazis in Austria and died in London. Her daughter also was believed put to death. Dr. Gardiner, however, who kept her maiden name for professional purposes, managed to return to the United States, as did her daughter.

And Dr. Gardiner lived to write her story.

Although Hellman and Dr. Gardiner noted that they had never met, Hellman did say they shared the same lawyer for many years.

Like Julia, Dr. Gardiner (known to the underground as Mary) said in her memoirs that she had offered her home to fleeing dissidents, provided affidavits to them and transported false passports taped to her corset for those leaving Austria. Her longtime friend, Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, wrote the 1973 book’s forward.

(Dr. Gardiner had written to Freud hoping to study with him in Vienna, but he referred her instead to a colleague.)

Both Julia and Dr. Gardiner were the daughters of wealthy Americans who attended Oxford and the University of Vienna Medical School.

After returning to the United States, Dr. Gardiner both practiced psychoanalysis and taught. She also edited a book about one of Freud’s most famous cases, “The Wolf Man by The Wolf Man.” She had known Freud’s disturbed client in Vienna.

Her other printed works included “The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill,” based on her work as a volunteer psychiatrist at public institutions in New Jersey.

In 1980, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor, First Class, for Letters and Arts.

Worked to Establish Museum

She was the paternal granddaughter of Nelson Morris, the builder of the Union Stockyards in Chicago, and the maternal granddaughter of Gustavus Swift, founder of the Swift Meat Packing Co.

Her survivors include Buttinger and her daughter, Constance Harvey, and six grandchildren.

In her final years Dr. Gardiner worked to establish a museum in Hampstead, England, where Freud and his daughter had lived after leaving the continent.