Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Svetlana insisted this would be her last interview. When Olga got home in July, she found a part-time job in a local Asian crafts shop. One morning a reporter came to the shop asking for Lana Peters. Olga and the shop owner hemmed and hawed and said yes, they knew her but no, she wasn’t there. Suddenly from upstairs a figure descended with a kerchief tied
around her head, carrying a mop and pail. As the washerwoman scurried through the shoppers, diligently mopping the floor, the journalist took no notice. Olga and the owner could hardly keep a straight face. It was Svetlana, offering her daughter an amusing lesson in how to avoid reporters.
2
In the late summer of 1986, Svetlana bought a hunting lodge on a five-acre property deeper in the woods. It was about twelve miles outside Spring Green in an area known as Pleasant Ridge in Dodgeville Township. An architect had designed the lodge as a retreat with sliding glass doors opening out to the woods, isolated enough that deer came to the back door at sunset. It was a beautiful little house, the taxes were minimal, and Svetlana loved the idea that nobody could find her. Her finances were now very precarious. She had left money in an English bank for Olga, and the Hayakawas were helping so that Olga could return to the United States for vacations, but needing to earn money, Svetlana was busy reestablishing contacts with agents and publishers in an attempt to get
The Faraway Music
picked up in the United States. She also set out on a campaign to rehabilitate her reputation.
In February 1987, ten months after her return from the USSR, she sent out two form letters. The first one was addressed generally to “old friends and former Patrons.” She complained about her portrayal in the US press as one who “hated America” (she was referring specifically to Patricia Blake’s
Time
magazine article). “I NEVER said so…. Would you say a few words that … ON the 20th anniversary of my adopting this country as mine, … I do love this country BECAUSE I do LOVE my American daughter.”
3
In the second form letter, addressed simply to “Friends” and sent to about thirty people, she said she was trying to make her living as a writer, but “my books are in some kind of a vicious circle.” She couldn’t get her first two books reissued and no one
wanted her third. She had only enough money for one more month and was asking for help in keeping her house in the woods. “It is hard for me to beg, but I must continue to write. This is my worst time I have ever met.”
4
Most of her friends were annoyed and even offended by her begging letter. In America you never asked people for money. You were meant to pull up your socks and make it on your own. But in writing her letter, Svetlana was acting on a basic Russian or Soviet assumption. Within one’s circle of friends, if one was in need, it was typical to borrow money. The Russian word for
borrow
was “take,” implying that the question of repayment was insignificant.
5
It was not embarrassing to ask for help.
Svetlana tried to see if she could revoke her Alliluyeva Charitable Trust, which still held $275,000 of her money. She’d spent $200,000 building the Brajesh Singh Hospital and had sustained it for twenty years. Financial reports had been sparse. Perhaps now that she was destitute, it was time for others to take over the project. But the Mercer County Superior Court determined that while she was legally permitted to reassign the beneficiaries, she could not claim any of the money for herself, because the trust was irrevocable in her lifetime. She redirected donations to the Medical Center at Princeton and the Stuart Country Day School.
6
She looked for other sources of income. That May, she accepted an invitation to lecture on Gorbachev to history students at Mundelein College in Chicago. She summarized her assessment of Gorbachev in a letter to Philippa Hill.
He wants glasnost—openness, but
where
are the independent
open
newspapers
in which
people could vent out their opinions? There are still
none
. Unless they change and
undermine
their own one-party-regime and allow—legitimately—
other parties
—they can’t have “openness.”
It’s all words, words, words still. But it will come, nevertheless, if not Gorbachev, the next fellow on the top will have to call for reforms, anyway.
7
However, despite the shrewdness of her assessment of Gorbachev, Svetlana found that the audience wanted to ask questions only about her father, which made her feel so helpless that she thought she might have a nervous collapse. This was the end of her lecturing career. She told Rosa Shand, “I am always in the clouds of some or another illusion—a positive or a negative one…. I’ll NEVER learn to live in the American reality. It is beyond me.”
