Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  It is unclear whether Svetlana knew about the impact her book was having on her friends in the Soviet Union, but she told people she was sick and tired of writing books. Though she had an idea for a new book based on the letters she was receiving from around the world, she now said she didn’t plan on writing anymore. It would be fifteen years before she published her next book. But it was not exhaustion or disgust over the reception of her books that caused this interruption. She was heading into a completely new and heartbreaking disaster.

  Chapter 24

  The Taliesin Fiasco

  Svetlana married Wesley Peters, the head architect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation, on April 4, 1970, at the Taliesin West compound in the Sonoran desert.

  (Courtesy of John Amarantides)

  Svetlana had been in the United States three years now and was still receiving letters from strangers around the world. In November 1969, persistent letters began arriving from Olgivanna Wright, the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, exhorting her to come to Arizona to visit the Taliesin Fellowship. Svetlana didn’t know much about the famous architect, and friends tried to warn her gently that the “Fellowship,” as Wright’s School of Architecture was called, was strange, but in the books and pamphlets Olgivanna was sending, Taliesin looked exceedingly beautiful.

  Svetlana had planned a monthlong trip to California to meet a number of her new pen pals, and then intended to go on to Hawaii to visit a Russian-born American painter she had met on Long Island. She decided she would stop in Phoenix for a week. It would be an American experience to add to her list. Truthfully, she was desperate to put Louis Fischer and Princeton gossip behind her.

  There was an unexpected hook in Olgivanna Wright’s letters. Olgivanna wrote that her eldest daughter, Svetlana, had died in a car accident twenty-five years earlier. What a strange coincidence that Svetlana should carry the same magical name, which means “enlightened.” The name itself was a talisman. According to Olgivanna, they were destined to meet.

  Svetlana had an equally compelling fantasy. She knew that Olgivanna was Montenegrin and was only four years older than her own mother, Nadya, would have been if had she lived. She imagined a woman with the dark Georgian looks of her mother. As she remembered it, “We both expected something very important to come out of this meeting, both caring for beloved images and fantasies. . . . Apart from this strange connection, I really did not expect anything exciting from the Arizona desert.”1

  Svetlana had no idea that she was about to encounter a titan who’d already plotted the role she was to play in the world of Taliesin. Few could stand up to Olgivanna Wright.

  Olga Ivanovna Lazovich was born in the kingdom of Montenegro in the Balkans in 1897, and her genetic inheritance was fierceness. Her father was a chief justice and her mother was a general in the Montenegrin army who’d once ridden on the back of her father’s saddle into battle against the Turks. Olga viewed her mother, the general, with awe and fear. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to Batum (Batumi) on the Black Sea to live with her sister. While visiting friends in Tiflis, Olga found her escape route. Now nineteen, she married a Latvian architect named Valdemar Hinzenberg. She weathered the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Tiflis and learned what near-starvation was. Soon she gave birth to her daughter Svetlana. In Tiflis she met the Armenian “spiritual teacher” Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Coincidentally, the Gurdjieff family knew Joseph Djugashvili before he was Stalin. He’d rented a room from them when he was a student at the Tiflis Seminary. He made himself memorable by stiffing them for the rent.2

  By the time Olga met Gurdjieff, he’d transformed himself into a mystic, teaching his spiritual discipline of cosmic dance based on his theory of astral bodies, through which one could achieve the higher consciousness of the true “I” and work out the laws of the universe. To avoid the Bolsheviks, Gurdjieff fled to Constantinople, where he established the first version of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. With her three-year-old daughter, Svetlana, Olga joined him. The route to becoming Frank Lloyd Wright’s wife was arduous and led through France to Chicago, where Olga met Wright at a theater performance in November 1924. He claimed he immediately fell in love with Olgivanna, as he renamed her. By the end of January, she had moved permanently to Taliesin. She was twenty-five.

