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Svetlana's certainly had changed. In her last years in Moscow, she had been no princess of the Kremlin, though this was not widely understood in the West. After the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, Svetlana had lived through a dark decade, bereft of status, deprived of some of her privileges. Although she found kindly friends, she was widely shunned in Moscow as the child of a despot whose very name "aroused fear and hatred in millions of men," as she later put it. In 1957, she legally shed her father's name in favor of her mother's, Alliluyeva.
In the U.S., fame and fortune brought to the surface some of the lordly ways Svetlana had learned during her 26 years in the Kremlin. An elderly black houseman working for a family that had rented their Princeton home to Svetlana was devastated by her imperious manner. After he cautioned her about her treatment of some precious objects in the house, she said to him, "How dare you! You're only a servant!" She was cavalier with a Princeton hostess. When Artist Dorothea Greenbaum, the wife of Svetlana's lawyer, gave a long-planned dinner party in Svetlana's honor, she did not show up or answer the telephone. A neighbor, alerted by Greenbaum, went next door to plead with Svetlana. Pointing to herself, Svetlana said, "Nobody can make me do what I don't want to do."
In the Soviet Union, Svetlana's love life had been marred by tragedy and strife. At 16, she had chosen as her first lover Film Maker Alexei Kapler, 40; Stalin rewarded Kapler for his ardor by sending him to the Gulag for ten years. There followed two marriages and two divorces and a common-law union with Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist who was 17 years her senior. When he died in 1966, Svetlana was permitted to take his ashes to India. It was on this journey that she impulsively decided to defect.
In Princeton, Svetlana fell in love with Louis Fischer, a writer on Soviet affairs, who died in 1970. An inveterate womanizer who was 30 years her senior, Fischer caused Svetlana much grief, and word of her outbursts against him soon got around town. One autumn evening in 1968 she arrived in a fury at Fischer's house. He was inside with his editorial assistant, Deirdre Randall, but ignored Svetlana's knocks and shouts. As Randall remembers the scene, Svetlana raged outside the house for well over an hour, weeping and demanding the return of her presents to Fischer: a travel clock and two decorative candles. When Svetlana shattered the glass panels on the sides of the door in an attempt to break in, Fischer called the police. Two officers arrived and found Svetlana hysterical, blood dripping from her cut hands.
Her breakup with Fischer in 1968 was followed by a period of painful loneliness. It was then that she fell into a bizarre misadventure that began with a series of fan letters from a stranger. The author was the widow of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna, who was in her 70s. Mrs. Wright kept urging Svetlana to visit her at Taliesin West, the stone-and-redwood enclave Wright had designed for the architectural firm and school that he had founded in the desert near Scottsdale, Ariz. When Svetlana accepted the invitation in March 1970, she could scarcely have imagined the fantasies Mrs. Wright had been spinning around her.