Word: taliesin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Svetlana's happiness was short-lived. The egalitarian atmosphere at Taliesin West--everyone was expected to share in the house and yard work--was not to her liking. It reminded her of Communism, she said. Less than a month ( after the wedding, clients of the architectural firm were shocked to see Svetlana slap her husband at a gala dinner party. At Taliesin West's summer headquarters in Spring Green, Wis., a resident recalls, Svetlana threw the contents of a highball glass into the hostess's face during a cocktail party and was forcibly escorted...
Much of Svetlana's anger came to center on Mrs. Wright, who ran the residents' lives at Taliesin West with what she proudly called "invisible discipline." Mrs. Wright decided what they wore, what they discussed at dinner and whether they should have children. "I detested her power over others," Svetlana said. "The lady bore such a resemblance to my father's worst qualities that I shrank from...
...hostility was viewed a shade differently by her new brother-in- law, S.I. Hayakawa, who is married to Wes Peters' sister. "She and Mrs. Wright were like two empresses in the same empire," the semanticist and former U.S. Senator recollects. Overpowered, Svetlana tried to persuade Peters to leave Taliesin West, where he had worked since 1932 as Wright's disciple and chosen successor. Peters temporized, and after 20 months of marriage, Svetlana stormed out, cursing Mrs. Wright and all that she represented with a wrath that recalled Stalin's. Taliesin West, "with all its horrible modern architecture," Svetlana said, should...
...decade after Svetlana left Taliesin West, she tried to make a fresh start in several towns in California and New Jersey, only to rebuff the welcome she found. After deciding to break up a friendship with a distinguished intellectual, she wrote to him, "You are deaf, stupid. You are doomed. You are a failure. I pity you. I despise you." In other letters she wished people dead. Of an elderly lady who, Svetlana thought, had crossed her, she wrote, "I hope she will not be with us too long." To British Author Malcolm Muggeridge, a deeply religious...
...would be granted U.S. citizenship only in 1978, felt alone in a strange country and seemed particularly vulnerable to the stresses of late motherhood. Having gained custody of Olga by the terms of her 1973 divorce from Peters, she refused to allow the child to visit her father at Taliesin West. Thus thwarted, the busy architect rarely went to see Olga and, though he corresponded with her, remained a more remote figure than Olga's aunt, Margedant. It was "Aunt Marge" who was to provide Olga with her strongest American roots. The child stayed with the Hayakawas in Washington, when...