Ganna Walska
| Ganna Walska | |
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| File:Ganna-Walska-1920.jpg
Passport photo of Ganna Walska (1920)
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| Born | Hanna Puacz June 26, 1887 Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Montecito, California |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Known for | Opera Garden design |
| Spouse(s) | <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
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Ganna Walska (born Hanna Puacz on June 26, 1887 – March 2, 1984) was a Polish opera singer and garden enthusiast who created the Lotusland botanical gardens at her mansion in Montecito, California. She was married six times, four times to very wealthy husbands. The lavish promotion of her lackluster opera career by her fourth husband, Harold Fowler McCormick, inspired aspects of the screenplay for Citizen Kane.
Biography
Ganna Walska was born Hanna Puacz on 26 June 1887 in Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire to Napoleon Puacz and Karolina Massalska.[1] Ganna is a Russian form of Hannah, and Walska "reminiscent of her favorite music, the waltz".[2]
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."[3]
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.[4] 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 Zazà 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."[5]
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.[6]
Ganna Walska died on March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.[7]
Marriages
Ganna Walska was married six times:
- Russian baron, Arcadie d'Eingorn, a Russian officer killed early in World War I. They married in 1904 but the marriage was dissolved two years later. The baron died of tuberculosis in 1915.[8][9]
- Dr. Joseph Fraenkel, a New York endocrinologist. They were married in 1916, and he died in April 1920.[8][9]
- Multimillionaire sportsman and carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran. They married in September 1920, and they divorced in 1922.[8][9] He died in 1929.[10]
- Industrialist Harold Fowler McCormick. They married August 11, 1922 at the City Hall in Passy in Paris.[8] They divorced in 1931. He died in 1941.[11]
- English inventor of a death ray, Harry Grindell Matthews.[12] They married in 1938 and he died in 1941.[13][14]
- Theos Bernard, her sixth and last husband. He was a scholar of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism and book-author. They married in 1942 and they divorced 1946. He died in 1947.
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.
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
References
- ↑ Pinkowski Files – a database of American Polonia http://www.poles.org/db/w_names/Walska_G.html
- ↑ About Madame Walska http://www.lotusland.org/about-us/about-madame-walska
- ↑ "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
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Faberge – Treasures of Imperial Russia (retrieved January 16, 2012)
- ↑ Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation
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External links
- Biography - Adams, Brian. "Ganna: Diva of Lotusland". Kindle e-book 2014
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to [[commons:Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).|Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).]]. |
- 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) — Archived October 22, 2007 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
- Pages with broken file links
- Articles with hCards
- Commons category link from Wikidata
- Polish opera singers
- American designers
- American landscape and garden designers
- American opera singers
- 1887 births
- 1984 deaths
- Artists from California
- Musicians from Santa Barbara, California
- People from Santa Barbara, California
- Montecito, California
- Polish emigrants to the United States
- Polish female singers
- People from Brest, Belarus
- 20th-century artists
- 20th-century women
- Singers from California
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