Mother Knows Best

The honeymoon phase ends quickly for newlywed Svetlana as she chafes against communal life at Taliesin — and its overbearing leader.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, friends. In the last episode, we went back
in time to really understand where Olgavana Lloyd Wright came from,
the intentional community she and her husband created, and the
power she now holds over everyone there, including set Lana.
But our newly wed spet Lana doesn't know what we know.
She's simply overjoyed to be married once again, to have

(00:22):
a husband she can't keep her hands off of, and
a beautiful life ahead of her in the desert. She
doesn't know that Tally Essen is floundering financially, or that
her new husband, Wes, who'd inherited a newspaper fortune, was
often the one to bail them out, but he'd spent
what he had and then some. She doesn't know that
when all seventy five fellows kiss her on her wedding day,

(00:43):
it wasn't just an act of goodwill or super sexy.
It was because in marrying Wes, she had married into
this whole extended family. And she doesn't know that Olga
Vanna's grasp on Wes is more powerful than hers can
ever be. So given all of this, does West really
love stet Lana or is he just doing as he's told?

(01:06):
Could the fellowship be a warm, welcoming new home for
our Russian defector. Or is this whole thing a Cohn
cooked up by Olgavana to bring in some publicity and
some cash. What the hell has fet Lana gotten herself into.
My name is Dan Catroser, and this is Svetlana stet Lana.

(01:29):
You wake up in the morning, you live your day,
and then you do it tomorrow, and over and over
again and over again and over Act one. Sorry not sorry, Okay,

(02:00):
dear listeners, It's time for a brief d anecdote. I've
been keeping something from you. Remember how I went to Scottsdale,
the Valley of the Sun. Well, it was to solve
a problem. I'd been digging into archives, conducting interviews, reading
and rereading spet Lana's memoirs and letters, and it felt

(02:21):
like speed Lana, the real, complex, multidimensional person was coming
into focus. But everyone else in her orbit they were
still feeling like charcatures, dramatic archetypes. I couldn't seem to shake.
If spent Lana was my hero, didn't that make Olgavana
my villain West Prince slightly less than charming? Tally Essen

(02:43):
the Tower my princess was trapped in Of course, I
knew that wasn't the case, and that if I wanted
to understand what really happened to spet Lana and why,
I'd need to get to know tally Esen and the
people that lived there in a different way. So I
had planned a trip to Arizona to meet tally es
and West's present day custodians and some of the older

(03:04):
residents who still lived there. I wanted a wider view
of the world they created. But after I had booked
my plane ticket and some interviews, they found me talking
about the play in a Q and a online Why
Slana Aliueva, Well, she was a woman that had great passion,
and she was a writer and determined to have her

(03:25):
own voice outside of the shadow of her father, who
winds up getting sucked into the cult of Frank Lloyd Wright. There,
that's what they heard me, Danktrosser on the Worldwide Web
calling the fellowship a cult crap. The interviews were canceled.

(03:48):
It was time to call Roger Friedland Roger, good morning,
and Harold Zelman all right, Oh my god, Harold, what
have you gotten me into? I needed their advice Roger
and Harold had also ruffled some feathers with the picture
they'd painted of Tally Essen in their book. What did

(04:08):
they think about the C word? Well, we discussed this
question endlessly. There is apple evidence that there are significant
cult like qualities, but we made a very conscious decision
never to use that term. Cult is a way of

(04:29):
making a value judgment. Cult is a total community that
you don't like, and I think it's not a good
term to use. There have been so many moments in
the process of working on this story that have made
me question what the hell I'm doing. When I write
a play with made up characters and made up scenarios,

(04:51):
no one is upset except for the stage manager. Stage
managers are always upset. But now, in telling this story
a play as a podcast, it has the power to
affect real people, real people who I don't know, real
people who live in Scottsdale, Arizona, and spring Green, Wisconsin
who are now upset at me. Me Dan Catroser. I

(05:15):
decided to go to Arizona anyway, even if I couldn't record.
I wanted to meet the people who I had offended
and see what was what for myself. The foundation agreed
to meet with me. So I get here and I