  Wright built the first Taliesin on his estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 1911. Three years later, while he was on business in Chicago, a servant, in what was presumed to be a fit of insanity, set fire to the house after nailing all the doors shut, leaving only a small hatch open. As the people inside crawled through the hatch, he killed each one with an ax. Devastated, Wright vowed to rebuild, and by 1932 he had established the Taliesin Fellowship. Seven years later, he expanded Taliesin to include a second estate, Taliesin West, in Arizona, which served as the Fellowship’s winter home.

  Frank Lloyd Wright originally designed the Taliesin West property as his winter home.

  (Courtesy of Ann Zane Shanks)

  Taliesin was not a school; it was an experiment in revolutionary communal living. Wright’s eccentric genius—his spectacular buildings, his colorful antiauthoritarian harangues, and his clarion call for an “organic architecture”—drew aspiring architects to Taliesin. Students paid a large yearly tuition to participate; it was they who hewed the rock with backbreaking labor and built the structures, tended the gardens, collected the garbage, did the domestic labor, served meals, and, in what little time was left, worked at their drafting tables. The students who chose to stay thought of themselves as social radicals, remaking the United States in terms of Wright’s grandiose vision of a vast landscape of Broadacre Cities, a network of natural villages linked by modern communication and transportation systems. Since Wright’s death in 1959, Olgivanna had run the whole enterprise and, though she knew nothing about architecture, had the last word in everything.

  By most accounts, Wright had not been interested in Gurdjieff’s teachings, though Gurdjieff did visit at Taliesin, but after Wright’s death, Olgivanna assumed the role of reigning queen and spiritual guru of the Fellowship. The dance rituals she organized at Taliesin, called “cosmic” dances, were Gurdjieff rituals. Every Sunday morning, she gave compulsory lectures on the pursuit of higher consciousness, often reading from Gurdjieff’s books. She claimed to have absorbed Gurdjieff’s methods for deconstructing a person and remaking him or her in pursuit of the true “I.”

  At Taliesin, even under Frank Lloyd Wright’s direction, there had always been a split between a coterie of insiders and those on the outside. To the disenchanted, the insiders who worked on architectural projects were “the studio crowd,” and the outsiders were the leftovers, many of whom were wives. When Meryle Secrest interviewed residents for her biography of Wright, one of the wives, Mary Matthews, spoke to her of Olgivanna’s special project for the outsiders:

  Mrs. Wright wanted to set up her own coterie with all those who were not exactly architects. They were supposed to come and sit at her feet. You gave her your spirit and she molded you. . . . She would see an opportunity when someone was uncertain or slightly at fault, and she would tear them to shreds to see how they would react. . . . I was not about to let her get the upper hand, and she finally said, “The trouble with you is you stand before me like a rod when you should bend like the grass before the wind.”3

  Olgivanna’s acolytes defended her. They said she “sometimes had to crack heads open to put something new in them.”4 One of the apprentices, Rupert Pole, although he admired Olgivanna, admitted that she was “a very designing woman, powerful and egotistical.” She insisted on supervising everything—down to the style of the apprentices’ hair and the color of their socks. She had an inner circle that came to be known as “the kitchen crowd” because people would wait in the kitchen for hours to consult her. Bill Calvert, another apprentice, claimed that he often accepted her criticisms as valid, but drew the line at the “kitchen talks,” where you were expected “to kiss and tell.�
� “I knew that a lot of fairly freewheeling liaisons were being arranged in the ‘little kitchen.’ . . . I knew what Olgivanna was capable of.”5 The marriages of apprentices were often arranged during those kitchen talks.

  While claiming that, like a second mother, Olgivanna was warm and accepting, even her staunch supporter Bill Calvert remarked, “Keep in mind that Mrs. Wright was running a branch of the czarist court, and absolutely anything was possible. I am not exaggerating a bit. She was a master of intrigue. . . . She wasn’t an ogre. It’s hard to convey. She was operating on a different principle. Her goals were to keep . . . Taliesin intact, and she did it brilliantly.”6 Olgivanna had a dictator’s gift for smart politicking.

