Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
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.
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Olgivanna had selected Wesley Peters for Svetlana. He was tall, handsome, charismatic, with a tragic past, and was completely under her control—the perfect candidate. Everyone at Taliesin enjoyed watching the progress of the increasingly “whirlwind” courtship. The fact that Svetlana and Peters were sexually attracted to each other was palpable to everyone.
It didn’t occur to Amin to warn Svetlana. He saw in her a person of raw need. “She coexisted with pervasive uncertainty, inconsistency, and insecurity about what her future held.” He found her “soft-spoken, attractive, and a pleasure to be with,” but she would occasionally withdraw into some private recess where she became inaccessible.
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Having read her books, he knew her history—the shattering loss of her mother to suicide; the arrests, imprisonments, and murders of her relatives and friends. Amin thought that perhaps Wes could make her happy, though he doubted it.
By the second week, Wesley Peters invited Svetlana to dinner at Trader Vic’s in Scottsdale. Now he opened up, talking about the first Svetlana, his beloved wife, and the tragic car
accident for which he felt responsibility. Although he had been a widower for twenty-four years, he spoke as if the accident had just occurred. He listened as Svetlana talked about her childhood, her broken marriages, the death of Brajesh Singh. As the restaurant closed, they were still talking.
Svetlana said, “I like you very much,” and suddenly it seemed they were talking of staying together. As Svetlana remembered it, Wes said: “Oh, I’m very glad. I’m going to tell Mrs. Wright.”
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On April 4, just three weeks after her arrival at Taliesin West, to the shock of many of her friends back in Princeton, Svetlana and Wesley Peters were married. In fact, what friends did not understand was that this man was irresistible to her precisely because he proposed marriage and not a casual affair. She may have failed three times at marriage already, but Wesley Peters seemed “so clean, so decent, and so sad.”
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She expected to entwine her life in his.
A joke went around Taliesin. It was said that Svetlana should call her next book
Only Three Weeks
.
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A handful of guests were invited to the afternoon wedding, which took place in the small living room at Taliesin. None of the guests were informed why they had been invited until they arrived. Mrs. Wrigley of the vast Wrigley gum fortune was there,
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as was Ed Murray, the editor of the local newspaper,
Arizona Republic.
By keeping the wedding secret and assuring Murray of the scoop, Olgivanna was calculating that his sense of indebtedness would serve her in the future.
Olgivanna introduced Svetlana to each of the guests triumphantly: “My daughter, Svetlana!” Svetlana was suddenly frightened, but her worry was that she might merely be a substitute for another woman and would be expected to remain in her shadow. How could she “ever fulfill everyone’s desire” to take the first Svetlana’s place?
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Her father’s voice was still in her
head: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” But it was too late for doubt. She did not want to believe that anything about this precipitate marriage could possibly be amiss.
Only one guest, Alan Schwartz, represented the bride at the wedding. Svetlana had called Schwartz at his office and said:
“Alan, remember when I was telling you about my brother, and you said, ‘If you ever need me, I’ll be there’?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” She said, “I need you to come here to Taliesin. I need you to come tomorrow.” I asked, “Why?” And she said, “I just need you to come. Do you have a pink tie?” So I said, “I think I have a pink tie.” She said, “Bring the pink tie.”
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Schwartz traveled to Taliesin without a clue as to why he was so desperately needed. He was met at the airport by a car and driven to Taliesin. Svetlana was standing at the entrance of the compound beside a tall stranger. “Alan, this is Wes,” she said. She then led Schwartz to the guest quarters and asked if he wanted a gin and tonic. “I better have something,” he replied, “because I don’t know why I’m here.” He was already somewhat suspicious, having noted that, though there were phone jacks, the phones in his room had been removed. Svetlana said, “I’m getting married in an hour.”
That night there was a huge party with all the architects, students, and guests in attendance. The only thing Alan Schwartz really remembered was Svetlana’s almost girlish happiness. “One got caught up in her impulsiveness. She’d pull you in and you felt helpless.”
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He also noted that Olgivanna Wright made sure she knew where he was every minute.
He had been scheduled to fly out after the wedding, but Olgivanna persuaded him to change his ticket for the following afternoon so that he could stay for the party. She knew
Schwartz was Svetlana’s lawyer. The next morning, she arrived in her golf cart to take him on a tour of the grounds. “She showed me where this had happened, where that had happened. She wanted to make a good impression on me, but she wanted to make sure I saw and heard only what she wanted me to see and hear.”
Kamal Amin recalled: “The glow of the event lingered on for some time as the international media picked up the story, placing Taliesin at the center of intrigue—a favorite place for Olgivanna.”
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There was a dimension of Olgivanna’s intrigue that would be discovered only afterward. Even as the wedding was under way, at 2:30 p.m. on April 4, a quitclaim deed was filed in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Wesley Peters had used his entire family inheritance to buy the foundation a large acreage called Hillside, adjacent to Wright’s original estate in Spring Green. Peters’s name was removed from the deed to the Hillside property. The title was reregistered in the name of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, blocking any future claim Svetlana might have to the property as the new wife.
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It didn’t take Svetlana long to discover that her rights as a wife were a little ambiguous. According to O. P. Reed, one of the fellows at the time, it was immediately made clear to Svetlana that Olgivanna was in charge—her “sway extended into their nuptial bedroom. Somehow Olgivanna convinced Wesley and Svetlana to spend their wedding night in separate bedrooms.”