(05:35):
go to the reception. It's this little plaza gravel by
the gift shop outside, and I'm just reading while there
are various tours coming and going. Fifteen minutes ahead of schedule,
the foundation representative I'm meant to meet arrives. He shakes

(05:56):
my hand, and he invites me to come and sit
inside with the William Wesley Peter's conference room. We're sitting
there in the room that used to be West's private quarters,
the room he shared with spet Lana. Their king sized
bed used to swallow up the space. Now it held
a conference table and chairs. And as I'm looking around,

(06:19):
taking it in the sandstone walls, the glass panes, the
intimate space that can either feel cozy or claustrophobic, this
man is telling me about his concerns and about a
book that tells salacious stories, stories that overtake the more
powerful history of what went on at tally Essen, a
century of architecture, art and communal living. This book is

(06:44):
called The Fellowship, written by Roger Friedland and Harold Zelman.
So I'm sitting there in West and spet Lana's room,
knowing that I have consorted with an enemy, knowing that
this book is something that has been upsetting to the
people there, And I panic, and I feel myself start
to apologize, a Jew apologizing in the desert, just like

(07:08):
my ancestors had done thousands of years ago. But what
exactly was I sorry about? I had been hasty with
the word cult, sure, but let's remove that word for
the time being. Maybe I'll just tell you what happened
and let you draw some conclusions for yourself. Let's get
back to spet April nineteen seventy, the earliest days of

(07:31):
Wes and Svetlana's whirlwind marriage. Up until the wedding, Spetlana
had enjoyed three weeks of relative anonymity. She'd been an
honored guest of the Fellowship, put up in a private
little cottage, doated on by Wes, showered with love and kindness.
At her wedding, everyone had initially been sworn to secrecy

(07:53):
about Stalin's daughter's visit at her request, but Olgavana had
invited TV news crews to the party. The secret was out.
Social bulletins were reporting on speed Lana's outings, commenting on
her appearance the wedding news even makes it back to Russia.
The Miami Herald runs a story with the headline Stalin's

(08:14):
daughter speed Lana weds again, and a subheader not very exciting,
says fed Lana's son. If my wedding was described as
not very exciting in a Florida newspaper, I would die.
Add to that the fact that speed Lana has packed
up her bags and moved from her guest cottage into
Wes's suite. Like all the dormitories there, it's a small space,

(08:39):
almost certainly smaller than her Soviet apartment, and it's in
the center of it all, near all the other fellows,
near the drafting room where they work, and the dining
room where they eat. Tourists are also coming in and
out of tally Es and West trapesing through the hallways.
Speed Lana had suspected the CIA of wire tapping her

(09:01):
house back in Princeton. Here the surveillance was open and constant.
And this communal life, it's not exactly her jam, she writes.
Being with others and seeing them walking through our rooms
was a usual thing. What's insisted that I were more

(09:22):
with people. How is a woman likes bet Lana, a
self described shy, a silent mouse, supposed to rest and
recharge or get anything done for that matter. I thought
I was with people quite enough. People are the worst.
And then there's Olga Vana, the matriarch of the place,

(09:45):
the person who had beckons ft Lana there in the
first place. Olga Vanna's interest in people's lives is vast.
She likes to know exactly what's going on, and she
likes to give advice on everything from meals to hairstyles,
to work schedules to the bedroom. Here's Roger. There was
very little of your private life that was not subject

(10:09):
to judgment, if not control. You know, your gestures, how
you walk, who you have sex with, I mean everything
was part of this project. It was a total institution
aestheticization of every aspect of your life. And this now
applied to Spetlana, who, in marrying Wes, had joined the

(10:31):
institution by default. Now it's no secret that spet Lana
and West seem to have a pretty powerful physical connection.
Years later, she'd tell one journalist that Wes was the
only man she ever enjoyed having sex with. Olgavana expected
all the hot goss naturally in case you can't hear

(10:57):
spet Lana in what sounds like the world's busiest restaurant.
She's saying that. Olga Vanna immediately asked her, how was
it and where was it? Meaning the sex? How was
the sex? Where was the sex? Olgavannah wants to know
if her former son in law is given a good
to his new bride, the one she hoped could be