8
Svetlana didn’t know it, but there was a scheme behind the scenes to find money for her. She had purposefully not sent George and Annelise Kennan her letter of desperation. She could not beg from them, but friends forwarded her letter, and Kennan decided to step in. He wrote to Frank Carlucci, assistant to the president for national security affairs, enclosing a copy of the “circular letter” that “Svetlana (Djugashvili) Peters” had sent to friends. Having given a précis of Svetlana’s history, Kennan remarked:
Obviously she has brought her troubles upon herself and deserves little personal sympathy…. However, a number of her former friends, while fully realizing her responsibility for her own plight, would find it difficult to stand by and watch her becoming a bag woman; and I question whether it would be advisable, from the standpoint of our government to permit this to happen…. In view of the sensible and generous way in which she was treated by the Soviet authorities [when she returned in 1984], I think it would make a bad impression, invite invidious comparisons, and not be in the interests of our government, if she
and her daughter (who is a nice girl and innocent of all complicity in her mother’s follies) were to become public charges. At the least, such a turn of events would lend itself to adverse propagandistic exploitation.
9
Kennan suggested that a small annuity of $300,000 be set aside, from which regular payments could be made to Svetlana—“necessarily clandestinely.” Within a few weeks, Fritz Ermarth from the CIA phoned Kennan to say that he was confident the matter could be resolved, though it would take a bit of time.
10
With Olgivanna Wright dead, Svetlana concluded that Taliesin was safe. Now she wanted only peace with Wesley Peters. Mostly she wanted Olga to have a relationship with her father and tried to persuade her to visit him. She’d tell Olga, “You know, he’s a good man. You shouldn’t hate him; you shouldn’t say bad things about him.” Olga would reply, “You know, Mommy, I won’t talk to you about it. We’ll just agree not to talk about it. I can’t change what I’ve seen.”
11
However, on her Easter vacation that spring of 1987, Olga yielded to her mother’s pressure and finally visited Wesley. People at Taliesin remembered the sixteen-year-old Olga, beautiful now, with her long hair spilling over her shoulders, sitting at the piano and singing Georgian songs in an ethereal voice,
12
but Olga herself found the communal life at Taliesin distressing and certainly felt no connection with her father. She told her mother she was grateful to her. “You gave me a great life. You took me out of there.”
13
She was relieved when she got back to Friends’ School.
Over the next winter in her hunting lodge, Svetlana worked on a new manuscript called “A Book for Granddaughters.” It was to be an account of her and Olga’s return to the USSR. She wrote her endless letters and did some translations. Knowing that her finances were precarious, her old friend Bob Rayle
stepped in. “I tried to offer her CIA help, but she invariably refused.”
14
Finally he managed to put her in touch with Ilya Levkov, a Russian émigré who ran a small press in New York called Liberty Publishing. That winter Levkov brought out
The Faraway Music
in Russian. The advance was minimal, but he also gave Svetlana the occasional book to translate into Russian, which brought in a bit of money. In January 1988, she flew to England, staying in Cambridge with Philippa Hill and spending time with Olga. There was some thought of her trying to settle there again, but it was only a brief illusion. After her flight back to Chicago, her bus to Wisconsin got caught in a winter blizzard. Her isolation in her hunting lodge in the backwoods began to seem daunting. She thought of relocating, but where?
15
In June 1988, Svetlana wrote to Rosa Shand with surprising news. She had something to confess. She had fallen in love. The man’s name was Tom Turner. “After years and years of ‘frozen heart’ I do love a man—and I cannot tell you what a great joy, regeneration and light this is to me. All is still in the stage of ‘unfoldment.’ “
A Texan by birth, Tom Turner was a fifty-two-year-old bachelor, ten years younger than Svetlana. He lived in Saint Louis. They had met two years previously in Illinois at the home of a friend and had kept up a friendship by correspondence, but recently they had begun to see each other. Svetlana told Rosa only a few friends knew their secret.