  Kamal Amin, an Egyptian American architect who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright and stayed with the Fellowship, explained that Olgivanna collected famous people, especially if they were wealthy. “She needed to sustain the extravagant lifestyle.” Olgivanna had read Only One Year, and as Amin put it, Svetlana was “a hot news item.”7 She had clearly heard and, perhaps because she had grown up in the Balkans, believed the gossip that Svetlana had stopped in Switzerland to collect the gold and millions of rubles that Stalin had stashed for her in a Swiss bank. Her plot was simple. She would marry Svetlana to her chief architect, William Wesley Peters, and the foundation would claim her money.

  Wesley Peters’s story was complex. He had arrived at Taliesin Fellowship as a twenty-year-old apprentice in 1932 and had immediately fallen in love with Olgivanna’s daughter, Svetlana. Just eight months after the Fellowship opened, he and the sixteen-year-old Svetlana fled Taliesin. Three years later, the rebels, now married, returned, perhaps understanding that only the cocooned environment of Taliesin could nurture the aesthetically beautiful lives they aspired to. During his absence, Peters had gotten his architect’s license and, with his engineering skills, he now proved a valuable asset to Wright. By 1946, the couple had two children and Svetlana was again pregnant. The gossip at Taliesin had it that this was actually the child of Gene Masselink, Wright’s private secretary and Peters’s best friend. Whether Peters knew this rumor or not, it was clear both men were in love with Svetlana.

  And then the fatal car accident occurred on September 30, 1946. Svetlana was returning from town with her two children when her jeep flipped over on a narrow bridge crossing a slough on the Wisconsin River. She and one of her sons drowned. She had continually complained to Peters that the soft-topped jeep she was forced to drive was dangerous and had begged him to buy a conventional closed-in car, but he had always refused. Peters believed the accident was his fault. Now he owed Mr. and Mrs. Wright not only loyalty, but also a crippling blood debt. Henceforth, people said, he was totally under Olgivanna’s power. His apprentice Aris Georges explained that Olgivanna had “a grip on Wes that was actually very disturbing. She would call him in and diminish him to pieces. And yet turn around and build him back up since he was the pillar she could not have done without after Wright died.”8

  It took money to run this enterprise of two large estates and to sustain the architects, their wives, and the apprentices, who, along with Olgivanna, her daughter Iovanna, and her daughter’s two children, numbered sixty-five people. Benefactors were needed. Olgivanna had targeted Svetlana as a benefactor.

  Svetlana flew to Phoenix in March and was met at the airport by Iovanna. On the twenty-six-mile drive from Phoenix to Scottsdale, Iovanna told Svetlana about the death of her half sister, Svetlana, repeating the name as though it held some magical significance. “I hope you will be my sister!” she said. They drove through the vast desert of Paradise Valley with its dusty sweeping plains and sunburned rocks under a bowl of brilliant blue sky up into the high mesa, which felt like the top of the world. The journey was completely mesmerizing.

  Olgivanna, with her large black Great Dane at her feet, waited amid the arcades of bougainvillea. Small, thin, dark-haired, elegantly dressed with a turquoise hat protecting her pale skin, she looked every bit the regal widow. Olgivanna embraced Svetlana, repeating her name several times, as if she were addressing her daughter. She was not what Svetlana was expecting. “There was nothing of that dreamy beauty of my mother, of her shyness, of her humility,” Svetlana recalled. This was an image from photographs; she had no visual memories of her mother, nor could she imagine what her mother might have looked like in old age.9 Still, Olgivanna was extremely warm and welcoming.

  This photograph of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, the architect’s third and final wife, was taken in 1971, by which time she’d been widowed for over a decade.

  (Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Svetlana was shown to her own private guest residence and told to prepare for a welcoming dinner in Mrs. Wright’s quarters. Because she didn’t have a floor-length gown, the requisite attire for Taliesin West festivities, Iovanna offered several of her own dresses. They were exquisite creations of chiffon and silk, but Svetlana was still too self-conscious to put on such a costume and stuck to her own conservative short green dress.

  She was out of place. The men and women gathered around the Taliesin fireplace wore tuxedoes and elegant gowns. She was introduced to a tall, distinguished man in his late fifties wearing a sand-colored tuxedo and a lavender ruffled shirt, with a gold pendant at his neck and numerous rings on his fingers. He looked like a peacock, but his face was stern. “Svetlana, this is Wes. Wes, meet Svetlana,” said Olgivanna, seemingly moved to be linking those names again. Svetlana had not expected to meet the long-ago husband of Olgivanna’s dead daughter.