(11:17):
her daughter. Sped Lana is weirded out and says so,
but Olga Vanna keeps pressing, wouldn't you talk about it
to your mother? I said no, I'm not. You know,
seventeen years old was very much. I don't think I
need the price when it comes to sex at tally

(11:38):
Essen and Olga Vanna is placing it. Sped Lana is
going in blind and not in a fun way like
in Love is Blind, but in a bad way like
in Love is Blind. We'll get into all this and
more after the break act too great sex spectations. It's

(12:00):
time for the juicy stuff, the sex stuff. Do I
have your attention? Making an insular, intentional community was hard,
especially when it was mostly hot, sweaty, shirtless dudes hammering
nails into wood I'm sorry, where were we? This goes

(12:23):
back to the thirties. You were expected to give yourself
entirely to the fellowship, to have no relationships outside of
the fellowship. Olgavana knew that you had to find some
method of dealing with sexuality if you're going to pull
that off, Because it's pretty obvious you've got a bunch
of guys, very few women, and they're all young and libidinous.

(12:48):
That's Harold recounting what he and Roger discovered about the
history of sex at Taliesin while researching their book. Inevitably,
the fellows start sleeping with locals, and the town spoke
are not happy about it. So Olgavannah goes into problem
solving mode. First, she tries to recruit more suitable women

(13:08):
into the fellowship, but she tries a few other things too.
She selected a group of men that she had decided
apparently would be okay with gay relationships. She lined them
all up and gave them explicit instructions in a homosexuality.
What Harold saying is that Olgavana allegedly showed certain men

(13:32):
how to have sex with each other and then paired
them up to stop the sexual energy from bleeding outside
the walls of tally Esin There are two things I
want to hold space for here. One, people were being
pressured into making sexual choices they may not have made
on their own. But two, in an overwhelmingly heteronormative world

(13:55):
like the first half of the twentieth century, the actual
mechanics of gay sex do need to be taught, And
to me, this moment at tally Essen is a fascinatingly
problematic piece of queer history. Olgavannah would have known a
thing or two about gay sex. She herself had come
from eccentric artist circles and almost certainly had a lesbian

(14:17):
lover who was part of Gertrude Stein's Parisian cohort. But
the gay quote lineup, as one apprentice called it, wasn't
the end of Olgavannah's meddling. And I wanted to learn
more about this layer of life at tally Essen from
someone who'd seen it play out. So I got in
touch with Celeste Davidson. Oh, Celest, Oh, I love what

(14:39):
you're wearing. Oh good well, I love plaid. You know.
When they asked George Clooney what his favorite color was,
he said plaid. Celeste was born at tally Essen. Her father, Davy,
was an architect under Frankloyd Wright, and her mother, Kay,
was Missus Wright's devoted chief assistant for decades. Celeste calls
her mom by her first name. By the way, so Kay,

(15:03):
who came first at sixteen years old, really was crazy
about the rights, and so she adopted and missus Right
as her mom, and Missus Dry adopted her as her daughter,
you know, psychologically, and her whole life was spent taking
care of missus Right. According to Celeste, Olga Vanna contains multitudes.

(15:25):
So how would you describe missus Right Aside from being
a bipolar bitch and controlling everybody's lives at tally Essen,
sometimes she could be quite nice. There's something incredibly beautifully
succinct about that sentence. Now, Olgavannah really did not want

(15:47):
children at tally Esen. Remember Ger Jeff had taught her
that kids were a distraction from the work. She'd sent
her own daughter away by his command, and decades later
she allegedly encouraged Celeste mom Kay to do the same.
She broke up our whole family, She made us all
go in different directions. At a very young age, five,
six years old, she separated us, and my mom went

(16:09):
right along with them. Roger and Harold's book include some
pretty harrowing details about Celeste mother Kay. They write about
how Oldgavanna offered her up as sexual fodder to other fellows.
The way that the Fellowships sort of portrays it is
that missus Wright really wanted Kay to sleep with everybody. True,