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Somewhat later Olgivanna would try to engage Svetlana in one of her “kitchen talks,” asking about her sex life with Wes, at which Svetlana bridled. “Mrs. Wright, I am not seventeen!”
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The morning after the wedding, Svetlana moved into Wes’s quarters. Though he was the chief architect, he had only a small room with a sofa bed, a shower cabin, and a terrace. The bride took her breakfast in the communal dining room. And discovered
that, now that she was no longer a guest but a member of the Fellowship, she was expected to attend morning and afternoon tea, as well as the shared noon and evening meals. Though she protested to her new husband that she would prefer some privacy, Wes had been living as a bachelor since his first wife’s death and had no intention of changing his ways. He tried to make her understand that they were now a
public
couple. Tour groups tramped through the halls of Taliesin, bringing in money, and some had come to see Stalin’s daughter. Wes told her she should have expected to be on view.
There was very soon a second demonstration of Olgivanna’s supremacy. She called one night at 1:00 a.m., urgently commanding Wes to appear in her quarters to solve a crisis. The fellows were used to these calculated disruptions. For some, to be selected was flattering; but Svetlana responded, “But, Mrs. Wright, it’s one o’clock in the morning and we were asleep.” She had missed the point. Svetlana might be the wife but Olgivanna was in control. When Olgivanna shouted at her, Svetlana replied, “Don’t shout at me. I do not like it when people shout at me.”
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And hung up. Wes’s response was to ask his wife not to interfere with his work.
The day after her marriage, she noted that Wes was not as “charmingly silent as on the first day” nor as “sad” as she had imagined. She now felt she was constantly displeasing him. He seemed to love the endless parties and wanted her there, though she thought they were a terrible waste of time. She didn’t understand that the foundation was always engaged in a desperate hunt for needed revenue. As fishing expeditions for patrons, the parties
were
the work. However, Svetlana had a will equal to Wes’s. She was determined to be happy and to
stay
happy. As she put it, “I was launched upon the path of domesticity, and nothing could stop me.”
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The first problem was that Wes was a compulsive spendthrift;
this impulse, as Olgivanna had warned her two days before her marriage, reached the level of pathology. Though he was unsalaried, Wes used his numerous credit cards to buy himself new cars, dogs, extravagant gifts for the apprentices, jewels and gowns for the Taliesin women, and even presents for people he barely knew. He was on the verge of personal bankruptcy, and his family farm was about to be repossessed. Olgivanna called it a strange weakness and was expecting Svetlana to keep him under control.
Soon after she was married, Svetlana informed her New York lawyers that she would be assuming control of her personal trust and demanded that her money be transferred to her husband’s law firm Lewis, Roca, Scoville, Beauchamp & Linton, in Phoenix. She told George Kennan, “My own financial independence has now become very important for me…. Please do not worry about me, I rely on Wes, on his love and his protection.”
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She planned to pay off Wes’s creditors. It would be her wedding present, and anyway, this was what an American wife would do. In retrospect, she explained, “I was trying to heal all old hurts of my husband.”
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She seemed to think that once her love “healed” him, Wes would be cured of his addiction to money.
Despite her lawyers’ valiant efforts to dissuade her, Svetlana remained firm; she seems not to have balked when she and Wes went to the bank and she discovered that his debts amounted to half a million dollars. Her own living for the past three years had been so frugal that she had barely touched her $1.5 million advance from Harper & Row.
People at Taliesin never took vacations, apart from their biannual weeklong treks across the country as they moved from their winter residence in Arizona to their summer residence in Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Svetlana and Wes managed a fourday vacation in San Francisco to stay with Wes’s sister, Marge,
and her husband, Sam Hayakawa. From family conversations, Svetlana understood that Wes’s extravagance had been a problem since his youth. While they were in San Francisco, Wes spent every spare moment in the city shopping: buying art, tapestries, jewelry. Svetlana saw this simply as his love for beautiful objects. He bought Svetlana dresses of silver-and-gold brocade. She was amused to model them for him. She recalled with nostalgia, “I enjoyed immensely seeing him choosing clothes for me—no one had ever done that for me in my whole lifetime!”
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For now, she was delighting in indulging Wes. When Joan Kennan visited Taliesin with her new husband, Walter Pozen, Pozen remembered Svetlana’s glee as she said, “I want to show you something.” She led them to her and Wes’s apartment. “We went into the bathroom and there were about sixteen different aftershave lotions, and she said, ‘That’s my garden of fragrance.’ “
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At Taliesin, Svetlana seemed content to enjoy her new status. Standing beside this handsome man, she was thrilled to be addressed as Mrs. Peters. It would appear, however, that she wasn’t quite the docile wife she pretended to be. At one of the fancy dinners where she was required to play hostess, she turned in fury on Wes. It wasn’t clear what occasioned the argument; paying his debts, perhaps she’d discovered he was still buying extravagant presents for the wives of apprentices. To the shock of the gathered guests, Svetlana slapped Wes’s face.
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They had been married only a month.
It was just a tiff. In June she was writing to her friend Jamie (Donald Jameson), who was still managing her case file at the CIA, that Wes was going to take her citizenship into his own hands:
He does know many influential politicians in Arizona and California (Wisconsin, too) both republicans and democrats,
and he, too, feels that being my husband he has to worry about me and to take care of all my problems. He is a darling, indeed. What a blessing for me to have met that man!
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