Ganna Walska
| Ganna Walska | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Hanna Puacz 1887[1] Brest-Litovsk, Poland |
| Died | March 2, 1984 Montecito, California |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Known for | Opera Garden design |
Ganna Walska (born Hanna Puacz, 1887–March 2, 1984) was a Polish opera singer and garden enthusiast who created the Lotusland botanical gardens in California. She was married six times to a series of wealthy husbands. The lavish promotion of her opera career by her fourth husband inspired aspects of the screenplay for Citizen Kane.
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[edit] Personal life
Ganna Walska was married six times:
- Russian baron Arcadie d'Eingorn, a Russian officer killed early in World War I[2]
- Dr. Joseph Fraenkel, a famed New York endocrinologist; they were married in 1916, and he died in April 1920[2]
- Multimillionaire sportsman and carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran, married in September 1920, divorced 1922[2]
- Industrialist Harold Fowler McCormick, married August 11, 1922, divorced in 1931
- English inventor of a death ray, Harry Grindell Matthews,[3] died 1941
- Theos Bernard, her sixth and last husband, a scholar of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism (and book-author), married 1942, divorced 1946
[edit] Life and career
In 1922, after her marriage to Harold F. McCormick, Ganna Walska purchased the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. She told the Chicago Tribune that she had invested her own funds, not those of her wealthy husband, and said, "I will never appear in my own theatre until I have gained recognition based solely on my merits as an artist." [4]
Walska pursued a career as an opera singer. The lavish promotion of her opera career by McCormick — despite her apparent renown as a terrible singer — inspired aspects of the screenplay for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.[5] Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on Citizen Kane, suggests that the character of Susan 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.
New York Times headlines of the day read, "Ganna Walska Fails as Butterfly: Voice Deserts Her Again When She Essays Role of Puccini's Heroine" (January 29, 1925), and "Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing" (July 14, 1927).
"According to her 1943 memoirs, Always Room at the Top, Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported The New York Times in 1996. "Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano's Fedora in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher's second wife for Citizen Kane.[6]
In 1926 Walska purchased the Duchess of Marlborough Fabergé egg that had been offered by Consuelo Vanderbilt at a charity auction. It was later acquired by Malcolm Forbes as the first Easter egg in his Fabergé egg collection.[7]
[edit] Lotusland
In 1941, with the encouragement of her sixth husband Theos Bernard, she purchased the historic 37-acre (0.15 km2) 'Cuesta Linda' estate in Montecito near 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 the lotus growing in several of her garden's ponds. She devoted the rest of her life to designing, redesigning, expanding, and maintaining the estate's renowned innovative and extensive gardens. Her landscape design talent is well regarded for distinctive gardens of exceptional creativity.
Ganna Walska died March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.[8]
[edit] Honors
- Gold Cross of Merit from the Polish government in 1931
- Légion d'honneur order from the French government in 1934
- L'Ordre National des Arts et des Letters from the French government in 1972
[edit] References
- ^ According to one of her passports, some sources give June 24 as her birthday.
- ^ a b c "Walska the bride of H. F. McCormick"; The New York Times, August 12, 1922
- ^ "Married". Time (magazine). February 7, 1938. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,789466,00.html. Retrieved 2007-07-21. "Ganna Walska d'Eighnhorn Fraenkel Cochran McCormick, 45, Polish-American opera singer, perfumer, feminist, whose four previous husbands had owned fortunes totaling $125,000,000; to Harry Grindell-Matthews, 57, inventor of the "death ray," which knocked out a cow 200 yards distant at its first British War Office tests; in London. The bride went on her honeymoon alone, while the investor rushed to his Clydach, Wales laboratory (fenced with electrified wire) to perfect an aerial torpedo."
- ^ "Walska Buys Theatre." The New York Times, December 15, 1922
- ^ Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles. New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1992 ISBN 0-06-016616-9 page 49
- ^ Owens, Mitchell, "Garden of the Slightly Macabre." The New York Times, August 22, 1996
- ^ Faberge - Treasures of Imperial Russia (retrieved January 16, 2012)
- ^ Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation
[edit] External links
- Ganna Walska at the Internet Movie Database
- Ganna Walska Lotusland, Frommer's Review
- Lotusland history
- "Chicago's Citizen Kane" (About.com) — Archive copy at the Wayback Machine
- About Citizen Kane (Humanities 140, "Approaches to Film," Winona State University) — Archive copy at the Wayback Machine
- Kiester, Edwin Jr., "Not your average backyard gardener" (abstract). Smithsonian Magazine, March 1997
- McPherson, Sean K., "Enemy of the Average." The New York Times, April 14, 2002
- Swartley, Ariel, "A diva who loved high drama." Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2005
- 20th-century artists
- American landscape and garden designers
- American entertainers
- American gardeners
- Horticulturists and gardeners
- Designers from California
- 1887 births
- 1984 deaths
- American people of Polish descent
- American musicians of Polish descent
- People from Santa Barbara, California
- People from Brest, Belarus
