File:Ganna Walska 1920 (14958733773).jpg

Ganna Walska , shortly after her marriage to third husband Alexander Smith Cochrane Opera singer Much-married socialite Creator of Lotusland gardens In Santa Barbara, CA

Born Hanna Puacz in Brest Litovsk Poland 26 June 1891 Died March 2, 1984 in Santa Barbara, CA

Ganna Walska started her life in fairly unremarkable circumstances in Poland but parlayed her wit and beauty to achieve social stature and a great fortune. She was married 6 times and husbands 3 and 4 were among the wealthiest men in the world. She was known to the public for her ambitiously promoted, but ultimately unsuccessful operatic career, her splendid marriages and even more splendid divorces and her fabulous jewelry collection. In her middle years she bought an estate north of Los Angeles and began to create one of the most lavish and fanciful gardens in the world, Lotusland.

“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.

She was born Hanna Puacz on 26 June 1887 in Brest-Litovsk, Belarus to Napoleon Puacz and Karolina Massalska.[ Ganna is a Russian form of Hannah, and Walska "reminiscent of her favorite music, the waltz".

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."

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. 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."

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.

Ganna Walska died on March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.” From Wikipedia.com

For more about this extraordinary woman, see:

<a href="http://www.lotusland.org/" rel="noreferrer nofollow">www.lotusland.org/</a>

<a href="http://www.luxecoliving.com/the-many-husbands-of-ganna-walska/" rel="noreferrer nofollow">www.luxecoliving.com/the-many-husbands-of-ganna-walska/</a>