(16:30):
it's beyond true. She said, I want you to go
out with Dick or John or whomever and turn them around,
straighten them out so they're not gay anymore. You heard that, right, folks.
Old Gavanna, who had orchestrated a whole lot of gay
sex among the apprentices, also believed that being openly gay
could hurt Tally Essen's reputation, and so when things got

(16:53):
too visibly gay, she apparently needed female apprentices like Kay
to sleep with them and turn them straight again. It's
all very scientific and not problematic at all. As a result,
gay men end up married to women, women end up
being asked to sleep around, and marriages with nonfellows like

(17:14):
spet Lana must be arranged and approved by Olgavana herself.
This is all detailed fabulously in Roger and Harold's book,
but it's also unsurprisingly controversial inside the Frank Lloyd Right universe.
And yet when I went to the tally Es and
West gift shop, I was amused to find it front
and center on display. Here's Harold Bucks a buck and

(17:41):
this kind of overbearing control in the most intimate parts
of a person's life. This is what spet Lana is
now experiencing years later when she walks into a well
established dynamic designed to sustain an alternative community. To be clear,
many people willingly signed up for this and stayed for years, decades,

(18:02):
sometimes the rest of their lives within this insular world.
They were making art NonStop, living in a tight knit
community cradled in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and
over the Fellowship's century long history, not everyone was subjected to,
or even aware of, what Roger and Harold termed the
sex clubs at tally Essen. Regardless, as Roger and Harold said,

(18:27):
living at tally Essen demanded total participation. Did spet Lana
know that when she married Wes she was marrying his
way of life too? More? After the break Act three,

(18:52):
The Price of Love, as we know from previous episodes,
Olga Vana tells fet Lana about Wes's debts, and spat
happily pays off tens of thousands of dollars as a
gift to her new husband. But that was a sizeable
chunk of her resources, not as Olgavana wrongly assumed, just

(19:13):
to drop in the bucket. I felt that there was
some mistake because they imagined me wealthier than I was.
I heard something was my books. It was not in
the vicinity of what they imagined. There was this terrible
thing in created by media or state department of the

(19:33):
nobahom my alleged millions in Swiss banks. A father never
left any money for me. He was a communist inclination.
He didn't believe in private wealth. Speed Lana doesn't have
secrets dollar dollars, and the money she does have, that
one point five million, give or take, isn't a trust

(19:54):
overseen by her lawyers in New York, who give her
modest monthly disbursements. So shortly after the nuptials, sped Lana
is encouraged to open a joint bank account with Wes
and when we were married, about second or thirday after wedding,
his lawyers, which were also Foundation lawyers, approached me and said, oh,

(20:21):
are we going now to open joint account, which was
again I said yes, yes, of course, of course, of course,
will do open Joinica. Sped Lana is also encouraged to
sell her precious house in Princeton for cash, which she
does somewhat resentfully, but giving up that house is a

(20:41):
symbol of her commitment to Wes and she's willing to
do it. However, while she's in Princeton overseeing the sale,
sped Lana apparently learns from her lawyers that the Francloyd
Wright Foundation has requested an annual grant of thirty thousand
dollars a year in perpetuity two hundred and fifty thousand

(21:01):
in today's dollars. Sped Lana is surprised. She's happy to
pay off her husband's debts, but funding the organization is
another thing. Entirely the overseers of her charitable trust counter
at a thousand dollars a year. When it returned, I
saw entirely different pictures. Nobody smiled with me. Missus Rice

(21:24):
has no time for me. West was again in competitive
gray face for the record. Olgavana says that everyone changed
their tune on speed Lana because she became rude and standoffish,
not because she wasn't as rich as they thought. And
maybe that's true. I've gotten a sense from a lot
of people I've talked to that Speedlana could be mercurial.

(21:45):
Her long term friendships were marked by periods of warmth
and hostility. Like Olgavana, she was also a complicated woman.
But this money stuff, it's super weird and sped Lana
starts to feel like she might have gotten played played
by Olgavana, yes, but by Wes, dear darling, dutiful Wes.

(22:06):
When spent Lana admits her husband that she's resentful of
Olgavana's financial demands, West responds exactly how you'd expect him to,
telling her to stay good friends with missus Wright or quote,
we shall meet a tragedy. But through the power of
selective hearing, Spelana still sees West as her beloved husband mother.