  In the dining room, elaborate Chinese tapestries hung on the heavy stone walls. The table was set with gold cutlery and crystal goblets around an elegant bouquet of desert flowers. Svetlana was seated next to Peters, who remained reserved and mostly silent through dinner. From his face, she immediately concluded that he was “sad, lonely, and utterly unhappy.” Even in his “crazy suit,” he seemed somehow “noble” and different from the rest.10

  Though arranged for her, the whole evening made Svetlana feel inadequate. She had no idea who the eager young men in bright ruffled shirts attending the guests were or, indeed, who even the other guests might be. But it was all so tasteful and luxurious. She decided to let herself enjoy this exoticism. She had her ticket for San Francisco in her suitcase.

  The next morning, Wesley Peters knocked on her door. He said he had been instructed by Olgivanna to show her around Taliesin. On the tour, still excited by Wright’s concept of organic architecture, he explained how the buildings, with their horizontal lines and their texture of rough-hewn stone, blended perfectly into the desert landscape. He said Wright and his students had built it all by hand, whittling the gigantic rocks from the hillsides. Svetlana hid her dismay. To her it all looked gloomy, “like ancient graves.”

  But her guide was “agreeable and gallant” and seemed to have “an old fashioned decency.” When Peters drove her to Scottsdale in his Cadillac, she found it “difficult not to be charmed.” His silent, relaxed companionship spoke to her of shyness. “I suddenly felt complete security and peace near this man; something I had not experienced for a long time—a sign more significant to me than many words.”11

  In Scottsdale Peters took her to shops selling West Coast Native American jewelry. She decided she wanted to buy a ring as a memento of her visit, and he insisted on picking out the best one for her. When she put the ring he’d selected on her finger, she felt a sudden shock and a thought went through her. “Am I going to marry this man? I was frightened by the thought because I cherished nothing more at the time than my newfound freedom and independence. The question did not go away, and I did not hear myself with a definite ‘no.’ This was danger.”12

  On the drive back to Taliesin, Peters was mostly silent. She watched him. “Doesn’t matter what he says; we do not chat; I just sit next to him.” He reminded her of Brajesh Singh, who also spoke little. “It was this same sense of quiet, of peace, of inner serenity.” She told herself in panic, “D
on’t get into this. . . . I have to be careful! I have to be careful!”13 She began to be impatient for the day of her departure.

  When Saturday evening came, this time Svetlana wore Iovanna’s blue chiffon tunic dress and joined the glittering masquerade of music and dancing, for a moment shedding her conservative, shy persona. She found she liked being one of these exotic birds of Paradise Valley. When she informed Olgivanna that she would soon be leaving, Olgivanna insisted she stay at least for the Easter celebrations, and Svetlana found it impolite to refuse. As was the tradition, she sat with the architects and their wives and painted Easter eggs. She wondered when these people worked. When did Wesley Peters work? He was always showing her around. She even asked herself: “What did all this mean, really?” Yet she delayed her departure.14

  At such crucial moments, Svetlana always fought her own skepticism and gave in to her feelings. She called it submitting to fate, the river that carried her forward. It didn’t seem to occur to her that Olgivanna had orchestrated this particular fate. Perhaps she was naive or simply needy, or perhaps Olgivanna was a brilliant manipulator and set the trap well. Kamal Amin explained that from the start, Olgivanna “wrapped Svetlana in an invisible, impenetrable layer of protection.” And Olgivanna was thorough. When Amin told her that his friend would be visiting at the same time as Svetlana, she changed the friend’s ticket to ensure that the two traveled on different flights. “He will start a relationship with her,” Olgivanna complained. Amin greeted Svetlana with a welcoming bouquet of roses at the dinner table that first night, but the next day, his seat was moved to a distant table, and his future contacts with Svetlana were severely limited. Clearly, Olgivanna had a design.15