Ganna Walska

Ganna Walska was born Hanna Puacz (according to one of her passports in 1887, some sources give June 24 as her birthday) in Brest-Litovsk, at the time part of the Russian Empire.

Personal life

Walska was married six times. Her husbands included:
* a Russian count
* Dr Joseph Fraenkel, New York physician
* multimillionaire sportsman and carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran, divorced 1920
* newspaper heir Harold Fowler McCormick, divorced 1931
* Theos Bernard, her sixth and last husband, a scholar of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism (and book-author), divorced 1946

Career

Walska pursued a career as an opera singer. Her memoirs were called "Always Room at the Top". Orson Welles claimed that McCormick's lavish promotion of Walska's opera career—despite her apparent renown as a terrible singer—was a direct influence on the screenplay for "Citizen Kane", wherein the titular character does much the same for his second wife, Susan Alexander.

Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on "Citizen Kane," suggests that the talentless character of Alexander was based on Walska. McCormick spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of "Zaza" by Ruggero Leoncavallo at the Chicago Opera in 1920. Reportedly, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick.

Lotusland

In 1941, with the encouragement of Bernard, she purchased a 37-acre Cuesta Linda estate in Santa Barbara, California, intending to use it as a retreat for Tibetan monks. Because of restrictions on wartime visas, the monks were unable to come to the United States. After her divorce from Bernard in 1946, Walska changed the name of her estate to "Lotusland" (after a famous flower held sacred in Indian and Tibetan religions, the lotus, Nelumbo nucifera) and devoted the rest of her life to maintaining its extensive gardens.

She died March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.

Other

She purchased the "Duchess of Marlborough egg" at a charity auction in 1926.

The book "Enemy of the Average", written by Margaret Nicol, is purported by the author to be based on the life of Walska.

External links

* [http://www.lotusland.org/history.html Lotusland history]
* [http://chicago.about.com/library/weekly/aa041700b.htm: Chicago's Citizen Kane]
* [http://course1.winona.edu/pjohnson/h140/kane.htm: About Citizen Kane]
* [http://www.knollpublishers.com/eota.html: About Enemy of the Average]
* [http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/home/la-hm-lotusland10mar10,1,1180021.story?coll=la-home-printedition: A diva who loved high drama - Los Angeles Times]
* [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0909938/ Ganna Walska at the IMDB]
* [http://www.treasuresofimperialrussia.com/e_chap15_duchess.html The Duchess of Marlborough Egg - Treasures of Imperial Russia]
* [http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/1997/march/lotus.php] : "Not your average backyard gardener" by Edwin Kiester (Smithsonian magazine, 1997)