(22:30):
Olgavana was the one who was getting in the way.
Late one night, a few months into their marriage, spent
Lana and West are in bed in the phone rings.
Spelana answers the call and finds a heated Olgavana on
the other side of the line. There's been a problem
with an apprentice, and Wes is needed immediately spent. Lana

(22:51):
isn't having it, she bites back. He was already in bed, sleeping.
Why do you need him? She was a little bit
on this excited side of yelling, And I said, missus right,
please don't yell at me. I'm a new person here.
I don't know your waist, but please don't. I have

(23:13):
been yelled at enough. Please don't yell at me. And
she kind of gasps. There, you know, now, this might
seem like a small, insignificant moment. We've all gotten an
after hours phone call from work. Maybe we said something
to our boss, or maybe we didn't, and most likely
we moved on. But there's a reason why Olgavannah gasped.

(23:36):
People didn't talk back to mother and first fet Lana
to not only reject missus Wright's orders, but then to
tell the matriarch not to yell. Why that's like not
wearing astless chaps at Folsom Street Fair. It's just not done.
According to an unpublished chapter of Olgavana's autobiography, which also

(23:57):
details this late night argument. West encouraged set Lana to
apologize to missus Wright for her outburst, however innocent her intentions.
Wes was a man who valued his work above all else,
and you didn't want his wife to muck things up.
Olgavana sets the scene set Lana coming into a room
and sitting down, staring at the floor while saying, I

(24:19):
apologize if I caused you any inconvenience. Olgavana describes fet
Lana's apology as cold like ice. She says she even
saw a disagreeable smile creep onto stet Lana's face, and
then set Lana shoots up with a frosty stare and says,

(24:39):
by the way, I want you to know, I am
a free person. I do as I please. Olgavana writes
she smiled that snake smile with lips and little waves
and said, you see, I don't belong to you. By
her own account, Olgavannah was spawns very quietly, spet Lana, Now,

(25:03):
in the last statement, your last half of your phrase
is true, you certainly don't belong to me. But in
the first part of your phrase, you are wrong. You
are not free. You are bound from head to foot
in iron chains they surround you. You are a slave,
spet Laana, of yourself. You are not a free person.

(25:25):
As a matter of fact, you are the most terrifying
slave I have ever seen yet. Slave of your passions,
slave of your hatreds, of your likes, of your dislikes,
of your jealousy, which is reaching a grotesque proportion. You
are jealous of me and Wess. You are jealous of
every girl on the place. You are jealous of every man.
You are a slave. You are not a master, and

(25:46):
it is the master who is free. No, spet Lana,
you are a slave. Okay. First off, I love this
monologue and I want to use it for auditions for
the rest of my life. And second, by Wes's design,
this whole exchange was supposed to be a reconciliation between

(26:07):
these two powerful women. But that's not how this went
at all. And speed Lana's lackluster apology to Olgavana and
Olgavannah's mean spirited response. This is the beginning of a
shitty pattern that is going to repeat again and again
and again. Like Paisley, but this fight about the late

(26:27):
night phone call and the weird apology and monologue that
followed the money, the communal life, the red flag after
red flag after red flag. None of this deters fet Lana.
She remains as devoted to Wes as ever, which to
me is so surprising. She must have really loved him.

(26:48):
You See, a man could be good friends or good lover,
or good parents, or good husband. He was good husband.
I felt that old my god, Finally, finally, I would
love to stay with this man, you know, until end
of my days. Because he had a way to introduce
me and say this is my wife. He would say

(27:10):
it's this is my wife in such a way that
I will just swoon, you know, I was just man,
Oh my god, how wonderful. When West finally takes bet
Lana on a trip to California that June, away from
tally Essen without the constant demands of the Fellowship, he
is attentive to his bride again. She meets his sister

(27:31):
and his brother in law. They go shopping. West picks
out over the top glittery dresses for speed Lana that
she would never pick out on her own. First doles, chiffon, brocade, silk.
You must look stunning, West tells her, and she accepts
She's no longer speed Lana, a Lujeva writer. She was
now sped Lana Peters, the architect's wife. She has to