It’s just all developing beautifully BETWEEN us two…. I think it CAN develop into the most happy and wonderful relationship for us both…. I should NOT think ahead of time—this is NO GOOD…. Please, keep this secret. Sometimes I’m so happy—that I want to shout: “Tom is a wonderful man!” but I shouldn’t.
16
It was as if she were afraid to anticipate happiness, expecting that if she spoke, it would be whisked away. They would spend long hours on the telephone, and she would take the four-hundred-mile trip by bus to spend the weekend with him in Saint Louis, or he would come to visit her in Wisconsin.
Turner had an interesting background. He had apprenticed as an architect with Buckminster Fuller, but had then worked as a businessman. He was also a Dominican tertiary, or lay brother. Such individuals, married and single, worked in the community. He loved music and all things Russian. Completely indifferent to Svetlana’s parentage, he delighted in taking her to meet his friends. Olga was still at school in England and never met Turner, but Svetlana wrote her long letters describing their lovely evenings cooking meals together—apparently Tom told her she was a great cook and would make a wonderful wife.
17
At one moment Olga thought they were getting married, something she secretly longed for. And then came the dreadful news. Several months into their friendship, Tom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
It would seem that Svetlana’s life was destined to turn in tragic circles. Once she had helped Brajesh Singh to die; now she would have to comfort a dying Tom Turner—which she did. Tom was not bedridden until the very end of his illness. Their loving relationship, with its terrible undertone, continued to the end.
Even as Tom Turner was dying, Svetlana suffered another collapse of her hopes. At the end of January 1989, three months shy of her eighteenth birthday, Olga shocked her mother by running away from school with a “sweet hippie boyfriend” named Hayden. One weekend when Olga was given leave from school to visit Hayden’s family’s estate—his father was a wealthy London banker—the two young lovers fled to Brighton. They were living in a Brighton bedsit: one room with a communal kitchen
and bathroom. As soon as Svetlana found out her daughter had quit school, she commandeered friends to go to Brighton and knock on Olga and Hayden’s door—they were too poor to have a phone—but no one seemed able to persuade Olga to return to Friends’ School. Frustrated, Svetlana contacted Hayden’s father and booked a flight to London on February 5. They would drive to Brighton together to bring their children home.
One morning Hayden looked out of the window of the bedsit. “Oh my god! It’s my dad.” Olga looked out the window and said, “Oh my god! It’s my mom.” They invited their respective parents in for tea, and all four squatted on the floor, because apart from a mattress draped in Indian fabric, they had no furniture. When she looked back at that morning, Olga remembered her mother fondly.
She had flown all that way to talk some sense into me and basically take me back to school. But when she saw how much we were in love, Mom—being such a romantic—just couldn’t bring herself to separate us. We were such a beautiful pair and totally happy. She saw something from her past. Her father had done this to her when she was only sixteen, when she fell in love with Kapler. She wasn’t going to do this to me. I guess she hoped that I would be able to sort this out for myself. Which I did. Hayden and I eventually went back to London and broke up. But my mother had to drive back to London that day with Hayden’s angry father who was fuming: “Are you kidding me? You’re not going to … no … that’s not how we do this….” But we were left there, yes.
18
A disconsolate Svetlana flew back to Wisconsin. Of course she was angry. It would be Olga who didn’t have the A-level marks to get into college. Her dreams for her daughter’s education
were dashed, while Hayden had his wealthy father behind him. In April, she put her hunting lodge up for sale and moved into an apartment in Madison.
Tom Turner died on June 3, 1989. When Svetlana attended his funeral in Saint Louis, she was moved to find how warmly his family accepted her. She wrote a bleak note to Philippa Hill in Cambridge. When her “dearest closest friend” died, although “both he and I knew it was coming, his death was a blow. NOT HAVING HIM around in the flesh IS very sad.”
19
The note is poignant in its stoicism. Svetlana had been well trained in loss.