(27:54):
dress the part, and this time with West in California
makes her want to dress the part too. I wanted
to be a part of the show, a part of
the business, a part of his life. This is the
constant struggle with Svetlana. She feels things both good and
bad in big ways. She's drawn to West, yet repelled

(28:16):
by the world he belongs to. I too, came to
tally Esen a skeptic. I really didn't care about the
organic architecture, and I generally think deserts are stupid. Where's
your dirt, desert, Where's your dirt? But during my visit
I had some wonderful background interviews with people that lived
and worked at tally Esen, charming, artistic, idealistic people who

(28:39):
I really enjoyed spending time with. They showed me around,
let me dig through their archives, and told me wonderful stories.
And there were moments when I was overcome by the
art and history and community of the place. I have
to imagine that spet Lana might have been too. So Yes,
it's true, Olga Vana was overbearing to say the least,

(29:00):
But there were other people there who were great. Here's
the last you know. There are people like l Luis
Christa who did the sculpture. She was an amazing person,
Jim and Maxine, Fefrid car the Lockhart Tall and Brandoc Peters.
I mean there were lots of people to get involved with,
other than the rights. The truth is. Of course, then

(29:22):
not everything is cut and dry. People places, they contain
multitudes and sometimes even hypocrisies. Now, every year the Fellowship
would caravan from tally Essen West in Arizona back to
the original tally Essen in Wisconsin for the summer, and
shortly after West and spet Lana returned from their California

(29:43):
mini moon, they pack up the car and make the drive,
just the two of them. They make their way through
the Grand Canyon, the Rockies, and the planes. West, who
has made this trip twice a year for nearly four decades,
is poring over with vivid stories, welcoming her into his world.
Sometimes fet Lana takes the wheel of the Cadillac when

(30:07):
I date. The driving us would relax thing funny songs,
recite limericks, or just doze. Then I would find him
once again as he was before. Outside of the fellowship,
West is simply the man she fell in love with.
Away from the mismerizing eyes of his boss former mother

(30:31):
in law, he would become quite a different personality. And
when they arrive in the Serene River Valley, he comes alive.
When he entered the green, lush Wisconsin countryside of us
became even lyrical. He loved these areas most of all.
That summers speed Lana and West settle into their new

(30:52):
life together in Wisconsin. She loves being his wife. She
loves the queen hills and babbling brooks. She feels herself
being drawn deeper and deeper. Suddenly everything has become so
bright and clear. Every blade of grass, every wild flower
I walked through, the grove's breathed, fragrant errands, felt so young,

(31:17):
every nerve in harmony with nature around me. But she
feels well something else too. After I spent two weeks
in that state of peaceful bliss, the local doctor confirmed it.

(31:37):
I fuzz pregnant. YEO. Suddenly, in this battle between Olga
Vana and Spetlana, with West caught in the middle, the
weirdest throuble of all Time, the steaks are a lot higher,
and this pregnancy it's not gonna go over well with

(31:58):
missus Wright on the next episode of set Lana stet Lana.
St Lana stet Lana is a production of iHeart Podcasts
and the documentary group I'm Your Host Dan Katrosser. The
show was written and produced by me Adam Webber, Alison Joy,
and Katherine Isaac. We also serve as executive producers at

(32:20):
the documentary group. Our executive producer is Joe Batzilowitz, with
production oversight by Stacy Kleiger an additional support from Tom
Yellen and Gabrielle Tenenbaun. Our iHeart team is supervising producer
Casey Pegram and executive producer Maya Howard. Editing assistants from
producers Christina Lorenger and Joey pat Original music by Elan Izakov,

(32:42):
Production counsel by Slas ekhous Dasty Haynes Lockoe, clearance counsel
by Ballard Sparr, Fact checking assistance by Megan Trout, Research
assistants by Caleb Martin Rosenthal. Special thanks to my husband
Jordan Siegel and Roger Friedland and Harold Zelman, author of
the book The Fellowship, who kindly granted permission to include

(33:03):
excerpts from their taped interview with Stelana